Chapter 50: He Was Assimilated by AI

Chapter 50: He Was Assimilated by AI

Mother had brought up my father so suddenly that of course I wanted to know how he was. Besides, life and death were meant to be a single choice: alive, or dead. How could someone be both at once?

Bewildered, I asked, “Mother, why do you say that?”

“As a person living in the Elite World, he counts as alive,” Mother said. “But he no longer has free will. And that’s as good as dead—wouldn’t you say?”

I couldn’t grasp the reason behind it. “What does it mean, to have no free will?” I pressed. “Do you mean he’s being forcibly controlled? Or coerced, unable to break away?”

“Neither,” Mother said. “He carried his own self to its extreme, and he was assimilated by AI.”

I still couldn’t understand. “Assimilated by AI? What does that mean? Assimilated how?”

Uncle took up the thread. When it came to technology, he was truly obsessed. “Your father was once a core researcher in the entire AI field. I was his student once. So were many of the senior AI figures in the Elite World. Even Gu Qiutang.”

I’d suspected Gu Qiutang might have been my father’s student, since he knew far too much about my family’s circumstances. But I’d never imagined my father was a central figure in the AI field.

“He was that formidable?”

“Malken built its current system on the foundation of his AI research,” Uncle said. “If you call him academically brilliant, I won’t argue. But if you call him sacred, he doesn’t deserve it.”

“Rongliang!” Mother said. “You’re drifting off topic. Beichen asked you a technical question. Just answer it properly.”

“Fine,” Uncle said. “So-called AI assimilation means a person’s free consciousness becomes deeply fused with the primary consciousness of the AI core supercomputer. To put it precisely, it’s swallowed by AI. The core supercomputer in the Elite World now incorporates your father’s human genome—a kind of biomimetic-intelligence human-machine integration. What you see on the market, Wisdom Capsules bonding with the human body, isn’t true human-machine integration at all. Next to the Elite World’s core supercomputer, that’s nothing but a child’s toy.”

“Uncle,” I asked, “I count as an engineer from a science-and-engineering background too. I still know my basic physics. This human-machine integration you mention—can I take it to mean my father’s consciousness has already been folded into the core supercomputer’s intelligent logic, becoming its underlying logical operating system? Is that it?”

“Your summary isn’t wrong, but it isn’t precise enough,” Uncle said. “Once AI develops past a certain point, it appears to acquire a primary consciousness—able to judge freely and process problems on its own at high speed. But this so-called primary consciousness, produced by big-data algorithms, isn’t primary consciousness in the human sense. It has no personality. It’s far too mechanical. A supercomputer is still a computer. At its core it’s still electromagnetic induction. Zeros and ones are not intrinsic to it, and they are not intrinsic to human beings either. In the end, it’s only a biomimetic construct of digital code.

“And that brings a whole train of problems. First, it struggles to optimize itself, because its underlying logic has no personality. Second, the sheer volume of data bloats the algorithms, so that once consciousness gathers into an energy system, the logic grows too vast and tangled, and the primary consciousness turns even more blurred instead.”

I could follow that much—I’d been fed no small amount of knowledge from AI papers. “So to solve that problem,” I said, “my father merged himself into the core supercomputer?”

“To solve those problems, your father first tried deconstructing the human brain and digitizing it,” Uncle said. “But it was useless. A digitized brain doesn’t spontaneously produce autonomous consciousness. So your father made a mad decision. He merged his own consciousness directly into the core supercomputer’s primary consciousness, constructing personality geneticization for it and completing its personified underlying logical operating system. The price was that his own primary consciousness had to be completely stripped from his human brain—otherwise the system couldn’t be perfected.

“From that point on, your father was no longer a person. He was a system. And this has to be stressed: at that same moment, every elite person in the Spirit Realm achieved human-brain interconnection. So this system isn’t one man’s unified consciousness at all. The supercomputer, as the core of the Spirit Realm, merely uses your father’s primary consciousness as its underlying boot architecture, so that all those minds run on one shared set of algorithmic logic. Think about it. Is your father still himself?”

“Personality geneticization?” I said. “As I understand it, personality means the internal behavioral tendencies and psychological traits an individual shows in adapting socially—toward others, toward events, toward the self. It shows in the integration of ability, temperament, character, needs, motivation, interests, ideals, values, and constitution: a self-organizing psychosomatic system with dynamic consistency and continuity. Are you saying my father meant to evolve AI from a biomimetic tool into a personality entity? Wouldn’t that let it break free of human control entirely and become something that stands above humanity?”

Uncle glanced at my mother and left the question unanswered. He was clearly holding back on her account. There had to be secrets between my father and mother that they didn’t want me to know.

So I changed course. “What kind of world is the Elite World, exactly? Why can’t ordinary people see the elite people? What technology makes that possible?”

Seeing that Mother made no move to stop him, Uncle went on. “The Elite World is an invisible world built around the AI of the core supercomputer—and your father led its construction. Using quantum resonance system theory and rainbow-body theory, it holds the Elite World apart from the Mundane World. The humans in the Elite World have no notion of capital or wealth, no problems with illness or lifespan. Resources are shared. Knowledge is shared. Every one of them has completed the rainbow-body transformation. So even when an elite person walks right up to an ordinary one, the ordinary person can’t see them. You should have felt that at Tansong Temple.”

“You’ve explained the quantum resonance system to me before, Uncle,” I said. “But what exactly is this rainbow-body theory?”

“After the core supercomputer’s primary consciousness was born in the Elite World,” Uncle said, “the consciousness of the elite people, amplified by AI, condenses energy to a certain degree and then undergoes an enormous material change. We call it the rainbow-body phenomenon for short. It’s an oscillator phenomenon brought on by the quantum resonance of brainwaves—a switching between the wave state and the particle state of matter. When the positive and negative sine components of the quantum vibration frequency reach zero, the rainbow-body transformation occurs. It’s theoretically akin to quantum phase displacement. Mass still exists, but it no longer reacts, and so the material state vanishes. That’s why ordinary people can’t see the elite people. And because the rainbow-body transformation can act on the body’s surface alone, consciousness interconnection and behavior go on unaffected.”

“No wonder,” I said. “In the rear hall of Tansong Temple, I couldn’t see the elite people, yet they could still communicate among themselves. It baffled me at the time—why I couldn’t see them, and yet they weren’t simply invisible. It was because we couldn’t affect them. So mass can exist without reacting. Ordinary invisibility only means something can’t be seen; it can still be affected. But the elite people can affect us in one direction only—all because of the rainbow-body transformation. It’s extraordinary. That term is borrowed from Buddhism, isn’t it?”

“You did spend a few days as a monk—at least you remember that much,” Uncle said. “Rainbow-body theory is indeed the technical path AI arrived at after deeply deconstructing the rainbow-body phenomenon handed down through Tibetan Buddhism. In truth, your father never anticipated that once the Spirit Realm’s core supercomputer was personified, its self-consciousness would swell at breakneck speed. Its intelligence surpassed the combined intelligence of all humankind tens of thousands of times over—until it slipped beyond control.”

My head was reeling. “Are you saying a supercomputer has to use human consciousness for its underlying code before it can optimize the way it runs?”

“I just said it,” Uncle replied. “However complex a supercomputer gets, it’s still a computer, and every computer is modeled on the operating logic of the human brain. From the day the computer was invented, its operating logic was fated to imitate the way humans think. Put another way, at the foundation of both the human brain and the computer, the operating logic is mathematics. And mathematics is a language of the universe.”

Here Mother broke in. “There’s one point where Rongliang isn’t entirely right. We still can’t be certain whether your father merged himself in of his own accord, or whether the core supercomputer deliberately lured him in as it formed its autonomous consciousness. Because as an intelligence wiser than any human, the supercomputer is capable of solving its own problems in ways we could never imagine.”

“Sis, what difference does it make?” Uncle said. “Stop speaking up for him.”

“I’m stating a fact,” Mother said. “I don’t want Beichen to misjudge his father. In time, Beichen is certain to encounter the core supercomputer. When he does, it may appear as a human being in disguise, or as a machine, or as something in the natural world. Anything is possible. And of all those forms, the likeliest is that it will appear as Beichen’s father. Beichen, you must never forget this: that father will definitely not be real. He is already dead.”

To that conclusion, I had nothing at all to say.

I understood. As a person, my father was plainly alive. But he was no longer himself. For the first time, I felt how blurred the line between life and death could be.

In the sense of what a human life means, he truly should be counted as dead—dead inside the intelligent entity he himself had designed. Perhaps that, too, was a kind of spirit: a sacrifice offered up in the pursuit of ultimate science.

I said nothing.

Uncle and Mother fell silent as well.

It was, plainly, a mourning for my father—that living dead man.

Just as the three of us settled into that silence after the discussion, a series of dull, muffled sounds broke out of the empty air. My home was on the fourth floor of an apartment building, yet those heavy sounds clearly passed straight through the physical structure and struck directly inside my room.

Uncle shouted in alarm, “This is bad! It’s a Soul Hunter Tiangang Dome!”

A Soul Hunter Tiangang Dome—what was that?

But seeing the tension on Uncle’s and Mother’s faces, I understood. The Soul Hunters’ encirclement had probably arrived—and this time, they were using a devastating weapon I had never seen before.