Chapter 96: Dark Forest (II)

Chapter 96: Dark Forest (II)

Picking up from the last chapter — Du Xiaoran, it turned out, had known all along that the virtual Future World was a mirror image formed by entangled photon pairs. That set my mind spinning.

A metaverse — a world simulated by a core supercomputer, however lifelike — was still something science could explain, no matter how convincing the illusion. But a mirror-image world was something else entirely. That was virtual truly being reality. This was technology Earth humans had absolutely no business possessing. Because pairs in quantum entanglement move in perfect sync. Every person, every event I encountered in that mirror world truly existed at the other end, in reality.

Taking a microscopic theory like that and scaling it up to the macroscopic world involved not just countless unsolved research problems but obstacles that might be flatly impossible to cross. Even if every technical hurdle had somehow been cleared, actually building it would still be an engineering project of staggering scale. And nothing of that scale had ever visibly happened in the real world.

This wasn’t something an ordinary person could wrap their head around.

Du Xiaoran finally admitted the Myriad-Dimensional Brain had told him. Which only made things stranger. The Myriad-Dimensional Brain was a silicon-based fossil — how exactly was anyone supposed to read information out of it?

I asked,

“The Myriad-Dimensional Brain? Didn’t you say you never managed to decode it?”

Du Xiaoran said,

“I never did decode it. Turns out there was nothing to decode. The Myriad-Dimensional Brain sends me dream-messages on its own. Whoever owned it before me probably got the same treatment, but people back then were too superstitious to handle something that supernatural. So either they went mad, or they died, and whoever survived unloaded it as fast as they could. Nobody ever really treated it as what it actually was — an alien. Not until it landed in Zhang Zirui’s hands.

“Zhang Zirui, being a young scientist, sent it straight to the Shadow Pavilion’s supercomputer, and that’s how everything after got started. Once I took it over, the Brain started sending me dream-messages directly. It was the Brain, too, that told me to go find you, to help you — said you could be the one to help it get back home.”

I fixed my eyes on Du Xiaoran and said,

“Something this important, and you never said a word?”

Du Xiaoran said,

“You think I’d have dared? If I’d told you straight out back then, would you have believed a word of it?”

I said,

“No.”

Du Xiaoran said,

“There you go. Some things only work once they’ve ripened on their own — that’s when two sides can actually understand each other. Say it too soon, and it doesn’t work.”

That gave me pause.

He had a point. If he’d told me all this outright at the time, I probably wouldn’t have believed him — wouldn’t have agreed to work with him either. It would have sounded like nothing but a con job, or the ramblings of someone unwell.

I said,

“So letting Pu Liuqian take the Myriad-Dimensional Brain — that was the Brain’s own idea too?”

Du Xiaoran nodded.

“Obviously. You think I’d have been able to part with it otherwise? Ten years, man. We had a bond by then. I really did make good money on the side, all thanks to what the Brain taught me. And yeah, it’s true — it shaped me deeply. Otherwise, why would I have gone through all those dangerous stunts with you? Do you know how risky that was?”

I said,

“We’ll leave the past where it is for now. What exactly is your plan for that mineral in the Dark Forest? You found the resource, fine, good for you — but look at yourself. There’s no way you can carry it away.”

Du Xiaoran said,

“I know that. So here’s what I was thinking. You come check out the deposit, help me chase off the people trying to steal it, and I’ll trust that your true body is bound to end up here eventually. When that day comes, you’ll be able to bring some back for real. This stuff…