Doomsday Wonderland

Both of them looked at each other silently for half a second. Then the man clad in a black jacket suddenly tilted his head.

The malice in his face ebbed away like melting ice, his humanesque carnality and emotions disappearing along with it. Even though his facial features didn’t change, the same face only showed an empty and vacuous expression.

‘Even though Puppeteer has a saturnine personality, he still feels human.’ That thought suddenly popped up in Lin Sanjiu’s mind.

The ‘Puppeteer’ in front of her sighed and looked at his own body. Next, he examined the white lightning bolt accessory on Lin Sanjiu’s head. “This sudden mission already disrupted my work routine. I didn’t expect to work overtime.”

He was actually a Veda!

Lin Sanjiu felt her hair stand on its ends. She froze, stricken. For a moment, she didn’t know what was worse: facing a coded Puppeteer at his full strength or dealing with a Veda in its original body.

If the former choice meant a difficult battle fraught with peril, the latter choice would make a person feel so helpless that they wouldn’t even bother resisting. Under such circumstances, it was pretty much useless and meaningless for her to fight her way out.

“I originally planned to ambush you. Since you’ve noticed, I guess I have to continue modifying and increasing the depth of this devouring program,” the Veda, who kept Puppeteer’s appearance, mumbled thoughtfully. “The efficiency of this current algorithm is too low.”

‘Modify? Increase the depth?’

Lin Sanjiu stood staring blankly. She probably seemed too flummoxed so the Veda even offered her an explanation helpfully. “Everything here is a virtual environment created by a package of ‘Arabian City data asset’. The current program works by using the surface of the assets here to devour your data. Its easier to code the program this way, but it is way too inefficient so I will just have to use another algorithm to devour you.”

‘I don’t understand — should I run?’

Her heart sank. Lin Sanjiu shifted a little but finally stopped. She gulped drily and glanced down at her rock feet. She had an inkling that trying to escape would be futile. Since that Veda could appear anywhere it wished, where could she run to anyway?

‘Why isn’t the highest god and my grand prize here yet?’

“Wait,” Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help shouting, “What will happen to me?”

“You will become a set of character info in our database.” The Veda looked up at her as his eyes gradually turn white. “The next time you discover that you can walk, talk and see again… will be when we reinstate your data. Before that, you won’t exist; the only thing existing would be a silent set of data.”

Lin Sanjiu shuddered. She stared at her feet as she tried desperately to come up with a way to escape. She had been standing for a while, but her feet had stopped assimilating into the rock. Lin Sanjiu had no clue what her opponent was going to do.

“Ah, it’s almost done,” the Veda suddenly commented. “It will start now.”

‘What?’ Startled, Lin Sanjiu’s body tensed up involuntarily, and her higher consciousness coursed through her rapidly. She scanned everything in her surroundings, afraid to miss the slightest change. However, reality soon proved that whatever she did was futile.

This time, neither the rock surface nor the walls devoured her.

She raised an arm and noticed that, starting from her fingertips, she was dissipating into her surroundings like smoke. Her hands and arms slowly dissipated away. It was as if she was just a human figure made of smoke.

“Air.” The Veda with Puppeteer’s appearance faced upward, showing a white neck. He seemed to sense Lin Sanjiu’s fear even without looking. “It was quite troublesome to make the air molecules devour you. I hope I can end this job early.”

“T-that’s impossible,” Lin Sanjiu shouted raspily, unable to pull her eyes away from her missing arms. “This is one of the cords in the Data Streams Library, there isn’t any air here!”

“You’re right,” the Veda spoke serenely just as before. To Lin Sanjiu, this might be the end of her life; however, for him, it was just a small blip in his work routine. “But you’ve forgotten something. There is an air asset in the Arabian City Package. Can you find an Arabian city that doesn’t have any air? When the city is corporealized, there is naturally air around, even if you don’t see it.”

He was surprisingly patient and answered almost all her questions.

When Lin Sanjiu looked down, she almost couldn’t contain her horror. Her rock feet had completely vanished. She now floated in mid-air like a ghost without legs. Watching more and more of her body disappear, she yelled out in despair, “Wait, wait! Stop for a second, I want to ask you something!”

“Are you trying to buy time?” the Veda asked with his head still facing upward.

“I just have a few questions.” Lin Sanjiu was so nervous that her forehead was covered with cold sweat — she could no longer feel her limbs. “If I’m going to die, you should give me a proper explanation, right?”

“You won’t actually die.”

After pausing for a moment, the Veda finally lowered his head and looked at her directly. “To give you a proper analogy, you’ll be like Ötzi The Iceman. Your life will be frozen at this particular timeframe. The only difference is that there is a possibility that you might be reanimated. Similarly, like Ötzi, you won’t be living out your normal lifespan.”

Lin Sanjiu might be wrong, but Vedas seemed very keen to offer ‘explanations’. The Veda who tried to emigrate her acted that way and so did this one.

“What do you want to ask?” The Veda crooked his head slightly. “You better hurry. I need to get back to my work soon.”

Obviously, Lin Sanjiu didn’t have any questions in mind. She just wanted to buy time.

“W-what work?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Well—have we met before?” The moment that question left her mouth, she sighed inwardly.

“No.”

“Why is it necessary to add us into your Data Stream Library?”

“The more the merrier.”

Apparently, she wasn’t asking the right questions. The answers she got were all too short. “You need to ask him a question he can elaborate on!” Mrs. Manas implored from her mind.

Lin Sanjiu racked her brain, but she really didn’t know what question she should ask to buy more time and get the Veda speaking. The Veda raised his chin slightly, seeming ready to continue the “devouring” program. At that critical point, something lit up in her head. Once again, [A Light Bulb Moment] activated at the right time.

Was this because her [No coincidence. No story] had been activated all this while? Did their effects stack?

“I know.” Lin Sanjiu didn’t have time to contemplate further as she quickly blurted her question. “You mentioned that you didn’t expect that this mission, which was to get rid of us, would drag on for so long, right?”

“Yes.” The Veda stopped raising his chin. “What of it?”

“You Veda claim to have the answer to everything. You claim to have the ability to unravel the deep mysteries of the universe. Yet, why can’t you predict such a small matter?” Lin Sanjiu didn’t have to worry one bit about her tone being too offensive because the Veda were probably the hardest ‘lifeforms’ to agitate. “I thought the only thing the Veda couldn’t do is create offspring, but from this, I guess you Veda don’t know a lot more.”

The Veda looked silently at her for a short while before he slowly spoke. “Regarding the answer to your question, there are two key factors.”

‘Yeah!’ Lin Sanjiu was so worked up, she nearly made a sound. He was obviously going to give a lengthy explanation. The longer the Veda’s answer, the greater the probability of the highest god and her grand prize finding her. While the Veda talked, she knew she had to take the opportunity to think of a way to convey her current position to the two people…

“To some extent, we are similar to human beings. This isn’t too out of the ordinary, as we actually share quite a few similarities with other lifeforms. As with humans and other intelligent lifeforms, for us, the unknown can be differentiated into two categories. They are ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’.

“I don’t understand,” Lin Sanjiu quickly interjected.

“For example, what is involved in this mission to get rid of the five of you and how much time I will need to complete the mission is a ‘known unknown’. In other words, I know what I do not know. Humans usually live with the illusion that they can make some partial forecast about the future, and invent all sorts of formulas and data aggregation tools; for example, your Gaussian bell curve. Humans create all sorts of flawed statistical models and forecasting methodologies. Worst of all, humans don’t have enough computational power. Therefore, among the billions or more variables that exist, humans can’t correctly identify which are the ones that would impact the future. Humans also can’t calculate them. This is why humans developed chaos theory and are fascinated by the butterfly effect.

“Furthermore, even though the Veda have ‘known unknowns’, they are simple problems we can solve. If we wish, we can use an inconceivable level of computational power to calculate the precise relationship between the trajectory of a billiard ball on a table and the rotation of a particular planet in space.” The Veda seemed to have intentionally simplified his explanation to a level that Lin Sanjiu could comprehend. “To give you a simple answer, let me put it this way: I did not activate this computational power so I didn’t expect that this sudden mission would make me work overtime.”

‘He has already said this much, but why isn’t the highest god and my grand prize here yet?’

“In that case, the unknown unknowns are…” Lin Sanjiu forced herself to ask another question, hoping to buy more time.

“Simple. That means I don’t know what I don’t know,” the Veda answered immediately. “So I can’t give you an example.”

“T-that’s it?”

“Yes. I believe I have answered your questions,” the Veda stated quietly. “There is one thing I want to say. I know that you have been trying to buy time all this while.”

Lin Sanjiu froze.

“If you are waiting for your two companions, I have to burst your bubble. They are not going to look for you…”

“That’s impossible!”

“Don’t be too impatient, listen to what I have to say. They’re not going to look for you because they’ve already found a Lin Sanjiu. They are probably trying to find a way out of the cord right now.”