Flowers Blooming in the Wasteland

"Do I have it?" Celeste tilted his head in confusion, his face still expressionless as usual.

He Xiao smiled: "I'll tell you everything you should know, but what you want to know most is exactly what you shouldn't know—Case, turn on the demo screen."

As soon as He Xiao finished speaking, Case turned on the big screen in the command room without saying a word of nonsense.

"Then tell me, what is the devourer called 'God' by the True God Cult." Celeste said, "This should always be the part I should know."

"I'm just going to tell you about it. First of all, you have to make it clear that it is not a god at all." He Xiao supported the table with both hands, looked at the big screen, and said lightly, "If something like it can If it is a 'god', then you and I are also a 'god'."

"You mean, we are the same thing as it?" Celeste looked at He Xiao in surprise and asked.

"They are all existences that humans don't know or understand. In this regard, we are the same as it." He Xiao turned his head and looked at Celeste, "You are not an ordinary human being. I don't need to say that you I know, but I don't want to tell you about you just yet."

"Then tell me about the Devourer." Thurlist, accustomed to not getting an answer to this question, turned his attention to another question, "Marth said it was the most powerful thing in the universe." It exists, but it is very general, and I still don't quite understand it."

"I'll tell you the details—let me first explain what kind of existence he is." He Xiao said with an interesting smile, "It's interesting that human beings with extremely rich imaginations have opened similar brains. Holes, they wrote about a thing called a molecular teleporter in science fiction novels, imagining that people's memories will be recorded, the body will be broken up into molecular states, and then the molecules will be sent to another place, and then assembled according to the original arrangement order. Go back and re-enter the memory to achieve the effect of teleportation."

While He Xiao was talking, the big screen behind him was simultaneously annotating him in the form of an animated video. Celeste saw a coffin-like machine. People walked into the machine and were scanned from head to toe. , it is broken up into a few percent of water molecules, a few percent of protein molecules, sugar molecules, sodium, potassium, phosphorus, etc., and then these particles are accelerated through a pipeline and transported to another place, After being assembled in a machine that also looks like a coffin, the coffin lid is finally opened, and an identical person comes out from inside.

He Xiao glanced back and found that Case was using humans to demonstrate, so he reminded: "Case is just showing you in a way that is easier for you to understand. In fact, this idea is a carbon-based Life is impossible for human beings. If human beings are broken up into molecules and then reassembled, even if the position of each molecule remains the same, what will appear is just a corpse that is exactly the same as before. It is almost impossible to input memory. However, in other parts of the universe, there are some creatures whose existence form is completely different from human beings can do this, so they invented the molecular teleporter and took the lead in realizing ultra-high speed move."

"Why can't humans do it?" Celeste didn't understand.

"That's a long story, let's talk about it later, okay?" He Xiao didn't care about his divergent thinking, and his tone was still gentle.

"Yes." Celeste obediently agreed.

So He Xiao continued his tepid explanation, and the animation also continued to make annotations simultaneously. It was obviously being broadcast by Case: "It is necessary to send a large number of molecules from one place to another intact. The conditions required are very harsh, and the pipelines that need to be manufactured are of course also expensive. So they began to think again-the same kind of molecules and molecules, there is no difference between atoms and atoms, why must they work so hard to transport the original molecules? What about the past?"

"In order to save costs, they directly record the position of the molecular arrangement in the form of data, and use the same molecules in another place to form an identical person. In this way, not only can countless resources be saved on the transmission equipment , and can further increase the transmission speed.”

"Then someone thought, anyway, in the process of transmission, everything about people exists in the form of data, so why not make some improvements to the data according to their own ideas-such as replacing the imperfect parts, healing Sickness, rejuvenation, things like that."

"Going one step further -- anyway, even thoughts and memories are digitized, why can't we make some changes to the memory, such as deleting the past that we don't want to recall, adding knowledge that would have taken us a lot of time to learn, and changing the bad personality? The fun part, wait."

"As a result, more and more people began to do everything possible to repair their own data, and strive to make themselves more perfect."

"Wait a minute, I have a question." Celeste interrupted He Xiao again, "If even the memory can be modified at will, wouldn't the ruler directly control people's thoughts through data?"

"I just compare them to human beings. In fact, their life forms and social rules are completely different from human beings. Many things that humans take for granted, they neither do nor can do." He Xiao said "For example, an important difference between the two parties is that human beings need to communicate inefficiently through language, writing, and body movements, but their thoughts are completely transparent. Once communication is established, it will be like two pieces connected to each other. Like the hard disks in the same system, they can see all the thoughts and bodies of each other clearly, so their communication will never be ambiguous, and it is clear at a glance whether they are friends or foes, and there is no room for lies and deception."

"Sounds good." Celeste said enviously.

"I don't think it's surprising that you think so. Now let's bring the topic back to this increasingly digital race." He Xiao asked Masi to continue the demonstration, "It's like humans are gradually using network communication instead of In addition to real-world communication, people on that planet have also created many virtual scene servers. Most people exist in them in the form of data for a long time. The entity becomes more and more like a burden to them. Only what appears When things must be done with entities, they will temporarily use molecules to synthesize a body, and when they are used up, they will dismantle the body and continue to let themselves exist in the form of data. They think this is a more advanced form of life. In the state of digitalization, they omit countless troubles brought by the body-such as eating, excreting, sleeping, etc., and even reproduction no longer requires the participation of entities. Anyway, all life can be digitized, and they can directly use Compiled by data, a child can fully meet the expectations of the parents in every aspect, and can also directly copy a hundred of themselves, each of which is as perfect as the template."

"Isn't that a lot of fun also gone?" Celeste said, "For example, the satisfaction of eating delicious food, and the joy of being intimate with the one you love, you can't experience it."

"No, those pleasures are not gone, but the way to obtain them is easier." He Xiao also said flatly, as if discussing the resistance elements of the circuit board, "Using human beings as an analogy, it is like before it takes a few tens of Sweat profusely every minute, consume so much energy to achieve a brief orgasm, and you only need to call a small piece of data in the future to experience that feeling immediately, and how high and how long it takes. Just like a drug addict Just as people who have experienced the extreme happiness brought by drugs will be insensitive to ordinary stimulation, as long as people on that planet have experienced the super stimulation in the data situation, they will all sneer at the "real" happiness that can be felt by the body. And this This kind of extreme enjoyment will not be addictive, as long as you delete the addictive part of the data, you can slowly experience the feeling of stimulating step by step from the beginning.”

"It sounds like heaven." Thelister said, "But in this way, it seems that they don't need to do anything anymore. Anyway, everything can be achieved by copying a piece of data."

"Yeah, more and more people are starting to find it boring. After all, a warm fire and blankets, high-calorie Coke and fried chicken can only bring heavenly pleasure to a hungry and cold person, but to For a person who has been in a warm environment, eating Coke and fried chicken casually until he vomits, he can no longer get any happiness from it. Digitally they have everything-everyone has almost perfect They all store the knowledge downloaded from the same knowledge base in their minds, their personalities and ways of thinking are becoming less and less different, and the extreme enjoyment that can be repeated infinitely quickly makes them tired. So one day, people began to Merge your own data with other people to form a 'national community', and then more and more people give up their meaningless independent will and choose to merge into this ocean of information."

Celeste asked perplexedly: "Doesn't anyone think that losing oneself is equivalent to 'death'?"

"It's like a small drop of water originally had a unique impurity structure and ecological circle. One day it fell into the sea. Did it disappear or gain eternal life?" He Xiao asked another philosophical question.

Celeste couldn't answer.

He Xiao didn't expect him to answer, but continued: "Of course, some people questioned this kind of 'integration' at the beginning. When the number of people who choose to integrate is a minority, integration is still a spontaneous and voluntary thing. When nearly half of the people were all fused, this powerful fusion body began to persuade and threaten those who refused to fuse, and when the vast majority of people were fused into one, the fusion body directly swallowed the few remaining individuals who refused to integrate. In the end , all life on the entire planet ceased to exist, only this incomparably powerful fusion of personalities remained—we call it the will of the planet, and this huge information group contained the personalities and memories of all people on the entire planet , materials, and energy, it can be said that it is the final result of the civilization development of that entire planet."