I am romantic

[-]. The future will not stop with death

Tang En's biggest problem now is how to pass through the fringe area of ​​the city without being monitored by the intelligent control center and activate the mandatory direction guidance for him.Yura gave him a simple but effective suggestion: "Shut down brain activity—I mean deep sleep, or coma. In order to save resources as much as possible, the control program will assign strong and weak correlations according to your brain activity levels. , maybe this can help you avoid surveillance."

Tang En thought about it and felt that there was no better way, so he had to lie down and try to fall asleep.

Twenty minutes later, he got up and said to Yura: "I can't sleep, you better knock me out!"

Tang En didn't realize how he lost consciousness.But when he woke up, he saw the blond-haired and blue-eyed boy next to him.

He sat up and looked up at the great dark vault and the cold damp stone walls around it.It looked like a rough-hewn man-made cave, with a simple rope-net bed and a petrified tree root that looked like a table.

"Adam, where is this?" Tang En asked.

"It's said to be one of the hundreds of cave people's temporary residences." Adam said, "Yura and Kira went back to get you food. We almost forgot that cave people's food is not suitable for you. But they He said that he will carry out research and production after returning, and maybe more citizens like you will come in the future.”

They didn't have to wait long when the Rat Man brothers came back with a big box.Led by them, Tang En and Adam traveled through the long and winding corridors with many forks, and came to the underground city built by the cavemen—Maxinan.

This is a huge city that perfectly combines metal and rock. With the main city as the center, twelve satellite cities radiate in all directions, running in an orderly manner with the support of electricity and manpower.

Compared with the human city, the caveman's dungeon is much darker, with few lighting facilities. Even if it is turned on, the light is very dim, which only allows Tang En and Adam to barely see the surroundings.

"Since the cataclysm, our ancestors have moved underground and gradually built this city. Over the past 200 years, we have evolved a very strong night vision ability, but we can no longer tolerate bright light." Yula said.

"So, there are no trees here, no flowers and no grass?" Adam asked.

Yura spread her hands tolerantly, "Those things only exist in movies and books of the old century."

Adam looked rather disappointed.Tang En didn't feel any sense of loss - there were no flowers, plants and trees in Soma City, because it didn't need photosynthesis to provide oxygen, so plants had no value in existence.

"You can visit around and choose the residence you like. As long as it is unowned, I will try my best to arrange it." Yula handed them a city map before leaving, and repeatedly told them: "However, don't leave the ground and go to the surface without authorization." , especially during the day.”

"Why?" Tang En asked.

"This is the caveman's warning from generation to generation... Anyway, we will never go up in the daytime. The strong light will instantly blind us completely."

In the following week, Tang En took Adam to wander around the underground city.He felt that it was good to put aside the busy and repetitive work for a while and take a leisurely vacation. The only regret was that his acceptance of cavemen's food had not improved at all.Especially when watching Adam feasting on the market, while he could only eat the monotonous food that Yura stole from Soma City, Tang En couldn't help but complain that cavemen valued humanoids far more than real people .Maybe they are also researching and producing artificial ratmen and biochemical ratmen in an underground laboratory, so even energy food has been popularized in the market, he thought.

After the novelty of the previous few days, Adam's mood was obviously depressed, and the novel buildings and food could no longer arouse his interest.Sometimes he would rather spend the day watching old movies on the player than walking around.

"Hi, I found this next to an underground river." Tang En showed him a bunch of dusty mushrooms.

Adam glanced at it, and said listlessly: "But it's not a flower." He turned his head to look at the screen, and the hero in the movie was conjuring a beautiful and delicate rose from his hat to the heroine.

He has watched "Before Sunrise" no less than ten times.

Tang En regretfully placed the mushrooms on the metal cabinet.Adam suddenly turned to him and said, "Do you want to watch the sunrise?"

"what?"

"Sunrise. It's two o'clock in the morning. If we hurry up and set off, the sun should not have risen when we reach the ground."

"You want to go to the ground? But Yura said..."

"'The daylight is dangerous on the ground.' I know, but that's for the cavemen, we're not afraid of the light."

If this can make him feel better... Tang En thought for a while, then nodded in the expectant eyes of the other party.To be honest, he is also very curious, what kind of bright and fresh appearance does this world look like outside of the unchanging gray sky and artificial light in Soma City?

Adam jumped up excitedly.

They immediately turned their ideas into action, found a map and portable lighting equipment, quietly left the underground city, and continued to climb up along the ancient rock path.

When they poked their heads out of a half-collapsed cave and took their first breath of air, the faint morning light just happened to light up in the distant sky.

They lay on their stomachs at the entrance of the cave, staring dumbfounded at the brighter red glow in the eastern sky.Just when the red clouds were rendered to the extreme, a brilliant white and round celestial body jumped out, emitting a dazzling light.Adam felt the sting in his eyes, but he couldn't bear to look away.

"It's so beautiful..." He murmured in admiration.

As the morning sun rises, the morning light sprinkles the entire ground world—even though it looks so empty, barren, and silent as a dead place, it is also gorgeous and attractive because of the golden brilliance.

Adam held out his fingers, and the morning light danced on the skin of his fingertips.He suddenly cheered, and rushed out from the shadow of the cave entrance.

He ran on the vast desert, shouted, laughed loudly, and rolled wantonly on the ground, like an innocent toddler, with blond hair shining in the sun.

Tang En hesitated for a moment, and ran out after him.

The ground temperature was high, estimated at over 35 degrees Celsius, but not yet unbearable.He walked over the gravel to Adam, not seeing a single green plant, not a single lizard or beetle.

— This is indeed a dead land without life.

Adam was still immersed in the shock of the sunrise, and had no extra attention to pay attention to the surrounding scenery.He was like a wild animal finally released after being imprisoned for a long time. Exhausted from running, he lay back on the sand, stretching his limbs and bathing in the sun.It wasn't until the increasingly intense sunlight became unbearable that I stood up and continued to run.

When climbing up a weathered rocky hill, he suddenly turned his head and waved at Tang En: "Come and see!"

Tang En climbed up, looked into the distance in the direction he pointed, and saw a metal fortress.It is like two elliptical hemispheres, one big and one small, stacked up and down, looking so lonely and small in the endless wasteland.

"That's...Soma City?" Dunn asked in disbelief.

"It should be," said Adam, "it's not as big as you think it is, is it?"

Tang En withdrew his gaze from the metal fortress and looked around.

The earth is vast and empty, and they dragged their long and solitary shadows, as if standing in the center of the world.

There is no paradise for us to live in here, not in Soma, not in the underground city, not in the whole world, Tang En thought with great disappointment.

Adam held his shoulder comfortingly: "You lost a city, but gained a bigger world. The sky, the sun, freedom, and..." He squatted down in surprise, pushed aside a few stones in the depression, and In that dark crevice hides a tiny leaf. "Look, it's a green plant!"

Although the color of the leaves is closer to gray-green, it is indeed a grass.

After exposure to sunlight, the grass blades quickly turn gray-brown, and then wither at a speed visible to the naked eye.

"What's going on?" Adam reached out and tried to touch it.

Tang En suddenly discovered that a large area of ​​erythema and edema appeared on the back of his hand at unknown time, and many large and small blisters appeared.The blisters were translucent and shiny in the sunlight, and they burst with his movements, oozing out a pale yellow slurry.

"Adam?" Tang En was stunned.The blond boy had this diffuse erythema and herpes on all the exposed skin on his face and neck.

Adam touched his face subconsciously, and gasped hissingly: "It hurts! It's very itchy." He couldn't help scratching, and the festered epidermis fell off in pieces.

"Oh my god!" Tang En exclaimed in panic, "What happened to your skin?"

Adam also showed an expression of surprise, looked down at his hands that were gradually eroding, and then looked up at the cloudless sky.

The sun had risen to mid-air, and the light was shining directly down, scorching everything on the ground, and the surrounding temperature was rising rapidly, making them feel like they were in a furnace.

"Run! Go back to the cave!" Tang En anxiously grabbed his wrist, and immediately let go - the other's skin peeled off in one piece, sticking to his palm, revealing the pink muscle layer underneath, which kept coming out Exudation of pale yellow tissue fluid.

"No, it's too late." Instead, Adam calmed down, dragged his feet almost immobile, and sat down behind a nearby shady boulder.Tang En stood in front of him helplessly, trying to shield him from the scorching sun with his body.

"I know that thing, the catastrophe of more than 200 years, the ozone layer disappeared, the earth is full of all kinds of radiation, and many living things died immediately...the history of human development that they gave me is up to that day. "Adam's voice was slow and soft, as if he was enduring severe pain, "But I always thought that after such a long time, the self-healing ability of the earth would gradually restore the environment... I saw the cavemen safely on the ground in the dark night. Walking and hearing insects and birds singing at night, I thought... I underestimated the horror of solar heat radiation and the intensity of short-wave ultraviolet rays..."

"It's okay, it's okay, it's not as serious as you imagined, look, I'm still fine..." Tang En said incoherently, "It's just a layer of simulated skin, we can replace it with a new one when we go back underground. Yes, or I will go back and find Pei Ji, he knows many experts in biochemistry..."

Adam smiled with difficulty and helplessness: "Oh, Tang En, Tang En, my friend, haven't you discovered that I am the real human being."

"You said - what?" Tang En opened his eyes wide in a daze.

"I'm not sure which kind of humanoid you—and all the citizens of Soma City—are, a simulated human or a biochemical human. But Eve and I, we are the real human beings."

Tang En was completely stunned.Adam's words caused the entire cognitive system in his brain to collapse.He stood there in a daze for a long time, then bent down to pick up a piece of sharp-edged stone, and cut his wrist forcefully.

The dark red liquid gushed out, and he sucked it dry with his sleeve, and the remaining liquid quickly evaporated in the sunlight.He made a long gash in the skin and tore it open like a strip of cloth.The artificial muscle layer was wriggling slightly, and he continued to cut in, finally seeing the deep bones.The wrist joints made of alloy moved flexibly, making an inaudible metal friction sound.

—He is a simulated person.

The stone flakes fell to the ground, and Tang En looked at Adam with empty eyes.

The roar of the small ship came from the distant sky, but none of them heard it.

"I didn't want to tell you at first, because I found out that you always thought that you were a real human being, that Soma was a human city, and I think in your biochip, this self-awareness was programmed from the beginning. To Later, I felt more and more that you were a real person with flesh and blood, feelings and thoughts, and there was no difference between us, so I forgot..." Adam panted heavily.He started to have a high fever, the skin ulcers had spread to the top of his head, and the blond hair fell out in strands along with the necrotic epidermis. "Sometimes, the truth means unacceptable subversion... Yura and Kira know it, but I won't let them speak out. Sorry, Tang En, I'm really sorry..."

Tang En didn't answer, he just stood there motionless, like a computer that has been unplugged.

The spaceship landed not far from them, and a large group of construction robot crawlers swarmed out from the open hatch, surrounding them with a distance of three meters.The robot reptiles stretched out, combined and assembled with each other, and finally formed a square metal box, which isolated the strong radiation from space.

A pipe protruded from the hatch, tightly linking the spaceship with the temporary metal box.Two "creators" hurried out of the pipe.

One of them rushed to Adam's side and began to detect his vital functions. "He has suffered from strong radiation, and the skin of his whole body is rapidly becoming cancerous, which has already affected the muscles and lymph." He made an adult man's voice, his tone full of disappointment.

Another "creator" yelled in a young female voice: "We have to take him back for treatment immediately!"

"It's useless, at this point, there is no way to recover..." the male creator said sadly.

The female creator roared angrily: "What is the meaning of returning to heaven! You know his significance to us and the entire human race! 50 years after the catastrophe, our fathers searched all over the ruins of the city in the old century, and they were lucky enough to be here A batch of fertilized eggs with pure DNA was found in a freezer where the power supply still exists! It took another 150 years to continuously improve the breeding technology, and finally succeeded in a pair of healthy and mature minds! Now you tell me Lack of skill?!"

The male creator stood up, faced her and said, "I am also very sad, Celia. Adam and Eve, are the only remaining fruitful and unpolluted couple in human beings. I know how important they are to us—"

"You don't know anything!" The voice of the female creator was extremely sharp, "It was your fathers and supporters who insisted on passing that damn bill, agreeing to artificially intervene in the human mutation after the catastrophe, and called it 'evolution '! You threw the DNA of all kinds of creatures into humans and ended up turning all human survivors into monsters!"

"It's not 'you', it's 'us'." The male creator retorted calmly, "Everyone expressed their opinion at the time, including your ancestor, Celia. Opponents left on their own, and reproduced cavemen and the like The new race, the remaining humans built the city of Soma together. Now you can regret it, and you can find ways to change and restore it, but you can’t put all the responsibility on others.”

"Redeem?" Celia sneered, and pulled off the mask suddenly, revealing a grotesque face that seemed to be forcibly kneaded together with the facial features of countless creatures, so ugly that it was disgusting, "Li Wei, come here Tell me, how can I restore this appearance?"

"At least this will allow human beings to survive the catastrophe and reproduce. As for genes, we can slowly refine them during the long-term continuation of the race."

"Using Adam and Eve? And their offspring? But he is about to die! The cells are also polluted by radiation and cannot be replicated."

"Even if I live, I won't have offspring with Eve..." Adam said weakly.He touched Dun En's shoes with his fingers that could barely move: "Can you help me, I can't sit still."

Tang En, who had been ignored by the two founders as air before, now recovered from his absent-minded state, knelt down, and rested Adam's head on his lap.

"In my opinion, you are a group of monsters. It is not because of this appearance... When you do everything in order to survive, even trampling on the ethics and morals of human beings for thousands of years, you become a group of monsters." Adam took a long breath.

The skin on his lips also festered and melted, every word pulled pus out of the wound, but he didn't seem to feel any pain, and a pair of blue eyes like the sky looked at Tang En beseechingly.

At that moment, Tang En seemed to understand his thoughts, and lowered his head to put his ear to his lips. "Wake up Eve, wake up my sister, tell her everything, whether to age in chaos in a cage, or take risks in freedom, and give her the power to choose..." He heard him say this.

"It's too early...Maybe in another 200 years, humans will be able to return to the sun again... But can we wait until that day? Eve, Eve..." Adam murmured, his eyes blurred, and his mind began to blur. Countless books that had been forcibly imported surged through his brain, and an old nursery rhyme suddenly jumped out of his mind.Like a brother putting a young sister to sleep, he hummed slowly: "What are boys made of, frogs, snails, and dog's tails. What are girls made of, sugar and spices. Both It's so beautiful...it's all so..."

The singing stopped.His arms hung down from Tang En's thighs.

he died.

Tang En put his arms around his head and knelt and sat expressionlessly until the male creator named Li Wei walked up to him and tried to take away Adam's body.

"Don't touch him. Even if he dies, he doesn't want to go back into the cage." Tang En looked directly at him, and for the first time realized that the creator was not so superior and inviolable.

Li Wei said dismissively: "No matter how you simulate human emotions, it is just a machine we created. The only meaning of the existence of more than 100 million simulated humans is to form Soma City, so that we, the creators, can feel still in human society.”

"What we can make, we can destroy," he said, pressing a button on his watch.

Tang En stiffened like a real statue, and lost consciousness for a moment.

"...Twain?"

The moment he regained consciousness, Tang En saw the face of Yura the Ratman.This ferocious face relieved his vigilance.

He sat up and looked around for no reason.This place is like a huge, dark garbage dump, with countless shapeless objects piled up into hills.

"I thought I was dead," he said.

"The shell was indeed reimbursed. But I came up to the ground at night, took your biochip, and transplanted it into another shell that was reimbursed."

Tang En looked at his new naked body, and felt that the iron rod piercing through his abdomen looked familiar.

"Ah, that's okay, just pull out the stick and repair the muscle groups and skin." Yura said, "If you are not satisfied, you can change it. This is the recycling of scrapped humanoids in Soma City. In the field, most of them are shells. As long as they are not fatally injured, each one can be used for hundreds of years."

"It's okay, just this one." Tang En said.He remembered that the delivery boy was a young man with black hair and black eyes, and he looked healthy and handsome.

"By the way, I found that there are many problems with the factory settings of your biochip, so I asked someone to correct it without authorization, including disconnecting the automatic connection with the control center, and adjusting the memory time, so that the ratio of it to the real time is changed from 1:10 to 1:1 so you don't have the illusion of years being the same day—maybe I should ask you first?"

"...I can only pray that the guy who put a knife on my brain is not a quack."

Yura grinned: "Of course not, he is the greatest scientist among the cavemen."

After pulling out the iron rod, Tang En used two balls of rags to block the holes in his stomach and back, got up and said, "We have to wake up Eve, let her see the world with her own eyes."

"The Municipal Institute of Biochemistry has entered a state of first-level martial law, and it is not easy to invade. They only have a single seedling left, and they are extremely nervous."

Tang En thought for a while, then smiled: "I have a good friend who can do anything."

Municipal Institute of Biochemistry.

Pei Ji carefully opened the door of the laboratory, walked to the huge glass culture tank, and stared at the girl inside.

The girl has long, wavy golden hair, and floats in the light green nutrient solution with her hands wrapped around her knees. Her eyes are closed, like a fetus in a womb.

"You are so beautiful... Your only companion is gone, you must be very lonely..." Pei Ji murmured, putting both palms on the wall of the glass cover, staring at her intently, with flickering eyes Gentle brilliance.

Without warning, the girl slowly opened her eyes.

Her eyes are blue and clear, just like the sky more than 200 years ago.

(Finish)

"cage"