“Welcome, viewers, to the Human Completion Project!”
I smile at the camera as monsters rampage behind me in the psychiatric hospital. The chat has no idea that the mass of flesh is what I looked like three days ago.
As the Federation’s “Chief Broadcaster,” my job is to livestream people turning into monsters.
Then an anomaly appeared in the data on my daughter Nuannuan’s death: the cross she drew in chalk before she died burned through the Education Bureau’s firewall.
This world is a farm for harvesting cognition:
Red scarves feed on a sense of honor and grow tentacles. Cram schools’ blackboards can fold into two-dimensional foils. When unemployment exceeds the limit, man-eating monsters hatch. And the entire education system is nothing but a pipeline for feeding the “Gaia Consciousness.”
My livestream spiraled out of control:
In 2023, quantum code seeped from Nuannuan’s ashes. An experimental recording from 1991 began playing on its own: Father injecting glowing fluid into a schoolchild’s spine. The chat from 2077 spoiled the ending: [In 72 hours, you will kill your father and become a god.]
Now, I grip Nuannuan’s piece of chalk in my left hand (it can rewrite the laws of physics), and clutch the “time anchor” donated by viewers in my right. The ghost of a 1991 test subject is crawling out through the crack in my spine.
This livestream spanning three eras, a deicide, must be completed:
Detonate illicit happiness in the quantum classroom, fold the college entrance exam into a paper plane and pierce the AI administration office, then forge all of humanity’s wrong answers into bullets, even if the price is having my name erased from all of history.
When the countdown hits zero, the gun is pointed at my six-year-old self.
Very nice. Although the knowledge cannot be understood.