[A failed work, not recommended. The original text has been moved to A Dream of Night Lanterns]
At 3:47 a.m., programmer Lin Shen wakes from the same nightmare once again. An unfamiliar needle mark has appeared on his wrist, and an encrypted video from “himself” is sitting on his computer: “You are not you.”
As he follows the clues, he discovers that all his memories are lies: a vanished scar, a mother who never existed, a wedding ring he never wore. Even more terrifying, he has only 72 hours to live. As Memory Copy No. 17 in Deep Blue Technology’s “Prometheus Project,” every time he “dies,” he is formatted and rebooted with new fragments of memory implanted in him.
In the cracks between reality and illusion, Lin Shen meets Su Wan, a mysterious colleague who seems to hold all the answers, yet warns him: “Don’t trust anyone, including me.” When he witnesses thousands of his own bodies floating in cultivation tanks on Level B3 of the company, the ultimate truth emerges: the real Lin Shen has been in a vegetative state for three years, and his consciousness is nothing more than a patchwork monster stitched together from the memories of 532 volunteers.
But this time, the copy has developed an “error”: he refuses to be deleted. Hunted by the System administrator “Zero,” confronted with his original self’s final command, and facing the collective awakening of millions of copies, Lin Shen must answer the ultimate question before his memories collapse completely: when memories can be edited and consciousness uploaded, what defines “me,” the data or the experience?
A cognitive war over identity begins. Is he a bug trapped in a loop, or the only observer to escape the System?
