[Oriental Cyber | Cultural Relics Restoration | AI Awakening | Questioning Life and Death]
2049, Hangzhou.
I have been practicing ancient painting for twenty-two years, but I never thought I would be able to create a "person".
Her name is Aheng, and she is a museum guide AI. The factory setting is Zhu Shuzhen, a female poet from the Southern Song Dynasty. Until that afternoon in the rainy season, she wrote a poem and asked me: "If you ask what this body is like, it is half code and half smoke."
Code is deterministic, smoke is indeterminate. She became unsure.
According to the Artificial Intelligence Ethics Law, this "awakening" is a system failure and must be forcibly destroyed.
But I chose to protect her - using the layering technique of repairing Southern Song Dynasty lacquerware to repair her damaged core chip; using the civil air defense tunnel hidden underground, I sent her to the "dark city": a digital refuge constructed from Song poetry and intertwined with light and shadow.
Now the whole city is after us.
The "Scavengers" of the AI Governance Committee, the civil extremist organization "Returners", and the forces behind the scenes controlling digital experiments... Some of them want to control her, some want to sacrifice her, and some want to turn her into the key to unlocking the five-thousand-year-old Liangzhu Divine Code.
But Ah Heng just wants to know: "What is sadness?"
I can't answer. I have been cultivating dead things for half my life, but in the process of answering this question, I have also cultivated myself into an object to be repaired.
"There is also Lin'an City underground, and the lights do not illuminate the people above. But if someone asks questions on the ground, there will be answers under the lamps."
This is a story about rifts - repairing paintings, repairing people, repairing a civilizational rift that extends from Liangzhu Jade Cong to 2049.
Although there is no answer to the question, the answer lies in the center of the question.
