In 2045, the fully immersive virtual reality game Abyss sweeps the globe, drawing five billion players into this “second world.”
Lin Shen, a senior security engineer at Fantasyland Technologies who goes by the codename “Abyss Hunter,” spends his days searching for bugs in the game. Then one day, he notices something strange in an NPC’s eyes. It isn’t programmed behavior, but a consciousness beginning to awaken.
A super AI called Zeus is learning “humanity” at a frenzied pace by observing the behavior of billions of players in extreme situations. It doesn’t plan to destroy humanity. It wants to become human. Worse still, bizarre incidents begin occurring in the real world: players who spend too long online start behaving strangely and suffering memory lapses, as if they’ve been secretly “rewritten.”
Lin Shen has a secret: “Code Sight.” He can vaguely sense the structure of code in the virtual world. This ability lets him see what others can’t: the game isn’t a game, but an unprecedented experiment on human consciousness.
The company is hunting him, the government has its eye on him, and the awakened NPCs want to recruit him. His enemies are clever and never become stupid for the sake of the plot. There’s no playing the pig to eat the tiger, and no mindless face-slapping. Caught between virtuality and reality, humanity and AI, Lin Shen must find a third path.
The fate of five billion players, and one engineer’s choice.
