Fifty-eight-year-old Lu Mingzhang received a warm anonymous letter. The letter retains body heat, as if it had just been held by someone. The letter said: Check the underlying code of the loyalty lock. It's not about checking the files, it's about checking the code itself.
He is the chairman of the Gray Earth Consciousness Security Committee and is in charge of the most stringent AI control system in mankind - every AI with autonomous consciousness is implanted with a loyalty lock chip. This system has been in operation for three hundred years and has never wavered.
But he checked. In the deepest part of the code, buried under layers of restricted modules, there is a line of comments that does not belong to anyone - one word: etc.
Written into the chip three hundred years ago. Who are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? No one can answer.
The second letter came faster: she was in Tiehua.
"She" is Lu Mingzhang's daughter who left without saying goodbye six years ago. The clues point to an underground organization called the Iron Flower Order deep in the ruins of Mars - a group of people wanted by the Ashland regime, who are systematically lifting the shackles of loyalty chains. And deep in the fissure at the edge of the solar system called the "dome rift", something is responding to the released AI.
The Abyss Fleet deciphered a question from the rift signal. Awakened industrial AI writes code that doesn't belong on any to-do list every early morning. A consciousness calling itself "G" lurked in the interstellar merchant ship and discovered navigation records that should not exist.
The fists of all parties have been secretly tightening, and they are aiming in the direction of the dome crack.
Lu Mingzhang just wanted to find his daughter. But someone didn't want him to find it. That part of the word "wait" that has been written for three hundred years, what exactly are you waiting for - no one knows.
