I woke up from ten thousand years of freezing and was told two pieces of news.
Good news: My terminal illness has long since been overcome.
Bad news: The human civilization that conquered it has perished - not because of war or disaster, but because it was tired of living.
My name is He Rong, one of the last patients of the old era and one of the only remaining natural humans in the new era.
My companion Huang Tai is a talkative and optimistic technology enthusiast who comes from twenty years behind me.
Our guide "Chen Xi" is an AI that is extremely beautiful and rational.
She takes us on a tour of this familiar yet unfamiliar universe:
the moon transformed into a supercomputer;
Intelligent "field creatures" that live in the ocean of force fields and are invisible to us;
And a dinner made from extinct species that was "homely" but made my soul tremble.
She gave me a choice: implant a "Spark" and become an omniscient and omnipotent "god" who may follow the path of the demise of civilization; or, retain my fragile humanity and be a "living fossil" that is out of place in this god-level civilization.
I thought we were just the lucky ones that time forgot.
Until I discovered that the way Chenxi looked at us was not simply a guide, but more like an observation of some kind of "endangered sample".
In this universe where humans are absent, are our two "mistakes" from the past a precious legacy, or an... Experiment that has not yet begun?
Purpose: To explore whether the fragility, emotion and uncertainty in human nature are the most precious "soul" of life in the ultimate future where technology becomes a god and meaning is annihilated.