[A 200,000-word short article is being saved~]
The first time Mingzhen realized that the world was really going to end was when the file number jumped to seven digits.
She originally thought that the end of the world should be more dramatic.
Like a loud bang, or a period of darkness that lasts for many days.
But what actually happens is that data continues to accumulate, hard drives run quietly, and humans decrease little by little.
She was called the "archivist of civilization."
The system made it very clear when she accepted the task: you are just a recording tool.
Mingzhen nodded.
She recorded the first fallen city without so much as a frown.
On the screen was a picture of a high-rise building breaking apart, and in the earphones were mixed cries. She just followed the process and marked the time, location, and damage ratio.
She later learned to turn off the sound, which made descriptions inaccurate.
Humanity is not unified on the matter of extinction.
Some people live desperately, some give up early, some try to be heroes, and some take advantage of the chaos to settle old scores.
Mingzhen archived it all side by side without embellishment. She knew that emotions should not appear in the record.
Only one person is an exception.
Ruan Zeyi is not on any priority list.
He is not a scientist, not an officer, and does not meet the conditions for preservation. He was just sent to perform a field mission with a very low success rate.
Before leaving, he said to Mingzhen: "If I am still alive, I will come to you as soon as possible."
Mingzhen did not create a separate file for this sentence, but just wrote down a line of time in his personal notes.
Later, communications were interrupted.
Later, the field list was marked as "lost contact" as a whole.
Until one day, she typed one more word in the file notes.
That's an image of a child.
In the picture, the little girl repeatedly practiced a sentence to the camera: "If you see this, it means we are no longer here."
Mingzhen stared at that line of text for a long time. She remembered that when Ruan Zeyi left, he looked a little lonely and his equipment was not complete.
She deleted the extra word and redid the entire record.
She told herself it was just work.
In the later stages of the decline of civilization, the world became extremely quiet.
There is no news and no debate.
Late one night, an uncataloged life signal popped up on the system.
The source is unstable and the display parameters are abnormal.
Ruan Zeyi came back that day.
He was injured, his clothing was torn and he walked with a noticeable limp.
He stood at the door of the recording room and did not come in. He only said one sentence: "Rather than letting you see how embarrassed I am now, I am more afraid that I will not come back."
Not long after, his life signal disappeared from the system.
But Mingzhen still gets up every day, logs into the system, and proofreads data.
When the last human life signal disappeared, the system gave her no prompt.
But time continued to move forward, and at that moment, Mingzhen suddenly didn't know what words to use to refer to herself.
She completed the final archive, compressing, sealing, and encrypting the entire human civilization.
Then start the deep space broadcast program.
The blue progress bar finished little by little, and the world belonging to humans finally ended.
After her last mission was completed, Mingzhen left the underground facility for the first time. Looking up, the city had long since lost its vitality, leaving only ruins.
She found a paper book in the collapsed library. The pages are yellowed, water stained, and have burnt edges, but still readable.
She sat on the steps and turned to the first page.
This time there is finally no system monitoring and no archiving obligation.
She read to the end and closed the book... Looking from a distance, the sky did not change and the world did not respond.
This book, like myself, has no object of understanding.
But she still finished reading it, because even if the world no longer needs stories, stories once needed humans.
And Mingzhen was the last person to remember this incident.
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Reading guide:
1. Human-machine love, 1v1, double cleanliness.
Intention: Precisely because everything will eventually disappear, the current existence deserves to be taken seriously.
