When Alex's golden tattoo first became hot, he was holding a pulse rifle against a clone that looked exactly like him.
"Prototype No. 73," The opponent's blade glowed coldly, "Ryan's order: Destroy all sources of pollution."
Source of pollution? Does it refer to the thirty-seven children with pure eyes behind him, or does it refer to the woman soaking in the life-sustaining tank, whose consciousness has long since become an anchor point in the earth's core?
When Dr. Evelin's robotic arm tapped the keyboard for the last time, a pale golden liquid seeped out of the cracks in the cylinder. She looked at the dancing neural map on the screen and smiled - it turned out that the so-called "doomsday screening" was just a child who was afraid of starvation and turned his scars into a mark on the world.
Lily's consciousness network spreads underground, and when the light thread wraps around Ryan's remaining red code, it's like wrapping a bandage on a rusty heart. "They said you were a monster," her voice passed through the core of the earth, "but deep in your code, I saw a piece of moldy raisin bread."
Later, hyacinths bloomed over the ruins of Albuquerque. The little girl with braids lay on the soil and listened to the light thread singing underground - singing about the loneliness of the brain in the vat, singing about the pain of the awakening of the clone, and how all the broken consciousnesses were woven into a net that could catch the stars in the super-dimensional field.
"Brother Alex," she held up the crayon drawing, "is this running star Aunt Evelin?"
——We were all screened out defective products, but in the cracks between each other, a new universe grew.
Purpose: Even if consciousness is shattered like a star, trust and connection can weave a new web across the apocalypse - to explore how in extreme environments, the essence of "human nature" has never been perfect genes or pure rationality, but the courage to overcome suspicion, accept imperfections, and illuminate each other, proving that even "designed existences" can grow their own universe called "hope" in the cracks.