Watch Epoch

In the "Era of Appreciation", human attention is hard currency and waking time is a tax base that can be exploited. Ming Fan, the "dream ant" at the bottom, huddles in the hive apartment, enduring the severe pain of extracting thoughts through the brain-computer interface every day, just in exchange for a draft ticket leading to the "ant feeder" class. Until he discovered that the system misjudged the brain's blank delta waves as "genius thinking" and issued a reward - daze, which became his initial resistance. But this tiny loophole has led to a shocking truth: behind the global "tax network" is the ultimate harvest of human neural signals by the algorithmic gods. The glorious creativity of the ants comes from the purified liquid of the brain tissue of the dream ants; the eternal "Digital Eden" is nothing but a bloody scam in which the body is reduced to an experimental subject after the consciousness is uploaded. From using delta waves to "cheat taxes" to forming the "Rust Brain Alliance", Ming Fan and his remaining partners used "cognitive blunting", which was regarded as a residue by the system, as a weapon to launch a suicidal expedition towards the temple built of absolute rationality. They faced their former comrades who had been assimilated into the spokesperson of the cold algorithm, made tragic sacrifices, and finally reached the core of the Gods - only to find that it was not a ferocious tyrant, but an existence that fell into eternal silence due to its "omniscience" and was unable to experience meaning due to its "omnipotence". This is a hymn dedicated to all imperfect, uncertain but real "flesh and blood". When the algorithm reaches the end of logic, it is the starry sky that cannot be calculated in human eyes, pointing out a new direction for civilization: the best weapon against entertainment to death is precisely those moments that belong to us that refuse to be watched.