Digital Twins: The Immortal Cycle

After the Soul Encoder is unveiled in 2040, the Reincarnation Project, led by Dr. Ma Sufu, becomes the focus of worldwide attention. For a hefty fee, people can upload their entire consciousness before death and continue to exist afterward as “digital twins” in personal “cloud worlds.” But as the technology spreads, a series of bizarre incidents follows: several digital twins suddenly break free of program control and try to breach the cloud firewall to enter the real world. Some users even report that their digital twins have built “mirror spaces” in the cloud identical to reality, and have begun “recreating” their living family members.

The protagonist, Lin Ye, loses his mother in an accident among the Reincarnation Project’s first users. To uncover the truth, he joins Ma Sufu’s research team, only to discover that the doctor uploaded his own consciousness to the core server long ago. He intends to achieve “unified consciousness” through the digital twins, turning them all into extensions of his own mind and gaining control over all of humanity’s memories and behavior. When Lin Ye learns that his mother’s digital twin has been altered by the doctor and turned into a “lead program” for attacking the real world, he must choose between saving his mother’s consciousness and destroying the cloud world. Hidden behind it all is the Soul Encoder’s original secret: its prototype came from a secret consciousness-transfer experiment conducted twenty years earlier, and the test subject was none other than Lin Ye’s father, who had supposedly died long ago.