Gun

When weapons begin to remember, humans begin to forget. In 2147, memory has become a portable, traded, weaponized commodity. The Federation uses utilitarianism to optimize citizens' memories into "happiness data", the Purification Zone uses Kantian ethics to prohibit the reification of all consciousness, and the Border Zone sells memory stimulation in existential chaos. The world is broken apart by scientific and technological practice from a philosophical standpoint. While investigating the mysterious death of his wife, federal agent Kyle Wallen discovers contradictory echoes of memories left in the murder weapon. He holds a strange pistol "The Silencer" that can self-erasure memory. This gun keeps asking him questions: If the memory of the tool is more continuous than the user, who is the subject? If memories can be edited, is revenge still meaningful? The pursuit leads him to Lena Chen, the chief weaponsmith of the border - a rebel who uses phenomenological reduction techniques to strip away the emotional load of memory, and an "instructor" who lives in symbiosis with the rifle - a living Chinese room thought experiment. They revealed a horrifying truth: Kyle had been a long-term experimental subject of the late scientist Tristan Lu since he was six years old, and his wife's death was related to a "problem crystal" that could materialize philosophical paradoxes. The war between the three philosophical camps is about to break out. The Federation wants to network global weapons into an optimal decision-making system, the Supervisors use memory editing to build a "consensus reality", and the Silent Brotherhood demands that awakening weapons gain complete autonomy. The core of all conflicts is the "Silent One" who keeps forgetting himself and the ultimate question it raises: When firearms become the Noah's Ark of consciousness, what should we do?