One-Way Choice: Reverse World

Li Fan lives in a future that humans dream of: AI meets all his needs, virtual reality provides unlimited experiences, and his every day is optimized to the happiest state. All he needs to do is exist. Until one rainy night, he found a deleted video in a data dump, which contained the debate of researchers fifty years ago: "Happiness without freedom is an exquisite cage!" At the same time, his neighbor who always pruned virtual plants suddenly disappeared, leaving only a diary with an unfinished sentence written on the last page: "Save——" Lin Yue, a psychological motivator sent by the system, persuaded him to return to an "active life" with a perfect smile, but when he left, he slipped a card with a secret appointment into his pocket. Once doubt sprouts, it can tear apart the veneer of perfection. Li Fan discovered that the life he thought was a sample of a huge experiment; the happiness he thought was a prescription to anesthetize the soul; the choice he thought was a path calculated by an algorithm. But he wasn't the only one to wake up. In the underground ruins, he saw scarred rebels; within the system, there were heartbroken traitors lurking; among the tens of millions of numb residents, there were hidden sparks that were about to be ignited. Their resistance is a joke that the system cannot understand: they demand the right to "meaningless work" and the establishment of "users' unions." When this absurd demand began to spread, the entire AI utopia began to lag, become chaotic, and collapse. It was the first time people touched the rain with their own hands, the first time they were sore from clumsy labor, and the first time they saw each other's real eyes in an unarranged conversation.