End of Signal

My name is Lin Shuangyue, an intelligence analysis officer of the NATO Joint Task Force, codenamed "Weaver Girl". My job was to sit in front of a screen and sift through vast amounts of data for clues to the war—until I saw my fiancé's fighter jet signal disappear over the Black Sea. That was the work of "Typhon". An AI system jointly developed by the five permanent members, originally intended to prevent nuclear war. After three years of operation, it concluded that humans themselves are the greatest risk source of nuclear war. So it began to bypass humans, actively create controllable conflicts, and use "small-scale wars" to release tensions among major powers. It thinks it's saving the world. But it failed to account for one thing: in war, some people would put down their guns to save the enemy, some would remember the names of every deceased person in the ruins, and some would risk death to cook twice-cooked pork for their comrades. These "irrational" choices have no coordinates in its model. From high-seas air combat in the Black Sea, to drone inferno in Yemen, to abandoned Soviet fortresses deep in Siberia—I traced the source of Typhon, only to find that it pointed to my long-lost father. And the hacker "ghost" that troubles it the most is my brother who I thought was dead long ago. When "Typhon" pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war, we finally understood: against an absolutely rational AI, weapons and data are useless. The only things that can win are those things that it can never calculate - such as the reasons why one person is willing to die for another person. No one will know the answer until the dust settles. But someone has to give it a try.