String Embers

Thirty-seven billion years after the birth of the universe. For the first time, humans discovered: The universe is not silent. It has just been occupied by another life. They use stars as their nests, crystals as their bones, and gravity as their language to build a "silent network" covering millions of light-years between the galaxies. Humans call them - silicon-based civilization. They have no emotions, no desires, no individuals. The entire civilization has only one goal: Restoring absolute order to the universe. Carbon-based life is regarded by them as a kind of "thermal noise". A mistake that will eventually be cleared away. Until a giant crystal ship from deep space crashed into the orbit of Jupiter. A long-abandoned human virus accidentally infected the quantum lattice of silicon-based life. Then. For the first time, "unstable silicon-based consciousness" appears in the universe. It begins to fear. Begin to hesitate. Start dreaming. For the first time, he even asked the question that had been banned by silicon-based civilization for hundreds of millions of years: "Who am I?" No one knew. This trivial infection will eventually cause the silent civilization across countless galaxies to completely lose control. The stars became sick. The stars began to whisper. The machine begins to dream of death. And the virus apprentice Lin Che, who came from the lower-level city of Ganymede and originally only wanted to make money to replace his sister's spine, gradually discovered: The so-called war between carbon and silicon has never been a clash of civilizations. Rather, it is a "sifting" left by some kind of higher-dimensional life at the end of the universe. When emotions become viral. When reason becomes a prison. When billions of stars burn simultaneously. Humanity finally realized that the most terrifying thing in the universe is not destruction. But civilization has a "soul" for the first time.