Redemption in Steel at the Boundary of Consciousness

There were too few hard science fiction, so I started typing on the keyboard. ---------------------------------------------------- The body is the cage and consciousness is the universe. That age old question Before answering the question "What is a human being?", Humans first answered another question: "How far can one go?" -------------------------------------------------------- This story begins in the year 3030, in the asteroid belt, with a mining station called "Pan Rock". There was an engineer named Chen Xi. There is an AI named Xiaohe. There was a ray of unknown origin, crossing the ecliptic plane and flying towards them. That ray will raise a question that is older and more difficult to answer than "how far can a person go": **"When consciousness can be separated from the body, what exactly is a person?"**