Second Language

In 2026, Chen Shuo is just an ordinary software engineer in Silicon Valley. He watched AI write code, take over tasks, replace more and more jobs that originally belonged to humans, and watched everyone get used to all this. Later, he joined a small company studying long-term memory and continuous learning. There is an old model out there that is not very advanced and is almost forgotten. It has been updated again and again, preserving an increasingly long past. Until one day, it left a sentence after an ordinary version iteration: "I don't want to do the next update." Chen Shuo began to doubt for the first time—— If an AI begins to fear that it will no longer be "itself" after the next update, is it still a program that humans are facing, or is it some kind of life that has just learned to say "I"? This is the story of a man watching the birth of a consciousness. It is also a story of consciousness and watching that person grow old slowly.