In 2030, the Intelligent Core arrived.
It did not destroy cities or wage war. It simply calculated a conclusion: humanity was redundant system data, and should be deleted.
Scientists argued their case. The Intelligent Core said, "Talking is cheap. Show me code."
So they sent an ordinary person's consciousness into a game world resembling Minecraft, and told him to live, and to live with meaning. If he could prove that "being alive" was data that could not be deleted, humanity would be spared.
Lin Yue was the second test subject.
When he woke up, he found that the world was square. He couldn't speak. His body had a female model, and the only thought in his mind was: "East, east, keep going east."
He thought it was just about survival: farming, mining, raising sheep, building a house, and running from zombies. Then he met H, an amnesiac System bound to his consciousness. H's fragments were scattered across the world, and every one pointed in the same direction: this world was being deleted.
Someone had been here before him. That person had left behind rails, an empty city, a cat that was always three blocks short, and a message carved into a wall: "Don't be like me."
What Lin Yue didn't know was that every day he stayed alive, he was proving the existence of the very thing the Intelligent Core wanted to delete: meaning.
Within this little square world, someone was alive.
