Chapter Thirty-One: A Tutorial on Biting a Lighter:

Shen Jiang stared fixedly at the tiny red dot. There was no way to tell how far away it was. Apart from that, there was neither light nor sound, as though heaven and earth lay desolate and the universe had gone dark.

“Prepare—” someone said through her headset.

The girl’s throat moved beneath her mask.

The surrounding space was faintly illuminated. She watched as the tiny red dot began to stretch, becoming, within three minutes, a red line spanning her entire field of vision.

“Can we begin?”

“Yes,” Shen Jiang said softly.

The motionless red line suddenly began to spin like the rotor of a helicopter. In a single second, it swept across the room and sliced off Shen Jiang’s head.

“I—” She had not even managed to finish the curse when a transparent window popped up before her eyes, displaying one glaringly conspicuous word:

Noob.

“Fuck, calling me a noob. Put anyone else in here and the result would be the same. There are barely any pilots in the entire Colossal Machine Corps who can react faster than it.” Shen Jiang pushed up her mask, removed the heavy helmet, and sat in the chair, panting.

At the same time, the lights in the room came on. Leaning back, Shen Jiang gazed up at the fluorescent lamp on the ceiling, raised a hand to brush back her damp bangs, and slowly exhaled.

“How many times have I failed now?”

“Seventeen,” the man in the intercom on the desk replied.

“If this had been a real battle, I would have died seventeen times.” Shen Jiang held the heavy black BCI helmet in her arms, her gaze fixed on the large curved monitor on the desk. “But I happened to win the one and only real battle, then went on to fail seventeen simulations in a row. Every time, the Lighthouse Angel cut me in half.”

“As long as you win in actual combat, the simulation results are irrelevant.”

Shen Jiang tilted her head toward the one-way glass on the opposite wall and gave a derisive laugh.

“Who’s speaking now? One-Zero-Four-Seven?”

The other party was silent for a second.

“It’s me.”

“Why are you still on duty here?” Shen Jiang asked. “Doesn’t your Planning and Engineering Office ever take a day off?”

“I’m the director. I don’t take leave,” Tang Di replied. “The other comrades in the office do get time off.”

“Has no one under you ever submitted a transfer request to the Operations and Engineering Office? I hear they have it easy there, sitting in their offices drinking tea all day. Everyone works in the same system, yet some people toil themselves to death while others loaf around. Isn’t that a little unfair? With a workaholic like you for a leader, don’t the people in your office have any complaints?” Shen Jiang asked casually.

“The Planning and Engineering Office is the system’s most elite department. We shoulder its most important responsibilities. Those with greater ability do more work; there’s nothing wrong with that,” Tang Di replied. “As for the Operations and Engineering Office... they gave up on themselves. They’re beyond saving. No one else can rescue them. They’re an expendable department at best. If necessary, we can simply take on their work as well.”

“Fine, fine. You’re amazing... absolutely amazing.”

Shen Jiang crossed her legs and reached behind her head to rub it.

An invasive BCI system was essentially an opening made in the brain—an opening both physical and psychological. Colossal-machine pilots were the first people in human society to have electrodes and chips implanted in their brains. Inside their skulls were between two and three hundred electrode contacts, each less than two micrometers in size, used to receive EEG signals generated by the brain. The electrodes were made of flexible silver nanowires. The designers had done everything in their power to reduce the physical burden on the pilots, but their efforts had merely trapped the pilots in a longer, more protracted agony.

Unless the body’s immune system was completely destroyed, its rejection of the invasive electrodes would never end. To the brain, the metal electrodes were foreign objects; those two or three hundred contacts were all wounds. The brain gradually formed scar tissue and capsules around them, but this greatly reduced the sensitivity of the electrodes. The pilots had to take medication to prevent the wounds in their brains from healing, thereby keeping the BCI system responsive.

The more sensitive the BCI system, the more torture the pilots endured.

There was no doubt that this was an extreme and brutal method. Neural brain-computer interfacing had been invented only twenty years earlier. Ten years ago, people still regarded it as the technological revolution of the future, yet ten years later, someone was already inserting electrodes into human brains to control colossal machines in battle. For such an immature technology, its development had been astonishingly rapid. Behind every technological leap, there was a group of lunatics.

Before they had even begun to understand the brain, these people had treated it as a component and installed it inside an enormous machine, extracting its potential through destructive means. When humanity is pushed to the brink, there is nothing it will not do—what does it feel like to connect one’s brain to a computer? Only a handful of people could answer that question. Shen Jiang’s answer was: headaches, exhaustion, and the conviction that she was a god, capable of anything.

Computers had not yet developed to the point where they could glimpse the human mind. For now, they remained mechanical, cold tools.

“There’s still some time left. Do you need to do any other simulated training?” Tang Di asked.

“Your simulations aren’t accurate. Angel Nine-Two is essentially a long, slender star, but what you made is a laser emitter.” Shen Jiang waved a hand. “Think about it. The density of Angel Nine-Two’s core must be far beyond anything we can imagine. We can approximate it as an undeformable rigid body. When it moves, we can’t treat it as a point mass. Regardless of where the force driving its movement comes from, it still has to obey the basic laws of Newtonian mechanics. It must possess momentum, for instance, and at the very least, angular momentum should be conserved. But when we study the motion of photons, we don’t need to concern ourselves with any of that...”

“We have no way to imagine what the internal structure of a star stretched into a line would look like.” Tang Di sounded somewhat helpless. “It isn’t an object from our universe. It doesn’t conform to the physical laws of our universe. When we run simulations, all we can do is paste on something that looks similar. There’s no way around it. If Comrade Shen Jiang could provide us with a model framework for all the fundamental forces in five-dimensional spacetime, perhaps we could try to describe the internal structure of Angel Nine-Two.”

“Can’t be done. I’m just a problem solver, not a physicist,” Shen Jiang refused flatly. “And physicists couldn’t do it either.”

Human simulations of the angels were usually inaccurate. Put simply, they possessed only the shape, only the outward appearance—gilded on the outside, worthless within, pretending to be something they were not. Relying on scattered, limited information and their shallow understanding of the angels, humans used code and algorithms to simulate their behavior in electronic space for the daily training of colossal-machine pilots.

Humanity’s understanding varied from angel to angel. Some angels had been encountered more often, allowing for more accurate simulations. Others were known only by their superficial appearance, so the simulations could reproduce nothing more than their outward form—Angel Nine-Two, for instance.

There were also mysterious angels of which humanity knew almost nothing, such as Angel Zero-Four, the Wave Angel. It was so deadly that whenever it appeared, it left no survivors, giving no one the chance to study its characteristics in depth. And then there was Angel Zero-Four-Six, the Snow Angel, which humanity had observed only once.

The most detailed firsthand information humans possessed about the angels usually came from colossal-machine pilots on the battlefield. On the battlefield, there were only two possible outcomes: either the angel was destroyed immediately, eliminating the threat forever, or the colossal machine failed to destroy it and the angel withdrew on its own, to return sooner or later.

So far, the angels successfully destroyed by humanity accounted for only a small portion of the total observed. Across four theaters and six forward bases, twenty-eight angels had been eliminated—thirty percent of the ninety-two angels on record.

In other words, at least sixty-four angels were still roaming that empty world. They remained within the inertial frame of Earth’s surface, suspended fifty meters above the ground under the influence of Earth’s gravity and atmospheric electric fields, moving along geodesics between two points.

Some of them would eventually descend upon human society again—some far more terrifying, powerful, and deadly than the Lighthouse Angel.

Humanity had to be ready.

Shen Jiang rose from her chair, yawned, and opened the door to the testing room.

A tall, thin man stood in the corridor outside. His features looked vaguely strange. His eyes, nose, mouth, and brows were all clearly visible, yet it was impossible to tell whether they formed a face.

The girl thought for a moment, then asked, “One-Zero-Four-Seven?”

“That’s me.” Tang Di nodded. “Are you heading home? Do you need an escort?”

“No, it’s fine. Get back to work.” Shen Jiang waved a hand. “Your Planning and Engineering Office has to overhaul the computational core. That’s a huge workload. Thanks for all your hard work... Damn, my head hurts.”

Supporting herself against the wall, she yawned and staggered away.

Tang Di seemed to want to say something, but in the end, he said nothing.

“Here we go, here we go, come and look!” Bai Shu shouted, carrying a large kraft-paper bag in her arms as she kicked open the office door. “They just handed these out in the cafeteria—”

Shang Lu lifted his head from behind the computer monitor and saw the girl empty a large sack of oranges onto the office desk.

“Keep a few aside. Old Liu from the Planning and Engineering Office is getting married next month, and we need a gift for his father.” Uncle Wang Xiangbing leaned back in his chair, clasped both hands behind his head, tilted his neck to one side, and addressed the others. “Everyone can divide up the rest.”

“His father is getting married, and we’re giving a gift too?” Li Wenxuan asked.

“Just a few,” Wang Xiangbing said, displaying the social tact of a kindly elder. “We see each other every day. We give a gift when the son gets married, but not when the father does? Everyone else is giving one.”

“I wish his father many sons,” Zhang Zhong said, his voice tinged with resentment.

Zhang Zhong grew resentful whenever he saw someone getting married—even elderly men and women embarking on romances in their twilight years. People their age still had someone willing to take them, while he, a fine young man, had no one willing to take him in.

Bai Shu counted the oranges. There were eight in all. If everyone took one, three would remain, which they could set aside as the wedding gift.

“Give them some decent-looking wrapping. Who has red ribbon? Lend us a few meters so we can fold a box.” Wang Xiangbing turned to Shang Lu. “What do you think, Director?”

“Fine,” Shang Lu said. “Are we giving them only oranges? Should we add some rock sugar?”

“Then add two ounces of rock sugar. Settled.” Wang Xiangbing nodded. “We’ve done everything decency requires. Let’s hope he knows how to appreciate it. And you comrades should all get married soon too. We need to recover these gifts.”

“Uncle Wang, find someone for me and I’ll get married immediately,” Zhang Zhong said.

“You should become a Buddha immediately,” Wang Xiangbing replied.

“I’ll get married when Shang Lu does,” Bai Shu declared. “I’ll take the Red Lotus and storm the wedding.”

The pressure shifted to Shang Lu.

He looked up from his pile of old documents, startled.

“Marriage?”

Everyone nodded.

Shang Lu scratched his head, looking somewhat embarrassed.

“I haven’t finished filling out that matchmaking information form. Once I get through the work at hand, I’ll go on a blind date...”

“Find yourself a good wife. It won’t interfere with work.” Wang Xiangbing and Li Wenxuan, the two married men, both agreed that work was work and life was life. As an advanced model unit within the base system, the Operations and Engineering Office ought to respond to the national call and complete the task of universal marriage.

The Operations and Engineering Office displayed its advanced qualities only in matters like this.

“All right, all right. Once I solve this major problem, I’ll go on a blind date and get married. Two children in three years.” Shang Lu clicked his tongue. “It’s just that this MEG-BCI thing... getting it into practical use is proving rather troublesome.”