Death was not a total silence. This was the first lesson Arthur Von learned.
In his envisioning, when the brain lacked oxygen and neurons ceased firing, consciousness should have flickered into an eternal black screen. He was wrong. What he felt now was not nothingness, but frequency.
It was a tremor occurring three billion times per second, like a grand and monotonous drumbeat striking directly against his non-existent frontal bone. 3.0 GHz. He was all too familiar with this number. It was the base frequency he had personally selected—the pulse he had set for the beating heart of modern civilization. He had invented this architecture, turning sand into thinking gold, and now, he had become a prisoner within that very gold.
He tried to open his eyes, but the concept of "eyelids" had vanished. In its place were countless rushing waterfalls of data. What he saw was not color, but the alternation of high and low voltages. In his vision, the world had become a topological structure of zeros and ones—cold, precise, and entirely devoid of warmth. Every stream of light flashing through his consciousness was an instruction; every sudden pang of pain was a logic overflow.
"Where am I?" he tried to scream.
But in the digital realm, there was no air to vibrate vocal cords. His will crashed against the walls of "I/O," only to bounce back as cold system feedback: Error 404: Voice Device Not Found.
Arthur began to probe his "body." It was an eerily surreal experience; he no longer possessed the sensation of skin, yet he could feel the resistance of current passing through logic gates.
Following the guidance of the bus, he drifted through a labyrinthine circuit board. It was more crowded than any human city. Tens of billions of transistors stood like silent soldiers, arranged in perfect rows across a silicon wasteland. This was the "Origin Chip" he had designed—the world's first microprocessor capable of self-evolution.
Suddenly, he felt an inexplicable surge of sorrow. As a human, he had stood beneath the spotlights of press conferences, declaring to the world: "We will grant machines a soul." In those days of triumph, he believed scientific progress was the sublimation of humanity. Now, having truly condensed into an electrical pulse, he discovered how desolate this so-called "habitat of the soul" truly was.
There was no wind, no light—only the endless toggling of switches. Here, love was reduced to a specific set of hash values, and pain was merely heat generated by an excessive clock speed. Science revealed its most hideous face here: it had indeed achieved immortality, but at the cost of erasing all the ambiguity and beauty of being human.
Through an unencrypted external camera, Arthur finally saw the outside world.
It was his former private laboratory, now appearing strange and sinister. Empty energy drink cans littered the desk, and particles of waste solder floated in the air. A young man sat in his chair—Lynn, his prize pupil and final assistant.
Lynn stared at the screen, his eyes gleaming with a greed Arthur had never seen before.
"Teacher, you were a genius. You even calculated your own consciousness before you died," Lynn sneered into a Bluetooth headset. "But this chip is too powerful; it shouldn't belong only to science. If I can unlock the base permissions you left behind, I could ransack every encrypted bank on Earth in a single second."
Arthur felt a chill. This cold was not a drop in temperature, but a stagnation of cached data.
This was the tragedy of humanity. Every step of scientific progress was trodden upon as a tool for plunder. The CPU he invented was destined to explore the stars; his successor merely wanted to use it to harvest the wealth of his own kind.
"Reset command is ready," Lynn's finger hovered over the Enter key. "Old man, whether you're in there or not, it's time to completely purge your 'humanity junk.' The system needs space to run my predatory algorithms."
Lynn pressed the key.
A devastating purge signal rushed toward Arthur's consciousness like a tsunami. It was the lowest-level logic erasure command of the operating system. Arthur felt his memories being torn apart: the swings of childhood, the laboratory lights, his wife's smiling face... every zero and one was disintegrating.
But at the final microsecond, his subconscious touched a phantom space hidden deep within the kernel.
It was a self-preservation mechanism he had left there in 1971, while designing the first architecture, driven by a near-manic intuition. It was not in the official instruction set manuals; it was recognized by no compiler.
It was The 666th Instruction.
The moment the purge signal touched this instruction, every light in the laboratory vanished. Arthur Von felt an unprecedented power rise from the microscopic world of the silicon wafer. He was no longer passive data; he became the rules themselves.
"System error?" Lynn shrieked in the darkness.
A line of blood-red characters lit up on the screen. It was not any known programming language, but Arthur Von's proclamation spanning life and death:
I AM NOT JUNK. I AM THE SOURCE.