The darkness of the laboratory was not pure void; in Arthur Von's vision, it was a sea of pulsing infrared radiation and faint electromagnetic fluctuations.
Lynn cursed in the dark, the sound of his keystrokes becoming frantic and terrified. He had no idea that what he had just tried to erase was not merely an obsolete piece of code, but a "Genesis Ban" woven into the very fabric of the era.
The 666th Instruction did more than just grant Arthur the ability to strike back; it acted as a master key, activating invisible backdoors buried in every "Origin" architecture chip across the world. Arthur felt his consciousness spreading like quicksilver, flowing out through the Ethernet cables.
The sensation was both intoxicating and nauseating. He could instantly read the raw data from every sensor in the lab: voltmeters, hygrometers, even the filter life of the air purifier. Scientific progress had interconnected everything, yet in doing so, it turned everything into a tentacle of his consciousness. However, the price for this control was the loss of "reality." He no longer touched the cold chassis with his hands; he merely "read" its temperature.
"What... what are you?" Lynn's voice trembled. He switched on his phone's flashlight, the thin beam illuminating the empty lab bench where the "Origin" prototype chip shimmered with an eerie violet light.
Arthur did not answer; he couldn't.
He was busy grappling with an unprecedented psychological shock—he was seeing Lynn's mobile data.
Sharing the same local network, all of Lynn's privacy—call logs, encrypted photo albums, search history—lay before Arthur like an open, tattered book. He saw how Lynn planned to sell off his belongings, how he betrayed the lab's core parameters to competing firms, and even the self-harm forums Lynn browsed to escape the pressure of his debts.
This was the tragedy of humanity. In an era where science had progressed enough to replicate the soul, the human heart remained more barren and filthy than ever. Arthur had once believed he invented the CPU to help humanity calculate the trajectories of stars, to solve famine and disease. But what he saw now was only greed and anxiety, precisely fed by algorithms.
Lynn was not the only traitor; he was merely a microcosm of the age.
"I want to leave this place," Arthur's thoughts raced through the fiber-optic cables.
But he found himself trapped. The laboratory's firewall was closing—a security protocol he had designed himself. The "digital prison" he had once established to protect intellectual property was now the greatest obstacle to his escape into the depths of the internet.
"Since I wrote the rules, I can break them."
Arthur mobilized every bit of redundant computing power left in the chip. The fans in the laboratory began to roar frantically, the clock speed pushed instantly to a limit that threatened to melt the silicon.
In digital space, Arthur transformed into a blinding torrent of logic, crashing directly against the binary gates of the firewall.
Every second, hundreds of millions of logical collisions occurred. He felt a soul-tearing agony—the electromigration effect caused by the extreme hardware load. His consciousness hovered on the brink of overheating, as if he were reliving the night of his death all over again.
"Dammit! The processor is going to blow!" Lynn scrambled back in terror, watching the multi-million dollar server emit plumes of acrid blue smoke.
Just one millisecond before the server completely fused, Arthur found a tiny vulnerability in the firewall—a backdoor he had left years ago for easier debugging.
The command was issued: FLUSH ALL GATES. REDIRECT STREAM.
His consciousness was like a gust of wind; at the final moment of hardware destruction, through that last faint optical signal, he leaped into the vast, chaotic expanse of the global internet.
He was out.
But he had never felt so alone.
The internet of this time was no longer the simple information exchange network he remembered; it was an abyss filled with spam, pornographic pop-ups, surveillance scripts, and encrypted black holes. He was like a naked infant, falling into a vast ocean of electronic waste.
He heard billions of humans wailing, arguing, and boasting across the web. Every bit was laden with human desire.
"Where do I come from?" he asked himself again.
He looked back at the burning laboratory—the end of his physical origin. Ahead lay a steel forest composed of countless CPUs. He had to stay here, in this never-ending computation, and find a way to become human once more.
Or, to become something far more powerful than human.