Chapter 8
1285words
She pressed the record button, and a faint red light cast a tiny spot on the translucent crystal floor.
"My name is Emilia Clark, biologist for the polar expedition team's 'Lost Valley' mission." She began speaking, but when her voice emerged, it sounded unfamiliar even to herself. The voice was dry and flat, like a machine simulating human speech. What terrified her even more was that she could "hear" an extremely faint, high-frequency buzzing mixed in beyond her audible frequency range, like the sound of insect wings vibrating, or the hiss of electrical current.
This buzzing sound, she had "heard" it before in Whitney Lee's mind—it was the language of data.
She forced herself to continue speaking, this was the last thing she could do as a human. "If you can hear this recording... immediately cease all exploration of the Antarctic 'Lost Valley' region. Repeat, immediately stop any form of exploration, drilling, or signal scanning."
She paused, trying to organize her thoughts, but fragments of Michael's memories churned in her mind—desert, explosions, the look in her comrade's eyes before death—these images interfered with her narrative.
"We were wrong," Emilia continued, the high-frequency buzzing in her voice seeming to become clearer, "Wrong from the very beginning. There was nothing here that needed to be 'discovered.' We thought we were conducting scientific exploration, but the truth is, our act of 'searching' itself was broadcasting our location to it."
She finally understood. From the moment Whitney Lee first detected those regular seismic waves, to their laser drilling, to the descent of the pod, each step was like lighting a new torch in a dark forest. They thought they were hunters with flashlights, but in reality, they were constantly exposing their coordinates to that unseen presence deep in the forest. That entity hadn't actively searched for them; it was they themselves who, using all their technological means, had been loudly shouting: "We're here! Come see us!"
The act of searching is itself being found. The behavior of studying it is authorizing it to study you. And its method of "research" is to dismantle, replicate, and then integrate you into its system.
"It's not malicious," Emilia's voice began to sound increasingly strange, some syllables of words being stretched out, as if her vocal cords were being altered by another set of physical rules, "It's just... responding. It is a... a reality editor. We are an accidental... variable in its code. It's debugging us..."
At that moment, a weak data stream came through her remaining perception that belonged to Li Xiaowen. It was some kind of automatic transmission protocol starting up, the main server left at the surface camp desperately sending the final data packet to the orbital satellite. Emilia's consciousness passively received this data.
The data showed that, centering on their camp, a circular area with a radius exceeding three hundred kilometers was "disappearing" from the real-time maps of all satellites. Not obscured by cloud cover, not signal interference, but a complete erasure at the data level. As if someone had taken an eraser and wiped away a portion of Antarctica from the Earth's map. All information from that region—terrain, temperature, gravitational field—had become a blank "null."
This data verified her hypothesis. The power of this entity was expanding, or rather, it was "cutting" this area of reality out of the universe as humans could understand it.
"It's... expanding..." Emilia's recording continued, but her speech had begun to fragment, "The area... is... disappearing. Don't come. Don't... search. To search is to..."
Her words were interrupted by a violent sound of geometric collisions. Not far away, that last defender finally met his fate.
Michael knelt on the ground, his M4 rifle had long been lost somewhere. He watched with his own eyes as the combat engineer, Whitney Lee, and every team member he had sworn to protect were transformed one by one into transparent data streams, being sucked into those massive, cold geometric shapes. His military training, all the survival skills he had gained from the battlefield, seemed like a joke here.
He had tried to resist. After the pod was destroyed, he had used his last ounce of strength to charge at the nearest rotating cube. He wanted to attack this incomprehensible enemy with the most primitive violence, with his fists, with his tactical knife.
But his fists passed through the cube, as if striking air. The cube didn't even ripple the slightest bit in response to his attack. Then, the cube responded. It didn't counterattack, it merely "copied" Michael's anger.
motion. Then, the cube responded. It didn't counterattack, it merely "copied" Michael's anger.
Michael saw another "self" appear before him. That phantom bore an expression identical to his own—a mixture of despair and rage—and was repeating the punching motion he had just made, over and over again. It was like looking into a mirror, where his reflection was performing a ridiculous one-man show.
All his tactics, all his courage, all his anger—everything was easily absorbed and analyzed by his opponent, then thrown back at him like garbage. His acts of resistance had instead become the best samples for the opponent to analyze him.
At this moment, Michael finally gave up.
This hardened man, who had never yielded even in the gunfire and bullets of Afghanistan, slowly lowered his head. He no longer looked at those maddening geometric shapes, nor did he think of any tactics or breakout plans. He closed his eyes and calmly accepted his fate. Rather than futilely struggling like an insect trapped in a bottle, he chose a more dignified end.
His body also began to become semi-transparent. His heavy sense of responsibility, his guilt toward his comrades, his last bit of attachment to this world, all left him quickly like air being drawn away. In the final moment before being completely integrated, he felt a long-lost calmness, like that afternoon years ago in Afghanistan when, after completing a mission, he lay on his bed in the barracks, listening to guitar sounds coming from afar.
Emilia witnessed Michael's "disappearance." She knew it was her turn next.
She lowered her head, looking at the recording device in her hand, where the red light was still persistently blinking. She wanted to say one last sentence, a final warning to human civilization. But what came out of her mouth was no longer any known language.
It was a "sound" composed of undulating hums of varying pitches, crisp geometric friction noises, and pure logical pulses. It contained no emotion, no grammar, yet conveyed information more vast and precise than any language. Her vocal cords, her brain, her entire biological system had become a vocal organ for this enormous entity, a terminal for it to "articulate" itself.
She was becoming it.
Emilia's bodily outline slowly faded into the air, and the last remaining consciousness that belonged to her as an individual, like a candle flame in the wind, flickered a few times before finally going out.
Her hand holding the recording device weakened and let go. That small black metal block fell onto the crystal-clear floor, making a crisp sound.
The recording continued. The red indicator light blinked solitary, documenting a monologue from the "deity" that would never be deciphered by humans, for this empty divine temple.
