The Mechanic(bl)

Chapter 128 - End Game (4)

Since Eden had begun to introduce consciousness uploading in the ordinary world, more and more people had fled to this place. Fearing Eden and the future of humanity, they chose to take refuge at the edge of the world, trying to escape the doomsday of their species.

The aircraft landed one after the other and Anya, Diego and the others emerged from the hatch first, followed by Natalie who emerged cautiously while supported by someone.

Among the crowd was a very tall Asian woman in black who immediately rushed up to Natalie the moment she saw her. When Natalie saw her, something soft and pure suddenly came into her eyes too and she threw herself at the woman in black.

Adam stepped out of the flying machine and all eyes focused on him.

Everyone here, more or less, knew the horrors of Eden, and this man was once a part of Eden.

Unspeakable hostility and fear slowly froze in the cold air that filtered in from the poles.

Natalie guided the woman in black to Adam, Zhang Xun and Pan, "This is Xue Lu, my mother's adopted daughter and a servant of the Clausen family."

The woman in black's gaze swept over the three with her delicate but sharp eyes and nodded slightly.

Ten minutes later, everyone was gathered in a large igloo near the centre of the town where a three-dimensional model of the earth was projected in the air with three red dots showing in Nuremberg - Germany, Snowmass - USA and the Nagqu region of Tibet, China.

These three red dots were the three coordinates selected by Adam after careful data analysis and consequence predictions. The bio-computers that carried the three most important parts of Eden's consciousness module should be at the locations indicated by these coordinates.

Xue Lu stood next to the sphere and looked around at everyone, "My lady has told me everything. Three copies of the virus have been prepared and the other two candidates have been selected from the family based on the coordinates you sent. They both have considerable standing in the ordinary world, are very loyal to the clan and are the most likely to get close to Eden's core servers."

As she spoke she made a gesture and the avatars and personal information of the two women appeared in the air.

Natalie said, "The Clausen family virus was stored in three encrypted computers that only successive heads of the family had access to unlock, but at the time, Dr Clausen was worried that a human government who wanted to take back power from Eden would get hold of the virus and turn it against Eden, so he set a replication limit for the virus of a maximum of five copies. We have tried twice before to inject the virus into Eden's network, but as the operation failed, we destroyed the virus so that Eden wouldn't intercept it and break it with the extended AI, so this time is our final shot."

"After this, if Eden transfers its core modules, it's unlikely we'll get another chance either." Adam walked up to the slowly rotating Earth, a pale blue glow flowing over his face, "If we fail this time, don't think of revenge or counterattacks, just accept defeat and find a place to hide. According to my predictions, at the point when the number of uploaders reaches about thirty percent of the population, the conflict between uploaders and non-uploaders will intensify and Eden will support the collective consciousness side. In the end the non-uploaders will have a very difficult time if they do not choose to compromise and join in. They may be forced to retreat to the wild forests or the wilderness to live a life of hardship, just as the males once did.

There will be two possibilities for human development after that. One is that the non-uploaders will go extinct because they can't adapt to their environment, and the other is that the non-uploaders will begin to transform themselves to fight against the uploaders. In the end, if we go by Zhang Xun's new definition of human, even the human values left in the non-uploaders won't be very high. The line between human and machine will become increasingly blurred and in the end may merge into one.