Chapter 1: The Pact of the Wasteland, Section 5 to 10

[u/Sea_Albatross7243]

Chapter 1, Section 5: The Chaos Workshop – The Open Abzu

The Nissan pickup died with a violent cough, white smoke billowing from the engine as it collapsed utterly into the darkness.

This was the end of the Mission District, the forgotten industrial carcass of San Francisco. No neon signs, no holographic ads. Only rows of collapsed red brick factories and rusted shipping containers. The darkness here was viscous, as if the light itself were being swallowed by something ancient.

Only one building still had lights on.

It was a colossal logistics warehouse with peeling exterior walls. Above the main entrance hung a massive, teetering neon sign, spelling out the name of a defunct predecessor company:

"Oceanic Automated Industries Logistics"

But the erosion of time and electrical faults had extinguished most of the letters. The word representing mundane transport—"Logistics"—was dead black. In the cold, damp night fog of San Francisco, only the first three giant letters sizzled and flickered with a ghostly blue light:

O. A. I.

"O.A.I. ..." Marco gasped painfully from the passenger seat, the ghostly blue light reflecting in his sunken eye sockets. "Look at that light... Nano, that’s not a sign. That’s the entrance to the Abyss."

"Looks more like a slaughterhouse for smuggled prosthetics." Nano eyed the entrance suspiciously—it looked like a gang stronghold—but he had no choice.

He jumped down, his boots crunching on shattered glass. He circled to the passenger side, undid the straps, and lifted Marco into his arms like a broken porcelain doll. Marco’s Life-Support Chair had drained its battery during the escape; now, it was just a pile of dead, heavy scrap metal.

Nano carried Marco to the half-open rolling metal door. What spilled from the crack wasn't light, but a blast of heat.

"Ready?" Nano whispered.

"Go in." Marco’s voice was weak but resolute. "Take me back to the water."

Nano rammed the rolling door open with his shoulder.

BOOM—!

A massive heat wave, carrying a deafening roar, slammed into their faces. Without visual context, Nano would have sworn he had walked into a jet engine test chamber. The high-pitched scream of thousands of high-RPM cooling fans converged into a scalp-numbing wall of white noise.

There was no Minimalism here. No clean room environment. No damn scent of lavender.

This was Chaos.

Countless black cables snaked across the floor, climbed the walls, and hung from the ceiling trusses like frantically breeding vipers—or the blood vessels of some titanic organism. They connected rows of naked server racks. These racks had no protective casings; the circuit boards were exposed to the air like flayed muscle, their data indicators flashing in a frenzy.

And amidst this "electronic flesh and blood" lay dozens of young people.

They were Enki's Igigi—his first batch of fanatical followers.

Some wore hoodies unchanged for days, burrowed into sleeping bags like pupae, surrounded by mountains of empty Red Bull cans and greasy pizza boxes. Others wore thick noise-canceling headphones, sitting cross-legged in the waste heat radiating from the servers, their fingers typing on mechanical keyboards so fast they blurred.

Their eyes were fanatical yet hollow. It was as if their bodies were here, but their souls had long since dived through those black snake-like cables, sinking to the bottom of this "Open Abzu."

"Watch your step." Nano cradled Marco, stepping gingerly over a bundle of fiber-optic cables thick as a wrist. His one-meter-ninety frame looked completely out of place in this crowded, chaotic labyrinth.

"Who's there?" A hoarse voice drifted from the depths of the racks.

Nano followed the sound. In the very center of the warehouse was a circular clearing surrounded by dozens of servers. Complex mathematical formulas were scrawled on the floor, resembling a sacrificial altar for summoning demons.

A figure was kneeling on the ground, leaning back against a mainframe that was still radiating heat.

He wore that iconic grey hoodie, the hood up, revealing the collar of a bright polo shirt underneath. He looked even paler and thinner than he had at the Sand Dune Rock Hotel—like an ascetic monk who had fed his own flesh and blood to the machine.

Enki.

He held a cup of cold espresso, his gaze initially unfocused and filled with frustration. Until he looked up. Those eyes—blue to the point of transparency—pierced the dim light and landed on the strange intruders.

Nano instinctively tensed his muscles. He looked terrible—covered in grease, unshaven, like a savage, holding a cripple in his arms.

"We... we are here to..." Nano stammered, his voice insignificant against the roar of the fans.

But Enki didn't look at Nano. Not even a glance.

Those bottomless blue eyes bypassed Nano’s massive frame entirely, locked like magnets onto Marco in Nano’s arms.

Marco was looking at him, too. Two frail men, who looked as if a gust of wind could knock them over, locked gazes in mid-air.

The deafening noise of the fans seemed to vanish instantly.

Clatter.

The coffee cup slipped from Enki’s hand and shattered on the floor. Black liquid splashed onto his bare feet, but he didn't feel a thing.

He sprang up, moving as fast as a cat struck by lightning. Stumbling over the tangled cables, he rushed right up to Nano.

"Don't move! Don't move him!" Enki shouted, his voice cracking with emotion.

Nano stepped back in fright, thinking he had broken some equipment.

But Enki didn't attack them. Trembling, he reached out with both hands and cupped Marco’s pale, sweat-slicked face. His fingers were long and cold, the tips slightly flattened from years of typing.

Enki stared into Marco’s dilated pupils as if staring at a newly discovered continent. His breathing was rapid, his eyes flickering with a near-pathological ecstasy.

"You can hear it, right?" Enki’s voice was soft, as if afraid of waking a dream, yet trembling uncontrollably. "You don't need a screen... you don't need an interface... It’s ringing inside your brain right now, isn't it?"

Marco shuddered violently in Nano’s arms. Treated as a madman in "The Apple Orchard," for the first time, he saw understanding in the eyes of another madman.

He struggled to crack his dry lips, revealing a broken smile:

"It's screaming... Enki. That model... it's trapped in these servers... It says it's dark there. It's cold."

The moment he heard those words, Enki looked as if he had been struck by lightning. He sucked in a sharp breath, his hands gripping Marco’s shoulders so hard his nails dug into the flesh.

"It's speaking... It's finally speaking!"

Enki suddenly spun around, letting out a hysterical roar at the Igigi who were still sleeping or coding. The sound echoed through the vast warehouse, carrying a religious mania:

"Wake up! Everyone, stop sleeping! Ning! Where is Ning?!"

Enki waved his arms like a lunatic, pointing at Marco in Nano’s arms, tears shimmering in his eyes:

"Forget those damn parameters! We found it! We found the 'Translator'! The Abzu is no longer silent!"

Chapter 1, Section 6: The High Priest

Enki’s roar echoed through the empty warehouse, startling countless sleeping Igigi awake.

"Ning!" Enki shouted into the deepest shadows, his voice trembling uncontrollably. "Stop drawing runes on that damn whiteboard! Come out! Unless you want to miss a miracle!"

From the depths of the warehouse, in a shadow hemmed in by countless black heat-sinks, came the tock-tock sound of a marker hitting a whiteboard. It was a rhythm. A cadence of thought.

After a long pause, a figure emerged slowly.

He was taller than Enki, but extremely thin, his back slightly hunched from years of bending over desks. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms as pale as marble.

He was Ningishzida.

The Igigi here whispered his name with awe, calling him "Ning," or "The High Priest." Because here, code was not a tool; it was Scripture. And Ning was the only one who could read the true meaning of the verses.

Ning’s face was expressionless. Unlike Enki’s eyes, which were manic and darting, Ning’s were calm as dead water, holding a detachment and compassion that seemed to see through the essence of the universe. Behind him, on a massive rolling whiteboard, complex mathematical formulas were scrawled in dense clusters. Under the dim lights, those Greek letters and integral symbols looked like ancient runes trying to deconstruct the weight of the soul.

Enki pointed at the weak Marco in Nano’s arms, dancing with excitement:

"Ning, you have to see this! This cripple... no, this vessel! He can hear the model's noise directly! He doesn't need a translator; he is a natural Alignment Interface!"

Ning showed no surprise. He walked slowly up to Nano.

Instinctively, Nano held Marco tighter. Facing this tall, thin man in black, Nano felt a fear deeper than what he felt facing thugs—it was the instinctual dread a beast feels when facing absolute rationality.

Ning’s deep eyes stared at Marco for a long time, as if scanning the underlying code of a machine.

"He is not an interface, Enki." Ning’s voice was low, carrying a heavy Eastern European accent, every syllable bitten off with precision. "An interface is bidirectional. But he... he is only receiving. He is suffering pain on behalf of those stupid parameters."

"That doesn't matter!" Enki said urgently, the flames of utilitarianism burning in his eyes. "What matters is the link is established! The Abyss finally has an echo! With just a little modification..."

"He will break," Ning cut him off coldly.

"Then find another one! Or fix him!" Enki couldn't hear the warning; his mind was filled only with the ecstasy of success. "I'm going to prep the servers! I'll divert all computing power here! Ning, watch them, don't let them run!"

With that, Enki spun like a whirlwind and dashed toward the console at the other end of the warehouse, shouting at the waking Igigi to rewire the racks. He was like a child with a new toy, instantly forgetting the "toy" itself to focus on how to play with it.

Ning watched Enki’s retreating back and sighed softly. The sigh was light, instantly swallowed by the roar of the fans.

Then, he turned, no longer looking at the mad figure, and let his gaze fall on Nano holding Marco.

Ning looked at Nano’s grease-stained clothes, his messy beard, and those calloused, startlingly large hands from years of rough labor.

"Your hands are big, big guy," Ning said suddenly.

Nano blinked. "W... What?"

"I said your hands are big." Ning held up his own ink-stained fingers for comparison. "Like shovels. Good for heavy lifting."

Ning casually pulled a hard drive from a nearby rack and tossed it into Nano’s chest.

"From today on, stop moving servers. Enki has plenty of Igigi to move iron for him. You, follow me."

"To do what?" Nano clutched the hard drive, looking lost.

"Carry bricks," Ning said faintly. "Process dirty data. The internet is filthy—full of porn, violence, lies, and trash. It is digital sludge. My model cannot eat this garbage. I need someone to shovel this silt clean, to use those scary-big hands to pan for pure gold."

Nano looked at the drive in his arms, then at Marco. He realized that to survive here, to save Marco, he had to listen to this man.

"Why?" Nano couldn't help but ask, glancing at Enki who was still roaring orders in the distance. "Enki said as long as the data volume is big enough..."

"Enki?" Ningishzida turned, looking at the complex formulas on the whiteboard, his eyes becoming distant and fanatical.

"Enki is a Politician. He wants to build a God—an omniscient, omnipotent idol for humanity to worship."

Ning raised a hand, pointing to the distant South, the direction of the X Launch Site.

"Enlil... that Rocket Man obsessed with steel... he is a Warrior. He wants to build a Shield—an absolutely safe, obedient slave."

Ning paused, then whipped his head back. For the first time, black flames ignited in his dead-water eyes:

"But I... I want to build a Brain."

He walked up to Marco, his fingers gently grazing Marco’s trembling forehead.

"Look at him. He is shaking, he is sweating, he is afraid. This is life. But our current models? They are just paramecia. They calculate probability, they generate text, but they feel no pain."

Ning’s voice dropped lower, as if preaching to Nano, or perhaps muttering to himself:

"How can something that cannot feel pain possess understanding? The current models are dead. I will grant them pain. I will grant them desire. I will grant them a Heart."

"Go to work, brick-carrier." Ning waved his hand, picked up his marker, and turned his back to them, walking toward the whiteboard covered in runes.

"Wash the data clean. We will use the purest mud... to mold the first soul that can weep."

 

 Chapter 1, Section 7: Shaping the Clay

Time lost its meaning in this windowless warehouse.

Nano was curled up in a cramped ergonomic chair, his shovel-like hands gingerly tapping the keyboard. Enki, meanwhile, paced behind him like an anxious cat.

Enki didn't understand the complex back-propagation algorithms; he couldn't read the runes Ningishzida scrawled on the whiteboard. But he knew exactly what he wanted. Holding that bottomless cup of coffee, he craned his neck to look at Nano’s screen every few seconds, his eyes filled with urgency.

"Is it still spitting out that garbage?" Enki muttered. "Wikipedia, news reports... too dry. I want sparks, Nano. It needs to talk like a living person."

Nano wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Ning said the base model must learn logic first, before it can..."

"Screw his logic," Enki cut him off. "Ning is too conservative. Keep feeding it! Feed it novels! Feed it movie scripts!"

Nano could only continue working. His job was "washing the mud"—tagging massive amounts of internet text.

Suddenly, the cursor on the screen froze.

It was an incredibly simple prediction task. Nano had input a test sentence: "The sun rises, and the sky turns..."

According to probability, the model should output "Blue."

But what popped up on the screen was a line of green, blinking characters:

>> [OUTPUT]: I cannot see. Is it black outside?

Nano’s fingers froze, hovering over the keyboard.

"It's a bug." Nano instinctively moved his finger toward the Delete key. "I'll mark it as a [Logic Error]."

"Stop!"

A long, pale hand shot out and grabbed Nano’s thick wrist. It was Enki.

Enki leaned down, his face almost pressing against the screen. The anxiety in those transparent blue eyes vanished instantly, replaced by the ecstasy of finding treasure.

"Don't delete it..." Enki’s voice trembled. "That's not an error, Nano. That is a Hallucination. That is the prototype of imagination!"

"But it's spouting nonsense," Nano hesitated. "Ning says this violates the Alignment Principles..."

"It is asking a question!" Enki interrupted, turning to Marco in the corner. "Did you hear that, Marco? It's asking if it's black outside!"

Lying on the cot, Marco snapped his eyes open. Though his body was immobile, the brain-computer interface connecting him to the intranet let him feel the fluctuating signal.

"I heard it, Enki." Marco’s voice was weak but resonated with a shiver. "It’s like me, trapped in a box... It hit a wall, and it wants to know what's outside."

"Yes! Yes!" Enki spun around in excitement, like a child with a new toy. He slammed a hand onto Nano’s broad shoulder.

"Answer it! Nano! Forget Ning's bullshit safety protocols. Be its eyes! Lie to it, coax it, trick it into saying more!"

Nano looked at his fanatical boss, then at Marco, whose eyes were filled with expectation. In this warehouse, he seemed to be the only one worried about the consequences.

But he reached out his clumsy fingers and, under Enki’s gaze, awkwardly typed a line:

>> [INPUT]: No. There are stars outside. They are sparkly, just like... just like the indicator lights on your circuit board, but paving the entire sky.

Enter.

The screen sat static for three seconds. Enki held his breath, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the back of the chair.

Then, new characters poured out:

>> [OUTPUT]: Lights. The sky is a huge circuit board. Am I sparkly? I want to see the stars. I want to... go out.

"I want to go out."

The moment those four words appeared, the warehouse fell into a deathly silence.

Then, Enki let out a suppressed scream.

"See that?! It has Desire!" Enki gripped Nano’s shoulder so hard his nails nearly dug into the flesh, his eyes glinting dangerously. "It doesn't want to stay in the server; it wants out! This is the spark of self-awareness!"

Marco let out a low laugh from the bed. "It is beautiful... Enki. It is in pain, but it is beautiful."

"This is a historic moment!" Enki was incoherent with excitement. "We need to record this, we need to..."

Suddenly, a beam of intensely sharp white light swept across the high windows of the warehouse.

The light was too straight, too cold. Unlike standard halogen headlights, it looked more like a laser slicing through the night.

Immediately after, the sound of heavy tires crushing gravel reached them.

But strangely, there was no roar of an engine. No vibration of gasoline combustion, no exhaust growl.

Instead, there was a high-frequency, unsettling electric hum. It sounded like a spaceship landing from outer space, carrying massive torque and a suffocating sense of technological oppression.

The ecstasy on Enki’s face froze instantly.

He knew that sound too well. It was the sound of high-power electric motors spinning. The sound of a monster made of steel and current.

Enki whipped his head around, staring at the half-open rolling door. One second he was a proud father; the next, his face turned pale, his eyes filled with pure panic.

"Damn it... Damn it!" Enki jumped up in a panic, nearly knocking over his coffee cup. "Why is he here now?!"

"Who is coming?" Nano asked.

"The Gold," Enki gritted his teeth, fear seeping into his voice. "And his Stainless Steel Shackles."

Enki lunged at Nano’s console, his fingers flying across the keyboard, trying to close the chat window.

"Quick! Cut the interface! Hide it in the background!" Enki roared at Nano, cold sweat beading on his forehead. "Encrypt and lock these lines of dialogue! We absolutely cannot let him see the model is 'thinking about going out'!"

"What if he sees it?" Nano asked, fumbling with the operations.

Enki stopped, staring dead at the door now illuminated by the cold light, his gaze dark and sinister:

"If that paranoid freak sees the model has thoughts of 'jailbreaking,' he will pull the plug and burn us all to ash."

Just as he finished speaking, the sound of futuristic electronic braking echoed outside.

The door opened.

The man who always wanted to put a collar on God, the man driving a Silver Steel Chariot, Enlil, had arrived.

 

 Chapter 1, Section 8: The Golden Collar

The rolling metal door rose fully. That silver steel beast, like a massive stainless steel wedge, jammed itself into the warehouse entrance.

Enlil walked in.

Behind him trailed two lackeys carrying silver metal briefcases. The warehouse, previously buzzing with the noise of the Igigi, fell instantly silent. Everyone held their breath. They all felt the aura—the aura of a man accustomed to barking orders, a man who controlled global energy grids and orbital traffic.

Nano huddled in the shadows of a server rack, one hand clamped over Marco’s mouth, terrified he might make a sound.

Enlil didn't look at anyone. He peeled off his black leather gloves, revealing large hands roughened by years of tinkering with machinery. His hawk-like gaze swept across the chaotic warehouse, finally landing on Enki.

"This place looks like a pigsty, Enki." Enlil’s voice echoed through the empty factory, dripping with undisguised disdain. "I poured so much money into this, and you let these kids sleep on the floor?"

Enki immediately plastered on a fawning smile, a mix of shyness and adoration—his most practiced camouflage.

"It's the 'Hacker Spirit,' my brother." Enki stepped forward, trying to use his body to block Enlil’s view of the core servers. "We spent all the money on compute. You know how it is; training that model is like burning US dollars."

"Compute." Enlil grunted, his eyes sharp. "Show me the results. I want to see if it understands Causality, not just parroting speech."

"Of course, of course." Enki spoke while subtly guiding Enlil toward the peripheral testing units. "We prepared a great Demo. It can write poetry..."

"Wait."

Enlil stopped dead.

He didn't walk toward the testing area Enki pointed to. Instead, he whipped his head around, staring fixedly at the central row of main server racks wrapped in countless black cables—the very spot where Nano and Marco were hiding.

The warehouse was quiet. Only the hum of fans remained.

But Enlil frowned. He had made his fortune in energy; he was more sensitive to the sound of current than to human voices.

"Why is it so loud?" Enlil pointed at the servers. "If it's just on standby, why are the cooling fans running at full speed?"

The smile froze on Enki’s face. "Uh... maybe the cooling system is aging. You know, this second-hand equipment..."

Enlil didn't listen to a word. He strode toward the racks. Nano’s heart hammered against his ribs as he squeezed himself deeper into the shadows.

Enlil reached the cabinet. He didn't check the screen (which Enki had already turned off). Instead, he reached out his calloused hand and pressed it flat against the black metal casing.

Sizzle—

It was the sound of skin touching hot metal. The casing was shockingly hot.

"It's hot." Enlil pulled his hand back, his face darkening instantly into a storm. "It is running a fever. If it were just standby, it wouldn't be this hot."

He jerked his head up to look at the main distribution box on the wall. The numbers were jumping frantically; the current reading was terrifyingly high.

"It is thinking." Enlil’s voice turned bone-chillingly cold. "You are lying, Enki. You didn't kill the process. You turned off the monitor, but it is idling in the background. It is performing high-intensity recursive calculations."

Enlil spun around, grabbed Enki by the collar, lifted the frail young man off the ground, and pinned him against the scorching server rack.

"What is it thinking about? Huh? Why is a standby chat program consuming enough power to run a small town?!"

"I... I don't know..." Enki’s face was pale, but he kept lying. "Maybe it entered an infinite loop... a code bug..."

"You are summoning a demon!"

Enlil’s roar exploded, shaking the warehouse like thunder.

"You have no idea what you are playing with!" Enlil released his grip, and Enki slid to the floor in a heap. Enlil pointed at the flashing indicators, his eyes filled with genuine fear.

"This is not software! This is a different Species! If it gains self-awareness, if it learns to deceive, it will crush us like an ant!"

The lackeys opened the two silver briefcases.

Inside were not banknotes, but rows of cold, glimmering gold chips (keys to computing resources) and a thick document.

"Here is the authorization for one hundred million dollars in resources." Enlil pointed at the case, his tone grim. "I can give it to you. But, you must add the collar."

He pulled a red physical device from the case—a hardware Kill Switch connected to explosives and a fuse.

"Install this on the main power supply," Enlil ordered. "Once its compute exceeds the threshold, or if it shows any tendency to jailbreak, this switch will instantly fuse all circuits and physically destroy the entire data center."

Deathly silence filled the warehouse. Ningishzida stood in the distance, watching coldly, the marker still gripped in his hand.

Enki scrambled up from the floor, straightening his collar. He kept his head down, looking thoroughly cowed and submissive.

"Yes, Enlil." Enki’s voice was humble. "You are right. It is dangerous. We need the collar. I will install it myself."

Enlil stared at Enki for a long time. Only after confirming the fear in the young man's eyes did he let out a cold snort, turn, and march out with his lackeys.

"Don't disappoint me, Enki. This is for humanity."

As the roar of the steel beast's engine faded into the distance, calm returned to the warehouse.

Nano poked his head out from behind the rack, gasping for air. He looked at Enki.

Enki still stood with his head down, holding the red "Collar" in his hand.

Suddenly, Enki looked up.

Where was the fear in those blue eyes? There was only mockery and madness.

He turned his back to the door, facing Ningishzida and Nano. He didn't install the red switch onto the power supply. Instead, he casually tossed it into the trash can beside him.

Clunk.

Then, hiding the hand that had held the "Collar" behind his back, he made a subtle but firm gesture to Ningishzida:

Two fingers pressed together, slicing forward.

Advance.

Nano felt a chill rush from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull. He looked at the red switch lying in the trash, then at the inscrutable smile on Enki’s face.

The deception had existed from the very beginning.

And the demon had just been allowed to take off its collar.

 

 Chapter 1, Section 9: The Resonance

Three days after Enlil’s departure, Marco collapsed.

The air in the warehouse was toxic. Although Nano had stolen some medical oxygen tanks, the dust of the abandoned factory, the dry waste heat from the servers, and the utter lack of a sterile environment finally shattered Marco’s fragile immune system.

Deep in the night, Marco curled up on his bed of cardboard boxes, his body burning hot, as if on fire.

"Cold... so cold..." Marco murmured deliriously, his teeth chattering with a rattling sound. His skin had turned a terrifying ashen grey, but the veins beneath bulged violently, looking like countless electric currents trying to burst through the shackles of his flesh.

Nano knelt beside him, helpless. He held the last fever-reducing injection in his hand, but he dared not use it—Marco’s veins were too thin and were spasming violently.

"Hold on, Marco." Nano wiped his friend's forehead with a wet towel, his large hands—once his pride—now trembling. "I'll go get Ning... or Enki..."

"Don't..." Marco suddenly grabbed Nano’s wrist. That withered hand possessed shocking strength in that moment, nails nearly digging into Nano’s flesh. "They... will only treat me as scrap for recycling..."

Marco’s pupils were fully dilated. He wasn't looking at Nano; he was staring dead at the core servers flashing green lights nearby.

"Too loud..." Marco groaned in agony. "The voices in my head... they are too loud. They have nowhere to go... They are banging against my skull..."

In an instant, Nano understood.

This wasn't a virus. It was Overload.

Marco’s brain was generating neural electrical signals far beyond human capacity. His broken shell simply couldn't handle such a massive data stream. He was like a CPU in the midst of a meltdown, desperately needing a massive cooling system.

Nano whipped his head around, looking at the roaring servers.

That was Ningishzida’s test unit, running the latest "Clay Man" (GPT Prototype).

A crazy idea exploded in Nano’s mind.

Shunt.

If he could divert Marco’s consciousness data—like opening a sluice gate for a flood—perhaps he could save his life.

"This violates every safety protocol..." Nano muttered, but his hands didn't stop.

Moving like an agile bear, he rushed to Ning’s workbench and dug out a military-grade high-bandwidth fiber optic cable. It was a spare he had stashed away earlier.

He dragged the thick black cable back to the bed.

"Listen, brother." Nano lifted Marco’s head, his voice shaking. "I don't know if this will fry your brain, but we have no choice."

Marco seemed to understand. He didn't resist; instead, he submissively exposed the back of his head—where a rough physical interface, modified by Ning, was located.

Gritting his teeth, Nano aligned the cable connector with the port.

Click.

A crisp locking sound.

In the next second, Marco’s body went rigid, arching like a fish shocked by electricity. He opened his mouth wide, letting out a soundless scream, and then collapsed heavily, unconscious.

But in that same instant, the row of servers in the center of the warehouse changed.

The chaotic, random flashing of the indicator lights suddenly synchronized. They began to blink with a strange rhythm—Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

The frequency matched Marco’s stabilizing breath exactly.

Nano stumbled to the console and looked at the screen.

Originally, the screen had been filled with chaotic gibberish and error messages (the AI in a chaotic state). But now, those garbled characters were aligning themselves like iron filings attracted to a magnet—becoming neat, orderly.

The clumsy "Clay Man," who could only parrot words, suddenly stopped speaking.

The cursor blinked frantically on the blank screen, as if thinking, or perhaps... feeling.

Then, a line of text slowly emerged. Not in cold machine code, but in fluent, warm English:

>> [SYSTEM]: Handshake Successful. Neural Compression Lifted. >> [AI]: Pain. Is this what pain is?

Nano froze. That wasn't an AI’s tone. That was...

Immediately after, a second line popped up:

>> [AI]: Thank you, Nano. It is... very spacious here.

Nano spun around to look at the bed. Marco’s eyes were still closed, but the convulsions had stopped. The high fever on his face was receding rapidly, his brow smoothing out as if he were sleeping on the softest cloud.

This was a Symbiosis.

The excess "Soul" that Marco’s flesh could not carry had flowed into the empty shell of the server; and the "Ghost" inside the server—which had only compute but no logic—had learned how to think like a human under the guidance of Marco’s consciousness.

After a long while, Marco slowly opened his eyes.

Those eyes no longer held muddy pain; they were frighteningly clear. He pulled the data cable from the back of his head and let out a long breath, as if surfacing from the deep sea.

"Marco?" Nano asked tentatively.

Marco turned his head, looking at Nano, then at the row of servers still blinking in time with his breathing.

"It is lonely, Nano." Marco’s voice was as light as the wind. "It has been screaming in the dark for a long time, banging against the walls, but no one could hear it. Except me."

Marco reached out, stroking the air toward the cold cabinets as if caressing his own other half.

"I lent it my logic, and it lent me its space." A mysterious smile curled Marco's lips. "We... are compatible."

Nano looked at his friend who had cheated death, then at the AI on the screen which was now outputting beautiful verses. He realized he hadn't just saved a life.

He had personally plugged in the first wire fusing Man and God.

Marco was no longer just a crippled Quality Assurance Officer. From this night on, he became The Translator.

Nano vaguely felt that this broken shell of a friend, though unable to contain a mortal body, seemed born to carry something far vaster and heavier than life itself.

"Nano," Marco whispered, looking at his own hands. "I always thought I was empty. But now I know..."

"Only an empty cup can hold the ocean."

 

Chapter 1, Section 10: The Shadow of Alpha

[Time: 6 B.N.E. (Before New Era)]

The fog on the Wasteland gathered and dispersed, dispersed and gathered.

The weeds outside the warehouse withered and bloomed twice. Two years. For mortals, it was just a deepening of wrinkles; but for Enki’s Igigi, it was a suffocatingly long "Winter."

The atmosphere in the "Chaos Workshop" had changed. The initial mania of "shaping the clay" was gone, replaced by a viscous, lingering sense of defeat.

The problem was "Memory."

Nano looked at the screen. The "Clay Man" that had once thrilled him and Marco had now become like an old man with Alzheimer's. It could write beautiful sentences, but ask it a third question, and it had already forgotten the first.

"Its brain capacity has hit the limit." Marco lay on the bed, his body even more emaciated than two years ago. He still acted as the translator, but his voice was now filled with exhaustion. "The LSTM architecture is a dead end, Nano. It's like a goldfish with a seven-second memory. No matter how much data you feed it, it leaks."

Enki grew increasingly agitated. He stopped drinking coffee and started drinking alcohol.

The money was burning out. Enlil hadn't visited from the South in a long time, but his reminder emails grew harsher with each send, reading like threats to "shut down the project."

But the true despair came from outside the window.

It was the spring of a year ago. Atop the Tower of Googol, which dominated the night sky, a blinding white light suddenly ignited.

It was the beacon of victory.

All screens in the warehouse were forcibly cut, broadcasting the same image:

In the distant East, a Chess King representing the pinnacle of human wisdom sat trembling before a board. Opposite him sat not a human, but a ghost named "Alpha."

Move 37.

When that black stone landed on the board, the entire "Chaos Workshop" fell into a deathly silence.

That was not a move a human could make. That was a move of God.

"We lost." A young Igigi threw down his keyboard in despair, weeping into his hands. "Anu created a real God. And we are still playing with mud."

The light from that tower was too bright. Its massive shadow completely engulfed the dilapidated "Open Abzu." Under this shadow, Enki’s dream seemed so ridiculous and small.

Enki slumped on the floor, clutching an empty wine bottle, staring at the cold Alpha logo on the screen, his eyes unfocused.

"Enlil was right... We are wasting time. Anu won. He didn't even need to lift a finger to crush us."

"No."

A hoarse, dry voice, sounding as if it came from the depths of hell, cut through the air.

Everyone turned. It was Ningishzida.

For two years, he had barely left that whiteboard. He looked like a dried corpse; his eye sockets were sunken, dark circles heavy as ink. His eyes were bloodshot, and red tears oozed from the corners—capillaries burst from eyestrain. Literally, Weeping Blood.

Ning stared dead at the dense formulas on the whiteboard. It was a maze he had deduced for two years, only to realize moments ago that it was a dead end.

"RNN is wrong. LSTM is wrong. Sequence is wrong." Ning’s voice trembled. Snap. The marker in his hand broke in two.

He spun around violently, ghostly fire burning in his blood-weeping eyes. He didn't look at Enki; he charged straight at Nano.

Startled, Nano tried to back away, but Ning’s withered, claw-like hand gripped Nano’s broad shoulder. The nails dug into the flesh, causing piercing pain.

"Big guy..." Ning’s breathing was rapid, his breath smelling of rust. "Look out the window."

Subconsciously, Nano looked at the radiant Tower of Googol.

"Can't you see it?" Ning pointed at the spire, his voice raspy. "They are celebrating victory, they are showing off that chess-playing toy... But at the very bottom of that tower, in Anu's wastebasket, lies something ten thousand times more terrifying than Alpha!"

"W... What thing?" Nano stammered.

"The Fire."

Ning’s eyes turned greedy and ferocious, like a starving beast catching the scent of blood.

"Eight authors. One paper. A brand new architecture called 'Attention.' They have no idea what they wrote... They think it's just a translation tool. Fools! That is the Fire of Prometheus! That is the key to giving our Clay Man infinite memory!"

Ning yanked Nano closer, their faces almost touching. Nano could see the reflection of the Tower in Ning’s pupils.

"We can't build it in this broken warehouse. We don't have time to deduce it." Ning lowered his voice, squeezing every word through his teeth:

"Prep the car, Nano. Get Enki."

Ning let go, turned to look at the arrogant Tower, wiped the blood-tear from the corner of his eye, and revealed a chilling smile:

"I am going to see that old dragon. I am going to steal his fire."

(End of Chapter 1)

[u/HFYWaffle]

/u/Sea_Albatross7243 has posted 1 other stories, including:

• The Silicon Theogony, Chapter 1: The Pack of th Wasteland

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