Doomsday Wonderland c1-855

by N. Heller

  Unbeknownst to them, a Vindice arrived in front of them. He was pressing his face firmly against the thin layer of protection. His face flattened, but there was no emotion. In such close proximity, Lin Sanjiu finally saw the light. He was the main culprit that mowed down countless posthumans.

  Gas.

  It was almost imperceptible to the eyes, but Lin Sanjiu was sure that she saw it. Wisps of gas came out of every part of the Vindice's body: his eyes, his nostrils, and his lips. The moment the air exited his body, it dissipated and mixed along with the air that they breathed in. Not even the barrier could stop it.

  'What are these Vindice?'

  "What should we do?" A muffled and sharp voice came. Lin Sanjiu turned to the side and realized it was a scrawny man who had asked the question. Like her, he was covering his mouth and nose with his hand.

  'I have to get out of here before the gas gets to me.' Gritting her teeth, Lin Sanjiu made a quick decision and leaped out of the barrier. The Vindice saw her movement, so he turned his head in her direction and opened his mouth.

  "Find a spot and hide!" somebody screamed out in the distance. "I'll try to draw his attention!"

  Lin Sanjiu gave a start, and before she could do anything, the Vindice had already launched his attack. He was staring at her with two glassy eyes, but the range of his attack was large. Under his tattered leather jacket, countless black tubes emerged from his skin with their nozzles pointing at every direction. Then, gas billowed out of the black pipes. It was so dense that it was enough to spread through the entire battleground. The gas moved like a hungry dragon that raided human towns and razed castles to the ground in fairy tales. It mowed down a few posthumans that were too slow, reducing them to nothing but a pile of meat pulp.

  Not wanting to get devoured by the gas, Lin Sanjiu focused every ounce of strength into a vortex she formed. The vortex clashed with the gas in a fierce collision like two giant beasts. They canceled out each other and dissipated into the air.

  Even though she had scattered the gas, Lin Sanjiu could feel her respiratory tract burning. It was constricting, and her eyes were both itchy and stinging with tears. While it was not lethal, it was definitely not a pleasant experience either. Even Lin Sanjiu, a highly-developed posthuman with a stronger physical fitness, could not bear the corrosion of the gas. It was no wonder that the posthumans in this world could not last for more than a minute in the gas. As Lin Sanjiu was forming a plan inside her head, the Vindice slowly appeared.

  The black tubes remained on his body, but they were not spewing gas anymore. It seemed like there was a limit to them.

  "Are you guys all right?"

  The voice came again, but due to the gas, he did not know that Lin Sanjiu was the only one who survived in this area. Following that, a squadron of mannequins rushed out from that direction and pounced on the Vindice.

  Even though they would be blasted into pieces the moment they pounced on the Vindice, the legion of mannequins was different from real humans.

  Their movements were stiff, but the controller had quick reflexes, and his fingers were nimble. He would not allow the Vindice to destroy them all at once, pulling them back whenever the Vindice launched his attack, and send only one mannequin at a time to intercept him. As the mannequins knew no fear or death, they fearlessly threw themselves on him to disrupt his view, even if it was only for a few milliseconds.

  The Vindice had destroyed six mannequins in quick succession. When the seventh mannequin placed its hand on him, the Vindice turned his two soulless eyes around, and his gaze met with a pair of light-amber eyes. The seventh one was not a mannequin.

  Perhaps even a Vindice did not think that there would be a human who was bold enough to come so close to him. The black tubes on his body all opened up again like snarling snakes. However, before he could release any gas, Lin Sanjiu had sent him flying high into the sky with A Twinkle In The Sky.

  "What is going on? Who is that?" somebody in the distance shouted. There was a hint of doubt in his voice as if he did not believe what he had seen. "Is that a Vindice?"

  Lin Sanjiu did not reply. She raced back in the opposite direction and darted towards the younger Puppeteer. Most of the people had died, and there was only a handful of posthumans left on the battlefield. Lin Sanjiu soon saw the teenager from earlier. His cheeks and lips were red, and his face was clouded with desperation. He was staring at a posthuman that was surrounded by Vindice, but he could not do anything since he had used up all his mannequins.

  Although the Vindice was not a biochemical type of being, it was still deadly to them. The expressionless Vindice glanced around before opening the black tubes on his body. In the twinkling of an eye, all the posthumans within a hundred meters radius dropped to the ground.

  Sensing that she had to act fast before the Vindice made his second move, Lin Sanjiu hastened her steps and pounced on the teenager. Dumbfounded, the teenager could hardly say anything before she lifted him. She secured him under her armpit and darted at full speed towards the gate.

  "Let go of me, you bastard!" snarled the teenager. He wiggled and struggled with all his might to free himself from Lin Sanjiu's armpit. "My friends are still there! I can't leave them!"

  "Stay here! I'll save them, okay?" Lin Sanjiu had no idea whether or not the teenager was a set of codes created by the Veda, or if he was the real Puppeteer who was lost in his own memories. She hurled the teenager towards the gate, and when she turned around, she was stunned by what she saw.

  The remaining Vindice had gathered in a circle. Seeing their strange behavior, all of the posthumans ceased attacking. One after another, they began to inch backward. The group of Vindice did not do anything. They just stood still and looked at each other. A second earlier, everybody was engaged in a vicious fight, then a moment later, both sides suddenly stopped moving. Even the sound of breathing had left the battlefield. The atmosphere was dense and strange.

  A Vindice moved. He pointed his finger at the sky, startling the posthumans. Then, as if they had lost their interest in laying siege to Sector 9, they turned around and left. Looking at the direction they were going, Lin Sanjiu saw that it was where she had sent one of them flying.

  Silence lingered for a long while. The people of Sector 9 did not come around even after the group of Vindice had disappeared into the horizon. This outcome was not something they had foreseen. They were ready to fight to the last man, yet it ended so quickly. Be that as it may, none of them felt delighted. Even with the barrage of the human sea, they only managed to destroy one Vindice and send one flying. Meanwhile, out of the hundreds of posthumans they had sent out, only 20 plus survived. It was a Pyrrhic victory.

  Musan was dead.

  Everybody was tired and overshadowed by depression. They all dropped to the ground one after another the moment they entered the gate. Some of them were injured while others were not. They could have gone home and taken a hot bath or rested on a comfy mattress, but none of them did that. It seemed that as soon as the battle ended, their strength had left them as well. They all lay silently and dejectedly on the ground beside the midden in the ruin as the wind pelted past them.

  Lin Sanjiu stood up and began to search through the crowd, but she could not find the teenager. She clearly remembered that she had sent him back into the gate safely, and she was sure that he was uninjured, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  When she walked past a man, he opened his eyes and asked, "Looking for somebody?"

  "I… I saved a teenager," Lin Sanjiu said ambiguously because she did not know Puppeteer's real name, "But I can't find him anywhere around."

  The man let out a long sigh. "You are talking about Yun, aren't you? I saw him just now," he said with an indescribable expression that crept upon his face. "As soon as the Vindice retreated, he left with his friends. I heard them say they're going to Sector 1 to search for our president."

  "But hasn't Sector 1 already fallen?"

  "Yeah." The man lowered his face and sighed
.

  Chapter 584 - The World And Its Young Saviors

  'Puppeteer is heading to the fallen zone?'

  An intense fear flared up in Lin Sanjiu's heart for a moment, but another thought entered her mind and soothed her. She let out a breath, and her expression relaxed.

  She had almost forgotten.

  This was Puppeteer's memory. She was merely re-living a fraction of historical events that had happened at a certain point in his life before their meeting. Although Puppeteer went to the fallen zone with his friends, he did come back alive in the end. With that thought in mind, Lin Sanjiu realized that her worries were uncalled for.

  'Since he'll return in the end, I should probably take this opportunity to learn more about this world. Perhaps I can find a way to escape from here.'

  Hearing information about this world from the young man was by no means an easy task. The several posthumans who had engaged Lin Sanjiu earlier on, including the lively man who had his pants ripped off by her, were all dead in a fine glow of gallantry in the battle. The remaining 20 or so posthumans did not know anything about world leaping.

  The good thing was that she had earned some prestige for herself through the action she displayed in the battle. Although the young man still felt skeptical about her, he answered every one of her questions.

  The first thing that had Lin Sanjiu so shaken was that the apocalypse did not cause the end of this world. In fact, this world had never been so pristine, efficient, developed, and ideal as it was today.

  Dumbfounded, Lin Sanjiu glanced around at the city. Her eyes jumped from the abandoned buildings to the streets to the corpses that littered the ground outside the gate before stopping at the overturned, damaged vehicles and trains. She almost thought her hearing had failed her, but the young man soon shed light on what that meant.

  "It's not the world that has ended. It's us, humans," said the young man as he sat in the corner with his back leaning against the wall. He grabbed a crumpled cigarette from nowhere and continued, "You are lucky, you know. Sector 9 is the smallest sector. It's the least populated and the most impoverished and backward division. People from other sectors always see us as good-for-nothing slums. Ironically, it's also due to this reason that Sector 9 has escaped their attention. At least, we can keep our homeland safe for a certain period."

  "They?" Lin Sanjiu emphasized the phrase. "Are you talking about the Vindice?"

  The young man looked at Lin Sanjiu quizzically. He even forgot to flick the ash of his cigarette.

  "Seriously, don't you know about that? Mind telling me which hole you've been hiding in all this time?" He teased halfheartedly, but he was too lazy to go into the whys and wherefores. He offered Lin Sanjiu a bitter smile and said, "Well, guess I have to take up the job and be your history teacher for the time being. Again, lucky you. I don't think there is anybody else—besides me—who's acquiescent enough to give you a history lesson at a time like this. Most of them would ignore you, while some would treat you to some punches. Anyway, come and have a seat here. It's going to be a long story.

  "It all happened about two hundred years ago. This world entered an era of technology explosion. During this era, due to several reasons and opportunities, Artificial Intelligence technology, a.k.a AI, acquired a quantum leap in development. After a while, the AI technology equipped with deep learning abilities and neural networks made a series of astonishing breakthroughs, reaching an unprecedented level of growth in merely a few decades.

  "That was the best of our times." The young man took a drag on his cigarette. The choking smell of the low-quality smoke instantly filled the air. "Nobody needed to work anymore. Oh, politicians still had to work though, pity them. AI had learned all human skills, replacing all human labor. They could do everything. The only thing restricting you was your own imagination. For example, menial work such as mining and extraction of petroleum that required heavy labor was merely the minority of the group. They performed even better than humans in certain areas that required professional personnel such as national defense, military, technology, medicine, music, and literature."

  "Even music and literature?" Lin Sanjiu could not believe what she just heard.

  "Yep, even music and literature work. In every piece of monumental production, traces are left." The young man threw Lin Sanjiu a surreptitious gaze as if he found no reason for her surprise. "After the AI grasps and masters the rules, they can produce a different kind of literature and artwork in multiple ways. Does the work look good? Of course, it looks good. At the very least, the final product is better than the work produced by a human hand, not to mention the production rate is massive. Before the purge began, I kept a lot of 54AI albums in my home."

  "The purge?"

  The young man had gotten used to Lin Sanjiu's lack of knowledge about this world, so he explained, "In that golden era, the AI virtually handled everything. The manufacturing processes: AI; the production processes: AI. They even overtook the research to ameliorate Artificial Intelligent technology. All humans needed to do was stay at home, and the government would give everyone a round sum allowance. The living standards improved, the crime rate decreased, society became stable, and everybody was happy. Of course, some work still needs humans to carry it out, but it was merely posing as so. It made no difference whether we did it or not."

  Lin Sanjiu could not imagine that this kind of world actually existed. After all, a world that possessed such highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens only happened in the movies or in some wild talk of some mad scientist.

  By right, if the Artificial Intelligence had not gone sideways, this should have been the perfect place, a utopia that everybody sought for.

  "You can't see the problem here, can you?" The young man looked at Lin Sanjiu and smiled bitterly. "We didn't see the problem either... The whole world didn't.

  "In the end, the AI replaced the people," he lamented as he looked at his own hands. His voice was low. "Do you know what people mean to those politicians? Human resources. We create value, and we promote the economy. We are laborers and soldiers. However, the nation soon realized that the AI far exceeds the value that humans can contribute.

  "They follow orders without question. They are efficient, precise, and constantly upgrading themselves. Most importantly, they would never commit any crime, they would never riot, and they would never ask for equality. Each country was feeding a large number of good-for-nothings that contributed nothing but was only double the trouble for them. In other words, we were the cancerous cells. You rear a cow that can give you milk. You rear a hen that can lay you eggs, but what can a human give in return? Nothing, zero, zip. We can give nothing aside from creating more doo-doo."

  A chill suddenly crawled down Lin Sanjiu's spine. Initially, she thought the AI had developed their own thoughts and began attacking humanity to overtake the world as many movies had shown. However, it seemed like she was wrong.

  "You get it now?" The young man smirked, but the smile did not reach his eyes. "In the beginning, the government merely tightened the law. Any crimes committed—be it theft or murder—would earn a death sentence. Hence, human judges lost their jobs and had to join us in receiving an allowance from the government. Later on, they released a list. Aside from those upper echelons and top researchers, all citizens were strictly prohibited from bearing children until they were tested and given a license to do so. All illegal children discovered would be euthanized immediately.

  "Of course, we fought back, but it was no use. We lacked weaponry, and we needed food from the government. When riots broke out, the AI was called in to quell the protest. They didn't have to show themselves. All they needed to do was fly over the sky and drop a bomb. After all, according to the new rules, rioting was treated as a capital offense, and the only judgment was death. By the time we realized we had lost everything that we could use for negotiation, it was already too late. We were on the chopping board."

  Lin Sanjiu was distracted by what
she heard. She then asked blankly, "Right now, is Mistral still run by the government and AI?"

  "Bingo." The young man grinned. "After roughly 90% of humanity had been wiped out, some of us began to evolve. Then, we don't know if it's because we're a hard nut to crack or if they suddenly lost interest in us, but the purge ended, leaving only the Vindice to roam from sector to sector to control the population. Oh yeah, the Vindice is an AI, too."

  Lin Sanjiu was shocked. "So, what you mean by the 'fallen zone' is a particular area that has been fully occupied by AI? No humans are living in there?"

  "If you leave out those jacks-in-office, yeah, you are right."

  "So… so, why does he still want to find the president?" Lin Sanjiu tried a few times, but she could not utter the name "Yun". She said ambiguously, "The president should be on the AI's side, right?"

  "Almost all of the bureaucrats at that level have been killed." The young man sighed. "But I get him. There's no way Sector 9 can survive the next wave of attack. When the Vindice return, they will burn the entire Sector 9 down until there's nothing left. He's willing to take the bet. The codes and the defensive system are the only things that can save Sector 9." He had long finished his cigarette but refused to throw it away.

  "No matter if Yun comes back or not, he's the hero of Sector 9," he spoke in an undertone, staring vacantly at the sun, which hovered above the horizon.

  Lin Sanjiu could not imagine Puppeteer in a hero suit. It did not come together with the image she had of him in her mind. After that, she extended her gratitude to the young man and stood up. She had no idea what would happen next or what action she should undertake to help Puppeteer and her escape from this memory.