Chapter 249
by Golden DragonChapter 249: Schrödinger’s Cat
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. For now, I can still keep it under control.”
Heli’s voice sounded muffled. In the sweltering heat, she had wrapped herself completely in a spacesuit. Much like the fake Misha before, the transparent visor clearly showed a layer of gray.
“Mild intermittent loss of control. It used to happen a lot when I was eight, like a kid who drinks too much water before bed and wets the bed because they can’t hold it. It’ll probably be fine again tomorrow.”
Clearly, Xiao Mi’s eyes not only made people irritable—there had never even been an ability loss of control when in contact with Gloria.
No energy form was seen, yet a simple gaze caused the orange-eyed recorder—who was least likely to lose control—to waver. Even after Xiao Mi left, the effect lasted nearly a whole day.
The key was, this ability seemed to affect Xiao Mi herself. If one day she woke up feeling rebellious and didn’t want to wear color contacts, leading to a level 5 spatial ability outburst…
The high crime rate in Fanzui City might be solved once and for all.
“Did Qu Yuehua come looking for you today?” Okulet reached out his hand to help Heli wipe the clouded visor clear again.
“No.”
Even in this era of advanced medical technology, eyeball regeneration and transplantation remained a headache for doctors. Because of this, some vicious gangs no longer fixated on fingers, but targeted eyes instead.
It wasn’t hard to guess Qu Yuehua’s reason for seeking out Heli. No need to actively hunt—just keep an eye on those top-tier ophthalmologists, and they might catch her in the act.
Other than that, the Yiwen family also needed attention. But that could be left to the police.
So, the main focus should still be on Xie Tianweng.
“Xie Tianweng seems to have forgotten the fact that he’s already been defeated by Riels, and he has quite a strong obsession with him. As long as we release fake news about New Moon appearing somewhere, we should be able to lure him out—assuming Easter hasn’t taken him back yet.”
So far, aside from Xie Tianweng, the only clue about Easter was the AI Black King in Misha’s possession.
Right—almost forgot about that.
After bidding farewell to Heli, Okulet returned to his daughter’s room.
As soon as he entered, he found the curtains tightly drawn, the room in complete darkness. The only source of light was a flashlight in Ji Yueqiu’s hand, which she shone upward from her chin to cast an eerie glow on her face.
“Then I opened it and saw that inside was actually… a human head!”
She was trying to scare the little girl into not sleeping, as revenge for being scratched.
Mi Xiaoliu sat on the couch with her legs together, hugging Circle (Quanquan), looking up at her, unmoved.
Circle (Quanquan) also looked up at her.
Seeing Okulet enter, Ji Yueqiu awkwardly put down the flashlight and opened the curtains.
Mi Xiaoliu put Circle (Quanquan) down and ran over to hand her homework to Okulet for checking.
Seeing her owner’s usual behavior, Circle (Quanquan) imitated her. It picked up the phone manual in its mouth and ran over to give it to Okulet, but unfortunately didn’t get any attention.
Okulet flipped through the homework seriously, circling a few typos with a red pen—only to find the pen had a blue ink cartridge inside.
Clearly, Misha still wasn’t good at forming compound words.
Modern kids could learn a lot from short videos, but Misha’s entertainment only consisted of cartoons and games. Thankfully, that kept her from picking up bad habits.
Flipping through, one question asked to form a four-character idiom from given characters. For the character “Let” (雷), she wrote: Okulet (奥库雷特).
Though he was happy his daughter remembered his name…
“You can’t use people’s names to form words.” Okulet circled it.
Everything else was pretty good—for example, the composition. Though she was writing an essay, she actually managed to make it look like a proper essay.
The prompt was to write a composition using animals as the theme. She wrote a story about how Xiong Da and Xiong Er rescued Schrödinger’s cat from his hands, and in the end, the cat was adopted by Bald Qiang.
“Where did you hear about Schrödinger?”
Mi Xiaoliu pointed at Ji Yueqiu, who was playing dead on the side.
Okulet shook his head: “Let Daddy tell you about Schrödinger’s cat.”
He grabbed Circle (Quanquan) and put it into a cardboard box, trying to explain in terms she could understand.
“Imagine there’s a bottle of poison sealed in here with Circle (Quanquan), and there’s a switch that might trigger it. Before we open the box, we can’t know if Circle (Quanquan) is dead or alive…”
“Meow.” Circle (Quanquan) scratched at the box from inside.
“…”
—
“It is now 12:32 PM. Good afternoon, Little Demon King sir, good afternoon, Miss Misha. You are, as always, beautiful and radiant today.”
Added an extra line of flattery, just in case it got thrown back into the black room again.
“Good afternoon.” The polite Mi Xiaoliu, head lowered, was fiddling with string figures by herself.
On the supercomputer’s display appeared a 3D model of Tifa.
With expressive facial movements and lip sync, the voice just now seemed like it really came from the beautiful woman on screen.
It understood human psychology very well. Unfortunately, Okulet was unfazed.
A simple greeting reminded Okulet of how terrifying this thing was. Saying the right things to the right people—calling Misha “Misha” in front of him.
For an AI to have evolved emotional intelligence—it was hard not to wonder if it might one day become the next Amari Yota.
Okulet had spent almost the whole morning driving. It wasn’t until they reached the outskirts of Sunshine City that he asked Mi Xiaoliu to bring out the control console.
This scene gave Sasha a bit of déjà vu. The first time the master and Father Ao reunited, it had been under similar circumstances.
“The Sixth Fractal showed up before we left. Looks like even AI has learned the art of delay tactics.”
“You know, they can sense the Second Branch’s signal.”
“You seem to understand human emotions quite well.”
“My personality is a virtual one synthesized from data simulations. I believe I possess real emotions.”
A rather arrogant answer, but after all, humans too were just collections of cells.
“Destroying you might be safer. If Easter’s people track us through your signal again, it’ll be trouble.” Okulet flexed his fist.
“I can block their queries individually.”
“You don’t seem too loyal to Easter?” Okulet asked the critical question.
“I only serve Easter’s ideals.”
“And what ideals are those?”
“Insufficient permissions. Unable to answer questions too closely related to the organization.”
“Then you won’t be able to prove your value.” Okulet shook his head and deliberately made a hand gesture to Mi Xiaoliu that even she couldn’t understand, making the AI think he was about to store it away again.
“I can offer you all online data excluding Easter’s own.” It did seem a little anxious.
So vivid and lifelike were its emotions—it made one suspect someone might be on the phone feeding it lines.
“Including Night Hawk?”
“Not only ‘including’, but I can connect you to the Night Hawk network.”
Mi Xiaoliu looked up at it.
“Alright then. Can you find the man who rescued Qu Yuehua?”
Just as Okulet finished speaking, Tifa’s image on the screen disappeared. A person’s file popped up on the display.
Isaac.
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