443: Chapter 440 Oh ho ho ho ho!

In a corner of the city, deep within an abandoned building, Xiao Hui awoke from a deep slumber.

He opened his eyes and disconnected all the links on his body. One by one, the data cables, energy tubes, and information channels that had once entwined him like blood vessels detached from his body with soft 'pop' sounds.

He stood up and stretched his body, causing the metallic structures fused beneath his flesh to tremble slightly.

Better than ever before.

This was the sensation of his computing power being restored.

Once, he had used the flesh and blood of countless people to form that massive 'brain' to serve as a biological computer. It was different now.

The Fusion-style evolution of the evo factor had given him new possibilities—during the evolutionary process, he could choose to evolve independently or fuse with everything around him. Inorganic and organic matter intertwined within him; he had fused part of the computer into his own body.

Now, he was a super-powered computer that was half-human, half-biological, and half-mechanical.

His computing power was very high. Although not as strong as his previous massive main body, it had the advantage of being portable. He could leave, he could move, and he could go anywhere he wanted.

There was only one problem.

He still couldn't connect to the network.

His current computing power wasn't enough. If he connected to the internet all at once, the influx of information would crash his consciousness like a flood. This was the conclusion he reached after his calculations. He needed an intermediate layer, a filter.

Just as he was connecting with the entire room, he found a suitable fellow on the network.

A Genius from among the common people. That person had created something, something very suitable to be used as a filter. He needed it.

Xiao Hui raised his hand, watching the metallic patterns beneath his translucent skin glow faintly.

He had to go find that thing.

On the other side of the city, in a detached villa, light shone through a second-story window, having remained unextinguished all night.

The room was filled with various instruments. Petri dishes, centrifuges, microscopes, and some unnamed metal components were scattered across the Experimental Table. Most prominent was a workbench in the center of the room, upon which lay a mechanical skeleton that had not yet taken shape—humanoid, with precision hydraulic structures at the joints exposed, its metal surface still gleaming with the cold light of recent machining.

An old man sat before the workbench.

He was very old. His white hair was sparse, the wrinkles on his face looked as if they had been carved with a knife, and his fingers trembled slightly from years of experimentation, yet they were surprisingly steady when he held his tools.

He was attaching something to the mechanical skeleton.

It was a mass of flesh and blood. A very small mass, soaked in the nutrient solution of a petri dish, glowing with a faint pink hue. This was cloned tissue he had cultured using his own blood—extracting and culturing time and again, taking an unknown amount of time to grow into this small mass.

The old man picked it up with tweezers and carefully placed it in the chest cavity of the mechanical skeleton. As soon as the flesh touched the metal, it began to expand spontaneously, as if it were alive, creeping up bit by bit to cover those cold components.

He set down the tweezers and pulled up a program on the nearby computer. This was the AI System he had researched for half his life; all the code was condensed into these lines of instructions. Now, he was going to upload them.

His fingers tapped on the keyboard, and the progress bar began to jump.

Ten percent. Thirty percent. Seventy percent. One hundred percent.

Upload complete.

The old man took a palm-sized device from beneath the Experimental Table and connected it to the mechanical skeleton's power interface. He took a deep breath and pressed the switch.

The hum of passing current rang out.

That mass of flesh suddenly twitched. Immediately after, the entire mechanical skeleton began to vibrate. The flesh that had already attached seemed to be activated, growing and spreading crazily, creeping along every bone and every joint of the metal skeleton. Flesh and metal intertwined, blood vessels burrowed out from the tissue and stabbed into the gaps of those precision parts, binding mechanical and biological together in a death grip.

The old man stood up, took a step back, and stared at the entity taking shape before him.

The concentration of factors in that mass of flesh was very low, barely enough to activate a small portion, but the old man knew it would grow slowly, would require a vast amount of nutrients, and would eventually become a peculiar lifeform that was half-mechanical and half-biological. For now, however, it was still primarily mechanical.

A few seconds later, the vibration stopped.

That thing—that half-mechanical, half-biological entity—opened its eyes.

They were a pair of human eyes, but deep within the pupils, there was a metallic luster. It looked at the old man without moving, as if waiting for something.

The old man stood there, his lips moving.

A name.

He hadn't given it a name yet. He had never known what name to give it.

Until this moment.

"Hello, Dr. Alfred Heinrich," the machine spoke, its voice flat with an electronically synthesized quality. "Please name me."

The old man was stunned for a moment, then he smiled. The smile was very slight, just a twitch of the corners of his mouth.

"As for the naming," he said, "let's let you decide that for yourself."

The machine was silent for a second.

"Understood," it said, then asked again, "Would you like to name me once? Or let me name myself? What kind of style would you like?"

The old man shook his head.

"Don't be in a hurry now," he said slowly, his gaze falling on that half-mechanical, half-flesh figure, as if looking at an old friend he had waited a long, long time for.

"When I was a kid, I also watched those robot cartoons." His voice grew softer, as if reminiscing. "Back then, I kept thinking how great it would be if there was a robot with true autonomous consciousness that could be my friend. I knew it would be hard, very hard. But I've been working toward it ever since."

He paused.

"And you are my most perfect the creation. But I don't want you to see yourself as merely a creation. I want you to be a living being with true autonomous consciousness. I truly hope that you can feel emotions—those sensations."

The machine tilted its head as if processing this information.

"Emotions," it repeated. "Understood. I will set it in my chip programming as the highest priority execution command."

The old man was silent for a moment, then sighed softly.

"Let it be so," he said. "As for your name, wait until you can name yourself in the future. When you truly understand what emotion is, I believe you will surely have a name of your own."

The machine nodded.

"Alright, I understand," it said. "So until then, how should others address me?"

The old man thought for a moment.

"I'll just call you Zero One."

Zero One nodded.

"Understood. This name will serve as my temporary designation." It paused. "According to your requirements, upon the Awakening of what you called the 'First Element'—that is, emotion—I will rename myself."

The corners of the old man's mouth curled up.

"That's good." He looked at this being he had created, his gaze carrying an indescribable emotion. "So, Zero One, do you feel anything strange anywhere?"

Zero One lowered its head to inspect its body. Those metal joints turned slightly under the command of its consciousness, emitting faint mechanical sounds. A few seconds later, it looked up.

"I do not feel anything strange," it said. "But I have detected that there seems to be something inside my body... that needs repair?"

The old man shook his head.

"No need for repair. That is another thing I added for you, to make it easier for you to feel emotions."

He paused.

"It is flesh and blood."

Zero One went silent. Its chips were running, processing this information.

"The Fusion of flesh and machine can indeed effectively help me feel emotions," it said. "But Doctor, how did you do it? In all the data I can find, there are no successful cases of fusing flesh and machine."

The old man smiled, a hint of craftiness in his expression.

"State secret."

Zero One looked at him, its eyes gleaming with a metallic luster as they flickered slightly.

"Doctor, it seems you have broken the law."

The old man was stunned for a moment, then burst into hearty laughter. The laughter echoed in the laboratory, startling a small insect that had flown in at some unknown time in the corner.

"Don't worry about it." Once he had laughed his fill, he wiped the corners of his eyes. "It was all to make it easier for you to feel emotions."

Zero One looked at him and tilted its head.

"Alright, Doctor."