第 018 Episode| The Descent

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 1 · 11:02:13 a.m. · Frozen Northern Reach, S-17-R Boundary

Lika walked toward the boundary.

From the patch of snow where he'd crouched to the outer edge of the boundary was roughly 3 meters. He took 7 steps. He didn't look at the CV-1A, didn't look at his retinal interface, didn't look at that seam of light bleeding across the horizon. He watched only his feet—and the stretch of ground ahead that had no business existing.

When the seventh step came down, he paused.

—

The spot where he stopped was 2 centimeters outside the boundary.

Not out of fear. He wanted to read, one more time, the last prompt his brain-chip interface had skipped past—the one it had thrown up the instant he'd stood:

[Observer fragment backup: complete · 1.41%]
[Notice: observer fragment has reached the 'midpoint' record threshold]
[Next stage requirement: observer must actively enter the observation range]

"Actively enter."

Lika read it aloud, softly.

In his time he'd drafted thousands of software clauses demanding that "the user actively consent"—most of them legal boilerplate to dodge liability. But this note didn't say consent. It said enter. Two characters different. One physical action different.

—

His left foot lifted.

—

The second his sole hung above the boundary—he hadn't gone in, hadn't pulled back—the brain-chip interface jumped:

[Pre-load detected]
[Initiating download sequence...]

—

"Download?" Lika could barely force the word out.

A download was the act of pulling external data from a server to a local end. Over the past decade-plus he'd written countless download protocols—a download was data moving, not a person moving. But this prompt said that he, himself, was being downloaded.

As if he were a file, about to be pulled across to some remote thing.

—

His left foot came down.

It landed on the inner side of the boundary.

—

For the first time, Lika felt "I have a body" and "I am data" at the same moment, and the two did not contradict each other.

His body still had weight. His left foot, planted on that blank patch of ground, registered ordinary tactile feedback—not the "no sensation whatsoever" his index finger had met past the boundary earlier, but real touch, even though the ground itself was neither cold nor warm and had no texture. His brain-chip interface ran a one-second buffer, then jumped:

[Tactile feedback: simulated · 5°C · neutral surface]

simulated.

His body wasn't actually feeling anything. The brain-chip interface had simulated the touch a normal person should have when stepping onto a flat surface, and fed it to his nerves.

Which might mean—his body was no longer in the original physical layer. Or: his body was still there, but his sensory data no longer came in through the body.

—

His second foot stepped in.

—

The edges of his vision began to flicker.

Not a hallucination's flicker. Like the stutter between frames when video fast-forwards—his sight was redrawing itself. The white of the snowfield, the silver-gray of the CV-1A, the violet-blue glyph characters all began to re-render. Every second, the world his eyes took in was cleaner than the second before, more defined, more like something a person had drawn fresh by hand.

The violet-blue characters vanished first. Then the seam of light, the CV-1A, the wind—one by one, pulled out of his senses.

—

[Download progress: 12%]
[Download progress: 23%]
[Download progress: 47%]
[Download progress: 78%]

—

With each line, a piece of the world before him fell away. First the far ground, then the middle distance, then the near. But this wasn't vanishing—he felt it clearly: the original world was still there, only he was no longer connected to it.

As if he himself had been cut from one file directory and pasted into another.

—

The last line jumped:

[Download complete: 100%]
[Tactile feedback: lost]
[Visual feedback: lost]
[Audio feedback: lost]
[Brain interface: maintained]

—

The brain-chip interface was still there.

His eyes were shut—he didn't actually know whether they were—but the brain-chip interface still ran its signal. Every other sense was gone; only the brain-chip, this one line he'd built with his own hands, was still connected.

For the first time he understood the literal meaning of "I think, therefore I am."

—

The brain-chip interface threw up one final message:

[Welcome to Rift Memory - Layer 1]
[Observer in position]
[Signature: L.K.S._Core]

—

He laughed. Laughed in a state with no body.

"You again."

---

【Ch. 018 End · S-17-R → Rift Memory Layer 1】