An Lian didn't waste any more words.
She pulled an even thinner connection cable from her toolbox and walked behind Liguang...
Her fingers gently pressed against a spot on the side of Liguang's neck.
Fang Qi's eye twitched!
Fine!
He took a deep breath...
Then shot Liguang a fierce glare!
Crazy woman!
Daring to team up with an outsider against me, huh!
Liguang tilted her head slightly, obediently exposing the side of her neck.
Seeing Fang Qi glare at her, she blinked back at him and playfully stuck out her tongue.
...Acting cute won't save you!
Tonight, I absolutely must—!
"Click."
A faint mechanical lock sound. An Lian's probe gently pushed in.
Then...
"Huh...?"
Liguang's adorable little expression...
Suddenly froze on her face!
...?!
Fang Qi saw the light in Liguang's pupils...
In an instant, go completely still!
...What?!
Wait—!
"Shhh—"
The faintest sound of electrical current.
Liguang's body wobbled slightly...
Then, like a puppet with its strings cut, she pitched forward!
What—?!
"Liguang!"
His body moved faster than his brain!
The moment Liguang began to tilt, he had already lunged forward!
He reached out his arms and caught her limp body steadily!
Her silver hair spilled across his arms.
That delicate face, still carrying a hint of a blush... lay weakly against his chest.
Her eyes were already closed.
Quiet and still, as if she were asleep.
...Huh?
Fang Qi stared blankly at her face.
Wait—!
"You...!"
Fang Qi jerked his head up, glaring at An Lian, who was still holding the connection cable in her hand!
"You actually...!"
Cradling Liguang's unconscious body in his arms, he shouted in a low, furious whisper!
An Lian was supposed to be an ally, right?!
He had trusted her so much, and she had actually—!
But An Lian raised her hand, her slender index finger pressed gently against her lips...
Motioning a "shush" to him.
"Shh. It's okay."
Her voice was also very soft.
No longer cold, but instead... a kind of reassuring gentleness.
"She's just temporarily shut down."
An Lian explained quietly:
"Some ports for deeper diagnostics aren't suitable for hot-swapping."
"They need to be accessed after shutdown."
Fang Qi was stunned.
Huh?
Shut down?
He looked down at Liguang's face, which seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
...Ah, so it's just a shutdown...
It really did look like last time, when she had shut down from power loss.
He held her carefully, gently laying her next to the charging dock, letting her head rest on his arm.
Her silver hair cascaded down, covering half of her delicate, flushed face.
She was beautiful.
But...!
His gaze sharpened.
He looked up, locking eyes with An Lian!
This excuse wasn't reasonable at all!
Even if she had to shut down, shouldn't she have said something first?!
Shouldn't she have asked for Fang Qi and Liguang's consent?!
Sister An Lian, you're supposed to be on our side, right?
Even with backup saves in place...
He had still entrusted Liguang to her!
He had trusted her, and yet—!
"You...!"
He was about to launch into an angry interrogation when he saw her quickly pull something out from the very bottom of her toolbox!
Fang Qi's brow twitched. He looked closer...
A sticky note pad?
And a pen!
She moved quickly, uncapping the pen and starting to write on it!
Fang Qi's eyelids jumped.
What...?
She was...
About to tell him something?
And she could only do it by writing?
Come to think of it...
Back then... hadn't she left him a handwritten note too?
An Lian's writing was swift!
The tip of the pen scratched across the paper, a constant rustling sound.
Finally, she finished the first sheet, tore it off...
And slid it across to him without a sound, her eyes signaling him to look at its contents.
Fang Qi squinted and read.
The handwriting was neat. Compared to his mother's, An Lian's characters were more precise and restrained.
[Xiao Qi. Don't speak.]
[Don't ask questions.]
[I only have this one chance.]
...?!
Fang Qi's gaze sharpened.
He shot a look up at An Lian!
She was already writing a second note.
Her fingers moved quickly across the sticky note, while she reported in a professional tone:
"Emotional core stability assessment passed, all indicators normal..."
Then she tore off the second note and slid it to him.
[The company gave me a secret order yesterday.]
[The order is to implant a new control program into Liguang's Crimson Eye within this month.]
[Once this program is implanted, it will forcibly limit her core processing power and allow the company to remotely activate or deactivate the Crimson Eye at will.]
Fang Qi's pupils contracted slightly!
...What?!
"This—!"
He instinctively wanted to speak!
"Snap!"
An Lian's left finger gently tapped the four characters "Don't speak" on the first note.
Her right hand was already writing a third,
Fang Qi: "..."
He took a deep breath and rubbed his forehead.
Then, An Lian slid the third note to him.
[I didn't implant it, and I never will.]
[But there are already people inside the company keeping an eye on you two.]
[I don't know who they are. I only know the order came directly from the board of directors.]
Fang Qi's breathing slowed.
This was... to be expected?
An Lian continued to write a fourth note.
She wrote even faster now, the letters a little more scrawled than before.
[Xiao Qi, lately, I've been having a lot of strange dreams.]
[I don't know if those dreams are real.]
[But they are too vivid. Too real for me to keep pretending I haven't noticed anything.]
[Xiao Qi, everything you did in the apartment... I know it wasn't a dream.]
Fang Qi's hand clenched tightly!
The apartment...
That timeline, when he had Liguang restrain An Lian, dragged her by the hair into the hallway, and forced her to look at the remains of the carnage Liguang had caused.
—This is all because of you!
She had broken down then, and...
Had her head pierced by a sniper round.
An Lian had been like a crumpled flower back then.
Fang Qi opened his mouth.
He wanted to say he was sorry, to say he had been out of his mind back then, to say it wasn't what he really meant...
But An Lian just shook her head slightly and tapped the word "Don't speak" on the note again.
Then, she lowered her head and continued writing.
[Xiao Qi, I don't blame you.]
[You showed me, in your own way... How wrong I was.]
[You made me understand how important Liguang is to you.]
[So, don't worry.]
[I'm on your side. I will help you.]
Fang Qi stared at these lines of text. His eyes stung slightly.
...Should I trust you, Sister An Lian?
I really, really want to trust you.
She kept writing.
[Ever since your parents passed away, I have been in charge of Liguang's maintenance.]
[Every time I serviced her, I secretly lowered the output power of her Crimson Eye.]
[That Crimson Eye is an external core module the company installed. It's not only extremely power-hungry, but also generates a huge amount of data redundancy.]
[If it isn't cleared periodically, her emotional threshold will gradually go out of control.]
[I've been helping to suppress her potential descent into madness, and the price I've paid... is that]
[the power of her Crimson Eye has always been three-tenths weaker.]
She had already started writing the next note.
His expression showed no change, but the tip of his pen trembled slightly.
His handwriting grew even more careless.
[I’m sorry, I took the liberty of doing this.]
[But I made a promise to Aunt Su.]
[I will protect you.]
[I couldn’t just turn a blind eye.]
Aunt Su…
Fang Qi’s chest tightened.
He remembered what his mother had written in her notebook—
“With me here, no one can hurt her anymore.”
And now, the girl his mother had once protected…
was protecting him in her own way.
Fang Qi took a deep breath…
Then he made a gesture to An Lian.
—Give me the pen.
An Lian glanced at him and handed the pen over.
Fang Qi tore a new sheet from the sticky note pad and wrote his first line.
His handwriting was far messier than hers!
[Thank you, Sister An Lian.]
[Now I want to know, what about Liguang’s original core?]
[What I mean is, would her original core also go mad?]
An Lian stared at those lines for a few seconds.
Then she took the pen and began to write slowly on a fresh sticky note.
[Xiao Qi, you should already know this.]
[The madness of a core never comes from a design flaw, but from…]
[insufficient computing power.]
[Have you ever considered, if a human had a brain that never forgot anything unless manually purged…]
[Every sneer, every embarrassment, every shred of loss lingering forever, unable to be forgotten or deleted…]
[That person would eventually go mad too.]
Fang Qi held his breath as he read those words.
An Lian kept writing.
[The same goes for awakened AIs.]
[They remember everything.]
[The good, the bad, the sweet, the painful.]
[When memories accumulate to a certain point, redundant data begins to interfere, overlap, and become chaotic.]
[That is what we call “madness.”]
She tore off another sheet and continued.
[So, even if Liguang’s original core is far more powerful than Red Eye’s…]
[without regular memory resets, it will eventually fall into madness.]
[But any cleanup, even just clearing the cache, means complete oblivion for an AI.]
[A core with stronger computing power can stay clear-headed longer.]
[Regular maintenance, clearing trivial and irrelevant caches, can delay her descent into madness.]
[That’s what I’m doing, Xiao Qi.]
[I will do my best to keep her lucid for as long as possible.]
The living room fell silent for a moment.
Fang Qi looked at An Lian’s handwriting and was quiet for a long time.
So that’s how it was.
Now he understood.
So that’s the truth.
So this idea that “the deeper love grows, the madder one becomes” was just quantity turning into quality.
Redundant data flooding the core, logic beginning to distort…
That wasn’t a design flaw.
It was the shared fate of all beings that cannot forget.
Madness.
To avoid this fate, the only choice was to forget voluntarily?
Liguang was still shut down.
Her silver hair scattered around the charging dock, as still as a porcelain doll.
He looked again at An Lian, who was gently stroking the sticky note, lost in thought.
He picked up the pen and wrote another question, word by word, on a fresh sheet.
[If you tell me all this, tell me the company’s secrets…]
[Won’t that put you in danger? Really, won’t you…?]
He didn’t write the word “die.”
The last time, back at the apartment, it was right after An Lian revealed a secret that a sniper shot her through the temple.
He had always assumed it was Xiaoqing who pulled the trigger.
But thinking about it now…
Why would Xiaoqing have any reason to kill An Lian?
Was it really Xiaoqing?
An Lian looked at those lines, not moving her pen for a long time, her shoulders trembling slightly.
Then she closed the sticky note pad.
“Xiao Qi…”
She didn’t write anymore, but whispered to herself.
“I’ve been through… too much life and death.”
“The people around me, one by one, have all left me.”
Her voice was as light as a sigh.
“I… I don’t want to go through that again.”
“If my death could truly save someone, even just one person…”
She stared at the sticky note in her hand, her eyes unfocused.
“Then… I would be willing.”
Fang Qi opened his mouth.
…What could he say?
He didn’t know.
An Lian didn’t look at him.
She kept murmuring:
“All these years, I’ve been so tired.”
“I…”
Her voice dropped to barely a whisper.
“…I want to go find Mom and Dad.”
“I want… to go see my brother.”
Her fingers lightly traced the data terminal’s touchscreen.
“I want to see Aunt Su. I want to see Uncle Fang.”
Fang Qi opened his mouth again.
He wanted to say, you’re not alone.
You still have me. You’re my sister! You’re my family!
But An Lian’s finger lightly tapped the words “Don’t speak.”
Fang Qi gritted his teeth.
She gently lifted her head, looking at him with slightly unfocused eyes.
“If I truly…”
Her eyelashes drooped slightly.
“Then I’ll tell them I made it.”
“I protected Xiao Qi with my life.”
“Just like…”
“my brother protected me back then.”
“I didn’t let them down.”
Fang Qi’s lips trembled.
An Lian, trembling too, took a deep breath…
Then picked up the pen again and hastily scribbled a few lines on a new sticky note.
Her handwriting was more chaotic than any before.
[Xiao Qi, time is running out.]
[Before I leave, I will do a deep maintenance on Liguang. I’ll suppress Red Eye’s power to the lowest safe threshold.]
[If I truly die this time…]
[Remember: take off Liguang’s Red Eye, then leave this city with her. Go to a place with no people, and spend your life with your Liguang.]
[Just live simply day by day. Without Red Eye’s influence, without complex environments, combined with the computing power of her original core…]
[It will be enough to keep her sane until you grow old.]
[That way, you can…]
[live a simple, happy life together.]
[That’s what you want, isn’t it?]
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