"Number Three, Number Three, quickly report the target's status. The video signal you transferred from the domestic side looks a bit blurry. It even seems to be smoking."
Hearing the familiar dialect of Country X in the earphone, a standard young man looked at the scene through the astronomical telescope and replied helplessly in the same dialect, "It's not blurry. The target's head is really smoking."
"Nonsense. How can a good head be smoking?"
"It seems that the target is heating up his own head."
The voice on the other side of the earphone fell silent for a long time.
"Pay attention to the observation and take a few more photos to send back."
...
"What's this?"
"This is the prefrontal cortex of your brain."
Song Han turned his head and found a mass of mosaic that was constantly changing its geometric shape floating beside him. Upon closer inspection, the mass of mosaic was composed of cube-shaped data tumbling non-stop.
"Are you the system? What are we doing here?"
"The prefrontal cortex of the human brain is the operation center for human decision-making, planning, judgment, and emotional regulation. We need to use its computing ability to help Jian'an process data. Pay attention, the data is about to be connected."
Before Song Han could react, with the system's voice falling, he was immediately overwhelmed by a huge amount of information. Endless numbers formed surging waves that kept rushing in from all directions. Being in the middle of it, Song Han even had a sense of drowning as if he were on the verge of death.
However, this feeling didn't last long, and he was kicked out by a mass of mosaic.
"Where is this again?"
"This is the connection bridge between the parietal lobe and the temporal lobe of your brain."
Song Han couldn't see the system's figure, but its voice emerged in his heart.
With the voice sounding, the originally blurry surroundings were immediately replaced by two pieces of constantly pulsating brain tissues, and Song Han himself was standing on the connecting axon between the two pieces of brain tissues.
This scene seemed somewhat familiar to Song Han, as if it were the illustration in a literature about the mechanism of brain nerve activities that he had once read.
"Except for a few individuals, you humans don't have the ability to process mechanical data on a large scale. These information data need to be transformed before they can become the five-sense information that humans can understand. The parietal lobe and the temporal lobe are the main computing units in the human brain for spatial perception, visual processing, environmental understanding, language understanding, and emotional perception. Next, I will transform the data information connected by Jian'an into visual information and sound wave signals that you can understand. You need to conduct comprehensive fuzzy calculations based on these visual and auditory information, combined with the environment, intonation, and emotions, to find possible clues."
There was no room for Song Han to refuse. When the system's voice fell, the pulsating brain tissues around him and the connecting axon under his feet were immediately replaced by a series of pictures and sounds.
The densely packed pictures intertwined and the constantly overlapping sounds gave Song Han the illusion that he had countless eyes and ears. They were so complex that just immersing in them made Song Han feel as profound as looking up at the starry sky.
"System, you son of a bitch! You haven't told me how to calculate these data yet!"
This time, the system's voice didn't sound. Instead, what emerged in Song Han's mind were the memory information of quantum mechanics and consciousness studies that he had crammed in recently.
"Information transmission is a definite physical process and cannot be ignored. Before obtaining the wave function information, consciousness doesn't know the result of the collapse. And after observation, consciousness has the additional information of the wave function collapse, and this additional information must be included in the calculation."
"Human consciousness will inevitably calculate the information it absorbs."
With a bit of understanding in his heart, Song Han focused his attention on any random piece of visual information he had obtained.
It was like peeking at the other side through a small lens. The conference room, combined with the smoky lens language, instantly a realization emerged in Song Han's mind that this was a picture of an internal meeting in Country X.
Instantly ignoring the information, Song Han focused his attention on the next piece of language information.
"Number Three, Number Three, quickly report the target's status. The video signal you transferred from the domestic side looks a bit blurry. It even seems to be smoking."
"It's not blurry. The target's head is really smoking."
Although he really wanted to know what it was like for a person's head to smoke, Song Han knew that this information wasn't the clue he was looking for. After ignoring it, he immediately flipped to the next one.
However, after flipping through it for a long time, Song Han suddenly froze.
The information that was currently entering his mind was the pictures and audio captured by AI Jian'an from the backends of electronic devices all over the world. They covered everything, both bright and dark. With the intersection of billions of pieces of complex information, they fully presented the complex psychological activity trajectories of humans.
If these specific pieces of information were connected before and after on the time axis, he could know all the secrets in the world.
However...
"What exactly is the clue we are looking for?"
After a long silence, the system emitted its voice.
"We don't know what means the other side will use to force us out. Theoretically speaking, the most likely means the other side will use is something that can have a large-scale impact on the living space of humans around the world, in order to collapse the future into the result it wants. Whether this result is to destroy humanity or to destroy us. So, any information related to the relevant content may be a clue for us to find the other side."
As if knowing that Song Han would have difficulty understanding the meaning of this sentence, the system continued to explain, "If it wants to start a world-wide war to destroy us, then the clue we need to pursue is the means it is about to implement. Just like described in that famous British ballad.
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the battle was lost; for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost; for want of a kingdom, a civilization was destroyed.
Under the guidance of conscious observation, any tiny change may trigger a chain reaction."
"So, the clue we need to explore is that iron nail?"
The system added, "It could also be a gunshot or a car accident. The hundreds of countries that human civilization on Earth is divided into, with their intertwined hostile relationships, religious conflicts, and ideological differences, are like powder kegs all over the world. The fuse of World War I was a gunshot assassination in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia on the Serbian border. The fuse of World War II was Germany's lightning attack on Poland, codenamed 'Case White'. During the Cold War, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, if the front-line commander hadn't maintained the last bit of calm, the development of our later civilization would surely have been firmly restricted to the surface of the Earth. The other side that can constantly influence human cognition, in such confrontations and conflicts, as long as the balance of the scales tilts slightly, it may destroy the entire human civilization."
The system's words left Song Han standing there in a daze for a long time. At this moment, he truly realized the horror of the other side.
The interstellar civilization wars that humans imagine are the roars of huge warships and cannons crisscrossing the starry sea, or the endless storms of exploding stars.
However, who could have expected that the real civilization wars might be exactly those wars and diseases in history that could have caused human civilization to stumble and restart?
This opponent, against whom there might only be a glimmer of hope of confrontation when humanity and AI unite as one in the future, is merely an unknown detection means used by the other civilization to constantly observe the stability of the cosmic environment billions of light-years away.
They don't even know whether the other side is a member of its civilization or, like the "Probe," is something that the other side can casually create and mass-produce.