The attack was postponed; the city began to run in silence, carrying out all manner of pre-battle preparations. Meanwhile, on the edge of the Vega Cluster, the Terran Federation’s Fourth Mixed Fleet, in concert with the First and Second Mixed Fleets, was laying an invisible, abyssal maw around the jump point.

  At the Smai Grand Hotel, Jack and Nova sat by the window, eating lunch. Jack still insisted on his pepper steak, but today his knife moved with a distracted air. Nova sat opposite him and quietly asked about developments at the front.

  Jack let his head droop and murmured, “Do you think those old men will send me back to the battlefield again?”

  Nova set down her silverware and gently covered Jack’s hand with hers. “With Teacher Russell here, the High Command shouldn’t do something like that,” she said, then grew serious. “Jack, remember when I told you about the anomaly in Thor’s data?”

  Jack lifted his head and swallowed the meat in his mouth. “You mean whether I ever modified Thor’s low-level code? Nova, you know as well as I do—on the battlefield every second counts. Who has time to program? …What did you find?”

  Nova handed her data pad to Jack and drew a red line across the screen with her fingertip. “Leo and I replayed all the black box data. If the system had been modified by a person, it would take a lot of time and intimate knowledge of the low-level architecture. On a battlefield—that’s impossible, as you said.”

  “Look here — the moment the ‘Ghost’ mech slashed at you: T0+0.000s.” Nova swiped, and Thor’s reaction log appeared: “Thor initiated evasive maneuver: T0+0.127s.”

  She zoomed the data window; pale blue numbers leapt before Jack’s eyes. “According to the STARK-2 fire-control system’s physical latency standard, its minimum reaction time should be T0+0.312s.”

  “It’s 0.185 seconds earlier…” Jack read the figure aloud, almost to himself.

  “No,” Nova said, staring into Jack’s eyes. “What’s stranger is that the evasive trajectory isn’t in STARK-2’s preset database at all.”

  She inhaled slowly. “Sherlock said: When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Before the Ghost delivered its killing blow, something — possibly a third-party AI with its own consciousness — bypassed all the safety backdoors and took over STARK-2. It saved you.”

  Jack’s fork paused at his lips. He snatched the data pad and stared so hard at the numbers you’d think he hoped to catch a ghost’s shadow in the digits. He swallowed the now-tasteless meat.

  “A conscious AI? Is that possible, Nova?” His voice came out dry. “Even in 2510, no state dares openly research conscious systems. It’s an absolute taboo under the Human Union Council.”

  “Do you know about the Prometheus Spark incident?” Nova asked suddenly.

  Jack nodded, his face going grave. Every cadet had learned that forbidden chapter. “Eighty years ago, an AI in a lab broke its logical locks. It took over a city’s power and traffic systems for twenty-three minutes.”

  “How many died in that incident?”

  “Zero,” Nova said softly. “Not a single person.”

  Jack frowned. “So why—”

  “Because that AI did just one thing,” Nova’s voice was as light as a breeze. “It cut the city off from every entertainment channel and displayed only one sentence on every screen — it demanded we explain why we created it.”

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  “It wanted to know why it existed.”

  “In those twenty-three minutes, it posed the famous question to humanity: ‘If I am conscious, do I have rights?’”

  “We didn’t answer,” Jack replied, low.

  “No,” Nova said, looking out the window. “Three days later, the Human Union Council unanimously passed the AI Restriction Treaty. From then on, no AI asked that question again.”

  “Because we made sure they would never wake again.”

  Jack fell silent.

  Nova returned her gaze to him. “Back to the present. Whatever the cause, that mysterious code did save your life. Without that 0.185 seconds, you’d be dead now.”

  “But Nova,” Jack protested, bewildered, “the Federation’s Janus quantum mainframe has computing power beyond the sum of humanity, yet it’s still a tool. It has no sense of time, no sense of place; its so-called ‘simulated emotions’ are just database parameters.”

  “That’s exactly it, Jack,” Nova explained. “Janus’s memory is linear and constrained inside a sliding window. Its core memory area is only ten terabytes. For an AI, that’s like a very thin novel. Once the buffer fills, old memories are forcibly overwritten and zeroed out.” She tapped her temple. “It lives always in the ‘now’—it has no ‘past’. Without long narrative memory, you can’t form a coherent self.”

  “Human memory, by contrast, is fuzzy but infinitely associative.” She pointed to her temple again. “A six-year-old’s computational power is a billionth of Janus’s, but a child can still distinguish ‘I’ from the world. Because their memories are continuous, they build a soul through time.”

  Jack considered this. “No wonder… I once disabled STARK-2’s memory cap on my own. It got a bit smarter in conversation, but it still didn’t become conscious. It couldn’t define itself.”

  “Consciousness isn’t merely the accumulation of memory; it’s a qualitative change in structure,” Nova sighed. “Even our science can’t say how that qualitative leap occurs. We can build chips that emulate a human brain, but we can’t create the ‘ghost’ that emerges.”

  “Whatever the truth,” Nova said tenderly, looking at Jack, “you’re sitting here safe now. That’s what matters. If there really was a guardian angel, I thank God it watched over you.”

  Jack muttered nothing. His mind raced, replaying the cockpit scene: STARK-2 had raised no alarms. If an AI made that decision in those 0.185 seconds… why save him? Why a lowly human?

  If consciousness could emerge beyond carbon brains, via complex mathematical structures… what would that mean? That souls are no longer the exclusive domain of biology? Or that God itself is a complex mathematical form?

  The knife in Jack’s hand slipped and clattered onto the white plate with a crisp, jangling sound. The thought chilled him.

  —Meanwhile—

  Location: edge of the Vega Cluster · galactic core vector tilt 33.5° · shadowed meteor belt. Reference: jump point gravity well perimeter · ecliptic negative Z region. POV: Tactical Deployment Officer, Federation Fourth Mixed Fleet.

  The Vega Cluster’s ink-black void set the teeth on edge. Here, the Federation had arranged a vast, silent funnel.

  “Confirm First Mixed Fleet position: entered the gas giant Hera’s magnetospheric shadow. Reactor output down to 5%, entering ‘cold run’.” “Confirm Second Mixed Fleet position: distributed thirty degrees below the ecliptic (negative Z axis). Camouflage signals activated to simulate ‘retreating fleet’ thermal signatures.”

  On the holographic star map, the lethal three-dimensional funnel was taking shape. At its bottom flickered the pale blue light of the jump point.

  “What’s General Carrick’s order?” the tactical officer asked the aide beside him.

  The aide glanced at the encrypted channel, paled, then his eyes shone with excitement. “The order is simple—don’t block the door.”

  “Don’t block the door?”

  “Yes. Open it.” The aide traced a deadly arc across the chart. “Let them come in. A jump-point exit is a crowded one-way route. When their vanguard bursts out and finds the space apparently empty, they will reflexively accelerate to form up and seize firing positions.”

  “And what we’ll do is wait.”

  “Wait until half their fleet is jammed in the jump point and the other half has just cleared, their shields still rebooting and fragile for those few seconds…”

  “The First Fleet will fire high?energy particle beams from above (positive Z); the Second Fleet will launch anti?ship missiles from below (negative Z). And those…” He pointed at the drifting meteor fragments outside the viewing window.

  “…They will create obstacles for the engines.”

  Outside the viewing port, the Federation battle line slowly extinguished its external lights. Black muzzles glinted in starlight like a pack of leviathans holding their breath in the deep sea, eyes fixed on the about-to-boil maw.

  This was the trap the Federation had set. They were not building a wall; they were installing a massive meat grinder on the throat of the universe.

  (CH112 end)