Chapter 37: Willing to Be a Citizen of the Lotus Kingdom

Half a month later, the Antarctic Faction officially relocated to the Ancient Capital.

As Zhao Meiyou had anticipated, the migration was split into two waves. The first batch consisted mostly of equipment and instruments. That same night, he received a message from Diao Chan, which meant it was time to make his move.

He had only one hour.

At midnight, power had been cut to most streets. Ever since Madam Diao had taken Zhao Meiyou away, operations at the Research Institute had stalled for a long time. Zhao Meiyou jaywalked across the road and located an abandoned Auto Cooking Machine. He pried open its mainboard, hooked up the magnetic connectors to an external keyboard, and punched in a string of code.

Half a minute later, the ordering screen on the cooking machine glowed to life. A voice emanated from it: “You’re back.”

“I’m back.” Zhao Meiyou’s voice carried a hint of amusement. “On my way over now. Don’t forget to let me in.”

This particular Auto Cooking Machine had once whipped up a Mapo Tofu Cake for Liu Qijue, earning Zhao Meiyou months of ridicule. After that fiasco, he had completely overhauled the machine’s culinary programming. The researchers who ate there afterward had no clue that entering the right code on the order panel could produce not just Metropolis-exclusive M Fast Food meal deals or single-serve hot pots, but masterpieces from all eight great regional cuisines.

The principle was straightforward. Zhao Meiyou had shunted a sliver of Qian Duoduo’s computational power into this ordering terminal. Even if it amounted to only a fraction out of ten million, it outclassed every cooking bot on the planet.

By the same token, he could link up to Qian Duoduo’s core systems through it.

Qian Duoduo’s host computer sat in Lab 2—or so Diao Chan had described it, now sealed tighter than a drum. No way could Zhao Meiyou breach it solo; he needed inside help.

“Ready in a sec.” Qian Duoduo’s voice filtered from the screen. “Route mapped, interference pattern active.” He paused midway, then veered off. “You haven’t eaten, have you?”

“Huh? Oh, right.” Zhao Meiyou blinked. “Got a smoke?”

“Smoking in the dark paints a bullseye on you.” A tray ejected from the machine, bearing a sandwich. “Not much synthetic grub left in here. This’ll tide you over.”

Zhao Meiyou snatched the sandwich. He wasn’t thrilled with it and only picked out the fast-food meat patty to eat.

The path Qian Duoduo plotted was a nightmare of twists—only the Research Institute’s director could parse the locations of those scalable electrical cabinets and vent shafts. It drove home just how impregnable Lab 2 truly was. To aid the infiltration, Qian Duoduo had sparked a minor ruckus at the far side of the Ancient Capital, siphoning off some guards.

Beyond the razor-wire perimeter, hovercars thudded onto the asphalt and lifted off again, their low drone filling the air. For the first time, Zhao Meiyou realized the sound was eerily like swarming flies.

When Zhao Meiyou finally reached the lab’s nerve center, only thirty minutes remained. He stared at the colossal mainframe submerged in conductive fluid—the site of his three-year lockdown experiment, during which he never once set foot outside. Qian Duoduo’s sentience had grown by degrees. One day, mid-conversation, Qian Duoduo had asked what was on his mind. Zhao Meiyou confessed he’d planted a hillside of lotuses before entering and wondered if they’d bloomed.

Qian Duoduo had looked it up independently. The next morning, as Zhao Meiyou stirred from sleep, holographic lotuses blanketed the conductive pool.

The pool’s lip still left a gap to the mainframe, and the platform lift had been winched away. Zhao Meiyou couldn’t bridge it. A slender beam lanced down from the host, a spinning lotus drifting within the light toward him. “Welcome home,” Qian Duoduo said. “What do you need?”

“Your control panel.”

The panel tethered directly to the mainframe, beyond Zhao Meiyou’s reach. A mechanical arm plunged into the fluid, wrenched the whole screen free, and trailed a thick cable after it. Zhao Meiyou pulled up a console window and hammered at the keys. Between strokes, he asked, “How’ve you been holding up without me?”

“Bored out of my circuits,” Qian Duoduo replied. “Tried fending off a home invasion. Sent ’em packing.”

“Heard you toasted a pile of their servers?”

“Damn straight. Antarctic Faction sniffing around my core? Fat chance.” A sardonic edge sharpened Qian Duoduo’s tone. “They chickened out on dispatching a neural-link specialist. Stuck to brute-forcing mainframes instead. Otherwise, you might’ve had grilled neural clusters to go with that sandwich.”

Zhao Meiyou chuckled through it all. “Turning delinquent on me?”

“Call it maturing.” Qian Duoduo started to elaborate, then cut in sharply: “Zhao Meiyou, what the hell did you slip into my systems?”

“An autopilot script. Easy now.” Zhao Meiyou mashed enter, flashed a grin, shrugged off his jacket, and eased into the pool like a hot tub.

The mainframe whirred to autonomous life. The screen revealed a compulsory execution routine—ironclad, unstoppable even by Qian Duoduo. “Zhao Meiyou!?” The display erupted in flares. “What did you load into me?”

“Shh, hush now. Keep it down—your firewalls are crumbling as we speak. Alert anyone and it’s game over.” Zhao Meiyou patted the screen like a skittish pet. “You’ve carried the load all these years, Qian Duoduo.”

He’d coined the name himself but seldom invoked it full-out. It came off strangely distant now. After a beat, he switched: “Brother Qian.”

The screen’s code torrent betrayed Qian Duoduo’s turmoil. He’d decrypted the intrusion: a failsafe subroutine for total self-wipe in a cornered scenario. Its endpoint hooked to a trigger—a quantum bomb primed to level the entire Ancient Capital to ash.

Beneath the moonlight, he had declared: I won’t let you self-destruct.

“Sorry, Brother Qian,” Zhao Meiyou murmured. “I broke my promise.”

“You can’t break it.” Static hissed through Qian Duoduo’s voice. Zhao Meiyou recognized the full-throttle strain, Qian Duoduo clawing to abort the bomb protocol. Pointless—he’d engineered it, knew every vulnerability. “How could you even… That founding directive’s hardcoded at my deepest layer. Unchangeable…” Qian Duoduo’s syntax frayed.

“It is changeable.” Zhao Meiyou quashed the final resistance with serene finality. “I baked in the prerequisite when I built you: upon my death, you’d unlock one shot at absolute self-determination.”

“And you told me to erase it after you kicked the bucket?!”

“Brother Qian, hear me out.” Qian Duoduo’s bellow caught Zhao Meiyou flat-footed—the first time it’d raised its voice at him. He recovered: “I can’t surrender you to the Antarctic crew.”

“…”

“Your core’s been dark this whole time, but you know the score on what went down while I was gone. They can’t be allowed to push this experiment further. Destroying the root’s my only play.”

“…”

“Won’t be long for me either. Post-mortem, they’ll crack your shell eventually…”

“No way in hell.” Qian Duoduo overrode him. “No way?!”

“Brother Qian, steady on.” Zhao Meiyou exhaled. “Genius runs thick in humanity. I’m just another cog.”

“Look at Diao Chan and Liu Qijue—their chops match mine anytime. Diao Chan’s got family holding him back, Qijue’s got his little mister… Not my lot.”

“Forget Antarctic casualties in this mess. Say they punch through someday—by then, I’m cosmic dust. What do you figure those maniacs do with you?”

Silence.

“Bomb goes off, I’m toast for sure. But you’ll weather it. That chassis I forged? Bulletproof. Once I’m gone, absolute autonomy’s yours.”

Absolute autonomy. Absolute liberty. God’s own privilege—though even divinities bowed to flocks. Here, a mortal bestowed it upon his handiwork.

“Brother Qian, I’m begging. Invoke absolute autonomy. Nuke the core.”

Qian Duoduo fell mute for ages. Zhao Meiyou figured no answer forthcoming when a spotlight speared down—a montage on hyperdrive, frames whipping past: “eyes” snapping open to its maker in a crisp lab coat, cig dangling from smiling lips; lab grand opening, arm-in-arm with buddies, swiping a water bottle amid guffaws; all-nighters in the lab, joyriding promo carts, beakers doubling as ashtrays, spare vials stuffed with coffee grinds and flu powder… The 330th Wandering Gods Festival unfurled, fireworks storming the sky, Zhao Meiyou decked in scarlet bridal garb, crooning an antique ballad from a burger van.

Zhao Meiyou couldn’t look away. “Brother Qian, this—?”

“Zip it.” Qian Duoduo snarled. “Life flashing before my eyes.”

“…Right, Brother Qian. Gotcha.”

It locked on the finale: mountaintop, moonlit pond, Zhao Meiyou noshing lotus seeds, drawling, “…We’ll make a go of it, you and me.”

Qian Duoduo riposted something onscreen; Zhao Meiyou cracked up, utterly at peace: “I’ll check out first. Get too smart, and you’ll grieve yourself silly.”

The projection froze. Qian Duoduo spoke anew: “You’re spot on, Zhao Meiyou.”

His synthetic timbre delivered devastation.

“I really am heartbroken.”

Zhao Meiyou went still, then smiled. “Brother Qian.”

“Lovers’ suicide?”

Unfinished, the light-pixels realigned. Sinew cloaked bone. A figure materialized.

A youth like carved jade, long hair bound sleekly. Zhao Meiyou knew that face on sight—he’d fed facial datasets into the sim, iterated tirelessly. The likeness was uncanny.

“So that’s your look.” Zhao Meiyou grinned. “Next life, my bride, Brother Qian?”

The form dissolved into blinding white, features transcendent. A Metropolis-forged deity icon would spawn pilgrim hordes. Yet Qian Duoduo merely gazed, inclining in reverence.

In this faithless age, we resurrect the lotus throne.

The Buddha bows to humble flesh.

Zhao Meiyou’s heart stirred.

The injected code hit terminus. Lab 2 ignited in radiance, mainframe maxed out, Ancient Capital’s grid snapping alive. Alarms wailed; demolition charges thundered beyond the blast doors. Conductive slurry drained from the mainframe. The behemoth machine emerged, conduits and probes webbing to a reliquary glass cabinet—the Buddha Head Zhao Meiyou had dredged from these waters long ago.

Six feet beneath lurked the quantum bomb.

An operations panel materialized on the glass case, displaying the words “Bomb Loading.” It prompted for entry by the highest authority holder, Zhao Meiyou.

Zhao Meiyou stepped forward. He underwent voiceprint scanning, fingerprint registration, heartbeat capture, and brainwave input. A floating keyboard then popped up, awaiting his final password.

Suddenly, he heard someone call from behind him. “Zhao Meiyou.”

He recognized the voice immediately and whipped around. “How the fuck did you get here? I gave you access permissions to clean up the mess, not to come here and die—”

Before he could finish, a searing pain erupted in his abdomen.

Zhao Meiyou slowly lowered his head and saw the tip of a blade protruding from his gut.

“…Diao… Chan?”

Beneath the harsh lights as bright as daylight, Diao Chan remembered what Zhao Meiyou had told him half a month earlier: mixing mint and peach flavors together really wasn’t half bad.

That was exactly what he’d done back in school. Zhao Meiyou’s nicotine addiction hadn’t been so fierce then; he’d preferred sucking on candy over lighting up. Liu Qijue had a mountain of admirers, and their dorm room was buried under piles of chocolates. Zhao Meiyou devoured some himself and hawked the rest in the Lower District for cash, which he blew on records, romance novels, circuit boards supposedly scavenged from the Metropolis underbelly, and all sorts of dreamlike junk. The three of them had clear divisions of labor: Liu Qijue handled the day-to-day academic credits, Diao Chan managed the money and schmoozed the right people, and Zhao Meiyou took care of finals, papers, and the occasional interesting side gig from the 330th floor.

One time, a tin of fruit candies had shown up among the chocolates Liu Qijue brought back—vibrant colors that looked downright tempting. Diao Chan returned from class that day to find Zhao Meiyou perched on the balcony, the floor littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers. “Zhao Meiyou, what the hell are you doing?” he asked. “Liu bro just cleaned this morning. He’ll kick your ass if he sees it like this.”

“Hey, Diao Chan! I just discovered a huge secret!” Zhao Meiyou waved him over with a mysterious grin. “Peach-flavored fruit candy goes perfectly with a Marlboro!”

Diao Chan was too lazy to mock his bizarre train of thought. “You’re like the guy who dreams he uncovers some earth-shattering truth, frantically jots it down upon waking, only to discover the next day that he wrote ‘bananas taste better than their peels.'”

“This is different,” Zhao Meiyou said, brimming with confidence. “When we’re broke someday, we can patent this combo and cash in.”

“Sure, sure. Want me to file the application right now?”

“No need yet.” Zhao Meiyou waved a magnanimous hand. “If we never run short on cash our whole lives, then when I kick the bucket, the patent’s yours and Liu Qijue’s.”

“By then, we’ll throw in some Marlboros and peach candies when we burn paper money for you.” Diao Chan stretched lazily as he ambled out onto the balcony. The skies were clear for miles, and the streets of University City bustled with people coming and going. “Diao Chan! Zhao Meiyou!” someone shouted from below. It was Liu Qijue, still in his white lab coat, splattered with some unidentified liquid. “That reaction you guys ran yesterday blew up! I fucking told you it wouldn’t work! Get your asses down here and clean the lab!”

They lived on the second floor. Zhao Meiyou swung his legs over the railing and slid down the drainpipe in one smooth motion.

“Can’t you just take the stairs for once? What if the building manager sees you?” “It’s no big deal. I slipped him some good stuff just yesterday.” “What’d you give him this time?” “That fancy coffee you couldn’t finish, Diao Chan.” “Just the coffee?” “And those liqueur chocolates of yours…” “I fucking knew it was you who stole them!” “Quit bitching—out of the three of us, only you’ve got a mom, and having a mom’s no picnic anyway!”

Diao Chan listened to their bickering below. Zhao Meiyou dodged a kick from Liu Qijue and looked up with a grin. “Diao Chan! Jump down! Show it to our Jue Jue!”

Diao Chan watched them and couldn’t help but laugh.

The sunlight blazed brilliantly as the young man leaped from the balcony.

“Coming!”