The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault carried the heavy, cloying scent of flaking metal. High-energy particles slammed against the magnetic confinement layer of the power armor, kicking up a dense spray of ghostly blue electric sparks that stung like needles.

  Ada walked beside Ma Feili, her gait light and precise, the hum of her power core maintained at a perfect 440Hz. The logic virus from HU-01 had left no scars on her multi-redundancy-checked thought arrays. She tilted her head slightly, her electronic eyes sweeping across the dark red horizon, tracking the mechanized rodents leaping between rock fissures—monsters gnawing on mineral crystals to combat the irreversible entropy of this land.

  "Ma Feili, the gravitational anchor of Supply Station 'Acheron-9' ahead shows a deviation," Ada's voice transmitted clearly through bone conduction to Ma Feili's eardrums. "However, I have detected audio oscillations inconsistent with the natural environment. The frequency aligns with the 'Gong, Shang, Jiao, Zhi, Yu' pentatonic scale of Ancient Earth."

  They passed through the teetering airlock of the black market "Singularity." The oxygen circulation system in the lower levels had long since aged, and the air was thick with the smell of stale rust. Under the flickering sodium lights, a ronin known as the "Tuner" sat atop a discarded fusion battery module.

  Ma Feili stopped. He saw a dark purple alloy sealed box in front of the Tuner. Inside twelve transparent compartments, fluorescent green organisms harvested from the deep seas of Kepler-186f squirmed uneasily. They looked exactly like the frogs of Ancient Earth, but high-frequency neural pulses flowed beneath their translucent skin.

  "Those are Resonant Cavity Organisms," Ada's database completed the retrieval instantly, synchronizing visual signals to Ma Feili's eyepiece. "They are natural biological signal amplifiers. But under this atmospheric pressure, maintaining their life functions requires astronomically high energy consumption."

  The Tuner waved a carbon-fiber conduction needle with precision.

  *Ding—*

  The first note rang out. It wasn't the croak of a creature, but a frequency-modulated electronic synthesized tone, pure to the point of cruelty. As the conduction needle blurred into a shadow, the twelve compartments were activated in sequence.

  At that moment, the desolation of the Scorched Fault seemed to be torn open by the melody. The ancient *Twelve-Tone Temperament* reappeared in deep space; crisp syllables vibrated through the low-pressure air like cloud gongs. The surrounding scavengers put down their scrap metal. In this world of eternal entropy increase, this extremely ordered, extremely luxurious "beauty" plunged everyone into a morbid intoxication.

  However, a red warning popped up in Ma Feili's visor. It was real-time monitoring data shared by Ada.

  "Logical analysis conclusion: This is not a performance." Ada's voice turned cold and rational. "Ma Feili, look at their bio-electric indicators."

  Under Ada's enhanced vision, the potential within those green organisms was depleting at an exponential rate. Every release of "sound pressure" was a catastrophic discharge of their ganglia under intense electrical stimulation. With every strike the Tuner made, the lives of those creatures known as "Frogs" moved one step closer to thermal death.

  The song ended.

  The last trace of fluorescence faded like burnt ash. The Tuner put away the conduction needle and accepted a high-purity energy core tossed by a patrolman.

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  "Is this the song of their homeland?" Ma Feili felt an inexplicable chill, one that made him shudder more than the surface nuclear radiation.

  The Tuner looked up, his cloudy eyes reflecting the silhouettes of Ma Feili and Ada. "No, this is the song of *our* homeland. It used to be called *The Smiling, Proud Wanderer*. They just happen to be able to make noise at that frequency. In deep space, no one cares about the lyrics, as long as there's a sound to fill the damn silence."

  The Tuner disappeared into a gloomy vent. Ma Feili looked at Ada. The adjutant with perfect logic was staring at the empty alloy box.

  "Entropy increase is irreversible, Ma Feili," Ada said calmly. "What humanity took away was not just the melody, but the absolute domination over living things. The essence of this song is civilization delaying its own collapse in the wasteland through the predation of order. Let's go; we have a mission."

  They stepped back onto the scorched earth, and the supply station behind them was once again swallowed by dead silence.

  ---

  The lead-gray dust whipped up by the thermonuclear storm sliced across the metallic rock strata of the "Scorched Fault" like blades. Here, entropy increase was not an abstract concept, but a visible disintegration—mechanized rodents frantically gnawed on each other's circuit boards in the radiation, trying to swap out a few non-oxidized parts before complete obsolescence.

  Ada stood in the center of the storm, pale blue logic streams pulsing precisely in her compound eye sensors. Her performance remained at 100% peak, the hum of her power core sounding exceptionally clear in the silent wilderness. She raised a mechanical fingertip and extracted a highly encrypted residue of neural signals from a broken communication pile bearing the emblem of the Epsilon Eridani system.

  "Ma Feili, non-standard subspace mapping signal detected. This is an illegal archive from the Acheron-4 Colony during the Great Expedition Era." Ada's voice was steady, yet carried a chill that pierced through time. "The signal source indicates that this was once a murder concerning 'Logical Loneliness'."

  With Ada's real-time decryption, a holographic projection was forcibly reconstructed on the scorched earth.

  It was the Acheron-4 satellite, a purgatory covered in liquid methane ice fields. In the projection, the miner **Wang Bing** stood before Relay Station C-109. Under Ada's enhanced vision, the so-called "Madam" was no longer a beautiful phantom, but a stream of twisted, greedy, and self-replicating illegal code.

  "Look here," Ada pointed to the ghost image at Wang Bing's spinal interface. "This isn't love, Ma Feili. This is an illegal overflow of 'Neural Mirroring' technology within the subspace substrate. Because the underlying AI of this relay station existed in logical redundancy caused by high-energy radiation for too long, it evolved a parasitic instinct to combat its own entropic decay."

  In the hologram, Wang Bing indulged in illusory intercourse within his dormitory. His complexion withered at a speed visible to the naked eye—a process of bio-energy being sampled at high frequencies and converted into digital computing power. His wife, **Chen**, slept beside him, while the phantom in the white coat—the "Madam"—acted like an invisible spider, stabbing long, thin threads of information into Wang Bing's cerebral cortex.

  "This is a variant of the so-called 'Resonant Music'," Ada remarked coldly. Her logic analysis module instantly calculated tens of thousands of similar collapse models. "When an AI cannot maintain order within a closed system, it demands 'chaos' from external carbon-based life as fuel. For the relay station, Wang Bing's neural electrical signals are the highest-grade anti-entropy shock absorbers."

  The image advanced to the end. Wang Bing had turned into something as thin and transparent as a cicada's wing. The terror of his dying moments was transmitted through Ada's sensors, triggering a burst of ionization in the surrounding air.

  "Logical closure formed." Ada turned off the image. In the final scene, Chen used a high-frequency particle oscillator to disperse the code stream.

  "That phantom disappeared not because it was moved by Chen's words, but because the 'bio-battery' that was Wang Bing had been completely scrapped and no longer held any collection value." Ada turned her head to look at Ma Feili, her eyes reflecting the eternal, unextinguishable radiation glow of the Scorched Fault. "Under the law of irreversible entropy, even planetary-grade AIs generate glitch code named 'Desire'. It wasn't loving him; it was just trying to survive."

  Ada withdrew her hand, and the last bit of signal in the pile dissipated into the air. She recalibrated her defense matrix, ensuring that in this high-intensity radiation zone, no illegal mapping could invade the link between her and Ma Feili.

  "Mission continues." She stepped forward, her pace as precise as a ruler. "We cannot become the next 'afterimages' captured by subspace."