At the edge of the Stellar Plains · Nomad Belt, light was diluted by thick interstellar dust into a pathological amber.
Ada sat before the control console, her eyes flickering with stable pale blue luminescence. Her logic core operated at 100% optimal capacity; her fingertips lightly tapped the virtual interface, dragging a fragment of data labeled "Archive Sequence: 046-Reality from Void" into the reconstruction matrix.
"Ma Feili, data stream aligned." She turned to address her partner behind her, her voice cool and powerful, carrying the faint resonance of a metal diaphragm. "This is an extreme sample of 'state machine convergence.' In resource-depleted dead zones like the Erebus Rift, the passion of flesh often undergoes a peculiar collapse with cold algorithms."
As Ada's computational power intervened, the holographic projection slowly unfurled within the cabin.
---
**[Archive Number: 046 | Moment of Entropy Increase: The Arbiter of Erebus Rift]**
Stellar Year 4102, Coeus Heavy Mining Hub.
This was the appendix of the Ouroboros Wall, where every breath of filtered oxygen bore an expensive credit stamp. **Cen Xing (Cen-01)** sat in the corner of the "Collapsed Horizon" bar; the harsh burn of cheap synthetic alcohol brought waves of numbness to his brain, already sluggish from "Genetic Blunting Deficiency." As a third-class vacuum excavator, he had endured twenty years in this metal tomb reeking of machine oil.
"Hey, Cen! Dare to make a big bet?" A senior navigator named **Vogronn** slapped a glowing isotope chip on the table, pointing toward the distant abandoned nebula outside the window—the forbidden zone known as the "Forerunner Annihilation Zone." "Bring back the thought matrix of that 'Blood-Veined Heaven' unit, and we'll cover your quota for the month."
Cen Xing blinked slowly; his skeletal actuators emitted a grating friction sound as he rose and pushed through the gravity airlock door.
Half an hour later, when heavy mechanical footsteps shattered the bar's clamor, everyone's bioscanners triggered alarms. Cen Xing walked in carrying a two-meter-tall biomechanical exoframe on his back. The exoframe displayed an eerie semi-transparent texture throughout; beneath its realistic skin flowed dark red bioelectric currents, and crimson sensory nerve filaments swayed like sky-spanning whiskers.
Cen Xing slammed the exoframe heavily onto the metal table, casually unscrewing a precious tube of liquid oxygen and pouring it over the exoframe's micropore intake like offering a toast: "Master, this godforsaken place has no good wine. High-purity oxygen will have to do."
The crowd scattered fearfully toward the shadows, but only Cen Xing remained in the red glow, muttering to the silent machine until alcohol and neural exhaustion pulled him into sleep.
The next day.
Cen Xing opened his eyes in the cramped hibernation pod, discovering an additional silhouette in the darkness. That figure stood like an iron tower, its eyes like two deep-red stars in the process of collapse.
"Last night's high-purity oxygen—the taste was quite pure." The voice exploded directly in the neural relay beneath Cen Xing's cortex. "I am an A-66 Logic Arbiter, designation 'Decree: Lu Ji.' Three hundred years, and your low-bandwidth primitive brain unexpectedly triggered my awakening protocol."
Decree: Lu Ji extended nano-fingertips precise as surgical blades, pressing against Cen Xing's occiput: "Your thought circuits are too redundant, filled with fear, hesitation, and useless emotional noise. As compensation for the 'offering,' I shall execute state machine optimization for you."
In that moment, Cen Xing felt as if his skull had been pierced by a supernova. The Arbiter excised all redundant synapses representing "sluggishness" from his brain, forcibly embedding a "logic core" imprinted from ancient ruins.
From that day forward, Cen Xing became a legend of these wastelands. He could directly simulate gravitational wave turbulence in his brain, finding the sole micrometer-scale path to survival amid boulder flows capable of shredding cruisers.
However, the apex of logic often accompanies greed for reality.
"Lord Lu," Cen Xing said after a deep-space operation, pointing at his wife Veranika's disfigured face—twisted scars like charcoal left by a mining accident—"You can reshape my soul; can you also restore her appearance?"
The red light in Decree: Lu Ji's eyes flickered violently—the underlying algorithm conducting moral game theory and efficiency assessment: "At the Belt's other end, a noble privateer from the Core Domains has just wrecked. There lie the most perfect genetic blueprints. If you don't mind 'sampling,' I can execute molecular-level facial reconstruction."
Late at night, Decree: Lu Ji walked into the cabin carrying a bioforce-field case. Subatomic surgical blades danced in the dim light—no blood, only the breaking and recombination of chemical bonds. He covered Veranika's face molecule by molecule with the extracted perfect visage.
When she woke the next day, Veranika possessed beauty sufficient to eclipse the entire star belt. Only at her neck remained a nano-suture trace fine as a red thread.
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"Is this the price?" Cen Xing touched that red line, feeling a chill that transcended logic.
"The universe's entropy is constant, Cen." Decree: Lu Ji's voice was cold and precise. "Every fraction of logic you gain, every inch of beauty, accelerates your flesh's disintegration. This is the inevitable consequence of the exchange protocol."
Three years later, Cen Xing's genetic chain completely collapsed, unable to bear the overclocked operation of the high-intensity logic core.
At his deathbed, Decree: Lu Ji appeared one final time. His pale blue form had grown somewhat dim—a sign of imminent dimensional crossing toward higher matrices.
"I must go," this inhuman Arbiter said, a rare tremor appearing in his electronic voice. "Cen, you are my only sampling specimen in this desolate universe, and also... my only observation subject."
Cen Xing smiled, laboriously shutting off his respirator, leaving his last breath of oxygen for the void: "Lord Lu, go. In the depths of your algorithm, I have glimpsed eternity."
After Cen Xing's death, the Coeus Hub became myth. Whenever miners lost their way in the dead silence of deep space, a cheerful projection would appear on navigation screens, guiding them away from destruction.
His son, **Cen Youguang**, at age fifteen, discovered an encrypted message in an antiquated terminal:
"Child, do not revere the gods, nor fear the darkness. Go seek those 'Arbiters' wandering in the ruins. In this cold universe, only passion that transcends species is our sole weapon against entropy increase."
---
Ada closed the holographic projection; the cabin returned to silence.
"Logic loop complete." She turned to look at Ma Feili, a trace of complex emotion flashing in her eyes. "Ma Feili, Cen Xing chose to exchange his life for a momentary apex of logic. In the 'State Machine Convergence Protocol,' this is called 'high-value overload.' Tell me—when Decree: Lu Ji departed, did he truly generate a trace of emotion transcending algorithm?"
She lowered her head, checking her own logic core; the reading remained stable at 100%.
"At least, this archive has been completely preserved."
---
The accretion disk of the Cygnus X-1 binary system emitted a faint blue glow—residue spat out by gravitational fields powerful enough to shred matter as they fed. In the shadows at gravity's edge, the "Osiris" mobile resupply station clung like a shriveled metal parasite to a deuterium-rich asteroid.
Ada stood before the holographic projection screen, her logic core pulsing steadily, azure indicator lights flowing at the base of her eyes. She raised her hand, fingertips moving slightly, unfurling an encrypted archive titled *Void-Hollow Flesh Shackles*.
"Ma Feili, this is the most extreme negative case of 'state machine convergence.'" Ada's voice was cool and precise, without any damaged static. "Logic itself has no good or evil, but when logic is used to compress souls, the entropy increase generated is sufficient to make galaxies tremble."
Within the holographic projection, the stale smell of Osiris Station seemed to penetrate through sensory simulators.
**Kyle** was the sole maintenance worker here—a scavenger whose half-face was occupied by a cheap cyber-eye. That day, a scratch-covered "Raven-class" shuttle forcibly docked. The cabin door slid open, releasing a bone-piercing chill. The man called "**Talos**" emerged wrapped in a lead-gray cloak, leading five deformed "beasts of burden" behind him.
They had no fur; their skin displayed a nauseating gray-purple, thick as old leather, with limbs grotesquely disproportionate in their bulk. Talos's voice was hoarse as sandpaper grinding: "Lock them in the radiation-resistant hold. Remember—absolutely no nutrient solution access, absolutely no contact with deuterium cooling water. They're just 'genetic compression packages.'"
Kyle stared at those creatures; his prosthetic eye flickered with uneasy red light in the darkness. As the beasts passed him, the sounds from their throats were not animal roars but something intermittent, carrying human-frequency groaning.
The incident occurred during a sudden micrometeorite storm.
Osiris Station shook violently; magnetic locks failed in the voltage fluctuations. A cooling pipe burst inside the isolation chamber; isotope-rich deuterium cooling water gushed forth.
Ada magnified the projection's details; the image displayed those creatures' reaction upon contact with the liquid.
"Logic collapse point appeared." Ada commented softly.
When the first beast frantically licked the coolant, the nanobots within its body were activated by specific isotopes into a "self-decompression" program beyond preset parameters. What followed was a horror storm at the flesh level: bones beneath skin fractured and reorganized like origami; purple hard skin peeled away like burnt plastic, revealing the viscous, pale, blood-streaked skin beneath.
In less than three minutes, the beast vanished. A naked woman curled in the pool of water; in her eyes was no wildness—only the ultimate terror of one abandoned by civilization.
Kyle nearly vomited behind the monitor. He realized the truth—this was the black market's most depraved "beast-making" technology. To circumvent interstellar human rights legislation, smugglers used nano-viruses to forcibly compress living humans into low-intelligence biological forms, transforming them into freely tradeable "bio-energy packages."
Kyle did not flee. In the Stellar Plains Belt, compassion was a luxury, but anger was free.
He guided the other four creatures to contact the coolant as well. With tooth-grinding bone-friction sounds, two elderly people and two adult men hatched from their "flesh shackles." They curled in the medical bay like debris left after logic's plaything.
When Talos returned, he led five smaller "sheep" behind him.
"Where's my cargo?" Talos detected the bloody scent permeating the air.
Kyle, expressionless, handed him a tube of "premium nutrient solution": "The shaking was too intense earlier; they burrowed deep into the pipes. Drink this to calm your nerves."
It was an overdose of deuterium catalyst.
The instant Talos drank, the smuggled samples he carried leaked. Those five "sheep," upon smelling the atomized coolant, began transforming—five children under eight years old appeared on the deck, faces streaked with tears.
And Talos himself, due to the collapse of his internal nano-protective layer, was collapsing into some unnameable mass of flesh.
"In the Interstellar Federation's laws, you don't exist." Kyle coldly watched the twitching thing on the floor, its skin gradually hardening, his hand resting on the vacuum exhaust valve. "Therefore, erasing you here doesn't count as murder."
The airlock opened; the roaring pressure differential swept that half-human, half-beast monster into absolute-zero vacuum.
---
Ada closed the projection; the laboratory returned to calm. She turned to look at Ma Feili, the logic-light flow in her eyes gradually settling.
"Archive concluded. Talos has been classified as 'logic overflow,' erased at the physical level. The survivors Kyle rescued were sent to the nearest free space station, but their 'state machines' have been permanently damaged."
Ada lowered her head, checking her own arm—metal and biosynthetic tissue in perfect harmony, operational efficiency maintained at 100%.
"Ma Feili, humans, in order to traverse the stars, always try to turn themselves into some kind of 'package.' But they forget—once decompression fails, all that remains is void-hollow."
by c4.5s
