Before the three of them set out for the valley, Qiu Ming had warned Zhang Heng and Electronic Sheep more than once that they should stop digging, before it was too late.
So before entering, Electronic Sheep had already imagined all sorts of horrific scenes waiting inside.
For example, a fully armed squad lying in ambush behind the gates, waiting to seize them. Or Shen Tang Morgan hiring a group of scientists to secretly conduct bloody human experiments. Or perhaps a group of extraterrestrials being held inside the base without the public's knowledge.
But none of those possibilities was as insane or dark as what he now saw with his own eyes. Everything Electronic Sheep had seen along the way was merely an ordinary corporate structure, one utterly commonplace department after another. Yet when it all came together and gradually revealed the final truth, he felt the world spin around him.
He looked at the people stepping down from the trucks. Every one of them appeared physically healthy, but in places no eye could reach, their souls had long since been riddled with holes from all the patches forced onto them.
Electronic Sheep could barely make out their faces, because every one of them seemed to have exactly the same face. And what terrified him most was that he knew he had once been one of them.
Once he realized that, Electronic Sheep could not help but consider a question: if all his current memories had been written into him, then what had the original him been like?
Electronic Sheep desperately tried to remember, pushing himself until his head felt ready to explode, yet he still could not recall anything. Worse still, he realized that even if he did remember some fragment, he had no way of knowing whether it