And so, thanks to the administrators' shady tricks, every time a group of people ran off, they created a batch of clones to replace them.
Viewed this way, every city still looked bustling and prosperous—of course, the ones walking the streets were all robots.
The clones, like natural-born humans, still hid at home playing virtual games...
At this very moment.
A robot was patrolling the streets.
It used a life-detection instrument to scan its surroundings.
The instrument could detect people inside the rooms on both sides of the street.
It searched through one piece of information after another.
And analyzed them.
When it finished patrolling the area and completed a scan of the people around it, it discovered a fatal problem.
None of these people met the standards its masters required.
They were all clones.
It turned out this robot had been sent by the aliens.
Strictly speaking, the aliens had transmitted a data AI over; the body itself had still been manufactured on Earth.
It immediately questioned the several administrators who had colluded with the aliens.
"Why do you have so many clones here?"
"Didn't you tell me that although many people had run away, even more had stayed behind?"
One of the administrators pretended to be puzzled. "These are all normal people. Look at their DNA, and their memories. Run a check and you'll know they're all normal."
These people had all been normally cultivated.
They were absolutely not those half-robots with chips implanted in them.
"Please stop deceiving me. My scanning function tells me that these are all clones," the robot said, shaking its head.
"They are not normal natural-born humans. They have not experienced a complete life, nor do they carry the sediment of years."
One administrator asked in confusion, "What does that mean?"
"And