"What? You know this person?" Ye Jiu asked when he noticed the slight change in Sun Hang's expression.
"No." Sun Hang calmly denied it. "They just seem a little familiar."
"If they seem a little familiar to you, then there must be a huge problem." Ye Jiu spoke with absolute certainty. "From my personal experience, anything connected to you is nothing but trouble."
"Are you saying you're trouble too?" Sun Hang shot him a sidelong glance.
"Whatever." Ye Jiu simply gave up. "Say whatever you want."
"But the memetic frequency detected on this nameplate does indeed match part of your memetic frequency." Candle Dragon's expression was grave. "The similarity exceeds 99.999%. That's no longer something 'common origin' or 'inheritance' can achieve."
There were only four possible relationships between two highly similar memes originating from different individuals—common origin, inheritance, copying, and extraction.
Common origin was easy to understand: the two memes shared the same "source of infection," like Song Yarong and Jiang Yu.
Inheritance was likewise a relationship between the source of infection and an infected individual, such as Sun Hang and the two women mentioned above.
But in both cases, the memetic frequencies would not be completely identical. Individual differences would also produce a slight variation of 0.3–1%.
Only in the latter two cases could the memes of two different individuals reach the absurd similarity of 99.999%.
Copying was easy to understand as well: an identical duplicate. Extraction, meanwhile, meant that one person's meme had been removed from their body and implanted into another...
And it could not have happened long ago. Given enough time, the implanted meme would mutate and become the second case, "inheritance."
If one wanted an implanted meme to remain unchanged for a long time, then the two bodies—even their thoughts and consciousness—would have to be