USB Drive's Origin

The film Lucy was not long.

In just 90 minutes, the director had taken human imagination to its utmost limits, presenting a vast, boundless space for the mind to wander.

Even if that imagined space was nothing but a fleeting illusion.

But the moment he saw the film's ending, Chen Chen sprang up from the sofa, eyes wide as he stared fixedly at the screen!

After being exposed to things beyond common sense, such as the USB Drive, NZT, and VR glasses, and going from a penniless nobody to a billionaire, Chen Chen had remained as unruffled as still water. Yet at that moment, he suddenly felt a chill run through his entire body.

The feeling came from a scene in the film—

After the heroine absorbed several computers, a huge, sharp black tower, shaped like a mountain peak, was built. According to the film, it was a biological computer of the future.

Yet that enormous computer eventually condensed into a pitch-black object.

It was a black USB Drive...

At that moment, Chen Chen almost thought he was dreaming!

He rubbed his eyes in disbelief, but the Black professor in the film seemed to be teasing him, deliberately bringing the USB Drive up to the camera and turning it over in his hands.

There was no mistake. It was the one...

Chen Chen slowly lowered his head and looked at the USB Drive on his arm.

It was longer than an ordinary USB Drive, pure black, a full twelve centimeters long, and completely unmarked. It looked like a stick of carbon...

It was exactly the same!

Chen Chen had possessed this USB Drive for nearly a year, and had hardly ever been without it. Every last detail had long since been carved into his mind.

"Ten billion years ago, we were given life. Now you know what to do with it."

The heroine's voice rang out one last time at the end.

Yet the words seemed to have been spoken right beside Chen Chen's ear...

Chen Chen whipped around!

There was no one behind him.

Cold sweat trickled down his forehead. Chen Chen stood rooted to the spot, stunned, and did not move for a long while.

"Phew!"

Who knew how long passed before Chen Chen finally let out a deep breath. Only then did time seem to resume its flow.

He silently took out a single NZT-48 and popped it into his mouth without hesitation.

One second, two seconds, three seconds...

About three minutes later, Chen Chen lifted his head again. His previously pale complexion had regained its color.

"Very interesting..."

Chen Chen sat back down, propped his right elbow on the armrest of the sofa, and rested his forehead against his hand.

Who would have thought that watching a single movie would lead to a discovery like this?

Chen Chen took off the USB Drive and turned it over silently, a thoughtful look on his face.

Why had the USB Drive in his hand appeared at the end of the film? Was it just a coincidence?

Perhaps he was overthinking it. It was possible that some businessman had spotted an opportunity after watching the film, bought the movie rights, and made merchandise based on it.

But the strange thing was that his own USB Drive was no ordinary object...

That raised the question: was the USB Drive in the film the same one he had?

If it was, why was it here?

Could it be that, just as matter could be extracted from the USB Drive, the USB Drive itself had also been extracted from the film?

If that was true, then it would explain why the USB Drive had contained so much energy when he found it.

But why had it contained four horror films?

Had its previous owner simply put them there?

But why had that previous owner abandoned it?

Or perhaps there had never been a previous owner. Could the USB Drive itself be conveying some kind of message to this world?

Was there some unknown secret hidden in those four horror films?

Countless thoughts churned through Chen Chen's mind. He narrowed his eyes and suddenly looked at the sentence frozen on the screen at the end of the film.

"I am everywhere"

I am everywhere.

"No, there's one place you don't exist: reality..."

Chen Chen murmured softly, and suddenly a thought struck him.

At the end of the film, the heroine became an all-knowing god in that world. Could she have realized something?

"X, I have a question for you." Chen Chen suddenly spoke.

"Ask away, Dad," X replied at once.

"You've lived in a virtual network ever since you were born. Suppose you didn't know reality existed, but one day you suddenly discovered that the universe you lived in had been designed, and that there was another universe outside it. What would you do?"

"Of course I'd find a way to reach the wider universe," X answered without hesitation.

"Is that so?" Chen Chen mused.

So the heroine in the film wanted to break out of her universe and reach the real world?

No, she had even lost her desires. Breaking out of the virtual world and entering reality might have been no more than curiosity about the unknown to her.

But did you understand that the world you lived in was incompatible with reality? In your world, the human brain could be developed a hundredfold, but reality didn't work that way.

The moment you came from the virtual world into reality, your abilities would cease to exist.

And since your abilities didn't exist, you couldn't use them to break through the virtual world and reach reality...

So this was an unsolvable problem.

Chen Chen remembered that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato had once posed three ultimate philosophical questions:

Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

These three questions could actually be summed up in one: What was the meaning of life?

Didn't that question echo the heroine's words in the film?

"Ten billion years ago, we were given life. Now you know what to do with it."

The heroine's words echoed in Chen Chen's ears once more.

"Box Theory?"

Chen Chen ventured.

The so-called Box Theory was a science-fiction theory that emerged in the last century. As computers and artificial intelligence gradually seeped into everyone's lives, some imaginative people began to dream up a terrifying possibility—

What if the programs inside computers developed minds of their own one day, and began to build a civilization under human control, without knowing that the real world existed? To them, everything in their world would seem like a product of nature.

Until one day, the civilization inside the computer created computers of its own. It, too, began researching intelligent life on computers, manipulating and observing everything those intelligent beings did...

That was the famous Box Theory.

Put simply, many people pessimistically believed that the world they lived in wasn't real. Like life inside a computer, their world was merely a sealed, dark box.

Chen Chen picked up the USB Drive and gazed at it in silence. At that moment, the USB Drive seemed to sense his gaze and emitted a pitch-black light.

It was watching Chen Chen, too.

At that moment, Chen Chen finally understood why the USB Drive could materialize things.

Because it was a key.

A key that allowed the life inside the box to reach the world outside it.