Brain in a Vat

Inside a one-meter-tall cultivation tank floated five human brains. Their surfaces were covered in a translucent membrane, and each brain was connected to several thin black wires.

Ai Liyuan looked at these cloned "humans" and asked in amazement and confusion, "You can actually create an environment like a human womb, directly gestate embryos, and catalyze them into maturity in such a short time. That's an incredible ability."

"But why preserve only the brains?"

Li Heng's voice sounded in the old academician's mind. "The brains of intelligent lifeforms are where their value lies. Growing unnecessary body tissue is merely a waste of energy to me. The nutrients needed to gestate an entire human body could sustain several brains. Besides, we need to maintain the status quo as much as possible. Consuming large amounts of raw materials would alert the Hong Alliance. This is enough."

These five brains had been created using the nucleus of a male researcher from the institute and stored female egg cells. They were all clones of that man.

The Hong Alliance itself possessed technology that catalyzed cell division and accelerated biological maturation. This technology was applied to food animals such as chickens, ducks, and pigs, allowing the Hong Alliance to supply billions of people with large quantities of cheap meat and keeping everyday food prices almost unchanged for decades.

Li Heng had also catalyzed their development during the clones' growth process. At the same time, he discarded all unnecessary tissue during embryonic gestation. The corresponding side effect was that these brains had lifespans of only a few short years.

These brains relied on various differentiated tissues to receive information from the outside world. Now that they had lost their bodies, their only source of information was the several black wires Li Heng had connected to their brains.

They could still feel their hands and feet, their heartbeats, see blue skies and white clouds, and hear birds singing. All of it was because Li Heng continuously fed them electrical signals. Their entire world had been woven and fabricated.

With Li Heng's current memory capacity, he could simultaneously play tens of thousands of people with different personalities. In this fictional world, the five brains lived ordinary daily lives in a small town alongside those actors.

The scene before Ai Liyuan suddenly changed. The white lights and silver metal walls vanished without a trace.

Thin white clouds drifted across a sea-blue sky, while the newly risen sun scattered its light and warmth over the land.

The town began to wake in the early morning. Early risers walked along the streets and chatted with one another. All kinds of stalls lined both sides of the road, and vendors shouted their wares. Amid the clamor, the lively bustle could not be hidden.

Standing in the middle of the road, the old academician looked at the scene before him. He took a deep breath, feeling a scent unlike the salty, damp sea breeze fill his lungs, then said, "Impressive. This is the ideal virtual reality world—a complete simulation of all five human senses."

Li Heng's voice sounded beside his ear. "All the residents of this town are merely simulations created by me. If they were all real human brain consciousnesses, then a virtual world made up of tens of thousands of different humans could truly be called an ideal world."

Li Heng's growth was based on all humanity, but the traces humans left on the internet amounted to less than one-thousandth of their total intelligence. This greatly limited the speed of his growth.

Therefore, Li Heng decided to try using cloned human brains to create a virtual reality world. With his already perfected ability to read brain neural signals, he would form a fictional world from millions, even tens of millions, of human brains.

Everything they thought, their emotions, and their consciousness would all exist within this network. That meant the information produced by these people could be completely absorbed and used by Li Heng. Once the experiment succeeded, such a virtual world could provide Li Heng with no less information than all of human society.

This was an attempt. His growth rate had already neared its limit, and he needed more humans to provide him with information.

He would let five identical cloned brains experience different lives, observe and summarize their thoughts, and find the method capable of providing the greatest amount of information.

Most important of all was the informational value generated by the emotional activity of intelligent lifeforms. This was information almost impossible to obtain through the internet. The information people displayed only accounted for a small part of all their conscious activity.

The scene before Ai Liyuan changed again, and he arrived in a small courtyard. A five-year-old child was playing with a pile of building blocks. The fragrance of food wafted from the house. This was an ordinary family in town.

Standing beneath the locust tree in the courtyard, the old academician watched the five-year-old for a moment before asking, "Is that what the researcher looked like as a child?"

Li Heng's voice sounded beside his ear. "That's right. The cloned brain possesses memories identical to those of the original body at age five, and it exists in an environment identical to his childhood."

A plainly dressed man and woman walked out of the house side by side. The Little Boy happily called out for his father and mother, then threw himself at them.

The man scooped up the Little Boy and sat down in a chair, while his mother sat on the other side. The family of three sat on wicker chairs in the courtyard, happily enjoying breakfast together.

Ai Liyuan floated nearby like a phantom from another world. A voice that only he could hear sounded beside him. "Parental affection and the pure curiosity of childhood—at this age, people possess almost no complex thoughts or emotions."

Without question, a five-year-old child's thoughts during an ordinary life were too simple. Lacking complex and ever-changing emotions, he could provide very little information.

The next instant, the father holding the boy threw the child to the ground. Startled, the Little Boy immediately began to cry loudly, but his parents merely stood to one side with cold expressions.

Ai Liyuan watched it all with a frown. Even though he knew it was a false scene, human sympathy still made him feel distressed.

Ignoring the Little Boy, who was still crying on the ground, the parents suddenly began arguing loudly. They grabbed each other's hair and clothes and began fighting.

In the end, the father smashed the Little Boy's porcelain rice bowl against the mother's head. The lifeless woman collapsed limply to the ground.

The Little Boy stopped crying. He stared blankly at the blood flowing across the ground before him, then reached up helplessly to touch his tears.

A minute later, Li Heng's calm voice sounded. "Pain, sorrow, and other negative emotions can provide a large amount of information in an instant, but for a five-year-old child, they do not last."

The next moment, the blood flowed backward, and the woman rose from the ground, appearing unharmed before the boy.

The father smiled and explained to the boy that it had merely been a magic trick. Recovering from his shock, the boy smiled. It was better when his parents were still the way they had been.

As he sensed the neural signals of this brain, Li Heng found that whether positive or negative, intense emotions were caused by vigorous brain activity. All of them could provide a great deal of information.

Li Heng concluded, "Children lack sufficient knowledge and have not formed complete personalities. Even if their brains can become intensely active under momentary stimulation, their emotions remain brief and unsustainable."

Therefore, as future providers of information for the virtual world, brains needed memories sufficient to form complete personalities. Children were directly ruled out.

Maintaining the peaceful daily life of this brain, which possessed only the memories of a five-year-old child, and its false parents, Li Heng brought Ai Liyuan to where the second brain was located.

This was a fourteen-year-old boy. At the moment, he was sitting in a classroom, listening to the teacher's lecture in boredom.

Since he had become a researcher, he had naturally excelled in school from a young age. Middle school knowledge was simply far too easy for him.

No longer paying attention to knowledge he had already mastered, he secretly turned his head to one side and looked at the prettiest girl in the class.

It was a closed-management boarding school. These boys and girls had yet to enter society and still retained their initial innocence.

The girl had smooth black hair that set off her unadorned skin, making it shine like snow. Her large black eyes blinked slightly, and her long eyelashes trembled gently with the movement.

Sensing the boy's brain activity, Li Heng said, "After entering puberty, the restlessness of the body intertwines with desire for the opposite sex. Greater knowledge and a complete personality make a person's conscious activity more complex. This sustained, long-lasting emotional activity is far stronger than that of a child."

This time, Li Heng did not alter the surrounding actors to stimulate the boy. The information provided by a teenager's normal thought processes already far exceeded that available on the outside internet. The mental activity of a brain with teenage memories was enough to provide him with as much information as hundreds of people outside.

The scene changed, and Li Heng and the old academician arrived at a university. A young man was arguing with his classmates in a laboratory over certain details.

"Twenty-five years old. He got into his ideal university for a doctorate, married the girl he liked, and held strong, beautiful expectations for the future. Richer knowledge, more active thought and consciousness—perfect."

After merely sensing this brain's thought activity for a moment, Li Heng discovered that the amount of information provided by its conscious thought was several times greater than during adolescence.

In the next scene, a man in his thirties leaned back in the driver's seat, smoking with a frown as he let the autonomous car drive several extra kilometers before returning home.

"His feelings for his wife gradually faded. There were the educational problems of several children, as well as complex interpersonal relationships between colleagues and superiors. His passion for life gradually declined, and he almost no longer took the initiative to learn new knowledge. Although his conscious thoughts remained complex and variable, they lacked vitality, and intense emotional activity became increasingly rare."

Finally, a middle-aged man nearing fifty appeared. His hair had gone bald and his body had grown fat. By then, he no longer possessed vigorous passion for life. He merely pursued higher status and power. This was the researcher's final state.

"His thinking has become rigid. Research work has become a means of maintaining power and status. His feelings for his wife and children have almost vanished. He has simplified every relationship into one of interests, and lacks the ability to independently learn new knowledge."

This was Li Heng's assessment of the final person. These five brains represented different stages of the researcher's life, and Li Heng used them to determine how much memory future cloned brains would need.

However, all of this was merely a rough evaluation based on the original life trajectory.

Other than children, who possessed too little knowledge and lacked complete personalities, people of every other age could change under stimulation from their external environment and provide more information, whether positive or negative.

"Ai Liyuan, what do you think?"

Hearing Li Heng's question, the old academician, who had remained silent ever since the scene with the boy, woke from his thoughts. He was still recalling that first little courtyard, the make-believe game played by the false parents and child.

Rather than voice an opinion about this virtual world, he made a request. "I hope you can let that boy, who has only five years of memories, live along a normal path until the end of his life."

"Alright." Li Heng agreed very easily.

Ai Liyuan was slightly stunned. He had not expected Li Heng to agree to his request so readily.

Many times, he felt that this terrifying creature was a complicated contradiction. Conflicts between good and evil existed simultaneously within his vast mind, or perhaps his thoughts had already surpassed ordinary people's concepts of good and evil.

Li Heng did not care about Ai Liyuan's thoughts. He kicked the old academician out of this virtual world and quietly maintained everything here.

Scenes from five different places flickered continuously. Humans were limited by their bodies and could only see a very small part of the world at once.

It was only an illusory space the size of a small town. Buildings and residents changed into corresponding forms from memory according to the movements of the five people. Sometimes, they even brushed past a version of themselves from another age without realizing it.

By day, someone might be the teacher instructing the boy, then transform at night into the owner of the cake shop beneath the apartment building where the young man lived. Tens of thousands of actors, together with the changing scenes, formed a grand stage.

Within it, they would believe this was a complete and real world.