Trojan Horse

He had no idea how long he had been unconscious before a loud bang from the neighboring dorm suddenly jolted him awake.

Still groggy, Sun Cheng instinctively groped around beside him for a moment before grabbing something cold and bringing it up in front of his face.

Struggling to open his bleary eyes, he looked at his phone. "8:23 a.m., April 14... Am I late?"

Rubbing his aching head, Sun Cheng tossed the phone aside and closed his eyes again.

"...I am Frenzy... a mechanical life-form from Cybertron..."

After dwelling on the chaotic fragments of memory still lingering in his mind, Sun Cheng stretched lazily and muttered, "...So it was just a dream..."

That made sense!

Only in a dream could something so absurd happen!

Yet it had been such a strange and unbelievable dream!

Even after waking up, Sun Cheng had not forgotten the dream. He still clearly remembered becoming "Frenzy," a mechanical spy from an extraterrestrial mechanical civilization—Cybertron.

Together with his partner—Barricade—he had infiltrated a research institution in the United States and used one of its computers as a port to hack into that world's internet.

"What an absurd dream. How could a person turn into a mechanical warrior?"

With a self-mocking smile, Sun Cheng got out of bed. He pulled the last cigarette from the flattened pack on one corner of his computer desk and put it in his mouth. Just as he found his lighter and was about to light it, waves of playful noise drew him to the window. Looking down through the balcony at the young university students radiating boundless youthful energy beneath the bright morning sun, a trace of envy and regret flashed through his eyes.

If only everything could start over!

That was a thought that had often lingered in Sun Cheng's mind over the past half month.

Once, he too had enjoyed such vibrant days. He had had countless friends who could stay up all night talking about dreams, games, or gossip with him.

Unfortunately, now they were all gone!

After lighting his cigarette and taking a mechanical puff, Sun Cheng turned around sadly and quietly looked at the dorm room that now had only him left in it. After a long while, he let out a soft sigh through the smoke.

"Serves me right!"

After cursing himself under his breath, Sun Cheng decided that since he was already late, he might as well not go. Once he had leisurely finished his cigarette, he noticed the unpleasant smell on himself from drinking too much the previous night and collapsing straight into bed. He took his washbasin across the hall to shower, washing up along the way before changing into a fresh set of clothes.

When he returned to the room, he first took out a packet of instant noodles, tore it open, put it in his lunchbox, and poured hot tea over it to soak. Only then did he carry it over to his computer desk.

The computer desk before him was a mess. Three empty bottles of cheap liquor still carried the lingering smell of alcohol. Beside them sat a plate of cold cuts and another plate with only a few strands of hot-and-sour shredded potatoes left. Everything gave off an air of poverty that made Sun Cheng's heart grow heavy again.

With a sigh, he set down the instant noodle container, bent over to pick up the trash bin, and dumped all the garbage from the desk into it.

After that, he found a rag and wiped the desktop clean before sitting down in front of the computer and turning it on.

"Hm? It froze again?"

Seeing that his IBM laptop, which he had bought less than a year ago, had frozen during startup, Sun Cheng frowned slightly.

Come to think of it, this laptop had been acting up a lot lately. It frequently froze for no reason, leaving him completely baffled.

When he took it to the repair shop, the technicians tested it right in front of him for most of the day but still could not find anything wrong.

Even after reinstalling the system, it still froze whenever it felt like it, giving him a terrible headache.

When a computer frequently froze, the causes were usually limited to a few possibilities: excessive dust, hardware failure, software incompatibility, or system issues.

The first two—hardware failure and excessive dust—could be ruled out. As a fourth-year microelectronics student at South Capital University of Technology, Sun Cheng had a habit of regularly taking apart his laptop to clean and inspect its hardware. His last inspection had only been a few days ago.

As for software incompatibility, Sun Cheng did not have many programs installed on his computer, and he had tested them all. There was no compatibility issue at all.

That left only one possibility: a system problem.

On second thought, it was hard to say whether the system was truly at fault.

Although most computers in the country had already upgraded their operating systems to Win7, Win8, or even Win10, quite a few people, like Sun Cheng, still used XP, a system long eliminated by the market.

Like most people, he had never chosen to upgrade because he had used XP ever since he first touched a computer. After getting used to it, although he had tried Win7 a few times and found it not too difficult to use, it still felt somewhat awkward, so he had never switched.

"Like a child without a mother... I'll check the forums later and see if any new patches are out..."

Sun Cheng shut down the laptop first, then turned it back on a few minutes later. The moment he looked at the screen, his face went blank.

"Huh? How can I understand all these English characters?"

His discovery truly stunned him!

Sun Cheng knew his own English level better than anyone. Although he had passed Level 1 last year and obtained the National Professional English Level 1 Certificate, barely half a year had passed since the exam, and he had already returned most of the English words he had learned to his teachers.

What was more, not only could he understand the English now, he even grasped the startup principles of the program perfectly. Sun Cheng knew better than anyone that his actual computer skills were only slightly better than those of a complete beginner.

"This..."

Unable to believe it, he rubbed his eyes. When he looked again and found that nothing had changed, Sun Cheng's heart stirred with the urge to test it. He quickly pressed F8 and entered Safe Mode.

The XP system installed on his computer was an old version collected by a former roommate. Compared with the fully localized Chinese systems now widely used in the country, many parts of it were still in English.

Under normal circumstances, even if Sun Cheng entered Safe Mode with its fully English instructions, he would not know how to proceed.

But now, something about his condition was strange.

After entering Safe Mode, he only needed one glance to understand the meaning and function of every line of pure English options. All kinds of instructions and explanations continuously surfaced in his mind.

For a moment, it was as if he had become a different person. Both hands rapidly tapped away at the keyboard without stopping, while he could even spare attention to control the mouse and make selections. The operating system that had once seemed so profound and incomprehensible to him now seemed completely open before him. Every string of characters, every line of code, no longer held any secrets.

After rattling away at the keyboard for a while, Sun Cheng finally took control of the system and initiated a comprehensive deep scan of both its software and hardware.

Watching the self-diagnostic program start up, he finally came back to his senses. He sat before the computer with an incredulous look on his face, staring wide-eyed at his hands, then at the screen, his eyes filled with shock.

"Was... was that really me?"

Everything that had just happened to him had been far too strange!

If Sun Cheng could understand the English characters in those system programs, he could barely explain it by saying he had not completely forgotten all the English he had learned. But how was he supposed to explain those computer skills?

In that instant, it was as though some super-consciousness had appeared in his mind. Even the XP system, which not even the country's top hackers would dare claim to have fully mastered, held no secrets whatsoever before that consciousness. It could even be described as childish and ridiculous.

Sun Cheng knew better than anyone what his computer skills had been like. As a microelectronics major, he was far better than the average person, but he was no professional.

Not to mention, he did not believe that anywhere in the world there was a computer expert who could spend merely one or two minutes tinkering in Safe Mode and come up with dozens of ways to improve the XP system. It was simply unbelievable.

Just as he was racking his brains over what had happened to him, the laptop before him suddenly let out a ding. He glanced at it and could not help frowning.

The XP system had completed its deep scan, yet still found nothing abnormal.

Unwilling to give up, he had no choice but to temporarily set aside the question of what exactly had happened to him. His fingers clattered across the keyboard again as he pulled up the abnormal crash logs hidden among the system files. After looking through them for a while, Sun Cheng's expression darkened. "There's an inaccessible folder in the C drive's system files? And every time the computer crashed, it was when it connected to the internet and scanned the files on my computer?"

After all that fuss, it turned out his computer had been infected with a virus.

Still, he had finally figured out why his laptop had been crashing so frequently lately.

Just as he was about to delete the virus file in Safe Mode, Sun Cheng suddenly remembered his inexplicably improved computer skills. He could not help becoming interested in the virus that had somehow found its way onto his computer.

After noting down the name of the folder containing the virus, he selected normal startup directly from Safe Mode.

Once the computer had booted up, Sun Cheng immediately opened the C drive and found the suspicious folder hidden amid the many system files. When he tried opening it, access was indeed denied.

If this had been a day earlier, he truly would have had no way to deal with this thing.

But now, Sun Cheng merely frowned slightly.

Sure enough, it had not been his imagination. The moment he realized that the suspicious folder could not be accessed, multiple solutions inexplicably surfaced in his mind. With his basic computer knowledge, a quick look was enough for him to determine that these methods were indeed feasible.

He chose the simplest option. First, he switched out and elevated his computer permissions to the highest level, then tried accessing the folder again. This time, as expected, there were no issues at all, and it opened easily.

"? It's actually a Trojan..."

After examining the source code, Sun Cheng's brow furrowed even tighter. "The installation date is February 24th. Wasn't that the day I reinstalled my system?"

He carefully reviewed the source code again, and before long, his face had turned utterly grim.

"There's no mistake. The Trojan was installed on my computer along with this system... Could it be..."

He suddenly bent down and rummaged through a drawer beneath the computer desk.

After quite a while, he finally pulled out an old 2GB USB drive and held it before him, his gaze drifting.

"I hope... it isn't what I think it is."

Muttering softly, Sun Cheng looked terribly grim. Having completely lost his appetite, he shut down the computer before him, slipped the USB drive into his pocket, pulled his phone out from the bed, grabbed his keys, and hurried out the door.