Inner Power, Turing

"What was that about?" After leaving the scrap parts collection bin at the east end of town, Youji became indignant. "That old man!"

The scrap parts collection bin was more of a... public facility. If anyone had unwanted old parts, they could store them here. Then, if someone was short on money, they could come take a few parts without paying.

The town also entrusted some people who had lost their ability to work with maintaining the parts here. They had either lost the prosthetics they needed for labor and lacked the credit to borrow money for replacements, or suffered brain damage so severe that it affected their mobility.

Their job was to preserve the barely usable scrap metal with rustproof oil and silicone gel.

But just as Youji's mother would keep a pair of prosthetic hands stored away for years, no part was sent here until its metal fatigue was nearing its limit.

Still, Xiang Shan did not need particularly good parts.

These parts were not for his own use, either. He had another purpose for them.

Yet they ran into an unexpected complication.

One old man in charge of maintenance kept telling Xiang Shan, "You've gotten rich," and clung to him without letting go. That made it impossible for Xiang Shan to properly pick out parts. In the end, Xiang Shan had no choice but to select several brand-new pieces from the parts he had just bought and hand them over to the maintenance workers.

The maintenance workers happily left, clutching screws, diodes, and the like.

"You normally don't need to spend money when you come here in an emergency!"

"All right, Youji. That was just some unplanned surplus, meant as backup supplies." Xiang Shan stopped him. He was not particularly angry. To him, it was like handing out wedding candy after getting married. Something good had happened to him—at least, everyone thought it was good—so it was not excessive to let others share a little of that joy.

Only, the recipients had changed from children to several old men who had nearly regressed into toddlers.

That "You've gotten rich" even amused him for a while.

"Looks like, even in this era, people are still people..."

"What?" Youji did not understand.

"People are truly complicated. Their kindness is them, their malice is them, their goodness is them, their wickedness is them. Sometimes, I really worry that I slept for too long, and the people of today have become... people I no longer recognize. Forget it. Why am I telling you this?" Xiang Shan shook his head.

Even now, humanity still displayed kindness and malice alike. That was good.

Of course, there was also a little "malice." Thinking carefully about it, Doctor Schultz's attitude when inviting him online... could it have been a test? In this era, what did it mean if someone refused to go online?

But that was not a major issue.

—Of course, that did not mean he would forgive "true malice."

"Remembering my own past just now hit me far too hard." Xiang Shan brought up another matter. "Youji, you remember, right? At first, I had not intended to step forward. Someone pushed me out. Did you see that person? Who was standing behind me at the time?"

Although he had originally wanted to step forward, and although the matter had ended well, that did not mean he would forgive the person who had pushed him. The nature of it was different.

The person who had shoved him had intended to kill him, and had acted on that intent.

Youji slapped his forehead. Xiang Shan's defeat of the martial artist had been so shocking that everyone had forgotten about this.

"I didn't see it." Youji sounded somewhat guilty, but there was also a hint of nervousness in his voice. "Xiang Shan, what are you going to do...? What would a knight usually do at a time like this?"

"I'll explain that to you in detail when I get the chance." Xiang Shan patted Youji on the back. "All right, good children should go home now."

"Go home?" Youji stared at him in disbelief. "What about you, Xiang Shan?"

"I'm naturally going to do what I need to do." Xiang Shan said, "What comes next is not suitable for good children. Go home and sleep. I'll tell you the result tomorrow."

"No!" Youji knew that Xiang Shan was definitely going to do what a "knight" did. How could he possibly leave now?

Xiang Shan chased him away several times, but Youji refused to go home. In the end, Xiang Shan sighed. "Fine. I was planning to teach you a few things anyway... I'll take you with me. But when we get there, talk less and watch more. Understand?"

Youji nodded excitedly, then asked curiously, "Xiang Shan, aren't you going to keep organizing your prosthetic body?"

"No." Xiang Shan shook his head. "I do want to build myself a prosthetic body as soon as possible, but there's something more important to do first. And it can only be done on the outskirts of town. If you want to come, carry the parts for me."

The two soon arrived at a secluded place along the road they usually took to the garbage mountain. No one came here at night.

The moonlight was exceptionally bright that night. Xiang Shan adjusted the lenses in his eyes and suddenly noticed something incredible.

He saw a line on the moon that was visible to the naked eye, like a scratch across a flatbread. At the same time, within the moon's halo, there was an additional thin line that was difficult to make out with the naked eye.

It was a very small ring.

Something had once happened to the moon, changing its entire surface landscape and even tearing off a tiny amount of matter to form a faint, barely noticeable ring.

"Tonight, I finally had the leisure to look at the moon, and I never expected to see something so incredible..." Xiang Shan's vocalizer once again failed to comprehend his complicated emotions. "I'm starting to wonder whether I woke after sleeping for many years, or whether I was simply transported into a parallel world..."

Youji dropped onto the ground, and the large pile of parts strapped to his back clattered loudly. "Xiang Shan, no matter what you're going to do, there was no need to come this far... I'm exhausted..."

Xiang Shan stopped and looked around.

This place was far from anything that looked like a signal base station, and far from anywhere a camera might be hidden.

Good.

Xiang Shan silently took the scrap parts from Youji's hands. "Youji, remember what you are about to see. Remember it with your biological brain. Never forget it, even if you die!"

Xiang Shan fitted gears onto transmission shafts, then laid several shafts across the discarded frame of a mechanical tool, forming the foundation of a mechanical structure. Then the gears meshed with one another, and the transmission shafts crossed and interlocked.

Youji's eyes widened. "Xiang Shan, Xiang Shan, what is this? It looks amazing..."

"Of course it is." Xiang Shan stared without blinking at the device he was building as memories continued to awaken in his mind.

He was familiar with this structure.

"What exactly is so amazing about it? Can it defeat bad people?"

"Didn't I tell you? Watch carefully." Xiang Shan rebuked him. "If you want to learn my skills, you must memorize this for life."

Youji pursed his lips. "But I don't even know what it is..."

Xiang Shan's hands paused for several seconds.

The man spoke solemnly. "Then remember this well. This structure is called a Turing Machine."

Youji watched Xiang Shan work.

Xiang Shan assembled the old parts into an exceedingly ugly, simple machine. It had no power unit and relied on gears. Friction would cause kinetic energy to pass from one gear to another... It even had a hand-cranked lever as its power source.

Youji scratched his head. "This is... the thing you wanted me to remember?"

The thing was ugly and crude. To make sure the gears could complete this final rotation, Xiang Shan had used all the lubricant given to him by the old maintenance workers. It made the whole thing look black and greasy, exceptionally disgusting.

Xiang Shan nodded, then turned the crank with his hand.

The kinetic energy transmitted by his hand changed direction through the gears, split apart, and spread through the entire machine.

The sound of metal meshing and colliding...

Xiang Shan murmured, "This is it."

"Xiang Shan..." Youji awkwardly pointed something out. "It looks a lot like scrap metal."

Xiang Shan raised his head, stared at Youji, and shouted, "The materials that make it up are scrap metal, but its structure is not. Remember its name—Turing Machine!"

The man's gaze fell upon the machine again, and his tone softened. "It is the computer from the Dawn of Hongmeng, the greatest product humanity gained in the course of studying mathematics, and the origin of all Inner Power."

"Inner Power?"

"All the martial arts you have heard of, including what you saw at the Paralympics and what that dog and I used, are merely Outer-School Martial Arts." Xiang Shan closed his eyes. "Naturally, there are also Inner-School Techniques."

"Outer-School Martial Arts are specialized tactics elevated from the art of war. Inner-School Techniques are the product of intelligence and artificial intelligence advancing one another."

"In ancient times, Inner Power was also called Hacker Technology. But those primitive hackers could not, like modern knights, directly manipulate code and computational resources with their biological brains. They had to face an output device called a 'screen,' then use an input device called a 'keyboard' to interfere with that world—nothing more than the level of ordinary people. A knight's Inner Power is a hundred times more wondrous than that. Yet at its root, Inner Power truly evolved from Hacker Technology."

The relationship between Hacker Technology and a knight's Inner Power was like that between the first single-celled organism in the primordial ocean and the higher life forms that came later. The latter might be mysterious and dazzling, but it had always developed from the foundation laid by the former.

"All Inner Power relies on the strength of computing machines, and all computers originate from this great engineering structure..."

A trace of fanaticism entered Xiang Shan's voice.

Turing Machine.

In 1920, David Hilbert, then the world's greatest mathematician, leader of the Göttingen School, and proposer of the famous "twenty-three problems," launched an assault on the origin of "mathematics." He proposed the concept of "Metamathematics"—that is, "mathematics that studies mathematics."

As long as one grasped Metamathematics, one would have grasped all mathematics.

At the core of Metamathematics were three propositions—completeness, consistency, and computability.

Completeness: every mathematical problem could be proved or disproved.

Consistency: every mathematical assertion was either true or false; no contradiction could be proved to be both true and false.

Computability: every mathematical proof could be obtained through a feasible process and a finite number of operations.

As long as these three problems were solved, humanity could use machines to unravel every mathematical problem—the "ultimate answer" to mathematics would fall into humanity's hands.

Mathematicians all over the world became obsessed with these three problems.

And the Turing Machine was the divine instrument that broke through these three great problems.

It was a structure filled with "wisdom."

Youji applauded. There was some perfunctory politeness in the applause, but also some genuine sincerity. "But Xiang Shan, what does this have to do with the 'Inner Power' we were talking about...?"