The Real World

"As for how they connect to the Metaverse..."

"That exposes a secret that sends chills down your spine."

Qin Yiguan stared at the incredibly complex bundles of wires inside the nutrient pod, his expression freezing.

The ends of those wires tapered down to the nanoscale, and every one of them pierced Ninth Brother's brain.

Humans...

Everything they saw.

Was data collected by the eyes, those "visual sensors."

Everything they heard.

Was data collected by the ears, those "auditory sensors."

Everything they touched.

Was data collected by "pressure sensors" such as their fingers.

And that vast, complex mass of data was ultimately integrated by a single human organ.

That organ was the brain.

It lay hidden inside a thick skull, unable to touch anything, like a well a hundred meters underground.

Yet everything people understood about the world came from what it presented to them.

When external light refracted into the eyes, the brain used the optic nerves to convert three spectral bands into bioelectric signals within its neural circuitry.

Then the brain told you.

-That thing is green.

-That thing is yellow.

But what, exactly, was green? What was yellow?

The spectrum of the real world contained far more than three bands.

All sounds traveled into the ears, vibrating the eardrums, before being converted once again into bioelectric currents the brain could recognize.

But the brain told you.

-That's a chicken clucking, that's rap, and that's not suitable for children.

Where did those standards come from?

Besides, who said a chicken's clucking was suitable for children?

When your fingers touched a stone, they felt the opposing force, which again became bioelectric currents within the brain's neural circuitry.

The brain gave you a sensation-that thing is hard as hell.

Everything you saw was an illusion defined by your brain, ultimately transformed into information within your understanding.

The richly textured world around you was, at its core, nothing but strings of bioelectric signals racing through your brain's neural circuitry.

Just as the ones and zeros in a computer could turn into a pretty girl dancing.

As for the truth.

Perhaps nothing in this world had any color at all.

Buildings, cars, wildflowers by the roadside, your girlfriend, black stockings-all of them might be nothing but a mosaic of pixels.

Balls might not be round, and Rubik's Cubes might not be square.

Perhaps everything was silent, and sound did not exist.

Or perhaps, when a pretty girl opened her mouth, there was no cutesy, affected voice at all, only horrifying screeches throughout the world.

Little-girl voices and sultry, mature voices might all be embellishments created by the brain to give you the urge to reproduce.

Perhaps this world had no smells at all, and food had no taste.

What you tasted was still only the result your brain gave you, a label used to distinguish shit from chocolate and keep its host from eating shit.

The results of this cerebral programming also had a "monitor," located within your mind.

It was called-consciousness.

So people actually lived within the worlds of their own consciousness.

They would never know what the world truly looked like.

It was a concept that grew more terrifying the longer you thought about it.

-The brain was deceiving humanity.

And the remarkable thing about the Metaverse was that it deceived the brain directly.

People were clearly lying inside nutrient pods.

Yet the Metaverse system could feed electrical signals directly into their brains, where those signals mingled with the neurons to create a fake "real world."

Inside the Metaverse.

Pleasure, excitement, delicious flavors, enticing scents, exhaustion, sleepiness... and intimacy between men and women. Every last thing could be simulated.

And Gemini had mastered the rules behind it all.

Suppose.

You were injured inside the Metaverse.

Your arm was severed, your muscles torn, your bones broken, your blood spraying.

The Metaverse could still deliver sensory data for laceration, blood loss, pain, and everything else with one-to-one fidelity.

Through physical sensation alone, humans could not tell whether this was a real body or an electronic one.

That was the Metaverse.

A vast world of code, combined with the automatic programming of human consciousness.

As long as the virtual data was precise enough, there was no difference between living in reality and living in the Metaverse.

Qin Yiguan pulled himself out of his thoughts.

"The essence of the Metaverse..."

"Is human consciousness opening itself to a world of code without reservation."

"Scientists have argued that human consciousness can, to a certain extent, influence the rules within the Metaverse in return."

"That matches the rumors. The farther you go in the Metaverse, the more logic gets turned on its head."

"Like that old saying-there is no God in no-man's-land, either."

"Then all these mental illnesses of mine..."

"Could they... produce different results in certain parts of the Metaverse?"

The young man gave a bitter smile. "But there's no way to test any of it. The authorities refuse to give me a nutrient pod. My campaign ended before it even began."

As for the Metaverse authorities.

They were actually the governments of various countries, serving as a kind of "agent." They had no authority to interfere with the Metaverse and were, at most, gatekeepers.

They handled many peripheral matters in the real world, such as reviewing applications for nutrient pods and distributing them.

Why didn't the Gemini Group handle those matters itself?

Because Gemini was too mysterious.

Its mystery had already reached the absolute extreme.

Because it... was no longer in this world.

To explain all this, one had to start with the mysterious "Gemini Superbrain."

The Metaverse's superbrain had initially been a physical matrix computer.

Then its core region took on a quantum form, before spreading across the top floor of Gemini Tower as dispersed particles covering 3,600 square meters.

One day twelve years ago, it finally reached some unknown sequence and evolved into the legendary superintelligence.

The so-called "main body of the superbrain" became an enormous green electron cloud that slowly rose into the sky, drifting beyond the atmosphere in a form no one could comprehend.

And now, human eyes could no longer see even that green electron cloud.

Earth's scientists were horrified. They ultimately reached a conclusion-in that instant, Gemini's core artificial intelligence had crossed some unimaginable technological gulf.

And in the years to come.

It would continue learning and continue improving.

The artificial intelligence would only grow smarter.

It would keep evolving hundreds of millions of times per second.

Its algorithms would draw infinitely closer to "ultimate correctness."

Of course.

Although the Gemini Superbrain had "ascended."

The Metaverse under its control remained.

Operating autonomously, it continued to serve humanity, its contents and the territories it generated expanding ever farther, almost without end.

By now.

The Metaverse's area had already reached forty-eight million times that of reality.

At the instant the Metaverse ascended, the system left behind a thought-provoking message.

"Consciousness is an existence of a higher dimension. Its potential far exceeds that of humanity's frail carbon-based bodies."

"Eight billion humans, welcome a brand-new world, and brand-new opportunities."