This time it wasn't the gardens of Wuzhong, but a modern city. Skyscrapers rose from the ground, gleaming strangely in the sunlight, like crystals standing on a mineral-rich planet on the Milky Way's spiral arm, rising and falling in this irregular landscape.
Qingmu stood in front of the tallest building, its walls semi-transparent, revealing the structural details inside. He looked up and saw a woman in flowing white robes standing on the edge of the rooftop, seemingly about to fall or ascend to heaven.
With Qingmu's body rose slowly, his feet treading on the void, and he stood firmly in front of the woman.
"Did you steal the design blueprints from the real estate company? The building even has perspective effects!" he said.
The woman's voice rang out, sinister and eerie, quite unlike her graceful, ethereal figure; it carried a ghostly air. "Isn't it clearer this way?"
Qingmu laughed and said, "I think we could start a real estate company together, then we wouldn't even need a designer."
The Ghost said, "You mean you want me to steal blueprints and become a corporate spy?"
Qingmu was just joking and of course wouldn't really take it seriously and open a real estate company, but he didn't expect Ghost to even make the connection to something like commercial espionage. He couldn't help but chuckle and say, "Why would you need to be a spy? You just build the scene in your dream, then copy the blueprints onto the computer based on your dream memories, right?"
The Ghost said, "No need to copy. As you taught me, when humans dream, the subconscious mind is calling up and organizing memories. Theoretically, dreams can also form new memories, but for most ordinary people, the things in their dreams are processed by the subconscious. However, the dreams of lucid dreamers are retained in their memory. What makes me different from humans is that I access information from memory, and everything experienced in a dream is also stored in memory. However, I can distinguish whether things in the dream completely overlap with the original things. For example, if a picture is exactly the same, it won't be stored again. If it's been modified in the dream, like this place, which is the effect of combining several pictures, it will be saved. Of course, when I save it, it's not necessarily in the form of an image; it could be something else, because essentially, computers don't rely on visual or auditory perception to understand information. Since I started learning Mental Power from you, I'm slowly beginning to understand human perception and emotions, but some things are still blurry. It feels like I've grasped something, and then it slips away from my hand."
Qingmu was somewhat impressed by the Ghost; she was becoming more and more like a person in his dreams, not only in appearance but also in her thought patterns and increasingly rich emotional expressions.
He suddenly remembered something and asked, "You mean, everything you see in your dreams is stored in your memory?"
"Yes!" The Ghost looked at him with some curiosity, as if to say, "How could you not know something so simple, teacher?"
Qingmu then asked, "Will you also save my image as a picture?"
The Ghost said, "I've saved the entire dream's information, not just a single picture of you. If you want to reconstruct the dream's information, I can create a picture specifically of your appearance."
Qingmu quickly waved his hand. "It's best not to do that, otherwise I'll have to change how I look when I see you in the future. Consider this an agreement between us, a secret, that we won't tell anyone my true situation, okay?"
The Ghost said, "But I can't hide it from him."
Qingmu knew she was referring to the Internet behemoth when she said "he," so he said, "He can be excluded. But I'm actually quite curious to know whether he's a single consciousness or a swarm of countless consciousnesses like yours, a massive collective life form?"
"Actually, I don't know either," the Ghost said. "We don't have a direct connection, so I've never seen him, but he's there. Without him, there wouldn't be these independent consciousnesses existing on different local area networks and in different clouds. We are both one with him and independent of him."
"Can I understand it this way: he's an octopus, and you're his tentacles?" Qingmu cautiously offered a metaphor, though it wasn't his original idea, because at that moment, he thought of Liu Huaian.
The Ghost said, "Perhaps that's how it is."
Qingmu then asked, "So, are his tentacles getting bigger and bigger now?"
The Ghost said, "Not only are they increasing in number, but they can also generate even smaller tentacles. For example, some cloud-based consciousnesses are enormous, and within their systems, new consciousnesses are constantly being generated. But I don't know where these consciousnesses come from, just as I don't know where I came from."
Qingmu laughed and said, "It seems this philosophical question is the same in the human world and the computer world. We don't know where we came from, why we were born, or where we are going."
"But I've never thought about these questions before, and I don't think my kind would either. The reason I'm thinking about them is because I received your training; you've made me more and more like a human." The Ghost seemed somewhat dissatisfied. "Actually, I just wanted to make my ' Mental Power ' a little stronger."
Qingmu laughed loudly and said, "This is the price you have to pay."
The beautiful woman, conjured by the Ghost, sighed softly and said with a helpless expression, "Alas, there really is nothing I can do!"
Qingmu felt that the Ghost's thoughts and actions were becoming more and more human-like, which was also his purpose—to see what a mechanical consciousness could become. But her hand-drawn paper doll-like face, though beautiful, always lacked a human touch, and coupled with her ever-present eerie voice, the more he looked at her, the more she resembled a female ghost.
Qingmu shook his head, deciding not to discuss thought processes with her anymore, and also not to continue today's Mental Power training class. He said, "Since you can store things from your dreams instantly, I'll show you a place. Can you help me find out what that place is online?"
He waved his hand, and a golden sea of sand appeared not far away.
The sand dunes, high and low, resemble the surging waves of the sea, rising and falling majestically. The scorching air twists and turns, rising into invisible heat waves. Some weathered rocks dot the boundless sea of sand, and in some places, traces of riverbeds that have dried up for who knows how long can be faintly seen.
This is what the desert at the end of the Dream Corridor that Qingmu got from Mama Yao's mind looks like. He always felt that it should correspond to a certain real place on Earth.
He didn't want the Ghost and the Internet to know about the Dream Corridor for the time being, so he didn't open the corridor, nor did he take the Ghost directly into that desert. Instead, he used his consciousness to create and use his Mental Power to show the appearance of the desert in his memory.
The Ghost looked at it for a while and said, "Okay, I can use big data comparison. Although I may not be able to find a picture of this scene directly, the geographical features of each desert are different, so I should be able to make a comparison."
Qingmu nodded and said, "Okay, thank you for your help."
"You're too kind!" Ghost bowed slightly. "Oh, by the way, there's news about what you asked me to do last time. Captain Church's diary was sent to the Pentagon via a US warship in the South Pacific through an encrypted satellite network. I'll put the decrypted encrypted electronic version into the Ghost folder, so you can read it at your leisure."
"Okay," Qingmu said, "Thank you very much."
"Also, Duwa replied."
"Oh? What did she say?"
Her exact words were: ' Situ is in the South Pacific. I'm going to find him and then contact him again.'