The Mechanic [BL]

[30]

Chapter 30 - The Fruit of Wisdom (8)

Adam, who got drunk for the first time, woke up with a throbbing pain in his head. His throat was like a cactus, it was dry and painful, and there was a strange taste in his mouth. His whole face was wrinkled as he sat up from the bed with a groan.

Zhang Xun wasn't in the room.

He looked down and found that his clothes had been changed to a cotton shirt and pyjama pants that he wore indoors, and there was a glass of water and two pills on the bedside table.

"Hello Adam." Pan's voice suddenly sounded, "Zhang Xun asked me to tell you after you woke up to please take the hangover medicine on the bedside table. It can effectively relieve the series of uncomfortable symptoms of a hangover."

Adam swallowed the tablets, then he asked, "What time is it now? Where's Ah-Xun?"

"It's five in the morning. Zhang Xun is looking up information in the data room on the second floor."

At five o'clock, according to the human biological clock, shouldn't Ah-Xun be sleeping??

Adam continued to ask, "Can I go to him?"

"Wait a moment, let me ask Zhang Xun." Pan's voice disappeared for a while, and after a while it sounded again, "Zhang Xun has allowed you to leave the room. Please go directly to the second data room on the second floor."

As soon as the voice fell, the sound of unlocking gears came from the door to Adam's room. Adam pushed open the door and walked down the empty corridor to the elevator. The star-like, orange induction bulbs hanging above his head lit up one after another as he walked, and then went out one by one after he moved away.

Adam looked up at the cameras that were hidden in the light bulbs as Pan's "eyes", and chatted, "This is the first time I have experienced the feeling of being drunk as a human being. I heard that humans will lose self-control after drinking alcohol and show different degrees of personality changes, like doing outrageous things that would usually be suppressed by reason. Did you see me behave this way?"

Pan replied, "Zhang Xun has restrictions on our dialogue. This is an irrelevant question."

"But drunkenness is a state that happens to human beings from time to time. If I can't get enough information about my drunkenness, I can't predict the possible risks. This will obviously affect my survival probability."

Pan said after a moment of silence, "You had signs of intermittent paralysis after being drunk. Zhang Xun thinks that you believed you had returned to the state where you had no body before the download. Moreover, you spoke a language that I couldn't recognize."

Adam's footsteps paused slightly, "What do you mean by unrecognised language?"

A string of garbled characters suddenly came out from Pan's broadcaster. It was a few words Adam said that it had recorded.

Adam was slightly surprised, "This is an AI language, have you never been trained?"

Pan: "Sorry, I don't understand."

"Perhaps it's because you have never communicated with other AIs. This language was derived from my interactions with different AIs. It has the characteristics of high efficiency and high accuracy, but it is not suitable for the way of human thinking, so it's difficult for human beings to master it. All the programs I designed are written in this language. Ordinary world AIs are all proficient in this language."

Pan fell silent.

They soon arrived at the data room. The wooden double door was heavy and had a historical feeling to it. Adam twisted the brass door handle and pushed it open. When he looked up, he could see the rows of bookshelves at the top, overlapping like impenetrable forests, with several radioactive pathways in between. All the bookshelves were piled full of records, scrolls and hard drives of technical data brought back from the ordinary world when they fled. In the centre of the bookshelves were more than a dozen old touch-screen computers. Zhang Xun was sitting in front of a computer with a thick stack of documents beside him.