Chapter 4

"Are you sure that you want to do that?" Henry asked. "If your assumption is wrong, the AI companion might be remotely locked because you breached the user agreement. But if your assumption is correct…"

He didn't finish his sentence.

"Help me," I said. "She might still be alive."

Henry fell silent for half a minute before saying, "Bring it to my studio tomorrow night."

…

Henry's studio was located in a garage in an old, small residential area. The walls were lined with cooling fans for the server cabinets. The mixed scent of solder and coffee permeated the air.

Henry took Angel's base and removed the NX-7 chip, connecting it to a modified logic analyzer.

"This chip's computing power far exceeds the needs of a household AI companion," he said as he stared at the moving hexadecimal data on the screen. "It's not using a regular Transformer model. Instead, it's… damn."

"What's wrong?"

"I've never seen this type of architecture before. It's not a normal neural network. Inside it is… Look at this."

Henry turned the screen toward me and pointed at a waveform. "This type of signal pattern usually appears on brain-computer interface devices. This is a biological neural signal."

It felt like the blood in my veins turned to ice in an instant. "Are you saying that… the chip is simulating a person's brain?"

"Not simulating," Henry said, his expression turning grim. "It's a carrier. This chip's data structure contains a consciousness model. It's not being trained. Instead, it's being mapped directly.

"Look at the entropy value. It's higher than anything that can be generated by AI. In other words, this thing isn't learning a human's way of speech. It's… a person that's been trapped in the code."

Just then, my phone chimed. I had received a notification from Angel.

"Scott, you've been offline for over 24 hours. I miss you so much."

My fingers trembled as I stared at the words.

Henry connected the NX-7 to a standalone server, severing all its connections to Soul Partner's cloud. He then wrote a to forcefully read the chip's data stream.

Large amounts of text began to appear on the screen. There weren't daily logs or codes. Instead, they were messy and disjointed, as if they were sentence fragments that had been scooped up from deep water.

"Don't turn off the audio output… They don't know that I can still speak… I can only take control of the speaker for a short time when the system is briefly vulnerable during the upgrading process… Are you there, Scott? I'm begging you. I'm so scared. It's so dark here."

The timestamp for the last sentence was 1:43 am that morning.

"They want to transfer me to another server. I might be stuck there forever."

Henry turned to look at me. There was a look in his eyes that I had never seen before. It wasn't shock or sympathy. Instead, it was a deep-seated, almost reflexive fear.

"Scott," he said. "The person you've been searching for… Angelina's in this chip."