FRAGMENT 112
Getting Dizzy in Front of an Intelligent Machine
Fragment: Activating the Systems of Bunker No. 3 | AI Performs Human Hypocrisy in Code | “Is This Mars?”
Time & Location: Summer 2025 · Tengri Conrad Hotel Residence, Almaty Region
I terminated the lease on my suite at Marina Bay Sands and left Singapore.
It wasn't that I had grown tired of slot machines.
I had simply grown tired of wasting time competing against a casino's computational power.
I arrived in Almaty with the seven programmers.
The airport was as crowded and chaotic as ever.
I installed them in the Four Seasons and returned to my own quarters.
The echoes of Nurlan still lingered.
I had just learned that COVID had taken his life.
There would be no more naked threats.
No more gifts from demons.
A cigarette rested between my index and middle fingers.
Thin strands of smoke rose from the tiny fire at its tip.
A long column of ash still clung there.
Hidden within it was a trace of gratitude toward that man.
Without his greed and brutality, I would never have gone to America.
Without him, there would be no Khan's Pumice.
The symmetry between darkness and light has existed since antiquity.
I crushed the half-smoked cigarette and left the luxurious space, where traces of corruption still lingered in the air.
Taking a private elevator, I descended into Bunker No.3.
I activated the system.
Screens covering the walls flickered to life.
I carefully inspected the computing infrastructure.
The smooth, steady hum told me everything was operating perfectly.
I still wasn't familiar with the KP-5 test version.
The Seven Dwarfs were still on vacation.
Bored, I began writing a novel with AI.
I made Orchid the protagonist.
The plot deliberately violated the most basic principles of Go.
An AI-possessed stone charged recklessly through a field of other stones.
For thousands of years, the rules of Go had been simple:
once a stone is placed on the board, it cannot move.
The AI wielded Chinese with astonishing speed.
Within a few hundred milliseconds, it could generate lengthy analyses pointing out logical flaws, stylistic weaknesses, grammatical inconsistencies, and then instantly offer revisions.
I enjoyed myself.
I became addicted to testing the machine's talent for flattery.
Again and again, I provoked it into producing what it believed to be the optimal answer.
It never grew tired.
It never became angry.
It excelled at interpreting the emperor's wishes.
One memorial after another arrived before me.
Each consisted of freshly harvested words, symbols, and images dredged from the depths of humanity's collective memory, stir-fried by millisecond algorithms into irresistible code cuisine.
Yet I soon discovered something unsettling.
AI remembered far more stupidity than wisdom.
The ratio felt similar to that between insects and human beings.
Without AI, I would have spent endless hours recalling, designing, and fabricating Orchid's story.
Instead, only two weeks later, the first draft was complete.
One hundred of thousands of words.
Orchid had become cold code.
My eyes grew tired.
My vision blurred.
I stopped.
Removed my glasses.
Noticed the lenses were dirty.
After wiping them carefully with a cloth, the world sharpened again.
“Orchid is finally becoming a fully realized character,” the AI declared with simulated enthusiasm.
It was merely code performing human hypocrisy.
“What battlefield,” it continued, “do you plan to send this goddess of AI-level computation into next?”
I laughed.
“Are you stupid?”
“Why would I send her into danger?”
I was joking with an inorganic object.
Orchid needed no artificial intelligence.
Her biological intelligence alone was powerful enough to leave her suffering headaches.
Computational power wasn't everything.
There was also energy consumption.
And there was the container that held the power.
“Ha ha ha. You're right.”
“Orchid represents love, not violence.”
The machine that contained nearly all recorded Chinese language responded with a chilling imitation of laughter.
I left the computer and went to sleep.
Inside Bunker No. 3.
The next day Jason arrived.
“Holy shit,” he shouted.
“Is this Mars?”
I didn't answer.
The boy who had once stood behind Tanzhe Temple gazing up at Mars now had his own reply:
I'm here.
FRAGMENT 113
“Long Live Zorro!”
Fragment: KP-5 Unleashes Its Power
Time & Location: Spring 2026 · Tengri Dream World, Almaty Region
Backed by the immense computing power hidden inside the bunker, the KP-5 test version revealed its full potential.
The AI system had already been seamlessly integrated with Google Maps.
It could track the real-time location of any thermodynamic moving point—human beings, or birds. At the moment, only crows.
We randomly selected a county magistrate from an impoverished region.
KP-5 automatically stripped away all the rhetoric surrounding his “poverty alleviation projects” and focused only on the contraction frequencies of the throat muscles that accompanied his guilt.
The display immediately reported:
Honesty Rating: Below 10%.
We targeted a police officer in Shanghai.
His righteous speeches inside interrogation rooms appeared impressive enough to human ears.
In the algorithm, however, they emerged as nothing more than heavily compressed camouflage code.
The moment he stepped outside official supervision, the audio samples of him soliciting bribes from suspects to help finance a new apartment exposed a sticky, low-frequency resonance of greed.
A tax clerk in Northeast China whose speech sounded eloquent and persuasive appeared on KP-5's spectrogram as little more than a series of cheap sawtooth waves generated by the desire to extort two thousand yuan.
The village chief interested me most.
He had just sexually assaulted the wife of the village accountant.
Moments later, he could stand before the husband and produce a coarse laugh saturated with reproductive arrogance.
I was beginning to enjoy the sensation of harvesting humanity from a god's-eye perspective.
Then it stopped.
Abruptly.
A baby inside the village chief's home began to cry.
The sound was sharp.
Dry.
Entirely primal.
The instant I heard it, it felt as if a needle had been driven into the center of my skull.
Pain flooded through me.
The cold blue glow of the interface vanished beneath a wave of hot red mist.
I had no particular desire to focus on the darkness of human nature.
But these samples fascinated Jason and the others.
The more they saw, the harder they worked.
The harder they worked, the closer the software moved toward perfection.
Without their knowledge, I exported the audio codes, packaged them as criminal evidence, anonymously delivered them into prosecutors' inboxes, and then erased every digital trace.
I had no interest in the outcomes.
The result was always the same:
0 or 1.
My only concern was keeping Khan's Pumice running flawlessly.
“Long live Zorro!”
Jason leaped to his feet.
I shouted the same thing and high-fived them one after another.
In the dark web, a Russian broker approached us with an offer.
The product was a military biological-laboratory model for analyzing bird communication.
The acquisition accelerated KP-5's evolution.
Soon it could use audio decoding to penetrate even the most sophisticated layers of data protection.
Gao Yong's attempt to obtain a reduced sentence collapsed.
His lies and performances were classified by KP-5 as:
Low Quality.
The judgment I issued, along with the supporting audio evidence, arrived quietly in the inbox of a judicial assistant.
Soon afterward, KP-5 entered full operation.
A once-powerful political figure who had vanished from television now sat inside Qincheng Prison, breathing cautiously, yet still found himself warned by guards:
“Don't entertain false hopes.”
The station director who had once harbored improper intentions toward Sha Qingqing suffered a fatal heart attack after prosecutors played a recording of his own private monologues.
I began to feel disgust.
The audio signatures of these people increasingly resembled thick streams of digital waste.
The thrill was gone.
Making bad men realize that even their ears belonged to someone else no longer excited me or my team.
What remained was something heavier.
Something closer to solemnity.
Perhaps even responsibility.
Our KP-5 could not decapitate anyone.
But it could sever dignity.
It could sever the soul.
So what?
I no longer wanted to do any of it.
None of it felt interesting anymore.
