The woman they connected with was Diana, an engineer at YOU, the company that developed and made the Button. She took them to the basement of an old apartment on the outer edge of Kelowna. There are obviously some marginalized people living here, the corridors are filled with all kinds of choking smells, and there are even layers of graffiti that have not been cleaned up on the walls.
Using her fingerprints, she opened a rusted iron door and led them into a two-bedroom apartment. The furniture is shabby, the white paint on the walls is mottled and moldy, the carpet is covered in water stains, and there are even mushrooms growing on the edges.
"This is the only safe house we have here. You will be there. A cargo aircraft will pass by at three o'clock at night, and then I will arrange for you to hide in the warehouse."
As she spoke, she rummaged through the refrigerator and found a few boxes of frozen bento boxes, as well as a few bottles of beer. She opened one of the bottles and took a few sips, letting out a sigh of relief.
Enoch began to dutifully unpack the bento boxes one by one and put them in the heating box to get them cooked. Diego rushed directly to the beers, and James entered each room to check, looked out the window, and looked for alternate escape routes.
Zhang Xun sat down on the slightly collapsed printed sofa, slightly restrained. Diana looked at him with interest, "I heard you're an engineer in Paradise Lost?"
Zhang Xun nodded. Talking to women always made him nervous, "Yeah... but we're called mechanics."
"I heard that most of the people in Paradise Lost don't even have a computer? Is that true?"
"It used to be." Zhang Xun sighed, "Now the situation is... complicated."
"Is it because of the Eden North America server you stole? I heard that you turned it into a human?" Diana asked excitedly, leaning forward and looking at him intently, "Have you ever seen it turned into a human?" Human Eden?"
Enoch, who was busy in the kitchen, glanced casually.
Zhang Xun said, "I have seen it."
"What is he like? Is he any different from ordinary humans?"
Zhang Xun thought for a while and said, "In the beginning, he was very unaccustomed to the human body and needed someone to teach him how to walk, how to eat, and even how to use the bathroom... It can be seen that he really wanted to return to his original state without a body. Zhang Xun recalled the days when he first got along with Adam, and the corners of his mouth gradually opened, revealing a smile.
Diana laughed heartily, "Teach God how to go to the toilet? Hahahaha, why haven't I encountered such a good job? You know so much, you are the one in charge of training him, right?"
Zhang Xun hesitated for a moment and said, "I did have a lot of contact with him."
"Then why did you run out? Is it because of Human Eden?"
"Hey, why are you asking so much?" Diego interjected.
Diana shrugged, realizing she was asking the wrong question, "I'm just curious too."
Diego turned from the high chair and looked at her with interest, "I'm also curious, you're an engineer at YOU, with such a high salary, why do you want to do this kind of gray area business?"
Diana took a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and took one out of her mouth. Zhang Xun noticed that she was smoking the most primitive cigarettes, not the electronic cigarettes that most people in the ordinary world currently smoke. The moment she talked about this topic, the brisk smile on her face faded a lot, "Because I want to leave a way out for myself."
James finished checking all the rooms at this time, sat down beside Zhang Xun, and asked, "Back way? What back way?"
"People in the normal world are too dependent on Button now. You know, when we designed Button, we got a lot of human behavior data analysis from Eden. That data tells us what kind of design makes people more dependent on us product, and even how to force everyone to use our product step by step. I don't know how they got that data from Eden, but... Over the years, I've seen people rely more and more on Button, less and less Interacting with the real world, even if the Button fails, they don't even remember the way home."
Zhang Xun secretly said, as he guessed, Button is something that Eden launched behind the scenes.
"Eden gave you data and analysis. In exchange, did it offer to let your company feed back what data?" Zhang Xun asked.
"My authority is not high enough, but I can almost be sure that all people's behaviors when using Button, including the searched keywords, the places and specific times they have been to each day, the advertisements they have seen, the music they have listened to... are all in Real-time feedback to Eden. For those who have connected chords, even their thoughts are being transmitted in real-time, they just don't know it. Now even Eden doesn't use those ubiquitous cameras to monitor ordinary the behavior of every person in the world."
Diana said, exhaling a long breath of smoke, "But I noticed that the Button you bought was specially processed on the black market. The version is relatively old, but the interaction system with Eden and YOU has been blocked. Can you It's not easy to get a Button like this, and in recent years most people who can handle Buttons have been banned."
Diego said proudly, "Of course this kind of thing can't be taken lightly. I have my special informant."
"But you have to be careful. If you are found to be using Buttons you bought on the black market, you will be caught."
At this time, Enoch brought the hot lunches one by one and distributed them to the four. Zhang Xun looked at the artificial beef with an overly regular shape, carefully cut a small piece with a fork and put it in his mouth, and found that the taste was actually exactly the same as beef. Unlike the synthetic beef in Paradise Lost, it has a weird soy taste.
After dinner, the three briefly slept for a few hours. At about 2:30 in the middle of the night, Diana woke them up, stuffed each of them with a bag of food and water, and led them out through the back door of the apartment. .
In the back alley there is a long bar-shaped "truck" hovering about thirty centimeters above the ground. The driver was a strong-looking woman of about forty, who, unless you looked closely, thought she was a man. She opened the hatch, drove the three men and a robot to the innermost part of the warehouse like a sheep, blocked them with several large boxes, and said angrily, "If you want to go to the toilet, there are empty bottles over there, if the car stops , you'd better not even breathe for me."
Before the three could agree, she locked the door with a bang.
In an instant, the thick darkness engulfed the four of them, and they could only hear the sound of the aircraft starting.
A ray of light lit up, but Enoch's palm exuded a yellowish ray of light, like a shrouded candle that pushed the darkness a few feet away, illuminating his artificially beautiful face.
"Looks like I'm going to be stuck here for hours," Diego said.
A few hours later, Zhang Xun realized that Diego's "boring" was not a joke. The air in the airtight compartment is getting thinner and thinner, and the chest cavity is like a big stone being pressed. Every time I take a breath, I feel that the oxygen I find is pitiful. He was sweating and his hoodie was soaking through. James looked at him worriedly and pressed his shoulder. "How are you?"
Zhang Xun forced himself to remain calm, "I'm fine."
As soon as he finished speaking, the water bottle whose cap was unscrewed suddenly came to Zhang Xun's mouth. Zhang Xun took the water bottle from the overzealous Enoch a little embarrassedly, and poured half of the bottle down his throat, feeling a little better.
Enoch in turn handed the water bottle to James and Diego. Diego said teasingly, "Why don't you help open the bottle cap when you get here?"
Enoch looked innocent, "I think you have enough physical strength to open the bottle cap yourself."
"Hahahaha, Zhang Xun, this little robot thinks you don't even have the strength to open the bottle cap?"
Zhang Xun was too lazy to break up with Diego, and breathing was his top priority now.
James stared suspiciously at Enoch.
The car rides smoothly in the air, occasionally encountering slight bumps in the airflow. But suddenly, with a sudden stop, the three humans lost their balance, staggered, and hurriedly stabilized their bodies.
problem occurs.
James immediately put his ear to the carriage and listened to the movement outside. Zhang Xun and Diego did not dare to come out, and Enoch also turned off the lights in his hands.
There were loud noises from outside the carriage, some stiff, and the unique voice of the mechanical police came, "Please open the carriage and cooperate with customs for inspection."
Zhang Xun felt goose bumps all over his body, and a voice in his heart said: It's over.
They should be crossing the border between Canada and the United States now. Once caught, they will be imprisoned by the United States immediately, or they may be sent directly to Eden.
And James has quietly removed his laser gun from his backpack and put on night vision goggles. In the darkness, his eyes narrowed like falcons, staring at the door of the freight car, raising the gun with steady hands.
The voice of the truck driver negotiating with the mechanical police came from outside the door, and after a while, another voice joined in, with an obvious American accent, probably one of the few human police officers on the border, "She has a special certificate, which is specially responsible for the government. Those who transport goods have immunity. Release."
When the car started up again, the three almost collapsed to the ground. I originally thought that there was going to be a man-machine battle, but I didn't expect Lucille's informants to have two brushes.
The van dropped them in Washington state and instead stuffed them into another cargo aircraft. After several turns in the middle, they were driven from one car to another like a livestock.
Seeing that they are slowly approaching the southern border of the United States, they are hiding in a carriage full of wool, trying to sleep in a dream so that they don't have to continue to suffer from heat and dehydration.
But suddenly, the body vibrated violently.
James woke up first. Because he could hear gunshots outside the car.
"Wake up! It seems something happened!" James shook Diego awake. Zhang Xun immediately hid behind a pile of wool and asked in a panic, "Police?"
Enoch, who had been listening carefully to the voices outside, said, "It doesn't seem to be. We are in Texas now, and the news said that there have been a lot of mobs here recently, probably because of robbery."
Hearing the robot say terrifying words in a very ordinary tone, Zhang Xun's heart grew even more terrified.
Suddenly, without warning, the lock on the door of the car was melted by a laser, and the door was opened. Several men in black protective suits and hideous skeleton masks on their faces held guns and roared in rude, modified voices, "The people inside, put down their weapons, and give me..."
Before he could finish speaking, a beam of light silently shot from James' muzzle, passing precisely between the brows of the mob. Followed by the second and third. James fired his gun without even a gap, as if he didn't need to aim at all. In an instant, the four mob who had been surrounding the door fell silently one after another.
At the same time, Enoch suddenly rushed to the door. The moment when the other mob who saw his companion fell to the ground surrounded him, he saw Enoch shoot out like a bullet, smashing the three mob away at once. James and Diego followed, firing guns at the masked mob that surrounded them.
The gangsters who are used to robbing the freight driver have no psychological preparation for suddenly encountering sharpshooters and fighting masters, plus an unexpectedly aggressive service robot that is not afraid of being shot by bullets. . Zhang Xun used the cover of piles of wool to move to the door of the carriage to look out, but saw three or four similarly dressed mobs riding a motorcycle away from the dust. There were several corpses whose heads were shot by James on the ground. Diego and Enoch knocked out.
James lowered his head to lift the mask of a mob and found that it turned out to be a man. After that, a few more masks were lifted, both male and female, but the number of males was considerable.
The poor truck driver has been killed by the mob, and the car's battery has been blown up, making it impossible to continue flying. Zhang Xun came out of the carriage and looked around, all he saw was the endless cracked wasteland and the vast mountains in the distance.
Diego spit on the ground, "What the hell is this place!"
The author has something to say: Thanks to the little angels who threw mines~~: Xia Ran, Xia Ran, Qingshanchuan around 1;
Thanks to the little angels who irrigated the nutrient solution~~: Lin Mumu 10 bottles; Rong Yu 1 bottle