Love, death, and false man

Chapter 16.16. Fatal Functions
Echoes, responses, electronic targets, Doppler radar, shouts from hundreds of sentries, commands transmitted through hundreds of microphones.

Tied to the subway, on an endless journey fueled by amphetamines, until the sound of wheels and children awakens them, trembling, lips cracked, their brilliance worn away in the dimly lit zoo, their minds haggard and desolate, hysterical, naked, their spirits numbed, their eyes deeply mired in a deadly dose.

The array, linked list, queue instruction code cannot understand the signal, compiling, deciphering, copying, wailing, life and source files and executable programs and documents and reports and angry confrontation and printer fatigue and prison and torture and ecstasy.

"The savior is watching you."

……

9/21—13:45
According to the police, he must receive treatment from a community psychiatrist once a week in order to completely eliminate the impact of the deep-sea fishing incident on his career.

Community doctors, although not quite on par with doctors in top-tier hospitals, still possess clinical physician qualification certificates.

On the second floor of an old building in the suburbs, the louvers cut through the sunlight, and the dappled light and shadows from the leaves cast a kaleidoscope-like illusion into the office.

The female doctor was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, wearing a white coat and gold-rimmed glasses. She looked somewhat world-weary and indifferent to her work. She lit a cigarette and took a drag. Because it did not match the serious condition described in the medical record, which only stated that she had mild special stress disorder, this did not look mild at all.

When Fang Yan entered, he closed the door and stuck a piece of transparent tape in the door crack. This way, he would know whether anyone had sneaked in by tampering with the timeline, and only he would know how to reset it.

He sat down, and after taking off his baseball cap, it was discovered that the inside of the cap was covered with several layers of insulating tape.

Fang Yan wore two watches on his left wrist and kept checking the time. There was also a flip phone and a smartphone on the table, but he was also checking the time there.

For Fang Yan, as long as the program could run, everything was fine, but he discovered a fatal flaw and a serious logical error.

This shattered all the delusions of the future base station mind control organizations. They could have just continued hunting down the fake humans, so why did this happen?
But damn it, he still discovered it—the biggest flaw, the fatal logical error—which drove Fang Yan to the brink of collapse and despair.

Fang Yan's face was extremely pale and his lips were cracked. He hadn't slept much since he thought about this at 2 a.m. last night. It was as if he had returned to the days when he was tormented by mind control about half a month ago. No, it was probably still the same now.

"My memories may be manipulated, presenting different memories at different points in time."

Fang Yan kept staring at the four clocks and monitoring his own thoughts, recalling what he could remember, trying to sense whether anything had been deleted, implanted, or tampered with.

"No one can control your memories; this is just paranoia."

The female doctor flicked the ash from her cigarette.

"I have no mental illness, please don't misunderstand. I'm here to clear my criminal record. I've just discovered some loopholes and came to you to verify them, that's all. You're a smart person because you have a clinical medical license, I just want to ask you some logical questions."

Fang Yan kept staring at his watch.

"Then tell me, what do you want to verify?"

The female doctor was speechless.

"It's related to consciousness and time."

"You said."

“I think I’ve discovered the essence of consciousness. When people use the word ‘I,’ they should think that their meaning is very clear, which is probably the most obvious thing in their lives. But when people discuss ‘who I am,’ they focus on the question of ‘who I am’ rather than the self-evident ‘I’, so the ‘I’ is a vague thing.”

"go on."

"If you transfer a person's emotions, memories, will, thoughts, and personality into another person, like a so-called soul transfer, that person still seems to be themselves. But if you transfer them into ten people at the same time, it seems like they are just copies of that person. The problem is that when a personality is copied and transferred, even if these brains and bodies are completely identical in molecular structure, it is just creating a copy. In this process, something is lost, and these lost things are the real self. The only difference is whether the personality and body are the originals."

"So you are now complete. There is no technology that can completely replicate a person, and no one can manipulate your memories. Isn't that good?"

"Let me finish. Suppose that 1%, 10%, and 30% of the cells in a person's body are gradually replaced by clones. Is that person still the same? But what if they are replaced by 80% and 100%? I have already mentioned that people with the same structure are just clones. This has already determined that this version of 'self' is not 'self'. So where is the dividing line? What percentage of 'self' needs to be replaced before it is determined that it is not 'self'?"

Returning to the previous question, the difference between a person and a replica might only be whether it's the original or not. But suppose a person's body is completely pulverized into floating atoms by an atomic dispersion device, and then reassembled, undergoing a process of death in the process. Is this "self" still itself? The only difference is that the atomic dispersion device retains the original atoms, while the replica uses different atoms. At the atomic level, the atoms are the same. If the replica isn't "itself," then the pulverized and reassembled "self" isn't itself either. Do you understand what I'm saying?

"The so-called Ship of Theseus, how interesting! But this paradox, like Kant's antinomy, suggests that humans can only perceive things within the realm of reason, and ultimately everything reverts to its original form." "That's right, it is indeed the so-called Ship of Theseus. The fact that a person is gradually replaced by other atoms doesn't change the fact that he is himself, and the reconstructed body after being completely shattered is not a replica of the original. The key lies in this ambiguous continuity..."

You need some tranquilizers.

"With these prerequisites in place..."

"Prerequisites?"

"That's right, didn't I say? It's not only related to consciousness, but also to time; it's quite complex!"

Fang Yan stared intently at the two watches and two cell phones, trying to figure out the number of time frames that had been extracted or something else.

"Take this and calm down first, then we can talk slowly."

The psychologist initially thought it was just a minor offense committed by a rich kid who had been released by a good lawyer on the grounds of mental illness and was coming to him to go through the formalities. However, after carefully reviewing Fang Yan's file, the psychologist realized that the guy came from an ordinary family and did not have criminal responsibility for manslaughter at sea. In any case, it was best to appease him first.

He shook out a cigarette and handed it to Fang Yan, who, extremely anxious, put it in his mouth.

"I can't smoke."

"Just make a hissing sound when you inhale."

The female doctor lit it for Fang Yan.

Fang Yan took a deep breath, mimicking what the female doctor had said.

(Smoking is prohibited for minors. Do not imitate.)

"Let's assume there's a device in the future that can send information to the past, usually only in bytes."

"Let me warn you first that this is just wishful thinking."

"It's a gravitational particle accelerator! I can't say more, but I can tell you how it works."

Fang Yan asked the female doctor to bring him a pen and notebook, and told her about the extremely rigorous relativistic mechanics, the operating mode of using Doppler radar to read language information from Broca's frontal lobe, and how satellite base stations and electronic targets can read, tamper with, delete, and implant memories.

The female doctor finally understood what the insulating tape inside the baseball cap was for.

Fang Yan then revealed the fatal flaw he had discovered. Only by fixing this flaw could he prove he wasn't mentally ill; otherwise, he would have undeniably killed Dongni, the person he was closest to besides his blood relatives.

"When people from the future use a gravitational particle accelerator to send a message to my past self, why not to me on the timeline, but to me right now? I did receive a message from the future recently, but how can I guarantee that the me who received the message is the present me? Or rather, why must people from the future contact me right now, instead of something that happened in the future or the past? Since future events have already happened and become the past, the processes that could be changed in the past have become the future. Going back to the initial question, let's consider the future information as a hypothesis, as if it doesn't exist. Let's only discuss this hypothesis, with the precondition of the fuzzy continuity of the Ship of Theseus. If a person is implanted with different information at different points on the timeline, presenting different memories, and the implantation at which point in the past or future is completely random, then is that person still that person? I can also list certain time points for you, so how do we represent the functional relationship between them?"

Fang Yan was in a state of confusion. He took a deep drag of his cigarette, his forehead covered in fine sweat. He was in some kind of extremely deep and convoluted mind control.

"I'm so damn..." The female doctor was dumbfounded, her expression was priceless. Perhaps she gave up a high-paying job in plastic surgery and chose psychiatry just to hear this kind of story. "You are absolutely the most awesome person I have ever met, bar none."

Your observation report has been submitted in full.

The task has been completed within the deadline.

[Successfully eliminated a traitor. Considering the threat posed by this traitor, an additional 400 merit points will be awarded.]

Your current merit points are: 800/1000.

[Your direct supervisor has additional information:]

(End of this chapter)