Once We Lived in Nanjing

"Keep an eye on it!" Old Zhao ordered.

But the big-eyed creature wasn't playing along anymore, and it quickly vanished from the camera's field of view.

This left everyone in the command vehicle a bit bewildered. How could it have run off?

"Where did it go?" Bai Zhen asked.

Zhao Bowen stood there, his head turned toward the west, motionless.

"Old Zhao?"

Zhao Bowen suddenly grinned, startling everyone in the vehicle. They had never seen such a ferocious and frightening smile before.

Zhao Bowen said in a voice like that of a lost soul:

"It's coming to find us."

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Swordman was coming for Zhao Bowen. To be precise, it was on its way to find Old Zhao, Bai Zhen, Wang Ning, and everyone else in the vehicle. It had locked on to their position at Life Insurance Square.

As for the exact time of the nuclear bomb detonation, Old Zhao guessed it was around 9:20 p.m., because at that time the video signal was completely cut off.

After the signal broke, nobody moved, Wang Ning and Bai Zhen still stared stiffly at the monitors.

Someone finally asked:

"Did it detonate?"

Silence, then someone replied:

"It detonated."

Zhao Bowen slowly sat down, his hands and legs trembling uncontrollably.

"If that nuclear bomb was really under our vehicle, then by this time Xinjiekou would have seen the birth of a little Sun," Old Zhao said. "You must be curious about how Miss Qiu triggered the detonation. It was actually voice-activated. The voice recognition component was buried in the key. The cryptanalysis team closely analyzed Swordman's language for natural semantic patterns and selected five high-frequency characters for the comparison database: 'I,' 'find,' 'you,' 'de' and 'fruit.' If Miss Qiu, awaiting detonation, heard three of these five words, it would immediately trigger the blast."

"The only thing we could do was not to require any manual remote control, precisely identify the enemy, and ensure that Swordman was within the kill zone. It was a matter of luck, but thankfully it worked," Zhao Bowen continued. "It should have worked. I believe nothing could survive at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion... If something could survive at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion, then we are out of options..."

"Also, don't you find it incredible?" Zhao Bowen's speech accelerated, his hands gesturing frantically, "It can make eye contact with so many people at once, and it does so through network cables and screens. Part of the reason is that it has more than one eye. I suspect Swordman's eyes are infinite in number, depending on the number of observers around. No matter how many people there are, from whatever angle, or even if they were to surround it in a 360-degree circle, even if encased in a sphere at its center, it would still make eye contact with each observer."

"What does that mean? It means that it doesn't follow the rules of our universe. Clearly, there is a mechanism in Swordman, or even a logic, a nonsensical logic that disregards the laws of physics and even mathematical rules: 'The observer is also the observed.' To that monster, the two are the same," Zhao Bowen rattled on in the silent vehicle. "This is unreasonable, as if forcibly decreed by a supreme and mighty hand that wrote the two on the blackboard and forcefully connected them with an equal sign."

"Further thinking, it changes the underlying logic of information acquisition. When you get information about Swordman, it also gets information about you. When you know Swordman's location, it also knows yours—this is why in the future, humanity cannot escape being hunted by Swordman. Any means of counter-attack are transparent to it; theoretically, one Swordman can lock on to seven billion people, not to mention twenty-five million Swordmen—"

Zhao Bowen grabbed his own hair.

"And pondering deeper, are Swordmen limited to only the kind we've seen? It has the ability to make sound, so it makes no sense not to use this aspect. Perhaps there's a type of Swordman that locks on to you as soon as you hear it speak, and maybe there are even more unreasonable ones. Just by knowing of its existence, it certainly knows yours, whether there's direct..."

"Click—" The vehicle door opened suddenly.

Old Zhao startled and looked up, the dim yellow light from the street lamp outside fell on his face, making him look gaunt and sallow.

"Old Zhao! What are you still doing sitting in the vehicle?" Bai Zhen leaned on the door and shouted at him.

"I-I-I... I... I..."

Zhao Bowen looked around; there wasn't another soul in the vehicle. He had been rambling on to an empty vehicle.

After the signal was lost, the command vehicle drove back to Meihua Villa. The work team inside had already dispersed to handle follow-up tasks. Old Zhao had let Bai Zhen and Wang Ning go upstairs first; he wanted to stay alone in the vehicle for a bit of peace—It was only then that Zhao Bowen came back to his senses, realizing he had been sitting in the vehicle all alone.

By the time Bai Zhen and Wang Ning were almost through with a night's work and it was almost 4 a.m., Zhao Bowen still hadn't come up. Bai Zhen figured the guy was probably asleep in the vehicle and came down to check.

"How are you feeling? You okay?"

Bai Zhen reached out to support him.

Zhao Bowen shook his head and crawled out of the vehicle, nearly collapsing to his knees.

"It's done," Bai Zhen steadied him. "It's over."

"It's over," Zhao Bowen nodded.

"Also, do you know the exact time of the nuclear explosion?" Bai Zhen asked. "We need to put a precise time in the report upstairs; it's important, it will go down in history."