Roots and the Stars[1]

Roots and the Stars,a english novel.

本故事纯属虚构声明

本故事纯属虚构，如有雷同，纯属巧合。

故事中涉及的所有公司、组织、机构名称，所有人名、地名、事件、产品、技术概念、商业行为、故事情节等均为虚构创作，不指向任何现实中的实体、个人、事件或商业活动。

Time: 23:17, Wednesday, November 7, 2049
Location: an office on the top floor of the Deep Blue Thought AI Technology Consulting Company, Xuhui District, Shanghai.

Lin Che was gazing at the series of hash values shown on his screen. This was already the seventh time his eyes had fallen upon the email that possessed both a blank sender field and a blank subject line. Without warning, the alert in the style of conspicuous red font and blue frame broke directly into his field of vision, displaying a commanding notification: “Highest priority—must be investigated by artificial review.”

The system had never assigned such a critical warning before for what appeared to be almost blank and nonsensical. The empty string’s ghost had returned, not as a textbook example, but as a digital anomaly demanding immediate human—or perhaps artificial—attention.

The spectral glow of the log entry bathed Lin Che’s face in an eerie blue. Zero-entropy? Quantum noise? These weren’t just anomalies; they were theoretical impossibilities, digital phantoms that shouldn’t exist outside a controlled lab. The transmission path—arcing from polar extremes to the Tibetan plateau before landing in his terminal—suggested a routing logic as alien as the signal itself. And a latency variance of zero? It defied physics. Data couldn’t travel instantaneously across the globe unless… His train of thought was violently derailed by the sharp, insistent chirp of his personal comm.

The holographic caller ID materialized in the air: Mei. A wave of guilt washed over him, cold and abrupt. He glanced at the time display hovering in the corner of his workspace—00:49. He had completely lost track.

He accepted the call with a weary gesture. Mei’s face, framed by the soft, warm light of their home bedroom, appeared before him. Concern etched lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there a few years ago.

“Che? Are you still at the office?” Her voice was soft but carried an unspoken weight. “Are you coming home to sleep?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Pushing himself away from the desk, its surface a chaotic landscape of code and cryptic logs, he walked to the floor-to-ceiling window of his top-floor office. With a frustrated sigh, he yanked the smart-tint curtain aside, revealing the nightscape of 2049 Shanghai.

The sky was not dark. It was a river of light, a chaotic, roaring tapestry woven from the navigation beams of flying vehicles. A stream of high-end Aerocars—sleek, low-silhouette models with pulsed neon underglows—screamed past his window in loose formation, their antigrav drives humming a dissonant chord that vibrated through the reinforced glass. It was a nightly spectacle of the ultra-wealthy, treating the regulated air lanes as their personal race track.

“Listen to that!” he exclaimed, more to the city than to Mei. “It’s past midnight, and these luxury coffins are still out joyriding. Where are the Sky Patrol? Do they just clock off?” His own voice sounded brittle with exhaustion.

The spectacle outside mirrored the chaos in his mind. A deep, physical fatigue had settled into his bones, a dull ache behind his eyes from staring too long at hash collisions and impossible log entries. The ‘ghost’ email was bad enough—a glitch in his own supposedly flawless ‘Deep Blue Protection’ system was a profound professional humiliation. But it was also a terrifying puzzle. And that puzzle was now stealing time he didn’t have. The proposal for the company’s next-generation AI product suite—a project he was leading—sat incomplete on his drive, its progress bar mercilessly stuck at 52%. The deadline was tomorrow, 2:00 PM. The air traffic was dangerously erratic tonight; the risk of an accident, even for an autonomous taxi, felt higher than usual. The thought of a long, turbulent ride home only to face a few fitful hours of sleep was unbearable.

The calculus of the night became grimly clear. The safest, most efficient choice was also the loneliest.

He turned back, his silhouette framed against the riot of light outside. Mei was still waiting, her patient silence more accusing than any words.

“Dear,” he said, the word feeling inadequate. “I… I can’t come back tonight. There’s too much. This… system issue, it’s unprecedented. And the new product proposal…” He trailed off, gesturing helplessly at the screens. “It’s only half-done. The sky traffic looks like a war zone out there anyway. It’s not safe. I’ll crash in the company pod for a few hours. You and Xiao Ming, please, don’t wait up. Get some sleep.”

He tried to offer a reassuring smile, but it felt like a crack in a dam holding back a torrent of frustration and anxiety. The ghost in the machine was haunting his screens, and its chilling presence had just dictated the terms of his night.

The darkness went ahead imperceptibly. It was just 3:00 in the early morning; Linche stretched out in a relaxed manner and then stood up to make a cup of coffee. This was the fourth cup that night.

The articles shown on the screen, which he had read, were barely visible; his brain became blunted. Some sentences expressed in deep AI theories and mathematical justifications exhausted his energy.

Suddenly, the hash value popped at the top among dozens of windows for the seventh time, with alarm sounds dragging him out of his fatigue. “What’s wrong? Where was this outrageous email?” he muttered curses under his breath. It was so strange—blank addresser, empty subject, empty content, except for that long hash value.
Why could the manifest spam mail escape the powerful deep guard system again and again? The red edge of this message box with a flashing green dot bothered him all evening. He soon became sleepy again. He had to knead his eyes hard; his temples began to jump rapidly.

“Master, you’ve been working for twelve hours straight.” His round, goofy companion blinked with gentle blue electronic eyes, a mechanical arm gently pushing the coffee cup on the desk. “I just performed a scan of your body. Your fatigue level has reached the human limit. You must rest now.”

Lin Che smiled bitterly. The development of the XYHou-3 had already entered its second year, the technical difficulty surpassing all imagination. His proposal was still stuck in the second phase—software component development. In just a few days, he needed to submit it to the technical director and product management team for review. Then it would have to pass the board of directors, requiring further investment of funds and manpower for hardware development, AI algorithm improvements, and software system updates…

“Just a little longer,” he murmured, his gaze falling back to the screen.

The email was still there. The hash value of an empty string stared back at him like a ghost.

XYHou didn’t leave. It simply stood guard beside him, as it had every late night for the past five years.

Finally, Lin Che couldn’t hold on any longer. He staggered to his feet and made his way to the sleep pod in the corner of the office. As the lid slid open, he turned back to look at XYHou—this loyal companion gazing at him with those gentle electronic eyes.

“Goodnight, XYHou.”

“Goodnight, Master. Sweet dreams.”

The lid closed, and darkness swallowed everything.

Chapter 3: “Everything Collapsed Suddenly”

It was a sweet dreamland that he couldn’t neglect. Anything that appeared in it would penetrate his mind, even a nice memory that would accompany him throughout his life.
He smelled a pure scent of green grass that hadn’t drifted into his nose for almost ten years.
A park floating in the air, he sat close to his wife Mei on the grass. Xiaoman, their daughter, lay in Mei’s arms, with her arms around the soft “Star Bear”.