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Destroy Apollo: Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Greta
“You haven’t changed much.”
We both spoke at the same time and then laughed. Greta still had her neat, ear-length short hair, and the bold red color hadn’t faded.
She looked at Gaia beside me, skipping the small talk and getting straight to the point: “Based on my initial assessment, this formatted area is indeed a decoy. I asked you to bring her here because the equipment in the shop isn’t sufficient for this. Let’s head to my workshop…”
She paused, took a deep breath, and lowered her voice. “My workshop isn’t on the public map. It’s quite a hassle to get there. We’ll have to avoid certain eyes.”
I nodded. “I was just about to remind you to stay cautious. I have a feeling… this shouldn’t be exposed to the public.”
Greta took off her jacket and, with her left hand supporting her right arm, unhooked and detached her entire right arm.
In her pupils, I saw the reflection of my own face, filled with disbelief. She tossed her hair with indifference and simply said, “Accident,” while handing me a small, old-fashioned flashlight.
“All smart devices need to stay in the shop, especially my prosthetic with a control chip. As for Gaia…” Greta paused thoughtfully. “Remember that thought experiment we discussed?”
Of course, I remembered.
All publicly sold smart devices must have a reserved interface so that Apollo can access them in case of need—like tracking criminal activity. This law was passed by collective vote and implemented during our university years.
So Greta and I discussed it. I couldn’t understand why people weren’t more wary of a system that was omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, leaving no machine undetected.
“Doesn’t an all-encompassing system resemble a perpetual cloud hanging over humanity? What if, one day, it turned against us? For example…”
“AI awakening and then turning around to enslave humanity? Are you talking about the usual science-fiction trope?” Greta interjected.
I nodded. She thought for a moment, her expression turning serious. “Edith, I don’t think Apollo counts as true artificial intelligence. If it enslaves humanity, then isn’t it already doing so?
“Or rather, humanity is enslaving itself. Assuming the higher-dimensional civilization has no ulterior motives, Apollo started as a blank slate—a canvas to be painted by humanity’s collective psyche.”
“In that case, if humanity or Apollo begins with ignorance and brutality, what’s painted would be a savage, bloodthirsty scene,” I said, a shiver running through me.
“If, from the beginning, Apollo’s path was set in stone, it would become nearly irreversible, spiraling endlessly—assimilating, expanding, self-perpetuating, looping forward…” Greta shrugged. “People in the Old Era used to experiment on monkeys, observing their behavior with bait like bananas. Apollo might just be a lure for a higher-dimensional civilization to study us.
“Besides, this law reflects the human collective consciousness. Most people think this way: entrusting privacy to a higher-dimensional, godlike entity that can aid in criminal investigations—why not?”
“What if the system fails one day? If an even more advanced civilization took control of Apollo, or controlled humanity to make irrational decisions—like… self-destruction—would we just stand by and watch humanity march toward its ruin?
“Or what if someone as ambitious as the figures from the Old Era emerged, inflaming the public with their theories, leading to outright massacres of ‘undesirables 1’?”
It was a sensitive topic, and I fell silent after I spoke, instinctively aware of the boundary I had crossed.
To answer these questions, one must interrogate the origins, probe into the core—the state of Apollo at initialization. But that part of history is a black box, always glossed over in vague terms. From the moment I was conscious, Apollo has already been the unshakable ruler.
“Rather than these lofty questions, I’m more interested in how to effectively avoid it. That’s the part we might actually be able to impact. Even if I personally don’t use devices with backdoors, we can’t stop the phones, computers, or smart bands of passersby around us… I think we could use a mechanism like active noise cancellation; after all, at its root, everything is waves.”
Greta pulled out something that looked like a raincoat. “After creating it, I only tested it in a limited scope. It works well on small smart machines, but this is the first time trying it on an intelligent mechanical life form this advanced.”
“I trust you. And I trust Gaia.”
After Gaia put on the shielding suit, we followed Greta to her workshop. First, we went through a concealed door in the shop that led to a hidden passage, which twisted and turned until it opened onto the city’s sewer system. We waded through a stretch of foul-smelling, sulfur-laden pipes and finally arrived at a gated doorway surrounded by iron bars.
“This is an abandoned subway station. During construction, they found R-metal along the line—an important material for building starships. So the entire project was halted and sealed off, never reaching the stage of intelligent integration.” As Greta spoke, she pulled a key out of thin air like a magician and unlocked the gate.
Once inside, we walked down a pitch-black tunnel, with only the glow from our flashlights occasionally illuminating the tracks. After an indeterminate amount of time, Greta finally stopped: “We’re here.”
Her workshop astonished me. Small but well-equipped, I even saw a—“Bella prototype? When I left the lab after graduation, it was still just a model. Has it been completed now?”
Greta nodded. “I inherited it from Professor Bella. After… serving my sentence, I had nowhere to go, so I worked at a lab outside the university, funded by the Saf Foundation.”
She sighed. “You know Professor Bella was always cautious about Apollo, so after that law was passed, she preferred to seal away her own invention rather than leave any backdoors for Apollo. She told the university that the prototype’s concept failed feasibility testing and shelved it. But in reality, research continued in that off-campus lab.
“When the other lab members and I completed the prototype, the professor still didn’t introduce it into the industry. Two years ago, the Saf Foundation, which only sponsored projects led by female scientists, was shut down for violating the principle of ‘equality.’
“The professor managed to fund the lab herself for another half a year, but then she was forced to dissolve it due to lawsuits claiming gender discrimination for only hiring female researchers. To prevent the equipment from going up for auction, she sold it all to me.”
Greta flashed a mischievous grin. “The Bella prototype sold for just 20 credits.”
I had no idea about any of this. “For years, everything went smoothly. Why was the foundation suddenly sued at that time?”
“I don’t know. After the lab closed, Professor Bella resigned and set off on an interstellar tour.”
As she spoke, Greta was busy scanning Gaia’s system, while I lingered by the prototype.
The Bella prototype is essentially a kind of electromagnetic interference device with enormous potential for civilian use, yet the professor kept it hidden.
So many pearls of information, each hinting at a clue, lay before me. I had an instinctive feeling there was something more behind all of this—just waiting for the moment they could be strung together into a coherent whole.
Just as I was lost in thought, I heard Greta’s excited voice: “It’s just as I suspected! The results are out, Edith!”
“I’ve checked Gaia’s hardware, and I can confirm that this space actually contains information, it’s just been hidden and encrypted. Generally speaking, such a design would reserve a timed task to activate it…”
“But I couldn’t find it.”
I thought for a moment, straightened out the logic, and asked, “Gaia, can you access previous records? The ones from when you interfered with Apollo’s detection of me?”
“I can. That’s classified as an abnormal operation, and the operation log has been preserved.”
After a short pause, Gaia spoke again, “I erased a specific command. During the interaction with Apollo’s subsystem, specifically the M5 planet’s main brain, I sensed a risk factor, so I completely wiped the command to prevent it from being traced back.”
It seems the command that was erased was likely the one that activated that 0.8% space.
This only reinforced the importance of that area.
“So, is there any way we can activate this space?” I asked Greta, but also myself.
Suddenly, I had an idea: “Greta, do you think we can start with the hardware? Information can’t just be recorded out of thin air. It’s already written into Gaia’s system, we just can’t see it right now.”
“I’ll give it a try.”
Not long later, Greta looked up. “The bad news is, the hardware is also encrypted. We’ll need to find the key, 9 positions, 26 letters. We can’t try every combination—there’s only one chance to input it. The good news is, the approach with the hardware is fine. I even got a hint.”
“It’s written in assembly language,” she added.
A series of numbers arranged according to some pattern—what do you think that looks like?
“I got it! It’s coordinates! Time and place. Events from the Old Era’s history.”
But those events all took place on Earth, a planet that is now distant and alien to us, a barren wasteland devoid of life, with the core emptied out. It’s a cold, desolate place.
Not to mention Earth’s history—that’s the history of the Old Era. People always look ahead, leaving history far behind. What exactly happened during these times and places? And how do these events tie into the key?
The next day, I took a break from work and focused on searching through the library with Greta and Gaia. We combed through the vast database, but after several days of intense searching, we only ended up with red eyes and minimal results.
“Found anything?”
Greta had just finished looking through another book from the Old Era. “Nothing. I’m starting to doubt the significance of this particular day—more precisely, the importance of this day at the node when Apollo initialized. These historical records are condensed, people wouldn’t document an ordinary day in the midst of tens of thousands of years of history. It’s not like an operating system logging every day…”
Logs.
A thought flashed through my mind. “Logs! We actually have the logs of all human society’s past.”
We exchanged a glance.
I shook my head and sighed. “Apollo… right now, we have what it takes to challenge Apollo. What I mean is, can we hack into its system and check those logs?”
“No, Edith. Actually, there’s another place with that log. The Old Era Museum. It was a required field trip when we were in college, and we experienced their ‘time-space reproduction’ technology firsthand. Though the historical events we experienced were set up by the museum…”
“But the guide at the time said the museum is connected to Apollo’s historical database. So theoretically, once we know the exact time and place, we can use the museum to recreate it.”
I smiled, finally feeling the gloom of the past few days lift. “Hacking into the museum’s database? I’m confident we can do that.”
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- Non-conformists; Outliers; those who don’t fit the mold or go against the norm.[↩]