The air in the underground laboratory still maintained a constant flow, yet that warm, gentle atmosphere seemed to grow even stronger as the maintenance work progressed. Alice stood before Cabinet No. 30, her gaze unfocused, as if—through the cold metal shell—she were once again seeing that bizarre, dazzling fantasy world.
"...At last, Alice boarded the train again."
She spoke softly, her voice echoing through the empty rows with a dreamlike rhythm.
"This time, she found the carriage completely empty. The attendant who should have been checking tickets at the door was gone, and even the driver in the cabin had vanished. The train sped through a pitch-black tunnel, the scenery outside the windows stretched into blurred blocks of color. Alice's heart leapt into her throat: the train was going so fast—what if nobody was controlling it? What if it derailed?"
Arran, checking the cabinet readouts, cooperatively put on a worried expression. "Unmanned driving? That is dangerous, especially in a world without logic."
"Yes." Alice nodded. "Just as she was panicking, a broadcast suddenly rang out inside the carriage, laced with electrical static—'Dear passenger Alice, please do not panic. I am the conductor of this train. I guarantee you a comfortable and pleasant journey.'"
"Alice was startled. She shouted at the speaker, 'But Mr. Conductor, where are you? I've searched every corner of the train and I can't find you at all! Are you invisible too?'"
Alice mimicked the conductor's low, rumbling laughter. "The conductor burst into loud laughter, as if it came from all directions in the carriage, making Alice's ears buzz. He said: 'Alice, you're inside my body. Of course you can't find me.'"
"Alice froze. She touched the seat beneath her, then looked at the windows around her, and asked hesitantly: 'You mean… you are the train itself?'"
"'Yes, dear Alice,' the conductor answered. 'You should have noticed this is a world that changes every moment. There were originally four attendants within this carriage. As the world kept merging and cycling, the result is an automatic train like me. Our consciousness fused into one. Our bones became steel. Our blood became steam.'"
Arran's hand paused slightly. Four attendants… fusion… That setting made him think of the cultivation tank he had just seen—the one with four brain cores.
Alice didn't notice Arran's reaction and continued. "Alice found it strange that the conductor emphasized the number 'four,' so she asked curiously: 'Would five people not work? If there were five, would the train run faster?'"
"The conductor's voice suddenly turned sorrowful, and a little afraid. He replied: 'Yes, Alice. It must be four. If it were five… they would never be able to—'"
"—WARNING! WARNING!"
A shrill, grating mechanical synthesized voice exploded without warning, instantly tearing apart the fairy-tale atmosphere.
Emergency red lights on the laboratory ceiling began to flash wildly. The previously gentle orange warmth turned into a heart-stopping blood red.
"System power load remains critically strained! Main energy core overloaded! Emergency power supply will be enacted under Power Scheme No. 5! Switch countdown: 5 minutes… 4 minutes 59 seconds…"
"What happened?!" Arran sprang up, nearly dropping the operations manual in his hand.
Alice's body went rigid. The heterochromatic light in her eyes began to fluctuate violently, as if under intense interference.
"The power system… has an anomaly." Alice's voice broke into fragments; her smooth human cadence was being replaced by a cold mechanical hardness. "Once Power Scheme No. 5 is actually implemented, not only will the base's power supply be affected… my terminal interface—or rather, this bionic body—will also be forcibly cut off due to insufficient priority and enter mandatory hibernation."
"Is… is something wrong with the generators?" Arran asked urgently. "If it's a generator failure, I can fix it! I know where the machine room is!"
"Wait. Let me search the situation…"
Alice tilted her head. In her lively eyes, countless lines of green data and code suddenly surged like a waterfall. Her body trembled slightly, as if enduring the impact of a massive data torrent.
A few seconds later, her expression shifted from confusion to terror.
"No… power generation is completely normal. The generators are running well… It's that the power demand has suddenly increased!"
"A sudden spike in power demand?" Arran was stunned. "There are only two of us here—where would a sudden spike come from?"
"The… radio base station?" Alice's voice shot up, filled with unbelievable fear. "Oh no! The radio base station is running at full power! Output has exceeded 300% of its rated value! It's draining the entire base of energy!"
"Ah! What do we do?! What do we do?! What do we do?!"
The girl clutched her head and let out a helpless scream. Like a child who had made a catastrophic mistake, she trembled violently all over.
"C-calm down, Alice! What exactly is happening? Why would the radio base station suddenly activate?" Arran stepped forward to steady her, only to find her body temperature rising rapidly.
"I can't calm down… something huge has happened!" Alice looked up, eyes full of tears and despair. "It's my fault! It's my fault! I actually forgot to guard against that plan… I thought the Doctor was dead, and everything was over… but that ghost is still running!"
"That plan? What plan?"
"No time to explain!" Alice shoved Arran away and pointed at the center of the hall—a massive backup hibernation pod filled with green coolant. "Arran, hurry! Help me! Put my body in there! Once Scheme No. 5 activates, the life-support system for this body will shut down immediately. If it isn't submerged in coolant, the biological brain tissue will burn out!"
Meanwhile, in Port Alexandra—underground machine room beneath City Hall.
The atmosphere here was completely different from the burning streets above. It was heavy with suffocating low pressure. Countless server racks were running at frenzy speed; the roar of cooling fans sounded like muffled thunder before a storm.
Mary stood before the main control console with arms crossed, her face livid. Across from her, Tin Man was unhurriedly plugging several data cables into the interface of the massive central processor.
"...So you're saying, wouldn't it have been better if you admitted from the start that borrowing the power of the 'crystal of reason' was a bad idea?"
While operating a portable terminal, Tin Man spoke in that utterly flat electronic voice.
"You insisted on using 'independent R&D' as a fig leaf to cover the truth. And the result? Your so-called perfect system is a castle built on sand. That 'Philosopher's Stone'—or rather, that biological brain core—is not something you can fully control."
Mary gave a cold snort, her eyelid twitching. "Hmph. That's because you kept spouting inexplicable nonsense. Why not just get to the point and directly point out the security vulnerability in the robot system? Why take such a huge detour telling fairy tales?"
"Madam Chair, if I did that, you'd probably have me arrested on the spot as a hacker invading the municipal system, wouldn't you?" Tin Man stopped his hands and turned around. A red glint flashed in his electronic eyes. "After all, I know too much. Even if that knowledge came from some bottomless crack between worlds, not from your tech tree… I understand perfectly well that what those in power hate most are people who 'know too much.'"
He turned back to the screen. His fingers hammered the keyboard at a speed so fast it left afterimages.
"All right. We'll begin now. I have to say—your current encryption methods are truly far too simple. Bluntly speaking, it's like walking around naked. You've relied too heavily on that core's 'black-box' function, and forgotten to put a proper lock on the peripheral network that connects to it."
"Attempting to establish a firewall… tracing abnormal signal sources…"
"Riiing—RIIING—!!!"
A harsh, urgent red telephone rang out, cutting off Tin Man's explanation. It was a dedicated line that only rang when the city faced the highest-level crisis.
Mary's expression changed. She snatched up the receiver.
"It's me. Yes, I'm in the machine room… Stop making a fuss. What happened?"
From the other end came the security chief's terrified roar. Behind it, explosions, screams, and the screech of metal impacts flooded the line.
"Chair! This is bad! The robots… all of the robots have gone mad!!"
"What?" Mary's pupils shrank violently. "What do you mean 'gone mad'?!"
"They… they're attacking civilians! Patrol robots, service robots, even the cargo-handling mechanical arms at the port… they've all lost control! They're destroying everything indiscriminately! It's like… it's like something possessed them!"
"Idiot! What the hell happened—say it clearly!" Mary shouted, but the hand gripping the receiver was already trembling.
Before the other side could respond, the main control screen in front of Tin Man suddenly turned crimson. Countless warning windows popped up like a virus, instantly covering the entire display.
"Large-scale external data intrusion detected," Tin Man's voice remained steady, but his speaking speed clearly accelerated. "Signal source… from the west. That is… a highest-privilege forced override command."
"It's over," Tin Man said blandly.
Back in the Doctor's underground laboratory.
The countdown hit zero.
The previously bright laboratory fell into gloom. Only emergency lamps cast a faint, ghostly green.
Alice's exquisite bionic body now floated silently inside a huge cylindrical glass container. The container was filled with viscous green nutrient solution. Several thick cables were connected to ports at her spine and the back of her skull. Her eyes were closed—like she was asleep, or like a doll that had lost its soul.
Arran pressed against the glass outside the container, panting hard. Sweat soaked his back. Just moments ago, he had used every ounce of strength to finish the placement in the final second before the power cut.
"Alice… are you okay?" He pounded the glass, shouting anxiously.
"Bzz… bzzz…"
An old monochrome display beside the container abruptly lit up. A green cursor blinked a few times, then lines of text began to appear one by one.
It was Alice's voice—but no longer carried by vibrating vocal cords. It had been translated directly into cold characters.
[Arran… I hope you can forgive me…][Now, I can only speak to you using this display. Scheme No. 5 has cut most power to this body, leaving only the brain's minimal activity.][Because we couldn't find any exposed external cables, we had no way to shut down or destroy the radio base station that's running madly from the outside… But when I realized "that plan" had begun to execute, in the final moment before my self-hibernation, I forcibly mixed a special data stream into the attack code being output along that plan.]
The text on the screen advanced quickly, as if one could feel Alice's urgency and guilt.
[It can only barely disrupt the attack rhythm for a short time, creating a tiny vulnerability. And even then, it only works if someone can notice that data stream amid the massive assault and knows how to use it… This is almost an impossible task.][But at least… I did a little of what I could.][Thank you for helping me… for placing this body—whose control has been interrupted—back into the hibernation pod. I know this is incomparable to the chaos the outside world is experiencing—outside may already have become hell because of me—but precisely because of that, I have to thank you… Thank you for still taking care of me at a time like this…]
Arran stared at the screen, his eyes burning. "Don't say that, Alice! This isn't your fault!"
The text paused, then continued to scroll—slower now, like a heavy monologue.
[As you know, I was completely created by the Doctor, so I do not have full administrative control over my own functions.][Greedy me originally wanted to wait until the very end—like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights—until I had finished telling every story I could tell, and only then tell you the part of the truth I had kept back. I wanted to stay with you a little longer, even if only one more second.][But I never expected that program had been quietly running in my background from the very beginning.][It has now suddenly begun consuming power at a frantic rate, seizing every level of administrative authority—beyond even my ability to interfere. That means it should have finished cracking the target's communication cipher and finally begun "active offense." Yes—this is only my inference, because from the start I had no permission to query that program directly.][However, taking everything into account—the radio base station's terrifying surge, and what you said just now about the "power spike"—only the Doctor's "that plan" could match the present state.][I'm sorry. I didn't tell you the whole truth, leaving you unprepared for a development like this…][And because I lacked sufficient permissions, I myself could not truly investigate the execution status of "that plan" before now. I was so foolish—like a stupid child—believing a parent wouldn't hide dangerous actions from them. Blindly believing it was nothing but empty talk on paper.][In fact… everything was prepared in perfect order, wasn't it?][Even if they abandoned me, even if the Doctor and the assistants all died, the plan already placed on the schedule could still run as usual. And even… without my knowing, the assistants had already reinforced the radio base station to a degree ordinary people could never destroy.][You don't need to comfort me… Arran, this is my fault…][I was too intoxicated by the beautiful, subtle atmosphere earlier—when you treated me as a "companion." I clung to that tiny warmth, so I chose to escape.][I… forgot the most important, and most terrifying, fact of all…]
The cursor flickered violently, as if sobbing without sound.
[This machine—my original and core design objective—was never some miracle of self-awareness, nor an experiment to explore forms of life.][I was manufactured as the ultimate weapon for information warfare.][After silently cracking Port Alexandra's communication cipher… using that enormous radio base station to hijack the entire radio spectrum.][Using their proudest robots to destroy themselves with their own hands.][This is the Doctor's revenge. This is the true meaning of "Machine No. 4."][If so, then "Alice"—the girl with a personality, who likes listening to stories, who longs to live—was probably only an incidental byproduct the Doctor created to relieve boredom, wasn't she?][To the Doctor and the assistants, "Alice" may have been nothing more than a decoration on a humanoid terminal interface—like a doll that exists simply to make the UI look nicer.][How ironic.][Because when they most needed the weapon called "Machine No. 4" to destroy the world, the human "Alice" was precisely the burden they least needed.]