Chapter 222 - 90: Brain and External Hard Drive

Chapter 222: Chapter 90: Brain and External Hard Drive

Beneath the brilliant, starry sky, Wen Xiao’s crisp laughter was still echoing.

Yu Xian looked at the girl in front of him, who was laughing so hard she couldn’t stand up straight. He let out a long breath, shook his head helplessly, and gradually began to relax as well.

However, even though it had just been a prank, Wen Xiao’s wax-figure-like appearance from moments ago still left Yu Xian’s heart pounding with a lingering fear.

He gazed at the girl before him, lost in thought.

Wen Xiao’s little act had just brought up a problem they hadn’t considered before.

’What if a "network interruption" really happened in this kind of shared Dream Net?’

’If one’s physical body in the real world suffered some kind of unavoidable physical damage from an accident, forcing the connection to be severed, what would happen to the consciousness left behind in the dream?’

’A deeper question was, could that consciousness get trapped?’

In the previous single-player dreams, if a test subject was shaken violently in the real world, they would immediately wake up from the dream.

According to the patterns summarized in the Dream Net Guide, once the person woke up, the single-player dream would lose its "host" and subsequently collapse, ceasing to exist.

’But what about in a shared dream?’

’If a person suddenly disconnected, would their consciousness be instantly pulled back to reality, or would a part of their subconscious be left behind, turning into a lost soul unable to log out?’

But this was all just speculation. They would have to find a way to test it later.

"Alright, no more messing around. We don’t have much time," Yu Xian said, pulling his focus back to the task at hand. He glanced at the translucent alarm clock icon in the lower right corner of his vision.

On Yu Xian’s clock, four minutes had already passed.

"This time, besides verifying the long-distance connection, I have another important question I need to test."

"Hm... what is it?" Wen Xiao stopped laughing, stood up straight, and straightened the hem of her pleated skirt.

"I want to see what happens when the ’host’s’ memory database doesn’t contain an item described by the script. How will the dream construct it? In other words, a memory gap," Yu Xian said, recalling the question Senior Sister Yiyi had posed yesterday:

"At the seventh minute, let’s see what appears for that book from the script, *High-Energy Astrophysics and Gravitational Waves*."

Wen Xiao tilted her head slightly and mused:

"I think... it’s probably like a large model for AI art generation. Think about it. If you input a prompt for something the AI has never learned from its asset library, what would it do?"

Yu Xian thought for a moment and asked:

"Let me think. It would ’hallucinate,’ or just randomly piece things together?"

"Exactly. The large model will usually ’guess’ or ’stitch’ things together," Wen Xiao explained.

"It first breaks down the words in the prompt and extracts the tags it can understand. For example, if you ask it to draw a niche textbook it’s never seen, it will call upon the basic model for ’book’ in its database, forcibly stitch something together, and generate an object that looks like a book on the outside. But the text inside will be distorted and warped, just meaningless, garbled structures."

She paused, then added:

"So, the physics textbook that’s about to be generated should also be based on my understanding of ’physics textbooks’ that I’ve seen before and that exist in my subconscious memory. It will probably invent a table of contents that looks plausible, but is actually a complete hallucination, and the content inside will likely be specious as well."

Yu Xian nodded thoughtfully.

Following that logic, when the script required the book *High-Energy Astrophysics and Gravitational Waves* to be generated on the chair at the seven-minute mark, the dream would only be able to draw upon Wen Xiao’s general subconscious understanding of "physics textbooks."

The result, logically, should be a fake book full of logical fallacies.

"I understand. Oh, right, one more thing." Yu Xian suddenly remembered the strange flicker from when the book appeared last time and added a warning:

"When it’s almost seven minutes, count down the last few seconds out loud. Try not to blink, and stare at that spot. I want you to help me confirm if a flash of grayish-white appears the instant the object materializes out of thin air."

"A grayish-white thing?" Wen Xiao asked, a little confused.

"Yeah. During the test at the apartment, I thought I saw a glimpse of it, but it was too fast. I’m not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me."

"Okay." Wen Xiao took a deep breath, widened her eyes, and stared intently at the surface of the chair.

The two fell silent, standing side-by-side in the void, waiting for something to happen on the wooden chair.

"10, 9..." Suddenly, Wen Xiao began to count down softly. Yu Xian silently followed along in his mind:

"...3, 2, 1."

Time.

The instant Wen Xiao spoke the last number, a book materialized out of thin air on the previously empty seat of the wooden chair.

Yu Xian froze for a second, then blinked in astonishment.

Because this time, he didn’t see the grayish-white afterimage from before.

He turned his head to look at Wen Xiao beside him. She was rubbing her eyes, which were probably sore from staring for so long.

Wen Xiao also shook her head gently and said in a low voice:

"I didn’t see it... It was too fast. I couldn’t see the process at all. It just suddenly appeared."

Yu Xian frowned.

’Was it really just my eyes playing tricks on me last time because I was so tense?’

’Did I just not see it clearly this time, or does that grayish-white afterimage only get triggered under certain specific conditions?’

However, now wasn’t the time to dwell on it. Yu Xian shifted his attention back to the wooden chair.

Right now, what confused him even more was the book’s cover.