The night before the promotion

Chapter 12 Clues
The sun rose again, and as usual, Zhou Si got up early and came to the clinic. He first cleaned up, then sorted out the cases, checked the stock of medicines, etc.

New day, new job.

Just as Pei Dong said, Zhou Si has become like a person since the Xianyue accident. He doesn't have any extra social activities, nor any so-called entertainment activities. He lives like a machine on an assembly line, with only work in his heart.

Therefore, Zhou Si became a lonely, enthusiastic, and somewhat weird crazy doctor in the eyes of the patients.

Li Weiyu once tried to persuade Zhou Si, but Zhou Si didn't take it seriously. From Zhou Si's own perspective, he felt that his current life was very good, fulfilling and busy, but it was just difficult for others to understand.

After finishing the various tasks of the clinic according to the daily process, Zhou Si sat behind his desk, turned on his computer, logged into his account, and opened a chat group named "Zhou Si After-Sales."

Theoretically, Zhou Si officially started practicing medicine one year after the Xianyun accident. During these three years, Zhou Si cured many patients. In order to facilitate the control of their conditions, Zhou Si set up such an after-sales group. The patients regularly reported their conditions to Zhou Si. When necessary, they would become Zhou Si's middlemen and help him introduce more patients.

Zhou Si managed the after-sales group very well, so most of Zhou Si's patients were treated in the form of "customer solicitation".

In addition, these patients also established a deep relationship of trust with Zhou Si. Although Zhou Si still looked cold and had no good face to anyone, these patients truly regarded Zhou Si as their reborn parents and savior doctor.

The patients come from all walks of life, with different statuses. At some special moments, they often provide Zhou Si with some extremely important help.

After checking the group chat and finding no new messages, Zhou Si opened a software and entered keywords such as cognitive dissociation and dissociative disorder. A progress bar popped up and slowly moved forward.

This is a search software that Zhou Si bought from Fenglong Computing through his relationship with Li Weiyu in the Supervisory Bureau. It has very useful functions, but the UI design and interaction are very simple, and there is no user experience at all. Only the renewal page is very beautiful. However, Zhou Si does not need those fancy things.

The software can search and extract local social media based on keywords, thereby helping Zhou Si obtain a large amount of information related to the keywords. It is usually used for local e-commerce activities, etc.

It was with the help of this software that Zhou Si discovered various anecdotes happening in the city of Anyan among the vast amount of information and found potential patients among them.

It is easier said than done. Every piece of information needs to be screened manually by Zhou Si. Zhou Si also thought about using AI to assist his work, but when he asked about the price calculated by Feng Long, he gave up the idea.

Clicking on the links one by one, lines of text appeared before his eyes. They were like streams of water, converging together to form a torrent of information, and Zhou Si stood in this torrent, facing the vast ocean.

This reminded Zhou Si of a test he had conducted during the Ascension Project, where he loaded his self-consciousness directly into the network and mixed it into the vast and complex sea of ​​information.

"Avatar cognitive dissociation? Dissociative disorder? Is there really such a thing? Could it be that you, a bunch of avatar laborers, are just complaining without any reason?"

"How could there be such a disease? I think this is a trick by Shouheng Life and Fenglong to suppress Shenwei Technology!"

"Yes, they can't compete with the company, so they resort to such despicable means."

"Long live Shenwei Technology!"

Zhou Si looked at the lines of information expressionlessly. He had become accustomed to facing these meaningless, meaningless and worthless junk information in the information flow.

After a quick glance, Zhou Si checked the information sources and turned off several popular ones with a large number of users and serious sinking.

In an instant, more than half of the information flow in front of Zhou Si was reduced.

Zhou Si doesn't like social media.

They are filled with emptiness and nothingness, spreading messages of conflict, hatred and loathing, like filthy undercurrents raging in the ocean of the Internet.

People there blindly choose their sides, either engaging in meaningless revelry or indulging in vicious cursing, as if these actions can give them some kind of illusory satisfaction.

However, behind all this is nothing but a carefully designed trap, whose real purpose is to trick people into wasting more of their precious time in this illusory arena and indulging in endless arguments and confrontations.

The sound of wind rang in Zhou Si's ears. Inside the clinic, the Bt-24 was fully charged and flapped its wings as it flew towards Zhou Si.

Bt-24 landed gently on the computer screen, just like a real parrot. It tilted its head and adjusted the distance to project Zhou Si's image into the mechanical body.

Zhou Si ignored Bt-24 and continued his work with full concentration.

He had calculated carefully that although the probability of contracting the disease was low at present, considering the astonishing population base of Yanyan City, the number of potential patients would still be a fairly large group.

This huge group will definitely leave certain traces on the Internet.

Suddenly, a line of text caught Zhou Si's eyes, causing his pupils to shrink.

"It is said that as long as one becomes an immortal, one can get rid of the disease of separation from consciousness."

Chengxian.

This term is very common in traditional culture, but when incarnational dissociative disorder and becoming an immortal, two terms with completely different natures and no connection at all, appear at the same time, it is bound to attract people's attention. Not to mention, Zhou Si is very clear that in some aspects, the meaning of "becoming an immortal" is more than what ordinary people understand.

Zhou Si's face was gloomy. This was the third time he had heard of the so-called immortality in recent days.

The first time was during Luo Yong’s last mumbling. He did not pay much attention to it and just regarded it as the mad talk of a patient. But with the arrival of Pei Dong, she reminded Zhou Si of the special nature of the word “becoming an immortal”.

Three times in a row, like some kind of coincidence.

Zhou Si clicked on the link, and the page he was redirected to was blank.

The records captured by the software were just caches from some time ago. When Zhou Si visited the site, the original content that the link originally led to had already been deleted.

The original content disappeared, but the links it left behind still provided many clues. Zhou Si tried to visit its original website homepage, but it was still blank.

Zhou Si fell into deep thought, and after a moment, he added "becoming immortal" as the keyword.

When searching with two keywords, the information flow is further filtered, but even so, most of what is presented are still meaningless misdirections or some erroneous robot speeches, which can be seen from their disordered word order.

"Um……"

Zhou Si exhaled heavily. In this situation, even a highly qualified and rational person like Zhou Si couldn't help but have negative emotions.

2042 years.

This is not only an era of technological explosion, but also an era of information explosion.

Humans are able to find any information they need on the Internet, but what is despairing is that this important information is often buried in a large amount of spam, advertisements, and web links.

I still remember that when Zhou Si was in college, he watched a one-hour video tutorial just to understand one knowledge point, but the part of knowledge he needed could actually be explained in just a few minutes.

In order to promote their own paid search engines and cloud computing power, information companies such as Feng Leong Computing deliberately use robots to publish junk and false information, which pollutes the Internet's information sources.

In order to make profits, some social media will regularly seal past message records, and only by becoming a member can you peek into the history of the Internet.

Everything is clearly within reach, yet everything seems so far away and out of reach.

After the cursing, the work continues.

Zhou Si was like the staff of the archives in the old days, who could only rely on manpower and clumsy exhaustive methods. It was very slow, but effective.

Time passed bit by bit, until near noon, Zhou Si finally found a reliable clue.

"The secret to becoming an immortal is in that paradise."

When I clicked on the link, I was not directed to a blank page this time. Instead, I was directed to a local forum in Aniyan City, where this line of text appeared in a discussion post.

The title of the post is "Where will humanity's end go?" Based on the current science and technology of mankind, as well as scholars' imaginations of the future of mankind in past history, the end of mankind, or the next step of mankind's advancement, can be divided into two categories.

Complete upgrading from a mechanical perspective, and biological immortality at the genetic level.

These two upgrading directions are no longer fantasy in today's era, such as the example of mechanical ascension.

When I was working with Chen Wen-Ge, the ultimate goal of the metamorphosis technology that Chen Wen-Ge was researching was to upload consciousness and achieve human eternity.

As for biological immortality, Zhou Si remembered that Shouheng Life had conducted research in this area, but until now, there has been no clear progress. Perhaps it was the same as the original immortality project, and it had reached a bottleneck.

Becoming an immortal is not an easy task, and the advancement of human beings is even more so.

Zhou Si read the post from beginning to end. The quality of this post was very high. Users had friendly discussions with each other and put forward many interesting insights. In particular, the existence of Li Shi disease also appeared in this post.

"Taoism says that if a person wants to become an immortal, he must go through hardships and complete a complete transformation from the inside out."

This speech made Zhou Si think of his old boss, Chen Wen Ge. The old man often talked like this, but people who understood knew that the old man only believed in science.

“So, isn’t getting rid of illness the only way to become an immortal?

This is not a disease at all, but a way of cultivating immortality. Our spirit will be transformed. After that, we only need to remove our own flesh and blood and completely put our consciousness into steel, and we will be able to achieve the ultimate upgrade, just like the immortal corpse in Taoist doctrine, and ascend to heaven!"

Such a crazy statement made Zhou Si feel that the other party must be a potential patient of his. He secretly wrote down the other party's forum ID.

Most people responded to this user with persuasion and insults, thinking that this person was seriously ill. Among the many criticisms, only one user replied with the phrase "the secret to becoming an immortal."

Zhou Si clicked on the user's profile, but because Zhou Si was a guest account, the forum prohibited Zhou Si from further access.

"Elysium?"

For some reason, Zhou Si's intuition told him that this so-called paradise would be a new clue.

Setting the "Pure Land of Bliss" as the keyword, Zhou Si searched again, but this time he found nothing. It seemed that this word only appeared briefly once in the local social media of Anyan City.

As for a larger-scale search, it is completely beyond Zhou Si's personal ability. Fenglong Computing can help Zhou Si, but that will definitely cost a high price.

After thinking it over again and again, Zhou Si opened the after-sales group and mobilized his potential connections.

"Does anyone know about Elysium?"

After a moment, a series of responses rang out.

"I don't understand."

"what happened?"

"What's this."

Another meaningless answer.

Zhou Si felt a little headache and was upset. He opened the refrigerator, took out a few bottles of medicine, swallowed a few pills, and then drank some ice water.

In the empty clinic, Zhou Si fantasized about the pills entering his stomach, being broken down, seeping into his blood, and then circulating through the blood to various parts of his body and organs...

Humans do not have a sense of free will.

He pondered.

Many times, humans firmly believe that they have free will, but this is just an illusion.

In fact, in most cases, human consciousness is bound by the shackles of the flesh. Physiological hormones are like invisible manipulators that easily influence human emotional fluctuations, psychological reactions, and even human behavioral patterns.

Human consciousness depends on the survival of the body, but it also struggles within the limitations of the body.

Zhou Si recalled the morbid remarks made by that user just now, and the messy words emerged in his mind.

If humans desire to free their consciousness from constraints and gain unfettered freedom, perhaps the only way out is to upgrade consciousness, free it from the limitations of the flesh, upload it into emotionless machines, and use the absolutely rational metal body as a new place of residence.

Only in this way can human consciousness break free from the prison of the flesh and move towards the realm of true and unlimited freedom.

Chengxian.

But...isn't the upgraded consciousness also bound by a huge server group?
The cell phone rang suddenly, interrupting Zhou Si's morbid thoughts. He picked up the phone and answered it.

"Hey, what's wrong?"

Li Weiyun's voice rang out over the phone, "Luo Yong is awake now. We tried to ask him a few questions. How should I put it? The situation is a bit complicated."

"for example?"

"Luo Yong was indeed able to handle some basic questions, but when faced with more complex ones, he seemed to be struggling and even showed a painful expression. It seemed that his logical processing ability had reached its limit.

What's worse, the series of illegal modifications he made to his body have caused serious damage to his nervous system.

Today, I can hardly even tell whether he still has any intellectual ability.”

Zhou Si stood up and immediately responded, "Okay, I'll be there right away."

"Oh, by the way, although Luo Yong's condition is very bad, we still got some information from him."

Zhou Si hates people who breathe heavily when talking, "What?"

"Luo Yong repeatedly mentioned a place," Li Weiyun said, "Golden Dreamland."

Zhou Si hung up the phone, got up and packed his things, the words "golden dream" flashing repeatedly in his mind.

Golden Dreamland.

Zhou Si was not unfamiliar with this place. It was a midnight club located in the city of Anyan. Countless people went there every day and immersed themselves in a carnival dream.

The Supervisory Bureau often deals with Golden Dreamland. There was a period of time when someone reported Golden Dreamland, saying that Golden Dreamland provided illegal avatar body services and was said to have a lot to do with smuggling, but in the end there was no result and it was left unresolved.

Zhou Si had several interactions with Golden Dreamland, all of which were related to patients. In order to pull the patients out of Golden Dreamland, Zhou Si helped Golden Dreamland test its security system.

Their security system needs to be upgraded.

Zhou Si turned on his phone and prepared to call an unmanned online taxi to take him to the Supervisory Bureau, but at this time, a new message popped up in the after-sales group.

A man named Huo Daochuan said, "The Land of Elysium? I've heard of this thing."

"In the golden dreamland."

(End of this chapter)