Countdown: Humanity's struggle to survive against yesterday

Consciousness Day, December 29, 2046.

At 2:17 a.m., in Beijing, at the National Cybersecurity Emergency Command Center.

A stark, cold light filled the semi-circular monitoring hall, where hundreds of electronic screens were neatly arranged, and data streams flowed silently like a long silver river.

The lobby was devoid of the usual hushed conversations of those on night duty; only the crisp, short tapping of mechanical keyboards filled the air. The cool breeze from the constant temperature system carried a barely perceptible tension, pressing down on the shoulders of every staff member.

Chief Network Defense Engineer Wang Ping hovered his fingertips above the mechanical keyboard, his knuckles turning white, his gaze fixed on the giant main screen in the center.

A line of dark red warning code at the top of the screen, like an unhealable crack, starkly spans the data stream.

[Anomaly cross-border traffic detected. Attack source: multiple anonymous overseas nodes. Attack level: Red - High Risk]

No one knows better than the people here what this line of code means.

It has been only 24 hours since humanity discovered and announced that there is no time travel phenomenon in the universe.

Initially, everyone thought it was a bizarre natural disaster that affected the entire universe.

But now they are told that time flows at a constant rate in low Earth orbit, a thousand kilometers away.

The universe does not flow backwards.

Only Earth is locked in a daily cycle of reincarnation by an invisible, unknown force.

This top-secret report was kept in the highest-authority folder of the command center. Before it was made public to the world, the higher-ups predicted that ambitious countries would take risks after the news was made public.

Someone might launch a covert attack when the world's population is ignorant and social order is on the verge of collapse.

The prediction ultimately became a reality.

"Buzz—"

The red alarm lights in the lobby suddenly flashed rapidly, and a sharp alarm pierced the silence.

The civilian network monitoring section on the right instantly exploded with large patches of red staining, like pure white cloth being rapidly stained with blood.

"Report! The civilian power grid dispatching system in the three southern provinces has been compromised. A vulnerability has been found in the three-tiered firewall, and malicious code is tampering with the power supply timing!"

"A worm virus has been implanted in the city's transportation IoT system, causing chaos in major railway lines such as the Beijing-Guangzhou and Shanghai-Kunming lines, resulting in widespread traffic jams!"

"Public security camera signals have been hijacked; overseas hackers are capturing live footage from domestic civilian surveillance systems in bulk and cracking encrypted cloud storage data!"

Urgent reports rang out one after another, and cold sweat beaded on the foreheads of the young technicians, their voices trembling slightly with nervousness.

On the screen, countless anonymous overseas IPs surged out like a tide from the international server jump pads, relentlessly attacking my country's civilian, commercial, and even semi-military network defense barriers without regard to priority or loss.

This is not a precise, single-point theft; it is a blatant, overwhelming bombardment.

"It's Apple and NPC getting involved now..."

Such intensive and precise manipulation cannot be accomplished entirely by human labor alone, unless hackers from all over the world join forces, which is obviously impossible. It can only be achieved by two other super AIs.

"Activate the Luoshu Defense..."

Wang Ping's pupils contracted slightly, and his fingertips slammed down, typing out a series of defensive commands.

The black combat chair slid automatically as he quickly switched between multiple background access interfaces. His cool, deep voice pierced through the alarm, steadily issuing the order: "Do not block shallow IPs, allow them all. Activate the Tianyan Level 2 defense architecture, lure the enemy in deep, and give Luo Shu an extra meal tonight."

Chen Zhou, the deputy beside him, turned his head sharply, his eyes full of confusion: "Engineer Wang? Let the traffic flood in? Civilian systems can't withstand this kind of high-intensity impact. Within three hours, the networks of half of the coastal cities will be completely paralyzed!"

"What they want is paralysis."

Wang Ping stared at the constantly changing attack trajectories on the screen, his eyes flashing with a cold light.

He clicked on the simplified attack tracing code deciphered in the background, and several lines of encrypted characters popped up in the corner of the screen. The characters' origins vaguely pointed to several overseas hostile forces' servers.

The other party is clever, and despicable enough.

All countries are currently trapped in a major regression, making weapons testing, military mobilization, and physical warfare meaningless.

No matter what military action is taken, when the time comes, everything will be reversed and reset. Shells will be returned to their chambers, tanks will be returned to their depots, and all physical conflicts will be smoothed over by time.

With physical warfare completely ineffective, information warfare has become the only remaining weapon.

Those foreign forces have long since detected the subtle signs of normal time in outer space through covert monitoring methods.

They knew that the current peace enjoyed by humanity was only a temporary illusion, and that once the truth about deep space being unaffected was revealed, the global landscape would be completely rewritten.

Therefore, they want to take the initiative.

By exploiting the general public's ignorance of time travel, hackers created widespread social chaos.

Power outages, traffic jams, leaked surveillance footage, and financial system glitches—in the daily cycle, repeated panic can constantly erode the psychological defenses of ordinary people.

No need for gunfire; just a few days of network outages can plunge city after city into chaos, undermining domestic order from within.

"How many attack groups does the enemy have?" Wang Ping asked in a deep voice.

"Preliminary assessment indicates that Apple, NPC, and at least seven overseas hacker groups, in conjunction with hundreds of anonymous civilian hacker organizations, have a total of over ten million attack threads, with distributed denial-of-service attacks continuing at full capacity." Chen Zhou quickly retrieved the data, his tone grave. "The other side is not hiding any malicious intent, disregarding server losses, and is clearly trying to violently overwhelm our civilian network."

On the screen, the red intrusion data stream continued to surge wildly, and warning pop-ups about the civilian firewall breaking kept appearing.

In a northern city, the parameters of the intelligent water control system were tampered with, causing water pressure imbalance in the urban area and water outages in some high-rise residential buildings; online live streaming and social media server interfaces experienced glitches, making normal communication impossible, and online complaints and hostility surged exponentially.

The city's fabric is being brutally torn apart by invisible black code.

"Have you identified the mastermind?"

"Found it. After the multiple layers of springboards were removed, the core command server was located in a secret military server room in a country in the Western Hemisphere." Chen Zhou opened the encrypted tracing map, with a red marker fixed on the other side of the ocean. "They deliberately left traces, like a blatant probe."

"A test?"

Wang Ping's fingertips traced the cool metal edge of the keyboard, and he understood.

The other side is testing our country's cyber defense limits, testing our emergency response speed under the special rules of time reversal, and even more so, testing whether we have grasped the truth that cosmic time has not reversed.

If we were to deploy the highest-level "Luoshu" defense computing power on a large scale, it would be tantamount to exposing the detection results; if we were to remain silent and back down, the civilian systems would continue to collapse, and the daily chaos would lead to an irreparable disaster for the people.

A dilemma, a deadlock.

"Report to the central government."

Wang Ping took a deep breath, his gaze sweeping over all the technical personnel steadfastly holding their posts in the hall. His voice was firm and powerful. "Request the temporary unlocking of the Tianyan System's military isolation module to establish a two-layer defense perimeter. The first layer is the civilian purification network, to eliminate worm viruses in the civilian system and maintain the city's basic operations; the second layer is the counter-tracking network, to lock down all attack nodes."

"clear!"

Urgent orders were issued at each level, and the command center instantly entered a state of maximum combat readiness.

The silver-white defense code, like a giant shield erected, slowly spread out in the virtual cyberspace, firmly resisting the surging torrent of black attacks.

But the next second, the main screen suddenly flickered violently.

A line of crimson English gibberish forcefully broke through the defense barrier and jumped abruptly into the lower right corner of all staff members' screens, arrogant and conceited.

Under the cycle of reincarnation, disorder endures forever.

Chen Zhou's face darkened: "The other side actually breached the shallow defenses and forcibly implanted pop-up code; this is an open declaration of war against us!"

"It's not a declaration of war, it's a notification."

Wang Ping stared intently at the line of gibberish, his fingertips rapidly deciphering the hidden code. Soon, a string of obscure information was revealed. Looking at the content, his expression turned completely cold.

"They're not just going to destroy civilian networks."

On the screen, a blurry satellite survey map of the orbit slowly unfolds, with clear altitude markings: one thousand kilometers.

The other side is also observing space.

At the end of the image is a short, encrypted sentence that is both blunt and malicious, blatantly exposing the other party's ambition:

Since Earth is trapped in yesterday, let us seize tomorrow's starry sky.

The cold light reflected in Wang Ping's dark eyes, and the sound of keyboard typing in the hall grew more and more intense.

The Earth is still asleep in its ignorant cycle of reincarnation, and ordinary people on the street are still laughing and crying over the same old day. No one knows that the invisible battlefield of the internet has already been filled with the smoke of war.

Amidst the dark torrent of code, the power struggle between nations quietly begins.

The cage of time has not yet been broken, but human warfare has already arrived in the next era ahead of schedule.