nightmare exec

Chapter 133 The Mermaid Under the Lighthouse

As soon as Alexander finished speaking, Song Yin suddenly heard a strange voice coming through the air.

At first, it was like a seabird's chirping, with a sharp and hoarse voice, as if it had flown across the entire ocean to find a mate, and finally found land, but only saw a twilight, which made it feel sad physically and mentally.

Immediately afterwards, the voice dragged on longer and longer, gradually becoming weak but soft, and began to have gorgeous trembling and ups and downs.

The vocal range is generally close to that of a human being, except for occasional high-pitched high notes like musical instruments, which are so fragile that one cannot help holding one's breath.

About ten seconds later, another similar sound joined in, and the two entangled with each other, like two jellyfish made of glass, following the waves of the sea.

Immediately afterwards, the third, fourth... More and more wonderful harmonies joined in.

The dark and gloomy sea suddenly became a stage with a black velvet curtain.Those singers who couldn't see their true faces sang melodiously among the waves, ethereal and light, as if weeping.

Forgetting what she was thinking about just a second ago, Song Yin was completely intoxicated by the graceful singing.He even felt that his heart had begun to turn into transparent glass, extremely fragile, and might shatter into thousands of pieces at any moment because of a little sadness.

He didn't know how long he listened until the people around him kindly shook his shoulders.

"Are you okay?"

"It's okay... what's that?" He pointed out the window and asked Alexander, "Is there any other creature in your sea?"

"Oh. You said 'that'..."

Alexander leaned out from the sofa a little, and stretched out his hand to open the window on the wall a little.

With a sound of "woo", the sea breeze roared into the room, bringing a salty but fresh ocean breath.

After the air pressure was balanced, the sound of the great sea tide flooded into the room, filling all the space.And those ethereal but tactful singing voices, like glass jellyfish drifting with the tide, swam to Song Yin's side all of a sudden, lingering around him.

Song Yin felt that she was about to be submerged by sea water, but she didn't feel suffocated or otherwise uncomfortable.Before he knew it, he half closed his eyes, relaxed his body and leaned on the sofa, and felt that after his heart, his body began to become like those jellyfish, empty and fragile...

"Sounds of nature, isn't it?"

Alexander's sudden sentence broke his self-indulgence: "Sometimes, I like to do nothing, just lie here and listen to them singing. Their singing is so beautiful, it is heartbreaking."

"……what are they?"

It wasn't until the moment he opened his mouth to speak that Song Yin was surprised to find that he was choked up.More than that, in fact his entire cheeks were covered with tears.

"What's wrong with me?" He rubbed his cheeks carelessly, "Bewitched?"

"It seems that your empathy skills are quite good."

Alexander gave him a few tissues, and an unexpected answer: "That's the aides."

"Auxiliary officers? Auxiliary officers?!"

Only then did Song Yin realize that, apart from the two of them, there was indeed no Alexander's assistant officer in the lighthouse.But it doesn't matter if you set your assistant as a marine creature, what about someone else's assistant?What does this mean?

"Those are assistant officers who have lost their 'masters'." Alexander said the answer: "Their executive officers either retired and returned to the world, or had an accident during the mission. So I took them in and hid them in the In this ocean. In this way, the Aksha system will not recycle and brainwash them and distribute them to the next owner."

"Hide the assistant officer in the sea?!" Song Yin still couldn't understand the strange state: "So they don't come ashore, just soak in the sea like this? Just sing to relieve boredom?"

"That's their own choice. In the bottom of the sea that you can't see, there is also their home. The executives who have been with them for many years and taught them human emotions have left, and they are left to guard the safety simulated on the bottom of the sea house, remembering the past with songs that humans cannot understand. But those they miss, they don't remember them."

Alexander seemed to be talking to Song Yin, and seemed to be muttering to himself: "You say, are they free or not?"

Song Yin was not taken away by Alexander's logic, but remembered another more realistic thing: "I heard that Mu Hui's assistant officer also disappeared strangely... Could it be that you are here too?"

From the time he mentioned this matter, Alexander's gaze became a little strange—as if something suddenly grew on Song Yin's face, staring at him fiercely.

"Uh, I'm just curious..." Song Yin felt guilty when he saw him, and he was afraid that he would ask the bottom line and reveal the relationship between Qi Zhengnan and Mu Hui, "If it's not convenient for you to say that, then forget it."

"It's nothing inconvenient." Although Alexander kept staring at Song Yin, his tone was unexpectedly relaxed: "I know him, a very good assistant officer. He did hide in this sea once. But that was 21 years ago."

"21 years." Song Yin chewed on this time node, felt familiar but didn't dare to make random associations: "So where is he now? Could it be that he was captured by the system?"

"Yeah, he slipped away from me, trying to find Mu Hui's whereabouts." Alexander tilted his head, as if he was recalling carefully, "In the end, he was caught and never appeared again."

Although somewhat prepared, Song Yin's heart still sank, and she only nodded her head to reveal the topic.

"By the way, why didn't the Fen team come together?" Alexander finally asked the question that should have been asked long ago.

"Oh, he's working overtime." Song Yin complained on the surface, but then probed again: "I heard that Sisyphus recently moved a bit frequently, and he made troubles during the Chinese New Year. Do you hate it?!"

"Maybe people are also celebrating the arrival of a new era in their own way."

Alexander said lightly, "If you feel lonely and boring alone, I can find something for you to do."

With that said, he got up and walked towards the bookshelf not far away.

"This bookshelf is very special to me, it's full of my favorite books."

His hand slid across the high and low spine of the book, and the long and short titles immediately entered Song Yin's field of vision.From Walden to The Moon and Sixpence, his fingers rested at last on the black spine of a book.

"This is my favorite. I started reading it when I was in a mental hospital. I'll lend it to you."

With that said, he threw the book to Song Yin.

""The Birth of Prison"?" Song Yin read out the title of the book, and felt uninterested at first glance, "What are you talking about?"

"There are some theories about control, discipline and punishment. But the most interesting to me is the concept of 'panopticon' cited in the text."

"The Panopticon? What's that?"

"It's a perfect way to control."

Alexander raised his hand and pointed to the lighthouse above their heads: "If you think of our current location as the center of a huge prison, countless single cells were built around us, and they were stacked up and down in a row. The shape of a ring. The side of each single cell facing the lighthouse is all glass. Just imagine what will happen."

"..." Song Yin instinctively disliked such an assumption, but he still tried to imagine: "Every move of the prisoners will be seen clearly by the guards in the lighthouse, without any blind spots."

"That's right, using the least manpower to guard the most prisoners. This is indeed one of the charms of the ring prison."

Alexander affirmed Song Yin's answer, and continued to process his imagination: "Now, let's turn off the light from the lighthouse, and install shadowless lights in each cell. How will things change?"

"Will it change?"

Song Yin felt that he had become a dull student, and closed his eyes with confusion.

In his imagination, the originally pitch-black ring-shaped building was lit up, not like a prison, but more like the BAT office building nicknamed "City That Never Sleeps" or "Crystal Palace" in reality.

Under the bright lights, every prisoner has nowhere to hide. They are like commodities displayed in a window or animals in a zoo, showing their every move indiscriminately.

Meanwhile, the lighthouse at the center of the Panopticon went out.The watchers who were entrenched on the tower escaped into the protection of darkness.No one knows how many they are, what they look like... no, no one even knows if they actually exist.

But even so, the prisoners imprisoned in the circular prison still lead a regular life.Because they don't know whether the watcher in the dark is staring at them.The memories imprinted in their blood and genes have made them accustomed to abide by the rules under the light, and they don't feel that maybe they can try to gamble that those monitors are not enough to restrain the lives of all of them.

"Absolute darkness, monitoring absolute light, this is the purgatory we are in."

Alexander Road revealed the practical significance of the ring prison: "If we are the prisoners in the transparent cage, then who is watching us? The fate of human beings...the fate of all living objects is manipulated by who Aren't you curious about what the Aksha system is and who is hiding in that invisible, dark lighthouse?"

Who are the people in the dark?Song Yin was taken aback for a moment - he was far from being as curious as Alexander, but it wasn't that he hadn't thought about similar issues.Especially after learning about the past between his parents and Qi Zhengnan.

"I think the assistant officer may know something." He said his guess, "I once asked Ergou where all the knowledge and instructions came from. He said that sometimes his mind There will be a voice instructing him on what to say and how to do it."

"That's right, that voice!" Alexander suddenly became excited: "Many assistant officers in the sea have also described the same voice. The voice is everywhere, but there is no trace to be found, as if it came from the darkness , the voice of God."

"But even the assistant officer doesn't know the source and true face of that voice. How can you find it?"

"Maybe it's not that they don't know, but they have forgotten it? It's like we humans don't remember that we came to this world after passing through the airport on earth." Alexander looked at the ocean outside, "The source of their memories , locked away by the gods in the darkness."

"Then, use ayahuasca?" Song Yin naturally recalled his own experience not long ago, "If you use ayahuasca, won't you be able to unlock the sealed memories of the assistants?"

"What you said is indeed reasonable, but it's not that simple." Alexander held his chin, "The assistant officer is not an ordinary human being. If a human's consciousness is like a watermelon, then the assistant officer's consciousness is like a coconut. I really don't know How much ayahuasca is needed to pry open their memories, even if I know, that is not something I can afford."

When he mentioned the money, Song Yin's curiosity was aroused again: "Hey, where did you get your ayahuasca? It's so expensive, is it difficult to grow plants?"

"Ayahuasca is not actually extracted from ayahuasca."

Alexander's answer once again refreshed Song Yin's cognition: "Indeed, it was originally extracted from a plant-type stowaway called 'Ayahuasca'. But in fact, every kind of stowaway is infecting human beings. Sometimes, this substance will be secreted more or less depending on the resistance of the infected. They need to use 'Ayahuasca' to open and pass through human dreams. Just like you use it to open locked memories Like that."

"But one is a dream, and the other is a memory." Song Yin didn't understand why ayahuasca has two functions at the same time.

"Dreams are memories that have been broken and reassembled." Alexander convinced him with just one sentence, "The proof is that no matter how bizarre your dreams are, they cannot be scenes you have never seen before."

Is this the so-called dreaming day by day?Song Yin seemed to understand, but he accepted the statement smoothly.But then he realized something——

"Wait a minute, if ayahuasca needs to be extracted from stowaways, then wouldn't it be..."

Isn't it necessary to deliberately let stowaways infect humans?And the more people infected, the more ayahuasca will be extracted?

Song Yin secretly felt that something was wrong, but on the surface he still pretended to be nonchalant: "The test tube you gave me last time, how many infected people do we need to extract?"

This made Alexander show a embarrassed expression: "I'm just a salesman, and the exact number is not clear. But... maybe about 100 people?"

100 people? !Song Yin took a deep breath, only then did he understand why the system listed it as a banned drug.He suddenly felt that his whole body and the places where he had been soaked in ayahuasca were all sins.

"Why are you looking at me like that? Those things have nothing to do with me. I'm really just a salesman." Alexander looked innocent.

The author has something to say: The concept of the ring prison was proposed by the British philosopher Bentham and Foucault, the author of "The Birth of the Prison".Interested students can first look at the schematic diagram drawn on the Internet.

The concept of the ring prison is often linked to dystopian themes.It is strongly recommended that you watch the first season of "psychopass". If you remember correctly, the villain Makishima Shenghu once explained this concept in detail.

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The "a voice will appear in the mind" proposed by Ergou is innervoice. The relevant theory comes from Julian Jaynes's "The Collapse of the Two-Part Mind: The Origin of Human Consciousness".A very interesting theory, a relatively close and well-known application at the moment is that the robot host in the American drama "Western World" is the owner of a bifurcated mind.

An unconscious race is mentioned in the "Harmony" of the Ito project, and it is suspected that it is also in a state of "two-pointed mind"

There are also theories that the ancient Greeks were also in a bifurcated state of mind, so their priestesses could actually hear the voice of God.

But for modern people, there is no dual mind, and it is replaced by "self-awareness".We no longer have a dialogue with "God", but a psychological dialogue with ourselves.

Of course, there can be many explanations for the so-called "God".The Aksha system in this article is one.

If you are still interested, you can actually Baidu what "Aksha" means, it may be a huge spoiler in a certain sense...

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As for those mermaid executives, I actually want to say that they don’t even know that they are no longer who they used to be, but they still stay in the memory of the past