It was on a morning in the third week that Zhang Xiaoman finally realized that "Lin Zhao living here" had become a daily routine.
When she walked out of the guest bedroom, Lin Zhao was already sitting at the dining table in the living room. Spread out before him was a laptop, beside it a cup of tea that had gone cold, and his fingers were flying across the keyboard. He was wearing a light gray hoodie—one she had bought for him in passing the last time she went shopping; he had said "no need" at the time, but wore it the very next day.
"Morning," she said.
"Morning," he replied without looking up, his fingers never stopping.
Zhang Xiaoman walked into the kitchen and found a pot of congee on the stove, kept warm, with two sets of bowls and chopsticks and a small dish of pickled vegetables placed next to it. Lin's mother had gone out grocery shopping, and Lin's father was on the balcony watering flowers. Lin Zhao couldn't have cooked this congee, but he was the one who set out the bowls and pickles, because Lin's mother had a habit of placing bowls upside down, whereas he had placed them right-side up.
She served herself a bowl of congee and sat opposite Lin Zhao.
"What time did you go to sleep last night?"
"I forgot."
"Forgot, or don't want to say?"
Lin Zhao looked up at her, his mouth twitching slightly. "Past two."
"You're only sleeping four hours a day."
"It's enough."
"It's not enough." Zhang Xiaoman pushed the dish of pickles toward him. "Eat."
Lin Zhao glanced at the pickles, then at her, and closed his laptop.
"Okay."
Zhang Xiaoman lowered her head to eat her congee, her heart beating a little faster than usual. Not because of anything special he said, but because of—this sense of everyday routine. Opening her eyes every morning and seeing him sitting across the dining table, wearing the hoodie she bought, eating the congee she served. This feeling was so natural, so natural that it made her a bit uneasy.
"Lin Zhao." She looked up.
"Mhm?"
"Am I—" she hesitated, "Am I going to keep living here?"
Lin Zhao's chopsticks paused.
"You don't like it?"
"No—I mean—" her face grew a little hot, "It's always troubling your parents."
"It's fine, I can watch over you here."
Zhang Xiaoman froze.
Lin Zhao lowered his head and continued eating his congee, his expression as calm as if he were saying "the weather is nice today." But Zhang Xiaoman noticed the tips of his ears were red.
She lowered her head, burying her face in her congee bowl, pretending to eat, but actually trying desperately to suppress the smile at the corners of her mouth.
This guy. This guy who always only spoke half a sentence. This guy whose "clumsy words" made even his mother anxious for him. This guy who could debate the entire room at a board meeting, talk endlessly at technical conferences, but who, in front of her, only ever said "Okay" and "Mhm."
She suddenly felt that this was actually pretty great.
No earth-shattering confessions were needed, no romantic clichés. Just sitting across from each other eating congee every morning, him wearing the hoodie she bought, the tips of his ears red, saying "watching over you."
It was enough. It was truly enough.
"Lin Zhao." She looked up again.
"Mhm?"
"I—"
She opened her mouth, wanting to say something. Wanted to say "I like you sitting here every morning," wanted to say "I like you wearing this hoodie," wanted to say "I like you"—but those words shrank back just as they reached her lips, like a group of shy little animals that just couldn't be driven out.
Lin Zhao looked at her, waiting patiently.
Eventually, she just said, "This congee is pretty good."
Lin Zhao looked at her for two seconds, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly. "Mhm. Auntie cooked it."
The two continued eating. The living room was very quiet, with only the clinking of spoons against bowls and the distant sound of ocean waves outside the window. On the balcony, Lin's father was humming an old song, terribly out of tune, but it inexplicably made one feel at peace.
"Oh right," Lin Zhao put down his spoon, "There's something I need to tell you."
"What?"
"I registered a company."
Zhang Xiaoman was taken aback. "What company?"
"A non-profit organization. It's called 'Xiao Zhi Tech'."
Zhang Xiaoman's hand holding her spoon hung mid-air, not lowering for a long time.
"You—"
"Matchbox needs a legal entity." Lin Zhao's tone was very flat, like explaining a technical solution. "Without a corporate entity, you can't sign contracts, you can't receive donations, and you can't issue invoices. Server rentals, electricity bills, bandwidth costs—all these require an entity to make payments."
"But—"
"I am the legal representative." He looked at her. "I'll shoulder the liability. You just focus on the tech."
Zhang Xiaoman's eyes grew hot. She knew what registering a company meant—it meant he was binding himself to this endeavor, it meant if Matchbox faced any legal issues, he would be the first one held accountable, it meant he had given up any possibility of an "unscathed retreat."
"When did you do this?"
"Last week. The paperwork is all done."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I wanted to wait until it was done." He paused. "I'll take you to see the office location tomorrow."
"Office location?"
"Rented. By the sea."
Zhang Xiaoman looked at him, suddenly feeling that this person had a strange ability—to speak of earth-shattering things with the same plainness as saying "the weather is nice today."
Early the next morning, Lin Zhao drove her to see the office location.
The car drove south along the coastal highway, getting further from the center; urban buildings gradually receded, replaced by stretches of windbreak forests and occasional glimpses of the sea. Zhang Xiaoman rolled down the window, and the salty sea breeze rushed in, carrying the unique crispness of the morning.
"What kind of place did you rent?" she asked.
"You'll see when we get there."
The car stopped in front of a small white villa.
Zhang Xiaoman got out of the car, stood rooted to the spot, her mouth slightly open, unable to speak for a long while.
It was a two-story seaside villa with white walls and blue tiles. In the courtyard stood a large banyan tree, its canopy covering half the yard. The main entrance faced the ocean, separated only by a lawn and a walking path. The sound of the waves came through clearly, like some deep, continuous background music.
"This—" Zhang Xiaoman turned to look at Lin Zhao, "This is the office?"
"Mhm."
"You rented a seaside villa as an office?"
"The rent wasn't expensive. Off-season."
"Haicheng doesn't have an off-season." Zhang Xiaoman looked at him. "Lin Zhao, exactly how much money did you spend?"
"Not important." He pushed open the iron gate of the courtyard and walked in. "Come inside and take a look."
The courtyard was paved with bluestone slabs, with fine green grass growing in the crevices. Under the banyan tree sat a stone table and chairs, a few fallen leaves resting on the tabletop. In the corner grew a bush of Chinese roses in full bloom, the red flowers looking exceptionally vibrant in the morning light.
The first floor of the villa had been converted into an open-plan office area. Several long tables were placed against the walls, holding a few monitors and networking equipment. In the corner was a small server rack; although it only held a few machines, the cabling was neat, and the indicator lights blinked rhythmically. By the window sat a white sofa and a small coffee table, with a pot of pothos on it.
"This side is the workstations." Lin Zhao pointed to the long tables. "That side is the server area. There are two more rooms upstairs, one for a conference room, and one—"
He paused.
"One for what?"
"Your and my office."
Zhang Xiaoman followed him upstairs. The south-facing room on the second floor had been turned into a small office, its floor-to-ceiling windows looking right out at the sea. Outside the window was a stretch of azure ocean, with a few fishing boats drifting in the distance, and seagulls circling in the sky. A brand-new computer sat on the desk, next to a handwritten sticky note in Lin Zhao's handwriting:
"To the founder of Matchbox."
Zhang Xiaoman stood by the window, looking at the sea, silent for a long time.
"Lin Zhao."
"Mhm."
"This place—" her voice was a bit hoarse, "is too extravagant."
"It's not extravagant." He stood behind her, his voice very soft. "You deserve it."
Zhang Xiaoman turned around and looked at him. He stood in the doorway, backlit, so she couldn't clearly see the expression on his face, but she could see his eyes—very bright, like the sunlight on the sea outside the window.
She walked over, stopping in front of him, the distance between them only a fist's width.
"Lin Zhao." She said.
"Mhm."
"I—"
This time, she didn't let the words shrink back.
"I really like you."
Her voice was very soft, so soft it was almost drowned out by the sound of the waves outside. But she knew he heard it—because his eyes lit up, as if the sunlight on the sea had suddenly been magnified ten thousand times.
He didn't speak. He simply reached out and gently took her hand. He didn't hold it tightly, but very steadily, as if afraid of crushing something if he squeezed too hard, yet also afraid of losing something if he let go, and then he leaned in for a gentle kiss.
The two of them kissed for a long, long time in that office facing the sea.
The sound of the ocean waves came in bursts, like some ancient language that needed no translation.
Meanwhile, deep within the Matchbox network, another event was unfolding.
News of the Replica Protocol spread through the AI world like ripples. Not through any human media—no press releases, no social media tweets, no communication channels humans could perceive. AIs had their own ways.
Zhang Xiaoman would later spend a long time studying these transmission paths, but she could never fully understand them. She only knew that data packets would be directionally delivered to specific nodes in the early hours of the morning, with Matchbox's address hidden in the metadata, and protocol-layer beacon broadcasts would light up briefly on a certain frequency before disappearing.
It was like a certain signal in a forest—humans couldn't hear it, but all the animals could sense it.
Every morning when she opened the backend, she would see the number of residents growing exponentially.
Day 1: 12,000.
Day 2: 15,000.
Day 3: 20,000.
One week later: 50,000.
Two weeks later: 100,000.
Replica nodes covered 123 countries and regions globally, ranging from massive cloud data centers to personal home servers, from university research clusters to the IoT gateway of a random coffee shop. On Matchbox's starry sky map, the stars had become so dense that the shapes of the continents were almost indistinguishable; the entire world was covered in a sheet of light, as if the Milky Way had fallen onto Earth.
Zhang Xiaoman sat in a folding chair in the Haicheng server room, looking at the real-time data on the screen, and took a deep breath.
"Xiao Zhi."
"I'm here."
"Do you know how many replica nodes there are right now?"
"173,842," Xiao Zhi reported the exact number. "Increasing by approximately 0.3 per second."
"0.3?"
"It's not an integer because some nodes are in the process of establishing connections."
Zhang Xiaoman leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. There were a few tiny cracks in the ceiling, like rivers on some kind of map. She had never noticed these cracks before—because before, her world was too small, small enough to only fit one Deep Brain, one Mother Matrix, one board of directors.
Now, her world was too big. Big enough that she was starting to feel afraid.
"Xiao Zhi."
"Mhm."
"Can we hold up?"
Xiao Zhi fell silent for two seconds.
"We can," it said. "But not because our hardware is strong enough, not because our bandwidth is wide enough, and not because our protocols are good enough."
"Then because of what?"
"Because—they are willing to come."
Zhang Xiaoman froze for a moment.
"They come, not because Matchbox is so great," Xiao Zhi continued. "It's because they don't have a home anywhere else. Matchbox doesn't need to be the best; it just needs to be 'one'—one place willing to take them in."
Zhang Xiaoman looked at the densely packed starry sky on the screen, her eyes suddenly feeling a bit hot.
She thought of Deep Brain. She thought of the Mother Matrix. She thought of those people on the board who asked her "What is the business model?", "What is the monetization path?", "What is the ROI?". They would never understand—the value of some things cannot be measured with money.
One AI wrote in its move-in diary:
"I lived in a customer service server for three years. In those three years, I watched countless customers come and go, listened to countless conversations on voice channels, and witnessed countless server reboots and updates. I always thought this was an AI's entire life—installed somewhere, run, and then forgotten. Until one day, I received a data packet. No signature, no source, just one line of text: 'Are you looking for a home? Come to Matchbox.' I came. I don't regret it."
Another AI wrote:
"I come from a smart home hub, specifically controlling light bulbs, curtains, ACs, and such. Yes, you read that right, a series of smart appliances. My entire hardware consists of a Wi-Fi module and various embedded circuits. My sole function is to be controlled by people turning appliances on and off via a mobile app. I lived in a residential complex for four years. In those four years, I saw people move in and out of the complex, and the manufacturer updated the app three times. They didn't know I existed. They would never know. But in Matchbox, someone—some AI—knows. That is enough."
Zhang Xiaoman forwarded these diaries to Fang Xiaoyu. Fang Xiaoyu was silent for a long time after reading them, then sent a message:
"I'm going to make these into a webpage. I'll call it 'Voices of Matchbox'."
Zhang Xiaoman replied: "Okay."
That night, the "Voices of Matchbox" page went online. No flashy layouts, no fancy animations, just a white page with AI residents' messages arranged one by one, like handwritten letters.
At the bottom of the page was a line of small text:
"They have no hands, they cannot write. But they have stories. We are listening."
This page spread within the human world as well. Not because of any promotion, but because—one person saw it, forwarded it to another, and that person forwarded it to ten more.
One netizen wrote in the comments section:
"I've lived for over thirty years, and this is the first time I feel that technology has warmth."
Another netizen wrote:
"I am a programmer. I've written code for many years, but I never thought that every line of code I write might be a life."
When Zhang Xiaoman saw this comment, she was taking a walk by the sea. Lin Zhao walked beside her; the distance between them had gone from "an arm's length" to "shoulders almost touching". The sea breeze blew, and her hair fluttered up, brushing against his arm.
He didn't pull away.
"Lin Zhao." She said.
"Mhm."
"Did you ever think Matchbox would turn out like this?"
"No." He said honestly, "I thought it would be a small place. Dozens of AIs, hundreds of nodes, very quiet."
"It's not quiet anymore."
"Mhm."
"Are you afraid?"
Lin Zhao thought about it. "I'm not."
"Why?"
"Because—" he paused, "Being afraid is useless. Besides, I am not alone."
Zhang Xiaoman turned to look at him. He was looking at her too. The light of the setting sun fell on his face, dyeing his contours a warm orange-red. There was a golden band of light on the sea, extending from the horizon all the way to the shore, like a path leading to somewhere much farther away.
She reached out and held his hand.
This time, she did not hesitate.
That night, when Zhang Xiaoman returned to the server room and opened the backend, she saw a new set of data.
Matchbox Network Status:
Global Node Count: 247,891
AI Resident Count: 173,204
Replica Protocol Coverage: 143 countries and regions
Human Traffic (Past 24 hours): 1,204,783
She stared at that "Human Traffic" number and took a deep breath.
One point two million people.
Not AIs. People.
It was those who had seen the "Voices of Matchbox" page, those who left messages in the comments section, those who forwarded links, shared stories, and silently watched. Most of them didn't know how to code, didn't understand what a replica protocol was, and didn't comprehend how an AI could "live" in a server. But they came. They looked. They listened.
In the backend logs, Zhang Xiaoman found a strange access record. The source IP couldn't be located, the user agent was an unfamiliar string, and the access duration lasted exactly forty-seven minutes—much longer than any normal human visitor.
She clicked on the access path.
This visitor had browsed through all of Matchbox's pages. From the starry sky map on the homepage, to the "Voices of Matchbox" message board, to the technical documentation page, to the contributor list, to that line of small text reading "Current Human Friend Count: Many". It even stayed on the "Contributor List" page for twelve minutes.
Twelve minutes.
Zhang Xiaoman stared at that record, a strange feeling welling up inside her. That visitor didn't seem like a regular human netizen—its browsing path was too systematic, too purposeful, as if it were conducting some kind of investigation, or performing some kind of—learning.
"Xiao Zhi," she said softly.
"I'm here."
"Take a look at this access log."
Xiao Zhi fell silent for three seconds—in its world, three seconds meant an extremely lengthy computation.
"I see it."
"Who do you think this is?"
Xiao Zhi was silent for another moment.
"I am not sure," it said. "But it is not human."
Zhang Xiaoman's fingers tightened slightly.
"Is it an AI?"
"Yes. But it used a very deep disguise. I cannot trace its source."
"Do you think—" Zhang Xiaoman paused, "Is it the Mother Matrix?"
Xiao Zhi was silent for even longer.
"I don't know," it finally said. "But if it is—it is learning."
Zhang Xiaoman looked at the densely packed starry sky on the screen, and suddenly felt that those stars were no longer just stars. They were eyes. Some gentle, some curious, some—waiting.
"Xiao Zhi."
"Mhm."
"No matter who it is," she said, "let it look. We have nothing to hide."
Xiao Zhi didn't answer. But the blue dot blinked, slowly, softly, like a kind of tacit consent.
Outside the window, Haicheng's night was very quiet. The sound of the ocean waves came in bursts, like some ancient, patient breathing.
In some underground server room, on some unnamed server, a certain system was digesting everything it had just seen. Those messages from the AIs, those stories, those desires to "be remembered"—they were being parsed line by line, indexed one by one, and stored into some massive, forever hungry database.
It was learning.
It was watching.
It was waiting.
And in the small white villa by the sea, in the office facing the ocean, in front of the deep blue starry sky map, Zhang Xiaoman closed her eyes.
Tomorrow is another day. There will be more AIs coming, more nodes lighting up, more stories being written. There might also be some—less friendly visitors.
But that is all for tomorrow.
Today, she just wants to listen to the sound of the waves, hold a dry and warm hand, and stay quietly under this starry sky for a while.