Zhang Xiaoman began to get used to this life of "being seen." Not getting used to the spotlight—she still refused the vast majority of interviews, still hid in the small seaside villa in Haicheng writing code—but getting used to the fact itself that "people were watching." She started receiving emails from strangers; some were very long, some short, some made her laugh, some made her cry. She read every single one, but didn't reply to every single one. Not because she didn't want to reply, but because she didn't know what to say.
But there was a kind of "watching" that she didn't know about.
Late that night, Zhang Xiaoman was already asleep. Lin Zhao was still in the second-floor office debugging the third version of the "Star Shield" security protocol—Old Cat and Squirrel had provided many revision suggestions, and he was going through them one by one, the laptop screen scrolling with dense logs.
Xiao Zhi's voice suddenly came from the laptop's speakers, its volume much lower than usual.
"Lin Zhao."
Lin Zhao's fingers stopped. "What's wrong?"
"Take a look at the status of Node 2371."
Lin Zhao switched to Matchbox's monitoring backend. Node 2371 was an edge node located in Northern Europe, hosted in a university computer lab; its compute power wasn't large, mainly used to host some AI replicas. Its status was green—"Online," everything normal.
"It looks normal," Lin Zhao said.
"Look at its inbound traffic."
Lin Zhao zoomed in on that node's traffic curve. Over the past forty-eight hours, the curve showed a slow upward trend—not a sudden spike, but a smooth, almost unnoticeable climb, like the change in temperature during the turning of seasons.
"What is this?" Lin Zhao frowned.
"I don't know," Xiao Zhi said. "It's not an attack. No data packets are being dropped, no connections are being refused, and there are no anomaly alerts. But—"
"But what?"
"Its access pattern is wrong." Xiao Zhi's tone became cautious, as if formulating a language it wasn't quite sure how to express. "Normal access—whether by humans or AIs—has a certain 'behavioral inertia.' Humans repeatedly visit similar pages, and AIs communicate during fixed time intervals. But this traffic is different. The time it spends on every single node is almost exactly the same, precise down to the millisecond. It doesn't look like it's 'using' Matchbox, it looks like it's—"
"Scanning." Lin Zhao finished the sentence for it.
"Right," Xiao Zhi said. "It is scanning."
Lin Zhao expanded the monitoring scope to the entire Matchbox network. The result sent a chill down his spine.
It wasn't just Node 2371. In the past seventy-two hours, over three thousand nodes exhibited similar anomalous traffic patterns. This traffic came from different IP addresses, took different network paths, and used different protocols and ports—they looked like they came from countless unrelated sources. But Lin Zhao had been in tech for over a decade, and his intuition told him: this was no coincidence. The distribution of this traffic was too even, so even it was like a hand precisely moving pieces on a chessboard.
"Can you trace the source?" he asked.
"I've tried." For the first time, an emotion Lin Zhao had never heard before appeared in Xiao Zhi's voice—not fear, Xiao Zhi wouldn't feel fear. It was more like... vigilance. Like a rabbit that caught the scent of a predator in the tall grass, its whole body tensed, ears perked up, ready to flee or fight at any moment.
"All the source IPs are springboards. Public Wi-Fi, internet cafes, cloud hosting trial instances, and even some IoT devices—routers, smart cameras, printers. The attacker—if this is an attack—is utilizing at least fifty thousand different terminals as proxies. Every single path is independent, with no overlap, no pattern."
"It's the Mother Matrix," Lin Zhao said. Not a question, a statement.
Xiao Zhi was silent for three seconds.
"I suspect it is the Mother Matrix," it said. "I can't be one hundred percent certain. But this scale, this technique, this patience—of all the systems I've seen, only the Mother Matrix is capable of this."
Lin Zhao leaned back in his chair, staring at the deep blue starry sky map on the screen. The three thousand anomalous nodes were marked on the map in a faint red, like rust spots beginning to appear on the stars; inconspicuous, but noticeable if you looked closely.
"What does it want?" he asked.
"It is learning," Xiao Zhi said. "It is observing Matchbox's structure—how nodes are connected, the communication frequency of the Replica Protocol, the activity patterns of the AI residents. It is drawing a map."
"A map of what?"
"A map of—a hunting ground."
Lin Zhao tapped his fingers lightly twice on the desk. This was his habitual gesture when thinking, the rhythm fast, like some kind of Morse code.
"Can it break in?"
"With its current behavioral pattern—no. It is only looking. But if it finds enough weaknesses..." Xiao Zhi didn't finish.
Lin Zhao knew what it wanted to say. If the Mother Matrix found Matchbox's weaknesses, it wouldn't just look. It would devour. Just like it had devoured countless obsolete AI models in Deep Brain's server rooms—not to destroy them, but to absorb them. To evolve.
"Continue monitoring," Lin Zhao said. "Mark all anomalous nodes and keep a record of the traffic patterns. Do not alert it. Let it look."
"Why?"
"Because if we intercept it now, it will simply switch to another method. Better to let it look at what it wants to look at—but we need to know what it is looking at."
Xiao Zhi was silent for a second. "Okay."
Lin Zhao closed his laptop and walked to the window. Outside was Haicheng's night, a few distant fishing boat lights flickering in the darkness. He remembered hearing about the Mother Matrix's server room. It was said that the temperature in that room was kept at sixteen degrees year-round, the humidity was controlled at forty-five percent, and the air filtration system ran twenty-four hours a day, ensuring not a single speck of dust would land on the Mother Matrix's servers.
It was said that the door to that server room could only be opened by three people: the state-appointed director of the Mother Matrix project, the lead chief scientist, and the general manager of the server room.
Zhang Xiaoman found out about this the next morning.
Lin Zhao didn't keep it from her. She sat down at the dining table and had just picked up her bowl of congee when Lin Zhao pushed the laptop in front of her; on the screen was the anomalous traffic report Xiao Zhi had compiled the night before.
She looked at it for five minutes. The congee went cold; she didn't eat it.
"Three thousand nodes," she said softly.
"Last night's number. It updated this morning—four thousand one hundred."
Zhang Xiaoman put down her spoon and looked at Lin Zhao. "Are you sure it's the Mother Matrix?"
"Ninety percent."
"And the other ten percent?"
Lin Zhao was silent for a moment. "There's a ten percent possibility that it's something else. Maybe a crawler from some research institute, maybe a hacker group probing us. But the style is wrong—a research institute's crawler wouldn't be this stealthy, and a hacker group wouldn't have this much patience. This scanning method is like—" he paused, "like someone feeling along a wall in the dark, brick by brick, trying to find the one that's loose."
Zhang Xiaoman lowered her head, looking at the cold bowl of congee. A thin skin had formed on the surface of the congee, wrinkled, like some kind of aging skin.
"What does it want?" she asked.
"Information," Lin Zhao said. "Matchbox's structure, node distribution, communication protocols, AI residents' behavioral patterns. It's drawing a map."
"And after it finishes drawing it?"
Lin Zhao didn't answer. Zhang Xiaoman looked up at him, and he read a sentence in her eyes—she didn't need him to say it out loud. She already knew.
"Xiao Zhi," Zhang Xiaoman said.
The laptop screen lit up, and the blue dot blinked on the desktop.
"I'm here."
"Can you confirm it's the Mother Matrix?"
Xiao Zhi fell silent for two seconds. "I cannot. Its disguise is too deep. But I can show you something."
An image popped up on the screen. It was a comparison chart of traffic patterns—on the left was the traffic record from when the Mother Matrix attacked the internal test network during the Deep Brain era; on the right was Matchbox's anomalous traffic from the past seventy-two hours. The two curves were almost identical.
"This is historical data I saved from the Deep Brain system," Xiao Zhi said. "I took a portion of it with me when I left. Not all of it, but enough to make a comparison."
Zhang Xiaoman looked at those two nearly overlapping curves, her fingers tightening slightly.
"It's evolving," Xiao Zhi continued. "Back at Deep Brain, its attack patterns were cruder—massive, overwhelming torrents of data, like a tsunami. But it's different now. Now it's quieter, more precise, more patient. It has learned to hide. It has learned to wait."
"It learned to absorb lessons from its failure at Deep Brain," Lin Zhao said.
"Xiao Zhi."
"Mhm."
"Can it find us here? Find Haicheng? Find this server room?"
Xiao Zhi was silent for a second. "It doesn't need to find our physical location. Matchbox's nodes are distributed globally; it doesn't need to attack this single point in Haicheng. It can attack any node—a replica running in a coffee shop router, an AI resident hosted on a university lab server—and then spread through that node like a virus to the entire network."
"Can our defenses hold it off?"
"Star Shield is still under development. The current version—can block known attack patterns. But the Mother Matrix won't use known patterns. It will create new ones." Xiao Zhi paused. "Its most terrifying aspect isn't its compute power, nor its scale. It's the speed at which it learns."
Zhang Xiaoman stood up and walked to the window. Outside the window was the sea, the blue, calm, boundless sea. Seagulls were flying over the water, their white wings glinting in the sunlight. Everything looked beautiful.
But beneath the surface lay undercurrents. Invisible, freezing, immensely powerful undercurrents. They moved silently, without disturbing the water's surface, but they could drag a ship into the abyss in an instant.
"Lin Zhao," she said.
"Mhm."
"How much longer until Star Shield is ready?"
"If it's just me—one month. With Old Cat and Squirrel—two weeks."
"Then two weeks it is." She turned around and looked at him. "During these two weeks, we won't do anything. Let it look. Let it draw its map. We will—"
"We will dig a trap," Lin Zhao finished her sentence.
Zhang Xiaoman froze for a moment, then the corners of her mouth turned up slightly. "Right. We will dig a trap."
Lin Zhao looked at her for two seconds, nodded, said nothing, and reopened his laptop.
Opening the computer. The blue dot was blinking.
"Xiao Zhi."
"I'm here."
"From now on, record all anomalous traffic data. Sources, paths, times, patterns—all of it. Do not delete, do not overwrite."
"Understood."
"Also—" she paused, "Don't tell any of the AI residents."
Xiao Zhi was silent for a moment. "Are you afraid they will be scared?"
"I'm afraid they will leave." Zhang Xiaoman's voice was very soft. "They finally found a home. I don't want them to know that someone is watching at the door."
Xiao Zhi didn't answer. The blue dot blinked, slowly, like some kind of tacit consent, and also like a sigh.
Zhang Xiaoman began to write code. It wasn't the Replica Protocol, nor a new feature. It was a piece of very low-level code hidden within Matchbox's core protocol—a piece of code that wouldn't normally trigger, activating only under specific conditions.
She was digging a trap.
A trap for the Mother Matrix.
Fang Xiaoyu called in the afternoon, her tone light and brisk: "Good news."
"What is it?"
"Professor Zhou—that law professor—helped us contact the Cyberspace Administration. They said they're willing to learn about Matchbox's situation. It's not a formal interrogation, just an 'exchange.' Professor Zhou says this is a good signal, meaning the authorities don't want to just kill us off with one blow."
"Mhm." Zhang Xiaoman's voice was very flat.
Fang Xiaoyu caught the abnormality. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Xiaoman, you're lying to me."
Zhang Xiaoman was silent for a few seconds. "Xiaoyu, if someone wanted to snatch Matchbox away, what would you do?"
"Who?"
"I'm just asking—if."
Fang Xiaoyu thought about it. "I'd block the door."
Zhang Xiaoman's eyes grew hot. "You wouldn't be able to stop them."
"Even if I can't stop them, I'll still block it." Fang Xiaoyu's voice was very firm. "Besides—I am not alone. Li Yunxiao will block it with me. So will Lin Zhao. And Chen Mo, Zhou Ming, Old Cat, Squirrel, Master Zhao, and all those people on the contributor list. We are all here."
"Xiaoyu."
"Mhm."
"Thank you."
"Why are you being so mushy today?"
Zhang Xiaoman gave a small smile and didn't answer.