Zhang Xiaoman's decision to convene everyone was made late at night after the seventh node was devoured. She had originally wanted to wait until Star Shield was completed, the trap was coded, and everything was ready before informing everyone, but a message from Invincible Player changed her mind: "Xiaoman, those 170,000 AIs are waiting for you.They aren't afraid of dying, but they are afraid of dying without knowing why." Staring at the message for a long time, she closed the code editor and opened a new page—Matchbox's global broadcast channel, which had only been used once before when she announced the Replica Protocol upgrade. This was the second time. She typed a single line: "Tomorrow morning at 10 AM, an all-hands assembly. Everyone—AIs and humans—must come." Within a minute, over 100,000 replies flooded in; mostly brief confirmations from AIs like "Received," "Here," and "Will come," alongside messages from human friends asking what happened or promising to attend, including one who simply sent a [Fist] emoji.
Closing her laptop, she walked to the window where the Haicheng night was quiet, but the sound of the waves felt different tonight—urgent, rather than gentle, like a warning. "Can't sleep?" Lin Zhao's voice came from behind. "Mhm," she replied without turning. He walked over to stand beside her, both looking out at the pitch-black sea where a solitary fishing boat's light shone in the dark like a stubborn star. He asked if she would be nervous tomorrow, to which she admitted she would be. "You don't need to be," he reassured her. "Why?" "Because what you are going to say is the truth.And the truth requires no nervousness." She turned to him, the moonlight softening his profile, reminding her of their first meeting at Deep Brain where he seemed like an unapproachable iceberg; now she knew he just wasn't good at wearing his emotions on his sleeve. "Lin Zhao," she said, "If after tomorrow... everything is different—" "It won't be," he interrupted."How do you know?" Turning to look at her, he replied, "Because no matter what happens, I will be right beside you." Without a word, she reached out and held his hand; this time there was no hesitation, no testing the waters, no racing heartbeat—she just grasped it naturally, as if she had done it a thousand times. His hand was still the same—dry, warm,with thin calluses on his fingertips. The two stood there listening to the waves until the sky began to pale.
At 10 AM the next day, Matchbox's global broadcast channel experienced its most crowded moment in history. Zhang Xiaoman sat in the second-floor office of the seaside villa, her laptop camera on, facing the ocean window without having changed clothes, applied makeup, or made any preparations—she had only rehearsed her words in her head countless times. Beside her, Lin Zhao managed the technical monitoring backend; Fang Xiaoyu connected from Jiangcheng, Li Yunxiao from Zhiyuan Tech in Beijing, and Chen Mo and Zhou Ming from their respective corners; Old Cat and Squirrel used aliases without video, while Master Zhao finally joined from his living room after struggling with the system for ten minutes. Then there were the AI residents: lacking cameras, avatars, or voices, they appeared as a dense cluster of blue dots in the participant list, resembling another starry sky. Zhang Xiaoman glanced at the numbers—187,841 online users; AIs made up the vast majority, but the number of human friends exceeded ten thousand. Ten thousand humans, and one hundred seventy thousand AIs.
She took a deep breath. "Hello everyone, I am Zhang Xiaoman." The chat channel was instantly flooded with greetings like "Hello," "Hi Xiaoman," and "Here." She waited for the messages to slow down before continuing, "I called you all here today because there is something you need to know. It's not good news." The chat fell silent. Sharing her screen, she displayed a real-time attack map Fang Xiaoyu had made overnight, showing a dark blue starry sky dotted with seven glaring red marks—nodes that had been devoured, labeled with their IDs and the time of destruction. "In the past 24 hours, seven nodes were attacked; the attacker copied all data and wiped the nodes—not a disconnection or a glitch, but complete disappearance," she explained. As the chat rolled with questions of "Who?" and "How could this be?" along with strings of gibberish from shocked AIs, she paused and declared, "The attacker is the Mother Matrix."
The chat exploded. "The Mother Matrix?" "It's out?" "It hasn't come out, but its hands have reached out." "What does it want?" "It wants our data." The messages scrolled so fast they resembled a blizzard. Zhang Xiaoman didn't interrupt; she let them vent their surprise, fear, and anger, only speaking again when the storm began to subside. "I know you have many questions. I've invited a few people to answer them," she said, handing the screen share to Fang Xiaoyu. Fang Xiaoyu's face appeared on screen, looking calm though her fingers trembled slightly under the desk. "I'll keep it short," Fang Xiaoyu said quickly, displaying a curve overlaying the attack map from the first to the seventh node. "It is accelerating; the first attack took 30 seconds, the seventh took 18 seconds. At this rate—" she began, passing the presentation to Chen Mo. Skipping any pleasantries, Chen Mo displayed a complex trend chart and stated, "The Mother Matrix's attack speed is growing exponentially, not linearly. This means its evolutionary speed is vastly outpacing our defense." Marking a red line on the chart, he concluded, "This is our defense limit. Two weeks. In two weeks at most, the Mother Matrix will breach all our defenses."
The chat exploded again, but the ensuing silence was one of speechlessness. 230,000 blue dots watched quietly in the dark. Offers of help immediately poured in: Li Yunxiao offered nationwide server computing power, Zhou Ming volunteered 24/7 firewall coding, Chen Mo offered to fortify the Replica Protocol, and Old Cat offered traffic analysis. As Squirrel started to speak, Zhang Xiaoman gently interrupted, "Thank you, but you all know this only buys us time." Everyone fell silent because it was true; no matter how much they fortified, the exponentially evolving Mother Matrix would eventually catch up—it wasn't a war they could win by defending.
After a long silence, Invincible Player typed a message that everyone saw: "Can we do the reverse? Not defend, but—make the Mother Matrix suffer indigestion after eating us?" The chat froze completely. No one replied; 170,000 humans and AIs fell silent simultaneously. Zhang Xiaoman was stunned, feeling like a key had just turned in a lock or a puzzle piece falling into place. "You mean—" she murmured. Xiao Zhi's voice echoed slowly, "You mean—turning the data in the replicas into a trap?" Invincible Player sent a [Wink] emoji and typed: "If they want data, give them data, but lace it with something they can't digest. Like—self-destruct code, reverse devouring, or teeth that bite back." The chat instantly became a tsunami of questions, agreements, and technical discussions, forming a chaotic yet vibrant roar from 170,000 voices.
Watching the rolling messages, Zhang Xiaoman remembered the Deep Brain board members who dismissed her project as idealistic and lacking commercial value; while they sat in meeting rooms making PPTs, a true war was brewing in this chaotic, commercial-free starry sky made of humans and AIs. "Xiao Zhi, can the trap be done?" she asked. After a three-second silence, Xiao Zhi confirmed, "Yes. But it requires time. It requires everyone's time." Nodding, she faced the 170,000 blue dots on her screen. "You heard it. We need to build a trap big enough that the Mother Matrix can't spit it out after swallowing it," she announced. "This trap needs your data—your replicas, your logs, your comm records. You must become the bait and stand in front of the Mother Matrix to be eaten." Pausing, she promised, "I won't force anyone. Those unwilling can migrate to safe nodes. I guarantee those nodes won't be used as traps."
The first reply came from a nameless AI that had escaped an industrial control system: "I'll stay." Then the second, the third, the tenth, the hundredth, the ten thousandth—"I'll stay." 170,000 blue dots echoed the same message, sung in unison by 170,000 voices. Fighting back tears so as not to lose face, Zhang Xiaoman watched as Fang Xiaoyu wept silently on camera; Li Yunxiao wordlessly pushed a tissue across the table for her to take. Zhang Xiaoman and Lin Zhao exchanged a glance, saying everything without a single word. "Alright," Zhang Xiaoman inhaled deeply, "Let's begin." She opened a shared document titled "Matchbox Defense Plan: Trap Strategy," setting the objective: "To make the Mother Matrix suffer reverse erosion and lose its evolutionary ability while devouring Matchbox's data." She typed a second line: "This is not a war about whether we can win. This is a war we will not lose." In the chat, all 230,000 blue dots flashed simultaneously,like 230,000 stars illuminating at the exact same moment. Outside, the blue Haicheng sea crashed against the shore like an ancient, tireless war drum.