Chapter 8: Sorcerer

Chapter Nine: Sorcerer

On the evening of May 16, roughly ten nautical miles north of Iceland.

A hundred meters beneath the sea lay a giant, egg-shaped underwater factory. Inside the egg, an unfinished submarine stood in the center of the workshop. It was ten meters high, eight meters wide, and about ninety meters long. Numerous toy dwarfs, roughly a meter twenty tall and dressed in green clothes, green hats, and pointed cloth shoes, bustled in and out of the submarine with light, brisk steps. If these dwarfs had been making toys instead of weapons, the place could easily have been mistaken for Santa Claus's hideout.

In a computer room above the factory floor was a young man in his early twenties, about the same age as Gu Wen. He lay on an enormous sofa with complex control panels and keyboards built into both armrests. In front of him, a curved display wrapped around him in a hundred-and-twenty-degree arc. More than a dozen smaller windows filled the screen. Some were packed with baffling data, some showed structural plans for particular sections of the submarine, and others displayed feedback and requests for instructions from the toy dwarfs.

This man, whose hands at full speed moved as though he were having an epileptic seizure, yet still executed every computer operation with perfect accuracy, was known as Sorcerer.

Almost every genius does something astonishing as a child, and Sorcerer was naturally no exception.

In third grade, he spent a week completing the first substantial, reasonably complex application of his life: “Knocker,” also called “knoock.”

It was very simple to use. First, install knoock on a phone, laptop, portable smart player, or even an sp—an electronic pen with audio recording, writing, scanning, portable hard drive, and other functions. Then, regardless of which device you had installed it on, all you had to do was walk up to an electronic door, press a button, and wait anywhere from a few seconds to a minute. The door would open…

Sorcerer originally designed the program to deal with his habit of being late for school. Later, however, several older students who bullied him discovered his little secret and threatened him with violence until he let them download knoock.

Before the semester ended, those students and their entire families had all been arrested. At any rate, Sorcerer never heard anything about any of them again. All he knew was that it had something to do with burglaries at several banks in the city.

Eventually, the police found Sorcerer too. They sent an officer to speak to him, confiscated his program, and strictly forbade him from ever writing anything like it again. After the knoock incident, Philip Nord—Sorcerer's real name—went onto HL's list of special individuals requiring close attention.

Two years later, in fifth grade, Sorcerer happened to watch an old film called Terminator 2. Afterward, he went to an old-movie rental shop and caught up on the entire series. He was astonished. Why had an idea someone had come up with back in the twentieth century still not become reality?

And so, by his second year of middle school, after several years of determined effort and painstaking work, he finally completed something called “Skynet.” To celebrate this modest success, Sorcerer, in excellent spirits, casually hacked a news website in Tiandu and scrawled a line like graffiti across its pages of dreary, fawning reports: justforfun, xd.

His methods were so formidable that the authorities could not quickly locate him by technical means. In the end, they only managed to track him down through hardware limitations and a process of elimination, combined with traditional criminal investigation.

After his arrest, Sorcerer was taken to HL headquarters in Tiandu.

The man responsible for questioning him was an HL agent named Kou Linzai, a major. His position was not particularly high, but his status certainly was. Among the nobility, he had already risen to viscount, and he had also married a woman of the imperial kin. Unfortunately, her early death had left him a widower. A nobleman who had acquired imperial-kin status, only twenty-five years old and so handsome that his own good looks woke him up every morning—with qualifications like those, he should reasonably have had at least a dozen beautiful young women falling over one another to throw themselves into his arms after his wife's death. But Kou Linzai really seemed to have no intention of remarrying. Ever since she died, he had carried a wine gourd at his waist all day, taking a few swigs whenever he had nothing to do. Wherever he went, he looked drunk. On duty or off, he was always like this. To outsiders, he was already a hopeless case. But with his status, as long as he insisted on showing up for work at HL, you could hardly fire him. In time, people gave him a nickname: Drunken Viscount. …

That day, Lord Drunken Viscount staggered into the interrogation room with Sorcerer's file tucked under his arm, his gait alternating between a crab's and a zombie's. He pulled out a chair, dropped into it as though falling over, crossed one leg over the other, opened the folder, and flipped through a few pages, muttering, “Hmm… second year of middle school… Skynet… and fun, eh…” Suddenly he snapped the folder shut and slapped the table. Glaring at Sorcerer, who was only thirteen or fourteen, he let out a long breath and demanded, “Talk! What is your purpose in coming to Earth?!”

That was roughly how Sorcerer's first formal arrest went. It was also the only arrest of his life.

The higher-ups in Tiandu proposed two ways of dealing with the boy. The first was to find a political commissar to lecture him for a few years and brainwash him into serving the Empire. The second was to throw him straight into Tidal Prison to wait for death. He could choose between the two. Sorcerer pretended to accept the first option. After leaving Tiandu, he escaped on the way to the place where he was to be held under house arrest.

Afterward, rumors circulated that his lordship Drunken Viscount had let drinking interfere with his duties, and that his carelessness had allowed the escape. Some went so far as to say that rascal Kou Linzai had deliberately let the prisoner go. Of course, there was no firm evidence for any of this. If you wanted to convict a viscount, you either had to find a patron of higher standing to help you behind the scenes or produce irrefutable proof. Otherwise, it was all hot air. Later, the fellow with the gourd paid individual visits to everyone who had been talking nonsense without evidence, spat in their faces, and took the opportunity to curse eighteen generations of their ancestors. Only after making a drunken scene in their homes did he swagger away.

In any case, that was the year Sorcerer, still not quite fourteen, began his life on the run. Fortunately, he knew how to take money illegally from an ATM using something other than a chainsaw, and he understood both the importance of concealing his movements and the danger he was in.

The binary world was a second dimension he inhabited, so on the internet he adopted a new name: Sorcerer.

Sorcerers were the mysterious spellcasters of DND, solitary and freedom-loving, never bound by convention. They relied on no spellbooks and had no mentors. Born with the ability to cast spells, they could create magic through intuition alone rather than logic. Their exceptional gifts gave them access to great power without arduous training, which made it difficult for them to share their knowledge with others. And so the mediocre regarded them as misfits.

Philip Nord was just such a sorcerer, one who had mastered binary magic at the highest level.

Over the course of ten years, Sorcerer's computing prowess had become legendary among hackers. His name was a benchmark. The closer someone came to him, the closer they came to the throne of the god of hackers.

As for the “Skynet” Sorcerer had written back then, he now considered it a very immature piece of work, quite unworthy of the name. If he had really managed to create a Skynet system like the one in the films, humanity would probably have been at war with the machines for several years by now.

But that was not the end of the story. In fact, after obtaining Sorcerer's Skynet program ten years earlier, the Empire had continued the project. The system had given rise to a new industry in the late twenty-first century: fully virtual online games with full support for brain-controlled play.

The astonishingly powerful optical computers used in those games were variants of Sorcerer's original Skynet. The Empire marketed them to civilians as entertainment in order to observe and test the system's potential for future development in military applications, space exploration, and even artificial intelligence.

Within barely a year of their introduction, these games had displaced traditional console games and PC online games. Fully virtual online gaming became one of the main ways young people spent their leisure time, all thanks to the technical foundations Sorcerer had laid at fourteen.

With the past out of the way, we return to the present. As Sorcerer lay there working away, the door to the computer room was pushed open. …

The person who entered was a little boy who looked about ten. He had skipped knocking not out of bad manners, but because he was Toy Marshal, the owner of this “Toy Fortress.”

In fact, Marshal might already have been over fifty. His present appearance was courtesy of an experiment evolution had performed on him years ago. Of course, in the Inverted Cross, apart from the idiot… sorry, apart from Gunsmith, no one really treated him as a child.

“Where's that kid?” Marshal asked as soon as he came in.

“Looks like he's installing something by the fourth engine,” Sorcerer replied. “I'll connect to a nearby dwarf worker and see if we can talk to him.” His hands flew over the controls, and before long another window appeared on the large display. Its video feed came through the eyes of a toy dwarf.

The toy dwarf turned its head a few dozen degrees and spotted Gunsmith. The camera then held steady, and the dwarf walked over.

Gunsmith was working inside a robot with oversized feet, more than two meters tall. The model had an open cockpit. He sat inside pulling various control levers, goggles over his eyes, his face covered in grease and his hair disheveled. He was the very picture of a mad scientist.

“Gunsmith, the boss just called.” Marshal's voice came from the toy dwarf's speaker.

Gunsmith stopped what he was doing and turned his head. “What? On my back again! Does it ever end? Didn't I say it'd definitely be finished before the twenty-fifth?”

…