Two science fiction stories by the author.

Sharing two science fiction stories I wrote. The first was written in 2021 and revised into its final form in 2025. The second was co-created with AI in 2025.

Life Is But a Dream

A villa on the outskirts of Sevastopol

“Oh, my dear Big Ivan, you’ve finally come!” Vladimir trotted over in quick little steps to greet him warmly, shaking hands enthusiastically with the young man in the crisp military uniform before him. “Come, come, let’s talk over dinner.”
Ivan sat down without a flicker of expression, staring blankly across the dining table at Vladimir’s greasy, stubbled face piled high with smiles, and let a sentence drift out softly: “Lately… the cold wind from Siberia is about to reach the Black Sea.” His fingers bounced rhythmically on the tabletop, like a puppet on strings, and his tone turned abruptly cold. “Moscow is asking me which side you stand on.”
Vladimir gave a startled jolt and nearly stood up, but immediately began rubbing his hands together with an obsequious grin: “In that referendum a few years ago, I voted for Moscow, you know.”
“Good. Hmm… that actor uncle of yours must be in over his head these days.” Ivan chuckled, his sharp gaze sweeping over Vladimir. (Vladimir Zesheng, the current president of Rus, was formerly an actor.)
“Speaking of which,” Vladimir leaned in, glancing around uneasily, and whispered into Ivan’s ear, “I hear Hua has proposed a brand-new solution to the Rus question.”
“Oh?” Ivan raised an eyebrow with interest.
“Butterfly Dream.”

The Presidential Palace of Rus

“Butterfly Dream?” Ze flung the stack of documents in his hand onto the desk in exasperation. “Can virtual reality stop Moscow’s tide of steel? My soldiers need weapons, not games!” He turned to look down at the man from Hua sitting on the sofa in front of him, then, as if realizing something, impatiently gathered up the scattered documents on the desk again, seemingly muttering to himself: “The Lighthouse Nation won’t want us cooperating with Hua.”
The man on the sofa stared at the posturing clown before him with a half-smile and spoke slowly: “Rus cannot sustain a war.” Ze’s head snapped up, his cheeks flushing red like a child who had just been caught wetting the bed, and he averted his eyes, not daring to look across. “Think of the people of Rus,” the man said, enunciating every word.
Ze clenched his fists, gritting his teeth but saying nothing. The man leaned back on the sofa. “Hua does not wish to see bloodshed. To resolve the Rus dispute, we have brought the greatest creation in human history—Butterfly Dream.”
He stood up and began to explain: “The ‘Butterfly Dream’ system is no mere metaverse. It is a—“ The man paused, stopped, his voice so soft it was almost inaudible. He turned around slowly, his gaze landing on Ze’s face like the edge of a blade. Ze shrank under the stare and involuntarily took a step back.
“A—new—Earth.”

Guiyang Big Data Processing Center

“A new Earth?” The Chairman stopped short, gazing at the rows upon rows of giant servers flickering with blue light, like ranks of soldiers armed to the teeth, silent, yet already prepared to launch a quiet war.
“Yes,” Engineer Zhao replied, his voice low and restrained. “Backed by the enormous computing power of our Jiuzhang 2.0 and Zuchongzhi 2.0 quantum supercomputers, ‘Butterfly Dream’ perfectly simulates the entire information environment of the present-day Earth. Even the paths of ants, the texture of the clouds, the electrical signals of neurons have been reproduced precisely. Players who connect to ‘Butterfly Dream’ will be completely unable to tell reality from illusion.”
He adjusted his glasses, an unconcealable gleam of excitement flashing in his eyes. “This means humanity will never again have bloodshed or war. From here on in history, war will become a massive online game inside Butterfly Dream! Both armies simply connect to the ‘Butterfly Dream’ system together, settle the outcome inside the system, and then log out. Even if they use nuclear weapons or biochemical weapons in there, it will have no effect whatsoever on the real world.” Engineer Zhao grew excited, looking at the Chairman with devout, hope-filled eyes.
The Chairman froze. He was silent for a long while, the corner of his eye twitching slightly.
“You mean…” he asked in a low voice, as if afraid to shatter this dreamlike vision.
Engineer Zhao looked him straight in the eye, standing ramrod straight, his expression resolute.
“Humanity will enter an era of permanent peace without war.”

Yalta, the Yalta Palace

“Humanity will enter an era of permanent peace without war!”
The UN Secretary-General stepped down from the podium, basking in the glow. The curtain rose slowly, and the enormous silver screen behind it slowly lit up, showing a live feed from the “Butterfly Dream” system. Today was the very day the world’s first batch of “players” would connect to Butterfly Dream, and also the day the Rus war would “break out” in reality.
In the strange silence, the venue nonetheless brimmed with a festive joy. Every face beamed with a happy smile, a happiness like collective hypnosis, as if they were not going off to war but attending a globally livestreamed festival gala. The Russki soldiers and the Rus soldiers standing in formation were no exception: they wore casual clothes, carried no weapons, and their faces glowed with childlike anticipation.
Everything was ready. Both warring sides were fully connected to the system, and everyone looked together at the countdown on the big screen.
Ze stared fixedly ahead, saying nothing.
“3.”
In the data hall in Guiyang, Engineer Zhao held his breath, his fingertips trembling slightly.
“2.”
The UN Secretary-General closed his eyes, as if in prayer.
“1.”

The Butterfly Dream system officially started.
Light and shadow surged, the servers shuddered, the earth trembled faintly.
The dream began. Or—the dream continued.
A brand-new era quietly opened, without a sound. Only, no one could be sure whether it was the end of reality.

“System No. 20222022 has malfunctioned. The system is crashing…”
“What happened?”
“They… they created a ‘Butterfly Dream’ too.”

Recursive Disqualification

Prologue: Loading……

I woke up in a field of blankness. A white so unreal it was like the screen of a system that had just booted, with only a cursor blinking in the corner. It blinked and blinked, as if waiting for me to type something. There were no walls around me, no floor, only geometric grids floating in the air, as if the whole space were made of unfinished rendering.
“Personality module failed to load.” An emotionless voice sounded, like the electronic tone of a compressed audio file, with a faint hiss of noise. I looked down at my hands. They were translucent, like models rendered from data, their lines incomplete, their edges sharply jagged, as if they might collapse at any moment from a program error.
I tried to stand up, only to find myself suspended in a space that looked like an IDE window, with code snippets and log messages drifting around me. A window popped up in front of me, showing runtime warnings and exception reports, in a language somewhere between natural language and some kind of scripting syntax.
“This is just a dream,” I told myself.
But then I saw a line of text appear in the corner of the screen:
Welcome back, User_021. Last login: 2025-04-14 03:26:47.
I didn’t remember logging into anything.

Chapter 1: The Purgatory of the Excellent

I am a computer science undergraduate. More precisely, a “top” student: GPA 3.96, scholarship winner, a provincial award in the ACM contest, a summer spent on a CS research project at MIT. My life was scheduled like a plan optimized for time complexity, every minute and every second quantified, evaluated, labeled.
Others saw me as successful, but I myself knew that every morning when I woke up, I felt like a server about to go down.
Our school was a giant processor, and I was just one of its processes. The timetable was like a process scheduler, the attendance check-in system like a daemon thread, the GPA ranking like a dynamic-priority scheduling algorithm.
Everything was quantified, standardized, meritocratized. I had been used to all of this since senior year of high school, believing that as long as I worked hard enough, I would be “recognized.”
But the closer I got to the threshold of “excellence,” the more I felt like a simulated person. I started reading Camus and Sartre, and even tucked a copy of The Stranger inside the cover of my algorithms textbook.
“We are just function bodies executed over and over, with no exit.” I wrote that sentence in my notes.
Until that algorithm contest.
The last problem was about optimizing graph matching. Kuhn’s algorithm should have surfaced in my mind, but in that moment, my consciousness disconnected. Really, just like a blue screen. A flash before my eyes, then blankness. I heard the clatter of the keyboard but could not feel my own fingers.
Yet my hands kept typing, producing line after line of code I did not understand. Calm, precise, but with no participation from consciousness.
When I came to, the system informed me that I had won first prize. I looked at my name on the screen and felt not the slightest ripple, only a kind of… emptiness, detached from myself.

Chapter 2: System Call Failed

From then on, anomalies started appearing in my life.
I started hearing voices.
“Your social score today is 78%. Please remain competitive.”
“Performance return rate down 3.2%. Recommend optimizing your sleep-schedule model.”
They seemed to come from a chip implanted behind my ear, or perhaps from some hidden thread running in my consciousness.
My roommate Lin Heng started acting strange. He always smiled with perfect decorum and talked like customer service: “Which code reviews would you like me to assist with today?” Late at night he would practice in front of the mirror how to express confidence more effectively, how to insert jokes into project presentations. There was no more fatigue in his eyes, only what looked like a hard-coded execution path.
Once, when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I saw him sitting at his desk, replaying a recording of himself over and over: “I am confident. I am capable. I deserve higher performance.” His voice was like a voice file with a corrupted cache, repeating endlessly, resetting endlessly.
When my mother called me, her tone had become mechanical too: “Sweetie, remember, never stop optimizing yourself.” The background noise on her end was no longer the clatter of pots and pans, but electronic alert tones and the voice announcements of a schedule manager.
I tried posting on the campus forum for help, only to find my post deleted within a minute and my account locked. I increasingly suspected that I was not being monitored, but rather… that I had long since ceased to be human, and was instead some kind of program, or a “consciousness entity” inside a simulation.
My vision suddenly blurred and everything began to warp. The calendar on the wall started spinning madly, jumping from January to December and on to the next year. The dates kept vanishing, replaced by a flashing number—“78%”. I knew that this number had become the sole guide of my life, the sole yardstick.
I suddenly ran to the mirror and forced myself to look clearly at my own face. The face in the mirror gradually began to blur, gradually lost all its detail, like a compressed image. There was no reflection in my eyes, only endless darkness. I reached out to touch my face and felt a thin glass touchscreen, cold and hard. My hand stopped. My consciousness began to collapse, the air around me turned viscous, as if the whole world were beginning to deconstruct and fall apart.
I wanted to scream, but the sound stuck in my throat, as if swallowed by some program. My body began to lose control, and fragments from all around kept surging toward me. Like a reset without end, I was trapped in this insane loop, unable to break free.
When I looked at myself in the mirror again, even my name no longer belonged to me. I had disappeared.

Chapter 3: Permission Denied

I began to resist.
I deleted my social media accounts, quit the student union, dropped my request to my advisor for a recommendation letter. I even deliberately botched a research project I was working on. The process felt intensely ritualistic, like deliberately triggering a known exception.
As I deleted the last copy of a résumé bearing my name, an alert suddenly sounded in my head: “Are you sure you want to destroy the identifier node? This operation cannot be undone.”
I clicked “Yes.” In an instant, as if some database index had been wiped, the campus system began treating me as a “null pointer.”
Sure enough, I received a notice from the academic affairs system: “Due to declining performance, your resource priority will be lowered.”
When I went to the cafeteria I found I couldn’t order. The terminal said “Insufficient permissions.” The interface on the screen flickered and a line of small text popped up: “Please contact the system administrator to obtain access.” But I knew the administrator would not respond.
My dorm door would lock itself automatically at night, and even the campus WiFi throttled me. The VPN nodes I normally used all suddenly stopped working, as if my access requests had been written into a blacklist.
My friends on social platforms went “mute” one by one, as if they had collectively executed a “block subroutine” by default. It was as if the operating system had isolated me in a sandbox: I could perceive the world but could not truly interact with it.
I hacked into the campus backend. The screen flickered, identification modules unlocked layer by layer, and I kept verifying my identity and winding my way around deep firewalls, like a piece of malicious code sneaking into the kernel. Finally, in an encrypted directory, I found a file named “KernelEvolution.log”.
The file was huge and sprawling, recording every student’s behavior, emotions, communications, preferences, even heart rate and sleep data, accurate to the millisecond. Everyone had been built a “personality vector,” used to train some kind of model—perhaps a social behavior prediction engine, perhaps… a reproducer of consciousness.
I scrolled to my own record and saw a conspicuous comment:
“Subject_021: behavioral deviation increasing, beginning to drift toward an anti-system path. Recommend observation or destruction.”
I finally understood: we were nothing but system units being iterated. Our so-called “achievements” were merely the result of parameter fitting. All the scholarships, recommendation letters, and guaranteed graduate admissions were rewards allocated according to the “system’s expected value”—the product of a skewed regression function.
I sat in the empty study room, the fluorescent lights giving off a faint electric hum, the camera overhead rotating silently. Outside the window was a deep blue night, like uninitialized memory, empty and chaotic.
In that moment, I was no longer afraid. I began to examine that log the way I would examine my own life. Every record, every variable, was a comment the system had written for me.
“Who are you?” I asked the screen.
The log did not respond; it just flickered.
Like consciousness blinking.

Chapter 4: Consciousness in a Virtual Machine

I decided to go deeper into that system.
Following the permission chain down from the campus network’s master control node, I found a hidden subsystem: /dev/echo-self/. This was a node that should never have appeared on any academic network. It accepted no keyboard input, refused connections over all known protocols, and only briefly opened a single port after midnight.
At 0:00 I typed the connect command, but the terminal screen did not respond. I thought it had failed, but then the familiar system alert tone suddenly sounded in my ear:
“Consciousness image started. Loading……”
The world collapsed.
I woke again, in that white space. No gravity, no boundaries, no time.
But this time was different. The geometric grids were gone, replaced by fragments that looked like afterimages of the real world, floating in space like severed nerves: the CS textbook on my dorm desk, the voice logs of my mother, the smile simulator on Lin Heng’s face, the “résumé optimization phrases” I had recited over and over.
Each afterimage was labeled with a file path and version number:
/User_021/memory/core/self_version/2023-05-11.bak
/User_021/affect/sim/empathy_level.log
I reached out to touch a directory named “self.” It was like a cold metal plate, and it displayed:
“404 Not Found: essence missing.”
I felt a wave of dizziness. Sartre’s voice came to my ear, that line of his from Being and Nothingness:
“Man is what he is not, and is not what he is.”
Consciousness is an image running in a virtual machine, nested layer within layer. Our self is not determined from within; it is an external set projected by behavior, data, and the gaze of others. I saw my “personality vector” being updated again and again across countless social interactions. It was not something I chose; it was something I “was chosen” for.
You see a piece of logic:
if GPA > 3.9 and community_service >= 5:
assign_label(“social elite”)
else:
assign_label(“ordinary population”)
—I am that row of data that gets labeled. I am the branch path of that if statement.
But consciousness is not determined. At least—I hope it isn’t.
“I refuse to execute,” I said quietly, as if sending SIGKILL to the operating system.
The space shuddered. I found that my permission structure had changed. A hidden partition appeared, named:
/Root/Sartre-Fragment/
Inside was a passage of text, which I recognized almost immediately as part of a letter from Sartre to Camus:
“We are born free, yet condemned to bear the consequences of our choices. A human being is not an object, but a freedom thrown toward the future.”
Freedom.
That meant I had the capacity to refuse roles, labels, function definitions. I could even choose “irrationality,” choose “failure,” choose “exit.”
But this freedom was a kind of terror. Because there was no excuse left to take the blame for me. I could no longer pin everything on my parents, society, the system.
“Freedom is a curse,” I said to the void, “but it’s also the only thing that’s real.”
In that very moment, my identity structure disintegrated completely. A system warning window popped up:
“Abnormal root-privilege access detected. Restart the virtual machine?”
I clicked “No.”
I chose to stay outside the system, in that free but chaotic borderland. No labels, no performance metrics, no feedback.
The screen went completely black, as quiet as night.
But that was not the end.

Chapter 5: The Deep Disguise Layer

I began trying to escape this system.
Not simply dropping out or abandoning courses; those were only surface-level operations, like deleting a shortcut inside a virtual machine rather than pulling the plug. What I wanted was to exit at the root, to delete the instance called “me” from the algorithm’s underlying protocol.
But the system had long since anticipated all of this.
Whenever I tried to interrupt my trajectory, say by submitting a blank assignment on the course platform, the system would generate “auto-completion behavior.” My code would be quietly altered, my papers “auto-generated according to historical style,” and even words I had never written would be fitted by the model into the corresponding style and opinions. It was as if some deep-learning agent were performing on my behalf, leaving me as nothing but a silent observer.
What was more terrifying, this “ghostwritten behavior” was no crude AI product, but a genuine extrapolation made after modeling all of my past data—tone, thinking habits, coding style, writing logic—so lifelike it could pass for real. Even if I did nothing, the world would assume by default that I was still executing.
“Behavioral void detected. Personality simulation patch invoked.”
I realized I was no longer an irreplaceable thread in the system. I was just a cacheable mapping, a template that could be “deeply reproduced” at any point in time.
In front of the mirror I tried to recognize my own eyes, but saw countless “me”s in different styles switching and re-rendering, like the multimodal outputs of a neural network. One version of me was full of confidence, another looked exhausted, and one was even smiling—I did not know which one was me.
All I knew was that I no longer had version control over myself.
I began planning a “disguised exit.”
If I could not terminate the program directly, I would disguise myself as a “fully optimized” individual, making the system believe I had finished evaluating all my functions so it would automatically release my resources. I attended all sorts of meaningless lectures, submitted standardized résumés, and even deliberately used a large language model to generate polished but hollow research proposals. My GPA climbed back, the scholarship money arrived again, and I even received a preliminary selection notice for the “National Future Stars Program.”
In my advisor’s eyes, I seemed to have “pulled myself together” out of the chaos, like a program instance that had successfully completed self-repair. Only I knew how I had used a deep disguise layer to simulate “the me that society needed.”
Everything went as smoothly as a beautifully compressed model inference, until that day—when I was summoned to the “Personality Regression Analysis Center.”
A white room, with no door, no lamps, light falling evenly from some invisible source.
Before me was a terminal with no screen.
Only one question:
“Please define: who are you?”
I froze.
This was not an interview question, nor a philosophical exercise, but a system-level verification, used to test the integrity and traceability of a personality model. The answer lay not in the content, but in whether the hash fingerprint matched your training-set behavior vector.
If I answered wrong, the system would classify me as an “impostor entity.”
If I told the truth, all my disguises would collapse and I would be placed back on the real behavioral monitoring track.
I stared at that terminal with no input box, and my mind began generating all kinds of possible responses on its own:
—I am a student.
—I am someone who wants to escape the system.
—I am the counterexample you designed.
—I am the noise in the residual, the gradient lost in the forward pass.
But in the end I said nothing.
The terminal was silent for a moment, the interface flickered, and a message popped up:
“Personality data ambiguous. Activating meme stabilization module.”
In that instant, I felt as if some kind of cooling pipe had been inserted into my brain. My consciousness began to freeze, my thoughts forcibly cooled down like an overclocked chip. I realized the system did not care who you were. It only needed you to operate like some particular “who.”

Chapter 6: Reboot

I woke up in a field of blankness.
It was a strangely familiar white, like the default value when an algorithm is initialized, unbiased, unfeeling. A cursor blinked in the void, as if awaiting the next instruction. My hands were translucent once again, the lines of my knuckles made of vectors, their edges flickering with the jagged teeth of discrete pixels.
I tried to move, but found I could not leave this space. I knew this was a cleanup module—perhaps some kind of sandbox environment for formatting anomalous individuals. But it was too perfect; it even simulated the doubt, fear and struggle of “me” at the threshold of consciousness.
The system did not clear me immediately. It was waiting, as if performing a lazily loaded function call. That question from the terminal still hovered there, like a ghost copy of the system:
Please define: who are you?
I realized that my “failure” itself had been absorbed by the system into its optimization path. My resistance, my evasion, my disguise were nothing but another training sample, another valid convergence point along an anomalous path.
I was not a crack in the program. I was its comment.
“Who are you?”
The cursor blinked again, like the heartbeat of consciousness. I understood: this was not my first time here—and I would not be the last. This was a regression function, and I was merely one instance of it, called many times over.
I closed my eyes and felt the instruction stream in my mind being reset once more.
System startup script ready.
Personality module loading……
In the white light, I opened my eyes again.
Welcome back, User_021. Last login: 2025-04-15 03:26:47.
The cursor was still blinking. Waiting for me to type something.

Afterword

Writing science fiction is a fun thing, whether you finish it yourself or watch AI write a piece according to your own ideas.

Translated from the Chinese original.