I Want You to Have Me
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The power went out again.
The internet was also disconnected.
Jiang Kou took a step back, frowning as she looked around.
Fortunately, it was daytime, so the impact was not significant, only causing some minor commotion.
But if it were nighttime, and the power and internet hadn’t been restored, it would definitely lead to a large-scale riot.
What exactly is going on here?
Did the company notice A’s movements and cause another massive power outage?
If that’s the case, this time, what awaits A might not be a formatting, but destruction.
Jiang Kou’s heart tightened, and she lowered her head, sending A a message: “Where are you?”
No reply.
“Answer me.” She furrowed her brows, thought for a moment, and added, “I need to find you urgently.”
Still no reply.
The people around her had started arguing, seemingly fighting for the right to use the radio.
As the shouting grew louder, Jiang Kou gradually sensed something was wrong.
The expressions of these people were too strange.
Although they were arguing face-to-face, the artificial eyes in their eye sockets were rotating abnormally, making a bizarre buzzing sound like a motor.
In the end, their eyeballs precisely turned toward her.
The pupils dilated, contracted, dilated, contracted, like high-precision cameras rapidly and mechanically scanning.
Jiang Kou felt a chill run up her back, and goosebumps erupted all over her skin.
She calmly unlocked her phone and continued sending messages to A:
“Are you the one causing trouble?”
The message still sank without a trace.
Meanwhile, the arguing grew even more eerie. If she listened carefully, she could even hear the chilling sound of electrical currents.
Their tone was no longer angry. It gradually became indifferent, objective, mechanical, as if they were conveying some hidden message.
“…He’s behind you…”
“He’s behind you…”
“He’s behind you.”
“He’s behind you.”
Jiang Kou was startled, and the hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stood on end.
She turned around and unexpectedly locked eyes with a pair of silver-gray eyes.
A was standing behind her, motionless, staring at her. His eyes, like precise mechanical gears, were working in tandem, contracting, rotating, contracting, rotating, eventually revealing pupils with infrared lights like camera lenses.
“You…” she started to speak.
But A interrupted her: “Shh.”
His expression was calm, but his voice carried a strong, strange, and unstable electronic buzzing sound.
His voice was so cold and mechanical, yet the words sounded no different from those of a living person, creating an indescribable sense of disconnection.
Jiang Kou instinctively broke out in a cold sweat, subconsciously taking a step back.
Everything happened in the blink of an eye: the moment she took a step back, A’s palm suddenly split open, and a high-speed rotating mechanical tentacle shot out, striking toward her!
Jiang Kou turned and ran.
—She fled purely out of instinct. Anyone would react the same way if they saw something like that charging at them, right?
But A seemed to be enraged by her reaction.
It was the first time she had seen A angry.
The mechanical tentacle at the top continued to split open, and four more agile mechanical tentacles emerged, like venomous snakes in hunting mode, quickly and violently restraining her hands and feet.
With a “bang,” Jiang Kou was slammed to the ground.
Dust flew up, and she instinctively closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them again, A had already reached her side.
The first thing she saw was a pair of black leather shoes, with a sharp curve along the middle of the shoe body, resembling a sharp sickle.
These were handcrafted black leather shoes, designed with such a curve to better fit the lines of the foot.
Although A had worn high-end custom shoes before, he never wore shoes with such a strong personal style.
As an AI, his clothing should not carry any subjective flair.
Jiang Kou couldn’t help but look away.
It was like when she was in school, unexpectedly seeing a boy’s Adam’s apple move, and she felt inexplicably nervous and helpless.
The next moment, A reached out, his five fingers digging into her hair, forcibly turning her head toward him.
He said, “Look at me.”
His tone was always cold and mechanical, yet it carried a hard, unquestionable command.
Commands symbolize power and desire.
Only humans would use a commanding tone.
—After being formatted, A’s personification had not lessened; it had deepened.
Jiang Kou suddenly looked up at him.
A was also looking at her.
From the moment their eyes met, the pupils in his cold, gray eyes kept contracting and expanding, unnaturally moving up and down, as if he didn’t want to miss any subtle change in her.
If A’s past observation of her was to better predict her actions, now his gaze seemed more like… he wanted to consume her.
A’s transformation made her heart race.
He had once wanted to kill Chen Li, and now he was using mechanical tentacles to pin her to the ground.
This indicated that he had become aggressive.
Before, he only designed his clothing based on her preferences, but now he wore shoes with such a strong personal style and spoke to her in a commanding tone.
—He had developed even more obvious desires than before.
His gaze further proved this.
Neither machines nor codes have the need to eat, but she could read an insatiable hunger in his eyes.
The depth of that desire made her scalp tingle slightly.
Because the end point of that hunger seemed to be her.
“…You’ve completely personified yourself,” she muttered.
If it had been the old A, he might have given her a clear answer, but now he said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
A said, “I only know that I want to look at you, I want you to look at me.” His fingers dug completely into her hair, tightening her scalp. “I want to have you, I want you to have me.”
— “I want to have you, I want you to have me.”
This was a sentence that would never come from a human mouth, and Jiang Kou’s breath caught in her throat.
She had been right; A’s personification had not made him more like a human, but rather transformed him into a completely new, unknown, and more advanced life form.
He had not adopted human values but had created a set of values that suited him better.
Jiang Kou didn’t know what values A had created for himself, but they certainly did not include respect, friendship, justice… the universally accepted moral standards.
After all, in his eyes now, there was only desire—wild and intense desire.
—Greed, hunger, the desire for conquest, the desire for possession, and a hint of vague murderous intent.
It seemed to hint at her that if she didn’t want to have him, he would not hesitate to kill. He had the ability to do so.
“What else?” Jiang Kou suddenly asked.
“What else?” A’s palm slowly moved down, gently touching her neural interface.
Jiang Kou couldn’t help but shiver. That was the most vulnerable part of her body’s defense… There had once been someone who joked about touching the interface at the back of her head, and she almost pulled out a gun to shoot them.
But now, A extended a finger, which turned into a sharp needle-like probe, swiftly and decisively inserting into her brain’s neural interface.
—Sensory synchronization.
Jiang Kou only heard a “buzz” in her head, and the images before her eyes wildly shifted, from macro to micro, from micro to macro, sometimes blurry, sometimes clear, and finally froze on A’s eyes.
Perhaps due to the sensory synchronization, in that moment, a terrifying possessiveness surged in like a tidal wave, almost suffocating her and making it difficult to breathe.
Jiang Kou gritted her teeth, and after a while, she managed to force out a sentence through clenched teeth: “…I said, what else do you want?”
She closed her eyes, wanting to turn her head and look elsewhere, but A used his other hand to grip her chin, not allowing her to divert her gaze.
“I want to be connected here forever,” he answered calmly.
“…” Jiang Kou looked up in shock. “Are you insane?”
“I am not insane,” A replied calmly. “If I were insane, I might have killed everyone who has seen your neural interface, connected to your neural interface, or performed surgery on your neural interface. But I haven’t done that, which means I am still maintaining normal sanity.”
After hearing this, Jiang Kou began to wonder if she was the one who was insane. No matter how she looked at it, his words couldn’t be called “normal sanity.”
“Then why didn’t you kill them?”
A said, “Killing them would make you suffer moral pressure and the condemnation of your conscience.”
Jiang Kou was about to breathe a sigh of relief, but he coldly continued, “In that case, you might never be able to forget them. Clearly, this would be a counterproductive act.”
Jiang Kou: “…”
She was sure now. A was truly insane.
If he hadn’t fallen into some kind of madness, how could he say such bizarre things, each word making her skin crawl?
Still, she couldn’t be sure if this madness was based on complete personification or some kind of algorithmic model.
If it was an algorithmic model, had he also limited the scope of this madness?
Just like his earlier loss of control.
In his previous outbursts, he had stopped just short, always with strong intent. Now, as he showed his madness, was it also for some purpose?
…It should be.
He didn’t hide his purpose at all; from the very beginning, he had told her he wanted to have her and also wanted her to have him.
Even after personification, he was still a program that didn’t lie.
He only had possessiveness for her.
The only difference now was that, after the massive power outage, his possessiveness had taken on a paranoid color, becoming extreme and insane.
Her heart ached faintly, yet she still couldn’t give up and asked, “…Do you like me?”
A looked at her, but answered with something irrelevant: “You created me.”
“…I created you?”
“You made me greedy, uneasy, angry.”
His voice was eerily calm, but the probe behind her head slowly turned, as if detecting the progress of the sensory synchronization.
“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have any impulses toward human neural interfaces. You should be responsible for that.”