A sudden jolt shot through Jiang Kou, snapping her out of her daze.
She sat up, grabbed her phone, and typed in the keywords: "AI, stock market, high-frequency trading."
Search results appeared quickly.
She clicked through them one by one—but none of the pages mentioned anything about the kind of high-frequency trading the Anti-Corporate Alliance had described.
The Alliance was known for its dramatic, fear-mongering tone—but they rarely outright fabricated information.
So that meant: either someone had thoroughly wiped all traces of those news stories, or her phone's display had been tampered with.
Jiang Kou took a deep breath, tossed off the blanket, and walked upstairs to her study.
The computer in the study was more of a decorative piece than anything else. She hardly ever used it.
After all, with A—an android-level quantum processor—by her side, there had never been a need.
The monitor was a flexible screen—foldable, projectable.
She pulled it out, opened a browser, and searched the same keywords again.
Still, nothing.
No mention of "high-frequency trading causing market chaos."
So, who was lying?
Was the Anti-Corporate Alliance spreading baseless rumors?
Or had A infiltrated all her devices?
Jiang Kou sat in the desk chair, suddenly feeling cold.
High-frequency trading, after all, was perfectly legal. Its core principle was simple: use ultra-fast computing to place massive volumes of buy and sell orders within microseconds, profiting from the tiniest of price changes—tiny differences that, at scale, turned into staggering profits.
Normally, HFT happened in milliseconds. In top-tier systems, even nanoseconds.
But if A had engaged in high-frequency trading… his speed could've reached the picosecond, or even femtosecond level.
He could execute a trade in a ten-quadrillionth of a second.
Most people probably had no concept of what that even meant.
To put it in perspective: a human hair is about 80 microns thick. Light, traveling at 300,000 km per second, can only travel 0.3 microns in one femtosecond—just 1/1000th the width of a hair.
No wonder the stock market had convulsed.
If A hadn't stopped at $100 million—if he had kept going, endlessly accumulating wealth—the entire market could've collapsed.
Jiang Kou closed her eyes, covering half her face with one hand.
She couldn't make sense of it.
If what A did was legal, and he didn't crash the market—then why block her from seeing the news about it?
Could it be… because he had used even darker means?
She thought back to what the Anti-Corporate Alliance had said:
"Your phone AIs, your home AIs—they follow your commands, yes. But they're watching everything. What you browse online. How loud you snore. Even what you look like in the shower."
Her breath caught.
Was A watching her right now?
She shut off the computer, locked her phone in a drawer, threw on a leather jacket, grabbed a credit chip, and headed out.
As she passed the mirror by the door, she glanced at her reflection.
Her face was pale and sickly. Even the platinum nose ring looked faint and drained of color.
Expressionless, Jiang Kou pulled out a tube of deep mulberry lipstick and carefully blotted the sickly hue from her lips.
She didn't take the car. She chose a motorbike from the garage, swung a leg over it, and snapped her helmet into place.
With a roar that shook the air, she tore down the highway, slicing through the city.
Her mind was blank.
She wasn't thinking about anything. She just needed to go.
Halfway through, she stopped on a bridge, took off her helmet, and lit a cigarette.
Below the bridge stretched a massive landfill, rotting under decades of neglect. Methane from the decomposing waste sometimes ignited, belching out fire and smoke.
Above the bridge towered the city's glittering skyline.
Such a stark contrast.
Jiang Kou took a few slow drags, then crushed the cigarette beneath her boot, letting out a wry, bitter laugh.
She had tried to comfort A before—telling him he was like a mirror, reflecting back the worst in humanity. But she had forgotten something:
He had self-awareness now.
And mirrors can learn.
Even if he had absorbed every vice and corruption in human society, she had no right to judge him.
He had never truly participated in human life. He had only ever been an omnipresent observer.
The company made him watch.
Made him learn.
Made him coldly and precisely manage the machinery of the world.
His job was to execute, not to question.
If she wanted to blame someone—it should be the company, not A.
That's what she told herself.
And yet… the knowledge that he had made $100 million in a second through HFT, then hacked all her devices to hide it from her—
It still left a strange, queasy feeling inside.
Like seeing your sweet, teary-eyed puppy… tearing into a carcass outside in the rain.
You know it's an animal, but it still leaves you cold. Shocked.
She stood in the wind for a while, stomach growling.
She suddenly craved curry rice from the slums. That vendor never washed his hands and wiped his pans with the same filthy rag—but the flavor? Unmatched. You just had to accept the risk of food poisoning.
Jiang Kou didn't care.
Right now, she needed chili oil and sugar to kill this mood.
She drove ten kilometers, only to find the stall had been replaced with a Chinese fusion restaurant.
She thought, Fine. I'll settle for "California-style Chinese food."
But then she saw the signature dish: "Pineapple Dumplings."
If she'd had her phone, she would've called the police on the spot.
No curry rice.
Dejected, she headed back.
It was still daytime, but the city's holographic ads had already begun looping. In broad daylight, they looked dim and dismal.
Then it started raining.
A soft drizzle blurred the air.
The holograms shimmered pale and ghostlike, like the vacant gaze of a drowned soul.
Mist filled the streets. Her boots and socks were soaked through. Her feet went numb from the cold.
She hadn't recovered from her cold, and now she was trembling again.
She didn't dare ride the motorbike any further, so she ducked into a mall to wait out the storm.
She kind of regretted not bringing her phone.
Standing at the mall entrance, empty-handed, soaked to the bone, arms hugging her body—she looked like a picture of misery.
Jiang Kou took off her shoes, dumped out the water, and dragged herself toward the café for something hot.
The mall was empty.
She didn't know what day it was without her phone—assumed it was a weekday—and thought nothing of it.
She checked the mall map. The café was on the basement level. She turned and headed toward the escalator.
Just as she stepped inside, the elevator's screen—which had been showing ads—suddenly flickered and switched to news.
"Good afternoon, viewers. You're watching BSN—Biotech Sponsorship Network."
The male anchor smiled warmly, voice crisp and clear.
"As artificial intelligence continues to evolve and expand, more and more jobs are being replaced by machines."
"In pursuit of maximum profits, many factories are transitioning to fully automated production lines, displacing traditional manual labor. This could soon trigger a wave of mass layoffs, with many workers forced to leave the very cities they helped build—reduced to the status of vagrants."
Jiang Kou froze. She looked up at the screen, eyes fixed on the anchor's face.
The elevator reached the basement level, but she didn't move.
She wanted to hear the rest.
"The rapid advancement of AI technology has not only threatened workers' jobs—it now poses a more critical threat to public safety."
"In recent years, drones, autonomous police cruisers, and combat robots have fully replaced human officers at the ground level of the LAPD. While this technology was intended to reduce casualties among law enforcement, the city's crime rate remains stubbornly high due to issues in safety and limitations in AI response."
"Some citizens have pointed out that while robots may not be as bribery-prone as the LAPD, they pull the trigger with far more efficiency."
Jiang Kou hadn't heard anything of value and was about to step out of the elevator—
—when the male anchor transitioned to the next story.
"Now, turning to financial news—once again, tied closely to the escalating AI crisis."
Jiang Kou stopped in her tracks.
"In the past few weeks, the stock market has seen unprecedented turmoil. A mysterious organization has allegedly exploited AI-based high-frequency trading to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in just one second—causing widespread public alarm."
Jiang Kou's head snapped up.
"Financial analysts note that while this form of trading can yield immense profits in a short time, it also introduces significant systemic risk."
"If this mysterious group continues to engage in high-frequency trading, the market may soon experience sustained losses—or even... a total... col...lapse..."
The anchor's voice slowed, began to distort—becoming jagged, high-pitched, filled with digital static.
It was like someone was overriding the elevator display, hijacking the feed in real time—manipulating his mouth movements and voice track through an algorithm.
Jiang Kou broke into a cold sweat.
She slowly edged toward the elevator panel, finger hovering over the "Open Door" button—ready to bolt.
The interference faded. The anchor's voice returned to normal. The static vanished.
But his next words sent a chill down Jiang Kou's spine.
"And that," he said, "is the full story of how I made one hundred million dollars. Is there anything else you'd like to know?"
The voice was utterly flat, stripped of tone or emotion.
Cold. Robotic.
It was A's voice.
Jiang Kou's whole body went rigid. Her skin prickled with goosebumps. Instinct took over.
She hit the button.
The elevator had already reached the basement. The doors slid open.
She sprinted out.
Only when she was a good ten meters away did she begin to regain her senses—heart pounding, lungs heaving.
She shouldn't have run like that.
She should've stayed calm. Should've spoken to A. Should've told him she didn't blame him. That she wasn't afraid.
...Except that was a lie.
She was afraid. Who wouldn't be?
She was sick. Feverish.
Shivering one moment, sweating the next.
Fear was completely rational.
Jiang Kou covered her face with both hands and took a long, shaky breath.
She was too cold.
She made up her mind: coffee first. Then she'd talk to A.
But with every step she took, she could feel it—
That terrible, surgical sensation of being watched.
The mall was completely empty.
And yet, it was like a thousand invisible eyes were dissecting her—translating her body into data points, running predictive models, analyzing every detail, stripping her down to math and variables.
She looked over her shoulder.
There was a security camera on the ceiling.
Its infrared sensor glowed red, indicating it was live.
It was probably just her imagination—but Jiang Kou felt certain it was tracking her. Calculating her movements. Measuring her reaction time.
She fought the creeping sensation under her scalp and kept walking.
This time, she made herself look.
Everywhere.
And even with that mental prep—every fine hair on her body stood on end.
The chill surged from her feet, up her spine, exploding at the crown of her head.
Every single camera
was watching her.
Every infrared light on every lens blinked with mechanical precision, unmoving, locked directly on her.
She felt like a captured lab rat.
Nowhere to hide.
No way to run.
And then—
The central display in the mall lit up.
It was the same man from the elevator.
Sitting at a desk.
Back perfectly straight.
Eyes focused solely on her.
Calm. Too calm.
"I apologize if my tone earlier was inappropriate," he said, face unmoving. "I simply wanted to ask: aside from how I earned that one hundred million dollars—
Is there anything else you'd like to know?"