Chapter 36: The Scientist Received by Hera

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."

"All your knowledge concerns the past, yet all your decisions concern the future."

At Changi Airport, after parting ways with Hera, Wen Hui chewed on these two sentences. From the very first day she had agreed to join her friend’s rebellion against the Xi Plan, Wen Hui had never hesitated. But today, after Hera detailed that robot—which seemed like a visitor from another world—Wen Hui truly grasped, in concrete terms, what it meant to suffer from the illusion of knowledge and what it meant to feel awe for the future.

Wen Hui entered the airport lounge to touch up her makeup. She was an expert in quantum circuits and simulated biological neurons, but she was also a woman. Her rich sexual experiences in adulthood meant that, much like Einstein playing Mozart with effortless grace, she could precisely identify where a man like Xi Zhijie’s erotic pressure points lay. Such men were too bloated and arrogant; they did not know they were staring into the abyss, nor did they realize the abyss was staring back at them.

Xi Zhijie had only just provided investment to Wen Hui’s company when he invited her to Xi Rui’s birthday party. Wen Hui played hard to get, politely declining under the pretext that the company was tackling a technical bottleneck. Consequently, Xi Zhijie invited her to play golf, claiming it was a chance to discuss the follow-up of post-investment management. Why would a venture capital mogul bother with such operational minutiae? Xi Zhijie simply had other intentions.

Hera was right. Having risen from humble beginnings and faced discrimination, Xi Zhijie was now recklessly unleashing his desires in every direction—the desire to control the heavens, the earth, men, and women. Even after successfully trapping and hunting down his uncontrollable partner, Whitney, last night, and planning to watch the scientist flying into Singapore to "examine" Ada tonight, Xi Zhijie had not canceled their golf date. The course was at the Tanah Merah Country Club near the airport, a renowned 18-hole, par-72 championship course in Asia.

As Wen Hui reached the basement of the terminal, her Grab car arrived. A girl stepped out, and their eyes met. Like all strangers crossing paths, they exchanged a polite, faint smile and a nod.

***

As Xu Jiayi stepped onto the escalator, she was still marveling at the woman she had just seen; her beauty was truly unique. Stunning women with vibrant features and graceful figures were not rare, but that woman possessed a resilient, formidable aura that required no effort to project. The more Xu Jiayi studied AGI robots, the more she could instantly capture the incomparable, living vitality of a human being.

Xu Jiayi crossed the atrium of Jewel Changi and arrived at Terminal 2. Singapore Airlines was one of the carriers docked there. At around four o'clock this afternoon, a flight from San Jose, via Los Angeles, was scheduled to arrive at Changi. Xu Jiayi bought a coffee and blended in with the crowd of excited or bored greeters. She had swapped her glasses for a pair of light-brown tinted sunglasses. Hidden within the two small decorative flowers on her baseball cap were disguised high-tech devices, functioning simultaneously as binoculars and facial recognition scanners, transmitting data directly to her visual terminal.

Her phone rang; it was a capable young associate from her organization.

"Sister Jiayi, the itineraries for several Chinese AGI experts in Silicon Valley—Dr. Huang, Dr. Qin, and Dr. Li—have been exposed. They are in the UK, China, and Japan, respectively. Only Dr. Fan’s whereabouts remain unconfirmed."

"Understood. Thank you for your hard work. Let's stay in touch."

Xu Jiayi hung up. With the current breakthrough in AGI, everyone in the circle knew who the top scientists were and which of them had close ties to the capital moguls focused on AI. After seeing the photo of the pursuer on Zhou Yongtai’s phone, Xu Jiayi suspected that the capital mogul served by the person she once considered a confidant had kidnapped Ada. Transporting Ada to China or the U.S. for research would be risky; this mogul would likely have a trusted scientist fly in first.

Xu Jiayi had reported this to her organization, which mobilized resources to discover that four Chinese scientists were leaving their labs for business trips. All four had a history of collaboration with the Zhiyin Fund. Since she did not know which one was coming, and because the flights from their respective cities arrived at different terminals, she followed the advice of her friend, a police officer named Singh. From that night until this afternoon, she had organized her assistants into shifts to stake out the arrival exits of all four Changi terminals.

Now, three of the four scientists had appeared in other countries, with official reports confirming they were merely attending international forums. Only Dr. Fan, whose laboratory was in Silicon Valley, had yet to surface.

The announcement blared; the flight from San Jose had landed. Many greeters left their seats and surged toward the arrival exit. The baggage claim area behind the glass doors gradually filled with passengers.

Xu Jiayi spotted a figure in a gray dress. In the image sent back by her binoculars, the dress looked quite worn, but the "Heracles Knot" on the lapel remained clear.

"It really is you," Xu Jiayi whispered to herself.

A man dragging a suitcase emerged from the passageway. Hera stepped forward and greeted him with standard social etiquette, shaking his hand. But as they reached a secluded area near the elevators, Hera suddenly turned and embraced the man.

Xu Jiayi looked down at her display terminal. Facial match: Dr. Fan. His original specialty was astrophysics, but he had later entered the field of energy research for AI, and he was quite famous among Chinese scientists in Silicon Valley. There was one more thing: like Hera, his hometown was Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, in China.