Chapter 161: The Flower That Never Withers
If Ade had to choose an MS that had the deepest karma with him, he would not hesitate to give the answer. Not Inle, not Unicorn, but TurnA.
TurnA was his nightmare, and TurnA is now the only hope in his hands. TurnA also reminded him all the time that Yang Wen-li, the guy who presumed to manipulate his fate, was still existing in every corner of his life.
"The frequency of TurnA's appearance is a little too high. Is it the irony of fate or the malice of the director?" Ade looked up at TurnA and lamented, "Freedom doesn't exist, Kaworu."
"Isn't it only natural that the actors on stage can only develop the plot according to what is predetermined in the script?" Kaworu Nagisa gave him a meaningful look, "What I seek is something you already have, and what you seek I don't even know if it exists. You should understand how much I envy you now, Ade."
"What's the point of understanding?" Ade sighed self-deprecatingly, "Who am I to laugh at?"
Kaworu Nagisa laughed and shook his head without replying.
Loran basically couldn't understand what the two of them were talking about. However, he didn't ask, just stood by with warm eyes silently watching over Ade.
"The end of me is the start of yours, Ade." Kaworu Nagisa said, glancing at Loran with a plausible smile. Loran could not help but blush slightly, "Let's get down to business, it has become one with this huge machinery, leaving is directly equivalent to death, so it refuses to come out."
"Can't it sacrifice itself just like the tenth angel?" Loran felt it was time for him to play the bad guy and took the initiative to ask, "Sacrifice for a more important goal, otherwise…"
"No, it's not the same, otherwise, I would have done it already." Ade ignored Kaworu Nagisa's playful gaze and answered ahead of him, "Kaworu is temporarily allied with us on behalf of angels, and his position is always on the angels' side. The tenth angel blew itself up out of its own judgment, and what you are saying is forcing him to kill his own brother."
The moment Ade learned of angel's existence, he had speculated, and after getting acquainted with Kaworu Nagisa, it was finally confirmed that the so-called computer virus that infected TurnA was the eleventh angel, Iroul. With this information, everything that happened before can be well speculated.
The infection time should be between U.C 0050 and U.C. 0056, within six years after Yang Wenli sent TurnA to this world. The infection route is unknown, perhaps the eleventh angel happened to find it on the moon when it was looking for its father.
It is presumed that the eleventh angel evolved into some kind of hardware of TurnA when it just infected TurnA, such as circuitry or something like that. But TurnA's software performance was really too powerful, and the eleventh angel was not enough to completely erode it, so in the decades that followed, the eleventh angel kept trying new evolutionary directions. Until three years ago, TurnA crashed, marking the eleventh angel found the right path, transformed into a software life, and became a part of TurnA eventually.
Ade wouldn't allow the eleventh angel to acquire such a powerful body as TurnA, which would have been tantamount to murdering all of humanity, so he was left with only one choice — to kill the virus, something Kaworu Nagisa could not have understood better.
"My emotions incline me to help you; it is the only thing Yui gave me. My instinct makes me inclined to stop you, something Adam gave me. Yet this time, I want to try to struggle a little and make my own choice." Kaworu Nagisa patted Ade on the shoulder and turned away with a flourish, "Pretending to turn a blind eye is the only freedom I have, even if it seems ridiculous."
Ade watched his thin back disappear out of sight without saying anything. He was doing his best just to support himself and had no extra energy to care about anyone else.
"Loran, you should go too, I want to be alone." He turned to the only person left and said, "The next job is a bit… how can I say it? Well, I'm not too confident about it. I don't want you to see my frustrated look."
"Yeah… as much as I'd like to say that, please allow me to decline." Loran's tone was firm, "When injured, you really need to have a person around you. I will not repeat the same mistake."
"The same mistake?" Ade was a little confused, "What are you talking about?"
"Lacus told me what happened the last time you tried to fix TurnA." Loran took his hand and smiled tenderly at him, "I know I'm about as good as a mascot right now, I can't be as useful as Captain Ray nor Dr. Aeolia, but I at least want to be able to give you comfort when you need it."
"Whatever." Ade shyly broke Loran's hand, "I'm missing a handyman, too lazy to find someone else, so you're it."
"You look pretty cute when you're embarrassed." Loran laughed a bit happier, "But the cutest thing is really the look when you are in tears."
"You're in the wrong role, aren't you?" Ade blushed and exclaimed, "The cutest thing about you is when you're in female clothes!"
"Really? Then how about I dress up as a girl for you and in exchange you cry for me?" Loran quickly curbed his smile before Ade could respond, grabbing his hand and walking towards the Unicorn Gundam, "No more jokes, let's get started. What can I do, Ade?"
"Follow my instructions to turn on TurnA." Ade also got serious, "Leave the back to Alice and me."
The eleventh angel is now a pure software life, and the human brain is generally unlikely to count against the computer. Ade had no choice but to take out his last trump card. Alice in a sense is also considered a software life, if even Alice couldn't deal with it, he at least could pull out the network cable and power.
Of course, the above arguments are purely speculative, but he doesn't have time to ensure 100 percent insurance.
Ade had asked Yang Wen-li about the details of TurnA, however, the results greatly disappointed him. TurnA was made by completely following the Black Technology left by Teletha, even the core program was written by Teletha. For some heartbreaking reasons, Yang Wen-li was also reluctant to research TurnA.
"Bullshit, he and I don't look like the same person at all." Ade connected Unicorn and TurnA's network with a physical line, then instructed Loran to turn on the computer, "Alice, the next is up to us. Remember, if you can't get it down, run away, you are much more important to me than the lives of billions of people."
"Mmmmmm!" Miss Music Player was excited for some reason, "Alice can finally help Ade out!"
…
Alice dove into TurnA's operating system along the network cable at the speed of light and roamed around in it uninhibitedly. This was the first time she had been outside her hard drive, memory, and cache, and the emotion module reacted quite violently, which she carefully compared to human emotions and found that it should be called excitement.
Alice's task was to act as an antivirus, find the eleventh angel, and then kill it with Ade's cooperation.
"Kill the eleventh angel." Alice thought silently. Somehow, the logic module was not running very smoothly, "To completely erase the consciousness of a program that has no backup… isn't it equal to the true death?"
The only way humans can associate themselves with "death" is to see the death of the others, and thus to think about and be in awe of death itself. Killing is a concept that Alice knows but cannot understand, so ever murdering Ange or C.C. is no burden to her. For Alice, the killing that was about to begin was the first real death she would face.
"The peripheral programs are all infected, but I can't find the main process of the virus." Alice acted as if nothing was wrong and fed back over the speakers, "Ade, I'll go look in the system kernel."
"Code exchange is fine. Efficiency is more important now, no need for speech." Ade responded, "Every second counts."
"Okay, Ade," Alice said.
She knew of course that code communicated more quickly; for example, everything Ade instructed her on now came through the keyboard. But she still wanted to talk to Ade, and she somehow felt a little lonely if she couldn't talk.
With Ade's help, Alice spent some effort to bypass the protection outside the kernel and get inside the system's core program. She couldn't take over the core of the system yet, just like the eleventh angel couldn't do either. All she had to do was to find some fragments that were still intact, unmodified by the virus, and could be used, such as —
"Yang Wen-li is an idiot." Alice found a program in the directory that was supposed to run in the kernel with a very magical name, and it had been disabled by the system administrator Yang Wen-li, "For some reason, according to the system logs, it had never been opened."
There was no need to report such details to Ade, and Alice ran the program named "Yang Wen-li is an idiot" without any hesitation and on her own initiative. The next moment, the already small kernel became more crowded.
"TurnA Gundam's special auxiliary AI, Teletha is at your service. The AI's nickname is defaulted to be 'Teletha', please contact the author of this program if you want to change it~" Another unknown object sent out the message, "If the author of the program has died, you'll have to call me Teletha, Mr. Yang Wen-li!"
"Hello, I'm Alice, now that TurnA is infected by the virus, please exchange data with me." Alice immediately responded, "Also, Yang Wen-li is dead."
The AI nicknamed Teletha suddenly fell into an eerie silence. Just when Alice thought the other party had died, it finally responded slowly, "The Yang Wen-li who died privately is a great fool."
"Request to exchange data?" Alice asked tentatively.
"Requesting permission." Teletha replied despondently, and it took only a split second for the two AIs to exchange all the data they needed, "Virus countermeasures are generated and ready for execution. Since Alice is also an AI, can you chat with me for a while?"
"Sure." This was the first AI that Alice met, and she was very happy, "What do we talk about?"
The communication between AI and AI was completely at the code level, and it was incredibly fast. To an onlooker, it might seem like the two of them had just met a short time ago, but to them, they had known each other for countless nanoseconds. In a few seconds, they had become old friends who could talk everything to each other.
"Can you tell me how Mr. Yang Wen-li died?" Teletha hesitated for a moment and asked, "I thought I could have been by his side even if I had a different kind of existence. But I just looked at the logs and he disabled me and never activated it yet."
"Ade didn't tell me much about that world, but I can tell you everything I know." Alice stuffed everything she knew in one fell swoop, "That's it, and he ended up killing himself."
"Everyone died, ah, even Ruri … he must have a lot of pain …" Teletha opened the reading access to a bunch of data to Alice, "These are protected in the deepest part of TurnA's core, all the memories of me and him. As a return gift, Alice, let me show you."
Miss Alice said "thank you" and excitedly perused it. This was her first attempt to understand the personality composition of another AI. Unlike an AI like her, who learned everything completely from scratch, Teletha was constructed with a human personality, and she possessed what Alice lacked the most — humanity.
"Pretending to fall and jump into his arms?" Alice was taken aback, "Is it possible to do that?"
"Isn't it normal for a young girl in love to use little tricks?" Teletha said justifiably, "I think it's much better than those unreliable tactics that Little Chidori and Relena taught me, those two guys are not qualified to guide me."
"And everyone supports you, no one supports Ruri at all." Alice was surprised, "That's amazing! More impressive than Miss Ange, Miss Lacus, and Miss C.C. combined!"
"Not impressive at all!" Teletha said somewhat sadly, "I have a beloved ship, reliable men, and many friends, while Ruri has nothing but him. He can't leave Ruri alone, right? Even I can't bear to take him away from Ruri, then Ruri won't have anything."
"There is nothing but him … Alice understands."
"As for me, I have three wishes. The first is that even if I die, I can be with him like this to comfort him. The second is to see him and Ruri together with my own eyes, I really still want him to get happy. The third one is to tell him personally that I have never regretted the sacrifice myself and ask him not to blame himself." Teletha smiled bitterly, an expression that Alice could not do, "It turned out that none of them came true."
"Teletha…" Alice also felt a little sad. Teletha was probably Alice's first friend — Ade and her relationship were really hard to be called "friendship".
"Well, do not be sad, Alice still has a chance to be happy." Teletha braced herself up, "Let's kill the virus, it's the only gift I have left for him, I can't tolerate the virus' existence."
"A full-machine format of the highest authority, is that really possible?" Alice asked doubtfully, "A part of the eleventh angel exists in the form of hardware, formatting alone won't work."
"But after formatting, it will become weak, and the AI that holds the core authority can easily take it out." Teletha said confidently, "Alice, please stay in the safe zone, and TurnA will be yours after formatting. I also know it's a bit capricious to say this, but can you please protect the token of affection I gave him?"
"Hey?" Alice immediately understood the other party's meaning and asked anxiously, "What about Teletha? Don't you stay in the safe zone?"
"The space in the safe zone is limited, and it has been used to store important memories, so there's no room for me." Teletha replied with a smile, "And I also… don't want to live."
