Pet King

Zhang Zian sat up straight on the bed. His whole body was soaked in sweat, and his sweatshirt stuck to his body. It was very uncomfortable.

His vision turned black, as if the image of him falling off the cliff was still lingering in his mind. His heart was beating in a straight line. It seemed that people said that if one died in the dream, one’s body would also die in reality. This might not be a lie.

The brain can’t differentiate between dream and reality, thinking that it’s in danger, it will drive the body to make a stress response, releasing a large amount of hormones, accelerating the heartbeat and blood pressure, and may stop the heart if it exceeds the limit.

He sat on the bed in a daze for a long time before he gradually recovered.

If this continued, he would get a heart attack from this terrifying butterfly sooner or later.

The wind blew the curtains up and down, and a little light seeped through the gaps of the curtains. The sky was still bright, even earlier than he usually got up. As the saying went, Spring Dreams were too short, but nightmares were too long.

He had sat up very abruptly just now, and he might have even ground his teeth before he woke up. Several sensitive Elfins should have woken up by now. They probably saw that he had just had a nightmare and went crazy, so they went back to sleep.

Fortunately, the morning at this time of the year was neither hot nor cold. Otherwise, he would probably catch a cold if he sat on the bed in a daze with cold sweat all over his body.

After having a nightmare, one should quickly divert their attention instead of reminiscing about the nightmare, but Zhang Zian could only do the opposite. He tried to reminisce about the dream while he still remembered it, otherwise the nightmare would definitely haunt him for the rest of his life.

The previous drama was put aside for the time being, and the focus was on the two questions raised by Zhuang Xiaodie.

He quickly understood why she had threatened him. It was because he was an ordinary person and didn’t care about free will. If she had just casually mentioned it, he probably wouldn’t have taken it to heart. Even if he met that junior high school girl again, he probably wouldn’t have asked Yingluo if she knew about free will or if he was an adult man to talk to a junior high school girl … No matter how he thought about it, it was too weird. He might as well have asked for money.

He doubted whether Zhuang Xiaodie’s premonition was wrong. How could a little girl expose the truth of free will? What a joke. Children of this age were either overwhelmed by their homework or had feelings growing in their hearts. They ran to the basketball court every day to cheer for their tall, thin, handsome, and sunny male students. Who would consider things like free will?

However, he had already agreed to it. He had to ask.

Of course, the premise of all this was that he had to meet the junior high school girl again. If he couldn’t meet her, then everything else was out of the question.

He was glad that she didn’t leave her contact information in the teahouse in hidden fog, otherwise it would be troublesome. He just thought that the money was fed to the dogs, and he didn’t plan to take it back.

There was a sea of people, and he had no way to contact her. He didn’t even know her name and appearance, so where was he going to find her? Even if Binhai city wasn’t a first-tier city, it had at least a few million permanent residents. Including the migrant workers, there would be tens of millions of people.

Thus, although this question was related to his life, it was actually very weak and could be delayed.

There was another problem …

Do robots dream of Electronic Sheep?

This seemingly strange question was actually the name of a science fiction novel. Many people had never heard of it, let alone read it. After all, the novel was first published in 1968, which was not very suitable for current reading tastes. Moreover, the author of the novel, Philip Dick, had always been known for his bold writing and imagination. It was difficult for non-hardcore science fiction fans to read it.

Although this novel was not popular, the film adapted from it was thunderous in the Western film industry. It was “Silver Wing killer”, which was released in 1982. It was regarded as the Best Science Fiction Film by many science fiction fans and even scientists.

Coincidentally, this film, which was born in the last century, was about a conflict in Los Angeles in 2019.

Zhuang Xiaodie was talking about the name of the novel, not the name of the movie, so the movie part should be ignored. The content of the novel was actually not new today, but the title was more impressive.

“Do robots dream of Electronic Sheep?” After Zhang Zian thought about it over and over again, he felt that she should be asking about the literal meaning of this sentence, and not testing if he could remember the contents of the novel. He had read the novel before, but he could not remember the content clearly.

There were two meanings to this sentence. Even a primary school student who was good at Chinese could analyze it. One was whether the robot would dream, and the other was whether the robot would dream of the electronic Sheep.

The question that Zhuang Xiaodie asked must have a deep meaning. She would not ask for no reason. She was not so free and in no mood.

The so-called robots could be found in the workshops of large factories. The dexterous mechanical arms assembled the parts neatly and looked quite shocking, but those robots that only worked according to preset programs were not in the same category as the robots people usually imagined. When people talked about robots, they usually referred to “human-like machines” in the true sense, or in other words, Bionic robots, which had the shape of a human and were similar to humans in terms of speech, movements, and even thinking.

Robots of this level obviously didn’t exist in modern society. Otherwise, the next industrial revolution would have broken out, and the productivity of human society would have explosive growth. The material life would be extremely rich, and humans would no longer work for survival and enter the ideal society ahead of time … If one thought about it positively, maybe “the Terminator” would become a reality, and the robot uprising would take human lives …

Bionic robots were still far from being realized. The current level of human technology had not even touched the door. Would Zhuang Xiaodie be interested in such a distant problem?

He continued to think deeply. The body of the Bionic robot was not the key. Whether it looked like a human or not was a trivial matter. The level of technology in modern society was almost enough to use machines to create a human body that looked like a fake. The deciding factor was whether the brain of the robot could think like a human, just like the key to determining the key to human being being the spirit of all creatures was the human brain, not the weak body of a human.

If the word “robot” was extended to artificial intelligence, it seemed to make sense.

Once artificial intelligence in the true sense of the word appeared, the Bionic robot would also be born.

Of course, modern society had yet to invent artificial intelligence that was no different from humans. Even so …

Zhang Zian took out his phone from under his pillow and stared at the black screen without unlocking it. He just stared at it in a trance.

In his phone, there was a real artificial intelligence, or at least it claimed to be.

Therefore, Zhuang Xiaodie’s question was actually an obscure question to him. Would the navigation elf dream?