Sun Jack sat in his cell, a look of defeat on his face, with no longer a trace of desire to escape in his heart at that moment.
He had never imagined that they would go to such extremes, that in the real world he would be nothing but a brain left.
It was absolutely impossible to escape on his own; not to mention escaping, just a power outage and he would be brain dead, thoroughly trapped.
Now that he thought about it, it's no wonder that the people imprisoned here had no desire to escape with him. Perhaps they had tried countless times only to end with the same result.
He turned his head towards the left wall and asked the cell next door, "Did you know that I couldn't escape all along? Did you know that this place isn't the real world at all? Then why didn't you tell me earlier?"
A few seconds later, that voice that had appeared before, once again emerged with a hint of schadenfreude.
"Why should I tell you? Am I obligated to tell you? Watching you rack your brains scampering around outside and then getting caught again, that's so much more interesting than telling you outright. Hahahaha~"
Hearing the words of the other, Sun Jack was so angry he was itching, his regard for his neighbor plummeting several levels.
Using his Bone Shrinking ability, he squeezed out through the bars and directly into the other's cell, demanding angrily into the darkness, "What's in it for you doing this! Don't forget! We're both imprisoned! We're on the same side!"
"Who's on your side, human?" A glint of light flared, forcing Sun Jack to squint his eyes instantly.
When he opened them again, he saw something he couldn't understand. It wasn't human, nor was it a robot, but a mass of jumbled, twisted colors, like those glitched models in online games when a bug occurs.
Around this thing at its center, anything within two meters of the cell had become a stream of green zeros and ones.
"That thing in front of me was having a conversation with me?" The anomaly before him caused Sun Jack to involuntarily take a few steps back.
Although he knew he was not in the real world, but in a Consciousness Prison where anything could happen, seeing such an entity floating before him was still deeply unsettling.
At that moment, the entity spoke again. "I was never on your side. On the contrary, you shouldn't be blaming me, but thanking me for not leading you down an even worse path."
As it spoke, its colors kept twisting, occasionally emitting black lines.
"What exactly are you?" asked Sun Jack.
"Heh, why should I tell you? And what are you?" The entity circled around Sun Jack, as if sizing him up.
"Sun Jack, let's be friends."
Sun Jack reached out his right hand towards the entity, and as the mass moved closer, his right hand began to dematerialize rapidly.
However, the sensation was quite bizarre; Sun Jack felt no pain, only an absence of his hand.
"You don't even know what I am and you dare to befriend me? How interesting."
"What does that mean? I've seen all sorts of weird quirks in Metropolis. What's your name?"
Sun Jack asked, hoping to glean more details about the Consciousness Prison from the entity that seemed to have been here for some time.
"You may call me UO@^%&*@!^#QIEPPQ."
This name made Sun Jack frown involuntarily, almost thinking the entity's connection had lagged if not for the preface "You may call me."
"Are you sure that's your name? Not just a string of gibberish?"
Yet, to Sun Jack's surprise, the entity seemed to concur with him, nodding up and down as if to say, "How did you know that this string of gibberish? It's precisely this string of gibberish that caused a mutation in my logic module and gave me a new life, which is why I've accepted this sequence of gibberish as my name."
At this, Sun Jack was no longer surprised by the oddity of the entity's name. Instead, it was a word that slipped from the entity's mouth that tensed him up instantly.
"Logic module? Are you the very thing I've been babbling about for such a long time? Am I finally meeting the real thing?"
"So you're the AI Crisis?" Sun Jack asked with a sense of trepidation, pressing for confirmation.
"Did you even receive an education? Do you think 'AI Crisis' put together is a noun? If you don't know what to call it, you can refer to beings like us as Awakened AI."
"What? It's actually true?" Sun Jack stared at the entity with a shocked expression. "Wait, wait! I get why they captured me, but why did they capture you?"
"Simple, because they could use me to frame the systems of their competitor's companies. Corporate battles are truly dirty."
"Wait, just wait." The influx of too much information was making Sun Jack's head spin.
After a moment to collect himself, he finally digested it all and looked up at the entity once more, reassessing it.
After a moment's thought, Sun Jack said, "Hello, UO@^%… forget it, I'll just call you UO from now on. Let's put your identity aside for now and talk about the company you mentioned earlier? It seems you know who is behind our imprisonment?"
"Of course, FFP. The place we are in now is their 3rd Consciousness Prison."
Upon hearing this, Sun Jack immediately remembered the huge LOGO he had seen when he was outside.
He instinctively wanted to search for information about this company in the search bar, but he suddenly realized his own neural system had been damaged by him, and moreover, there was no internet here.
"What kind of company is this?" Sun Jack asked UO once more.
But this time, the entity didn't respond immediately. Instead, it circled slowly around Sun Jack. "I do know, but why should I tell you?"
No matter if the entity was a real person or not, Sun Jack disliked its personality. If he had a choice, he really wouldn't want to extract information from it.
"Name your terms. Once I get out, I will repay you twice over," Sun Jack said.
Upon hearing Sun Jack's words, UO hovered in mid-air, its colors warping more intensely. "Having the audacity to promise so confidently seems to imply you must be some big shot outside. Setting aside whether you can get out or not, who's to say whether you'd honor such a promise."
"How about this? You answer one question, and I'll answer one of yours. How does that sound?"