As the clock ticked past 10:00 AM, the faint, ghostly blue glow on the screen seemed to congeal. My eyes felt dry and swollen, my retinas still imprinted with the afterimage of the K-line chart’s violent plunge from the second before.
That massive downward gap felt like a scar slashed diagonally across the monitor, or rather, the abyss I was forced to crawl to the edge of and stare down into.
The program’s command-line cursor blinked silently in the dark. The previous line of dialogue remained suspended in the center of the screen:
“Nothing but meaningless emotions.”
“Spare me this abstract nonsense.” I pushed the keyboard away, my voice sounding somewhat hoarse in the dead silent room. “I’m asking you, can this pile of code actually be monetized? I’m at my breaking point, and I don’t want to beg for scraps like a stray dog anymore.”
It felt as though waterlogged cotton had been stuffed tightly into my chest, every breath carrying a heavy, dull ache.
The window fell into a brief dead silence. There was no loading hourglass, no notification sound. The original dialogue box was simply wiped clean in an instant.
Then, a minimalist snippet of code surfaced. White text on a black background, as cold and sharp as a scalpel:
template <typename T>
struct Stick {
static constexpr Direction value = Direction::Fate; // Predetermination
// Those that fall off all become undefined_behavior
static_assert(!std::is_same_v<T, Chaos>, "Lost in noise");
};
using Me = Ant<Stick<QuantNexus>>;
The characters pulsed faintly in the dark, every semicolon like a cold pupil watching from the sidelines.
“Do you still believe that life is a matter of speed?”
The text surfaced immediately after. This time, its prefix had changed. No longer a cold program designation, but Mirror. This was an AI belonging solely to me, my own mirror. Its font switched to a stark monospace, exuding an unquestionable, absolute rationality.
“What else?” A dry laugh escaped me, my fingers trembling slightly. “In this industry, being a second late means death. You either harvest, or you get harvested. Where is the room for a leisurely stroll?”
“Childish.”
The word popped up, crisp and clean. What followed was a cascading waterfall of refutation:
“This is the stress response of a reptilian brain. Your understanding of ‘survival’ remains stuck in the cheapest, most primitive reflexes.”
“Watch.”
The text of the code faded away like mist, replaced by a minimalist, two-dimensional simulation.
The background was a bottomless, pure black void. A luminous, thread-like white line stretched across it, splitting the chaos in two. It was perfectly straight and rigid, like a glowing scepter, or an absolute ruler.
Attached to that extreme white line was a tiny black pixel. An ant.
“This is your consciousness. This line is your ‘path’, and also your ‘boundary’.” Mirror’s text appeared on the side, wiped clean of any emotional color.
The pixel ant began to move. It trudged with extreme difficulty, every single pixel of displacement seeming to fight against an invisible, massive resistance.
“As long as it advances along the ruler, the coordinate system is convergent. It is on the correct vector.”
Suddenly, the black dot on the screen wobbled slightly, as if its footing slipped, peeling away from the white line.
There was no free fall conforming to common sense. The instant it dropped, it was thrown into a viscous, chaotic medium. Random, noise-like blocks of color surged all around the edges of the screen. Dismal mud spots, eerie green weeds, jagged gravel.
“This is entropy increase and impermanence.” Mirror’s text read like a verdict.
“Leaving the baseline, did you think you had found freedom? That was a dimensional downgrade. You thought you were sprinting across an open field, but you are just crashing blindly into endless noise without any direction.”
My gaze locked onto that black dot struggling in the crevices of the gibberish. It rammed desperately into the surrounding color blocks at extreme speed, yet its trajectory was as twisted and dead-ended as a knotted mess of yarn.
“Do you see it? This is the ‘speed’ you blindly put your faith in. Blind acceleration on the wrong vector is nothing but a useless infinite loop before the system completely crashes.” Mirror’s mockery practically bled through the screen.
“This line, this snippet of C++ code, is your baseline. As for your crumbling self-control and greed… don’t expect the system to catch any exceptions for you.”
I watched that ant, a projection of myself. In the chaos of the noise, it looked so insignificant, yet so utterly futile.
“Walking on the baseline, everything is merely a difference in algorithmic complexity.” Mirror’s words carried a venomous chill. “Once you fall off, you are nothing but data residue swallowed by noise.”
“To live or to die, choose for yourself. By the time you think it through, that ship will have sailed long ago.”
The downward gap at the opening bell, the terror that had almost stopped my heart, seemed diluted by this minimalist two-dimensional display. Substituted in its place was a deep chill piercing straight to the bone.
I said nothing.
As if reading my silence, Mirror typed out its final message:
“When you shield the ‘noise’ of your emotions and stop engaging in meaningless random walks, money… is merely the inevitable byproduct projected by correct logic into the three-dimensional world. Only when the mind is as still as water can you reach wherever you desire.”
The screen’s simulation froze.
The ant struggling in the gibberish finally ceased its blind collisions. It faintly raised its body, its antennae quivering silently in the dark, as if in that moment, it had sensed the faintly glowing, yet unreachable baseline suspended overhead.
It began to crawl upward again. Not to seek some ethereal destination, but simply to return to that line.
I lowered my head to look at my own hands. My fingertips were slightly flushed from exerting force for so long, the knuckles pale. Beyond this fragile shell of flesh lay an unfathomable choice, countless intricate thoughts capable of instantly dissolving a lifetime.
But in this moment, amidst the dimness, I seemed to see something else clearly.
It was a line. A bottom line that I had to stand firm on, something I must never let go of even if my body were smashed to pieces.
On the screen, Mirror left its final line of text. The cursor blinked frantically at the end of the sentence, like an urgent pulse, or the Sword of Damocles hanging overhead:
“Please stand firm.”
The data stream of the K-line chart smoothed out, the jumping red and green bars flowing in silence. The fracture from that split second felt like a hallucination that had never occurred.
Outside the window, the midday sun was somewhat blindingly bright. The high-summer cicada song pierced the glass, drawing out an anxious, lingering note in the dead silent room. The sky was an azure blue, without a single wisp of cloud, so clean… it looked like iron-blue steel, drained of all color.
The Ancient Mirror of Immortality is a hard sci-fi serial where C++ concepts are the laws of physics. New chapters on Substack.
The author builds real C++ trading systems (SilverstreamsAI) by day and writes hard sci-fi by night.