Chapter Ten: The Inner School, Turing

“What’s going on?” After leaving the scrap parts recycling bin on the east end of town, Yuki was visibly annoyed. “That old man!”

The scrap parts recycling bin was, in fact, more of a public facility. If anyone had obsolete parts they no longer needed, they could deposit them here. And if someone was short on cash, they could take a few parts without paying.

The town also assigned some people who had lost their ability to work to maintain these parts. These individuals either had lost their prosthetic limbs for labor and had no credit to borrow money for new ones, or suffered severe brain injuries that impaired their mobility.

Their job was to preserve the “barely usable” scrap metal with rust-proof oil and silicone.

However, just as Yuki’s mother might store a pair of prosthetic arms for years, parts were only brought here when they were close to reaching their metal fatigue limit.

But Xiang Shan didn’t need top-quality parts.

Besides, these parts weren’t for his own use. He had other purposes.

Yet, they encountered an unexpected entanglement.

An old man in charge of maintenance kept insisting to Xiang Shan, “You’re rich,” and wouldn’t let go, making it difficult for Xiang Shan to select parts properly. In the end, Xiang Shan had to pick a few brand-new parts from those he had just bought and handed them over to the caretakers.

The caretakers left gleefully, clutching screws, diodes, and the like.

“Usually, you don’t have to pay anything to get emergency parts here!” Yuki protested.

“Alright, Yuki, that was just an unplanned surplus, meant as backups,” Xiang Shan stopped him. He wasn’t really angry. To him, this was like the tradition of handing out wedding candies—something good happened to him [at least everyone thought so], so sharing some joy with others wasn’t excessive.

Only the recipients had changed—from children to a few elderly men who were nearly regressing to childhood.

That phrase, “You’re rich,” even made him chuckle for a moment.

“Looks like, even in this era, people are still just people…”

“What?” Yuki was puzzled.

“People are complicated—kind and cruel, good and bad all at once. Sometimes I worry I’ve been asleep too long and the people now are strangers to me… Never mind, why am I telling you this?” Xiang Shan shook his head.

Even now, humans still show kindness and malice. That’s enough.

Of course, a bit of malice still exists. Come to think of it, Dr. Schultz’s attitude when asking him to go online… could that have been a test? In this era, does refusing to go online mean something?

But that’s not a big problem.

—Though that doesn’t mean he’d forgive “true malice.”

“Just now, recalling my own experience was quite a shock,” Xiang Shan brought up another matter. “Yuki, do you remember? At first, I wasn’t planning to step forward, but someone pushed me out. Did you see that person? Who stood behind me then?”

Although he originally wanted to step up, and the matter ended well, it didn’t mean he forgave the person who pushed him.

The person who pushed him had intended to kill him—and acted on it.

Yuki slapped his own face. Because Xiang Shan’s defeat of the martial artist was so shocking, everyone had forgotten that.

“I didn’t see,” Yuki said guiltily, but his voice carried some tension. “Xiang Shan, what do you want to do… What would a hero usually do in this situation?”

“I’ll tell you about it when there’s a chance,” Xiang Shan patted Yuki’s back. “Alright, good child, go home now.”

“Go home?” Yuki was taken aback. “What about you, Xiang Shan?”

“I’ll naturally be doing my own thing,” Xiang Shan said. “What’s coming next isn’t suitable for good kids. You go home and sleep. I’ll tell you the outcome tomorrow.”

---

“No!” Yuki knew that Xiang Shan would definitely do what a hero does—and he wasn’t going anywhere now.

Xiang Shan urged him several times, but Yuki refused to leave. Eventually, Xiang Shan sighed and said, “Fine, I was planning to teach you something anyway… I’ll take you, but you must speak less and observe more, understand?”

Yuki nodded excitedly, then curiously asked, “Aren’t you going to keep fixing your prosthetic?”

“No need,” Xiang Shan shook his head. “I do want to make a new prosthetic soon, but there’s something more important right now. Also, this needs to be done on the outskirts of town. If you’re coming, bring those parts with you.”

The two soon arrived at a quiet spot, a path they usually took to the junkyard, where no one came at night.

The moon was exceptionally bright tonight. Xiang Shan adjusted the lens in his eyes and suddenly noticed something remarkable.

He saw a visible line across the moon, like a scratch on a pancake. Within the moon’s halo, there was also a faint, barely discernible thin line.

It was a very small ring—a star ring.

Something had happened to the moon’s surface, causing a drastic change in its landscape and even tearing off a small piece of material, forming a faint, almost invisible ring.

“Finally, I have some leisure to look at the moon, and I actually see something extraordinary…” Xiang Shan’s voice transmitter failed to fully capture the complexity of his emotions. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve really awoken after many years of sleep, or if I’ve crossed into a parallel world…”

Yuki plopped down on the ground, the large pile of parts on his back clanging loudly. “Xiang Shan, whatever you’re doing, there’s no need to come this far… I’m tired…”

Xiang Shan stopped and looked around.

This place was far from anything resembling a signal station and away from any hidden cameras.

Good.

Silently, Xiang Shan took the scrap parts from Yuki’s hands. “Yuki, remember what you are about to see. Store it in your biological brain and never forget it—even if you die!”

He fitted gears onto a drive shaft, then placed several shafts onto the discarded frame of a mechanical tool, creating the foundation of a mechanical structure. The gears meshed with each other, and the shafts interlocked.

Yuki’s eyes widened. “Xiang Shan, what is this? It looks amazing…”

“Of course it’s amazing.” Xiang Shan stared intently at the device he was building as memories flooded his mind.

He was familiar with this structure.

“What’s so amazing about it? Can it defeat villains?”

“I told you to pay attention,” Xiang Shan scolded. “If you want to learn my skills, you must memorize this.”

Yuki pouted. “I don’t even know what this is…”

Xiang Shan paused briefly in his work.

Then he said solemnly, “Alright, listen carefully. This structure is called a ‘Turing Machine.’”

Yuki watched Xiang Shan’s labor.

Xiang Shan had assembled an extremely crude, simple machine from scrap parts. It lacked a power source and consisted of gears; friction would transfer kinetic energy from one gear to another… It even had a joystick handle as the power input.

Yuki scratched his head. “This thing… is what you want me to remember?”

It was ugly and crude. To get the gears running one last time, Xiang Shan had used all the lubricant given by the caretakers. The machine looked black and oily, repulsive even.

Xiang Shan nodded, then turned the joystick.

The kinetic energy transmitted by his hand changed direction and branched out through the gears, powering the entire mechanism.

The sound of metal teeth meshing and clashing filled the air.

Xiang Shan murmured, “This is it.”

“Xiang Shan…” Yuki awkwardly pointed out, “It looks like scrap metal.”

Xiang Shan raised his head, staring at Yuki and shouted, “The material is scrap metal, but the structure is not. You must remember its name—Turing Machine!”

His gaze returned to the machine, voice softening. “It’s the primordial computer, the greatest product humanity created in the study of mathematics, and the origin of all internal power.”

“‘Internal power’?”

“All the martial arts you’ve heard of—even those you saw at the Paralympics, and those the dog and I used—are mere external martial arts,” Xiang Shan closed his eyes. “Of course, there’s also ‘internal martial arts.’”

“External martial arts are specialized tactics refined from the art of war. Internal martial arts are the product of the mutual enhancement of intelligence and artificial intelligence.”

“‘Internal power’ was called ‘hacker technology’ in ancient times. But those primitive hackers couldn’t manipulate code and computing resources directly with a biological brain like heroes do now. They had to face an output device called a ‘screen’ and interfere with that world using an input device called a ‘keyboard’—that was just the level of mortals. A hero’s ‘internal power’ is a hundred times more magical. But fundamentally, internal power is an evolved form of hacker technology.”

The relationship between hacker technology and a hero’s internal power was like that between the first single-celled organisms in the primordial ocean and the later higher life forms. The latter was dazzling and mysterious but ultimately developed from the former.

“All internal power is based on the power of computing machines, and all computers originate from this magnificent engineering structure…”

A hint of fervor crept into Xiang Shan’s voice.

Turing Machine.

In 1920, David Hilbert—the world’s greatest mathematician at the time, leader of the Göttingen school, and proposer of the famous “23 problems”—launched an assault on the essence of mathematics. He proposed the concept of “metamathematics,” the study of mathematics itself.

Mastering metamathematics meant mastering all of mathematics.

At its core were three problems: completeness, consistency, and computability.

Completeness meant all mathematical problems could be proved or disproved.

Consistency meant no assertion could be both true and false—no contradictory proofs.

Computability meant all mathematical proofs could be obtained through a feasible process within finite steps.

Once these three problems were solved, humanity and machines could crack all mathematical problems—the “ultimate answer” to mathematics would be in human hands.

Mathematicians worldwide were obsessed with these three problems.

The Turing Machine was the divine tool to tackle them.

It was a structure imbued with “intelligence.”

Yuki clapped, half out of obligation, half sincere. “But Xiang Shan, what does this have to do with the ‘internal power’ you mentioned…”

---