Cyber ​​Ghost Record

Chapter 117-116: Art
An underground printing plant.

Suger put his legs on the control panel, leaned back in his chair, and glanced at the workshop through the glass. Of the four Aurora printers, only two were still running. Chiba Ryoko sat on the other side, running her fingers through the waitress's hair as if dressing up a doll.

"Recently, medicine has been hard to sell. Smugglers in Yingchuan City have joined forces to monopolize the underground pharmaceutical trade. Dentists and bartenders no longer dare to take on medicines of unknown origin. They are the main force behind drug smuggling."

“They didn’t sell well after that,” Su Ge said.

“We need to explore some new channels. We’re basically doing orders left over from the previous owner right now,” Chiba Ryoko said. “You have a pretty convenient identity now, right? Just use Su Xing’s identity. Bai Gui will definitely take your goods. That guy is pretty good at getting things done. This morning he wired 50,000 to Su Xing’s account, saying it was your share of the spoils from last night. That junk isn’t worth 50,000.”

“I used him, and I did give him an opportunity.” Su Ge looked at the light reflected in the glass, thinking of the hospital that had been blocked by the gang. He considered Shen Ke’s suggestion and shook his head. “We can’t get too involved with him, and we certainly can’t use Su Xing’s identity to do smuggling.”

“Then this factory is doomed.” Chiba Ryoko paused. “But there are other ways. We can handle the upstream and downstream channels and just send a few accomplices.”

"You're just going to wait for me here, aren't you?"

Sug turned to look at Chiba Ryoko, but did not see her.

He suddenly felt a tickle in his ear—the touch of his hair. He looked down and saw Chiba Ryoko leaning close to his ear.

“It’s no use disagreeing,” she said softly. “I already have a servant.”

"When?" Su Ge was taken aback.

"Look, he hasn't realized it yet."

Ryoko Chiba smiled and left Suger's side.

Only then did Su Ge understand her joke. He touched his ear, feeling a faint itch on his fingertips. He withdrew his hand and looked at her. She had already left the control room, giving him no chance to deny or refuse. Through the glass, Su Ge saw Chiba Ryoko walk into the workshop, past the printers, the lights from the running machines reflecting on her swaying, dark hair.

He unconsciously raised his hand and sniffed his fingers.

She turned her head and looked over.

He immediately withdrew his hand, as if he had done something wrong.

She smiled, turned around, and walked towards a corner of the printing factory.

It was hard to tell whether his expression was sarcastic or encouraging.

Suger looked away and leaned his neck against the soft cushion of the headrest.

"Don't try that on me, I've been fooled once."

“Almost,” he added.

"I haven't lied to you about anything."

Ryoko Chiba walked to the corner of the printing plant, where her backup machine and the prosthetic bodies stored in the Tzu Chi Building had been moved.

A delivery drone swept past her, flew out of the warehouse, and its shadow swept across the damp, reflective street before disappearing into the distant rain and mist.

……

As Shen Ke walked into the street, an inverted pyramid floated in the darkness in her green pupils.

This is the dark web, a space that doesn't follow the physical laws of the real world. The smooth glass surface of the pyramid reflects the distant glimmer of light, its apex touching the ground. A narrow door opens at the bottom, serving as the entrance to this place.

She walked over and entered the building's interior, a funnel-shaped space. At the bottom of the space was an exhibition hall with white and brown flooring, sculptures and paintings everywhere, and reliefs and murals on the walls and columns. A spiral staircase at the edge of the hall rose upwards as if it had no end. "An art museum."

Her voice echoed in the endless space. She was speaking to Suger, who was simultaneously receiving her senses.

This dark web space was one of the information exchange channels provided to Suger by the Security Bureau. The mysterious informant who had disappeared had used this channel to expose more than a dozen contraband factories and dozens of crimes.

"He hid the intelligence in these works of art."

She walked to a wall where there was a mural in only red, black, and white, depicting a group of artisans firing clay, chopping wood, and using these materials to create arms, heads, torsos, and sculpt armor. It was clearly a scene of ancient artisans making figurines.

She looked at the date on the painting: March 12, 2241. It was a work from several years ago. The mysterious informant had left a clue in the painting, which the Security Bureau used to raid a secret, illegal prosthetic assembly plant in Yingchuan City.

Su Ge observes the murals through Shen Ke's eyes.

"I can't see any hidden information."

"This mural points to a separate dark web space that contains crucial information, such as addresses, specific times, and the identities of criminal suspects."

A hyperlink, Socrates thought.

"Wasn't the hidden link encrypted?"

Shen Ke shook her head and raised her hand to touch the unevenness of the paint on the mural.

"No, maybe he was just trying to uncover the secret, so there was no need to encrypt it."

“This place doesn’t seem to have many customers,” Suger said.

"There won't be any customers in a place like this."

Shen Ke looked at the full-length mirror next to her and stared at her reflection, which was also her gaze meeting Su Ge's.

"Your words always give away your identity as a hibernator."

"Why this time?"

“Because your words reveal a concept that people today don’t have,” she said. “Commodities need customers, while art only needs an audience. Artworks and commodities used to be inseparable, but that was a long time ago.”

"Uh, you mean art has lost its value?"

She did not deny it, but said: "In your time, art was the privilege of a few. To create, you needed talent, passion and time. To spread it, you needed money, connections and luck... This privilege was quickly dismantled."

“AI,” he said, recalling the years before he went into hibernation, when AI lowered the barrier to artistic creation. Some predicted it would bring about a global Renaissance, while others predicted it would kill art.

“Artworks are no longer scarce, and therefore lose their value, their commercial value,” she said. “So they become more pure.”

Her words left him with a sense of emptiness. He understood that during periods of change in production relations, some groups would always be left behind by the times, and this sense of emptiness stemmed from his feeling that he was one of those abandoned.

She walked through the exhibition hall, scanning the paintings and sculptures. The artworks here were a mix of styles; some were rich in emotion, some seemed to contain hidden metaphors, and some looked like just a jumble of images.

"Isn't that great? You like something not because it's famous, nor because it's valuable, but simply because you like it."

As she spoke, she stopped in front of a wall and examined the painting on it. The painting was on a large sheet of burlap, with a tree against a dark background. In the trunk of the tree was a human body, embracing itself in the posture of an infant in the womb. Its face was indistinct, and the tree was covered with bright red fruit.

(End of this chapter)