Chapter Twenty-Seven: I Believe You Came from the Future

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Xu Jiayi stepped into the Rainbow Police Station on Old Hill Street and headed straight for Officer Singh’s reception desk.

“Hey, little sister, this is Singapore, a civilized society. You can’t cut in line.”

In the waiting area, a woman of about fifty waved her numbered slip and scolded Xu Jiayi indignantly.

Singh quickly pushed aside the partition and stepped out to explain to the woman, “Auntie, this is an engineer. She’s in charge of all the robots in our precinct, and she’s here for an inspection today.”

An engineer?

The woman slanted a glance at Xu Jiayi, muttering to herself: Aren’t robot engineers supposed to be very wealthy? The news says that senior employees at robotics companies have annual salaries well over a million Singapore dollars. How is it that this young girl is dressed so shabbily—worse than a domestic helper?

While the strange aunt looked at the dowdy-looking Xu Jiayi, Ronan’s eyes lit up the moment she followed Singh through the glass door into the inner reception room.

However, when he stood up, a wave of awkwardness washed over him. As he shook hands with Jiayi, his gaze drifted away.

Singh pursed his lips and teased Jiayi, “I know a Chinese saying: ‘Even if the deal doesn’t go through, the goodwill remains.’ Look, when your ex-boyfriend ran into trouble, you were the first person he thought of. Doesn’t that fit the meaning perfectly?”

“That is absolutely not what it means,” Jiayi retorted, showing him no mercy. “Singh, your command of Chinese is truly abysmal.”

Singh shrugged, his face practically beaming with the words “I am super confident,” and laughed, “Doesn’t matter. I’m the best Chinese-speaking Indian guy among the Malaysian immigrants, and that’s enough.”

He then turned to Zhou Yongtai and said, “Handsome, you must have guessed why they broke up, right? This woman doesn’t give a man any face at all. Who could stand that?”

“As long as she can help a man stay alive, that’s enough,” Jiayi said as she sat down. “Singh, hurry up and get out of here, or you’re going to get reported by the Uncles and Aunties for being absent from your post.”

Singh kept his good-natured smile and turned to leave.

Regarding the bizarre story of his adventure and the immediate danger Ronan had described, Singh—who firmly believed in the existence of deities—did not view Zhou Yongtai, the time-traveler, as a psychiatric patient.

Moreover, because of his frequent work with and supervision of AGI robots, Singh also believed that the AGI of forty or fifty years from now could very well be like the hijacked Ada.

Now, with a true artificial intelligence expert—who also happened to be “Ronan’s formidable ex-girlfriend”—having arrived at lightning speed, Singh felt a genuine sense of relief.

…

Jiayi looked at Zhou Yongtai, then at Ronan, and said, “Singh told me a little bit over his police phone. Now, tell me the details.”

Her tone and voice were not particularly gentle, but the expression on her face was neither cold nor perfunctory.

In fact, it was not perfunctory at all; her eyes shone with sincere concern.

Even though Zhou Yongtai was accustomed to Ada’s indifferent face, and even though he had rarely interacted with any human females since he could remember, he felt an instinctive sense of closeness to the female engineer before him.

This feeling allowed him to briefly set aside his bewilderment and restraint. Together with Ronan, adding details to each other’s accounts, he gave a clear, comprehensive summary of his and Ada’s origins, their experiences over the past few days, and the sudden disaster that had descended upon them.

When they finished, both Ronan and Zhou Yongtai were somewhat nervous.

Jiayi was a genuine scientist. Unlike Ronan, who was an artist with a wild imagination, or Singh, a Hindu believer influenced by mysticism, would her first reaction be that these two men really needed to see a psychiatrist?

Jiayi had kept her head down while listening. Now, she stood up and walked to the glass wall facing the main police hall.

People inside the room could see what was happening outside, but the citizens in the hall, there to report crimes or conduct business, could not see them.

Jiayi studied each of the busy AGI robots one by one before returning to sit in front of Zhou Yongtai.

“Mr. Zhou, you say you come from Komodo Island in Indonesia?” she asked calmly.

Zhou Yongtai nodded.

“Near the Pink Beach?”

“Pink Beach?” Zhou Yongtai looked blank. “What Pink Beach?”

Jiayi slid her chair over to the whiteboard and used a marker to draw two irregular circles representing the islands.

“Here is Komodo Island, and here is an island. Could you tell me what it’s called?”

Zhou Yongtai answered without hesitation, “That is Padar Island.”

“Exactly. And the Pink Beach is right here, between Komodo Island and Padar Island.”

Zhou Yongtai shook his head firmly. “No, there is no beach there. There is only a research base called ‘Cloud.’ When I was very young, I lived there with my mother, along with other survivors who had gathered there, and our mechanical servants. Later, the base was overrun by AI combat units. A group of us escaped and hid in an underwater life-support pod for a month, only to discover that all of Komodo had become a wasteland.”

“And then?” Jiayi continued to ask.

“Then, my mother believed that places already ransacked would be safer for a while. We hid back on Komodo and, sure enough, managed to survive in various bunkers for nearly ten years.”

Jiayi’s face was as calm as still water, but inside, it felt as if a thunderclap had struck.

Cloud Base…

This was a project that the core members of her organization had only decided upon during a secret high-level meeting last week.

The name, the location, and the vision were all temporarily confidential. The number of people who knew about it, including herself, did not exceed eight.

The matter was of such great importance that the core members hadn’t even disclosed it to the mid-level researchers, let alone anyone outside the organization.

Even if, for the sake of argument, one of the other seven people had a social connection to this Mr. Zhou and had somehow let it slip, why wouldn’t Zhou Yongtai have gone directly to that person instead?

Therefore, Zhou Yongtai was indeed a person from the future. That was why his instinctual reaction was to be completely oblivious to the famous Pink Beach of the current time, yet he had immediately and accurately identified the “Cloud” base.

Jiayi then spoke decisively, “I believe you, Mr. Zhou. Welcome to 2035.”

“Was that a test just now?” Ronan realized. “So, are they going to build a ‘Cloud’ base there in the near future?”

“You’ve become much smarter than you used to be.” Jiayi pursed her lips.

Ronan responded with a humble, self-deprecating smile.

The familiar feeling returned. Back then, they had both believed that increasing details indicated the other party looked down on them, which was why they had broken up.

But now, Ronan no longer felt that “sudden surge of anger.”

“Alright, Mr. Zhou, try to recall now: since you traveled here, what AGIs, or even just generative AI products, has your mechanical servant Ada come into close contact with? Oh, and that stalker you mentioned who only appeared for one day—did you manage to secretly take a photo of her?”

This immediately reminded Zhou Yongtai.

That day at the charging station on Joo Chiat Road, he and Ada had pretended to be tourists taking selfies, capturing the woman following them in the frame.

Zhou Yongtai took out his phone and opened his photo album.

“It’s this woman wearing sunglasses. Actually, Ada’s visual system can identify the facial features she covered, but unfortunately, it cannot reconstruct them into an image to share on the phones of this world.”