Most people nowadays use electronic notebooks to record written things.
From the time Jiang Yanyi learned to read, his mother had cultivated the habit of keeping a handwritten diary, and this habit had persisted until now.
He was one of the rare few who still insisted on handwriting. Young as he was, he had a bit of an old scholar’s demeanor.
Moonlight from the night shone into the room. Only a small desk lamp was lit on the desk. Wearing an outer coat, Jiang Yanyi sat behind the desk and truthfully recorded the first day’s performance of the robot Moji in his notebook.
He added some of his own observations afterward: Terrible taste in aesthetics, quite a temper.
Later, Jiang Yanyi pulled up some electronic documents sent to his phone by Meteorite Tech. On the signature page of the parameter inspection report, he found Yao Tong’s contact information and added her as a friend on his social app via his phone.
Not long after the friend request was sent, Yao Tong accepted it.
Jiang Yanyi took a photo of his handwritten observation record and sent it to Yao Tong, then followed up with a message:
[Moji seems a bit special. Her emotional simulation is very detailed and realistic. I can clearly feel her emotional fluctuations.]
Yao Tong’s reply came after a while, probably while reading the observation diary.
[She is special indeed. But Moji is the first bio-bionic android we’ve developed without installing any skill packages. Perhaps being unaffected by skill packages makes the core program run more lightly, hence the fuller emotional expression.
However, overall, rich emotions aren’t necessarily a bad thing.]
Jiang Yanyi: [Alright, then I’ll continue observing.]
Yao Tong: [Keep in touch if any issues arise.]
After finishing the conversation with Yao Tong, Jiang Yanyi logged into the internal network of the education system, downloaded a set of teaching plans from elementary to high school, and imported them onto his tablet.
After completing these tasks, he put the diary and fountain pen back into the drawer, got up, and went into the bathroom.
Robots don’t need to sleep. When night falls and humans are asleep, robots usually enter a charging state, with their bodies going into dormancy as well.
But Chi Xiaoxue had no intention of entering dormancy. She lay on the bed bored for a while.
Her thoughts gradually wandered—from her bizarre transmigration experience, to parallel universes, then to her parents and friends in another time and space, and that novel she hadn’t finished listening to in time.
If one day the two time-spaces intersected, would her parents still recognize her as she was now?
If the world she lived in now was a novel, would someone be watching her every move as if reading a story?
Thinking of this, Chi Xiaoxue sat up, tidied the long hair she had messed up by tossing and turning, then lay back down.
Considering someone might be watching, this time she didn’t lie down in a messy, twisted heap like before.
Instead, she lay on her side, one hand bent to support her head, with her well-proportioned legs elegantly crossed under her nightgown. The pose she struck resembled the noble consort reclining described in ancient novels.
Chi Xiaoxue’s thoughts drifted around. Soon, she thought of Jiang Yanyi again.
He was her male lead. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him during the day; she only felt he was a handsome guy with a good vibe, dressed in a crisp shirt and trousers. But his specific facial features were already blurry in her memory.
Now Jiang Yanyi should be asleep. Chi Xiaoxue simply got up from bed, planning to go take another look at Jiang Yanyi’s appearance.
She knew Jiang Yanyi’s bedroom was on the second floor. So she went barefoot, silently up to the second floor, gently pushed open one of the doors, and found it was actually a study.
Then she tried another door. Just as she poked half her head in, she unexpectedly met Jiang Yanyi’s scrutinizing gaze.
“Moji, something wrong?” Jiang Yanyi was sitting up in bed wearing pajamas, bathed in the warm yellow light of a wall lamp, holding an open book in his hands.
“No… nothing.”
Chi Xiaoxue considerately closed the door and went back downstairs, not bothering about the puzzled expression Jiang Yanyi had just shown.
·
Not needing to sleep at night meant having much more time than others. Chi Xiaoxue practiced speaking all night long.
She verbalized everything she thought of. At first, it was halting, but later it became much smoother.
As long as she kept practicing diligently, they wouldn’t keep saying her activation was slow anymore.
The next morning, Chi Xiaoxue confidently walked out of her bedroom, thinking that once she opened her mouth to speak, she would surely amaze them.
Chi Xiaoxue wandered around the house. Jiang Yanyi was in the kitchen preparing breakfast, and Xiao Bai hadn’t gotten up yet.
She deliberately walked into the kitchen, making some noise so Jiang Yanyi would notice her, allowing a natural conversation to start.
She tapped on the humming coffee machine. Sure enough, Jiang Yanyi turned and saw her.
“M… morning.”
Chi Xiaoxue got nervous and didn’t perform well, but it was okay. She tried to recover:
“Making breakfast?”
This time she spoke fluently, then looked at Jiang Yanyi smugly.
Jiang Yanyi looked her up and down, his brows gradually furrowing.
He first turned the heat for the simmering soy milk down to low, then turned around, leaned against the counter with his legs crossed, arms folded across his chest, and looked at Chi Xiaoxue with interest:
“What on earth are you wearing?”
Chi Xiaoxue looked down at her outfit—a khaki jacket and jeans, both new clothes bought yesterday. She thought, Does this guy have a bad memory? He went shopping with me yesterday.
“Clothes,” Chi Xiaoxue replied.
Jiang Yanyi pointed at the plaid nightgown she was wearing under the jacket and over the pants. “What’s the deal with this nightgown appearing here?”
“La… layers.”
Five minutes later, Jiang Yanyi appeared in Chi Xiaoxue’s bedroom, opened the wardrobe, took out all the clothes bought yesterday, matched them into sets one by one, and hung them back up.
Professor Jiang pointed at those coordinated outfits and said to Chi Xiaoxue, “From now on, wear them as I’ve matched. If you dare improvise freely again, I’ll find someone to turn off your preference attributes.”
Seeing her standing dazed by the door, Jiang Yanyi asked again, “Remembered?”
Chi Xiaoxue quickly nodded. “Re… remembered.”
“Remembered what? Repeat it.”
“You… want to find someone to… handle me.”
Jiang Yanyi stared at her speechlessly for a while, then sighed and laughed, repeating what he said before.
This time Chi Xiaoxue remembered, but she felt a bit unconvinced.
Before becoming a vegetative patient, she saw celebrities in posters dressed like that, and everyone praised it as “fashion.”
Why did it become weird when it came to her?
By the time Jiang Yanyi finished making breakfast, Xiao Bai was also up.
Seeing the father and daughter sitting at the dining table ready to eat breakfast, Chi Xiaoxue also went to the fridge, took out a nutrient solution jelly, poured it into a small bowl, and sat at the dining table with her bowl.
Jiang Yanyi glanced at her but said nothing, tacitly approving her behavior.
To integrate into the family faster, bionic androids were designed to imitate human lifestyles.
Things like eating at the same table—if the owner didn’t like it, they could simply tell the robot not to.
But Professor Jiang didn’t mind. In fact, he quite liked this kind of interaction.
“Zhibai, Daddy has to go to school later. You and Moji stay at home. You can watch cartoons for one hour. Auntie will come over around 10.”
The little curly-haired girl held her milk bottle with both hands, gulping down milk, and shook her fluffy curly hair up and down to indicate agreement.
Chi Xiaoxue scooped jelly with a small spoon. When she saw the milk bottle in the little curly-haired girl’s hands, she was a bit stunned.
Just yesterday, this child was discussing profound topics with her dad that Chi Xiaoxue couldn’t understand, making it seem like she had already graduated from college. Today, she was hugging a milk bottle drinking milk—quite a contrast.
Professor Jiang tapped the table with a bent finger. Chi Xiaoxue looked up at him, and he said to her:
“Moji, starting today, you need to systematically learn cultural knowledge, aiming to complete all subjects from elementary to high school within half a year.”
Robots aren’t limited by energy like humans. As long as they have power, they can keep learning tirelessly without exhaustion.
Moreover, the essence of their “learning” is actually data processing. Once new knowledge is recognized by the iris, it is input into the intelligent brain processing center, quickly transformed into mastered knowledge after processing.
Take memorizing ancient poetry, for example. Humans might need dozens or even hundreds of repetitions and comprehension to recite smoothly, while a robot only needs to read it once, and the processor can accurately remember those lines.
So Jiang Yanyi’s task of completing all knowledge up to high school within half a year wasn’t randomly set. Given the robot’s photographic memory and learning ability, half a year was more than enough.
But Chi Xiaoxue, upon hearing this task, fell into a long silence.
Half a year, elementary to high school.
Was she that strong?
Jiang Yanyi couldn’t read her despair, interpreting her silence as agreement.
Chi Xiaoxue felt a bit regretful. Had she known Jiang Yanyi had the quirk of talking nonsense at the dining table, she wouldn’t have come to share the table.
Just thinking about studying made the flavored jelly in her bowl seem less tasty.
After tidying the kitchen and dishes, Jiang Yanyi prepared to go to school to teach.
Before leaving, he turned on the holographic screen in the living room, pulled up the cartoon “Prince Feng Hui” that Xiao Bai watched every day, and set a timer for one hour.
He also took out the tablet computer with downloaded courseware and placed it on the coffee table.
“Moji, come sit here.” Jiang Yanyi pointed at a round cushion on the carpet in front of the coffee table.
Chi Xiaoxue, like a puppet on strings, walked over dazedly and sat down.
Jiang Yanyi opened the courseware. “You’ll study here today until I come back from work. I’ll check your learning progress.”
Once a robot accepts a task, it will keep executing it. Concepts like slacking off or procrastination don’t exist for them.
So Jiang Yanyi simply assigned the task and left, feeling it was much easier than teaching human students.
Those students at school were like a herd of wild horses running loose every day. Jiang Yanyi wished he could tear his mouth off and stick it to their ears to pour knowledge into them.
Before leaving, Jiang Yanyi looked back at the robot sitting obediently studying, satisfied, and then left.
Meanwhile, Chi Xiaoxue stared at the AI teacher in the video. Knowledge points chattered in through her left ear and out through her right ear, leaving behind an empty brain.
After a few minutes, her eyes shifted from the AI teacher’s face to the holographic screen, where she began watching the cartoon with great interest.
Xiao Bai noticed her watching the cartoon and went to get smart glasses. Putting them on and activating smart glasses mode, the holographic screen went black, with no sound either.
Chi Xiaoxue knew the child deliberately didn’t want her watching the cartoon, so she glared at her unhappily.
Then she turned back to stare blankly at the AI teacher. After a few minutes, she suddenly sighed, let out a couple of cold laughs, then fell silent again.
A while later, she twirled a strand of hair with her fingers, swaying her head and singing a song.
After singing “Yong Qi” (Courage) completely off-key, Chi Xiaoxue fell silent again.
She held her forehead, thinking hard. Who sang “Yong Qi” again?
That song was very popular when she was little; she could hum it casually, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember who sang it.
The name felt so familiar, yet she couldn’t recall it—that feeling was utterly maddening.
After pondering hard for a long time, Chi Xiaoxue slapped her forehead and said with certainty, “Faye Wong. ‘Yong Qi’ was sung by… by Faye Wong.”