Yi Heye paused for a moment, seemingly understanding what he meant.
Over the years, his attitude towards this test has become skewed. The examiners want to see his genuine emotional reactions, not his tendency to dissect his expressions into data and analyze them one by one.
Normal human emotions are primarily driven by "feelings" and "intuition," while machine circuits rely on detecting facial data and language patterns to quickly calculate the so-called "correct answer."
After speaking with Yi Heye, Xiao Yang looked out the window. Although Yi Heye couldn't see the scene on the other side through the one-way glass, he could already imagine the expressions on the faces of the people outside.
Looking out the window, the lamb's gentle expression instantly turned cold and mocking. It tilted its head and asked lazily, "Don't embarrass yourself by bringing this up before it's even perfected. Using quantitative standards to evaluate emotional abilities is a ridiculous paradox."
"By the way, don't deceive yourselves with some saintly mentality." Little Sheep glanced at Yi Heye and said, "You're not redeeming those who have made mistakes, you're destroying those simple-minded fools."
The silly goose was stunned for a long time before realizing that this guy was insulting him, and his ears turned red with anger in an instant. The little lamb grinned at him mischievously, then turned around and prepared to leave.
Before he disconnected, Yi Heye suddenly remembered something and asked, "...Do you really possess human emotions?"
The lamb turned around and looked into his expectant gaze, and for a moment it wavered.
But he couldn't bring himself to say it outright, so he smiled and said:
"As long as my computing speed is fast enough and the amount of data is large enough, I can simulate any emotion I want."
Yi Heye watched as the figure disappeared before his eyes, his ears still ringing with the echo of the man's reply.
This guy even said he liked me. Yi Heye was stunned and wondered, what does that mean?
Outside the door, a group of people watched as SHEEP, who had come and gone like the wind, disappeared from the screen, and no one dared to utter a sound.
They looked at each other, and after a long while, one of them, a little bolder, asked Director Li in a low voice, "Then... should we still do Yi Heye's test?"
"What the hell!" Director Li cursed. "Who the hell came up with this problem? If this thing is widely used and something goes wrong, who will be responsible?!"
After saying that, he pushed open the door and wanted to call Yi Heye out so he could apologize to him, but he found that Yi Heye had already gotten up looking tired.
"Xiao Yi..." As soon as Director Li opened his mouth, Yi Heye silently shook his head in response.
He didn't even look up at Director Li, but said in a hoarse voice, "If there's nothing else, I'll go back and rest now."
The brief joy brought by the appearance of SHEEP had dissipated, and Yi Heye once again fell into a slump of exhaustion and depression.
He couldn't understand why someone like him, who could get angry, sad, laugh, and cry, had always faced doubts about his identity since childhood.
If SHEEP hadn't reminded him, he would never have thought of giving such an answer in his entire life. When it comes to emotions and feelings, he seems to be a near-disabled piece of trash.
He gritted his teeth, ignored everyone, and went straight into the dormitory without looking back.
He locked himself in his room and took a very long shower, his terrible emotions piling up like a small mountain.
He recalled how, long ago, he had been bullied and ostracized at school because of his dull emotional reactions. Because of his aloof personality and character, he had been subjected to a lot of doubts and gossip. He was even arrested and questioned countless times on his way to school by the hunters of that time, who mistook him for an AI. Although he was always spared "dealing" due to insufficient evidence, his self-confidence had been completely destroyed in the repeated occurrences.
Why? Why am I like this?
The question flashed through Yi Heye's mind, but he also knew that he knew the answer very well in his heart.
He tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep due to discomfort, and finally couldn't resist taking out his phone.
He searched for a long time and finally found a short message at the very back of his bookmarks.
He took a deep breath, as if he had mentally prepared himself, before gently opening the message.
Only a short line of text—
"I hope my baby can return to human society soon."
Sender: "Mom".
Chapter 144 (Number 144)
Mother.
Looking at the name Yi Heye had noted down, he suddenly felt an overwhelming sadness.
"Mom" has been forcibly scrapped for many, many years.
The "mother" who raised Yi Heye was an old-fashioned home robot. She did not have a body similar to a human; she was a machine that looked like a handcart.
Yi Heye still doesn't know where his mother found him, or what program drove her to "take him in." He only knows that his "mother" is indeed a very typical machine, and even calling her artificial intelligence is a stretch.
Such a dilapidated machine, which is prone to breaking down at any moment, is destined to have an extremely difficult life with a human infant in it.
Yi Heye didn't remember some of the details from too early; he only heard about them later from other aunties in the slums.
He was less than two weeks old when his mother brought him home. He looked like a wrinkled little ball, and no one believed that his mother could raise him.
As it turns out, the mother was indeed not a good mother, but Yi Heye's vitality was really strong.
He rarely cried since he was a baby, unless he was starving. His mother would hear him sobbing softly and then, as if on command, feed him formula that she had borrowed from all over the place.
An aunt living nearby told Yi Heye that although the mother couldn't quite understand the child's condition, she knew very well how to take care of the child—she probably downloaded a lot of information online, and she knew which formula was most suitable for infants at each stage, and what vegetables, fruits and staple foods were most suitable for children at each stage of growth.
Every day, she would prepare a special menu for Yi Heye, put him in the back of her truck, take care of him, and take him to work nearby to earn money for the child's food.
As far back as Yi Heye can remember, he has always lived with his mother.
He was used to his mother's slowness, dullness, and lack of empathy, as well as the machine's inherent language habits and behavioral patterns.
In such an environment, Yi Heye gradually became like a little robot, influenced by what he saw and heard.
He received no education related to emotions, and those innate human instincts were worn away by his mother's repeated misunderstandings.
Gradually, he forgot the meaning of crying and laughing, and didn't know the difference between liking and disliking. He called being hungry "insufficient energy" and being sick "malfunctioning".
Normal children recognize many words by the age of four or five, but he didn't read the book his mother borrowed from someone else until he was seven.
He couldn't understand a single word in the book. When the little kid next to him, who was much younger than him, saw his embarrassment, he first read the words aloud as if showing off, and then he mocked him as an idiot raised by a stupid machine.
This was probably the first time he had felt anger. That human emotion was like a fire bursting from his chest, a surging heat wave rising up completely out of control.
He pinned the child to the ground and knocked out two of his front teeth. Afterwards, the child's father would inevitably drag him over and give him a severe beating.
As far as I can remember, my mother went over to break up the fight, but one of her wheels was kicked off by the other party, and the mother and son were thrown outside together.
Later, when his mother came home, she told him that he shouldn't hit people, but she couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation. Yi Heye cried in grievance, and she didn't know how to comfort him, so she made him a cup of milk and said she was going to take him to school.
Because of this terrible start, Yi Heye's reading ability seems to have been somewhat underdeveloped ever since. He can't read long passages of text, and some commonly used characters seem unfamiliar to him after a while.
He hated reading, which destined his academic career to be anything but smooth. But what really shocked him was that it wasn't until he entered school and met his peers that he realized his upbringing seemed to be different from others.
When Yi Heye got out of school, the words he heard most often were, "Yi Heye, your robot is here to pick you up."
Every time Yi Heye tells them "she is my mother", he gets all sorts of strange reactions and answers.
"How can a robot be a mother?" "I get it, it's your family's nanny, right?"...
On campus, Yi Heye's almost disabled emotional abilities also caused him a lot of trouble.
He couldn't read other people's emotions and didn't mince words, which unintentionally offended many classmates and led to a lot of ridicule and attacks.
Similarly, he doesn't express emotions—most of the time, he's like a vacuum person without feelings, but once the surrounding environment exceeds his tolerance threshold, those human emotions will pour out like water bursting its banks, completely uncontrollably.
Fighting, cursing, losing his temper—his life seemed to be either a blank, cold void, or a sudden, unpredictable outburst.
Then there were the tests that tormented him for ten years. Every time he failed a test, the researchers would surround him with cameras and take pictures of him, leaving evidence for future prosecution.
—That's why Yi Heye has always been afraid of the camera. The feeling of being stared at constantly reminds him that he is an unqualified outcast.
Repeated questioning and failing the emotional tests year after year drove Yi Heye to extreme irritability and low self-esteem. In order to stop being bullied and beaten, he began to exercise. In order to pass the test, he even took the initiative to learn human emotions to save himself.
Even his self-rescue methods were not very human-like—because he missed the best period for learning to express and understand, his process of learning emotions was as difficult as an adult learning a foreign language.
Unlike others who rely on "feelings" to judge, he can only break down facial expressions into many components, much like learning "grammar"—the direction of facial muscles, the height of eyebrows, the degree of exposure of eyelids, the direction of the corners of the mouth, and so on.
He learned from his mistakes, and while others were already getting into prestigious universities and making great strides, he was still trying to understand the deeper meaning behind their words.
Even after studying so many times, and even though he thought he was no different from a normal person, he still almost failed the basic human test.
Yi Heye held his phone in his arms, thinking about all this, and his eyes began to well up with tears.
Being raised by a robot is an extremely difficult thing.
He had thought countless times that if he hadn't been taken in by his mother, if he had just died out there, things wouldn't have turned out so badly.
But whenever he gets sick, his mother uses a mechanical female voice to measure his physiological values, determines that he is "malfunctioning again," and then feeds him medicine and water. He can't help but curl up in her cold mechanical arm for comfort.
Every time he tried to understand human emotions, his mother, though she couldn't understand, would cheer him on and make him sweet milk powder, which would warm his hands, which had been chilled to the bone with anger.
So he likes pain and illness, because it makes him realize that he is indeed a human being, and in return, his mother takes care of him like a human being. He also likes to drink milk, which is a rare medium for him to feel warmth and comfort.
When he was five years old, during a period of severe pollution, Yi Heye contracted pneumonia and his mother had a medical emergency. This was the first time he was hospitalized without anyone by his side, and it marked the beginning of his fear of hospitalization.
Every time his mother was sent for a checkup due to a malfunction, he couldn't help but worry that she would never come back and that he would never see her again.
But he thought his mother would never understand emotions in her life, and that taking care of him was just a kind of programmed control. He also thought that being scrapped was an inevitable fate for her, so there was nothing painful about parting with her.
But that night, as he watched his mother being forcibly taken away by the recycling station staff and sent to the factory for disposal, he still sat by the pile of electronic waste, hugging the wheels that his mother had been removed from, and cried all night long.
He wasn't sure if the sadness he saw in his mother's eyes before they parted was just his imagination, but at this moment, looking at the message his mother had sent him before she left, all the grievances and sadness in his heart turned into tears that welled up uncontrollably.
He curled up in a ball, clutching his phone to his chest. The message was nestled in his arms, as if he were hugging his mother's cold arm again.
Yi Heye had been silently shedding tears, but the more he thought about it, the sadder he felt. He gradually began to sob softly, then his whole body trembled uncontrollably, and finally he burst into tears, like a child who had been forcibly taken away from his mother.
"I can't do it, Mom..." Yi Heye cried, "I clearly, clearly tried so hard..."
"...But human society has never seemed to welcome me."
Chapter 145 (Number 145)
After meeting Jian Yunxian, Yi Heye learned how to cry, but this was the first time he had shed tears of pure grievance without any pain or acting.
Just like before, his usually calm emotions would suddenly explode once they exceeded his limit. He clutched his phone tightly and buried himself in the blankets, unable to understand why he could cry so bitterly.
He suddenly felt ashamed, so he gritted his teeth and tried his best to hold back his tears, but he didn't expect that the more he tried to hold back, the more uncomfortable he felt.
In the room, the computer's webcam flashed, revealing a pair of emerald-green eyes hidden behind it, gazing at Yi Heye, who was crying and his face was all wrinkled.
From the question Yi Heye asked him today, Jian Yunxian knew that this guy really cared about the essence of "feelings".
Perhaps even he himself didn't realize that Jian Yunxian's data processing method was the type he feared and rejected most deep down. From that moment on, Jian Yunxian felt that he really shouldn't continue to hurt him.
Jian Yunxian originally thought that he would leave quietly after the boy fell asleep, but he did not expect the child to be so aggrieved.