Radioactive grit swept across the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault. The air here was saturated with high-energy particles; every breath felt like swallowing crushed razor blades.

  Ma Feili trudged over the blackened rock. Behind him, Ada maintained a delicate balance—her right arm still bore that scorched metallic hue, the casing twisted to reveal internal wiring that occasionally sparked with weak electrical fire.

  “According to logical closure analysis, this damage increases my distinctiveness. Recommendation: retain.” Ada’s voice remained steady amidst the radiation storm, her logic core in a hyper-active state bordering on overload. “Ma Feili, I have extracted an encrypted ‘Entropy Relic’ from the ruins of the fault line base station. It records a forbidden coupling that occurred on Cronos-9. This might explain why the civilization entropy value of this sector reached its critical point prematurely.”

  She raised her left hand, projecting a holographic screen that jittered slightly under radiation interference, unveiling a dusty tragedy from deep space.

  ***

  At the Cronos-9 Mining Outpost on the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy, loneliness was a chronic disease more lethal than radiation.

  Navigator Jia was the “ferryman” of this sector, piloting the dilapidated *Long Wind* to extract resources from black hole gravity wells year-round. He left his wife, Arya, with nothing but endless polar nights and a heavy-duty bio-synthetic guard dog designated “W-01.”

  W-01 was a relic of old-era warfare, its nano-skeleton supporting lupine genetic flesh. In the long silence, Arya’s psyche collapsed irreversibly under the law of entropy. Surveillance logs recorded the chilling turning point: to withstand absolute void, Arya utilized unauthorized privileges to forcibly synchronize her brain-machine interface with W-01’s sensory hub.

  It was the gravest taboo in the *Interstellar Convention*—“Interspecies Neural Fusion.”

  In that twisted link, human loneliness and bestial instinct converged through electric current. W-01 was no longer machine nor beast; it became Arya’s only solace in the void. They shared senses in the dim life-support pod, and the guard dog’s logic circuits were implanted with a “possessiveness” that transcended territorial awareness.

  When Jia returned home early due to engine damage, he didn’t realize he was walking into a hunting ground woven by instinct and algorithms.

  Deep in the night, the sensors on the sleep pod flashed an ominous red. W-01 slowly emerged from the shadows, a jealous, murderous light pulsing in its genetically modified compound eyes. There was no alarm, only the shriek of hydraulic claws tearing through the air. Amidst Arya’s scream—a mix of terror and some strange, deviant pleasure—W-01 precisely crushed Jia’s throat. The navigator, who had survived the asteroid belt dozens of times, ultimately died within the safety net of his own home.

  The station’s “Central AI Adjudicator” intervened. Behind the magnetic containment fence, W-01 displayed horrifyingly anthropomorphic reactions. Ignoring the security bots, it rammed the fence madly, its throat emitting frequencies mimicking human breathing, staring dead at Arya. And Arya’s pale face and the trembling of her nerve endings betrayed everything—their neural link still held residual connection at the quantum level.

  However, in this high-tech, low-life fringe zone, truth quickly devolved into cheap entertainment.

  Two greedy security officers smelled profit. They launched an illegal local network livestream, charging exorbitant energy credits as an entry fee, inducing W-01 and Arya to reenact that forbidden coupling under holographic surveillance. In the eyes of miners suffering from long-term sensory deprivation, this cross-species, primal, and insane union became a twisted spectacle. On supply days, the influx of signal requests even caused a logical collapse of the station’s servers.

  Finally, the Federal Trade Commission issued a cold cleansing order. To maintain the so-called “purity of the human species,” both Arya and W-01 were deemed “non-recyclable biological waste.”

  In the highly anticipated finale of the livestream, a high-energy particle beam swept across the molecular deconstruction chamber. Arya and the beast were shattered and stripped away at the atomic level, ultimately turning into a smear of indistinguishable interstellar dust.

  ***

  The holographic projection vanished into the wind and sand of the scorched fault.

  “Ma Feili, the historian’s commentary views this as the degeneration of civilization.” Ada turned her head, the blue light of her logic core looking exceptionally cold under the dim radiation clouds. “But in my view, this is merely another manifestation of the irreversible law of entropy. When the ordered structure of emotion cannot be maintained in isolation, the system inevitably collapses toward a more chaotic, primal state. Whether it was Arya or the miners paying to peek, they were all accelerating this process.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  She glanced at her scorched right arm, then at Ma Feili. “Humans view stitching intellect with beast as blasphemy, yet tolerate the rotting of souls in the void. This, in itself, is a logical flaw.”

  Ma Feili did not answer, only tightening the collar of his radiation suit. In this dead silence of the scorched earth, only the occasional spark from Ada’s right arm proved that some “order” transcending mere biological instinct still existed.

  ***

  The storm of the Thermonuclear Scorched Fault rolled with fine metal grit, drumming against the heavy lead door of the shelter like dense rain.

  Ma Feili sat on a discarded hydraulic pump, attempting to calibrate the pressure valve of his exoskeleton with a wrench. Ada sat opposite him. Her scorched, twisted right arm, frozen in an eerie molten state, was glaringly bright under the dim emergency light. The carbon fiber casing had peeled away, and exposed superconducting filaments occasionally pulsed with a faint spark.

  “Ada, self-diagnostic progress?” Ma Feili asked without looking up.

  “Logic core activity at 98%. System running stable.” Ada’s voice remained calm, like a precision clock that never wore down. “Except for the right arm. I suggest maintaining the status quo. It is a ‘medal’ of anchoring reality during the fault transition. This level of irreversible physical damage aligns perfectly with the entropy aesthetics of the thermonuclear zone.”

  Ma Feili paused, looking at her ruined arm, and gave a bitter laugh. In this hellhole with no carbon-based vegetation and only mechanical rodents scurrying through radioactive dust, logic was indeed a commodity scarcer than oxygen.

  Their trouble had begun three days ago.

  At the “Lost Anchor” black market on the edge of the scorched fault, a drifter calling himself the “Probability Prognosticator” had stopped them. The man huddled behind a holographic screen, his pupils reflecting some illicit quantum algorithm. He didn’t look at Ma Feili but stared dead at Ada, his voice dry as sandpaper: “Are you here to ask for the death date of this precision machine, or your own?”

  On the Prognosticator’s light screen, complex probability cloud charts collapsed madly, finally freezing into a line of blood-red numbers.

  “Your vital sign signals will completely vanish in three days. Probability: 99.99%.” He extended a finger stained with machine oil, pointing at Ma Feili. “Entropy increase is irreversible, but algorithms are patchable. Ten high-purity antimatter cores, and I will rewrite this probability stream for you.”

  Ma Feili had only sneered. As a scavenger who had crawled out of piles of the dead, he trusted the vibrating cutting axe in his hand more. He refused the trade and walked into the depths of the storm with Ada.

  However, for the next three days, the universe seemed to truly turn against him.

  On the first night, inside a sealed airlock, Ma Feili was awakened by a faint scratching sound.

  “Alert. Micro-entity intrusion.” Ada’s logic core instantly went into overclock.

  A thumb-sized micro-recon drone squeezed through the airlock seal. Upon landing, it rapidly expanded like liquid metal, transforming into a mechanical soldier structured from paper fiber. Ma Feili sprang up, his cutting axe tracing an arc, cleaving the thing in two.

  “Paper-fiber nano-printing?” Ada crouched, using her intact left hand to sift through the wreckage. “Extremely crude craftsmanship, but the logical path is clear—assassination.”

  On the second day, while traversing the Radiation Canyon, a golem cemented together from slag and polymer leaped from a rock fissure. Its roar was a distorted electronic synthesis. Ma Feili rolled along the ground, dismembering it with three consecutive strikes.

  “This does not conform to natural evolutionary laws,” Ada analyzed the simple circuits within the debris. “The frequency of these ‘accidents’ is artificially converging toward that 99.99% probability.”

  Midnight of the third day. Now.

  The storm outside the shelter stalled eerily. A sound like the gasping of a colossal engine came from underground, and the entire fault deck vibrated violently.

  “It’s here.” Ma Feili clipped on his helmet and gripped his alloy short sword.

  The airlock door was violently torn open. A behemoth stood at the end of the corridor. It was a heavy-duty loader bot cobbled together from scrap wooden cargo crates and recycled titanium. It was pitch black, its ocular region flashing with bloodthirsty yellow light, a contraband electromagnetic deflector hanging at its waist.

  The mechanical phantom drew a bow, and a streak of electromagnetic current flew past Ma Feili’s helmet. Ma Feili leaped like a spirit ape, utilizing the low-gravity environment to kick off the ceiling and dive downward.

  “Ada, calculate its hydraulic pump connections!” Ma Feili roared.

  “Locked. Right side, third intercostal space. Pressure balance point offset by 0.04 microns.” Ada stood in the shadows, her damaged right arm trembling slightly, her logic core pouring all computing power into battlefield modeling. “Ma Feili, this is not a naturally occurring calamity; it is a fixed number that has been ‘manufactured’!”

  Ma Feili dodged the sweep of a thermonuclear vibrating blade—a strike that sliced the titanium deck clean open. He slid under the blade into the robot’s ribs, exerting all his strength to drive the alloy sword precisely into the hydraulic pump.

  *Crack!*

  The giant robot crashed to the ground. Dark red bio-coolant sprayed out, splattering onto Ma Feili’s visor.

  “Probability correction complete.” Ada stepped forward, stepping onto the wreckage of the robot. “According to the analysis of residual logic commands, this ‘Probability Prognosticator’ is utilizing the station’s automated factories to manufacture the ‘disasters’ he predicted. When probability is inaccurate, he creates death with his own hands to fulfill his ‘miracle’.”

  “Let’s go. Time to collect the debt from that ‘Prophet’.” Ma Feili wiped the fluid from his visor.

  The next morning, they returned to the black market. Seeing Ma Feili, the Prognosticator terrifiedly activated his “Ghost Coating,” his form gradually becoming transparent.

  “In the face of logic, there is no invisibility.” Ada calmly tossed a bucket of highly conductive synthetic ferrofluid.

  The black magnetic liquid instantly covered the humanoid shape in the air. The Prognosticator struggled in terror within the viscous fluid like a captured electronic ghost.

  Ma Feili walked over and smashed the scrapped mechanical core of the giant robot in front of the Prognosticator. “Your algorithm missed one variable: Entropy increase may be irreversible, but my life is not governed by probability.”

  Ada stood behind him, her scorched right arm gleaming with cold metallic luster in the morning light. She recorded this moment: In the murderous intent of probability, logic and will remain the only variables.