"What problem is there?"
"Will this loving couple have children? If, one day, they discover each other's identities, think of the pain that would bring? The child is innocent, but the child is a hybrid of human and android. What then?"
"What hybrid? Androids and normal humans have no fundamental genetic differences. Their children will naturally be children of normal humans, not aliens or robots." Yūki Yotsuya smiled, she had been smiling throughout, but her smiles varied. "And the situation you mentioned will not happen. This loving couple will never know each other's origins until death."
"Because others don't know, it's not a sin? Because others don't know, one can do anything? Morality isn't just for show; morality is about having a clear conscience." Jiang Ye frowned. "Do you know Yang Guozhong, the Tang Dynasty Chancellor?"
"I seem to have heard of him, but I don't know him." Yotsuya Yuki shook her head.
"Yang Guozhong was ordered to inspect Jiangxi and Zhejiang. He was away from home for a year. Finally, after finishing his work, he returned home only to find his wife several months pregnant. Yang Guozhong asked, 'What's going on? Whose child is this?' His wife said, 'It's your child. You were away for a year, and I missed you terribly. I thought of you day and night, and dreamed of being with you every night. Suddenly, one day I started having morning sickness, and then I became pregnant.' Yang Guozhong was overjoyed, thinking, 'My wife truly loves me.'" Jiang Ye said, "The matter of androids and human children is essentially no different from this. In ancient times, there were no paternity tests, so Yang Guozhong's wife boldly deceived him. Was that right?"
"Furthermore, how would an android not know where they came from? Even if you raised an android infant from an orphanage and lied to them, telling them they were ordinary humans whose parents had disappeared. But there's no way to keep a secret forever. One day, a piece of news would spread across the planet: most children from orphanages are android infants." Jiang Ye continued, "At that time, all androids would doubt their identities, and those around them would also doubt their identities. Amidst this suspicion, their tragic lives would begin."
"No, no, no, your method has too many flaws. If you were to use institutions like orphanages to deceive android infants, with the number of androids on our planet, every major city would need to build tens of thousands of orphanages. That's too obvious and abnormal." Yotsuya Yuki suddenly stopped smiling. "Our method is very simple... creating memories."
"Creating memories?" Jiang Ye's eyes widened.
"That's right. Our planet has a dedicated memory creation team of up to thirty thousand people, along with a large number of related software and artificial intelligence assistants." Yotsuya Yuki said, "Every android will have unique memories, extremely realistic memories, making them believe they are living beings."
"This..." Jiang Ye was first shocked, then his mind began to race. "I remember you saying earlier that only a thousand people on your planet knew about androids. But what about this memory creation team of thirty thousand people?"
"They don't know they are creating other people's memories; they think they are game designers." Yotsuya Yuki smiled. "Many immersive games nowadays need to be indistinguishable from reality. Each of them is responsible for creating a segment of memory, believing it will be used in some game."
"This, this, this..." Jiang Ye was utterly stunned.
Yotsuya Yuki tapped his hand, and the screen immediately changed.
In a white studio with a hemispherical glass dome, a blonde girl was working, wearing a silver-white helmet and holding something like a camera, constantly rotating it.
Many scenes appeared before her: answering questions in class, being bitten by an insect while playing in the grass, birthday parties, being beaten after a parent-teacher conference, accidentally seeing her neighbor's older sister's cleavage, buying a drink and getting a "buy one get one free" prize... Various memories were rapidly created, as realistic as movie scenes.
"Memory creation isn't a very difficult technology. Employees only need to be good at observing life and can be trained in a month or two to start working." Yotsuya Yuki said, "Human memory is very unreliable. Most people can only recall fragments and find it difficult to remember everything clearly. Therefore, only fragmented memories need to be created."
"We also have specialized teams responsible for identifying these memory fragments. Which fragments will profoundly change a person's worldview, and which fragments are merely warm or boring daily routines. Then, they are categorized and pieced together, connected into an android's brain."
"So, androids won't know they are different from others." Yotsuya Yuki said.
"But... even if androids are implanted with memories, how do they enter human society?" Jiang Ye asked.
"That's very simple, by creating a memory gap."
"What do you mean?"
"It's the moment of consciousness interruption. For example, sleep. You close your eyes tonight, and wake up tomorrow morning. Are you still you? Perhaps you've already become an android, and the memories of last night's sleep were implanted in your head. For example, fainting, fainting from low blood sugar, fainting from a hard collision during a game, fainting from staying up all night playing games, fainting from eating wild mushrooms. Through these moments of consciousness interruption, an android's memories and reality can seamlessly connect."
"There are various ways to introduce androids into society. For example, building a new residential area where all the residents are adult androids. One night, troops enter and place all the sleeping androids in their respective beds, then quickly withdraw. The next morning, they wake up, look at their bedrooms, and they are as they remember them. Following their memories, they naturally get up, wash, eat, change clothes, and go to work. Before leaving, they add dog food to the dog's bowl, and the dog shrinks back, but they don't notice. In the elevator, they encounter android neighbors, whom they've seen in their memories, and greet each other like old acquaintances." Yotsuya Yuki explained, "It could also be a child whose last memory was playing on the street and being hit by a car. Arrange for this child to wake up in the hospital, and they won't notice anything unusual, only cry."
"Interpersonal relationships can also be faked, right?" Jiang Ye's hair stood on end again.
"That's right. To be precise, it's not just 'can be faked,' it 'must be faked.' Create an entire family, a community, a company all at once, forming a perfect closed loop. For the first few days, this closed loop will operate internally, but soon it will establish intricate connections with the entire human society, eventually integrating completely. Over time, the originally assigned android couples might divorce and form partnerships with others. Community residents will move out, and ordinary human neighbors will move in to fill empty houses. Companies will grow or go bankrupt, hiring new employees or laying off old ones. Finally, all androids will be scattered to the four corners of the earth, disappearing like dandelions."
"As long as the details are realistic enough, humans cannot distinguish between virtual and reality. Everyone believes they have lived for many years, but some people are actually only one day old in reality." Yotsuya Yuki blinked. "Do you understand?"