Prologue
In our youth, we were all captivated by the eloquent diplomats in stories. They were the embodiment of charisma. The wisdom to turn the tide at critical moments, the empathy in their speech that could instantly disarm anyone, the relaxed confidence to control any situation. We assumed this wisdom and ability were the world's fairest assets, for they seemed impossible to buy or inherit. They were the crystallization of talent and sweat, the ultimate advantage intrinsically part of a person. It could make you successful in your career and invincible in love. That's why it was so precious, so desirable.
But what if technology completely subverted this final bastion of fairness?
What if this intellectual charm, coveted by all but hard to obtain, suddenly became a cloud service, available on-demand and pay-as-you-go? It wouldn't be implanted in your brain; it would just whisper in your ear—through a device named Hermes, indistinguishable from ordinary glasses.
When humanity's most cherished inner qualities become external commodities that can be traded, allocated, and budgeted, what kind of collapse will the very foundation of our world undergo?
(I) The Budget of the Mind
It was nearly midnight when Sean returned home. The living room was dark, save for a sliver of dim yellow light from under the bedroom door. He knew his wife was worrying about her company's project again. He took off his coat and stood at the door for a moment, clearly hearing the suppressed, soft sobs from within.
His heart felt as if it were being squeezed by an invisible hand. He knew he had to go in, had to hold her, had to say something to make her feel better. But he couldn't think of anything. Not a single word. After a long day's work, fatigue was like lead, poured into his limbs, his brain a waterlogged cotton ball, heavy and muddled.
A translucent interface, visible only to him, silently appeared in the corner of his vision.
【Emotional Interaction Module v3.5】
- Option 1: Standard Comfort Package. (Includes: hug posture guidance, three generic comforting phrases, recommended frequency for back-patting). Compute Cost: 0.8 units.
- Option 2: Deep Empathy Mode. (Real-time analysis of her vocal emotional fluctuations and micro-expressions, generating personalized empathetic responses, providing follow-up topic suggestions). Compute Cost: 25 units.
- Option 3: Humorous Distraction. (Retrieves a heartwarming joke from the cloud knowledge base suitable for the current atmosphere, guaranteed to make her laugh). Compute Cost: 3 units.
Sean's gaze was fixed on the crimson number in the top-right corner of his vision: 【Family Cognitive Points Budget Remaining This Month: 27 units】.
This month, to conquer that damn project, he had already overdrawn a massive amount of logical reasoning and creative brainstorming credits. Next week, he had a make-or-break client proposal. It would be a tough battle, and without the aid of the "Negotiation Assist Pro Max," he stood no chance. The activation fee for that Pro package was exactly 25 units.
He stared at the number 25 next to the Deep Empathy Mode, his throat dry. He knew it was the only right choice at this moment. He could even imagine the flawless, perfect sentences Hermes would generate, words that would wrap around his wife like a warm cashmere coat, making her feel completely understood and deeply loved.
In the end, he reached out his finger and, in the air, gently tapped Option 1.
He walked into the bedroom and, following the virtual human silhouette projected in his vision by Hermes, gave his wife a standard hug. He smelled the fragrance of her shampoo and listened to the emotionless instruction transmitted by the AI through his bone-conduction headphones: "Repeat the following phrase: 'Darling, it's okay.'"
"Darling, it's okay," he heard his own voice, dry and stiff, like a piece of weathered wood.
As he held his wife, in a corner of his glasses, in an unused area of his vision, the data streams and charts for tomorrow's proposal began to preload in semi-transparent form. His brain was forced into a dual-threaded operation, one half feeling his wife's warmth, the other half rehearsing tomorrow's war.
His wife cried even harder in his arms. He held her, but his mind was on the 26.2 units of budget he had left. It should be enough for next week's proposal.
(II) The Transaction of Life
When Elara woke up from the sensory collection pod, the first thing she felt was hunger. A gnawing, stomach-cramping hunger, as if she hadn't eaten in three days. She sat up, stretched her stiff neck, and checked the time. Monday, 7:00 AM sharp.
She was full of energy, her mind as sharp as an overclocked processor. Her life felt like an edited film, jumping directly from the exhausted end of her workday on Friday evening to this ready-to-go dawn on Monday morning.
But the weekend wasn't a blank slate. On the contrary, a forty-eight-hour memory that didn't belong to her had been forcibly implanted into her mind. She vividly remembered being like a ghost tied to a chair, forced to review videos of car crashes, torrential rains, and hailstorms at a thousand times the normal speed. The tedious, repetitive labor, mixed with terror and nausea, was like an indelible scratch, covering the weekend memories of sunshine and sleeping in that she should have had.
A cold system notification on her wrist terminal explained it all:
【Thank you for contributing 48 hours of unconscious sensory data stream to Singularity AI, primarily for the annotation and training of the Llama-18-Autonomous-Driving-Extreme-Weather model. In return, 8,500 cognitive points have been deposited into your account. We wish you a pleasant workday.】
10:00 AM, the conference room. She used her points to activate the real-time assistance of the Pantheon model, available only to top-tier members. The world before her was instantly analyzed, quantified. She could see the emotional state analysis and focus predictions floating above each participant's head; she could access all of the company's databases in real-time, answering any question with a perfectly cited, comprehensive response in 0.1 seconds. When the CEO raised a tricky objection, Pantheon even simulated three optimal response strategies in her mind, clearly marking the risks and benefits of each.
For those two hours, she wasn't Elara. She was an omniscient, lightning-fast, charismatic god.
The presentation was a resounding success.
At noon, she sat alone in a fast-food restaurant downstairs, ordering a double-meat burger. The sun was bright outside, and a few college students were playing guitar and singing on the street corner. They were off-key, but their smiles were brilliant. Watching them, the implanted work memory, filled with negative emotions, suddenly surged up, making her feel a wave of physiological nausea.
She hadn't paid with time. She had exchanged a piece of her vibrant, clean life for a data-polluted, scarred past. She had fed a non-human god with herself, just to trade for a few moments of glory in the human world.
(III) The Folded Lifespan
When Kai returned to his hometown, he smelled the familiar scent of earth and grass. He hadn't been back in six months. He looked refreshed, but his eyes held a weary wisdom that didn't match his age.
At the dinner table, he explained his life over the past six months to his parents. He had participated in an elite program called "Time Folding." Every day, he only worked eight hours in the real world, but within those eight hours, through high-density information stimulation of his brain by an AI, he completed the equivalent of seventy-two hours of work output and skill training. In six months of physical time, he had compressed four and a half years of professional experience and life wisdom into his own life.
"Dad, Mom," he said proudly, "I've lived five years of life in six months. I've already completed the initial accumulation phase of my life."
His mother listened, but instead of the expected happiness, she was silent for a long time. Then she asked a question: "So... Kai, in these six months, how long has it been since you last looked at the stars at night?"
Kai was stunned.
In his folded time, there were no starry skies, no walks, no idle chats, no listening to birdsong. All low-information-density experiences were judged as redundant by the system and automatically filtered out. He had a longer effective lifespan, but the price was losing all the inefficient but beautiful moments that constitute the texture of life.
He looked back at the past six months and realized that while his life had been greatly extended, it had also become incredibly thin. Time was like ink constantly diluted with water; it seemed to fill the whole bottle, but the color was almost transparent.
He wanted to explain this new view of life to his parents, but he found he couldn't. The high-density information storms he had experienced were like a language from another dimension to them. He had lived longer than others, but he had also lived more lonely than anyone else.
(IV) The Talent of Sync Rate
Zack worked harder than anyone else on the project team.
He had practically memorized the three-hundred-page Hermes user manual, bought every online course on efficient human-AI collaboration, and even late at night, when others were asleep, he was still practicing how to give the most complex instructions to the AI with the most precise natural language. He firmly believed that diligence could make up for any lack of natural talent.
But all of it was a joke in front of Leo.
Leo was his colleague. They used the same model of Hermes and handled the same projects. But Leo never read the manual, never worked overtime. His interaction with the AI was visibly smooth and elegant, as if the AI were just an extension of his brain, an organ that required no conscious thought. He always smiled, listening and simultaneously completing several rounds of high-speed iteration with the AI in his mind.
This afternoon's brainstorming session was Zack's nightmare.
When the manager proposed a complex requirement, the AI's suggestions in his mind were like a piece of laggy code that needed to be recompiled. He had to struggle to understand and integrate them just to barely keep up. But Leo, as if telepathically linked with the AI, could always catch the most brilliant ideas from the information stream and express them in a completely natural way.
When the meeting ended, Zack's face was pale from his meager contributions. Leo walked over, patted his shoulder sincerely, and said, "Bro, you're just too tense, thinking too much. Just relax, treat it like your own intuition."
At that moment, Zack felt a chill more profound than failure. He finally understood that the gap between him and Leo wasn't about effort or skill, but an innate physiological trait called "AI Sync Rate." He was like a colorblind person who, no matter how hard he studied color theory, could never truly see a rainbow.
"Diligence can make up for a lack of talent." The creed he had been taught since childhood became a cold, cruel joke at that moment.
Epilogue
What happens when humanity's most coveted, non-transferable intellectual charm suddenly becomes tradable?
These four stories are four possible answers. Together, they paint a picture of a profound absurdity: human civilization spent millennia elevating concepts like wisdom, character, and insight to a pedestal, viewing them as the pinnacle of personal achievement. Now, technology, with an efficiency we cannot refuse, has brought them all crashing back down to earth, turning them into budgetable commodities, exchangeable consumables, insurmountable natural talents, and quantifiable KPIs. Once, the diplomat was our entire imagination of a gifted human: a light that couldn't be faked, an aura that couldn't be taught. But now, that light can be bought, and that aura can be pre-trained.
You might think this is all distant science fiction.
But think about this: just recently, the top AI has already outperformed human gold medalists in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Yes, the cost of calling it is still extremely high, and its processing speed isn't fast enough yet. But we all forget that technological progress is exponential. The ghost of Moore's Law still haunts the data centers. Just like the AI assistant in your phone, which could only report the weather two years ago, can now order takeout, write copy, and discuss your emotional problems. The expensive model that costs thousands of dollars to run today is the prototype of the "Negotiation Assist Pro Max" that Sean had to scrimp and save for; the god-level performance that requires immense computing power today is version 0.1 of the Pantheon model that Elara activated.
Wisdom, the oldest and most revered pursuit in human civilization, may soon no longer be just an inner quality, but an external resource that can be accessed, optimized, and managed. It's no longer the achievement of climbing a mountain, but more like a cable car that can be laid at our feet at any time.
This will bring not just changes to individual destinies, but a complete, society-sweeping upheaval.
When the essence of education is no longer to impart knowledge but to train AI sync rate, what will our schools become? When the success of marriages and social interactions depends on the emotional intelligence package you purchase, how much trust will be left between people? When a nation's competitiveness is directly determined by the version number of the top-tier AI model it controls, how will the new world order be arranged?
This may not be a distant speculation, but the new reality for all of us, with the curtain about to rise.
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