Chapter 330 — Patti
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
Logging out on the spot would have been too obviously deliberate, so Gaoyang could only answer with a stiff smile and then instinctively glance around: the woman who seemed to be Selena Guelfern did not appear to be nearby.
"You're looking for Sister Selena?" Patti noticed Gaoyang's movement and at once piped up in her clear little voice. "Sister Selena isn't here! She's at home, busy!"
Gaoyang breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Then, looking at Patti with some curiosity, he asked the question he had wanted to ask from the start. "By the way, how is it that you can always recognize me? There should be plenty of people here using the same appearance as mine, no?"
This was what puzzled him most. In this primitive network—one that had yet to implement real-name registration or floating usernames above each person's head—there was no way to identify anyone at a glance. Everyone just molded themselves a body and came in. The Sleepers were still perfectly content with the "early stage of universal internet access," wandering about the network at will. Yet this little girl before him could pick him out every single time. That was genuinely strange.
After all, Charles the First's face was a popular skin in this network...
"Is it hard to recognize?" The girl blinked, looking utterly blank at Gaoyang's question. "But I just can recognize you. There are lots of people here who look the same, but everyone's 'feel' is different..."
"'Feel' different..." Gaoyang did not know whether to laugh or cry. What kind of answer was that?
He sensed no small amount of oddity about this girl and could not help feeling a measure of wariness. But after two or three such encounters, he had gradually let go of his initial notion: behind this little girl called "Patti" there was probably really not some greasy, middle-aged, unwashed cultist...
Even a founding big shot like Suojilin could not be that perverse. This "Patti"—even if she was not such a young child in the real world, she could not be far off.
Perhaps geniuses really did exist... plugging into the Sleepers' network at ten years old, or whatever.
At that thought, and seeing no sign of Selena Guelfern anywhere nearby, Gaoyang decided that a few words with this peculiar little girl would be fine. So he strolled slowly along the tree-lined path with her and spoke in what he hoped seemed a casual tone. "You seem to come here often?"
Patti looked curious. "Do you mean this garden, Uncle? Or this dream?"
Did the girl regard this virtual space simply as a "dream"? Where in the world were there dreams like this...
Gaoyang muttered inwardly, but his face betrayed nothing. "I mean this 'dream.'"
"I come here often, yes. Especially at night—I always have to come here," Patti said, sticking out her tongue. "Because if I don't get into this dream, I can't sleep well..."
"Can't sleep well?" Gaoyang frowned. "Why?"
Patti really did seem to be a child innocent of the world's ways. She answered almost everything he asked. "Because my body hurts and itches..."
As she said this, a look of resistance and fear clearly crossed the girl's face. Gaoyang had wanted to press further, but the words reached his lips and he swallowed them back, shifting rather stiffly to another subject. "Speaking of which, I haven't seen your parents here. Aren't they 'brethren' of the church?"
"Brethren" of the church—this was a colloquial term believers used among themselves. Gaoyang was sure that even if Patti really was innocent, she must have heard such words often while moving about this network.
The girl shook her head. "Papa passed away a long time ago... Mama is very busy, and she doesn't like it here."
Her father was dead, and her mother seemed to be someone who resisted the Sleepers? Then how had this little girl connected to the network?
So she had not been brought into the cult through her parents?