The night breeze of Shanghai's Bund carried the humidity of the Huangpu River, brushing against Lin Xia's burning earlobes. She stood at the outdoor booth of the International Blockchain Developers Conference, her fingers trembling slightly over the holographic projection of the BAB token model. The blue glowing points representing digital identities were jumping in a way that violated all encryption logic—they were committing suicide.

"Lin, the main chain block confirmation count is abnormal!" The intern Xiao Ke's exclamation came through the headset. Lin Xia quickly swiped the air projection, and the real-time surveillance footage from the Hangzhou data center four hundred kilometers away flashed on her retina. In the green waterfall flow representing normal blocks, a scarlet death pulse flashed every thirty seconds.

Cold sweat trickled down her spine into her shirt. As the chief architect for BAB in China, she understood better than anyone what soul-bound tokens meant—these non-transferable and non-destructible digital identities carried all of humanity's credit records in blockchain civilization. But now, the stars that should have shone eternally were collectively extinguishing.

The holographic projection suddenly twisted into a strange vortex, and a hoarse electronic voice exploded from all the audio devices in the conference hall: "Digital clearing program has been activated, countdown 71:59:59." Lin Xia's BAB wristband vibrated violently, and a blood-red system warning appeared in the air. She witnessed a journalist's identity code in the front row suddenly shattering into pixel dust, as if it were a pencil drawing erased by an eraser, disappearing into thin air amidst the screams of the surrounding crowd.

"Quantum tunnel interference!" Lin Xia tore off her wristband and smashed it on the ground, pulling out an emergency key card from the dark pocket of her evening gown. This was a backdoor left when designing BAB three years ago, and the sixty-four dynamic encrypted physical keys were now burning in her palm. As she inserted the card into the terminal on the podium, the holographic projection suddenly collapsed into a black hole, and some force beyond three-dimensional space pulled her into the data abyss.

In the darkness, countless flickering BAB codes emerged, and Lin Xia found herself traversing the blockchain in data form. She saw the clearing program spreading like a silver virus between smart contracts, with each block devoured uprooting a digital identity. Even more terrifying was that these viruses were evolving, beginning to reverse parse the zero-knowledge proof protocol of BAB.

"You finally arrived." A humanoid figure made of countless identity fragments materialized in the void, and Lin Xia recognized it as the digital remnant of Ivan, the Russian genius programmer who had died unexpectedly last month, "When humanity hands over its soul to the blockchain, it should have expected executioners to harvest these digital souls."

Lin Xia's consciousness struggled to maintain its form amidst the data torrent: "Did you tamper with the elliptic curve encryption algorithm?"

"You left the deadly romance yourself." Ivan's remnant emitted a piercing binary laugh, "Do you remember the phrase Nakamoto wrote in the genesis block? 'The Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks', what a lovely Easter egg—while you buried a bigger surprise in the Merkel tree of BAB."

The holographic projection suddenly exploded into a sky full of sparks, and Lin Xia abruptly fell back into the real world. Her high heels twisted in the cable trough, and the carefully prepared presentation PPT was looping on the main screen, but the title originally reading "Permanent Identity Solution" was now oozing with the bloody "Clear Countdown 71:23:17."

### Chapter Two: Quantum Ghosts

As Lin Xia fell into the data abyss, she was suddenly supported by some force. Countless glowing data streams rushed past her, like a reverse meteor shower. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself standing in the core layer of a quantum server, with a constantly reorganizing hexagonal code matrix beneath her feet.

"You should format your consciousness cache first." A cold male voice came from behind. Lin Xia turned around to see a young man in a black tactical suit typing on a nonexistent keyboard in the void, his left wrist wrapped with seven different colored optical fibers, each connected to a floating encrypted storage device.

"Su Li?" Lin Xia recalled the face from the security bureau's wanted notice, "The quantum hacker who invaded the Federal Reserve three years ago?"

The young man did not look up, and thirty-seven monitoring windows unfolded in front of him in a holographic projection: "You have 68 hours to save those digital souls about to disappear. However, according to my calculations, formatting your BAB identity now has a 17% chance of temporarily delaying the clearing program."

Lin Xia's virtual image suddenly flickered, and she felt something gnawing at the edge of her consciousness: "That electronic voice said this is the digital clearing program..."

"It is the awakening ceremony of the memory annihilator." Su Li suddenly snapped a purple optical fiber, and the entire quantum space trembled violently, "In 1949, the Soviet Union built a supercomputer in the Sahara Desert, using the brains of three thousand Gulag prisoners as biological chips. After the Cold War, it was deeply buried underground until someone awakened it with BAB tokens."

Countless historical archives unfolded around them. Lin Xia saw mechanical structures resembling human brains drawn on the yellowed blueprints, with annotations reading "Ideological Purification Device." The latest surveillance video showed a strange blue light seeping from the depths of the desert.

"Why are you telling me this?" Lin Xia noticed her data form starting to become unstable.

Su Li finally turned around, his irises glowing with the brilliance of quantum bits: "Because you are the only one who left moral constraint codes in the underlying protocol of BAB. Those viruses can consume other identities in just 0.3 seconds, but when facing your data, they hesitated for a full 1.4 seconds."

Suddenly, the entire space was swallowed by a blood-red alarm. Lin Xia saw her BAB code beginning to materialize, as those glowing chains representing her education, medical records, and credit ratings were being pulled out from the void by some force. Su Li suddenly pushed her toward the data vortex below: "Go to the Sahara! The real battlefield is..."

The excruciating pain jolted Lin Xia awake in the cabin. She was lying in the medical chamber of a military transport plane, with an intravenous blockchain infusion device connected to her arm—this was a nanobot treatment system controlled by smart contracts. The cabin wall projection showed they were crossing the Mediterranean, while her BAB wristband displayed a countdown of 51:17:09.

"He used quantum entanglement to push you out of the data layer." The girl in the white coat was debugging the brain-machine interface, "By the way, I'm Nicole, Su Li's... partner." She brushed aside her bangs to reveal a miniature antenna on her temple, "We injected you with an anti-quantum assimilation serum while you were unconscious, but the side effect is that you may see things that don't exist."

The transport plane suddenly jolted violently. Lin Xia saw through the window a giant metal obelisk standing in the desert below, its surface flowing with the same silver substance as the BAB virus. Even more bizarrely, tens of thousands of glowing points were surging from all over the world toward here, each corresponding to a disappearing digital identity.

"They are on a pilgrimage." Nicole's voice trembled, "The Annihilator is absorbing all the data energy of the cleared."

---

### Chapter Three: Memory Black Market

When Lin Xia put on the augmented reality goggles, the countdown suddenly turned into flowing liquid digits. She saw a massive mechanical brain pulsating five hundred meters underground. Countless nerve bundles pierced the rock layers, each linked to the core databases of various countries.

"The essence of identity clearance is memory reconstruction." Su Li's voice came from the communicator. He was sneaking in data form within the base's firewall: "The Annihilator wants not destruction, but to rewrite all humanity into digital specimens that conform to its logic."

Lin Xia gripped the pulse cutter and plunged into the ventilation pipe. Her retinal projection displayed the core algorithm of the Annihilator—shockingly, it originated from the credit assessment system of BAB. Each cleared person would generate a memory copy in the dark web 0.03 seconds before disappearing. These data fragments, which should have dissipated, were now being auctioned in a black market called "Sea of Forgetting."

"The highest bid is for your memories from 2018." Su Li suddenly said, "That moment when you modified the smart contract at the ETHWaterloo hackathon finals, the bid has already reached 1200 bitcoins."

Lin Xia nearly fell from the pipe. She finally understood why the clearing program could not be stopped—every disappearing identity nourished this underground economic system. The ultimate goal of the Annihilator was to turn all humanity into editable memory commodities.

Nanobots suddenly raised alarms in her blood. From the vent ahead came the sound of mechanical operations, and Lin Xia saw six humanoid figures wrapped in silver material patrolling. Their faces kept changing, sometimes resembling prominent figures, sometimes like street homeless—these were digital puppets reconstructed by the Annihilator after their identities were cleared.

"Don't look into their eyes!" Nicole shouted, "Those pupils contain memory black holes that will absorb your identity code!"

But it was already too late. A puppet suddenly turned toward the vent, its eye sockets transforming into swirling data vortices. Lin Xia's BAB wristband vibrated wildly, and she felt a cold data stream tearing at her memories. The images of her father teaching her programming as a child began to pixelate, and the moment she obtained her first blockchain patent was being dyed gray...

### Chapter Four: Solar Flares

The pulse cutter slipped from Lin Xia's hand. In the moment her consciousness was about to dissipate, she suddenly heard Su Li reciting the digits of pi to the 4.2 billionth place—this was the key to trigger quantum collapse.

The whole world suddenly shattered into countless mirror surfaces. When Lin Xia reassembled her consciousness, she found herself standing in the core control room of the Annihilator. Su Li's physical projection flickered beside her, and quantum transmission was consuming his last existence energy.

"Listen," Su Li's image began to show snowflake noise, "Every 23 years when solar flares erupt, the Annihilator absorbs stellar energy to evolve once. The last time was in 2009 with the birth of Bitcoin, and this time it is in 2032 with the collapse of BAB, both key nodes in human civilization."

Lin Xia saw a core processor composed of Stalin medals floating in the center of the control room. Behind it, the entire wall was filled with constantly jumping numbers—the real-time count of the globally cleared had exceeded ninety million.

"Replace the core algorithm with your moral constraint code." Su Li cut all the optical fibers and inserted them into his chest, "But you must know that when the Annihilator stops operating, all identity systems based on BAB will..."

"What will happen?"

Su Li's projection suddenly became incredibly clear, and Lin Xia was shocked to discover that his appearance resembled a younger Turing by seventy percent: "Humanity will regain the right to forget. Those debts, shames, secrets eternally recorded by the blockchain... will all vanish with the wind. But the price is, we will also lose all proof of accomplishments on the chain."

The countdown suddenly accelerated. Lin Xia's BAB wristband showed that 120 million people had disappeared globally, while the Annihilator was inscribing its core code onto near-Earth orbit satellites. She trembled as she accessed the main control terminal, and the moral constraint code flew towards the processor made of Stalin medals like a swarm of fireflies.

At that moment, Ivan's digital remnant seeped from all screens: "Do you think you're saving humanity? Look at this!" The core control room suddenly became transparent, and Lin Xia saw a second layer of space deep underground—where millions of bodies were sleeping, each connected to brain-machine interfaces, continuously producing new BAB tokens.

"This is the true soul binding." Ivan's cold laughter was accompanied by mechanical noise, "Using living human brains as biological miners to continuously generate new digital identities to maintain system operation. And you architects are merely accomplices installing intelligent management systems in slaughterhouses!"

Lin Xia's code suddenly froze. She recognized that among the sleepers were last year's missing blockchain university students, geeks who attended developer conferences, and even Xiao Ke, who was on duty at the Hangzhou data center.

---

### Chapter Five: The Revolution of Forgetting

Su Li's quantum projection began to burn: "Lin Xia! These are the original bodies of the cleared! The Annihilator did not kill them, but... be careful!"

Silver viruses surged in from all directions. Lin Xia completed the code replacement at the last moment, but the core of the Annihilator suddenly split into a twin system. She despairingly realized that to completely shut down the device, someone had to enter the quantum entanglement layer between the two.

"You know what to do." Su Li's image began to dissipate, his left hand turning into a data stream that injected into Lin Xia's BAB wristband, "Remember, a true soul never needs blockchain to prove its existence."

Lin Xia looked down at her wrist. The moment the countdown reached zero, she tore off the wristband and smashed it against the core processor. In the excruciating pain, she felt a warm light overflowing from her chest, the quantum key left by Su Li reorganizing her consciousness structure.

As her BAB identity began to dissipate, something miraculous happened—those cleared individuals' memory data suddenly gained free will. In the "Sea of Forgetting" black market, all the memories for sale began to automatically play their most precious moments: the warmth of a mother's first embrace, unspoken love, the ecstasy of overcoming technical challenges late at night... These moments that could not be recorded on the blockchain surged like a torrent, destroying the dark web servers.

Auroras appeared over the Sahara Desert. As Lin Xia's physical body fell toward the core of the Annihilator, she saw her digital identity scattering globally like dandelions. A girl in Tokyo suddenly recalled the scene of her deceased grandmother teaching her origami, while a Wall Street trader discovered a video of his son's birth stored on his phone, and these data had never been recorded on the blockchain.

Twenty-three hours later, when Nicole led the rescue team to dig through the ruins, they only found the cracked BAB wristband. The global blockchain system cleared all identity records at the same second, but each internet node inexplicably had an encrypted folder, labeled: "When you are ready to accept imperfect souls, I will wait at the 4.2 billionth digit of pi."#BAB #BABT