Destined Entwining: Capturing My Devoted Beau

Chapter 296 - 165: The First Time in Ten Years (Second Update, Alliance Hierarch: Fire Dance LHH2012)

"Oh?! Really! What’s the solution?! Tell me quickly!" Thomas anxiously pounded his fist on the desk.Joyce Shaw smiled and said, "If you have more original data and there’s no need for reverse engineering, it would be much faster to analyze."

"I see..." Thomas furrowed his brow and thought for a while, then said, "I’ll try to get more detailed original data for you, so you won’t need reverse engineering, but I need more detailed data analysis, precise to every procedure. Can you do that?"

"...That depends on how detailed the original data you give me is," Joyce Shaw slightly bowed and said lightly, "I haven’t seen the data, so I can’t make any promises."

Thomas nodded, "Hmm, that’s reasonable. You can leave now and let me figure something out."

He muttered, "The acquisition can’t drag on for that long, we have at most a month."

Joyce Shaw just happened to hear this as she walked out of Thomas’s office and couldn’t help but shake her head.

A month, how is that enough?

If one month is really enough, it would almost mean obtaining the core system’s original data of the other company...

Joyce Shaw originally didn’t think Thomas had such capability.

However, in the afternoon just before getting off work, Thomas walked into her office excitedly, saying, "Joyce, look at what I’ve got for you?!"

Joyce Shaw looked up and saw Thomas holding a flash drive.

"Here, the most original detailed data," Thomas simply sat across from her, lowering his voice, "I won’t go into details, but the data analysis I need is also on this flash drive. Once you finish the analysis, I assure you commission! I’ve already submitted the proposal for your commission to the headquarters, it’ll definitely be approved by tomorrow."

Joyce Shaw nodded, smiling, "Thank you, Thomas, I will certainly work hard."

Thomas was satisfied and reached out to shake her hand, encouragingly saying, "Keep it up!"

After Thomas left, Joyce Shaw once again immersed herself in intense work.

When she transferred the data from the flash drive to her computer and looked at it carefully, she couldn’t help but feel more apprehensive.

It turned out that the AI company they were to acquire, called Wayford Intelligence, was an artificial intelligence company working on a robot operating system.

The company’s robot operating system was very specialized, not merely for entertainment or auxiliary robots, but for robots that could replace assembly line workers in large factories.

Moreover, they could be pre-programmed and remotely controlled.

Wayford Intelligence’s robot operating system possessed rudimentary artificial intelligence, allowing it to make condition-limited judgments based on real scenarios, and more and more workplaces with precise operational requirements had begun using Wayford Company’s robot operating system.

More importantly, Thomas had really obtained nearly all the original system data from the other side!

No wonder he didn’t need to do reverse engineering anymore...

This was akin to completely copying over the other party’s artificial intelligence system!

Then what was there for her to analyze?

Also, how did Thomas manage to get the original data of this company’s artificial intelligence?

That’s commercial espionage...

Joyce Shaw frowned, clicking open one folder after another, eventually seeing Thomas’s data analysis requirements for her.

This time, Thomas no longer needed her to analyze how Wayford Company’s robot operating system was designed, but to analyze under what conditions and in what environments this robot operating system had worked before.

In other words, she needed to restore the original work records stored in the other party’s robot operating system through videos.

For example, if you think of the other party’s robot operating system as a camera, then her task was to extract the video records stored within that camera!

The premise of doing so was to confirm whether the other party’s robot operating system was indeed artificial intelligence and, if so, to what extent.

The greater the proportion of artificial intelligence within their robot operating system, the more video footage she could restore.

Because a robotic system using artificial intelligence is surely equipped with cameras hidden within.

Just like human eyes, without eyes, a person cannot see the surrounding environment and make actions.

For instance, the current smartphones all have cameras. When you think you can control your phone’s camera, and it’s not working when not turned on, you are hugely mistaken.

As long as your phone has a camera, it is constantly working.

Just that sometimes, it operates secretly, and sometimes, you know it is working.

Joyce Shaw’s undergraduate and master’s education focused on artificial intelligence systems for robotics, so she was very familiar with these operations.

Given how comprehensive the original data was, it became much easier for her to analyze.

The more challenging task was restoring the hidden video footage in the other party’s robot operating system.

This also requires a massive amount of computation to break through the other’s encryption and perform image extraction and restoration.

For the past half month, Joyce Shaw had only gone home once a week, spending all other times buried in her office, doing her data processing.

However, she wasn’t working alone anymore; Joseph Saunders and Mary Palmer stayed with her in the company, even on weekends or pulling all-nighters, one of them would always be there.

Initially, Joyce Shaw found this to be nice because working alone in the company was indeed very lonely, and having someone to talk to was pleasant.

But soon enough, she started to sense something was off.

One evening, she decided to go out for dinner.

When she left the company, Joseph Saunders had just gone to the restroom and didn’t see her leave.

When he finished dinner and returned to the company, he heard Joseph Saunders’s nervous voice outside the wide-open company doors.

"Mr. Stewart, Director Joyce is missing! I don’t know where he’s gone! He was just here! I just went to the restroom, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone. I can’t reach him on his phone! What should we do?"

Joyce Shaw found it strange and came in to ask, "Joseph Saunders, are you looking for me?"

Joseph Saunders, with his back to the door, shivered noticeably upon hearing his voice, then hung up the phone, turned around, and said with a smile, "Director Joyce is back... I couldn’t see you just now and got scared, so I called to ask. By the way, I just called you, why didn’t you answer?"

Joyce Shaw took out his phone to check, chuckling, "...It ran out of battery. Look at me, I forgot to charge it."

Joseph Saunders saw Joyce Shaw plug in the charger, and sure enough, there was no battery left.

He let out a silent sigh of relief, smiling, "That’s good, that’s good. Director Joyce, are you pulling an all-nighter today too?"

Joyce Shaw nodded, "Yes, no other choice, Thomas only gave me a month, can’t avoid working overtime."

"Director Joyce, you’re amazing!" Joseph Saunders gave him a thumbs up, "You’re the best!"

"You’re too kind." Joyce Shaw nodded slightly, "If you have nothing to do, you can go back, no need to stay with me."

"...I... I don’t have anything to do either, staying at the company saves on rent..." Joseph Saunders stammered, squeezing out this sentence.

"In that case, you rest, I won’t disturb you." Joyce Shaw knew Joseph Saunders had put a folding single bed in his office.

At night, when Joyce Shaw pulled an all-nighter, Joseph Saunders would sleep in his own office.

Joseph Saunders nodded with a forced smile and went back to his own office.

Joyce Shaw also went into his own office.

He saw Thomas had sent him an email, asking about his progress.

Joyce Shaw replied, "I’ve retrieved about a tenth of the image data, I’m optimizing the resolution."

Thomas was very pleased and immediately replied, "Send me what you have first."

Joyce Shaw didn’t think too much about it and sent the yet-to-be-optimized image data to Thomas.

Then he continued working.

The next day, Thomas sent him an email, containing only one sentence: "Great Job!!!!!!"

The string of exclamation marks expressed his overwhelming excitement.

And on that afternoon, the entire Capital City suddenly experienced a fifteen-minute power outage.

It was the first time in nearly ten years that such a situation occurred in the Capital City.

...

During the power outage, Kenneth Osborne was in his office talking to Francis Johnson.

The office, with its curtains drawn, suddenly darkened, and Francis Johnson jumped to a hidden corner of the room in a reflexive reaction.

Kenneth Osborne: "..."

He didn’t react as quickly as Francis Johnson and didn’t understand why Francis had such a reflex, laughing, "Mr. Johnson, with a reaction like that, I might suspect what you did in the past."

"I used to be a robber, and I’m unusually sensitive to unexpected situations," Francis Johnson said with a playful smile, then suddenly felt his phone vibrate, glanced at it, and his expression gradually turned serious.

"What’s wrong?" Kenneth Osborne also became serious, "Is there something wrong?"

Francis Johnson said calmly, "Today, the entire city is experiencing a blackout."

Kenneth Osborne: "!!!"

This was major news for him too.

He originally thought it was just a problem with the power system in their building, a tripped circuit breaker.

He never imagined the entire city would lose power!

How many years has it been since they had a power outage?

In Kenneth Osborne’s memory, when he was very young, in that little county town of River City, during summer if the weather was particularly hot, sometimes there would be power outages.

That was when they lived in the old city.

Later, as the national power system became more advanced by the day, the word "blackout" nearly faded into history’s dustbin.

He never imagined that over ten years later, in the prosperous Capital City, he would hear the word "blackout" again.

Kenneth Osborne instinctively said, "Impossible."

Francis Johnson looked up with a half-smile, "What’s impossible? Anything is possible."

"No, it shouldn’t be," Kenneth Osborne said with certainty, "The national grid has the most advanced AI power system in the world. Even if one line has a problem, the AI detection system will automatically activate and use another line instead. That’s why our country rarely has large-scale power outages now, unless there’s a natural disaster or other uncontrollable factors."

"Today, the weather in the Capital City is normal, with no natural disasters occurring, so it’s impossible for there to be a citywide power outage."

※※※※※※※※※

This is an additional update for "Alliance Hierarch FireDanceLHH2012", the third update at 7 PM.