Starting as a Mechanical Hunter

Chapter 538 - 71: Human Hard Drive

The Digital Life Alienation Plan is essentially a war of attrition. By leveraging the ’High-tier Information Mist’, a gap is pried open on Database 0 without alerting anyone, and the endless artificial viruses in the virus library make the best experimental material. They and the AI act out ’breeding behavior’ as ’male and female’ respectively.

But there’s a premise to this, which is that the number of AIs must be sufficient, otherwise, big problems will arise!

The viruses in Database 0 are each extremely dangerous entities, and having enough ’feeding materials’ is fine. Once ’feeding’ is insufficient, inevitably, they will turn against their host.

On the ’aero suit’, information energy started to plummet crazily, various strange numbers appeared on the surface of its protective layer, even disrupting the simulated vision.

The surrounding ’digital desert’ was also rapidly changing, with the experiences of void and reality starting to intertwine frantically.

Digital life forms lack processors, or rather, they have yet to evolve systems that can perfectly simulate the brain. And unlike traditional AI, they can’t rely on various hardware such as brain plugins and thinking chips to compensate for weaknesses. Hence, when problems occur, they’re major.

And in the third-layer digital space, within Earth Net Group’s enormous technical space, urgent alarms rang almost immediately.

"What’s going on?"

"A distress signal from Cyber Space indicates suspected virus invasion of the digital life system, numbers 1, 2, 3...31, all of the deployed personnel!"

"The birth of Cyber Digital Life has halted. I repeat, the birth of Cyber Digital Life has stopped."

"Test AI are disappearing on a large scale, tracking is underway."

Countless light spots appeared on the screen and began migrating rapidly towards the data layer. Every captured AI had a positioning system installed to prevent others from causing trouble.

David Hilbert revealed a trace of a cold smile, but those familiar with him, like Tuu Xiaoling, knew this was the sign of this ’Evolutionary Sage’s’ fury.

The Digital Life of 145 iterations had already achieved 100% simulated traits of an intelligent species, including various emotions.

"Where is the prototype now?"

"According to the information obtained, it has already entered Database 0."

"Then this becomes interesting. Such a massive ’hacker invasion’, besides that super hacker, who else could achieve this?"

"There was an AI lady by his side..."

"I hope your intelligence module is included within the scope of iteration," David replied coldly. "Can an Intermediate AI carry out such a large-scale virtual invasion?"

"However, according to all theoretical possibilities, this likelihood has reached 42.1%," Tuu Xiaoyu calmly replied. Her emotional module had not evolved to the point of showing fear, shirking, or shifting blame.

"No, there must be something we haven’t thought of!" David interrupted brusquely. He had prepared for this plan for nearly two years, presuming every possibility had been calculated. He absolutely refused to admit that at the crucial moment, he was outmaneuvered by someone else.

"Then there’s another possibility. Although the prototype’s main consciousness entered Database 0, the Cyber Hacker’s second personality, consciousness replication, or data thinking is manipulating the situation behind the scenes."

"This is Cyber Space after all!"

Although the Cyber Hacker was notoriously difficult to kill, not even following the cables would reveal a real person, let alone the bizarre self-programming and motley array of avatar techniques.

But there’s a principle in the hacker world that once a hacker enters Cyber Space, all avatars will enter a dormant state. The reason is simple: upon entering Cyber Space, all external disguises vanish, replaced by the unique ’ego’.

As a hacker, no matter how remarkable your virtual technology, once the ’ego loses control’, all thought logic crumbles in an instant.

This is why, upon logging into Cyber Space, all consciousness-related techniques must enter a state of dormancy.

Hence, the best way to deal with a Cyber Hacker is to find their entity during their Cyber Space login and destroy them physically.

With this in mind, David’s eyes narrowed, and with a flick of his hand, a holographic projection was magnified dozens of times, revealing the Divine Land in the real world.

It was an ’Earth Crust Engine’ slumbering beneath the sea.

It was also the largest piece of hardware maintaining digital space operations over a thousand-mile radius.

Inside the engine was Earth Net Group’s unique digital life transformation chamber—a surgery room that uploaded humans to hardware, converting them completely into digital life.

The screen rapidly magnified, entering the ’engine’ to the transformation chamber above.

And for some time, the operating room’s door had been violently destroyed, leaving the interior in shambles, with shards of bulletproof glass scattered everywhere, and even many mechanical guard remains.

"Play it back!!"

The camera, hidden within the transformation chamber, began rewinding. At first, a ’corpse’ was brought in, put into the ’transformation chamber’ for digital life simulation. The process was half-completed when the ’corpse’ abruptly opened its eyes and revealed a bizarre smile, pushing its hands to blow open the entire ’transformation chamber’. Countless flesh tendrils soared from the ’corpse’, ravaging everywhere, destroying everything in their path.

The guards rushing over just as they entered, the ’corpse’ opened its palm, shooting flesh spores from its fingertips like bullets into the guards, decomposing rapidly and transforming into strange flesh membranes. Within breaths, the energy system was depleted, mechanical parts exploded, and then even the camera feed became hazy.

Because a massive expanse of flesh quilt had already spread from the ground to the walls and covered the camera.

The footage abruptly stopped.

Tuu Xiaoling exclaimed in astonishment, "As you said, the prototype activated a second personality. Isn’t he worried about going insane?"

"No!" At this moment, the Evolutionary Sage calmed down, surprisingly making a judgment.

"The one controlling this shell isn’t the prototype."

"I don’t understand what you mean."

"Though I’m temporarily unable to understand how it’s done, it’s not the prototype controlling this shell, but that AI."

"AI?"

At this moment, within the Earth Crust Engine, ’Gao Gong’ walked leisurely, whilst data streams continually flowed in his eyes.

This is an exclusive hallmark of AI.

And within the brain disc of this shell, Dida was operating tensely, with a dense gathering of being continuously downloaded AIs behind her, stretching to the horizon.

The entity of Gao Gong had become the storage hard drive of a multitude of AIs.