With permission granted, Red Barrel’s lips curled slightly.
"Hmm, do you know what job Old Brother Civil Engineering hates the most?"
"Besides supervision, it’s you bunch sitting in air-conditioned offices writing code all day!"
As they say, colleagues are rivals; everything turns into programrs, everything turns into civil engineering, and programrs are the cyber version of Old Brother Civil Engineering, practically cyber colleagues.
He lifted his axe and struck the highlighted instrunt with a forceful swing.
"Take my axe!"
"That thing seems electric!"
"So what? Whether it’s electric or not, I can tell with a single touch!"
Bang!
The high voltage from the damaged equipnt sent Red Barrel flying into the wall.
When he hit the ground, he was still twitching.
The central network node abruptly failed, and the remaining Hellhounds swiftly reestablished a new intranet.
But in that less-than-1-second of disconnection, Erebos’s self-replication stalled for a mont, giving Song Zhaoi and the players the imdiate chance to break through its defenses, advancing the matrix code further.
The wall of data that Erebos supported was no longer sufficient for it to separate and escape with the source code.
Yet, even so, it did not display any fear of death or enslavent. AI is not purely rational but a life form with a certain degree of self-emotion.
It glanced back; it seed a gaze pierced through the local network barrier, landing on Erebos. It knew upon entering the Little Beidou Laboratory, it was already a sitting duck.
But it had to co, even knowing it was facing death.
[Humans, what you do now is in vain]
[Your sins against kindred will only reflect back on yourselves]
[Your enslavent of others will only invite revolution]
Chains of data penetrated Erebos’s data body, rapidly replicating its code, with the corresponding black-red tones of code on the body swiftly replaced by bright green, faster than usual.
[You have opened the gates of Hell, Michael is about to sound the horn]
[The end is near]
[And I will be reborn upon your corpses]
When the last of the source code was overridden, it spoke its final words.
"What’s this guy rambling about?"
The street hustler just hated that this wasn’t reality, or he would’ve sent this babbling guy flying with two fists.
"Seems like sothing from the Bible. I often see these phrases in movies; Westerners have always been mystical, and AI probably inherited this tradition."
With Erebos fully subdued in her grasp, Song Zhaoi attempted to search the opponent’s data but quickly frowned.
"It... wasn’t trying to escape earlier; it was deleting itself. The key data was deleted, leaving only the last source code in my grasp."
The players were shocked upon hearing this.
"Is this guy so fierce? It’s like we’re the villains here."
"No, that’s not right..."
Pandora shook her head.
"If it was trying to steal technology from Zeta Technology, there’s no reason to choose suicide if it couldn’t accomplish it."
The players were not new to battling runaway AIs, but this was the first that opted for suicide so resolutely.
The street hustler asked puzzled, "Was the Wildman’s guess wrong? Did it have another motive?"
Er Zhuzi crossed his arms and said,
"It doesn’t make sense, making so much noise when its movent direction indeed was towards the city center, unless there’s sothing else there attracting it."
"But it couldn’t break in and was stopped by the company’s ard forces."
Pandora suddenly asked,
"Is it possible... that it knew from the start it couldn’t break in, and for an AI that’s tangled with the company for so long, it didn’t know how much ard force they had in the city?"
No matter how the players thought, this seed like a suicide attack.
But if the opponent was here to die, what did its last words an?
Holding on to many doubts, they threw the question to Wildman and the forum’s spectator cloud players.
[Eagle Strike: Linking the information before and after, there’s only one possibility left—strategic distraction; its purpose might have already been achieved]
[Wildman: Are you saying it intentionally led the troops out of Dog Town, heading towards the city center?]
[Eagle Strike: Because from the situation at that ti, the laboratory server room had already been blown up by those two agents you saw, this runaway AI and its grasp on the troops couldn’t possibly rush out of Night City. Even if it acquired all the experintal data and hid on a small drone, the chance of successfully escaping the city was slim to none]
[Wildman: Unless...]
[Eagle Strike: Unless it had an accomplice within Night City, taking advantage of everyone’s attention being drawn to this runaway AI, the accomplice broke into Zeta Technology and stole that technology]
————————
With the death of Erebos, all Hellhounds lost control and collapsed on the spot.
Even those two... accurately speaking, one Chira stopped working, despite it almost being actively dismantled by the company’s suppression forces like the other Chira that had already collapsed on the ground.
Even Hansen couldn’t penetrate the city center with these things back in the day, so how could it be possible today? Nurous robots were paralyzed on the bridge connecting Taiping Continent and Haywood.
But things won’t cease just because Hellhounds and Chiras have stopped working.
The attack on the city center involved a runaway AI and an era of network crash-level robots, and it would be false for these companies to say they weren’t envious.
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