Cyberpunk: From Dogville to Legend

Chapter 363 [Rabies Kit] and Life's Performance (Part 1) [5.7K]

"The concept of 'enemy' is just that—a concept."

As he spoke, Otto's hands moved gently, as if explaining the survival rules of the cyber world to Lin Yue.

Lin Yue naturally understood what Ultraman meant.

AIs may have their own purposes, but the AIs outside the Great Firewall infected by the Rabbis virus only aim to ensure their own survival and iteration. Furthermore, they do not understand humans, nor are they aware of the meaning of human social rules. Even so, they still possess extremely high intelligence and logical reasoning abilities…

"The need to survive and the need to evolve are both meanings."

"Perhaps you are special to them as well. Based on this conjecture, I warned you to be careful of these intelligent programs outside the Great Firewall... However, the outcome is still uncertain. With your current network capabilities, you can even find a way to break through tools like Orion that are specifically designed to hunt them..."

The meaning behind it is self-evident.

"You think too highly of me, Ultraman."

Lin Yue shook his head.

"I'm just curious, doesn't the Black Wall monitor them?"

Ott: "I've already answered that question. They found an offline database to store their own program, and the Black Wall can't interfere. Any normal program disguised as theirs could be them, so the Black Wall naturally won't track them."

"The black wall has an inertia, and its design seems to have been based on this fundamental thinking."

Lin Yue felt that further discussion of this issue would only cause unnecessary trouble; at least he had gained important information from today's meeting with Ultraman in cyberspace:

Unlike the Night Clan's wandering AIs that blend into the human population.

They are more special, more evil, and more unscrupulous...

Having prepared himself for the worst, Lin Yue then shifted the topic to the company's database defense measures.

Ott's solution was simple: let the data go offline for a while. Those roving AIs would eventually enter the Night City public network area. Today's commotion has already been noticed by the Internet Surveillance Bureau, and those AIs will experience the pressure from the biggest force within the Great Firewall.

After thinking about it carefully, it's true...

Even Yeshi Corporation doesn't dare to cause trouble in the internet sphere within the Great Firewall, so the behavior of these wild AIs naturally cannot escape internet surveillance.

"Alright, Ultraman, I have to go back now."

Lin Yue was somewhat worried about the people in the company.

After all, there was no warning when Ott pulled him into the private IBS. Qiwei was also quite calm. Following Lin Yue's instructions, she quickly shut down the firewall of the data fortress. Brandon was in charge of defense and vigilance, and everything was done in an orderly manner. This made Lin Yue feel more at ease. At least when he couldn't help in time, the Dreamers that Emma handled were self-sufficient and knew how to weigh the results.

"You left looking preoccupied. Was it because you were worried about having too many problems that were bothering you, but you didn't dare to continue talking to me?"

Lin Yue rested his elbow on the data bar and propped his chin up with one hand.

"Dealing with you is the most difficult thing for me... I'm just wondering if going outside the wall would allow me to access the source of those bizarre memories from before, and how should I tell you about them—"

“There’s a place that has always attracted me, and ever since the last Badlands operation ended, some inexplicable subconscious thoughts have been popping into my head.”

Ultraman: "So that's why you became the leader of the rebellion against the company so quickly, right?"

Lin Yue laughed and said, "You know, Otto, I envy Shangri-La. At least there, the digital souls don't suffer from hunger and cold, and you've also achieved protection."

Lin Yue made no attempt to hide these things.

Even if he didn't explain it to Ultraman, this highly intelligent entity would have its own understanding of how he knew.

"It seems to be that strange world, the place where your soul dwells. After you projected into cyberspace, your previous memories will become the scenes that imprison your soul, just like the characteristics of a soul killer—a digital soul converted into a program. They may linger in the virtual space before their death and be unable to come out, as if they are having a long dream."

what? !

Lin Yue's eyes suddenly widened...

When Lin Yue heard this explanation, he even felt a slight headache.

Ultraman's calm words struck him like a thunderbolt.

If we refer to his own memories, it seems that Johnny Silverhand, who lost his integrity before his death, also said something similar, like having a dream, until this chip coaxed the dying V back from the brink of death. Those scenes were Johnny's memories. He has been living in his own world, experiencing that "farewell performance" and his girlfriend's "death replay".

At that moment in Dogtown, Lin Yue seemed to be imprisoned in that warm room as well.

He's a clueless nerd who diligently works on his game guides; his world is quiet and lonely.

"Oh shit…"

Lin Yue let out a long breath to calm himself down.

When I first encountered the network access pod prosthetic body, I almost got pulled into the world outside the Black Wall. At that time, the Black Wall didn't seem to offer any resistance. The reason why those wild AIs outside the wall dared to deceive me with the memories of Shangri-La seemed to be because they had undergone careful planning and long-term preparation.

Or perhaps they know themselves.

Could it be... that I have some connection to the outside world?

After his conjecture was confirmed, Lin Yue became even more determined to go outside the Black Wall and search for these clues with Ultraman.

"Ok?"

Just as humans and programs were worrying about their unknown journey of exploration, something Lin Yue had overlooked suddenly changed.

panel…

[Hacking Techniques Kit (Please download via the internet; requires extensive research)]

Lin Yue was initially puzzled by this line of information. Why would the panel give him such a reward? And where should he go to download it? None of this was explained—

When the anomaly occurred, Lin Yue finally understood.

This reward doesn't need to be sought out; it will come to you on its own.

Otto's image instantly magnified; she wanted to protect Lin Yue's neural projection within her private IBS.

The data chain immediately locked onto Ultra's address, which changed tens of millions of times per second, and had now penetrated ICE, heading straight for Lin Yue inside!

Before Lin Yue could speak, the surroundings had already shifted and the stars had moved...

He was like a guy who stood still, and in an instant, he arrived at an unfamiliar place amidst the blurry torrent of data rushing past him!

Maintaining sufficient vigilance towards the unknown is a good habit, but at this moment, his vigilance seems somewhat inadequate…

Signal lost.

Lin Yue felt as if he had been suddenly thrown from Ultraman's ship into a boundless ocean. The faint connection between Ultraman and himself was quickly severed, and Lin Yue couldn't even tell whether he was inside or outside the wall.

Wow!
The body suddenly stopped!

Lin Yue instinctively bent down to prevent himself from falling...

"This is where?!"

As he surveyed the empty space around him, he sensed something extremely wrong—

Because at this moment he had no control over his body at all.

This place is like a data forbidden zone; you can't even search for the slightest bit of information here!

hum…

Lin Yue's virtual avatar sensed the source of the slight change, and a long river of data rapidly unfolded. Lin Yue's fingertip expanded rapidly as if a sapling was growing wildly.

Is the panel really a program?

Lin Yue stared blankly at the data, the design ideas of which he himself could not fathom. The data flowed freely, quickly occupying this empty world, until he unfolded it.

It consisted of blocks of readable data, but it was too profound for Lin Yue to understand what it was trying to convey…

"This thing is waiting for a certain type of data to come closer!"

Although he couldn't see the design of the panel or the ingenuity behind it, Lin Yue, who had at least 20 points of intelligence and had systematically studied network knowledge, knew that a fully expanded program could only have two outcomes: either it was running, or it was waiting for a patch update!
That's right.

The favorability panel is performing this action right now. The so-called program suite is a reward that it cannot predict or fabricate out of thin air. The program needs to be written by a human or AI, and the panel is only responsible for storing and calling up the program.

My guess was right after all.

The strange data emerging from Lin Yue's body quickly received the chains transmitted from the void. These chains further enriched the program and brought Lin Yue the most magical and lethal program kits that hackers needed for navigating the cyber network—

"Rabies kit?"

The program suite's name is extremely strange, immediately bringing to mind the Rabbis virus that caused network crashes!

however…

But that wasn't all; what followed was an unstoppable uproar…

……
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Please enter your username.

In front of the large, bulky monitor typical of its time, a boy with gloomy eyes stared silently at the instruction box.

He was thinking, his eyes also capturing the clearly visible process of the screen's resolution refresh.

The evening breeze blew the window open, causing the thick computer technology books to rustle.

The boy turned his gaze to the pages of the book.

"Personal information can be leaked at any time on the Internet, so protecting personal privacy has become extremely important. This is also the key reason why personal computers need to run firewalls."

The boy's hands were short, after all, he was only five or six years old, making one wonder if a child his age could do typing independently.

However, it seemed that the words on the page inspired him, or perhaps he thought of a suitable online name for personal protection. He raised his hand, and like a child pianist, his fingers moved with the dexterity of an adult, causing a series of loud, clattering sounds on the keyboard...

[Entry permitted. Welcome to the blog.]

The room was dark, with only the boy's face illuminated by the blue background of the social networking site—the dense text was content shared by adults about life, society, technology, and so on; of course, some less pleasant information was also seen by children of this age, and in the few seconds it took to scroll through the page, the child, with his amazing reading ability, absorbed all of this information.

This may be the duality of the internet.

Amidst the debate that should prompt people to reconsider whether such young children should be allowed access to the internet, the boy uttered a single word.

"boring."

Until the homepage appeared on the social networking site.

The child was visiting an information-selling website that even some tech-savvy individuals struggled to pinpoint the access port to. It didn't seem as difficult as he'd imagined. On his first day online, the boy diligently memorized the date displayed on the computer system in the lower right corner.

Feeling he had wasted his time, the child stared sullenly at the webpage that failed to satisfy his interests, and decided to destroy it.

It's like someone telling a child that there's a beautiful sandcastle carved from sand in the eastern forest, but after seeing it in person, it turns out to be just a crude sand sculpture. The child's naivety leads him to decide to destroy it, and also to test some internet information technology he's learned about in books.

The "decorations" on the webpage are peeled away layer by layer, leaving only piles of basic code in front of the child.

He made an extremely bold decision: to hack into the server.

“It might be interesting to make it public.”

For the first time, a smile appeared on the boy's gloomy face.

By obtaining information that people are trying to hide and then placing it on a website that anyone can access, such as... a company's portal, this should cause panic among these people, and the ultimate goal of the prank will be achieved.

The boy described to himself what he was going to do next in words. His behavior was strange, like a program pushing forward and backward through the knowledge he had acquired.

"Analyzing the event logs of mainstream systems is an important source of information for tracing the source of the problem."

"I might be noticed immediately."

The result obtained through reverse reasoning also came out of the boy's tender throat.

"Then let's make the logs unreliable."

Debating with himself and calculating possible outcomes for himself, an unimaginable level of computational thinking is vividly displayed in this child.

"IP address redirection cannot prevent others from tracing it."

The boy was talking while his hands were moving rapidly.

"Then let the IP address keep redirecting."

"What about suspicious entries in the registry?"

"Then let's make everything suspicious..."

Midnight silence.

Programmers, either fast asleep or buried in their work in tall buildings, had no idea that a child was about to launch an attack on one of North America's largest social networking sites.

The only tool he used was a personal computer connected to his home network.

"Ah... I found it."

The boy's hand hovered over the keyboard; he had discovered the secret.

The massive leaks of citizens' information on gray websites have actually been transmitted by the same people. When users agree to certain carefully crafted agreements by the server controllers, they are so eager to see this amazing, uncharted territory that they ignore these unfair terms that completely destroy their personal information.

The boy's own information was also prominently displayed among them!
No one knows what the little boy was thinking when he looked at those few lines of text that encompassed his home address, parents' names, school, supermarket checkout records, his father's credit card repayment history, and so on...

When the DEL command was issued, the boy also deleted the family information records of his friends in the nearby community.

How he managed to accurately filter through tens of millions of entries is no longer important; what matters is that the girl knocked on his door on Halloween… His parents were busy working overtime and hadn't prepared any candy, so the girl shared some warm gingerbread she'd gotten from the neighbor as Halloween treats.

So he felt he could help with this.

What followed was retaliation without reservation.

The entire process lasted for more than half an hour. The online money-printing machine built by intelligent and fully educated adults was completely smashed. The information appeared one by one on the portal website of a seemingly rising internet software provider, and their proud advertising copy was modified...

Cutting-edge technology

The boy only used the adjective.

The most despicable technology

This is his signature, the standard hacker "holstering stance".

That's not all. When you provoke a bison that can't catch you at all, teasing it can also be a form of fun.

So the large company tried to recover the data overnight, and the technicians wanted to use the darkness to overwrite these things. However, the stripping of permissions was more serious than they had imagined.

They no longer have actual control over the servers located inside the company building.

The hackers who thoroughly compromised the server left them with a very interesting puzzle:
Count how many people are covered in the information within three hours.

Countless...

This information will be packaged and sent to all users, including politicians, celebrities, and people with sensitive identities among the blog's users.

Next, we'll see how the other person struggles to beg for mercy.

The boy watched this online chase with a more intense interest than browsing the webpage, but he was, from beginning to end, merely the one who set a false target…

As time ticked by, disappointment crept into the boy's eyes.

No one saw through the scam. They arrogantly believed that using a lot of fancy technology would allow them to get the data back into their hands. They were just hitting the target with all their might, while the real enemy was sitting in the audience in the arena.

The boy could almost picture those sweaty guys staring intently at the countdown to the puzzle, roaring, trembling with fear, desperately trying to find their IP addresses…

He was obsessed with this feeling of omnipotence.

The last time he felt this way was when he was watching a mouse caught in a mousetrap and unable to escape. He could have reached out and opened the trap, but it seemed more interesting to just sit there and watch (a sign of low empathy).

It's all over.

Even after the puzzle is solved, the boy will not stop his pranks, and he denies all of the seemingly plausible answers offered by the other party.

He sent an email using a borrowed server rental account, telling those who begged him to reply whether the answer was correct and to state the amount of ransom they were demanding.

"I haven't counted either, I'm so sorry ;p"

There was no specific purpose; it was just for fun.

A child whose parents were out working overtime accomplished a feat on the computer that would give even adults nightmares. Then, the child picked up a ripped teddy bear from beside the chair, slowly walked to the door, and patiently waited for something.

Four o'clock in the morning.

The sound of a car engine getting closer outside...

Squeak.

The door opened with the sound of bells—

A woman's surprised and apologetic voice rang out, "Baby! Oh my God, oh my God..."

"Feel sorry!"

After the man finished hanging up his coat, he spoke.

"Sorry, son, Mom and I worked too late tonight. How about Dad buys you a new toy? Like this—"

The man took the child from the woman's arms.

Will you forgive your father?

"Ok?"

The boy didn't know why he couldn't see his parents' faces; perhaps it was too dark. He could only sense two adults trying to comfort him to prevent him from crying and causing the neighbors to call the police.

"I want a handheld computer."

The parents' salaries are more than enough to meet this requirement.

A satisfied kiss landed on the boy's face.

"Row!"

"But you have to go to sleep... Even though you didn't cry, you're already a brave guy, my boy!"

Immediately afterwards, the boy lay down on the bed and listened to the fairy tale that was so boring that all he wanted to do was close his eyes.

The door is closed.

"The company's business plan is out, and the competitor has been taken down."

"The supervisor credited our sales department for the success, and the bonus was huge (kissing sound)."

Mother sighed.

"You can see, honey, the child is very lonely... I'm wondering if we should find him a babysitter or something, what do you think?"

"Or should we buy him a pet?"

The father spoke.

"Forget it... kids aren't good at taking care of pets."

"Let's buy him a computer. He can only use that thing to play some games, which will help him pass the time."

The man hesitated for a moment, then his voice faded away as the door to his parents' bedroom closed.

The boy breathed a sigh of relief after receiving a positive answer.

He was not asleep.

Gazing quietly at the moonlight outside the window, savoring the inexplicably exciting feeling from the moment just now, I turned my eyes back to the computer screen.

I'm ready to sleep, feeling completely satisfied.

Everything was silent.

The screen lights up intermittently due to unstable AC power.

The page remains the login page for the social networking site, with usernames clearly visible:
Ricky Bartommos

……

……

(End of this chapter)