Warhammer: The Time Traveler

Chapter 210 Spider Murphy's Worries (Thirteenth Update)
Beyond the abandoned town, the war between Arasaka and military technology continues.

The sounds of gunfire and the vibrations of explosions came from outside the isolation wall, but after being weakened by the composite sound insulation layer installed around the workshop and the active sound wave cancellation field, they were very weak when they entered the interior.

The flashes of gunfire sometimes illuminated the rusted metal walls at the edge of the ruined town, but they could not penetrate the workshop's thick protective structure.

This defensive line, composed of physical barriers and energy fields, effectively keeps the flames of war outside.

Within the abandoned town, especially the central workshop and its managed data network, operations remained stable and unaffected.

Deep within this local area network controlled by Chen Yu, in a separately partitioned data space, the form of Spider-Murphy's existence is undergoing subtle changes.

She initially viewed this place as an exquisite and sturdy prison, a compromise she had to accept in exchange for the truth about Lucky Bartholomew.

But she soon realized that this place was unusual.

The stability and purity of this data space far exceeded any environment she had experienced while wandering in and out of the ruins of the initial network or the Black Wall.

There is no chaotic data flow, no constant vigilance against other lurking AIs, and no oppressive feeling from the omnipresent Black Wall AI.

Everything here operates according to a simple yet efficient underlying logic, and everything is in perfect order.

What shocked her even more was the computing power support.

When she began to carry out the task assigned by Chen Yu—to guide the three female hackers—she tried to mobilize resources to conduct simulation exercises and compile code.

With a thought, an almost inexhaustible computing power responded, its speed and resource allocation so smooth that it gave her a near-omnipotent illusion.

She can easily simulate the complete environment of any area network in Night City, run dozens of complex intrusion protocols simultaneously without feeling any delay, and even dedicate a portion of the threads to brute-force cracking a certain encryption protocol, without her main consciousness being affected in the slightest.

This is support that no server cluster in this era can provide.

She had secretly tried to probe the boundaries of this data space in an attempt to understand its computing power limits.

However, no matter what form or frequency her probe commands took, the feedback was like a stone sinking into the sea, or like water droplets being poured into the ocean—she could feel the vastness of the ocean, but could never touch its boundaries.

This space seemed to offer her only a tiny fraction of its overall resources, and even this tiny fraction far exceeded the full power she could mobilize as a legendary hacker and as a powerful, mobile AI at its peak.

This realization elevated her assessment of Chen Yu even further.

The technical expertise of this self-proclaimed "passerby" and "researcher" is unfathomable.

He can not only repair remains from half a century ago, easily decipher the Arasaka Shrine, and manipulate the Black Wall as if it were his own arm, but he can also construct a data space that transcends the understanding of his time.

Compared to him, Saburo Arasaka's pursuit of digital immortality, her military technology that she flaunts, and even many legendary hackers and roving AIs, including herself, all seem like frogs in a well.

After receiving clear instructions from Chen Yu to guide Lucy, Sasha, and Qiwei, Spider Murphy displayed extraordinary seriousness and focus.

This commitment stems not only from the constraints of forced loyalty, but also from an unspeakable awe of those who control higher levels of knowledge and technology, and an expectation that outstanding performance might yield more clues about Lucky.

Her coaching style is direct and efficient, abandoning the flashy but impractical techniques and overly personalized habits of the old internet era, and instead focusing on the most basic logic optimization and efficiency improvement. Regarding Sasha and Qiwei, although their electronic warfare cybernetic bodies, modified by Chen Yu, are already top-tier in terms of hardware, there is still significant room for improvement in software adaptation and operational thinking.

Murphy astutely pointed out their shortcomings: over-reliance on ready-made puppets and a lack of deep customization capabilities.

"Using other people's weapons will never make you a top hunter." She strictly requires them to deeply understand the underlying code of each puppet, master its core principles, and learn to adjust and optimize based on the real-time feedback of specific target systems. She even personally encapsulates unique, more targeted, and more covert intrusion tools.

In addition, she taught them how to allocate neural bandwidth more efficiently, ensuring that while maintaining multiple intrusion channels open, they must reserve some computing power for risk warning and self-defense, so as to avoid becoming completely passive once the intrusion is thwarted, like most reckless hackers.

Murphy saw another kind of potential in Lucy.

Lucy's technical foundation leans more towards rigorous, traditional approaches, but her extensive experience operating near the Black Wall has given her an exceptionally keen intuition for data risks.

Instead of forcibly changing her style, Murphy guided her to transform this vague intuition into a more systematic risk assessment model.

“Feelings might deceive you, but data won’t.” She guided Lucy to build a dynamic threat awareness algorithm, learning to predict the types of defenses that might be encountered before an intrusion is launched, and to prepare the corresponding cracking protocols in advance.

At the same time, Murphy also began to teach Lucy some advanced techniques from the old network era about the digitization of consciousness and how to effectively hide and disguise oneself at the data level—knowledge that Lucy had little access to in Mann's squad.

At first, Lucy, Sasha, and Qiwei maintained an instinctive wariness and a sense of distance from "Spider Murphy," a figure they had only heard of in legends.

However, this barrier quickly dissolved after Murphy began to provide substantive guidance.

She didn't present herself as a lofty legend, but rather acted like an experienced and demanding coach, pointing out the core flaws and blind spots in their technical system.

Under Murphy's systematic guidance, their progress was concrete and visible.

Sasha found that he could write intrusion protocols at a speed that increased by nearly 30 percent, and the code structure became more concise and efficient, like a finely cut blade.

Qiwei learned how to build more deceptive collaborative intrusion protocols. Her cooperation with Sasha was no longer a simple division of labor, but a sophisticated tactical interweaving at the data level.

Lucy's harvest was particularly remarkable.

The "intuition" she used to rely on, which was based on experience, was reinterpreted and reinforced by Murphy using a rigorous algorithmic model.

She can now simulate and rehearse several possible defense modes before launching an attack, and preload the corresponding countermeasures.

This "anticipation-preparation" capability greatly reduces the risk and uncertainty during intrusion.

The data space provided by Chen Yu, with its near-limitless computing power, was a key catalyst for their rapid improvement in capabilities.

Here, they can run dangerous code that might instantly burn out ordinary interfaces in reality without any scruples, and they can repeatedly try penetration and defense under extreme conditions without worrying about suffering irreversible neural damage or triggering real-world tracking.

This high-intensity, high-risk drill in a secure environment is a luxury that cannot be replicated by any external network access point, allowing their combat capabilities to achieve a qualitative leap in a short period of time.

(End of this chapter)