Chapter 259 - 240 Soul Killer of Underfitting (Computer broke down today, sorry)

In Cyberspace, Lille saw that the computational power provided by the entire H8 Skyscraper gradually formed into a chaotic vortex, a black hole that continuously changed colors, a Black Sun that constantly scorched Cyberspace!

This contradictory feeling defied intuition, but in Cyberspace, it made perfect sense!

Soul Killer!

The legendary weapon completed as early as the ’20s, initially designed by the hacker Otto Cunningham to recognize and store human emotions and consciousness.

After a series of operations by Arasaka, it was perfected into a terrifying weapon against hackers in Cyberspace—

It’s said that once targeted by the Soul Killer, the hacker’s consciousness would be eternally trapped in Cyberspace!

The moment this exaggerated program appeared, Lille felt he was already within it, the data flow became extremely unstable, and the temperature was rapidly rising!

This meant that the intensity of the current in the cables was rapidly increasing, causing the cable temperature to quickly rise, which would eventually burn Lille’s nerves!

And if he tried to unplug the network cable at this moment, the already chaotic current would cause a surge due to the interface disconnection, enough to fry a person’s brain nerves!

Lille was completely unable to identify the source and mechanism of these chaos, nor did he have any way to start to correct and control them, as his connection with the outside world was completely cut off by this situation!

Out of control in Cyberspace!

The feeling of chaos filled every inch of Cyberspace, the data flow was utterly illogical, resembling neither a program nor...

[Evolution Heart: The complex psychological activity brought about by Cyberspace activity has been eliminated.]

Human emotions!

Lille suddenly realized the true meaning of the chaos!

The Soul Killer was learning!

The Yihara-Bragg transformation converted electrical signals into biological signals, allowing people to perceive data, whereas the Soul Killer did the exact opposite. It completely recorded the electrical signals of the human brain in Cyberspace and constructed an AI almost completely consistent with the psychological profile of the observed target!

When locked onto by the Soul Killer, hackers would panic, causing brain activity to become more pronounced, further accelerating the black hole’s depiction and recording of the consciousness!

Just like a fingerprint collection panel, the more fully and forcefully one presses, the faster the fingerprint recording efficiency!

Once locked by this program, a person would be stuck in Cyberspace due to its operational characteristics until physical death.

This process would trigger all of a person’s thoughts and emotions, all of which would be recorded on a chip.

Meaning, the moment of physical death is when the recording ends.

Boom!

Just when Lille figured this out, something enormous seemed to crash onto the background noise of Cyberspace, causing the Black Sun’s temperature to plummet—

It seemed that apart from being trapped here, there wasn’t much of a sense of danger.

The reason seemed to be...

The Soul Killer had begun to take shape, extending arms from the vortex, kneading Lille’s consciousness, along with all the surrounding data remnants.

Normally, a hacker at this point would have already wet themselves, but Lille was extremely calm, which seemed to cause some issues in the operation of the Soul Killer...

Yes, the reason was that the emotional fluctuations generated by Lille were so minimal that the sensitivity of the Soul Killer was insufficient to learn from them.

"Is this what cheating feels like..."

Little Octopus crawled all over Lille, and Lille even saw that the Soul Killer gathered more data from Little Octopus than from himself...

If this continued, Arasaka might think Lille was a child under two months old...

"What are you doing?"

[Ⅵ¶¢ÐÞ: Feels quite powerful, oh, it doesn’t seem as hot as just now.]

And then it stopped trembling.

The Soul Killer’s efficiency lowered further, gathering more data from the surrounding useless data, and the temperature around Lille decreased a bit more.

Lille waved his hand, and the Soul Killer showed a slight reaction again, with the temperature rising slightly.

Now Lille was sure that the Soul Killer itself was just an AI model without self-awareness, with the training process involving the recognition of everything the target does, then filtering and integrating it to form the so-called digital persona.

Because of Lille’s minimal emotional fluctuations, the Soul Killer’s recognition of him had some issues, causing...

Underfitting, the model hadn’t received enough training.

As for the heating, it seemed not to be a function of the Soul Killer itself but a program akin to an "arsonist" (note), which caused a rapid surge of current in the hacker’s equipment, thus frying the hacker’s brain.

The truth of the Soul Killer... was likely that Arasaka added some offensive modules to Otto’s developed program.

After all, Otto’s AI was indeed almost unbeatable in target recognition and preventing hackers from logging off. Once targeted, Arasaka could launch any network attack, and the hacker could only wait for death—

In this regard, once the Soul Killer locked onto a target, the target either pulled the plug and went brain-dead or starved to death, or Arasaka didn’t want their digitized persona and directly killed them with network attacks.

Unless the attacked hacker was on some super corporation’s server, in which case it would be a battle till the end.

But now, due to advanced network monitoring, Arasaka’s attack strength had significantly weakened!

And because Lille was "cheating," the Soul Killer had hardly recorded anything, with even its attacks appearing extremely weak, causing almost no damage to Lille.

Perhaps the current attack by the Black Sun, concentrated on Lille’s equipment, could still cause significant trouble for Lille. But because the recognition program was the Soul Killer and its recognition function wasn’t working correctly, the attack was virtually non-existent.

Little Octopus pointed at the black hole.

Lille showed a peculiar expression: "You still want to touch that thing?"

Little Octopus timidly nodded,

[Ĵ§»: It feels very powerful, but it’s not targeting me.]

Indeed, how could an AI have any emotions... To ensure the completeness of the record object, the Soul Killer was quite skilled at distinguishing AIs.

Thinking in this way, for ordinary hackers, the Soul Killer was indeed an unsolvable and terrifying method.

But for Lille...

No way!

Lille’s face suddenly changed. It was dangerous even for him!

He knew it wasn’t dangerous for himself, but if Jack and V—

Especially V; if she lost her cool and unplugged her cable in a panic, she would truly die!

This reaction immediately triggered the Soul Killer, and Lille felt his brain heating up!

Lille calmed his emotions and allocated all computing power to Little Octopus—Little Octopus instantly became a big octopus, turning into Lille riding on it!

Now he was the assistant, and Little Octopus was the leader.

"Little Octopus, let’s go!"

Octopus didn’t react.

After a while, it pointed at itself with a tentacle,

[Ω: Little Octopus is me?]

"Isn’t it me!"

[Little Octopus: Okay! Can we have a ceremony? Last time in the real space, the ceremony didn’t feel like much.]

Cyberriel stroked the cyber octopus, the data flow reconfigured with the interaction, indicating a change in current.

[Little Octopus

It seemed comfortable this time.

Bang!

The background noise of Cyberspace was completely pierced!

The heat decreased instantly, and the Soul Killer’s key learning targets all shifted to the signal source that had burst in!

[Blais: Burger King, hang in there! We will solve Arasaka soon!]

Lille didn’t even think, he sent a message before the communication gap was covered by the chaos of the Soul Killer,

[Lille: I can’t hold on much longer! Tell my people, I’m fine!]