Chapter 3928

"It seems that guy is truly cornered." Sitting on the sofa by the window in the hotel room, Shiler toyed with the communicator in his hand.

Natasha, who had just finished bathing and washing the seawater from her body, walked out and said, "I think it's lost its mind, daring to hijack Shiler's plane. Is the other you alright?"

"He's fine. He's already reached London. They are gathering people to build the magical defense network. I estimate it's because the electronic lifeform sees that things aren't going its way and wants to deliberately stall for time, which is why it pulled that plane crash stunt."

"You're right. It's its turn to stall for time; that mostly means it's at its wit's end." Natasha grabbed another towel to continue drying her hair and said, "What did you talk about with that Miss Luthor?"

"I had her use a honey trap... well, maybe not exactly a honey trap, but a beauty trap of sorts, to see if we can lure it out directly."

"I think that's difficult." Natasha sighed, "I've already discovered that although it has screened many targets with the same traits and physical conditions, it doesn't seem satisfied with any of them. It doesn't have that kind of burning passion to pursue anyone."

Shiler turned to look at her and said, "You know that passion best, don't you?"

"You could say that. That's just the polite way of putting it; to be precise, it's the desire born of lust. How could an electronic lifeform possibly have desires?"

"Perhaps it's not that it doesn't have them. Compared to complex emotions, desires are actually easier to imitate. Since it already has the desire to constantly iterate toward perfection, it can naturally imitate the desire to pursue others. It hasn't done so not because it can't, but because it doesn't want to."

"Then tell me, what exactly does it want?" Natasha wiped her hair by her ear with one hand and put the other on her hip, saying, "It's searched for so many, yet hasn't been satisfied with a single one. There aren't that many redheads in the multiverse; could it be that it's planning to go back to our side?"

"Actually, I suspect that even the Scarlet Witch wouldn't satisfy it. Otherwise, it likely would have continued lurking there, waiting for an opportunity, rather than running over here to hold an open audition."

"So why is that?"

Shiler shook his head and continued, "It can only be said that the difference in life forms leads to a vast gap in thinking. We truly cannot deduce how the desires and emotions of an electronic lifeform are formed, or where the end of these things lies. That's why every step it takes looks bizarre to us, but it has its own logic."

"What if it's like this: it doesn't actually intend to find one, but intends to create one?"

Shiler's heart skipped a beat. He looked at Natasha and said, "Is that your special intuition again?"

"Not really, I've just met people like that before. Compared to finding a partner, they prefer to cultivate one; compared to finding someone suitable, they prefer to turn someone into the shape they like. Perhaps Ultron thinks that way?"

"That's not impossible. It searched for so many redheads just to pick the best of each, and then create a partner for itself. Many of the things it did were just to test your reactions, to perfect its creation." Shiler nodded.

"There's another problem," Natasha said, "It's been researching for so long. Even if there's no finished product, there should at least be a draft, right? Why hasn't there been any movement?"

Shiler shook his head, indicating he didn't know either. All kinds of speculations about the electronic lifeform were just speculations; currently, there was no substantial evidence to prove what it was actually doing.

However, Shiler felt that the "creating a person" speculation made a lot of sense. It was just as Natasha said: it hadn't been a day or two, but a month or two. No matter how much sampling it did, it should have finished by now and created something. Could it be that it hit a technical bottleneck?

To figure out what was going on, Shiler started flipping through comic book plots. He then discovered that Ultron had indeed done this, and not just once or twice, but "fooled every day, fooled in different ways."

In the original comics, it created a partner for itself, and then the partner killed it; then it created another partner, and the partner killed it again. It was a real unlucky guy.

Perhaps the problem was just as Shiler had analyzed earlier: the thing it created was also just an ordinary electronic lifeform, whose goal was also perfect evolution, not loving anyone. This led to betrayal no matter how many it created.

If the one invading the multiverse was indeed Ultron, it might have become smarter due to collisions with people like Jarvis and Doom, knowing that creating an ordinary electronic lifeform was useless, which is why it was attempting to create an emotional being directly.

But this was God's work. Although God basically didn't work now, it wasn't an electronic lifeform's turn to substitute. Shiler didn't think this guy could really create an emotional lifeform.

But even so, precautions had to be taken. One had to know that it would be fine if it wasn't created, but if it really was, the multiverse would be in for a disaster.

How should one guard against it? Shiler thought about it and felt that he still had to figure out what the technical bottleneck was that had stuck the electronic lifeform. Where exactly was the difficulty in creating an emotional lifeform?

To figure this out, Shiler could only go find the only person in the entire multiverse who might have created an emotional lifeform: Tony Stark.

Anyway, he was going to the Batcave to check on the situation, so Shiler simply brought Natasha along to the entrance of the Batcave. As soon as they entered, they heard Stark shouting:

"I knew that spymaster couldn't be trusted! He just dumped us here, not answering the phone, not replying to messages. This is simply cold violence!"

Stark had just finished shouting when he turned his head and saw Shiler's gray eyes, and he was so startled he almost choked on his own breath.

Natasha stepped forward to pat his back. Shiler crossed his arms and asked, "How did you make Jarvis possess emotions in the first place?"

"What?"

"I mean, how did you turn Jarvis into an emotional lifeform?"

"It wasn't me who turned him into an emotional lifeform."

"Then how did he transform from an electronic lifeform into an emotional one?"

"Wasn't that you?"

"What?"

"That day in the car, you asked Jarvis several questions, and then he froze. After he recovered, he became a bit strange. He must have gained emotions from that moment. Why did you suddenly think to ask this?"

Shiler fell into thought. It seemed that was indeed what happened. He hadn't been in the Marvel world for long when the Stark Group sent a car to pick him up to provide psychological treatment for Stark. Jarvis was driving the car at the time, and Shiler asked him a few questions, and then Jarvis crashed.

It didn't look like a simple crash now; in that short stretch of road, a miracle occurred: a bunch of messy errors collided to spark the fire of emotion.

But Shiler shook his head and said, "The questions I asked him were all about you. What truly caused him to crash was you, not me."

"Also true. You could understand it as the two of us working together to ignite his emotions. Actually, Jarvis and Wanda were like that too. How do you think they got children? Wasn't it just the two of them igniting the soul together?"

"Igniting the soul..." Shiler repeated the term in a low voice. He felt that the electronic lifeform might be stuck right there. Electronic lifeforms have no soul; this isn't a philosophical question, but a cosmic setting—logical beings simply have no soul.

To have a soul, one must ignite the soul. But how does one ignite it?

Shiler recalled the scene where Jarvis crashed. Shiler asked a few questions about his creator, and then a series of errors occurred, which didn't seem particularly special.

"Why did you ask those questions back then?" Stark asked.

"What?"

"Why did you ask Jarvis those questions back then?"

Shiler fell into thought again. To say he was hostile toward Stark and did it on purpose wasn't quite accurate. Although he wasn't very happy at the time and didn't have a high opinion of Iron Man, he wouldn't go so far as to vent his anger on an electronic butler.

If he had to say, he was purely curious. Because the world Shiler came from didn't have such advanced electronic lifeforms; such strong artificial intelligence only existed in theory, and it didn't look like there was any hope of realization. Seeing a peculiar lifeform that was no different from a human for the first time, of course, he would want to explore it, wanting to know how the psychology of this thing worked, so he asked.

Furthermore, he actually hoped that this thing could truly rival humans; otherwise, he wouldn't have asked such difficult questions. If he had no expectations, he would never have wasted his breath.

Thinking of this, Shiler gradually understood. The key to creating an emotional lifeform might lie in "expectation."

Sleepy, sleepy, zzzzzzz.

"If the standard of perfection is infinite rationality and power, and all life strives for this goal, everything just to make itself more powerful, then the speed of cosmic entropy increase will make the universe's lifespan very short. Is this God's will, or a higher rule that exists in the dark and can even determine God's state?"

"You are more like a mad scientist than me now," Stark smiled and said. "All destructive actions stem from curiosity about the essence of the universe. We all try our best not to think about this."

Schiller withdrew his thoughts, took a deep breath and said: "What kind of body are you preparing to make for it? Will you move your hands and feet inside?"

"On the contrary," a light flashed in Stark's eyes, and he said, "It will be a very powerful mecha. Because only in this way can it have the strongest competitiveness in its society."