Cyber Heroes

Xiangshan fell to the ground.

Xiangshan turned his neck and looked at the boy's trembling fingers. This is supposed to simulate an unconscious action of "typing on the keyboard". Xiangshan initially tried to spy on the boy's input from his finger movements, but he quickly gave up. This is just an action for "auto-suggestion", and the finger movements do not strictly correspond to the actual input content. Moreover, Xiangshan really broke his cervical vertebrae, and the damage to his central nervous system made his fingers less flexible.

But the instructions entered by the boy were not affected.

Xiangshan remembered a "legend" in the hacker circle.

It is said that some geeks actively use potions to improve their cognitive abilities.

——Ahhh... unexpectedly...

Improving cognitive abilities mainly involves strengthening the speed of reading and understanding, strengthening the ability to process high-level languages, and memorizing more "perhaps possible operations."

Then there are “finding vulnerabilities faster” and “extracting permissions faster”.

Finding system vulnerabilities and implementing attacks is actually a repetitive task, and this work can be automated by the flexible use of various hacking tools. But if you just use attack tools provided by others, you are not a hacker. At most, you are a chicken with subjective initiative. This is where the difference between masters and novices lies.

Strong people will hone their sensitivity to security vulnerabilities and creatively use techniques that ordinary engineers will not be exposed to. For them, tools are extensions of their hands and feet.

And what about going further?

That may be what Xiangshan once did.

Xiangshan once used martial arts AI to replace the mapping between "consciousness and body movements", and used his own consciousness to directly control the martial arts honed by supercomputers.

The attack tools of hackers can also be used as "external plug-ins" for consciousness.

This is probably what the boy is doing now.

He was attacking Xiangshan's prosthetic body everywhere at a speed unimaginable by homo sapiens. Through limited feedback, he established the concept of the prosthetic body's operating software in his mind, and then continuously adjusted the direction of the attack.

Humans who lived in the past may have difficulty imagining the power of this intervention of consciousness. But by analogy with Xiangshan's achievements, it is not difficult to guess what is extraordinary about him.

As early as ten or twenty years ago, Xiangshan could use similar operations to gain an overwhelming advantage over all traditional martial artists.

And these hackers probably have a similar reasoning.

Xiangshan quickly realized the crux of the matter. After he executed the old "Vulkan", he connected the house's wireless signal, hoping to take over the house's monitoring system through legal operations. This can avoid risks to a certain extent.

However, when Xiangshan connected to the wireless signal, he put himself on that boy's home court.

When information exchange occurs, the poison follows the signal and enters the prosthetic body.

Xiangshan stumbled to his feet and wanted to kill the boy. But almost all prosthetics are doing the wrong thing. Xiangshan suddenly lost his balance and almost fell to the ground. The fall prevention program took over his body, and Xiangshan stretched out his hands to support the ground like an instinct. But the hand also began to tremble rhythmically.

The chain sword that killed "Vulkan" was at hand, only a few centimeters away from Xiang Shan's arm. But the movement of reaching out towards the mountain was repeatedly disrupted. Xiangshan felt that his prosthetic hand had returned to the state of a robot at the end of the 20th century. It had a gripping ability that was like a motor disorder and could not hold the hilt of a sword at all.

Xiangshan forced the prosthetic body to restart. He soon fell into the dark void. This body is not his. His brain is trapped within this prosthetic body that is interfered with by others.

In this brief darkness, Xiangshan thought. After a few seconds, the prosthetic body restarted and he finally regained a little control.

Ah, but not much.

Xiangshan still couldn't block the wireless signal connection. Although the control panel directly connected to his consciousness showed that he had closed the network connection, he didn't know what the boy had done. Now it was just an icon with no practical meaning. The uploading and downloading of data continues.

Xiangshan gave up the chainsword. The top of the boy's head, including the back of his head and the upper part of his cervical spine, were all prosthetic, but the front and lower part of his neck were made of flesh. If he could move normally, he could quickly unscrew the boy's head.

He took two more steps toward the mountain. Then he lost control of his feet again. Xiangshan fell to the ground in embarrassment.

His palm was only one foot away from the boy's neck.

——Think on the bright side... At least this kid hasn't directly raised the alarm yet...

Perhaps because he was blinded by hatred, the young man did not sound the alarm immediately. He seemed obsessed with killing Xiang Shan with his own hands.

——Not quite yet...

Xiangshan's vision was suddenly covered by an alarm. The young man seemed to have found the key. He's trying to overload Mukayama's prosthetic processing equipment.

Xiangshan moved his palm little by little towards the boy's neck.

Suddenly there was a sound of objects collapsing in the kitchen. It seemed like a lot of bottles and cans had been knocked to the ground.

——Is there anyone else?

Xiangshan felt a sense of despair in his heart.

Then, a sudden and inexplicable pain hit Xiangshan.

——No...no, this feeling is...

This is EMP. When the electromagnetic pulse rolls through Xiangshan's prosthetic body, the tactile component cuts the magnetic induction lines and generates electric current, creating a strange feeling.

The strong interference made Xiang Shan's vision blurry. A lot of noise appears out of thin air.

There is a third person in the room.

The man who appeared later picked up the chain sword that fell towards the mountain, and cut the boy's neck without hesitation. Blue-purple blood spattered and even darkened the ceiling.

The man directly pulled a piece of metal foil from "Vulkan"'s body and wrapped it around the boy's head. Then, the new assassin tore off the blood-spattered goggles and threw them on the ground.

Xiangshan was slightly better. He then raised his head and looked at the man who killed the boy.

The assassin was wrapped in a very thick down jacket, and his hood covered his mouth and nose tightly. Counting the goggles she wore just now, she had almost no skin exposed. The heavy down jacket made it difficult to determine her figure, but judging from her demeanor, she must be a woman. In her left hand, she held a stick-shaped machine that looked a bit like a shotgun, which should be a directional electromagnetic pulse generator. This stick had been pointed at the boy's head just now.

Until Xiang Shan saw her eyebrows.

"Xinyu?"

Xiangshan couldn't help but exclaimed.

Although there are many scabbed and ulcerated windows between the eyebrows and behind the eye sockets, these eyes look a bit strange. But Xiang Shan is certain that this is Zhu Xinyu who has been missing for a long time.

"Ah, it is indeed you, Shan'er." Zhu Xinyu sighed. She looked at Xiang Shan carefully, looking left and right, "He has become more handsome, but he is still as pleasing to the eye as before. I can't even recognize this face."

Xiangshan stood up and wanted to get closer. But Zhu Xinyu raised the chain sword and stood between the two of them: "Come less, come less. I can't be sure whether you are true or false yet."

Xiang Shan said: "You really know...You are here to kill Vulcan?"

"Indeed. The chief security officer of the team behind the scenes." Zhu Xinyu kicked the overturned ice cream bucket on the ground, turned around and walked to the kitchen, grabbed the steaming coffee pot, and poured herself a cup. "Kill these two idiots, and the mastermind behind them will be stabbed in one eye - oh, I'll freeze to death."

"How did you get in? How long have you been here?"

Zhu Xinyu pointed to the refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen, "I don't know if you know it, but next door to this kitchen is a large cold storage divided into upper and lower floors. That old boy Vulkan said, 'Even if the world is destroyed in a nuclear war, To live independently for ten years' is the standard for storing food."

Xiangshan was shocked: "What a...crazy design idea. If he is a survivalist, why doesn't he go underground?"

"He has no choice." After Zhu Xinyu drank the coffee, he poured another cup and blew twice, "Anyway, he can live a very luxurious life in this room, but in essence he is just a prisoner of luxury. This old boy is very afraid that the conspiracy will be exposed and the world will be in chaos, so he stores a lot of food. And he is also superstitious about organic food, so the cold storage has a special chilled area. It all relies on a few robots to operate inside. I'm here to stay It's...it's been forty days, it seems. If you want to ask me when I noticed you, it was when 'Because I'm Batman' popped up - hiss, it froze me to death."

Xiang Shan was silent for a moment: "You haven't been discovered for forty days?"

"These two brothers can't enter the cold storage at all. There are only robots in it. As long as you can follow the logistics into the cold storage, you can hide it for as long as you want. For me, the biggest difficulty is, 'Can I hack into this place before the robot opens the box? System'." Zhu Xinyu drank her third cup of hot coffee, and then she put down the cup with satisfaction, "But unfortunately, the loopholes used by 'Vulcan' some time ago included parts that I published. And I'm in it. Saving a hand - I caught their clues. Even more unfortunate for them, I found that in the router here, there are 'gadgets' that I wrote when I was young. This guy was too lazy to reinvent the wheel and used Some open source tools. But in the end, my level is higher. Even if the code was open source, the two brothers did not realize that the discord inside was essentially a security hole... The robot could not detect me, and the monitoring system was taken over by me. I can even come out to use the toilet once in a while."

Xiang Shan couldn't help but ask: "This won't be noticed?"

"Tsk, that's right, they quite trust their monitoring system." Zhu Xinyu said. "And I have probably mastered the loophole in the prosthetic eye used by the mastermind behind the scenes. As long as I don't make a sound, they will automatically ignore the visual information related to me even if they are only a few meters away."

Xiang Shan applauded: "Awesome, amazing..." He couldn't help but ask: "What's going on with these two guys?"

"Half brothers. In South Asia, although polygamy is not very legal, it is traditional in some cases." Zhu Xinyu kicked "Vulkan" on the head: "This young man has done it a long time ago. As a programmer, he is out of tune with his family's religious background and hopes to break away from the family. And this younger brother, who is very different in age, is the only person close to him in the family, and he seems to be the one he cares about the most. The kid is a genius. I'm not sure Which one of them is the one involved in the series of actions behind the scenes, but now the younger brother should be a little stronger than the older brother."

"Damn, you know so detailedly..."

"I stole their diary." Zhu Xinyu said, "They seem to think that the information written on the paper carrier is safe. There is not even a lock on the diary."

"It's really traditional enough." Xiangshan restarted the prosthetic body again, stood up and moved his hands and feet a few times: "In other words, you know all the information here?"

"Only the parts that can be stolen. I initially thought they would get those things that kidnap all humans here, but unfortunately not. Although the two brothers made that part of the data, it is not stored here. To put it bluntly These two brothers are not qualified to share that unjustified power."

"Okay. Then follow the original plan and take away all storage devices. Take away all paper documents." Xiangshan connected the monitoring signal to his visual system. This time it was a success. It was probably Zhu Xinyu who opened the door to convenience.

While searching for all the potentially useful content, Xiangshan asked: "Speaking of which, where have you been these days? I mean after the night when you pointed the kitchen knife at me..."

"I still don't know if you are real or fake. What if these two Vulkans are also fake, and you are a dummy who combined two stunt doubles to play me?"

"Hey, hey, conscience of heaven and earth. We just killed two people, at least one of them is a top hacker. I don't think you should say that no matter what, right?"

"What if it's a lie?" Zhu Xinyu responded indifferently, "Actually, I have seen many people being killed. It's true."

"ah?"

"I have watched many people being killed. I still can't confirm whether they are real or pretending to be me." Zhu Xinyu said, "Including some old friends."

Xiang Shan was silent for a moment: "Who is there?"

"Xu Daozheng from the Prosthetic Development Department, remember?"

"Senior Brother Xu..." Xiang Shan pressed a hand on the marble countertop, and the cracks expanded silently, "I... Lao Xu? This..."

"Being put in a sack in Peking. Right at the Sports Science Research Center."

Xu Daozheng, one of Xiangshan’s old friends, even knew him earlier than the original team of Rama Park. In the late 1920s, when Xiangshan was still tinkering with 3D printing in Professor Liu's laboratory at the Basic Industrial Training Center, he knew Xu Daozheng. At that time, Xu Daozheng was the assistant of another professor next door to Xiangshan's laboratory, mainly tinkering with the design of mechanized prosthetics.

He led the development of Superman Enterprise's first batch of prosthetics, which were used by disabled people in the fire service, police, and military. .

This news shocked Xiang Shan for several seconds. He quickly became discouraged: "Dead? Are you sure there's no way to save him?"

"He was stabbed and disposed of together with the biochemical waste." Zhu Xinyu said, "And you'd better pray that your old senior is really dead. Otherwise, he is probably the mastermind behind it."

Xiang Shan shook his head and smiled bitterly. This topic is really difficult to answer. He asked another question: "Speaking of which, how did you confirm the existence of the mastermind? What did you do after that day?"

"The code actually used by the company's management system and the code you see in the office are actually not the same person. I also found clues from various senses of inconsistency." Zhu Xinyu said, "After that? Then I secretly took two A piece of information was given to Yawgmoth and Niaguti respectively. That guy Yorg quickly had a problem, but I was somehow able to contact him. At that time, I felt that something was wrong, so I focused on Nyag. Ya. Likewise, I was not sure whether she was a real person or a member of the mastermind behind the scenes, so I kept observing her from a distance. Until the killer appeared in front of her..."

"Wait a minute..." Xiangshan was a little confused. He asked a question, "Are you totally not considering joining forces with me for this kind of thing?"