Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 761 - 7 David’s Castle

Chapter 761: Chapter 7 David’s Castle

Conquest Heavenly King David Klein severed the connection with the server, a trace of anger crossing his face.

But David knew that was the only hint of anger he would show.

Moreover, the incident had actually taken place several minutes earlier. The preprocessed dialogue data from the personality masks was just now presented within the consciousness of this biological brain.

It had ended several minutes ago.

David stood up. His office was very classical, adhering to the minimalist style popular at the start of the twenty-first century, complete with a plain matte desktop. And he himself appeared as a Homo sapiens.

Even the surroundings looked a lot like Earth.

But this place was located at the Martian poles.

The private territory of the Conquest Heavenly King.

When David first moved to Mars a hundred years ago, he had marked a piece of land and recreated at a one-to-one scale Superman Enterprise’s second building in the outskirts of Beiping—later the core building of their tech park. This was David’s private residence.

Aside from the Ninth Martial God incident, where he personally led troops to confront the Ninth Martial God, and several interceptions of the chivalrous forces within the Asteroid Belt, he rarely left this place. Not even the news of the Tenth Martial God appearing on Mars could prompt him to act.

In usual meetings with several Great Knight Commanders from the Order of Scientific Knights, he preferred to participate online or through remote operation of a prosthetic body.

Eighty years ago, after Hartman obtained the concept of "personality mask executing information preprocessing" from an enemy, he followed this line of thought. Now, he had managed to reduce the delay of interplanetary remote dialogues to a point imperceptible to ordinary people.

The Martian dust was dry and cold. David felt no affection for such a place...

Ah, perhaps that was not accurate.

In the early 21st century, David Klein, an engineer at NASA, was deeply obsessed with Mars and the Moon.

"The emperor of the Solar System crowns you the King of Mars" was, for David at that time, a cult-like beautiful dream, one among countless space fantasy daydreams.

—Being there in person was just so-so.

That was David’s thought on Mars ninety years ago.

The Martian sky wasn’t as azure as Earth’s. Here, the sun was very small, and the sandstorms were severe.

But lately, David began to feel that even the seemingly small sun was quite pleasant.

At least it was far away from the Father of Machines.

Xiang Shan had died, dead for two hundred years. Yawgmoth had gone mad, and was becoming increasingly insane.

Others had gone mad as well. The level of insanity in Chen Feng and Zhu Xinyu was frightening. And Ingrid... he had truly thought that someone like Ingrid would never do something that crazy.

Long, long ago, Xiang Shan had said that labor that could be replaced by machines was hardly likely to be a direction for advanced productive forces.

A bit later, Xiang Shan said, any force that could be served by machines was a power more beneficial to the rulers. To rebel, one would have to rely on technology that "could not be completely replaced by machines in a short time."

The algorithm for Martial Arts was designed to be "simple for the human brain to understand but computationally expensive for computers to process." This was Xiang Shan’s idea.

At that time, Xiang Shan was still very naive. He had never thought of the idea of "using the human brain as a computer peripheral."

Using a personality within the computer, to control the human brain as an external device, and using this brain to help process the Martial Arts Algorithm.

To avoid interference existing within the brain, it was also necessary to use Restoring Enzyme to dissolve the original consciousness.

This process even required volunteering,

The carcass of the being later called the "Second Martial God" was such a monster.

Yawgmoth had gone mad. But everyone had gone mad. Madness seemed to be a contagious disease, spreading simultaneously among them both.

David felt he had definitely gone mad too.

He habitually lifted his head and rubbed his temples.

Then, he sat back down in his chair.

"Forget it, let it be. It doesn’t matter what Hartman, that dog, thinks," David shook his head and then closed his eyes.

This prosthetic body was merely his means of interacting with the material world. His biological brain was not here now.

David’s consciousness this time had not entered any prosthetic body, but a model instead.

It was also his past appearance. A chubby man with a big beard.

The scene was at the bar in the Superman Enterprise Tech Park.

Everyone was here. Xiang Shan, Yawgmoth, himself, Ingrid, Anatoly, Zhu Xinyu, Tao Enhai...

So many people were here, in this scene.

David quickly read through the local memories. They were celebrating the successful conclusion of the first Number One Martial Arts Tournament. Videos of Lu Xuanyu overcoming his opponents were being shown on the bar’s projector.

Yawgmoth still had that look of someone owing him money. He just sat on one side, clutching a can of some liquor. Meanwhile, others were chatting casually.

However, for some reason, the noisy bar suddenly quieted down for a few seconds.

"What happened?" David picked up his drink.

All the AIs here were Personality Masks, very sophisticated Personality Masks.

Unlike the Second Martial God in most respects, these were standard AIs.

To create this Illusory Realm, he had spent ten years studying Xiang Shan’s memories. David had only studied the memories from the 30s to the 60s, a span of thirty years. Although this duration was not long compared to his lifespan, and he had been a direct participant of these historical events, he was not so easily influenced.

Yawgmoth, in an attempt to diminish the "divinity" of Xiang Shan in the public eye, released the Xiang Shan memories he possessed—the quantum disk data he distributed among the Kings, all of which he had later copied. It was said that the Kings also privately shared the quantum disk data they held.

To prevent Yawgmoth from distorting the facts and altering history during this process, Xiang Shan’s other friends also uploaded their own related memories as annotations.

Afterwards...

This data could then be used to train AIs for role-playing.

David even used psychological and behavioral research methods, spending ten years organizing that data, attributing certain memories to specific sources of information—marking the memories uploaded by Zhu Xinyu as "Zhu Xinyu" and those uploaded by Ingrid as "Ingrid".

These memories were "memories about Xiang Shan," and at the same time, "memories of these sources themselves."

Using Ingrid’s memories to train Ingrid’s Personality Mask, using Zhu Xinyu’s memories to train Zhu Xinyu’s Personality Mask.

For the insufficient parts, they used the "relevant memories seen through the eyes of other people" for corrections.

Apart from the original and brutal ritual of the Second Martial God, the true essence of "Pseudo-personality Mask" was something he accomplished gradually with the enormous effort of the Order of Scientific Knights.