Cyber ​​psychosis is my girlfriend

Where the Palm meets the Pine.

It is on National Highway 99 that Luo Qi passed by, about 16 kilometers from the center of Fresno.

It stands to reason that this should be a prosperous area in central California.

If there is such a rich land, why don't people choose to live and work in peace and contentment, but set foot on the road and become wanderers passed down from time to time?

The answer is at hand.

Withered vitality, barren land, and the scars left by several wars.

Not just the Unification War, but the Corporate War and the armed conflict between North and South California.

In the disaster-prone 21st century, this place also experienced an unimaginable drought.

The once fertile and fertile San Joaquin Valley has now left a scene of decay like a frontier town.

The foundation left over half a century ago makes it the only good place within a radius of dozens of kilometers. Here you can find biotech hydroponic farms, factories of logistics companies and mining companies, and even an Indian building. The high-rise building of Ye's company.

Luo Qi didn't come here to see how the American dream has been destroyed little by little by the irresistible external force of human beings in the past few decades.

If that's the case, he will definitely take Suzi and Melissa and take some time off.

He's here to find a legacy of the old web era—

"10,000 miles of high-speed Internet in California" plan.

In that ambitious era, the then California government started the construction of this plan, intending to bring the entire state into a high level of network coverage.

But soon, the data crash destroyed the network environment all over the world.

Let the entire newly emerging cyber age feel the end of darkness.

The most black and humorous thing is that the planned start of work and data collapse will both occur in 2022.

As the main artery, the network optical cable pipeline will connect large and medium-sized cities along with important roads such as national highways. This is the so-called "middle mile" part.

And these large and medium-sized cities will serve as the core, covering the "last mile" across California, connecting homes and businesses with local high-speed networks.

But the main artery has just been completed, and the data collapse has already overwhelming.

Then came the long waste.

It's not like Fresno technologists haven't thought about getting back to using this sprawling network of equipment over the past few decades.

But the too dangerous old network environment made this idea a fantasy.

But to this day, the product of this high-speed Internet project has not been completely scrapped and is still in operation.

Who is maintaining it?

A shrinking urban network department hiding far away more than ten kilometers away?

of course not.

Night City's network is a closed subnet that is highly independent from the old network environment. Simply put, it is a local area network covering the entire city.

There, he can only touch things that wander outside the black wall and keep peeping inward.

Lucy used to "mine" for Arasaka in the deep web.

Why not in the city, but in the so-called "suburbs" far away?

Because it wasn't originally a suburb.

It was a once prosperous economic center with well-developed network veins.

Just like here.

Luo Qi stood in the center of the former base station, a tall concrete building standing on the mountainside, under the iron tower standing upright to the sky under the sky.

Night gradually came.

The dots of light on the earth can also be clearly seen in space.

Cyberspace is not like reality, where there are many people, there is the center of gravity.

In the ocean of data, he can see how far the network extends.

The ocean of stars made of code slowly spread out in front of him.

With Fresno as the center, along the network optical cables and side branches that are still in operation, like blood vessels and nerves, it spreads to the entire land of California, thousands of miles across.

This is a death penalty area that even network surveillance dare not easily set foot in.

Countless viruses and out-of-control AI hover in it, like a pitch-black abyss, choosing people for their love, and screaming shrilly.

But Luo Qi kicked open the crumbling, rusty door, letting in the light from the outside world.

Then yell.

"Otto, I'm here to negotiate terms!"

Chapter 660 This is not a transaction, this is a notice

No one dares to casually connect to devices that communicate with the deep web.

There isn't an actual area of ​​the world called the Deep Web, or anywhere in the world that has a Deep Web.

In 2022, on the eve of the data collapse, the network has covered almost all corners of the earth, including remote mountains and old forests and Gobi deserts that do not make much sense.

DataKrash, a word that almost equated with the devil, has brought the world into a dark age.

The new network environment is almost established under completely different conditions.

It is not that no one has tried to unearth the massive wealth left over from the deep web, but the result is failure and death, with heavy losses.

Homeless people who are always migrating on the road know that any reckless attempt may cause unacceptable harm.

For this reason, they have even developed special equipment whose only function is to comprehensively scan and analyze the conditions of connected equipment terminals and their networks.

If they are not optimistic, then they will carefully bypass or eliminate them as if they have encountered a landmine hanging on a string.

Opportunities are always accompanied by risks, just as pathways are always full of pitfalls.

Thus was born a niche profession——

Deep Web Hunter.

Venture to the broken and unknowable fallen old network, and then salvage data that is not known to be valuable, pray not to be discovered by viruses and roving AI wandering in cyberspace, and then return fearfully.

Every attempt is tantamount to walking on the edge of hell, and one mistake is the fate of falling into the abyss.

But the high returns contained in it are so attractive.

Desperate hackers, down-and-out people who dream of making a fortune, or companies that think it is profitable, are all organizing people to go to this restricted area.

Lucy was chosen by Arasaka because of her talent when she was a child, and then put into it as a consumable.

again and again.

Luo Qi could tell that in the depths of her soul, she was far more afraid of the deep net than Arasaka.

Arasaka was standing behind with a gun pointing at her, telling her to die.

And it is the deep net that is really likely to kill her, and indeed kill her companion who has the same fate as her.

Her fear of Arasaka stems more from the invincible sense of powerlessness that has almost all information and monitoring resources in her hands.

But the truth is, Arasaka is far less powerful than she thought.

If so, their plan to recover the deep web with many companies in the years after the data crash should not have failed.

Arasaka is watching everyone, so why aren't Internet Surveillance and the New US Cybersecurity Agency?

The newly established city subnets are huge local area networks.

Looking at it from another angle, it can become a prison cage.

Thanks to the new network ecology, network operators have never been so close to everyone's information and privacy.

T-Bug always complained to Luo Qi, if it was in that era, hackers should shine even more.

Fly through cyberspace, not dance in a cage.

Luo Qi feels that the current self seems to be only a stone's throw away from the free world she said.

As long as he opened the door, he could enter the dark data space that was falling apart.

The existence of the network needs to depend on the device.

The operation of the equipment needs to rely on electricity.

Who is supplying electricity to California's once huge network system, and who is using this information superhighway all over the world?

The answer is AI.

Those AIs roaming the deep web.

The highly intelligent self-sufficient design allows many production equipment that have left humans to maintain their ecology under the control of intelligent systems.

And after half a century of evolution, these AIs seem to have learned to survive——

Born, lived, and transformed reality.

This crude imitation of the subjective initiative that was originally considered to be possessed by humans has been realized in the hands of these wildly growing and freely evolving AIs.

Although this is still far from real life, they do achieve basic logic.

Has the status of humanity been challenged?

Rocky didn't know.

But he was sure that it was very close, even a little too close.

Although AI is not life after all, just like a virus only has a protein shell and nucleic acid.

But just like viruses and humans, as long as they exist together on this planet, they will conflict for the common goal of survival.

The battlefield between AI and humans is in cyberspace.

And now, Luo Qi is going to their home court.

"connect."

He stands on top of what used to be a central server station for the Internet, surrounded by signal towers.

The electromagnetic signal cannot be felt, but Luo Qi feels it is very clear, as if floating in a sea of ​​invisible matter.

Gravity is also gradually receding.

The deep purple sky fell, covering the earth, and then enveloped him in it.

His eyes looked at the land where night fell, and his consciousness alternated back and forth between the real and virtual worlds, and finally overlapped completely.

Cyberspace has arrived.

Luo Qi once asked Paul to establish a safe connection between him and Ott, and to maintain full monitoring.

The visualized data flow is like a flood, with no rules to follow.

There is no sky, no earth, and no concept of length and time. You can't see or touch things. Everything needs input devices.

Because the human brain is, after all, an actual biological organ, not binary hardware.

But the existence of Muramasa completely broke this barrier.

Luo Qi can feel that his consciousness is entering this world that cannot be described with any feeling from an incredible dimension.

The only thing that can be clearly felt and defined is information.

Information is like a river, flowing.

Information is like light, coming in and going out.

Information is like space, like time, filled around, invisible and intangible, but they are there, endless.

You can think of it as darkness, where you can't see anything.

It can also be thought of as a smooth road, like a pure white nothingness.

Here, the description on the traditional definition does not make sense.

There's only one thing to do, and that's to feel it, to accept it, to use it, to throw yourself into it, to be part of the message.

Parses binary streams and reconstructs them.