The blue light of the police technical department was particularly glaring at three in the morning. Chen Mingyu tapped the coffee-stained display screen with his index finger, watching as twenty-seven virtual IP addresses jumped wildly on the map. "These guys are slipperier than eels." He tore open a third packet of instant coffee, spilling the powder into the gaps of the keyboard. "Every time we trace a signal to a server in the Philippines, it suddenly pops up from Iceland."
A dull thud echoed from outside the glass wall as a heavy object hit the ground. Technician Xiao Wang stumbled in, cradling a server chassis that rolled twice on the floor, its metal casing screeching against the tiles. "Captain Chen!" He barely had time to retrieve the equipment before he nearly tripped over a network cable while rushing in with a tablet. "There's something off with the Tip account on the Live Streaming Platform!"
A holographic projection unfolded above the conference table, with streams of virtual gift data swirling like a galaxy. Forensic expert Su Qing's fingertips brushed through a cluster of data, instantly stirring up scarlet ripples. "The active times of these viewer accounts completely overlap, just like..." She suddenly fell silent and turned to look at Forensic Department Director Old Zhang.
"Just like someone is controlling two hundred phones at once?" Old Zhang's e-cigarette emitted a minty mist as he spoke. "What's even more terrifying is this—" He pulled up a segment of code, and a foul smell like rotting fruit suddenly wafted from the ventilation opening. "AI-generated viewer Danmu, even the swear words carry the scent of machine learning."
Chen Mingyu's temples throbbed. In the surveillance footage, the judge mechanically wiped his dagger, repeating this action four hundred thirty times over seventy-two hours of recordings. The forensic report indicated that a microchip was implanted under his nape, with healing levels suggesting it had been inserted exactly six months ago—perfectly coinciding with the registration date of the Live Streaming Platform.
The assault team's bulletproof vests clinked together in the elevator. As the metal door opened on level -3, Chen Mingyu caught a whiff of burnt smell from the server's heat sink.
Twenty quantum computers were arranged in a bizarre hexagram formation, their cases emblazoned with the logo "Prometheus Technology", the dark red paint resembling congealed blood.
"Watch out!"
The demolition expert Old Wu suddenly tackled Chen Mingyu as bullets whizzed past, narrowly missing their tactical flashlight, revealing an automatic gun turret at the end of the corridor.
The hacker Xiao Qi's laptop, Keyboard, was smoking as she bit down on the data cable and shouted indistinctly, "Give me ninety seconds!" The bullet holes in the wall erupted into concrete splinters beside her.
When the last firewall was breached, Chen Mingyu discovered something even more terrifying within the mainframe—thirty thousand hours of human testing records.
Every execution action by the Judicator was optimizing some kind of algorithm, and the audience's fearful reactions were quantified into data streams.
In a folder named "Ragnarok", lay 3D models of thirty candidate cities.
But in the chairman's office on the top floor, only half a cup of lukewarm Blue Mountain Coffee remained.
The bronze clock on the sandalwood desk pointed to four o'clock, each tick of the second hand eliciting faint electromagnetic pulses.
Chen Mingyu noticed that the tempered glass of the floor-to-ceiling window showed signs of melting, as if something had vanished from this spot at high temperature.
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