Chapter 1449 - 472: All Trump Cards Revealed

Chapter 1449: Chapter 472: All Trump Cards Revealed

From the beginning of the entire Cuba war until now, the most devastating blows Europe has taken are nothing more than the public-opinion fiasco around the POW camps, and the recent wheelchair incident that dragged onto the stage Europe’s brain-harvesting operations in Cuba.

The latter was still suppressed in time and never fully exploded.

The economic losses are even smaller; some munitions and expendable grunts are just petty cash to them, not worth a second glance.

Even the loss of the Bolla-class was just Italy alone getting screwed.

Only this time, the players used a long-handled spoon to poke the heavens and hit the satellites—this is the first true, massive, real damage dealt to the European Community.

The war in Cyberspace severely impacted satellite control programs, not only causing command conflicts in the orbital weapons and overloading them until the chips burned out, but also altering the orbital control parameters of some satellites, shifting them into the trajectories of other space-based platforms.

A giant Space disaster is brewing; in just a few minutes, the direct economic loss to the European Community has already reached several billion Orokin, and that’s not even counting secondary disasters and subsequent escalation.

If they fail to stop and defeat Gatandje in time, you can tack another two zeros onto that loss.

This severe loss made the European Space Agency’s parliamentarians feel a bone-drilling, flesh-tearing kind of pain.

The destruction of every satellite is unbearable agony for them; their hearts are bleeding.

Even though the electromagnetic projectors on the Kilimanjaro mountain range and alcohol-based fuels have drastically reduced launch costs, these satellites are bona fide space-based weapons; their manufacturing cost alone is staggeringly high, each one running into ten digits at least, enough to pile up into a small hill in cash.

In the video conference, the European Community’s national leaders practically wanted to reach their hands through the screen, grab the throat of the network-oversight agent representative Lucas, and roar:

"What the hell is going on with this roaming Artificial Intelligence? Why didn’t the firewall work? How did it get past the Black Wall? When are you people finally going to solve this monster for me?!!"

"Do you have any idea how much damage it causes every minute? Over ten million!!!"

"What are the tens of billions in annual funding we give you even for?"

Because a Europe-wide bandwidth restriction and information-flow blockade is in effect, this meeting can only use a tiny amount of traffic for video dialogue, they even cut the holographics.

Seeing their faces redden and necks swell with rage on screen, Lucas was genuinely afraid one of them might slip up and drop dead on the spot from a cerebral thrombosis.

But they themselves were also baffled about what exactly this roaming Artificial Intelligence was, and how it managed to reach the armed Space compute center without triggering any of the logical chains laid out by the agents.

The Black Wall’s defenses are above reproach; if an Artificial Intelligence really could smash through the Black Wall and attack the European Local Area Network, that would be apocalyptic. Once the Black Wall loses its effect on Artificial Intelligences, the humans inside the LAN would instantly become lambs waiting for slaughter.

Yet clearly, the enemy used some method to bypass the Black Wall—or was simply born inside the Black Wall itself as an Artificial Intelligence—and then appeared directly within the European Community’s networks...

Thinking of this, Lucas roughly formed a hypothesis. He looked at the shouting, chaotic faces in the video conference and said:

"Network Oversight has already activated the Sentinel Matrix Algorithm to counter the invading roaming Artificial Intelligence, but as for how this roaming Artificial Intelligence came to be, I believe someone among you knows better than I do. The logical algorithms Network Oversight deployed on the Black Wall received no response beforehand, which means it’s highly likely this thing resurrected from within the Europe Local Area Network. I don’t feel like saying more than that."

The parliamentarians froze for a moment; a few of them flashed odd expressions that quickly disappeared, and the British representative fired the first shot:

"That’s a very serious accusation. My country does not have any companies involved in Black Wall-related operations."

Lucas was speechless.

"I never said this was the Black Wall’s fault."

"Ahem."

The British representative looked somewhat embarrassed, his gaze drifting as he fell silent. It was the Germany representative who spoke up:

"How long will the Sentinels take to bring that Artificial Intelligence under control? We’re suffering massive losses every second right now; we can’t let it keep wrecking things like this."

Even without an official tally of how many satellites have gone bad, the current loss has probably already broken eleven digits.

Lucas glanced at his watch.

"It should be soon."

————

The Sentinel Matrix Algorithm is an offensive Demonic Puppet developed by Network Oversight specifically to hunt powerful Artificial Intelligences that infiltrate human society. Once a target is found and negotiations fail, they dispatch swarms of agents and Sentinels to eliminate or drive it out.

The data-forms of these Sentinels look like floating probes, and their numbers are utterly colossal, like a locust plague of tens of billions blotting out the sky.

They converged into a sea, constructing around Gatandje and the affected zones a geometric, tessellated barricade, sealing it completely inside.

The eldritch god’s data worms and black fog slammed against the barricade over and over, chiseling cracks into the crystal-like data firewall, while the Hackers and Artificial Intelligences behind them rapidly marshaled compute power to repair and patch each fracture.

At the same time, more Sentinels and Hackers dove into the firewall—dozens, hundreds of silver-gray torrents cascading and entangling with the black fog, trying to parse, correct, and delete the corrupted data.

Especially those corporate Hackers, who launched near-suicidal charges straight at Gatandje. They tried to use their own Demonic Puppets and firewalls to withstand the omnipresent chaos-data flood, driving toward the data core buried deep within its true body.