Overturned Tower

When Russell "opened" his eyes again, he had turned into a dune cat.

He was in a black, starless void.

Turning into one's own relatives in the matrix space—this is the common form of intrusion by psionic hackers.

If this method is not used, it is easy to get lost and confuse reality and matrix space... After all, memory attack is the most common means of counterattack; and if it is too irrelevant to oneself, it is easy to suffer self-injury caused by offensive defense walls. lead to a breakdown of consciousness.

The cat is in a pure black maze, turning around to examine everything in front of it.

The material of the maze walls is reminiscent of obsidian, because their surface has no metallic luster, and there are some uneven defects.

Every defect is a big or small loophole.

And the current Russell hasn't even touched the defense wall... This is just the outermost firewall, a static defense used to block ordinary intruders.

Russell licked his paws calmly, jumped up and down twice to move his limbs, and then jumped high.

He threw himself on one wall, then turned back and jumped to the next adjacent wall. Among the two walls forming a right angle at ninety degrees, Russell bounced lightly and climbed to a height of three to four meters.

This is the limit of protection of the labyrinth wall—if the plate is used to invade, it will take a while to bypass or smash the wall.

Russell gracefully walked on the wall of the maze, then jumped high and jumped directly to the wall on the opposite side when he needed to make a detour. Repeatedly, he didn't even make a detour, just jumped twice to reach the other side.

The inert firewall, which can trap ordinary hackers for at least 20 minutes, took Russell less than 20 seconds to bypass.

"…Um?"

After he jumped over the maze wall, he suddenly raised his tail vigilantly.

The moment he landed, the flames burst into flames—the vast wildfires in all directions completely obscured his vision, and the pain fell on Russell immediately.

What's unreal is that the cat's body is completely engulfed in flames...but the hair on his body is not burning.

"It turned out to be a 'fire meteor'?"

Russell meowed, feeling a little puzzled for a moment.

This is a rather old defense wall, so old that it has long since disappeared from the market.

It took Russell about two seconds to recall the existence of this thing.

The special feature of "Bolide" is that it is a special offensive defense wall—its offensive method is that, without verifying the key, when anyone touches the defense wall, it immediately transmits a burning fire that becomes stronger and stronger according to time. burning pain.

In the offensive defense wall, the most commonly used countermeasures are "memory damage", "pain signal", "reality positioning", and "matrix ban".

The "fire meteor" was once the ancestor of the "pain signal" type of offensive defense.

Its defense logic is as follows: first, immediately conduct an indiscriminate attack on all requesters. It converts the pain sensation of human beings when they are burned by flames into data signals, and then outputs overwhelmingly different intensities of burn pain sensations.

If there is a key in the target chip, then of course it can be passed quickly, and the pain will not be too long... But if you try to break through the defense wall, it will become more and more painful, and may even directly kill people.

For ordinary users, it will only hurt a few tenths of a second when passing by the company. It's like burning your finger with a candle.

But if Russell enters the matrix space far away and attacks the company through the ice-breaking program of the disc... Assuming that the disc in his hand does not make mistakes, it will take ten minutes to calculate the offensive defense wall. Then his avatar needs to stay in the matrix space for ten minutes. This false burning pain will last for so long.

Of course this pain is fake, everyone knows that they are definitely not burned.

But the avatar has senses—if it hurts so much that you lose consciousness and fall here, you can never go back.

It would be much better if you don't use avatars to intrude... Then you just keep receiving massive amounts of spam. If the data is not downloaded, the data will only be transferred to the disc and will not flow into the chip.

But it would be easy to burn the deck... Without the use of avatars, the psychic hacker can be said to have no advantage. It is difficult to break through the outermost firewall through technical means.

Thirty years ago, the Bolide was the best commercially available offensive wall.

It works well because it really treats people equally.

Anyway, it only takes a moment to verify when the physical body passes, but it takes a long time to crack remotely. Although the defense may not be strong, the pain of equal treatment will make psychic hackers unwilling to attack this company first.

—As long as the psychic hacking organization is allowed to attack other companies first, rounding up is tantamount to protecting its own company.

Later, it was gradually abandoned, not because the mechanism was cracked by psionic hackers.

Because it has no mechanics at all - its ice pick is not complicated.

In the case of constantly outputting a large amount of garbage information, it is impossible to compound a too sophisticated defense wall behind, otherwise in the case of this kind of data throughput, it is prone to bugs.

Explained by the illusion in the matrix space... that is, at the end of the wall of fire is the most simple wall of light.

That's an inert wall. Equivalent to a captcha that resets every minute.

It doesn't have any technology at all, all it needs is the amount of calculation... It's like countless math problems, and it only needs to be calculated layer by layer. Those who have the key can directly obtain the synchronously generated password from the company server, while those without the key can only calculate from the outside and then rush in.

But from another perspective, perhaps no technical content is the best technical content...

If I have learned the technology and you have the same time if I have not learned the technology, and I have to rely on the disc board to calculate, then my technology is not for nothing?

Later, because there is a more useful and more threatening "honeypot" in the offensive defense wall, it is very convenient to open the box in reality, and shake a nearby mercenary to physically kill you, so the fire that outputs pain Meteor is directly deprecated.

After all, when clocking in and out of get off work every day, no matter whether employees or directors, everyone will be burned equally as soon as they enter the company or as soon as they leave the company—people will complain after a long time.

There is a high probability that the delphinium will not bring a disc plate that can specifically crack the bolide. Because it's so easy...

In that case, Delphinium would have to endure the pain of being burned by the fire to maintain the state of the avatar, waiting for the disc board to perform a forced cracking calculation.

...Fortunately, it was me who came in.

Russell thought.

It's as if someone threatened that a bomb would go off if they didn't solve these math problems within the allotted time—and went to great lengths to get a PhD in math. It turned out that the doctor was asked to stand in a high-temperature sauna and solve a thousand junior high school math problems.

It's not that I can't figure it out, the main reason is that my body can't bear it...and there is not enough time at all. Even if you know the answer at a glance, it takes time to write.

Russell skillfully endured the pain of being burned by the fire, and quickly invoked the ice-breaking cone program to break the inertial defense wall behind the bolide.

An offensive program named "Great Mathematician".

A black illusory cone quickly condensed around Russell.

It's like a spinning pencil head, wrapping Russell in it and moving forward at high speed.

It has no protection against those flames at all. Those flames still passed through it, continuing to burn Russell inside.

But just after the vertebral body flew for less than half a second, a wall of light suddenly lit up in front of it.

It is not composed of data, nor is it an entity... but countless nested hexagonal matrices.

The black illusory cone immediately began to spin at full speed. And every time it rotates, the middlemost layer of the hexagonal matrix is ​​disintegrated—and they immediately shrink and fill up instantly.

If it is a more advanced disc with a composite ice-breaking program, it can directly break through it forcibly at the moment it "tightens". This is a violent solution specifically for the stacking algorithm.

Fortunately, the performance of "Kwai Lily" is very good, and it should be able to finish the calculation quickly without forcing a breakthrough.

At this moment, in the outside world, several vents on Russell's prosthetic limb opened with a snort—white, steaming hot air visible to the naked eye was continuously discharged from it.

Looking at his appearance at the moment, the inferior is obviously a little anxious.

He was a little restless... He wanted Russell to withdraw quickly, but he was worried that he was reaching a critical point and affecting his state.

But in the matrix space, the operations of the [Great Mathematician] quickly reached the end.

— It took a total of forty-six seconds to crack a total of 863 layers of inert defense walls.

Just seeing this time, Russell knew very well—the delphiniums are absolutely endless.

If she didn't have the "Mathematician" series of discs, it would take at least three to five times as long to force a breakthrough with other discs.

Assuming that the time for her to break through the firewall is the same as that of Russell, then after she breaks through the firewall, there will be at most half a minute left.

At that point, the delphinium must choose—to move forward, or to retreat.

If she chooses to move forward...and that's really the only defense, then everyone's happy.

But if there is any protection behind her that prevents her from closing the final general program, then when she retreats...another round of such calculations will also be performed.

That's the new random number... there's absolutely no end to it.

Unless the delphinium chooses to flee, this is almost a death trap.

— but will she run away?

Maybe, maybe not, but anyway...

Russell suddenly realized.

The person who arranged this bomb program must be full of malice in his heart.

It's not at all the same as "a nasty joke" by the bad guy, who was just going to blow up the delphinium...or the bad guy!

When the light wall collapsed, the cat went straight to the next floor.

There is still some slight redness on his body... It's not that the fur is burning, but more like the color of metal when it is gradually cooled after being scorched.

It took about five or six seconds before the red light on Russell's body was completely extinguished.

But before that, Russell arrived in the next space in a blink of an eye.

One hundred cabinets, in a structure of 5 times 20, were piled around Russell in a circle.

"This is the real caged bird, delphinium. Can you see where the door is when you're in the cage?"

A repeated voice echoed in Russell's ear: "There is only one cabinet with a button to end all of this. The rest of the cabinets are empty, and you still have thirty seconds.

"Guess what cabinet I'm going to hide the button in?

"If you know the bad guy enough, maybe you can know the number that is particularly meaningful to him..."

"—Bad boy, I still have more than ten minutes."

Russell couldn't help complaining: "Are you so sure that she can get here in thirty seconds?"

There simply isn't another psionic hacker defending the city here.

There is no sense of remote control, only an automatically triggered message. Like an empty city that is unguarded, nothing and no trace can be found.

But that's okay.

It's best not to waste time—

Although Russell has prepared several solutions, if the first one can solve the problem, there is no need to come up with the remaining ones.

After breaking through the defense wall, the authority of the psychic hacker here... basically can be said to be infinite.

In the void of Russell's cat body, countless deformed mechanical hands suddenly drilled out, pointing at all the cabinets with precision.

The offensive program called [Thousand Hands] turned into a hundred simultaneous processes, opening all the cabinets in an instant.

In the end, the number of cabinets with buttons was "thirteen", and the robot hand put the button in front of Russell, while the other robots disintegrated and disappeared at the same time.

Russell secretly remembered this number.

Instead of pressing the button directly, he raised his right paw and waved it. A projection of an eye pattern floats above the button.

After confirming that this button is indeed a program termination command, Russell presses it.

Afterwards, the world around him instantly turned gray and dull. The echo that was still thinking about it also came to an abrupt end.

So Russell started backing away.

Every time he took a step back, the scene in front of him flashed back.

But it's not the same as when he came in.

The walls of light have dimmed, the flames have been extinguished, and the labyrinth has sunk into the ground—only black outlines on the ground can be seen.

When Russell stood on top of the maze and retreated again... before his eyes, the world was spinning and began to shake violently. It's like speeding through a tunnel with your back to the front when you're playing Riptide.

When Russell opened his eyes again, he had returned to the real world.

【—The defense wall has been cracked】

The real information mark of this thing began to appear in front of his eyes.

【You have successfully hacked into: Caged Bird】

【Product Category: Toys or Children's Books】

【Producer: Veil of Ignorance】

【Production batch: not on sale】

【Audit Code: Not Approved】

[Product details: "We are the representatives of the God of Justice, clowns on the stage, and people in shells."]

[Data Transfer], [Format], [Developer Mode], [Power On/Off], [Restart]

Russell tapped lightly to turn off the phone.

As for the internal structure... Let's save it and use the developer mode to look at it later.

The red light that was constantly flashing on the iron mask finally went out completely with a beep.

"It actually broke..."

The inferior couldn't help but exclaim.

This is the first time that Russell has seen such strong emotional fluctuations in the inferior.

"...Fortunately, I did not disgrace my life."

Russell couldn't help explaining: "But to be honest, UU Reading www.uukanshu.com's opponent's skills are really a bit poor. There is a layer of fire between the stones on both sides, except for dragging or dragging..."

Seeing the jigsaw in the scene... Russell thought that what was waiting for him must be a tough fight.

...Can delphiniums and inferiors be caught in this kind of broken scene?

Russell had strange doubts in his heart.

From this completely unequal "game", he vaguely smelled a strange... smell of losing patience and breaking pots.

It's like running a team, and suddenly there is an encounter that is almost impossible to win-Russell's first reaction is, is this KP planning to tear the card?

"It's all right, kid."

But even though he was thinking so, he didn't say it, but comforted the boy.

With a click, he unplugged the magnetic connector. Retract the thread into your own prosthetic.

Russell covered his head after being roasted for a few minutes, slightly dizzy, and woke up for a while. Then he raised his hand and took off the iron mask that had been turned off on the child's face, and was about to turn around and pass it to the inferior for him to take back to study.

However, Russell saw that the inferior suddenly froze in place, and didn't pick up the mask immediately.

"you…"

The inferior's tone was a little hesitant.

Seeing that his reaction was wrong, Russell seemed to understand something.

Speaking of which... the huge mask like a hood seems to completely block the boy's spiritual relatives.

Now that Russell turned around and saw the child's face clearly, he also froze in place.

He finally realized another trap set by that "game host":

I saw the slender boy under the mask... with elf ears.