Chapter 30: Dreamscape: The Guardian

Du Qiu had an uneasy feeling.

He felt that if he were to descend, he might be detected by some sort of preventative measures that could be in place.

He believed that with the level of technology of the extraterrestrial civilization in the dreamscape, they would certainly have ways to deal with his own self descending into the machine intelligence core.

What Du Qiu couldn’t quite understand was why he was already inside the super machine without having descended, and what this intermediate state was all about.

Originally, he thought he would be in the intelligence core, but with the emergence of the system energy module, it clearly wasn’t so.

These questions Du Qiu temporarily kept to himself as he cautiously examined this world.

In this place, apart from the dazzling stars and the energy zone that occasionally emitted blue light, there was that area flickering with dozens of white vortices.

Du Qiu could almost assert that he came from one of the white vortices.

Therefore, Du Qiu tentatively speculated that these white vortices should be the communication points with other places.

That is, each white vortex could lead to another destination.

It thus appeared that this world was composed of three parts: the stars representing the computational core, the blue light-emitting area representing the energy zone, and the white vortices representing the entry and exit points.

With regard to the stars and the blue light-emitting area, he was able to explore them by focusing his consciousness.

However, for these white vortices, Du Qiu was a bit hesitant to perform such focused explorations, fearing that if he focused on one white vortex, he might be led to an unknown place, which would be quite abrupt.

After pondering for a while, Du Qiu decided to explore the vicinity of these white vortices first.

These white vortices were spaced apart from each other by a certain distance, and this rotation did not cause any overall displacement, making it obvious that they were unlikely to affect each other.

Du Qiu had some admiration for this extraterrestrial civilization. How had they managed to study a way for his consciousness to traverse unimaginably vast distances through dreams and appear here? Could it be that each of these white vortices was akin to a portal of time and space, and his travels in the dreamscape were actually through time and space?

Since the area around the white vortices was a void, Du Qiu observed nearby without any information prompts appearing, which also indicated that there really was nothing there.

Just as Du Qiu was about to retract his exploratory gaze, suddenly a screen popped up, and at the same time, information entered his consciousness. “A level-one protective net!”

The screen was filled with countless executing codes, which, upon Du Qiu’s observation, quickly turned into that kind of programming language code he had seen before.

Du Qiu painstakingly examined each line of code, growing more and more surprised.

No, it should be said that he was increasingly delighted!

When he had spent a considerable amount of time examining all the codes, a sense of relief spontaneously emerged.

This level-one protective net should be the monitoring mechanism for protecting the super machine’s intelligent core. If the intelligent core executed any operation not in accordance with the designated program, an early warning would be triggered immediately.

Clearly, this protective net program must have been a change brought about by his own operations on the super machine.

However, Du Qiu quickly felt that something was amiss.

Could it be that the extraterrestrial civilization did not have a unified monitoring system for their intelligent machines, and only set up this protective net after an incident occurred?

Thinking of the protective net he had found between two white vortices, he hurriedly conducted a careful exploration near all the white vortices.

The result was strange; the protective net only appeared between three white vortices. From the distribution, it seemed like it was enveloping these three white vortices.

Du Qiu thought of a possibility: the protective net might be a whole, covering the three white vortices, but he hadn’t dared to sense it in the white vortex area, which created an illusion for him that it only appeared between the white vortices.

In fact, it might be invisibly covering the white vortices, and any information stream passing through it would be detected.

That raises the question: Why was this protective net at the white vortices, and why only enveloping three of them?

Obviously, his prior judgment was wrong.

The protective net was absolutely not for monitoring whether the intelligent core had any anomalies. Think about it, when he caused a zero-level anomaly last time, there was no protective net in place, but the zero-level anomaly was still reported.

Now that the protective net is placed on the white vortices representing the entry and exit points but only covering three, ignoring the rest, it gives the impression that the net is meant to prevent the super machine’s intelligent core from passing abnormal information flows to those three entry and exit vortices.

Wait, could it be that the extraterrestrials suspect this super machine has contracted a virus, but as they can’t identify the issue and still need to use it, they settle for protecting three critical information entry and exit points as a secondary measure?

The more Du Qiu thought, the more it seemed to be the case.

Is he considered a virus for causing the zero-level anomaly? With the computer intelligence of the extraterrestrial civilization being so advanced, should they still be worried about viruses?

However, Du Qiu immediately dismissed this idea, because based on his understanding of the protective net program, it was nearly impossible for any code with virus-like characteristics on Blue Star to bypass the protective net.

It could be said that the protective net code was the most airtight security program Du Qiu had ever seen, and it seemed capable of preventing all abnormal programs.

If the protective net was used to comprehensively scan the intelligent core, it would certainly be able to detect any abnormal program and clean it up.

Du Qiu suddenly had a thought: transplanting this protective net into Blue Star’s computer systems would likely result in the world’s most powerful firewall.

He believed that with the current level of computer technology on Blue Star, as long as there were no artificial intelligences, it would be very difficult to crack this defense.

Wait, could artificial intelligence break through the protective net?

Du Qiu was unable to judge for a moment, but then he thought, can his current state be detected by the protective net?

If he came in through one of the three white vortices blocked by the protective net, then clearly the net had no effect on him.

But if he came through other white vortices, it’s hard to determine whether the protective net would be effective against him.

Why did the extraterrestrials only set the protective net over these three white vortex entry and exit points?

Why not set it directly in the intelligent core, which would have been better?

If it were so, perhaps he would not have been able to enter this place tonight.

Du Qiu was puzzled; he felt that there must be some factor he was unaware of, or he had overlooked something.

Just when Du Qiu was about to review the protective net’s program codes again, he suddenly felt it odd. Why was he able to detect the existence of the protective net from his current position?

The most amazing thing was that what he saw was originally executing codes, but when he studied them, they turned into program codes.

It was as if his consciousness came with a decompiler that transformed all the executing codes back into program codes.

This dream was getting more and more interesting, deeply intriguing Du Qiu.

Despite not understanding everything or being unable to figure things out, Du Qiu did not continue to investigate; he once again reviewed the protective net’s program codes.

To prevent omissions or differences, Du Qiu made a point to sample and check near each of the three white vortices.

Because of this thorough investigation, he finally discovered a common noun in the codes of the protective net, which could be described in Chinese as “Guardian 8210010126!”

Remembering the first time he descended into the super machine’s intelligent core, there was also an expression called “Seed 1008600363”!

Likewise, it was a noun followed by a numeric code.

It seemed that like the super machine, the Guardian had also been numbered, and the early warning information from the protective net would be transmitted to it immediately.

Combining this with the fact that no protective net was set up in the super machine’s intelligent core previously, Du Qiu felt that the Guardian might be the extraterrestrials; the ones who had previously shut down the super machine.

When he thought about the real existence of extraterrestrials, Du Qiu was inexplicably excited.

Thanks to “Poyang Lake 3” for the tip of 100 coins!