Chapter 1 A Rather Awkward Armed Conflict

A baffling armed conflict had led to a rather awkward atmosphere on the scene—or at least, Hao Ren found the whole thing quite baffling. Fortunately, the captured female robot hadn't completely refused to communicate. In fact, she had reacted the moment N-6 spoke.

N-6 asked in confusion why the other party had initiated the attack. N-4 responded to the question with a stern counter-question: "What exactly are you now?!"

The question was apparently so bizarre that N-6 froze for about two seconds before expertly rattling off a string of numbers: "Current identification code N-6, factory serial number: E75-3C6215..."

"You're not," N-4 stared intently at the former comrade before her. "You're just wearing the shell of N-6. You have unauthorized code running inside you. Your logic circuits are operating under the control of another program. You're not N-6 at all."

"Negative. My identification code is still intact. I possess all of N-6's identification keys and unmodified logic circuits. The components replaced inside me do not affect the operation of my primary personality..."

"Negative. Your identification code has lost credibility because it contains unauthorized third-party code. Although you still possess all the N-6 components, the extra information indicates that you have been contaminated by foreign information. An agent whose personality has been contaminated must be regarded as an enemy."

"Negative. My third-party code is only to facilitate the operation of new hardware in my body. As a driver program, this code will not affect my main personality."

"Negative. You have been contaminated, so your self-defense is not credible. You may believe that you are functioning without fault under the influence of a foreign program."

"Negative..."

Hearing this much, Hao Ren roughly guessed where the problem lay—and the answer in that guess made him feel particularly screwed.

"Hold on, hold on, let me jump in," he interrupted the increasingly confused conversation between the two robots. "You two negating each other back and forth is just wasting words—this one here, she's called N-4, right? If I'm not mistaken... you thought N-6 had her program modified by an unknown force, turning her into an enemy, so you launched an attack?"

N-4 stared blankly at Hao Ren for a while before saying calmly, "Refuse to answer. N-4 has no obligation to communicate with representatives of unknown forces. This task should be completed by a negotiation-specialized agent."

Vivian conjured a ball of lightning in her hand and tossed it elegantly. "If you were a logically normal artificial intelligence, you would choose the optimal solution at this time. It's obvious that serious communication with us is the best. Regardless of whether the negotiation is successful in the end, at least you haven't wasted the opportunity."

N-4 looked at the ball of lightning in Vivian's hand, her face expressionless. "N-4 agrees with your statement, but this does not mean agreeing with the worldview you may possess."

"We're not enemies," Hao Ren pointed to himself, then to the other party. "In fact, you guys have been the ones initiating attacks from beginning to end. We were shot at by you with guns for a long time before we retaliated, and in the end, I didn't even use the ship's artillery—if you're not stupid, you should know that a ship this big can't possibly have no weapons. If I really had hostility towards you, you would have been reduced to ashes long ago."

There was no change in N-4's face. Hao Ren couldn't judge whether the female robot opposite him had been persuaded through facial expressions, but he believed that his words were logically sound. Anyone with rational thinking could analyze the reasons. And at this time, Lily also chimed in from the side: "We didn't tamper with 6 at all. I don't know how you robots identify each other, and I don't know what weird customs you have. Anyway, everything we installed on 6 was just to bring her back to life."

Speaking of this, the husky girl pouted and muttered, "You don't know how miserable 6 was at the beginning. She was blown up like a scene from a dismemberment case. It took us an hour just to find her parts, and we could only put together one-third of her body. Later, we temporarily made a batch of parts to install on her to make her whole. The situation was so serious that no one cared about any third-party code..."

Although N-4 kept a straight face, she still listened to these words. She looked at Hao Ren and then at Lily, shaking her head. "But you first expressed hostility."

Hao Ren and Vivian said in unison, "When did we express hostility?"

"You burned our radar system. This is an undeniable act of aggression."

Hao Ren slapped his forehead when he heard this. It turned out that the initial misunderstanding was caused by Nolan flashing her headlights!

Nolan had been listening to the conversation from beginning to end. At this time, she finally couldn't help but show up. Her holographic image appeared out of thin air in front of N-4. "You took the initiative to shine your radar on us. We thought you were going to do something. As a precaution, we blinded your radar—who knew your radar was so fragile? A little bit of shining and it burned out."

This was the domineering spirit cultivated by the star-racing king who roamed the starry sky. If someone flashed a headlight at me, I would flash back with ten times the power of the sun. The veteran driver Nolan was righteous and confident.

Having said that, even N-4's chip-brain had to waver. She looked at N-6 hesitantly. "I must directly verify your basic data to determine whether you have really not been affected by foreign code in your judgment or had your thinking replaced."

Being able to take the initiative to propose this method to identify the truth actually showed that this female robot had been persuaded.

For "agents" who were artificial intelligence, opening their basic data to others was equivalent to completely opening their defenses, showing all their thoughts and memories without reservation. This was an operation that would only be performed based on absolute trust or obedience. N-6 and N-4 had the same permissions, and there was no relationship of obedience between them, so at this moment, there was only trust—and this trust was the greatest sincerity.

N-6 agreed to her friend's request without any hesitation.

Hao Ren released N-4's hand restraints, and then quietly watched the process with the others, hoping for a good outcome. Opening the basic data required the most reliable connection method, so N-6 and N-4 chose to directly connect each other with cables. They opened the data interfaces behind their necks, directly connecting the two people's chips. No one spoke during the tens of seconds of verification.

Finally, N-4 unplugged the cable behind her neck. "I have read your personality data, N-6. Now I acknowledge your statement. Your personality is not contaminated."

"Your judgment is as slow as ever."

So N-6 also knew how to complain about others!

Faced with this not-so-polite complaint, N-4 did not express any opinion. She just shook her head. "N-6, I found an error in your memory—you believe that these people who saved you are the descendants of humans who remained on the home planet, but they are not."

N-6 blinked. "Was my information wrong?"

"You lost contact with the Zenith at the time, so you didn't know what happened later," N-4 said to Hao Ren. "A spaceship of unknown origin crashed on the surface of the home planet. We are now inside this spaceship."

"It's a landing! Just a landing!" Nolan immediately jumped out. "You crashed!"

N-6 directly ignored the hopping Nolan and stared straight at Hao Ren. "Did you deceive me?"

Hao Ren spread his hands. "We didn't want to deceive you—we hadn't said anything at the time, and you just assumed that we were humans from this planet. Then we happened to want to understand the situation here, so we didn't reveal this in order to facilitate communication with you. Of course, I still want to apologize for this concealment, but we didn't have any malicious intent."

"A reasonable explanation," after a moment, N-6 nodded. "But since your identity has changed, I have to re-evaluate your credibility index and reset the relationship index with you, please be aware."

Hao Ren looked at the sky helplessly and rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay—I can really see that you are an artificial intelligence at this time. But I'm very curious, you don't even know that a spaceship from outer space crashed on your home planet?"

"It's normal that she doesn't know this," after authenticating her friend's identity, N-4's attitude towards Hao Ren obviously changed a lot. This time, she took the initiative to help explain. "When N-6 crashed, the Zenith had not yet confirmed what exactly hit the surface of the home planet. The information about the 'unknown spaceship from outer space' was confirmed three days after you crashed, and even after confirming the existence of the unknown spaceship, only a small number of people knew the truth... the information was blocked."

In N-4's subsequent explanation, Hao Ren finally learned something about the "Zenith" and solved a problem that had been bothering him for several days:

Why no one had come to investigate his group of extraterrestrial visitors for six days.

Because although Nolan's crash was earth-shattering, not everyone living in the Zenith and the lunar base knew about it.

At that time, Nolan did not travel all the way from the depths of the universe to this planet in the conventional navigation method. She jumped directly to the edge of the planet's atmosphere, and then "crash-landed" here. This resulted in her exposure to space being quite short. In addition, when the space crack opened at that time, a trace of the aftermath of the divine power storm was also released together. This part of the divine power aftermath did not cause any harm to the planet, but swept through several observation satellites in space during its dissipation. Those satellites were the eyes of the Zenith. They didn't even have time to confirm what appeared on the home planet before they turned into scrap metal floating in space.

So although Nolan's crash was very loud, it didn't attract too much attention from the surviving resistance army—or rather, more of their attention was focused on the energy shock, and they didn't pay attention to the "small collision" that occurred on the planet's surface.

Only a few of them knew that something from space had fallen on the home planet, but they didn't know what it was—their monitoring of their home planet was not as strong as Hao Ren imagined.

As a front-line combatant, N-6 did not have high enough intelligence permissions, so although Hao Ren and his party had already landed on the surface of the planet when she carried out that bombing mission, she knew nothing about it.

And after that, the "information blockade" incident mentioned by N-4 occurred.

Hao Ren released N-4's restraints and summoned a floating seat to sit in front of the other party. He felt that this female robot was now a friend who could communicate well.