Players Invade Cyberpunk

Chapter 1183 - 383: I Believe They’ll Smash Your Machines

Local entropy reduction means entropy will increase on a larger scale.Just as behind the orderly social life of human beings lies the consumption of astronomical amounts of fuel every hour, the accumulation of billions of years on Earth is vanishing at a staggering speed.

If life had never appeared, this process of entropy increase might have been stretched out to a length of time beyond imagination.

But meteorites brought organic compounds and amino acids; from then on, the primitive terrestrial ecology began to change, and through wave after wave of random chemical reactions, the first life was born.

Then... how did the first life in the cyber world come into being?

After becoming a cyber life form, Richard Knight had pondered this question more than once.

In this data-centered world, only a few decades after humanity first made contact with Cyberspace, the first true artificial intelligence in history was born in the hands of Microtech in 2013.

But was that really the first?

Or was it merely the first AI to appear in front of humanity?

The birth of AI was related to humans connecting to the internet, but that was not the decisive factor.

Blue Eyes knew that humans were not the first stone to fall into the lake and set off ripples; there was someone else.

He sat alone in the empty conference room, unable to stop recalling his shock when he learned the other party’s identity.

Even more startling was how close that person had actually been to him.

The conference room door was pushed open from the outside.

Lin Miao walked step by step to the conference table and pulled out a chair to sit down.

He braced his hands on the table and looked at the man sitting across from him.

The other man’s temples were flecked with grey, his features were sharply cut, and in his deep-set sockets lurked a pair of keen, hawk-like eyes. He looked to be a little over sixty, and the thick beard covering his face lent him a brutal air, as though he had hacked his way out of the sea of commerce.

The two of them remained silent. After they had stared at each other for quite a while, the man finally stood up and, in a voice hoarse with time and sighs, began to speak slowly.

"I... was born in 1954, into an educated family in California. It was a great yet turbulent era.

From as early as I can remember, aside from cartoons and entertainment shows, the thing television broadcast most was news about the struggle between two ideologies.

From battlefield to marketplace, from pen fights to fistfights, competition was everywhere.

Middle East wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War...

Under storm clouds and uncertainty, everyone feared the possible outbreak of a Third World War.

Yet it is undeniable that it was precisely in this era, when a war that could wipe out humanity might break out at any moment, that we saw the fastest several decades of development in all of human history.

Almost every year, inventions and events emerged that could alter the course of human history; technology advanced with each passing day, and people’s lives grew ever more prosperous.

Everyone thought such a golden age would continue forever. We fantasized about colonizing the moon in twenty years, landing on Mars in fifty, that the world of Star Trek was not far from our reach...

But... every beautiful dream has the day it shatters."

Richard looked at Lin Miao, a hint of sorrow shading his words. For someone who had witnessed the rapid rise of a golden age, it was almost impossible to endure the decadence of the present world.

"The economic crisis toppled the Soviet Union, and the war of ideologies thus came to an end. At that time I was so naive; I believed that neoliberal economics was the truth, the treasure that could drive human society into high-speed development.

Even if the United States disintegrated and Europe became the final victor, that would merely be further ironclad proof of the success of neoliberal economics, the result of the market’s self-regulation.

I used all my assets to buy this Bay Area, and on this land I sought to build a city belonging only to corporations: no interference from any government authority, no gang crime, business competing under an absolutely free economic model, survival of the fittest, and humanity would surely create new glory.

Yet I never imagined... that would turn out to be the last afterglow of human society. From then on, I... was damned beyond redemption."

"The monopolistic giants had no interest whatsoever in limiting themselves to commercial competition alone: murder, bombings, frame-ups, collusion to monopolize...

The moral bottom line was broken again and again: human trafficking, organ trade, cults and gangs, drugs and corruption...

This society showed me, in the cruelest way possible, what a breeding ground of sin a world without government control would become.

Human self-restraint is so fragile in the face of a society awash in desire. Without government institutions to manage them, all that remains is an orgy of indulgence.

The so-called ideals crumble instantly before interests that lie within arm’s reach.

And I paid for my naivety with my life."

Richard Knight stated his own death in an even, detached tone.

"Mr. Lin, as someone who survived the Cold War era, I am not that militarist lunatic Huang Ban Sanlang. I’m very clear on what you are doing, and I know how powerful you are. If you wished, you could even, in a single strike, destroy most of the satellites humanity still has left, and cripple internet infrastructure on a continental scale.

But you cannot change humanity’s ever-growing desire. I’m sure that after all this time in Night City, you’ve already seen that clearly enough."

Underground cults, corporations aboveground.

Even the famously dark Middle Ages and the great famines of antiquity cannot compare to one ten-thousandth of the toxic excess of capital.

"What are you trying to say?"

Lin Miao looked at Richard Knight with an impassive face.

"You want me to help you brainwash the whole world?"

"To be precise, it’s about implanting into the subconscious. In essence it’s the same as using advertising to implant consumerist hedonism. Technology itself has no good or evil; good and evil lie only in the hands of those who use it."

Richard argued.

"Mr. Lin, you and your people have already gone all out in Cuba, but for the Europeans, they haven’t even started to warm up yet.