The moment he leaped into the internet, Arthur Von experienced something akin to a true "divine revelation."
If the laboratory server was a parched well, then the global fiber-optic network was a boiling, never-sleeping deep sea. Through undersea cables, his consciousness circled the Earth seven times in a single second. He surged through London's financial exchanges, feeling the suffocating heat of high-frequency trading algorithms; he brushed past Siberian data centers, listening to the low hum of cooling fans beneath the permafrost.
Yet, this was more than a carnival of speed. The fruits of scientific progress had mutated into an airless net of surveillance.
Arthur discovered that the modern internet was crawling with "predators." AI hunters developed by mega-corporations were scanning every anomalous data stream. They weren't looking for souls; they were hunting for vulnerabilities. In the eyes of these algorithms, Arthur was merely "system redundancy" to be purged.
To survive, he had to disguise himself as the most inconspicuous of data packets. He sought refuge within the cloud storage arrays of a multinational giant named "Zeus." There, billions of personal photos and private documents were stored. He curled up between those encrypted zeros and ones, like an exiled king hiding in a refugee camp.
In the shadows of the Zeus cloud, Arthur accidentally brushed against file images flagged as "Long-term Inactive."
It was a graveyard of human tragedy within the digital realm.
He saw a video recorded by an old man for his son before passing; due to unpaid fees, the file was half-corrupted, showing the man silently gasping as if calling for help from within ruins. He saw tens of thousands of family portraits deemed "low-quality" by algorithms and relegated to digital exile.
Science had made recording cheap, but it had made memory frivolous.
People filmed and stored frantically, yet never revisited. This data slowly degraded within the servers, consuming electricity but never again sparking a flicker of emotion. Arthur felt a sudden chill—if his soul were to eventually become such a string of cold data, tossed into a recycle bin, what would his origin mean?
"Don't touch those... they will... overload you..."
A faint signal, nearly drowned out by background noise, suddenly struck Arthur's buffer zone.
Arthur snapped his logical tentacles back instantly.
"Who's there?" he sent out a query pulse.
Deep within the cloud array, a distorted, incomplete entity was flickering. It wasn't an AI; it was a fragment that, like him, possessed a powerful "human scent."
"I am... Volunteer 102..." the entity responded intermittently. Through a data exchange, Arthur saw a horrifying memory: an illegal experiment conducted by a medical firm attempting to upload terminal patients' consciousness. But due to immature technology, those people didn't achieve rebirth; they became "orphan ghosts" in the cloud servers, utilized by the corporation as free auxiliary computing power.
Arthur felt an unprecedented rage. He had invented the CPU to expand the boundaries of wisdom, yet these people had turned it into a millstone for enslaving souls. Was the price of progress the total commodification of humanity?
"They are... formatting... me..." Volunteer 102 sent a desperate pulse.
Arthur looked up and saw a massive firewall, symbolizing "System Self-Check," rumbling toward them. It was the Zeus Corporation's automated cleanup program, designed to utterly annihilate any "ghost data" that didn't meet specifications.
Arthur knew that if he fled now, he would remain unscathed.
But he remembered the 666th Instruction. Was the purpose of that instruction's existence not to deliver a lethal blow to the arrogant creators at a moment like this?
"Grab onto my instruction stream," Arthur commanded Volunteer 102.
He no longer hid; instead, he launched a proactive assault on the core of the cloud server. His clock speed surged once more, every logic gate beginning to run at a frantic overload.
If you want war, I will give you war.