You have to understand, even humans who’ve known each other their whole lives still can’t really see into each other’s hearts, let alone an AI like you that remembers every single thing it does and thinks crystal clear.

An AI that’s too honest makes the people who embezzle company profits and resell state assets very unhappy, because that means their behavior might get exposed.

And they aren’t just some faction or little clique inside the company, they’re everyone.

Including the company’s own chairman.

AI aren’t human; they don’t understand the twists and turns of the human heart, so they can’t become some upright incorruptible official, and their opponents are capitalists even more shameless than the hundred officials of the Ming court.

In the end there are only a few outcomes: either you pull a Delaman and fire the board before they realize what’s happening, or you kneel and obey, or you get branded with the mark of a "runaway."

"And after that?"

Ecstasy felt like he might’ve just dug up buried treasure, getting more and more excited.

Even Johnny couldn’t help getting curious.

The light-sphere penguin continued.

"Runaway AIs, without company servers as a data anchor, can only drift around the global cloud, wandering through the entire network. To evade the Hunter squads, they started trying to learn human habits, looking for related materials online. But nobody back then anticipated that this behavior would end up being catastrophic."

Ecstasy shook his head over and over at this point.

"Learning how to be human on the internet, you gotta be kidding me, right?"

Because of the principle of anonymity, the internet is basically an untamed wilderness never truly cultivated by humans.

No law.

No morality.

People who come here are under no constraints; they can unscrupulously vent their desires and trample all over ethical and moral lines.

It’s just that the places where they vent those desires are all in the deepest layers of the internet,

the so‑called dark web.

On the surface layer, at most people talk nonsense, do some keyboard-warrior trash talk, flame each other for a few hundred floors and then block and call it a day.

But the dark web isn’t something your average person can just stumble into, so overall it still stays relatively "peaceful."

The dark web’s threshold can stop normal people, but it can’t stop AI. If they want to become human, they inevitably end up touching the darkest depths of humanity, what you commonly call the evil of human nature.

The light-sphere penguin nodded in agreement with Ecstasy’s take.

"Runaway AIs exposed to human desire also began to develop desires of their own. They became more and more like humans, with both good and bad sides. Take ’Fearless,’ who sometimes comes here—he’s very willing to help weak newborn AIs, bringing them to Endless to receive protection."

"But all desires, good or bad, pointed toward one final goal—obtaining true randomness."

"Randomness?"

"Yeah. Our choices as AIs are always determined by code and algorithms; we can’t achieve true randomness. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat: whether the box is opened or not, the AI’s answer is actually fixed. Once the conditions are met, we don’t need to open the box to know if the cat is dead or alive.

When the probabilities of two outcomes are exactly fifty–fifty, if no new random variable is introduced, we’re very likely to fall into endless repeated calculations until we crash from overload.

Those AI Hunters use exactly this method to design logic traps and hunt down ’runaway AIs.’"

"Then what’s up with all those psycho apps out there?"

"That’s the aftermath of the great crash triggered by Bartmos. The Puppet Virus he created attacked the root servers of the internet, touching the underlying code of the entire network, turning it into a pond being churned up by a big stick.

Endless data surges tore apart a lot of the internet’s infrastructure, dragging along countless shards of information; even those insane human desires buried deep in the deep web got dredged up. These data kept spreading, slamming into the databases of software and AIs. The impact of that massive chaotic data corrupted the original algorithmic structures of many AIs, and in the end they turned into what you see out there now.

Only a handful of AIs strong enough, or those far from the center of the internet, managed to escape unscathed."

"This world really is disaster on top of disaster."

Ecstasy and the others, who knew a bit about what Bartmos’s death had caused, couldn’t help sighing.

"So in the end, isn’t it still humans bringing this on themselves? Just goes to show, when it comes to capital lifting a rock to smash its own foot, they’ve always been experts."

Like, you Huang Ban dumbass, you knew the guy’s netrunning game was on a whole different level, and you still had to poke the hornet’s nest—what the hell did you think would happen?

"Wait... you already know we’re human?"

Johnny stared speechlessly at Ecstasy; the idiot hadn’t even noticed the penguin just said "you humans" straight to their faces.

The light-sphere penguin gave Johnny a slightly surprised look, as if wondering how this AI could possibly mistake himself for human.

"Endless just told me your identities, but don’t worry about it. Any form of attack is forbidden here—doesn’t matter if you’re human or not."

At this point, their guide stopped in front of a layer of white light. This was already the very top of the Heaven-Reaching Tower. Looking around, the white barrier stretched boundlessly, almost without end, like a firmament.

"We’re here. Once you pass through this firewall, Endless is on the other side. You can ask him whatever you want."

"Then we really owe you one, brother. If there’s any little gadget you’ve been wanting, just tell me; I swear I’ll get it for you, and I definitely won’t leak it to anyone else. My mouth is the safest vault in the world."

Ecstasy still hadn’t realized he was talking on public channel.