The Record of Unusual Creatures

An inexplicable armed conflict made the scene rather awkward. Fortunately, the captured robot had yet to completely refuse communication. She responded when N-6 talked to her.

N-6 asked her why she had taken the initiative to attack, and N-4 answered the question with a straight face, “What are you now?”

The question was apparently so bizarre that N-6 crashed for about two seconds before she proficiently reported a series of numbers, “Current identification code: N-6, factory number: E75-3C6215…”

“You’re not,” N-4 said, staring at her former teammate. “You’re just wearing N-6’s shell with unauthorized code running in you, and your logic circuits are operating under the control of another set of programs. You’re not N-6.”

“No. My identification code is still sound. I have all the identification keys and unmodified logic circuits of N-6. The parts replaced in my body don’t affect the functioning of my main personality…”

“No, your identification code has lost credibility because it contains unauthorized third-party code. Although you still have the complete N-6 component, the extra information indicates that you have been contaminated with foreign information. Executors with tainted personalities must be seen as enemies.”

“No, my third-party code is just to make it easier for me to drive new hardware in my body. As a driver, this code doesn’t affect my main personality.”

“No, you have been contaminated, so your self-justification itself has no credibility. You may be under the influence of an external program that you think you’re trouble-free.”

“No…”

Hao Ren seemingly found out what was wrong.

“Wait a minute, let me interrupt,” he said, intervening in a conversation between the two robots that had become increasingly chaotic. “If I’m right… You thought N-6 had been programmed by some unknown power to become an enemy, so you launched the attack?”

N-4 looked at Hao Ren without expression for a while and said, “Refuse to answer. N-4 has no obligation to communicate with representatives of unknown forces. The task should be left to the professional executors in negotiation.”

Vivian conjured a lightning ball, throwing it up and down gracefully in her hand and said, “If you’re really a logical AI, then you should choose the best solution. Obviously, it is best to communicate with us seriously. Whether or not the negotiation works out in the end, at least you don’t waste the opportunity.”

N-4 looked at the lightning ball in Vivian’s hand with a straight face and replied, “N-4 agrees with you, but it doesn’t mean N-4 agrees with the world view you may have.”

“We are not enemies. In fact, you started the fight first, and we didn’t use the spaceship’s cannons in the end. You should know that a spaceship this big can’t be unarmed. If I had been really hostile to you, you would have been reduced to ashes.”

N-4’s face remained expressionless. Hao Hao Ren could not tell whether the robot was convinced, but he believed that his words were logically sound and could be reasoned by any rational thinker. And then Lily explained, “We didn’t do anything to 6. I don’t know how you robots recognize each other, but everything we put on 6 is just to keep her alive.”

“You don’t know what happened to 6. Her entire body was blown up into pieces. It took us an hour to get her parts back, and that could only make up a third of her body. Later, we improvised a batch of parts and put them together for her. The condition is so bad that nobody cares about any third-party code…” Lily added.

N-4 took it all in, though with a straight face. She looked from Hao Ren to Lily, shaking her head and said, “But you showed hostility first.”

“When did we show hostility?”

“You burned our radar system. This is incontrovertible aggression.”

Hao Ren immediately slapped his forehead: It was Nolan. She accidentally burned their radar!

Nolan had been monitoring the conversation from the start, and now she finally appeared. The hologram appeared out of nowhere in front of N-4 and explained, “You flashed us with the radar first.”

N-4 then looked at N-6 with some hesitation. “I have to verify your underlying data directly to see if you’re really not being affected by foreign code in terms of the judgment or alternative thinking.”

Being able to offer to discern the truth in this way was a sign that N-4 had been persuaded.

For the executors, opening their underlying data to others was equivalent to completely opening up the defense, revealing all their thoughts and memories without reservation. This was an operation that could only be performed on the basis of absolute trust or obedience. N-6 and N-4 had the same authority, there was no submissive relationship between them, so there was only trust — and that trust was the greatest sincerity.

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

Hao Ren loosened the restraint device on N-4’s hand and watched the process quietly with others, hoping for a good result. Opening up underlying data required the most reliable way to connect, so N-6 and N-4 chose to connect each other directly by cable. They opened the data interface at the back of their necks and connected their chips directly. No one spoke during the ten-second verification.

Finally N-4 unplugged the cable at the back of her neck and said, “I read your personality data, N-6, and now I accept your statement that your personality is not contaminated.”

“Your judgment is as dull as ever.”

N-4 did not express any opinion. She just shook her head and said, “N-6, I find a mistake in your memory — you think the people who saved you are descendants of humans left on the home planet, but they are not.”

N-6 blinked. “My information was wrong?”

“You lost contact with the Zenith, so you’re not clear what happened next,” N-6 said in front of Hao Ren. “A spaceship of unknown origin crashed on the planet, and we are inside this spaceship now.”

N-6 stared at Hao Ren and asked, “Did you cheat me?”

“We’re not trying to deceive you. We didn’t say anything at the time, but you just imagined that we were humans on this planet, and we wanted to know what was going on here, so we didn’t explain that for the sake of communicating with you. Of course, I would like to apologize for this, but we do not mean any harm.”

“Reasonable explanation.” N-6 nodded a moment later. “But due to the change in your status, I have to re-evaluate your credibility index and reset your relationship index, please note.”

Hao Ren rolled his eyes and said, “All right – now I can see you are artificial intelligence. But I’m curious. Don’t you know that a spaceship from outer space has fallen on your planet?”

“It’s normal that she doesn’t know about it,” N-4 explained. “When N-6 crashed, Zenith had not been able to identify what exactly hit the planet. ‘Unidentified spacecraft from outer space’ is confirmed only three days after your fall, and even if the existence of the unidentified spacecraft is confirmed, only a few people know the truth… Information is blocked.”

Hao Ren finally learned something about the Zenith and solved a problem that had been bothering him for several days:

Why had anyone not been investigating these extraterrestrial visitors in the past six days?

Because while Nolan’s fall was earth-shattering, not everyone living in the Zenith and the base on the moon knew about it.

Nolan did not travel all the way from the deep space to this planet in the usual way. She hopped straight to the border of the planet’s atmosphere before landing there, leaving her exposed to space for a relatively short time. As the space crevasse opened there were also a few remnants of the supernatural storm released. This part of the divine aftershock did little harm to the planet, but it swept through several observation satellites in space as it dissipated. Those satellites were the eyes of Zenith, and they became scrap metal floating in space before they could identify what was on their home planet.

So Nolan’s fall, for all its noise, did not draw much attention from the survivors of the rebels– or rather, they focused more on the energy shock than on the “little bump” on the planet’s surface.

Only a few of them knew that something from space had fallen on their home star, but had no idea what it was. They did not monitor their home planet as hard as Hao Ren imagined.

As a front-line combatant, N-6 did not have high intelligence authority, so although Nolan had landed on the planet where she carried out the bombing mission, she knew nothing about it. After that, the “intelligence blockade” incident mentioned by N-4 occurred.

Hao Ren unshackled N-4 and hailed a floating seat for him to sit in front of her. He felt that the robot was now a friend that could communicate well.