"Why?"
"The encryption method..." Old Ma's voice suddenly took on a strange tone. "Xiao Zhang, did your father investigate this back in the day?"
My phone nearly slipped from my grasp. "What do you mean?"
"Three years ago, just days before he passed away, he came to see me, asking for help to crack a similar code." Old Ma's voice trembled. "But I didn't have time..."
Before he could finish, a black sedan silently glided into the garage, its headlights sweeping over the concrete pillar where I was hiding. At that moment, my heartbeat felt so loud it seemed to betray my position. Father, you had been guiding me all along... "Are you saying..."
"Don't you understand? They are using AI to filter specific groups of people, and the life data of these individuals has been converted into Cryptocurrency!"
I gasped in shock. Suddenly, I recalled the neatly arranged Life Trajectories charts in the Chen Ci data center... "So those beneficiaries..."
"Yes, they are likely all experimental subjects. But the most terrifying part is that this system has already started predicting the Life Trajectories of healthy individuals. For example..."
"Fang Li," I murmured.
There was silence on the other end for a few seconds. "You'd better check their patent application records."
After hanging up, I immediately hacked into the patent office database. Sure enough, two years ago, Chen Ci applied for a technology under his name: "Value Assessment System Based on Human Data."
I noticed that in the historical records of that encrypted file, a researcher named Wang had repeatedly raised ethical concerns about the system. However, his opinions were marked as "rejected" each time, with the last record stopping a year ago.
I received his message: "Reporter Zhang, the matter you are investigating is related to my daughter. Meet me at the lab. But remember, don’t let her know it’s me..."
"Be careful, it might be a trap." Old Ma's warning came just in time.
"But this might be the only chance." I replied. The data in the system could be deleted at any moment; I had to find solid evidence.
I opened my notebook and began quickly writing a data acquisition program. To enter the lab, I needed to understand their system architecture first.
Just as I was halfway through coding, the screen suddenly flickered, and warnings began popping up one after another. My intrusion had been detected.
"Don't bother." A line of blood-red text appeared, "Our system is not something you can crack."
But they made a fatal mistake—they were using an old system. As a former programmer, I was all too familiar with this backdoor. Time flashed back three years, when my father had used this very loophole...
"Sorry to disappoint you." I quickly typed on the keyboard, exploiting the vulnerability to trace back.
The screen before me began to jump wildly. Firewalls, layers of encryption, proxy servers... finally, after navigating through layers of fog, I saw a suffocating sight:
A web of relationships appeared on the screen. Each flickering dot represented a life, accompanied by a shocking number: "Remaining Time."
This was no charitable system; it was clearly a sophisticated Biological Matching Database.
And at the center of the diagram, glaringly displayed, was a line of piercing text:
"Top Secret Project Code: Life Data Optimization Program"
At that moment, a new message popped up:
"Great, you passed the test. Now, come to the laboratory. There's someone here who is eager to meet you."
Below the message was a photo.
It was Xiaoyu.
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