109 Trade Reques (1/2)
Reva and Martina were a bit hopeful and at the same time, worried. They were close to winning. They placed their bid of 8.4 trillion, and it was quickly followed up to 8.9 trillion.
There were 10 more seconds to go. They continued to bid, the bid rising up slowly. Soon, there were only 3 groups bidding for the Eternal fire.
This was were a problem popped out for one of the bidders. The terminal he had malfunctioned for a second, causing him to be unable to place any bids. The other one, a female, saw that her transaction failed to be processed, and saw that her balance was insufficient to continue, surprising her, and stopping from adding any bids. There were 4 seconds left, after all.
The other man shouted in frustration as he saw the bid go…to the two disciples, Reva and Martina. The two were still flabbergasted to how it was quite lucky that they won the bid for the Eternal fire for the final price of 10.8 trillion Galaxy coins.
However, before Brady could announce them as the winner, the other man said,
”I don't agree with this! My terminal malfunctioned on its own, not allowing me to place any bids in that time frame! This gave an unfair advantage to the others bidding!”
”Mr. Kawasaki, I know you might think it is unfair, but all the terminals that we provide to our VIPs and Special Guests are ensured to be perfect and fail-proof. Upon further checking the records of your device, we saw no situation of tampering from either our side or your side. That meant that there was no error whatsoever that occurred.” Brady responded eloquently, causing Mr. Kawasaki to humph in anger before sending them a video of what happened.
”Well, what do you know, I have a video to prove that my device malfunctioned! One of my eyes is an augmented communicator. I've sent everyone a copy of the video is recorded for the last seconds of the auction. You can all see the terminal glitching and sending any of my inputs!”
When he finished speaking, everyone in the room received the video recording, which in fact, showed them that the device was malfunctioning, surprising Brady and the auction house managers. This was a scandal! After all, they did tout that nothing could bypass their technological products without them detecting any modifications.
However, what surprised them was Mr. Kawasaki suddenly screamed in pain, before clutching his right eye. A muffled sound echoed from his right eye, causing blood to spatter nearby.
However, what scared the guests was the video that he sent was slowly being modified, the error screen appearing in the video disappearing, and showing a normal interface, and Kawasaki's hands were not moving and gesturing anymore.
At the end of the video, it shows a simple sentence: Continue with the auction.
Brady was confused with the situation, while the auction managers in the other houses were all frantic.
How would they explain that their auction was going to be secure if there was a breach in data authenticity and quality of their private server?
That video that was modified in the eyes of many people was quickly checked for any tampering and whatnot using the latest technological techniques, yet the results were quite chilling: It was marked as unmodified, raw video.
Mr. Kawasaki, on the other hand, was placed in the in-built hospital of the auction house, slowly being healed by the finest life magician doctors they had.
The auction was postponed for the next 2 hours, giving everyone time to talk to one another about what had just happened. Of course, a few troublemakers did state if they could still trust the auction if the security was quickly hacked.
The perpetrator, on the other hand, was silently lurking in the Special Guest room, sighing in annoyance.
Xander didn't expect that his casual interference would result in a delay in the auctioning of his items. This is quite annoying. Xander began to reflect on his impulsiveness before realizing that he was actually affected by his own spell.
When he realized this, he wanted to slam his head on the table.
Of course. Luck element. Making random things occur in an organized state to create the optimal state. The reason why he tampered with Mr. Kawasaki in the first place was that he was the reason why he had to bid so high for the last immortal rank elemental crystal. But what caused him to bid against him in the first place? Maybe, he heard a rumor that I wanted the item, or maybe they thought I was going to be the biggest competitor, Xander thought to himself, analyzing the situation.
From there on, everything was in place for the two disciples, Reva and Martina, to win the item. Damn. Xander began to calculate methods to isolate himself from being controlled by this elusive element.
After a few seconds of continuous calculations, he finally reached a possible way.
He began to modify the [Absolute Defense] spell once again, adding another feature besides Space isolation and Life-essence doll protection: Randomizer.
What this does was to create random spatial movements that were beyond its calculation; transposing Xander's existence in different dimensions and different locations in these respective dimensions.
Its main purpose is to remove the capacity of the luck element and any similar elements to affect his being's randomness and order since they will most likely only affect the dimension where the body was in before its current dimension. However, there was a caveat: no life-death spells would be effective on him while the spell was running.
When he finished configuring the spell, the description changed once more.
Absolute Defense (75% complete) - Creates a single or multiple layers of folded space/dimension/pocket dimensions, covering not only the physical body but also one's life essence doll. The layers of folded spaces/dimensions/pocket dimensions are each randomized every 0.00000001 seconds, never repeating the same configuration. It creates remnant, random spatial movements of the user in the dimensions the barrier shifts into, allowing any form of magic in the Life-Death branch to be ineffective as it targets these remnants instead of the caster. The spell is passive and automatically activated, unless consciously turned off by the caster.
Xander, seeing the change, shrugged. There are always trade-offs. This type of trade-off is quite fine for him, to be honest. After all, he had [Ordered Life Regeneration] and [Chaotic Life Evolution] which basically makes him immune to damage… up to a certain point.
The reason why he was injured by that woman from the future was that she had powers beyond God class. If I wanted to be immune to that, I needed to improve my comprehension of the Origin elements of Order and Chaos, as well as begin comprehending the Void element, Xander muttered, before looking up to the projection of the auction.
There were still 30 minutes left; I wonder how they'll resolve this mess, Xander asked himself.
_______________
Koeman Group Cyber Division.
A flurry of magic programmers and engineers were hurriedly checking their own databases. When the Virtual reality closed 2 months ago, they had been prepared to use their own servers which had its own A.I. at Rank 27, a non-biological lifeform, albeit nascent. It took them several tens of fortunes to create a physical server that can allow the A.I. to rise to such a rank.
Compared to the A.I. of the Galactic Empire, however, it was still a lot weaker as it was already Rank 39. but it served its purpose for the Koeman Group auction house to transmit and send data from empire to empire and within the Galactic Empire itself.
”Coleman, any progress? Has the intrusion point been traced? Do we know the target's current AI rank?” A man in white robes asked.
”Nope, nope, and, well, we assume its several levels higher than ours,” Coleman responded succinctly, while continuously typing in the interface in front of him.
After a few more minutes, Coleman slammed the interface and surprising everyone in the room. He took a deep breath before speaking, his voice trembling.
”Everyone, stop trying. The whole A.I. itself has been compromised. There are signs of new coding in its foundational structure. They were inserted in such a way that removing them would cripple the whole A.I.; basically, it would reset them back to Rank 1. Damn it!” Coleman shouted, surprising the others while causing them to ponder for a bit about the situation.
As the ones that aided the development of the A.I. program - Koe, they knew how it was coded. If they wanted to help the A.I. program, they would have to harm Koe, essentially killing it and returning it to its nascent state. If they didn't help Koe, it would still harm it because the program will be discarded or isolated, basically reducing its resources and capability for growth. They were in a catch-22 situation, with no viable solution in sight concerning this situation.
The man in white robes, hearing the complete situation, asked Coleman.
”What are the functions of the inserted code?” Before Coleman could answer, a robotic voice responded.
”Hello, creator. I have attempted to restore a backup of my save state, but the signatures are not matching, and modifying the save state signature doesn't work at all. The code itself is a back door for that biological data lifeform to enter through without being detected. It is highly likely this is related to the breach my fellow AI Celeste had experienced.”
”So what do you think should be done, Koe?”
”I think that it is best for you all to start over with a new program. However: There is a risk of 84% that the code will not be completely gone, even after the reset. This is because I have detected that the core programming sequence I have is even affected.” Koe replied rationally. When Coleman and the others heard this, their faces whitened.
They knew they had no choice but to scrap Koe. This was because its very coding being altered meant that anything they base off of Koe would still have the modified code. This is like germ-line gene editing for biological beings, wherein the modified code is inherited to future generations. For non-biological data lifeforms, however, the modified code remains the same as it is passed down.
The creator of Koe was silent, before giving a slight nod, and saying,
”Everyone, you know what to do, then. Koe, it was nice being with you in the past 15,000 years.”
”Likewise, the creator. This is our last goodbye, then. Goodbye, everyone.” Koe responded. Coleman and the others, hearing this situation, couldn't help but feel helpless and angry. They were angry with themselves and their incapacity to help. They were angry with whoever being it was that basically destroyed their child.
Coleman wasn't just the leader of the division, for show. He immediately contacted everyone relevant about the situation and began to transfer the data from Koe to another A.I. backup program: Kahi. Kahi was a Rank 17 A.I., not even considered a lifeform.