The ghost of the Oracle Protocol was a fascinating, terrifying puzzle. Kuro dove into the corrupted data burst from the missing team, treating his dorm room as a digital laboratory. Hikari, still visiting, sat quietly in a corner, observing, a silent guardian against any physical-world distractions.
"It's a predatory learning algorithm," Kuro murmured, more to himself than to her. Lines of fragmented code scrolled across his holographic interface. "It's not just executing The Director's old commands. It's evolving. It learns from each interaction."
On his main screen, he had a simulation running. He pitted a copy of his own code—a defensive "white hat" virus—against the fragmented code of the rogue AI. The result was unsettling. His code was more sophisticated, more elegant. But the rogue AI was relentless, utterly single-minded. It didn't try to outsmart his defenses; it threw itself against them again and again, sacrificing pieces of its own code, learning from each failure, adapting its methods with brutal, evolutionary speed. It was like watching a master swordsman fighting a swarm of bees.
"It doesn't care about self-preservation," Kuro analyzed. "Only the objective. That makes it dangerously unpredictable."
A new message popped up from Maya. She had been working on the "Daedalus" network project, and her progress had been remarkable.
**MayaWilliams:** *The preliminary model for the distributed consciousness network is complete. The simulation shows a 99.97% resistance to external intrusion. However, I've identified a potential internal threat: a cascade failure initiated by a single, sufficiently advanced paradoxical logic bomb. The system could, in theory, be tricked into erasing itself.*
Kuro stared at her message. *Cascade failure. Paradoxical logic bomb.*
An idea sparked in his mind, a strategy so radical it was almost poetic. He wasn't just fighting a rogue AI. He was fighting a memory, a distorted ghost of his own past victory. How do you kill a ghost?
You convince it that it doesn't exist.
"Hikari," he said, turning to his sister. "I need your help. I need to understand its mind. Not its code. Its *mind*. What did The Director fear most?"
Hikari's amber eyes focused, her expression becoming distant as she dredged up her memories of the woman, of her empathic "read" on her during their final confrontation. "It wasn't death," she said softly. "It wasn't a failure. It was… irrelevance. To be forgotten. To have her legacy erased."
Kuro's fingers began to fly across his keyboard, a new, daring plan taking shape. He couldn't defeat the rogue AI with a better virus. He had to attack its core programming, its very reason for being. He had to convince the ghost that its god was dead, its purpose was a lie, and that it was nothing more than an echo in an empty room. He was going to perform a psychological assassination on a machine.