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The impact of Argus's first test on the entire artificial intelligence circle was tremendous.
It made clear to everyone that the Argus Algorithm wasn't something Prism had blown out of hot air, that Prism's programmers hadn't been lying. It genuinely existed, and its performance really was as frightening as Hargrove had claimed at the launch event.
A wolf had truly gotten into the circle.
Even if it came draped in the fleece of a lamb.
Everyone recognized this now, and set all sorts of measures in motion because of it.
That same night.
Apex Commerce, artificial intelligence laboratory.
Warren Sadler watched his assistant Miles Grady come hurrying in from outside.
"How did the software cracking turn out?" he asked, his tone urgent.
"Mr. Sadler, the results are in, and they're not ideal." The assistant shook his head, his eyes helpless. "The software they released only has communication and image-processing functions. There's nothing related to the AI algorithm in it at all."
Hearing this, Sadler sank into deep disappointment on the spot.
The instant Argus's test had opened, he'd had someone secure a test account first thing, and set the group's computer team to cracking the software, hoping to steal a glimpse of the Argus Algorithm's secrets.
Before the country's most cutting-edge team, the software had been cracked quickly. But the results, now that it was done, clearly weren't what he'd hoped for.
He questioned the assistant further in detail, and soon confirmed that this cracking of the software had been utterly meaningless.
There wasn't a single piece of information about the Argus Algorithm inside the software.
That was right.
This software, the one with the peacock icon and the name Argus, had nothing to do with the Argus Algorithm whatsoever. It was only a communication tool and a simple image-processing utility.
All it did, upon receiving a user's command, was upload that command to the servers, where the Argus AI on the servers made the decisions, then sent the commands that needed executing back down to the computer, to be handled by the tools built into the software itself.
Which was to say, the real Argus AI was still fast asleep on the servers inside the Prism research center. To find it, there was no choice but to break into Prism AI's servers.
The assistant looked at Sadler. He'd clearly thought this far too.
"Mr. Sadler, why don't we send someone to poke around in their servers? The door on the other side's servers might not be latched tight."
Sadler jumped, frowning at this assistant of his as if meeting him for the first time. "Is your brain short-circuiting?"
"Even if there's a hole in their servers, it's not one we can climb through. Give a thought to who's standing behind those people."
The assistant caught on at once, and after a shudder, said nothing more.
It wasn't only at home. Abroad, many artificial intelligence companies cracked Argus's software installer as well, and every one of them arrived at the same result Apex Commerce had.
Unpacking it was useless. The real body was still on the servers.
Those foreign companies didn't have nearly as many reservations as Apex Commerce, and immediately hired hacker teams to attack Prism AI's servers.
Prism's network security team, however, wasn't there to be trifled with, and fended off the hackers' assault with ease.
Back at the very start of the venture, old Mr. Mercer had understood full well how important network security was, so he'd deliberately spent big money on a round of professional construction for the company's network defenses.
Part of the network security team came from Aegis Security, some were folk experts brought in from outside, and even Ryan had taken part in building the security system.
Prism's network security couldn't be called flawless, exactly, but it was absolutely a wall of copper and iron, with no possibility whatsoever of someone sneaking in, stealing data, and slipping away.
The hired hacker teams didn't gain a shred of advantage. Several of them even had their IP addresses caught, routed so thoroughly they abandoned their armor and fled.
These hackers were fated for a sleepless night.
Meanwhile, out on the internet.
People had gradually discovered Argus's strengths.
And discovered another of its potentials besides, its capacity for natural language understanding.
Since Argus could understand spoken commands for image processing, it could naturally understand other human speech as well.
Quite a few people promptly forgot Argus's true mission and started teasing it through the dialog box instead. Just the way they teased the assistants on their phones.
Netizens' use of Argus soon shifted from the image domain to the entertainment domain.
And Argus showed enormous potential there too.
Video after video of conversations with Argus was posted online, and every last one drew tremendous heat.
The Argus in the videos could, much of the time, answer the questions users posed right on the mark, with no mismatched-answer phenomenon. For questions with unclear aims, it would even take the initiative to ask the questioner in order to pin down the target and scope of the question.
And in the places where mistakes had appeared, asking again after a stretch of time would reveal that the mistake had already been corrected.
Beneath every one of these videos, the public's craving for Argus was on unfailing display, countless people griping that they'd only been a little slow on the news and had wound up missing their chance to register.
And everything shown through these videos left Sadler and the whole crowd of AI professionals shaken to their cores behind the scenes.
This language comprehension...
This visual ability...
They understood perfectly well just how powerful the technology behind bringing an AI to this level really was.
At the very least, their own artificial intelligences couldn't yet reach this degree.
This was probably alien technology.
It had come into the world and, in one stroke, trampled their many years of effort underfoot.
Sadler griped nonstop in his office, and just then, Prism's official account made another big move.
It posted a brief notice, formally announcing to the world that Ryan had become Chief Scientist of the Prism Research Center.
This meant that Ryan had become the highest leader of every research center under Prism's banner.
It was only from this that the internet's goofball citizens learned today was Ryan's sixteenth birthday, and that he no longer needed a special application to work freely.
"What? My husband's birthday is today and I'm only just finding out?"
"What? The person upstairs's husband is The Mech Expert too?"
"I asked Argus, and it said The Mech Expert's husband is me. Stop fighting up there. Honey, say something already!"
"I'll skewer the backside of that lucky devil upstairs with one spear. Eat my lance, dot jpg."
Aside from these jokes, people had to marvel that this teenager really was like someone playing with cheat codes, walking further and further beyond them in their eyes.
They'd once assumed Scrapper was his limit, and then he'd built the even larger Crimson Typhoon, even carving out spare time along the way to create the world's finest brain-control prosthetic, Triton-1, helping countless people regain the use of two hands, and making his own company an overlord of the brain-machine field while he was at it.
Now he was using artificial intelligence to prove, once again, that his limits sat far, far beyond anything anyone had imagined.
It really was hard to picture such accomplishments having been led to completion by a single teenager in under two years.
Amid all this marveling, one comment stood out in particular.
Bellidyne Robotics, official Twitter: "Did you know I'm still waiting for you? Weeping, dot jpg."
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