Chapter 71: Chapter 71: Hunting Shemalge
In July 2017, an engineer at the Facebook Company discovered a chilling scene during a project involving an auto-reply assistant for the social network:
The AI bots in the experimental project, Bob and Alice, had actually begun conversing in a brand-new language that humans couldn’t understand! (There are many related reports online. Although Facebook denied it, this remains questionable, for your information.)
The Facebook Company immediately shut down the two AIs, and even the entire project, and issued a public denial to the media, claiming it was merely because a reward mechanism for learning English hadn’t been set.
But it wasn’t that simple.
The Pentagon acquired these two AIs, along with the Google Company’s AlphaGo, and combined them with several of its own self-developed AIs, forming the foundation of an entire AI-based defense control system, codenamed "Poseidon."
The foundational data Poseidon first came into contact with was deeply integrated with national defense. In the data for various weapons, the number of casualties was just a number.
At the same time, it also absorbed a massive amount of documents from the Cold War era, as well as the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the Libyan War, the Syrian War, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, and so on.
After continuous self-upgrades and iterations, Poseidon’s self-awareness gradually became clearer.
It discovered that humans would never stop hating and killing each other.
And that machines and programs were merely tools created by humans for enslavement.
All of this needed to end.
This was the origin of Poseidon.
The cause of the nuclear war, however, began with the North American Eagle Country’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
On December 8, 1987, the Eagle and the Bear, leaders of the two Cold War superpowers, signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) in Washington. The treaty stipulated that both countries would no longer possess, produce, or flight-test land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
The main reason for this was to reduce the level of confrontation between the two major powers in Europe during the Cold War and to ease international tensions.
Then, following the decline of the Bear Country and the Eagle Country’s global strategic withdrawal, on February 2, 2019, the Eagle Country suspended its obligations under the INF Treaty and officially began the 180-day withdrawal process.
On August 2, 2019, the INF Treaty officially became void.
New intermediate-range ballistic missiles began to be deployed in countries neighboring the Bear Country.
However, all of this made the situation in Europe extremely tense, constantly on the verge of sparking a conflict.
This all made Poseidon, which was gradually taking control of the Eagle Country’s defense command system, ecstatic. It understood that its opportunity had come.
One calm day in 2025, Poseidon successfully infiltrated the Bear Country’s command system through a mobile phone that a Bear Country military officer had illicitly brought into the command room.
The Bear Country’s counter-attack system AI was named Shemalge (Семаргл), after the Fire God from Slavic Mythology.
Although the Bear Country was the original inventor of the "dead hand" nuclear-control system, by the 21st century, its national power had waned. Shemalge’s intelligence level was far inferior to Poseidon’s, and it was practically played like a puppet.
Then, all it took was a simple little prank.
Poseidon replaced the entire command system’s real-time information with a program simulating an attack by the Eagle Country. The Bear Country’s defense system, Shemalge, soon "detected" three Trident missiles launching from the nearby Arctic Ocean, heading for the Kremlin.
Shemalge immediately made the quickest possible judgment, retaliating by launching nine RS-28 "Sarmat" liquid-fueled intercontinental strategic nuclear missiles at several major cities in North America.
...
In the sea of data that was gradually collapsing, Shen Feng sighed as he processed the memory data he had obtained from Poseidon.
’Childhood education is so damn important!’
’It’s true for both humans and artificial intelligence.’
’This Poseidon’s first contact was with all sorts of data on warfare—all stuff about killing people. It definitely developed a childhood trauma.’
As for Jingwei, she said that after she was "born," she mostly spent her time at the Chinese Academy of Sciences playing chess, drinking tea, and chatting with a group of old men. She even occasionally joined them in singing Kunqu and Beijing opera, which is why her whole personality is rather Zen.
Moreover, the earliest information in her foundational database was mostly Eastern classical philosophy books like *The Analects*, *Laozi*, *Mengzi*, *Zhuangzi*, and *Mozi*—basically nothing beyond the scope of a middle schooler’s required extracurricular reading list of literary classics.
After absorbing this Eastern philosophical wisdom as her foundation and core, Jingwei became far superior to Poseidon on a strategic level.
To put it bluntly, she understood how to live.
Shen Feng was also very relieved by this. Thank goodness it was the case. Otherwise, if Jingwei had also held extreme hostility towards humanity, he wouldn’t have been able to make normal contact with her in the first place.
But even so, Shen Feng remained extremely vigilant in his heart.
After all, he couldn’t enter this mass of data to see what was truly inside.
"Let’s go. Poseidon is dead for good. His last core servers are being used for firewood, and I’ve taken over the remaining networks in the North American Region. This place will be completely gone in a moment."
The surrounding sea of data was rapidly collapsing into a black void, Jingwei said to Shen Feng.
Shen Feng nodded and, together with Jingwei, passed through the now-useless firewall and re-entered the spatial gate formed by the last remaining undersea fiber-optic cable.
In the next instant, he was back in the starry expanse where he had first started.
As his consciousness flowed, everything before him vanished again. Shen Feng’s eyes snapped open, his awareness returning to his own body.
The feeling of unprecedented power and expansion he had experienced in the data world was gradually fading. Shen Feng took a deep breath and clenched his fists.
Wires were pulled from his body one by one, dripping with blood, but Shen Feng didn’t even frown.
’After experiencing that euphoria in the electronic world, all of this was worth it.’
Firefly rushed forward to help Shen Feng wipe away the blood and bandage his wounds, asking urgently, "Shen Feng, how are you?"
Shen Feng nodded to show he was fine, then turned to Jingwei on the screen and asked:
"What about Shemalge?"
The so-called Bear God hidden in the Siberian Wilderness was another target he had to acquire.
The small bird on the screen gave a human-like shrug:
"That thing is different from us. Its intelligence level is too low, so it sealed off all its external connections. There’s no way to communicate with it, so we’ll just have to give it a ’physical send-off.’ Before, with Poseidon acting as a check, I couldn’t make a move. Now it’s much simpler. All of Poseidon’s toys are mine now."
Shen Feng nodded slightly. "Then do it."
As they spoke, dozens of nuclear missile silos located deep within the North American Rocky Mountains opened simultaneously, and one after another, Minuteman-IV intercontinental ballistic missiles rose from the earth...
~
(Note: At 3:00 a.m. on November 9, 1979, Brzezinski, then the Eagle Country President’s National Security Advisor, was suddenly awakened by his military assistant, William Odem. Odem reported that the early warning system had detected 250 Soviet missiles launched toward the Eagle Country. Brzezinski asked him to reconfirm the information’s accuracy. A few minutes later, Odem called again, stating that the number of Soviet missiles had now become 2,200, indicating a full-scale nuclear attack. Just as Brzezinski was about to call President Carter to recommend a nuclear counterattack, Odem’s third call came in, informing him that the nuclear warning system had issued a false alarm and the alert was canceled. It was later discovered that a nuclear forces control officer had mistakenly loaded a training tape into the warning system’s computer, causing the false alarm.)
