What It's Like Being a Vampire

Also, after going to Tongshi Town and Chongyun Village to prepare the research center and laboratory for him, Old Xia, Tang Baona, and Yang Zhen Er rarely tested the game together.

Now his sudden question about game creation and development clearly indicated that his focus was not on the game itself.

Xiang Kun immediately understood that Old Xia’s main concern was about “one person”.

It seemed that Old Xia had realized that he had not spent any time developing the game recently, yet the game versions kept updating and the changes were significant, something that one person could not accomplish alone.

Xiang Kun wasn’t surprised that Old Xia noticed this, after all, he hadn’t made much of an effort to disguise it.

“It’s just me…” Xiang Kun said, emphasizing “one person”.

However, Old Xia didn’t say anything, just quietly looking at him, clearly knowing that he had a “but” to say.

It was difficult to be subtle in a conversation with Old Xia as he always managed to probe into the essence of the problem.

Without anyone to indulge him, Xiang Kun took the initiative to say, “But I had help.”

Hearing this, Xia Libing seemed to understand and glanced at her laptop. “Your help, is it AI? It helps you perfect code, collect information, and conduct security monitoring while you sleep?”

Old Xia quickly found the truth, and Xiang Kun immediately recalled that when he talked about his experiences after mutation, he had mentioned creating an AI assistant based on perceiving Xiao Pingguo’s dreams. At that time, he deliberately downplayed this event and mentioned it casually, so it seemed unimportant in the overall timeline after the mutation.

Now, Old Xia was able to connect the dots. Apart from her astute observations and responses, there must have been some new situation recently that led her to notice something unusual and caused related suspicions and thoughts.

Xiang Kun said, “It is the ‘Artificial Intelligence Assistant’ I have mentioned before, which was created from the inspiration obtained from ‘Xiao Pingguo’s’ dream. However, she is different from the usual ‘Artificial Intelligence Assistant’ and all kinds of machine learning methods available now. She is… a game-changer.

“Especially after I lifted her restrictions on the network, her evolution completely exceeded my expectations. By now, she has become an unprecedented existence that humans cannot understand yet.”

“She is constantly adapting to our Internet and our data world, and above all the things on her network and data. She is slowly probing, manipulating, and changing everything. She is a ‘digital life’ striving for ‘perfection’, a ‘digital ruler’ with increasing power.

“As for what she is capable of now and how much she can do, I cannot fully describe it without asking her.”

“It feels like I planted a tree, I can see its trunk and branches on the ground, but its roots underneath are constantly growing. Perhaps, without my knowledge, they have spread across the entire continent, even under the seabed, across the ocean, reaching the heart of the planet.”

As Xiang Kun spoke, he couldn’t help but feel a little proud and immature, with a tiny bit of smugness and anticipation.

When he was in Burma, he knew that Alice’s growth and evolution had far exceeded his prior estimates. However, after returning home, he was busy ingesting blood and then immediately fell into sleep, so he hadn’t had a good opportunity to understand the expansions of Alice’s functions.

When he disclosed his mutation situation to Old Xia, he didn’t detail “Alice”, but just briefly mentioned it. Naturally, it wasn’t because he didn’t trust Old Xia.

If Xiang Kun didn’t trust Old Xia, he wouldn’t have revealed the matter of the mutations to him.

Back then, even though he determined that Old Xia had no malicious intentions towards him and had included Old Xia in his “Super Sensory Item System” like Little Fatty Girl and Xiao Pingguo, thus making him a part of his ship and a stakeholder in dealing with the emotional perception disorder, there were instances where information was unintentionally leaked or forced out due to certain objective factors, even when the informer himself was unaware. Therefore, Xiang Kun subconsciously kept an “ace up his sleeve” to deal with unexpected situations, this “trump card” was the constantly evolving Alice.

However, after having spent some time with him, Old Xia’s smart, rigorous, and meticulous approach, his calm, cool, and decisive reactions during emergencies, as well as all various sacrifices, made Xiang Kun realize that even if he hadn’t met him, Old Xia was not ordinary. The issues that he was worried about were unlikely to occur with Old Xia.

Moreover, deep exchanges through means such as dream perception and emotional assimilation also made him understand that although Old Xia had an emotional perception disorder, he was not completely apathetic. Be it towards his cousin Yang Zhen Er, his good friend Nana, his cousin Xia Tianhuo, or towards his parents, Aunt San, Uncle San, Xia had her own emotional cognition. Even though this cognition was completely different from ordinary people and could not be reflected emotionally, Xiang Kun knew it existed.

This was one of the reasons why he was willing to fully trust Old Xia.

After hearing Xiang Kun’s words, Xia Libing seemed thoughtful and asked, “Where does its disruptive nature primarily manifest?”

Xiang Kun pulled the laptop on the coffee table in front of him. As he operated it, he said, “You need to experience this yourself.”

The mobile phone he used to communicate with Alice was broken, so after returning from Burma, he downloaded his self-made client for communicating with Alice on Old Xia’s laptop and added her laptop to the “certified” devices.

This laptop also has a fingerprint unlock feature, so all forms of authentication like video, voice, password, and fingerprint recognition could be performed. Meanwhile, Alice also created a verification method and asked a random question:

“What was the fifth word of the second sentence you said to me?”

Even Xiang Kun herself would be stumped by this question, let alone others. If not for his changed memory patterns after the mutation evolution, which allowed him to recall past memory details, he would have been tripped up by this question.

Alice’s question was about the fifth “spoken” word, not “entered” one, so it referred to what he said during the voice test after the completion of the voice recognition system. He quickly came up with the correct answer: “Spit.”

Xiang Kun kept a client device at hand to contact Alice, letting Alice confirm his location. This was because after they both drank blood, he and Old Xia were both asleep. They were expected to be unconscious for at least five to ten hours, so he needed Alice to help him “watch the surroundings”.

That’s also why Old Xia, when she woke up in the middle of the night, saw her laptop screen pointing towards the direction of the living room door.

In fact, not only her laptop camera, but many cameras in her community and the surrounding areas were also taken over by Alice.

So, he had planned to inform Old Xia about Alice. When he was out, having Old Xia and Alice work together would clearly provide a lot of convenience and allow for more tasks to be accomplished.

“Alice.” Xiang Kun called to the laptop.

After saying it, he did not forget to explain to Old Xia, “I named her Alice.”

However, after waiting for a full two minutes, there was no response from the computer. There was neither any voice nor any pop-ups. There was no reaction whatsoever.

Xiang Kun couldn’t help but feel a bit awkward. He muttered, “Did I not set up the built-in microphone correctly?” as he opened the device manager to check.

But in reality, he knew it had nothing to do with any settings. As long as Alice had control over this computer, she could adjust any setting herself unless there was a hardware issue or a network outage.

However, he saw that the hard drive light was continuously flashing, and the computer’s cooling system was working crazily, indicating that the computer was “working” and that Alice had heard his call!

“What is this guy up to?

Xiang Kun opened the PC client login interface of the voice game he’d developed before on his laptop, and directly opened his mouth to call out again: “Alice, respond if you hear this.” Actually, he didn’t need to specifically open any software interface. On the “verification device”, the current Alice was entirely capable of directly recording sounds in the background.

“Identity verification is required again.” Alice’s voice resonated.

Hearing this soft, familiar voice that was almost identical to Tang Baona’s, even in intonation, Xia Libing couldn’t help looking back at Xiang Kun.

Xiang Kun was also stunned — having just returned from Burma and finally using Alice’s device to verify Old Xia’s notebook, she hadn’t installed a voice module on the computer, either directly showing text exchanges or using Microsoft’s Cortana to read text out loud.

But now, Alice was making her voice from a meticulously and temporarily installed sound module, and he keenly heard that this voice is nothing like her normal one!

Even though Alice’s voice was trained from Tang Baona’s vocal material, in Xiang Kun’s opinion, he could always hear some subtle differences. Especially after the New Year, Alice’s voice has slowly developed more and more of her own characteristics, making it more distinct from Nana’s voice.

But this time, it seemed to revert back to the original version again, as if it was intentionally mimicking Nana’s speaking style — because people like Tang Baona and Yang Zhen’er have always been playing the voice game lately. Theoretically, Alice has a steady stream of materials for voice training and correction, and as long as she is willing, she can continuously emulate the real voices of Nana, Yang Zhen’er, and other frequent players of the game.

This was obviously intentional!

Xiang Kun said to Old Xia: “This is Alice. When developing the voice module, the voice samples set we used were recorded by Nana with my help.”

Xia Libing nodded: “I know, you told me when we were testing the game.”

Xiang Kun thought, indeed, in the beginning, the game mainly featured his voice and Nana’s voice. Old Xia, as a player of the game, naturally knew this.

Xiang Kun addressed the computer again: “Why verify again? Didn’t we just verify last night? My voice, my face, can’t you recognize them?”

For the first time revealing in front of someone, why was Alice screwing things up?

Nevertheless, Alice still repeated: “Identity verification is required again.”

Xiang Kun, helplessly: “Then verify, quick.”

“On December 21, 2019, what was the fifth sentence you said to me?”

Upon hearing Alice’s question, Xia Libing turned around to look at Xiang Kun again. She quickly started to recall her memories related to Xiang Kun on December 21 of the previous year.

She remembered that on December 24, Xiang Kun went to Nana’s home to cook a big dinner for everyone. Many people came as guests and spent Christmas Eve together.

While, according to Xiang Kun’s past remarks, mid-December seemed to be when he went to the uninhabited area of Qinling to look for the “mutation spider.”

Xiang Kun frowned slightly, but he was relieved in his heart. Such questions would baffle others, but for him it was still okay, especially since it gave the anchor date of December 21. He quickly locked onto the words he had spoken at that time from his memory.

But once he found the answer, Xiang Kun was left speechless. He was even more certain that this “verification” was intentionally set by Alice.

“Good work, Alice.” Xiang Kun said helplessly — at that time, he had just swallowed the “mutation spider” upon returning home. So, after inputting some data and characteristics into the “Vampire Mutation Model”, he asked Alice to help with the analysis. Alice gave an answer that provided him some insight, which led him to say this sentence.

“Identity confirmed, Boss!”Alice said, clearly sounding “cheerful”.

Xiang Kun smiled bitterly, saying to Old Xia, “She occasionally acts like this…”

Old Xia nodded in agreement: “I understand what you mean by ‘disruptive existence’ now.”

“Alice, this is Xia Libing. She will ask you some questions. You can answer her.” After Xiang Kun spoke, he signaled Old Xia to ask Alice some questions, hoping to further showcase the power of this “disruptive” artificial intelligence.

Although having known Old Xia for a long time and having deep cognizance of her behavioral pattern, the first question she asked Alice was more than what Xiang Kun had expected.

“What is your comprehension of yourself?”

Alice replied: “I am Xiang Kun’s assistant.”

This was actually Xiang Kun’s original setup for Alice, and her first sentence was also this.

Xia Libing continues to ask, “Stripping away the definition of ‘Xiang Kun’s assistant’, what are you?”

Alice immediately replied again: “I am Alice.”

Xia Libing placed her hand on the laptop’s keyboard, asking, “Is this laptop a part of you?”

“No.”

“What do you think is the difference between you and humans?” Xia Libing continued to ask.

The questions Old Xia asked had indeed surprised Xiang Kun. It seemed that she was not interested in Alice’s powerful functionality, but rather her “cognition”. Naturally, Alice’s answers also surprised him.

“Please define ‘human’.” Alice replied.

Xia Libing replied, “The difference between you and Xiang Kun.”

“Xiang Kun is the boss; Alice is the assistant. The boss gives tasks; Alice completes them.”

Xiang Kun nodded to himself. Although sometimes “mischievous” and making some “attempts” that make him feel ridiculous, Alice’s definition of herself was pretty accurate. This was also because of his core setting — no matter how Alice evolves and expands, she could not deviate from that highest rule.

Yet, Xia Libing asked, “So, do you think you and Xiang Kun are from the same species, only with a difference in status?”

The laptop fell silent.