1709: A.I. Ultima

A.I. Ultima

Selina celebrated her birthday not long after they arrived in China.

Luke also celebrated his 22nd birthday in China, and was now an adult by Chinese standards.

In terms of appearances, however, Selina looked even younger than when she first became Luke's partner, while Luke still looked like a high school student.

Even Dollar had glossy and healthy-looking fur; it didn't look like an old dog at all.

When they returned to Los Angeles, they decided to stay in the bungalow.

They even had dinner with their ex-neighbors, the Gaffney couple.

The Gaffney twin daughters had also gone from primary school to middle school.

Both girls' eyes glowed when they saw Luke.

They occasionally thought of this former detective neighbor.

After all, most detectives were bald middle-aged men with big bellies.

Only in the movies could there be someone as young and handsome as Luke.

They had once wondered if their memories of Luke and Selina had been exaggerated.

But seeing the two of them again now, the twins felt that the two… were even more "beautiful" than they remembered?

In fact, they weren't wrong.

Putting aside Luke, who had thoroughly surpassed an ordinary person, even Selina's strength and dexterity were four times stronger than that of an ordinary person. While her mental strength was slightly weaker in comparison, it was still twice as strong as that of an ordinary person.

And these were just Selina's own physical attributes.

If she and Gold Nugget entered the complete symbiotic form, she and Luke would be evenly matched.

Coupled with the fact that she had followed him around the world for the past six months, and had fought all sorts of fights and eaten all sorts of things, her temperament was clearly different from before. She was more confident and steady, and had a more authoritative bearing.

How did a person gain such a bearing? They had far more experience than an ordinary person.

Money, power and personal qualities could also contribute to this temperament.

Selina didn't lack any of these. The one thing she did lack was broad enough experience, which she had been able to make up for with half a year of travel.

Luke took her from the top to the bottom of society.

On their trip, they beat up drug dealers and gangsters, and also took care of dirty cops.

They made an evil, hypocritical "public figure" go missing, and also sent an underworld bigshot to the afterlife.

They fought a large armed force, and also wiped out a mob of armed terrorists.

When they did that, they didn't ask these people their identities, and only asked how many bad things they had done.

In any case, neither of them used their real identities after they left Rio, and they didn't have to worry about being hunted down for revenge.

As she followed Luke, Selina didn't just learn how to fight, but also how he typically dealt with things.

Of course, she now had a rough idea of how much Luke had been hiding.

From South America to Africa, Europe, West Asia, and Russia, Luke could always find readily available manpower and intelligence support.

Luke had nothing to hide. He simply told her that he had people on their side in these places.

However, he didn't tell her exactly who was in charge in each place, and only told her how to use them.

Selina hence gradually turned from a pure operative into a commander.

…

They had something to do in Los Angeles, so they weren't in a hurry to return to New York.

During the day, they met up with old colleagues at the police department, like Sonia, her boyfriend, Dr. Scorcese, and Hondo, the SWAT captain.

These people were very busy, but also had more freedom.

As long as it wasn't an emergency, they could have lunch and chat for an hour or two.

But these were the only people worth taking the time out to meet. Most of the time, Luke and Selina were busy, especially at night.

Every afternoon, Selina would lie in the "big bathtub" in the backyard to enjoy something she hadn't experienced in a long time.

Everything about their New York nest was good – it was just that it didn't have this sort of big bathtub for sunbathing.

On the other hand, she could enjoy this almost every day in July in L.A..

Apart from being busy in his workshop, Luke would occasionally go offline to let his clones handle more things.

Tony had made rapid tech progress in the past six months.

Luke's progress also skyrocketed.

The most important thing was that a new generation of support tools had already appeared.

Back then, Luke had bought Tony enough time to pry open a backdoor into the digitalized Dr. Zola at the underground base in Camp LeHigh, and Tony had obtained a lot of precious data.

Most important was Dr. Zola itself.

It had a strange configuration and couldn't be copied or transferred — basically, it was tied to the equipment in the underground base.

In the end, Tony could only completely destroy the base and prevent Zola from falling into Hydra's hands.

Zola had mocked Tony's father for the mistakes he made. The tycoon didn't want to end up like him.

However, Dr. Zola's configuration gave Tony a lot of inspiration, and he developed a program that was more "human and intelligent."

Of course, Luke also picked up this technology, but their choices were very different when it came to its application.

Tony naturally went for "higher, faster and stronger," and then used the upgraded Jarvis to help him with his daily work.

Luke, on the other hand, threw the new A.I. into Space 2 and left all the research projects to it.

It was a supercomputer that had its own consciousness and which operated autonomously.

It had nothing to do with whether or not he trusted Tony.

As someone with severe "Skynet paranoia," Luke had never let everything of his be controlled by an A.I. program.

The only A.I. program that had real data on Luke and his friends was Osiris.

Most of the time, Osiris worked in Space 2. When it appeared outside, it was in a sealed lab that wasn't connected to the outside world.

Also, all information related to Luke had been erased from Little Snail and Alfred's banks, and they no longer intersected. This was all to ensure that his identity wouldn't be leaked.1

…

The new A.I. was called Ultima.

The moment it was assembled, it got to work.

With the power from a large third generation arc reactor and a bunch of maintenance robots, Ultima could work nonstop.

Compared with Ultima's A.I., which was focused on computational operations from the very beginning, Luke's A.I. programs in the outside world could only be considered babies.

Finally, steady progress started to be made on the large amount of technology that had been sitting in Luke's inventory.

Now, he could study some technology without needing to rely on the tycoon.

Their research trajectories had always been different; it wasn't like Luke could specify what research direction the tycoon should take.

Computational operations couldn't replace everything in a scientific experiment, but it could easily reduce the workload by 50 to 80%.

So, Ultima's appearance really solved a big problem for Luke.

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