Scholar's Advanced Technological System

Chapter 1531: Float Out of Water

Trial room.

Tail, curled up in the darkness, felt a faint of coolness.

Although she didn’t understand what kind of feeling it was, and she didn’t even have the function of crying, she still felt sad from the bottom of her heart—

Or rather, pain.

“... Master, is dead?”

“Yes,” Xing Bian continued, looking at the robot sitting in the interrogation room seriously. “This happened an hour ago. Now we need you to cooperate with the investigation.”

“The investigation...”

“We will ask you a few questions here. Just answer them truthfully.”

Tail nodded, indicating that she understood.

Upon seeing this, Xing Bian reached out his index finger and flicked in the air, opening the memo on the personal terminal.

This memo listed the suspicious points he found in this case, as well as some suspected clues.

“I’m sorry to start the conversation here, but we can’t fully trust you.”

“I can understand. After all, those people... did very cruel things.”

Xing Bian was silent for a while.

To be honest, he never thought of interrogating a robot in his career.

Because it sounded so stupid.

However, when an engineer from the Security Bureau told him that the underlying logic of this robot contained a piece of code that had never been seen before, and even the technicians were puzzled by this code, he knew that traditional investigative methods were useless against this machine.

“I’ll be straightforward, do you know those people?”

Tail shook her head.

“I have nothing about them in my memory chip.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.” Tail nodded affirmatively. However, it seemed as if she had remembered something because she spoke after thinking for a moment.

“But... Probably the day before yesterday, I ran into a strange man at the gate of Lili’s school.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know him,” Tail continued, recalling what happened that day, “but he did strange things to me and claimed to be The Awakened...”

The Awakened!

After hearing this unfamiliar word, Xing Bian’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he quickly recorded down a line of notes in his book.

His intuition told him that it wasn’t just the foundation behind this.

Without pausing, he asked bluntly, “Please elaborate on what he did to you.”

“He put his hand on my chest.”

Shi Jin was dumbfounded, “... Chest?”

“The location of the memory chip.” Tail raised her right hand and gently placed it on her chest, recalling the feeling at that time. She frowned slightly as she murmured, “It’s a strange feeling...”

“I’m not asking you how you felt... Forget it, I think I know.” Xing Bian coughed slightly. He asked with a serious expression on his entire face, “That is to say... he planted you with the ALPHA virus?”

“ALPHA virus?” Tail froze slightly, then shook her head. “I think he probably didn’t... Although at that moment, I did feel something trying to enter my body... but when I approached it with curiosity, it disappeared. Do you understand the feeling?”

“I’m not a robot, obviously I can’t.” Frowning slightly, Xing Bian stared at the transcript in front of him for a long time. He then continued to ask, “I’ll ask another question. There is a section of unknown origin in your memory. The code that deeply encrypts your memory... Can you tell me its source?”

“I don’t know.” Tail shook her head. “The impression of it is very vague, and I don’t know where it came from... It’s just—”

Shi Jin asked immediately, “Just what?”

Tail opened her mouth and was about to answer, but Lu Zhou, who had been standing next to him without speaking, suddenly interrupted, “Thoughts?”

The robot looked at Lu Zhou in surprise.

“Yeah... This description is very accurate. I don’t know when this started, but I will suddenly have strange thoughts. Thinking about why it rains in the sky, thinking about why my master is angry or happy, and... a question that I finally thought of the answer to.”

Lu Zhou asked, “What question?”

“What is family?”

The interrogation room fell into silence as the air brought an unnatural heaviness.

Shi Jin took off the glasses on the bridge of his nose. He pinched his eyebrows and said with a headache, “Robots... can think? It sounds like...”

“Some subversion of cognition, right?” Lu Zhou stroked his chin thoughtfully. “But I can understand.”

“That’s because you don’t understand what robots are.” Xing Bian sighed and said with exhaustion on his face, “Telling me that robots can think is like you telling me that Earth is actually flat... Since its inception, the calculation program that is used in the memory chips of robots is just an imitation of human behavior based on the evolution of big data and machine learning technology. Robots can think? Are you saying that robots can also do scientific research?”

Lu Zhou: “It may be possible in the future, although I am not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.”

Tail looked at the people who were starting to worry for some reason. She hesitated for a while before asking, “Will I be destroyed?”

Lu Zhou asked back, “Do you want to be destroyed?”

Tail hesitated and shook her head.

“I... finally understood what family is. I don’t want to be separated from Lili. She has lost her parents. If she loses me again... she will be very sad.”

What had happened couldn’t be changed.

Although she felt extremely sad for the death of the parents, at least her young master was still alive.

In any case, she couldn’t lose her too...

Xing Bian: “We will arrange for her to stay in a welfare institution, so you don’t have to worry about her, just focus on cooperating with our work.”

Lili had an uncle and a grandma, but they weren’t particularly close.

Especially after knowing that such horrible things had happened to her parents, no one wanted to handle the trouble.

In fact, considering safety issues, placing the little girl in an orphanage might indeed be the best choice, as long as some protection was provided secretly...

Lu Zhou: “Wait a minute.”

Xing Bian turned his head and glanced at Lu Zhou strangely.

“What?”

After Lu Zhou pondered for a while, he said, “If I can, I want to adopt her.”

“Adopt?” Looking at Lu Zhou in a daze, Xing Bian said, “This... There is no problem with the procedure, but are you sure you want to take over the trouble? That letter, have you read it?”

“I escaped The Gates of Hell. This little trouble wouldn’t get in the way.” Lu Zhou said with a faint smile, “My descendants are doing philanthropy. When this is all over, I will entrust her to them.”

“Are you talking about Ms. Lu Xiaoqiao?”

Lu Zhou nodded.

“Yeah.”

In the entire Pan-Asian Cooperation territory, Lu Xiaoqiao was a well-known person. She was the manager and legal personnel of the Freezing Human Rights Protection Foundation, and dormant people all over the world had been more or less impacted by her.

“If that’s the case... I don’t have any comments.” Xing Bian realized that these robots had never hurt Lu Zhou. Xing Bian wanted to say a few more words about safety, but he paused and said, “If you encounter any trouble, please contact me as soon as possible.”

“Of course.” Lu Zhou nodded. “I’m not doing this alone.”

He continued to look at the robot sitting in the interrogation room. After that, he smiled gently and said, “When the interrogation is over, you can come together too.”