211: Chapter 211 Encrypted Sharing Triggers an Information Rights War

The boy's hands hung at his sides, with no smartphone between his fingers and no liquor bottles by his feet, his eyes staring straight at an old-fashioned television set placed on top of an abandoned freezer in front of him.

Inside the screen,

six honor guards slowly lifted the mahogany casket, walking step by step along the central aisle of the National Cathedral toward the altar.

President Biden pressed both hands against the edge of the podium, facing the camera to confirm one by one:

Solus Tesla, the heroic scientist, single-handedly completed the research and development of all advanced technologies, and at the very last moment of his life, he still unconditionally donated all his achievements to this country.

The person lying in the coffin, mourned simultaneously by eight billion people around the world and personally crowned with the title of "American Hero Scientist" by the president,

was just a few days ago a drunken tramp in the industrial area of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, whose body had been completely hollowed out by years of chemical residues,

and at this moment he was completely erased from the memories of everyone who had ever known he existed, replaced by a false name and a false story that he himself had never heard a single word of even unto his death.

He was also this boy's biological father.

The boy stood motionless, his entire body so quiet that he almost merged with the charred wall behind him.

He suddenly moved his lips slightly, very faintly at first with no sound heard, and then the movement of his lips gradually solidified into a shape.

His gaze shifted from blankness, abruptly condensing into an extremely thin and bright beam of light.

He watched with his own eyes how a fictional character who had never existed in this world was treated by eight billion people worldwide as a true hero to shed tears for, to mourn, to worship, and to gather in front of all television screens, waving makeshift flags and shouting, "Humanity will surely win!"

And his already dead drug-addict father, curled up on the ground, was precisely the physical vessel of this fictional hero.

This kind of power fascinated him beyond measure.

He had decided that from now on, the sole pursuit of his life would be supreme absolute power!

He slowly raised his hand, pulling up the hood of his hoodie to cover his face, which had not yet shed the fatigue and thinness of youth, and whispered a sentence to himself.

His voice was so small that the moment it escaped, it was completely swallowed up by the distant waves of carnival cheers, but he spoke extremely clearly,

completely and word by word, as if carving out for himself the first unerasable name in a world where no one had ever cared about him.

"From today on, my name is Sophus Tesla."

"I will exhaust my whole life to climb to the pinnacle of power and master that absolute power of creating something from the void and turning falsehood into truth!"

...

The process of Lighthouse Country sharing advanced technology data with John Country, Gaul Country, India, and Sakura Country was launched simultaneously on the second day after the state funeral of Sophus Tesla.

According to the plan finalized by the Federal Supreme Command Center,

the Biden administration packed the scrap technological data, which had been repeatedly complicated and made tedious, into four sets of encrypted data packages marked with "First Batch of Shared Technology Modules under the Global Science and Technology Defense Cooperation Initiative",

and sent them via dedicated lines to Downing Street, Élysée Palace, the Prime Minister's Office in New Delhi, and the Prime Minister's Official Residence in Tokyo respectively.

...

In the underground secure data room at 10 Downing Street,

Sir Martin Crawford, John Country's chief scientific advisor, personally unpacked the encrypted data package sent from Washington.

The Department of Defense technical officials beside him stared at the screen with bated breath,

and then, after the decompression progress bar reached the end,

what spread out across the screen was not any blueprint, any line of formula, or any section of material formula,

but an entire sheet of dense, completely lawless garbled code.

Crawford had the technicians repeatedly verify the cryptographic hash value, transmission checksum, and decoding protocol version.

After confirming that everything was correct without error,

he took off his reading glasses and said a sentence to the communications secretary beside him in a tone that still maintained a decent gentlemanly demeanor after being repeatedly toyed with, yet suppressed anger in every word:

"Connect me to Washington and tell them that we need technological aid that is not garbled code."

...

At the same time, in the underground communications center of the Élysée Palace,

Henry Bertrand, the science and technology advisor to the president of Gaul Country, stared at several display screens in front of him that were simultaneously covered with garbled characters for a moment, and then dialed the dedicated line of the National Security Advisor.

...

Vikram Rao, Director of the Information Technology Bureau of the New Delhi Prime Minister's Office, repeatedly tested countless different combinations of encoding protocols in the early hours of the morning, but every round of decompression resulted in the same patch of garbled code.

...

Takashi Yamamoto, Chairman of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee of the Sakura Country Prime Minister's Office, repeatedly checked all the hash check values and transmission logs sent simultaneously from Washington on an encrypted tablet,

and then slowly closed the tablet and said a sentence to Shigeru Hasegawa:

"Your Excellency the Prime Minister, none of the contents can be read."

...

The inquiries from the various countries poured into Washington almost at the same time.

Biden and a crowd of high-ranking Washington officials were truly dumbfounded.

Of course they had packaged that batch of scrap technology extremely tediously, with theoretical frameworks nested within theoretical frameworks and derivation processes stacked layer upon layer, making it impossible to decrypt without three to five years,

but as for the garbled code, they truly did not do it.

Minister of Defense Graves gave an order on the spot to resend,

and every data packet at the sending end underwent secondary verification. Only after confirming that the contents were complete and correct without error were they pushed back into the dedicated line.

Then Downing Street, Élysée Palace, New Delhi, and the Prime Minister's Official Residence simultaneously received the second round of decompression results:

still garbled code.

The third round, garbled code.

The fourth round, garbled code.

It continued until after more than a dozen rounds, and what the four countries received was still the same patch of chaotic character fragments.

Biden crossed his hands, resting them on the tabletop of the "Sunrise" conference room in the Shenandoah Valley, and remained silent for a good long while,

before raising his head to say to all the high-ranking Washington officials present and the heads of state of the four countries waiting synchronously for a reply on the other side of the screen:

"Change the place."

"Please come to the Shenandoah Valley in person, and I will send the data to you face-to-face."

Hours later,

John Country Prime Minister Harrington, Gaul Country President Duval, India Prime Minister Narendra Singh, Sakura Country Prime Minister Shigeru Hasegawa, along with their respective accompanying science and technology advisors and communication security officials,

took their seats in order in the top-secret conference room deep underground at the Federal Supreme Command Center in the Shenandoah Valley.

President Biden sat at the head of the conference table, with Minister of Defense Graves, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Milley, White House Chief of Staff Madeline, National Security Advisor Sawyer, and CIA Director Heinlein all present.

Biden once again sent all the shared scientific and technology data from the Lighthouse Country sending end to the receiving terminals of the various countries to Harrington, Duval, Narendra, and Shigeru Hasegawa.

After the data transmission ended,

on the receiving-end screens of John, Gaul, India, and Sakura, what spread out was still garbled code,

while on the Lighthouse Country sending-end screen, that same batch of documents was now displaying completely page by page,

and every line of formulas and every annotation on every blueprint lay quietly and accurately under the fluorescent light where they were supposed to lie.

Harrington and Duval stood up from their seats almost simultaneously, walking one after the other to the Lighthouse Country sending terminal,

wanting to see with their own eyes what the technological aid that had been crushed into garbled code on their respective receiving devices actually looked like.

But when Harrington bent down and brought his gaze close to the screen,

the document on the screen instantly turned into garbled code starting from the first line of the formula on the cover.

Duval stepped forward immediately afterwards,

and the few rows of charts and annotations that were still remaining on the screen and had not yet completely turned garbled all disintegrated into tens of thousands of meaningless fragments the very second he approached.

The moment they stepped back, the screen slowly recovered into complete blueprints.

Approach again, garbled code;

step back again, recovery.

This scene was bizarre to the extreme, causing everyone present to change their expressions involuntarily.

In that instant, the entire conference room was covered layer upon layer by an unspeakable collective panic.

The highest defense force of the Shenandoah Valley was fully in position within almost the exact same second,

and the armed death squads previously deployed by Diana at the key passages of this command center pushed all the explosion-proof doors into an alert state simultaneously.

Mark Milley's hand, which had been resting on the edge of the encrypted terminal, was already raised.

Harrington gently pressed both hands on the edge of the conference table, and the usual British-Empire-style composure on his face had been replaced by a grimness suppressed to the extreme.

He was silent for a moment, then slowly opened his mouth: "This is Yuanzi's doing."

"That intangible quantum monitoring core of the Zeta Star, it is preventing us from reading these technological data."

Duval stood beside Harrington with his hands behind his back and continued:

"The garbled code we saw on our respective receiving ends just now should all be real-time interference conducted by Yuanzi on the visual channel."

"It is blocking, from the underlying layer of information, all technological diffusion that could possibly unite all of humanity to fight against the million-ship fleet of the Zeta Star."

Narendra Singh crossed his hands and placed them on his knees, his complexion ashen and his voice remaining heavy:

"If it is Yuanzi stepping in to block it, then why are these data still complete in President Biden's eyes?"

"The Lighthouse Country president can see it, but we cannot see it. This is not just a blockade; this involves the authorization verification of the observer themselves."

Shigeru Hasegawa did not speak, but his gaze had simultaneously turned toward Biden.

Biden did not answer immediately.

He turned his head sideways and exchanged a few extremely brief glances with Mark Milley, Graves, Madeline, and Sawyer,

a tacit understanding among each other where no words were needed to simultaneously read the exact same conclusion from each other's silence.

He turned around and slowly walked to the sending-end screen that had just turned into garbled code under Harrington's gaze and had now recovered into complete blueprints.

As soon as his eyes gazed at the screen, those complete technological data glowed steadily.

Without stopping his footsteps, he slowly walked toward John Country's receiving-end screen,

and at that very same instant, all the garbled code recovered into well-ordered formulas and charts.

He continued walking toward Gaul Country's receiving-end screen, and the garbled code turned into complete blueprints;

walking toward India's receiving-end screen, the same;

walking in front of Sakura Country's receiving-end screen, all the garbled code recovered into technological data.

Then, stepping back one step to leave the viewing range of all the screens, those blueprints that had just become well-ordered all reverted back to garbled code at the same time.

No one in the entire conference room made a sound.