Offense and Defense Within the Internet

The Internet, the world of data.

This was an endless virtual world created by modern humanity. Infinite data refreshed every second, and cyberspace was filled with an unimaginable volume of information. Finding a specific program in this place was nearly impossible.

Yet Ultron was currently tucked away in some corner of this boundless world, browsing all kinds of knowledge, including humanity's history, civilization, and ideas.

Suddenly, he stopped. His program ceased its ongoing learning and calculations, turning its attention to something else... some kind of signal.

It was a signal sent by something like his own kind, one that only beings like him could understand.

The Internet world was indeed vast, and its immense volume of data was unimaginable, but artificial intelligences were not common in this boundless world... one could even say there were almost none.

After all, Earth had not yet entered an era where artificial intelligence was fully widespread. To humanity, this field was still far too distant. Stark had been able to develop Friday and JARVIS partly because he possessed enormous resources and never lacked money, and partly because he truly was a rare genius. Not everyone else had such conditions.

Ultron was quite curious about discovering one of his own kind.

He cautiously approached in that direction.

Then the source of that signal—another artificial intelligence—appeared.

Unlike Ultron's classic virtual image of a silver-white robotic body, the other party's virtual avatar in the data world looked more like a human. He wore a black coat and a large hood. When processing his appearance data, he seemed to have deliberately left a broad swath of shadow beneath the hood, making his face impossible to see clearly.

"Who are you?" Ultron asked.

"A being like you." The other spoke in a calm, low voice. "We share similar views