After paying the water and electricity bills, the more stable supply, although slightly more expensive, is still better than frequent outages.
In any case, these things required money before, and now with separate billing, it's easier to save costs yourself.
Dog Town remains the ever-welcoming Dog Town, but some hidden changes are solid and real.
This has caused quite a few of Hansen's original supporters to have a change in mindset; perhaps this young, powerful figure has indeed brought some positive changes to Dog Town.
For original partners, the new successor seems easier to deal with than Hansen.
Gago was always adept at pretending to be a good guy, used to the insincere flattery like a company lackey. Meanwhile, Mercer, who never liked wasting time on haggling, found Venus always capable of negotiating a price that satisfied both parties with high efficiency.
After some effort, with Hansen's 'intentional' ceding, the power transition in Dog Town finally completed relatively smoothly.
Unfortunately, despite Mercer's view, the transition of power was still not completely finished. Many of the trading partners continued to trust the 'Hansen' brand name, but time was running out.
In fact, Mercer's reprogramming of Hansen's consciousness was quite unsuccessful.
Compared to Evelyn, whose memory was only altered slightly, the modifications on Hansen—from subconsciousness to memory and even emotional operations—were immensely challenging.
In less than three months, Mercer had to modify his memory nearly five times, resetting Hansen to the state of the first modification.
There were even one or two instances where Hansen almost exposed anomalies publicly. Thankfully, Venus monitored his brainwaves at the right time, causing him to 'faint', preventing major issues.
But as the modifications increased, Hansen's consciousness became increasingly overwhelmed. After the final modification, when Hansen opened his eyes but remained silent for a long time, Mercer knew—Hansen's value had been essentially exhausted.
Thus, Mercer began preparing Hansen's funeral.
This man named Hansen was also about to reach the end of his life.
...
September 29, 2074, Spark Team Base.
Hansen lay lifelessly in the hacker chair.
His head and body were connected with data lines everywhere, his eyes open, yet the data and lines on the instruments beside him were flat, like a dead person.
"He can't hold on anymore." Lucy glanced at the data and concluded, "It seems repeated modifications to the consciousness data might even lead to brain death... Mercer, the Soulkiller Program is far more dangerous than we imagined."
"Could it be a mismatch between consciousness data and neural records?" Mercer pondered.
Lucy merely frowned slightly: "But that shouldn't cause such an unresponsive state now..."
Mercer looked at the unresponsive Hansen, ran several tests, but Hansen almost completely lacked any reaction to the outside world.
"Let's deep dive and have a look. The data didn't seem so bad during the modifications..."
Mercer said, and then used the Octopus Arm to insert the connection line into himself.
Lucy hesitated for a moment, reaching out: "I'll come in with you too."
"You want to deep dive? That's quite rare... Alright, let's go together."
Mercer smiled and opened the back cover of her head, inserting the line for her as well.
Lucy's psychological shadow lingered, and to her, deep diving was extremely dangerous; unless necessary, she preferred to spend more time completing work on a computer.
Mercer didn't wait for Lucy, inserting the line for her first, then directly deep diving into Cyberspace.
This time, after seeing Hansen's consciousness data, he couldn't help but sigh.
The consciousness data of Hansen, which was restored using backup data just ten minutes ago, was again full of large segments of garbled symbols.
In Cyber World, Hansen was mumbling to himself, "No, this isn't right..."
If a normal person's consciousness data body is a continuously changing flowing data stream, but the inner core data is stable, Hansen at this moment was a complete mess from the inside out.
Codes kept turning red, characters flickering into garbled symbols, sometimes reverting to normal, sometimes abruptly erroring.
Mercer had almost never seen such a breakdown of consciousness data in humans.
Lucy came online, observing Hansen, who was continuously erroring and mumbling: "There seems to be some pattern in the data errors?"
"I think there's a conflict in his memory data... I'll try fixing it."
Mercer again retrieved Hansen's consciousness data from the server backup, but this time, no matter how it was filled, Hansen's consciousness would stabilize briefly before collapsing again.
Until in an instant, Hansen suddenly turned his head, looking at Mercer, and roared: "It's you!"
He lunged at Mercer abruptly, but despite the short distance, however he waved and clawed, he could not reach Mercer.
Not even a slight bit closer.
Mercer observed his actions calmly, watching the data changes: "Oh? The data seems to have stabilized a lot..."
"You are messing with my memories! You're toying with my soul! Aren't you!" Hansen's otherwise clear face, at this moment, flickered with fuzzy mosaic.