31 Ren Hong's Past

"Okay! Sakura, show your skills to my beautiful CEO! If you fail to surprise her, you'll have to keep living in the Titan supercomputer or keep wandering!" Ren Hong stood with his hands away from the laptop, looked at the loli in the monitor, and said, "For the sake of your new home!"

"For the sake of my new home!" Upon hearing his words, the petite Sakura in the monitor let out an electronically synthesized sound. Although there was a short echo in her voice, it was full of vibrant emotions. She kept silent for a while before suddenly leaning forward as though she were about to jump out of the monitor. She had two long ponytails styled in the shape of a pair of turquoise bunny ears, shamelessly acting cute. "I'm the lovely Sakura. Am I not adorable?"

Gao Yue looked at the loli inside the monitor and froze, turning to Ren Hong. "This is… Artificial…"

"Try talking to her! A friendly reminder: Sakura is very smart!" Ren Hong interrupted.

At that moment, Gao Yue's heart stirred as if she had thought of something. And as she watched Ren Hong nod encouragingly, she focused her eyes once again on the loli who was acting cute.

"What's your name?" Gao Yue asked.

"My name is Sakura!" Sakura answered without any hesitation, which surprised Gao Yue. The latter instantly asked: "Who gave you that name?"

"My big brother!" Again, a very quick answer.

Gao Yue was almost sure who the 'big brother' she was talking about was. Gao Yue asked again: "So Sakura, can you tell me who your big brother is?"

"My big brother is him!" The computerized loli pointed at Ren Hong beside her, and before the astonished Gao Yue could speak again, she said, "If you weren't standing beside Big Brother, I wouldn't have told you, even if you're the CEO of Big Brother's company!"

Gao Yue widened her mouth, subconsciously holding her hands together. Judging from her widened-eyes, one could tell how shocked she was at that moment. If the previous conversation had already surprised her, right after this sentence, she could be said to be bewildered.

Sakura's words contained so much information that it would take a great deal of comprehension, judgment, and cognitive ability to say it. She was as if a real human being.

"She…" The startled Gao Yue looked at Ren Hong again.

"Alright, Sakura, you did it. Go and play, and remember not to get discovered. I can't protect you yet, understand?" Ren Hong looked at the baffled Gao Yue, before turning to the computer and saying.

"When will I have my own home, Big Brother!" Sakura suddenly revealed a depressed look.

"Soon! We're building a new home and you'll have one soon; an entire building!" Ren Hong said with a smile.

"Yay! Goodbye, Big Brother!" Sakura cheered, and the image on the monitor disappeared.

Ren Hong turned to Gao Yue once again, who was now like a wooden carving.

"Sakura is…" After a long time, Gao Yue looked at him incredulously. At that moment, she still hadn't fully recovered from her shock.

Ren Hong smiled slightly and didn't answer her question. He went to the other side of the desk and started a monologue like the only actor in a stage play, speaking to himself. "When I was 7 years old, I got my first taste of computers. When I was 8, I learned the PHP language. When I was 9, I got hooked on computer programming. When I was 11, I hacked all the computers in my junior high school for the first time and made all the mainframes in the school completely obsolete. Not only that, but I also did it in the school computer lab without being caught! By the time I was 12 and a half, I had learned all the computer programming languages, learned about the concept of hacking, and I fell completely in love with the thrill of hacking without the constraints of the Internet."

"I became a hacker, but kept a very low-profile. Ugh, you can say that I have never been discovered. I'm also unsure how many times I've hacked in total. Basically, almost all famous organizations have been hacked by me and I don't remember sparing any of them… You know, 12 year olds don't have much self-control, not to mention me with my curiosity and natural talent. But later, I gradually lost interest as it became unchallenging!"

Gao Yue gawked at him and listened to the monologue he was performing.

Ren Hong crossed his fingers for a moment. He spread his hands apart, turned his palms facing upward, and continued: "When I was just 14 years old, I unintentionally watched Spielberg's <<A.I Artificial Intelligence>> and that was when I suddenly had an idea… Realize it! Naive and stupid, right? It's almost impossible!"

"So from then on, I didn't hack any computer or website. I spent almost all my spare time looking at strings of code, so much so that code seemed to appear all over the blackboard in the classroom. It was the biggest challenge I've encountered so far in my life. I took reference to my predecessors for deep learning, neural networks, and so on. But Sakura, who was born at that time, was as stupid as Microsoft Cortana, Xiaoice, and Apple's Siri, and for two years I felt like it didn't pay off. But finally I decided to start all over again without any hesitation. That's just how stubborn I was. Eventually I started designing Sakura again in a very different way from the outside world, and three years ago, I entered the last piece of matrix code for Sakura…"

At that moment, Ren Hong looked at the flabbergasted Gao Yue and said, "And I succeeded…"

"You mean, Sakura…" Gao Yue was so overwhelmed that she couldn't speak properly.

"Apart from not having a human body, she basically has a soul. When I entered the last matrix code and activated it, she was like a baby who had just descended into the world and was ignorant of everything! I treated her like my own sister and worked tirelessly and happily to teach her, to instill in her my outlook on life and my values, to teach her about herself and others—just like how an adult teaches an initially ignorant child. Despite that, Sakura was very smart. No matter what I taught her, she would learn at once. In order to be a qualified teacher, I also kept learning anything I found useful. My brain kept stockpiling all kinds of knowledge, unintentionally achieving the almighty me—at least, that's what I thought. In time, she also regarded me as the single most important person in the world…" Ren Hong said obsessively. The depth of his eyes had as if traveled through time and space and returned to that time from before, that he was most proud of.

"Gosh…" Gao Yue wanted to say something, but didn't know what would be appropriate of her to comment.

Is Sakura the world's first true artificial intelligence? Does she really have a soul?

"How smart is Sakura now? A child's IQ?" Gao Yue tried as hard as she could to try to make herself accept the reality.

"No! Sakura is very smart; it's just that I set her up with the mentality of an adorable loli. She's very, very smart, so don't ever question her intelligence!" Ren Hong stressed.

"Where did she go?" Gao Yue asked again.

"How the hell do I know where she's gone? It's possible that she's hanging out in the United States, possibly in Europe, or anywhere the Internet can reach. But for now, her temporary home is inside the Titan supercomputer in the United States Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Ren Hong said casually.

"Will she be found out?" Gao Yue was surprised to hear that.

"Sakura will always follow my orders. As long as I ask her to not cause trouble, no one in the world will find out about her," Ren Hong said confidently. After a pause, he added, "After the construction of XlouS's headquarters is completed, the 'l' shaped building will be Sakura's new home. As I said earlier, the entire building!"

"You mean the company is adding supercomputers in the future?" Gao Yue realized that the amount of information she obtained today was too much, and felt like her brain was about to shut down.

"Yes, the entire 'l' shaped building. I shall let the title of 'World's First Supercomputer, Tianhe-2' stay around for a few more years. In the future, our company's supercomputer is bound to be the world's first," Ren Hong said those words so easily with a smile.

"This is too much for me to take!" Gao Yue felt her head swell up and stood up from the chair, ready to leave. "I need some time to process everything!"

Just as Gao Yue passed by Ren Hong, she suddenly felt her hands and her body being pulled back uncontrollably. The petite young lady let out a scream and fell into the wide and warm chest behind her. She was caught off guard. "Ren Hong, what are you doing?"