After Mercer's response, Lucy's reply was delayed, and he sighed.
The flow of time has changed.
His brain, or rather Mercer at this moment, instinctively mobilized the server's computational power, making his thinking speed reach a level that ordinary people could not comprehend.
What is the response speed of a computer per second, and what is the calculation speed?
A mainstream CPU (like Intel i7) can execute tens of billions of basic instructions per second, and the computational power Mercer now possesses far exceeds this number.
Although the processing speed of these basic instructions cannot be simply regarded as the speed of thinking, it still proves one point — for the current Mercer, time as defined by humans has lost its meaning.
He no longer waited for Lucy's reply but instead began a serious reflection and analysis of everything about himself in this state.
He no longer needed to recall anything; what he needed was just 'retrieval.'
When he needed to remember something, he could 'replay' the complete scene at the time at a nanosecond speed.
Including background details he hadn't noticed before — like tiny scratches on a poster in the corner or a whispered phrase that was ignored.
He could not only 'see' the past but also perform secondary analysis on this memory data.
This feeling made him somewhat lost — he even had the leisure to review his past like watching a movie while thinking about serious issues.
Multi-tasking?
No, now Mercer could think about a hundred things at once, a thousand things, and the speed and efficiency of thinking only depended on how much computational power he decided to allocate to the thoughts.
A blue phantom appeared.
The figure of Venus appeared beside Mercer.
Her eyes shimmered, and in those azure eyes made of data gazing into Mercer's, there seemed to be some 'obsessed' emotion.
Or rather, Mercer saw among the millions of data streams in her that conspicuous data stream representing emotions.
Almost at that same moment, he even empathized with Ultraman — compared to his current cognitive and thinking abilities, his sensory abilities as a human seemed pathetically weak.
The present Mercer felt like a futuristic cosmic supercomputer, and humans? Probably just abacuses.
Yes, Mercer didn't even think common human computational power could be described as a computer, at most an abacus.
Perhaps a hacker master like Lucy could be reluctantly seen by him as an old, outdated PC — but the gap between them was also evident.
Venus did not speak, nor made a sound, or perhaps, in the data space, communication was not based on those anyway, and now, in this state, it chose a more efficient and direct way of communicating.
That was directly initiating a data exchange transfer window to Mercer.
"You're so beautiful." The data she sent even came with emotionally enriched emotion codes, which meant 'admiration,' 'adoration,' 'awe.'
"Am I?"
Mercer looked down but did not feel much different from the past.
The only difference was the consciousness data core, almost imperceptible during deep dives, now surrounded by streams of consciousness data, dazzling in his view.
The immense computational power instinctively gathered around him, Mercer's body began to elevate uncontrollably, and he felt that perhaps now he was half the size of Ultraman. If a hacker broke in, they would probably only see a blue giant made of data.
"Yes, the posture of your data exchange, the feel of processing data... it's so beautiful."
Venus spoke words humans might never understand, but Mercer could instantly grasp her meaning.
He effortlessly shrunk his body, restored the stance during deep diving, looked at his hands and feet, and then condensed a mirror before him.
Through what looked like a mirror, actually an observation of the self-check program, Mercer patiently observed his own situation.
The data code representing emotions was a bit chaotic — indeed, his mind was quite complex now, especially since he was taking advantage of this astonishingly fast state of mind to spare some computational power to contemplate gender issues... skip, skip.
The data representing thoughts was flowing like a waterfall at the moment.
A human's thought like a stream, while Mercer at this moment was an entire roaring ocean.
Strings of rapidly flickering blue code signified Mercer's current speed of thought, and in comparison, Venus, using the same computational power, her calculation speed was significantly slower than his by more than a notch.
Mercer looked carefully, seeing his complex consciousness data enveloping the consciousness data core, which was quietly and stably congealing into a diamond shape amid the turbulent waves of data.
Slowly rotating, breathing with blue light.
Turning his head to look again, the AI data core inside Venus at this moment also seemed to have come alive, though the shape looked like... uh, a cat's head.
If Sasha saw this, she would probably scream — that there was an AI data core that looked like a cat's head? That's just too cute.
"Do you still feel like you are human now?" Venus curiously asked.