Hunter of Mysterious Creature-Chapter 554 - 126: Sniper

Pear Blossom Mountain, southern slope.

The field agents searching for Yao Yu had already reached halfway up the mountain, where there were several abandoned orchards and many buildings—the villagers responsible for tending the pear trees spent most of the year living on the mountain. Besides that, warehouses for storing freshly picked pears were also built here.

Compared to the foot of the mountain, the terrain here suddenly became much more complex, significantly increasing the difficulty of the search.

"Prepare to release the all-terrain drone swarm," said the team leader over the communication channel.

Several field agents with half-human-height boxes on their backs stopped, squatted down, and opened the boxes with the help of their teammates.

Even from a few hundred meters away, Sun Hang could see clearly—a hundred mechanical spiders crawled out of the boxes, dispersing in all directions, immediately crawling into buildings that might become hiding places.

"S9 model all-terrain autonomous intelligent drones," the team leader explained to Sun Hang nearby, "each individual unit carried by a soldier contains 1,400 units, capable of covering a 300-meter radius of a complex area, especially suitable for search operations in urban areas with complicated terrain... the only downside is the relatively weak battery life; each drone, at full charge, can only operate at full power for 25 minutes."

"Is this thing fully automatic?" Sun Hang asked.

"The drones operate fully autonomously until a suspicious target is detected. Once a suspicious target is detected, the corresponding intelligent module is activated. It will automatically summon other drones within a certain range to repeatedly scan the area where the suspicious target is located and will notify the control terminal... that is, us," the team leader nodded, "so it’s quite difficult to deceive these little things."

"Then if you equip this thing with explosives, wouldn’t it be very useful?"

"Before such autonomous drones were successfully developed, someone already suggested this idea, but it was met with joint opposition from all walks of society... the vast majority hold the view that weapons capable of arbitrarily killing humans should not be entirely controlled by programs. Otherwise, if a program bug occurs or it gets infected by a virus one day, it would be an unimaginable disaster," the team leader laughed bitterly.

"Isn’t that right? I’ve read some literature describing modern warfare, and I remember before the massive invasion of the mysterious creatures into the human world, these types of drones were already used extensively on battlefields in human wars. Especially in the wars between the Siberian Federation and Rosenia, and between Hebrew and the Arabs, drones evolved into the mainstay of warfare, right? Initially, bombs were only equipped on modified civilian drones, but later small-caliber machine guns were mounted on mechanical dogs running wildly across battlefields, right? At that time, the Xiazhou Federation made huge profits by selling these drones."

"It’s different..." the team leader patiently explained, "those mechanical-dog-like drones were remotely controlled by humans from behind the battlefield. If the remote control is disconnected, the drones would immediately shut down."

"But autonomous drones are different; they don’t require human control. They follow pre-written program logic... Suppose you set a ’destroy target’ command for these drones, they might even fire on surrendering enemy soldiers or civilians, these situations are entirely uncontrollable. No matter how precisely the program is set, you can hardly guarantee that the drones will successfully distinguish between soldiers and civilians on a complex battlefield..."

"I think I understand... Humans don’t want their life and death to be in the hands of cold machines and programs; they can accept being killed by a similar being with warmth and a heartbeat, but can’t accept being slaughtered by mass-produced intelligent machines, is that what you mean?" Sun Hang summarized.

"That’s right." The team leader nodded, "That was the main reason for opposing the autonomy of unmanned weapons at the time... Some experts even believed that allowing machines to kill humans might even bring the ’intelligence crisis’ early. It’s just that no one expected..." 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"The intelligence crisis didn’t come; instead, the mysterious creatures invaded first," Sun Hang continued the conversation.

"Yes..." the team leader sighed, "However, although autonomous combat drones were not used in human wars, in the later stages of the mysterious creature wars, the Hezhong States across the ocean did deploy a large number of autonomous combat drones on the battlefield... In the early to mid-stage of the war, their army suffered heavy casualties and even did not have enough manpower to remotely operate the drones, so using autonomous combat drones to fill in the front line gaps was a forced measure..."

"And then?"

"There was no ’then’; drones offered minimal help in the war, and even some became infected with mysterious creature-like virus programs, with many combat drones turning sides before they even left the production plant... The most infamous was probably the ’Texas Insurgency Virus Incident’.

"Texas Insurgency Virus Incident?" Sun Hang glanced at the mountainside, knowing it would take some time for the field agents to finish searching the housing area. It was better to hear some stories than to wait in vain, "Let’s hear it."

"Based in Texas, ’Tristan Electric Industry’ was the largest drone manufacturing company in the Hezhong States at the time. Tristan had 24 factories in Texas, producing a third of the nation’s autonomous combat drones. This team leader in the Field Operations Department, having previously worked in the military drone field before joining the Mysterious Creature Research Institute, saw Sun Hang’s interest in these matters and enthusiastically continued the story.