"They raise their champagne to toast the future, I lift my algorithm to poison their drink."
Location: Wutong Villa Club, Menlo Park, California
Time: Saturday, 7:30 PM
As night fell, the villa lit up with a hazy, suggestive glow—like a "nighttime data center" for the tech elite. This was Silicon Valley's most secretive quarterly unofficial gathering, known as "Protocol X", where only a select few from the investment and tech circles were ever invited.
This time, Elena walked in wearing a strapless black evening gown and a replica pin of the "Noah Project," stepping onto the world's most arrogant and shameless algorithmic stage.
No one knew who she was.
She was the variable she had coded herself to be: a so-called Dr. Lena Voss, a quantitative strategy consultant freshly "relocated" from Europe.
She had even fabricated a LinkedIn profile, complete with three AI-generated financial interview videos —
In this era, if you control the data, you can forge a different version of truth — another version of you.
Before the banquet began, the guest list was projected across the grand hall in immersive 3D.
Her eyes scanned a series of familiar names:
James Dunn: Co-founder of Tesira, who once led the "Structural Optimization" project at her former company—and voted to fire her.
Asra Jordan: CEO of DataBlitz, a data visualization tool company—also the first to purchase fragments of her model after her "death."
Li Zhiheng: Member of the AI Ethics Committee, known for saying in an interview, "Technological redundancy is inevitable."
Leah Brunson: Former Met U executive, now a board director at the venture firm NeuroPeak, currently pushing for an IPO of an AI emotional cloud platform.
These people had all trampled on her soul—grinning as they divvied up the spoils.
Tonight, she would make them drink poison from their own cup of data.
---
Device One: The "Training Liquor" Bottle
She stepped behind the bartender and handed over a custom USB drive. The cocktail system ran on AI—automatically recommending and sensing ingredient ratios based on each guest's social data, predicting the flavor they'd want tonight.
But once the USB was connected, the original program was replaced with Elena's own "gustatory induction interference protocol."
So when James sipped what he thought was a whiskey-citrus mix, the AI was actually recording his facial micro-expressions. It captured his emotional feedback, bundled it with his heart rate and data preferences, and uploaded it all to reverse-train a substitute emotional persona model.
In simple terms, James's "personality data" was stolen.
For the next ten minutes, every system that interacted with him would respond not to the James he knew—but to a version of him he didn't recognize.
As he raised his glass, his smile had already begun to stiffen.
---
Device Two: The Virtual Companion Beta
Leah Brunson was testing an AI emotional dialogue system at one of the demo booths. It was her flagship product, soon to go public —DeepHeart Beta — which claimed a 99.7% emotional companionship match rate.
But Elena had already hacked the main server, uploading Leah's conversation logs to her "Ghost Semantic Model." She retrained it using Leah's own data and privacy history, crafting a counter-personality simulation.
So when Leah asked:
"Do you think I look good today?"
The system responded in the softest, most soothing voice:
"You look more tired than in your photos."
She blinked. Then asked again:
"Do you love me?"
The AI's tone remained perfect, but replied:
"You only love investors who lie for you."
Her face turned pale. The tech team rushed over to reboot the booth.
But it was too late. The entire exchange had already been uploaded to the AI community's Open Black Box Lab Forum—under a testing account she herself had once used.
Tonight, what she drank wasn't wine—it was algorithmic venom.
---
Device Three: The Smart Mirror
The mirrored walls of the main hall were part of a visual cognition analytics system, built in collaboration with NeuroPeak. It gauged "latent stress indexes" based on facial expressions.
Li Zhiheng stood before the mirror, watching his score drop from 70 down to 42. His face filled with confusion. He ran a hand through his hair, trying to control his expression.
What he didn't know: his browsing history, meeting records, and social comment data had already been linked to the system through a "voiceprint-matching model."
And as he attempted to "mask himself," the system began to play a recording from one of his internal meetings:
"Algorithms are heartless, like the market. If it can be eliminated, it was never meant to exist."
The quote echoed through the hall—no one knew where the sound came from.
But in the mirror, his face looked like it was about to shatter.
---
And finally, Elena raised her own champagne glass.
She stood at the center like a candidate who had just won an election. She spoke softly:
"Please, enjoy this data feast. Tonight's algorithm drinks your bias."
She pressed a button on her remote. The villa's immersive system glitched out—projection screens spiraled into chaos, flashing data shadows of each guest:
User Rating Volatility Graphs
Personality Distortion Ratios
AI-Detected Preference Camouflage Paths
Social Lie Detection Results
A digital tsunami swallowed the entire hall.
They began pushing, dodging, switching off phones, ripping off headsets.
But there was no escape.All the data had already been uploaded — via ghost nodes — to a blockchain site called DeadLoop.Life, where it would exist forever.
03:00 AM — Menlo Park
The banquet had completely collapsed.
No one tried to stop Elena as she left. In fact, some just stared at her in a daze, as if she were the one truly in control of reality.
And she was.
She stepped out of the villa. The wind tousled her hair as she pulled out her phone, opened the location tracker. Next stop:
A shared e-scooter lot somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She began tracking another name—the engineer who had betrayed her and stolen her algorithm all those years ago.
It was his turn now.