LRAB Chapter 86 This seems a bit too extreme.
Chapter 86 This seems a bit too extreme.
Chapter 86 This seems a bit too extreme.
Joey doesn't look like the authoritative person he is, especially considering he has a young face.
Before he went berserk in the fight, he looked even more ordinary than Clark Kent.
However, sometimes a person's authority does not come from their appearance or temperament, but from what they have done.
Captain Atom knew that Joey was threatening him, and that Joey had enough power to make the threat a reality.
But the word "surrender" is still too harsh for a soldier.
Wonder Woman tightened her grip on the lasso:
"Surrender. Don't mistake the mercy that Superman has bestowed upon you for weakness."
Before the lasso of truth that can see through all the fog of the mind, there is no one with a firm will.
Wonder Woman could have easily subdued Captain Atom with the power of her lasso, but she held back, ensuring that everything Captain Atom said next was from his own will:
"A true soldier never surrenders."
Captain Atom raised his head high, along with Wonder Woman's Vulcan sword, but then he uttered a crucial sentence:
"But I'm not willing to fight for those three thousand people you mentioned."
Joey quickly raised his hand to stop Wonder Woman's movement:
"Let him go, Diana."
Why do all the heroes in this world seem to be sick?
Wonder Woman, who was supposed to bring peace and quell wars, is quite bloodthirsty, while Aquaman, who was supposed to connect land and sea, is typically clueless.
And now Captain Atom is a stubborn guy. If he had been half a second slower in speaking, Wonder Woman might have already cleaved him in two with a single sword strike.
Well, achieving half of the goal is enough.
Joey looked at Captain Atom, who had regained his freedom, and tried to extract some information from him:
"Think about where your wife and daughter might be protected, help me narrow down the search, and I can find them faster."
"No, you should be thinking more about how to secure your throne as a conqueror in the future."
Captain Atom rejected Joey's questions and good intentions. At this moment, having chosen to compromise with Joey, he was freed from constraints in every sense:
"As for them? That has never been a problem."
As Captain Atom said before, he was never coerced into taking this step—finding them from a safe house was not difficult for Captain Atom at all.
Captain Atom knew perfectly well what those people meant by "protection," but he still spontaneously chose to fulfill his own responsibility.
But now he has abandoned this responsibility.
This is the good and bad of compromise. The good is that, from a pragmatic perspective, both sides avoid war at this moment, which does make things seem like the best of both worlds. The bad is that no one gets a heroic ending.
Superman has become a despicable butcher who threatens others with massacres, while I have become a cowardly deserter. I chose to back down this time, so what if next time, after Superman obtains that supreme power, he gradually becomes like those insects, or even worse?
Would he still have the courage to face Superman again then? Captain Atom is pessimistic about this.
However, Captain Atom had no other choice at this moment. The vast difference in power between the two sides meant that he could only entrust the survival of the entire world to the collective morality of the other party and that small group.
"Stop frowning, Nathan. I recognize that look on your face. You always look this stupid when you're thinking about moral issues."
One of the steel skeletons flew over from the horizon, interrupting Captain Atom's reverie:
"You can think about those boring moral questions when you get home with your Angela. Whether you admit it or not, the existence of people like you and me blurs the lines between morality and right and wrong."
I'm so sorry for what happened just now.
'
Captain Atom looked at Cyborg, who was now nothing but a machine, and belatedly realized the terrible thing he had just done, to the point that he didn't know how to apologize.
According to his calculations, he should have already died in the battle with Superman by now.
Cyborg interrupted Captain Atom's confession; at this moment, the destruction of a body was not a significant loss to him.
"I should be thanking you. You helped me break free from the limitations of my physical body—go now and spend some quality time with your family."
Whether Earth will even exist a week from now is a question.
Watching Captain Atom leave, Joey and everyone present began discussing how the entire plan should work.
Wonder Woman and Aquaman must be excluded from the plan; the political significance of their identities as the Amazon Queen and the ruler of Atlantis is too great, as any change in one would have far-reaching consequences.
Force is a means, not an end, and its source must be carefully chosen when using it.
As for Starfire, her peaceful nature as a Tamaran prevented her from harming him. As for Shazam, Joey glanced at him and saw that he was currently locked in a fierce battle with Black Yadang, with neither side gaining the upper hand.
As for the Batman from another universe and the recently "resurrected" Hawkgirl, Joey just hopes they won't cause trouble, otherwise the prison will need two more VIP suites.
After all the calculations, only Cyborg and Joey remained.
"Not just two people, but an entire army."
Cyborg pointed to the tens of thousands of robots behind him: "These machines are only a little vulnerable to you. In small-scale firefights with conventional armed forces, they are practically invincible and endless."
To be honest, Cyborg was reluctant when Joey told him that there were 3268 people on the list.
After all, Cyborg is just a conservative.
After Cyborg initially aggregated the information flow on the internet, he, like Joey, also pulled up a list in his memory.
This was something that was not difficult for either of them.
In such a modern, interconnected society, coupled with a group of idiots who, even when engaged in classified activities, are happy to turn on their webcams every day to post on Facebook or TikTok, the entire North America holds almost no secrets for Cyborg.
If Cyborg wanted to, he could monitor everyone in front of the camera via the internet. Obviously, Superman could do the same thing, without even needing to rely on the internet like he does.
This Kryptonian is a living god on earth.
On this planet, who is innocent, and who is guilty? Who deserves to be tried, and who deserves to be forgiven?
For Cyborg and Superman to reach a conclusion is just a matter of a single thread, a single thought.
As for putting it into action, that's even simpler.
This is supreme and absolute power.
The implications of this absolute power have surpassed the sociological research accumulated by humankind over thousands of years, entering an unknown realm that even steel bones cannot calculate.
This is also why Steelbone thinks that 3268 people is still a bit inappropriate, as it does not meet the expectations of the conservative Steelbone after calculation.
This number is a bit too conservative.
Unlike Joey, who relies solely on a fleeting moment of visual observation, Cyborg can see the present and the past existing throughout the entire internet in the cyber world.
This resulted in him compiling a file as large as three million bytes even when storing characters using the least efficient ASCII encoding.
Under the ASCII encoding rule, one letter occupies one byte, which means that Steelbone has pulled out a list involving hundreds of thousands of people.
The moment Captain Atom destroyed half of his human body, Cyborg's mind began to roam freely in cyberspace, just as he had said, no longer restricted by that half of his flesh and blood.
Although Superman's eyes can see through the entire Earth, his vision is still too short-sighted. Solving the problem of just over three thousand people cannot solve any real issues.
Since you've already chosen to step into the abyss, why only take a small taste and stop?
Rather than being too lenient in the early stages and getting bogged down later, it's better to nip the problem in the bud from the start.
So Cyborg directly projected his own list:
"Superman, I'd like to make a 'small' change to the list you mentioned."
Looking at the list that stretched out to cover almost half of Gotham's sky and contained 260,000 names, Joey suddenly felt that his list was indeed a bit too conservative.
Each name on the screen is followed by a list of specific crimes committed by that person, along with the evidence that could lead to their conviction. From a practical standpoint, this is practically perfect.
But things started to look off from the middle of the list. Many of the people listed didn't have any criminal record; at most, they had only committed some minor violations.
"What are those things, steel skeletons? Does speeding, not getting your car inspected, or illegal parking count as heinous crimes?"
Steel Bone quickly scrolled down the list, and everyone on the subsequent lists had a clean resume, without any blemishes:
"The vast majority of people on these lists are those who will be incited to rebel against us within the next 120 hours, with an average probability of over 33.34%."
Caught off guard, Joey was startled and quickly reached out to stop Cyborg from showing the rest of the list.
Joey knew that he and the others around him could not become heroes in the traditional sense, but there was no need for them to become end-generation heroes directly.
"Stop! Stop! We want to establish a new order, but not this kind of new order!"
At this moment, Joey suddenly realized that the half-mechanical, half-flesh Cyborg body that Captain Atom had destroyed earlier might actually be Cyborg's 'body' in a sense.
That half of Cyborg's flesh and blood brain was definitely not just a decoration under normal circumstances; the difference in thinking between a cyborg and a pure cybernetic was beginning to show at this moment.
Without a physical body to balance his reason, Cyborg, a pure cyber consciousness living in cyberspace, seems to have become a bit too extreme.
"Watch your reason and consciousness, Cyborg. You may not realize it yet, but your thinking has completely run wild."
Human society is driven by emotion and chaos; it is not a matter of readily apparent algorithms and programs.
Fortunately, Cyborg was quick to grasp the concept. After rapidly calculating the feasibility of the plan after eliminating Superman and considering the power difference between himself and Superman, he realized this in time:
"After considering feedback and revising my action strategy, I think I might need some hormones to balance my thinking."
Joey now just wants to precisely eliminate the termites at the top of the towering tree and take good care of it.
To prevent insects from breeding on the tree again, Steel Skeleton plans to cut off the entire trunk and replace it with stainless steel once and for all.
If Cyborg had implemented his plan, they wouldn't even have to wait for the Kryptonians to arrive; Joey's little gang would probably have had to start a war with the entire world first.
At this moment, Joey felt that the information flow that erupted when Barbatos collided with him was indeed true regarding the Dark Multiverse.
Almost everything in this world is forcibly heading towards collapse. The entire universe is not only a train rushing towards a cliff, but even everyone in the carriage wants to rush into the driver's cab and slam on the gas pedal twice more!
Joey arrived just in time, stepping on the brakes in the cockpit while waving his fists to stop anyone outside who wanted to accelerate. Otherwise, this world would probably have been recycled and rebuilt by the World Watcher Barbatos long ago.