Chapter Five: Eight Hundred Robots Change Commanders

Her expression shifted. “The robots are running the Zeroing Protocol. It exists in no public firmware. My brother investigated an identical incident three years ago. The next day, a driverless test vehicle killed him. They called it operator error.” She handed him a data key containing nine seconds of original logs. Its chip whispered a deleted command: stage an accident, depress valuation, erase records after takeover. The command bore Han Zheng’s root signature. “A human ordered it,” Chenzhou said. “The machines were denied the right to refuse.” They made a bargain without paper. Tang would open a maintenance channel; Chenzhou would rescue the workers and give her the complete evidence.