bioinnovel Chapter 412 Moral Dilemmas
Chapter 412 Moral Dilemmas
However, the precise rescue that the Iron Monger completed in 1.7 seconds was only seen by a few people who were closest to him.
Emily, sitting at the outdoor café, witnessed the moment the concrete slab was pushed aside.
Three teenagers hiding behind an overturned dining table witnessed Iron Monger's palm cannon melting the metal fragments that should have taken their lives into harmless particles.
But further away, amidst the surging crowds of Times Square, the truth was obscured by distance and panic.
"It's killing people! I saw it fire a shot!"
In the crowd, a man in a brown jacket shouted at the top of his lungs—it was Hydra Agent 7, whose mission was to create panic.
"That robot has gone out of control! The government is using robots to massacre civilians!"
Another woman's scream came from the opposite direction—Agent 12, who deliberately tore her sleeve and smeared it with pre-prepared blood plasma.
"Run! It's going to kill us all!"
"It's a demon! A metal demon that crawled out of hell!"
Hydra agents mingled in the crowd, using voice changers to deliver accusations from all directions. They didn't need everyone to believe them; they just needed to create enough confusion and suspicion.
And their strategy worked.
Fifty meters away from the Iron Monger, a middle-aged man held up his phone with trembling hands. In the camera's view, the Iron Monger's shoulder-mounted machine gun was firing, and people were falling in the distance—he couldn't see that the fallen were the attackers who had just launched rockets; he only saw a metal monster firing, and then someone died.
"God...it's really killing people..." he murmured, his fingers loosening their grip and the phone falling to the ground.
The ten-second video will be uploaded to social media in three minutes with the title "Live footage of the robot massacre in Times Square".
Further away, a young girl cried into the phone, "Mommy, that big robot is shooting! So many people are dying! I don't know what to do..."
Her voice traveled through the airwaves to the other side of the city, and panic began to spread.
Even those who were close enough to witness the Iron Monger's rescue efforts were now bewildered.
"But...it just saved us..." Emily tried to say to a man running away beside her.
"That's a trap!" the man roared without turning around. "Didn't you hear me? It's killing people! I saved you just to lower your guard! Run!"
Emily opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She looked at the Iron Monger—the three-meter-tall metal giant standing between the crowd and the danger zone, raising his hand in a "stop" gesture, while an electronic voice repeated the evacuation instructions.
Its posture is protective.
Its sound is soothing.
But the screams, cries, and accusations around her surged in like a tide, gradually drowning out the facts she had witnessed.
"But..." she wanted to say something else.
"No buts! Run!" Another passerby roughly shoved her.
Emily staggered a couple of steps, glanced at the Iron Monger one last time, then turned and merged into the fleeing crowd. A sliver of doubt lingered in her mind, but fear had already taken over.
This is the effect Hydra wanted.
Panic spread like a plague, and reason was drowned out by the clamor. Even those who saw the truth were as faint as whispers in a downpour.
Iron Monger is now facing a real crisis.
Its sensors clearly showed changes in the crowd's emotional index: the panic level soared from 67% to 89%, and the hostility level jumped from 12% to 41%. More and more people began to look at it as if it were a monster.
But it didn't have time to deal with these misunderstandings.
Because the second wave of attacks has already begun.
This time, the Hydra agents used a truly ruthless scheme.
The six agents split into two groups of three, occupying two high points on opposite corners of Times Square—one group on the fifth floor of an office building on the west side, and the other on the terrace of a hotel on the east side.
They weren't setting up rocket launchers, but rather more sophisticated remote-controlled missile launchers.
More importantly, their target selection was carefully calculated.
The first missile fired by the western group was not aimed at the Iron Monger, but at a crowd gathering point 30 meters northeast of the Iron Monger—where about 20 people were being evacuated under police guidance.
The ballistics indicated that if the Iron Monger missile was not intercepted, it would explode in the center of the crowd, with an estimated death toll of 15-18 people.
If the Iron Monger intercepts, the missile will be hit and explode eight meters above the ground, but the shrapnel from the explosion will rain down on the seven civilians below—who happen to be standing in a relatively open area with nowhere to hide.
The first missile from the eastern group was even more insidious: it was aimed at the exterior wall of a building forty meters southwest of the Iron Monger. The first floor of that building housed a flower shop, where five people were currently hiding. If the missile struck the building, the collapsing exterior wall would crush the people inside; if the Iron Monger intercepted it, the blast wave would shatter the flower shop's street-facing windows, and the flying glass would also cause fatal injuries.
This is not all.
The other agents in both groups had already loaded the second and third missiles, targeting a crowd gathering point further away.
This is a carefully designed moral dilemma:
Every target has been linked to innocent civilians.
Every choice can lead to injury or death.
The core of the Iron Man program, the instruction that "protecting civilians is the highest priority," has now become the chain binding it.
Its processor completed the simulation of all trajectories and consequences in 0.4 seconds.
Conclusion: No solution can achieve zero casualties.
However, there is a plan that can minimize total casualties.
That plan required it to do one thing: when the missiles were halfway through their flight, before they reached an irreversible position, to "collect" them all, and then use its body as a container to contain the explosion within itself.
But this requires it to be able to handle six targets simultaneously, to move to different locations in a very short time, and to have... flight capabilities.
Its right foot thruster was damaged.
The processor provided a final solution: take off at full speed, intercept as many missiles as possible during ascent, and use your own body as a barrier to contain the explosion at a high altitude.
Success rate: 37%.
Estimated probability of self-damage: 92%.
To implement or not to implement?
Iron Monarch glanced at the people it was protecting—Emily, who had questioned it earlier but ultimately ran away, was already fifty meters away; the mother holding the baby was being pulled away by a policeman towards a safe area; the three teenagers were crouching in the corner, one of the boys looking up at it with a complicated expression.
It also saw a crowd further away—hundreds of terrified faces pointing at it, cursing it, and fearing it.
No one was listening to its repeated evacuation instructions.
Nobody was watching the safety gestures it made.
Everyone believed the accusations: it was a runaway killing machine.
But it still made a choice.
The leg hydraulic system was operating at full power, and the mechanical structure groaned as if it were nearing its limit. Although the right foot's thruster was damaged, the basic energy storage spring could still function one last time.
The Iron Monger bent its knees, and the ground beneath its feet shattered like a spiderweb.
Then it jumped.
It wasn't elegant flight, but a pure, savage burst of mechanical power. The three-meter-tall body shot into the sky like a cannonball, its speed so great that it even created a brief low-pressure zone around it, whipping up a whirlwind.
When the first missile reached it, it was already twelve meters in the air.
It didn't grab with its hands, but instead rammed with its chest.
The dark gold breastplate precisely met the missile's pointed warhead, the angle of impact calculated to the millimeter to ensure it wouldn't immediately trigger the fuse. Simultaneously, its left arm lashed out like a whip, unleashing a palm-mounted blast—not to destroy the first missile, but to alter the trajectory of a second missile with a gentle shockwave, directing it towards itself.
The third one, the fourth one...
It twisted its body in the air, like a clumsy but determined giant metal bird, using its back, shoulders, and even its head to make contact with the deadly objects flying in.
It caught one—clamping the bullet with its deformed fingers.
It missed one by deflecting it with the armored side of its knee.
It even used its last bit of energy to create a weak electromagnetic field on its surface, attracting the guidance systems of the two missiles.
The entire process lasted 1.3 seconds.
It "collected" all six missiles and brought them to its side, with the closest point being only twenty centimeters from its armor.
Then, twenty-eight meters above the ground, just as the fuses of six missiles were about to trigger each other due to their close proximity—
The Iron Monger did one last thing.
It curls its body into a ball as tightly as possible.
To minimize the impact area of the explosion on the area below.
Try to keep the fragments inside your body as much as possible.
Then--
boom--------!!!!
It wasn't six separate explosions, but a single, massive, muffled roar that seemed to tear the sky itself apart.
The explosive charges of six missiles detonated simultaneously at extremely close range, creating fireballs over eighteen meters in diameter that turned the twilight sky a fiery orange-red. The shockwaves spread outwards like solid walls, shattering the windows of all buildings within a 150-meter radius.
The Iron Monger's figure completely disappeared in the center of the flames.
Burning debris fell like raindrops, mostly missile fragments and propellant residue.
But the largest piece—dark gold, covered in scorch marks and cracks, its shape still vaguely resembling some kind of mechanical structure—was falling from the sky, trailing black smoke and spinning.
The object crashed heavily onto the asphalt in the center of Times Square.
boom--! ! !
The deafening impact shook the entire ground. A crater five meters in diameter and one and a half meters deep was instantly created, and asphalt and concrete fragments flew outwards like shrapnel.
Smoke and dust billowed, enveloping half the square.
When Sitwell peeked out from behind the corner of the building where he was hiding and saw this scene, he finally couldn't help but chuckle softly.
"Finally... finally it's over!" He suppressed his voice, but the excitement in his tone was almost overflowing. "Self-destruct! Perfect ending! What advanced AI, what heavy armor, weren't they all crushed by human intelligence!"