Volume 11: Memetic Crisis Chapter 543: Entering the Contaminated Area
Ke Lan checked her equipment one last time. The fifteen-second countdown on the heads-up display returned to zero at this moment and was reset to a new three-hundred-second countdown.
This was the "window time" reserved for them by the fire control system. He and Asano Akira had to cross the blank area before the 300-second countdown ended, otherwise they would be shot into sieves by the densely packed heavy machine guns behind them, and then crushed to ashes by several rounds of covering artillery fire.
"Walk!"
Ke Lan said to Asano Akira, striding forward.
A distance of three hundred meters, five minutes... To use a common joke on the Internet, "My grandma can get there even with a wheelchair" - but in fact, this road is not easy to walk on.
The road surface left behind after the violent demolition of the buildings in the block is not smooth, with all kinds of potholes and exposed pipeline tunnels... If you are not careful, you will miss a step and fall into the mezzanine.
Moreover, the supporting structures of the ground in many places have been severely damaged - these places seem to be intact on the surface, but in fact, only the top two-millimeter thick steel plate is still collapsed there , and the supporting frame and load-bearing platform below have broken and sunk. Ke Lan's own weight plus this set of power armor, as well as the weapons and ammunition he carries with him, weighs more than one ton. What's more, the contact area of his feet is not large, and the pressure on the ground is even higher. Such a thin steel plate cannot support him at all.
Directly below West Area 1 is not a residential area, but one of the core reactors that provides energy for the Ark. The various passages and pipes inside are as complicated as a maze. If there is no guidance robot, you may not be able to get out of it even with a blueprint.
If you're even more unlucky and hit some important flammable or explosive facility, you could even save the trouble of sending the body to the incinerator.
When they encountered such places, he and Asano Akira had no choice but to take a detour.
It was not until there were only forty-five seconds left in the countdown that the two of them finally reached the door of the institute's headquarters.
Ke Lan took out an iron-gray hard card with no patterns, words or designs on the surface and inserted it into the access control gate. Suddenly, a perfect circular hole with a diameter of about five meters appeared on the light curtain in front.
Depending on the level of the researcher, the permissions of their ID cards are different. The lowest level is white, which can only pass through the gate of the institute and the access control of the building of the department to which they belong under normal circumstances. Green cards and blue cards can go to more places than white cards. As for the purple cards held by professors, they can move freely in the entire institute headquarters except for a few confidential restricted areas.
Of course, this refers to normal circumstances. If an emergency occurs - such as now, then whether it is a white card or a purple card, it will directly become a "waste card". Only the red cards of the institute's management and the black cards held by the institute's dean and vice deans can retain their original permissions.
The "iron card" in Ke Lan's hand is held by the chief of the crisis management department. Its authority is equivalent to the black card of the director of the research institute, but in addition, this card also has the special authority to delete "black cards" and "red cards".
"Let's go." Ke Lan patted Asano Akira's shoulder and stepped across the light curtain first.
He found a communication interface post at the entrance and plugged the communication cable he had just unplugged into the post at the street corner. Because of the existence of the energy shield, neither wired communication nor laser communication could penetrate the shield and reach the outside. They had to rely on the communication interface post and the lines buried under the ground to keep in touch with the command center in the rear. Therefore, preserving this interface post became the first task after entering the contaminated area.
Ke Lan pulled out three folding brackets from his huge backpack and mounted three automatic machine guns with the communication interface pole as the center. Except for Ke Lan and Asano Akira who had identifiers, any moving objects that appeared within the range of these three machine guns would be fired without hesitation.
The ammunition belt uses a fifteen-unit active ammunition inserted into every three conventional incendiary bombs. Therefore, even if the target of the attack is the Seed of Erosion, a round of long bursts is enough to deliver a lethal dose of active ammunition into the target's body.
There are at least four hundred Seeds of Erosion at various stages sealed in the underground ice storage at the institute's headquarters, and at least a hundred "containers" frozen in ice coffins, all of them alive... Although it is unlikely that all of these Seeds of Erosion and containers will escape, no one can predict what accidents may happen if the entire institute's headquarters loses control.
"Next time we have this kind of experiment, we should do it in the wilderness." Ke Lan complained as he tightened the screws, "That way, even if something unexpected happens, at least the situation will be easier to clean up."
"There won't be a next time." Schroeder's voice came from the headset .
"Do you believe it? I don't believe it anyway... I dare say that many of those bastards in the countermeasures team should be targeting me now, right?"
"I can guarantee that from now on, the institute will strictly prohibit any projects related to you..."
"Don't talk nonsense. The crew would have issued this ban long ago. If they could abide by it, I wouldn't have to come here to clean up the mess, don't you think?" Ke Lan directly retorted Schroeder.
After tightening the last screw, Ke Lan knocked on the bracket with a wrench, and suddenly a crisp sound was heard.
"What's that sound? Is it gunfire? Did you encounter the enemy?" Schroeder asked nervously. In order to prevent the "meme" from spreading to the headquarters in the rear, the only communication information that Ke Lan and Asano Akira transmitted back in real time through the cable was sound and coordinates. As for things like images, they needed to be manually screened by Ke Lan and the parts with "memes" were mosaiced out using processing software before they were sent back to the rear.
"I didn't encounter any enemies. I was just checking whether the machine gun mount was firm." Ke Lan said as he turned on the sensor of the automatic machine gun. Several faint red lasers shot out from the muzzle, sweeping back and forth regularly in a fan-shaped range.
"To be honest, I don't think these three automatic machine guns can stop the monsters that escaped from the underground ice storage."
"The original plan was to send a team of autonomous robots to follow you into the contaminated area, but the targets of autonomous robots are too obvious, making them more likely to be attacked by monsters..."
"What you said... sounds like three machine guns that are more than one meter long and rotate back and forth are not conspicuous..." Ke Lan complained casually and started walking forward.
Asano Akira held the scabbard with one hand and the handle with the other, following closely behind him.
"Well... that's because..."
Schroeder obviously wanted to say something, but Ke Lan immediately interrupted him ruthlessly: "We are about to start moving forward, please remain silent to avoid causing interference."
Although both of their power armors were equipped with a large number of detection devices, what Ke Lan trusted most was Asano Akira's ears.
To be precise, Asano Akira's hearing is not a pure hearing - his main organ for receiving sound is not his ears, but the "thought tentacles" that spread out in all directions with him as the center.
As we all know, sound is a kind of wave. For a normal human, only when the sound wave is collected by the auricle along a medium such as air, and then transmitted along the external auditory canal to the eardrum, the eardrum and the ossicles amplify the vibration of the sound wave, and then through a series of complex conversion processes, the vibration is converted into neural electrical signals and transmitted to the auditory center. Only then can the human be considered to "hear" the sound.
As for Asano Akira, the sound waves were captured by those "mind tentacles" before they touched his body. Therefore, he could "hear " more and more clearly than ordinary people.
…
Less than a hundred meters ahead, a hellish scene appeared before Ke Lan's eyes:
Hundreds of research institute staff members were lying in disorder at the street corner, their iconic white coats were stained with dark red blood, and the buildings nearby were covered with dense bullet holes...
Before Ke Lan got close, he smelled a strong smell of blood. Even the breathing mask with its own filtering function could not completely eradicate the smell of blood in the air... The further he walked, the more corpses he saw. He could even clearly feel the sticky feeling on the soles of his feet with every step he took. Only a few hours had passed since these people were killed, and the flowing blood had not yet completely coagulated, forming a two-centimeter thick, sticky "pulp layer" on the ground.
"I have arrived at the first interface. There are at least 600 human corpses here, most of which are concentrated at the intersection." Ke Lan squatted down and reported to the rear command center while looking through the nearby corpses. "These corpses were killed by guns . I don't see any signs of 'meme' infection on them."
"These people should be the victims who appeared after the first batch of autonomous robots entered the contaminated area one and a half hours after the incident..." Schroeder said in a heavy tone, "Since autonomous robots cannot recognize 'memes', the AI automatically mistook the 'eyeballs' that were highly similar to the 'memes' as the target of attack... These people should have been killed by autonomous robots by mistake."
"Each of these people can be considered a valuable asset to the institute, right?" Ke Lan said, "For the scholars on the Ark, being able to enter the institute is almost the ultimate goal of this life... This thing is like the Ivy League in the old era. Any person who is taken out is a remarkable figure. But at this intersection, a group of human robots killed hundreds of them like chickens. The crew must be heartbroken, right?"
"Actually..." Schroeder hesitated for a moment, then continued, "Even if they were not killed by the autonomous robots, it would be difficult for them to survive. At that time, the entire contaminated area had been sealed off. According to regulations, it was impossible to let these people out. If they stayed in there, there would be only one outcome..."
"Infected." Lin Qiming's voice interrupted.
"Yes, according to the Undead Crew, they should have accepted the situation of zero survivors in the contaminated area." Schroeder continued, "Even if you encounter survivors asking you for help, you can ignore them. Please make sure to put the main task at the top priority."
"Just watch someone die without helping him?" Ke Lan asked as a supplement.
"……right."
"This is really extreme... Even if this incident can be successfully resolved, the institute will probably be seriously damaged..."
"In fact, it has already been severely damaged." Schroeder sighed, "Originally, the research institute had a total of 2,449 staff members, excluding security, general staff and engineering departments..."
"And now?"
"The only ones left now are the temporary response team..."
Ke Lan was stunned for a moment. He had visited the countermeasures team before. Including those "students" who had no right to discuss and could only watch from the sidelines, the entire countermeasures team had less than a hundred people... Although Ke Lan had never had a good impression of this group of lunatics, he had to admit that the Ark's current level of technology was entirely due to this group of lunatics.
In the fifty years since landing on Alpha, the leaps in human technology are equivalent to five hundred years on Earth, or even more. Although a large part of these developments come from the technology left over from the Alpha civilization, if it weren't for this group of people analyzing, transforming, and applying the Alpha civilization's technology, it would be very difficult for humans to even gain a foothold on this planet.
The loss of high-end talents is far more regrettable than the loss of property… These talents cannot be measured by numbers. It can even be said that each of them is a combination of genius and diligence. They are one in a million, rare and favored by heaven. No matter how many resources there are, it is not certain that such an expert can be cultivated… But now, this group of people have died in the blink of an eye, and only less than 10% is left.
Ke Lan felt that if he were sitting in the position of the Undead Crew, he would probably have fainted from anger.
"The inspection is completed. There are a total of 709 bodies at the street corner, and none of them are infected." Ke Lan put away his previous teasing tone and said seriously.
"receive."
"I'm going to keep moving forward, wait a minute--" Ke Lan had just stepped over a body lying face down on the ground, and suddenly stepped back.
"What's wrong?"
"A peculiar body was found... He was not killed by a gun."
"Has he been infected by the 'meme'?" Schroeder asked.
"No."
"Synchronous images."
"Yeah." Ke Lan nodded and entered a series of commands on the control terminal. A red warning border immediately lit up on the edge of his helmet display screen - this indicated that everything he was seeing was being transmitted back to the command center in the rear in real time.
If I see the "meme" carrier now, the entire crisis management department will probably be expelled... Ke Lan thought to himself, locking his eyes on the corpse on the ground.
To be precise, it is on these "two pieces" of the body.
The corpse was cut in half by something sharp, and the cut was very smooth...but the autonomous robots that entered the contaminated area were not equipped with such weapons.
