Volume 14: Devastation Chapter 655: General Archives
With the subtle sound of the mechanical gears turning, the elevator began to descend - Ke Lan could feel the feeling of weightlessness gradually increasing. Through the glass walls on both sides of the car, she could see that the shaft wall was rising rapidly, and one red indicator light after another flashed by.
The distance between each red indicator light in the elevator shaft was four meters. Ke Lan counted a total of 1,465 indicator lights before the car suddenly slowed down and then stopped.
This is the deepest part of the Black Well. If the No. 0 formation in the North Area is taken as the benchmark, the depth here is more than 5,800 meters.
It is located right in the center of the Ark.
The elevator door opened, and lights lit up one by one on both sides of the dark corridor ahead.
"You have arrived at the bottom of the Black Well, the main archive of Noah's Ark." said a cold mechanical female voice.
Obviously, technology has developed to the point where it is possible to synthesize virtual voices that are difficult to distinguish between real and fake, but why use such a stiff mechanical sound... Are those people in the Undead Crew trying to be retro? Ke Lan complained in his heart and walked forward.
Compared to the obsidian corridor in the core area conference room, this corridor made entirely of metal modules is much longer, but fortunately the entire passage is completely straight, with no bends or forks, so there is no need to worry about getting lost in it.
The soles of Ke Lan's boots stepped on the solid metal base, making a "tapping" sound. The sound spread far away along the corridor, and then turned into an echo and reverberated back.
There was a faint smell of rust in the air.
Ke Lan vaguely heard a rustling sound above his head. Looking up, he found a dozen mechanical spiders clinging to the two walls. Those eye-like monitors emitted a bloody dark light, and the metal limbs made a creepy sound when rubbing against the wall... If a timid guy was here, he would probably turn around and walk towards the elevator immediately.
As if noticing that Ke Lan had noticed these mechanical spiders, the mechanical female voice spoke again: "These autonomous spider robots are part of the Black Well Guard force and are directly controlled by the core mastermind."
"Using robots as guards...is it because you don't trust humans?" Ke Lan complained.
Perhaps the AI didn't know how to respond to this complaint, and the mechanical female voice did not respond.
What a stupid AI... Ke Lan secretly complained. Imperfect artificial intelligence can be completely classified as artificial mental retardation. The AI that manages Heijing ca n't speak as well as the smart housekeeper in his previous residence. Who knows which third-rate programmer trained it.
"Aren't these autonomous mechanical guards afraid of being invaded by viruses, Trojans, or something like that?" Ke Lan asked again.
"Virus programs cannot pass through the firewall of the core brain." The AI's answer was stupid...well, or rather, very formulaic.
"Oh, really?" Ke Lan muttered. Now that the other party said so, he felt a little itchy... If he had time someday, he would try to attack the firewall of his own core brain?
If it had been in the past, this kind of behavior would have been no different from courting death, but now that Ke Lan has officially become a member of the Undead Crew, everything is naturally different.
Finally, Ke Lan reached the end of the corridor.
A circular airtight door with a diameter of more than 30 meters. There is no handle, keyhole or password button on the door. There are only dozens of palm-deep grooves. Ke Lan initially thought that these grooves were modeled after the places used to place energy crystals in the Alpha ruins, but in comparison, these grooves are much larger... If you want to fill them up, even if you use the lowest-level first-level crystals, it will take hundreds of pieces to fill one groove.
What's more, there are a total of sixty such grooves on the circular airtight door. It's just a door, not a battleship engine. If opening the door once requires consuming such a large amount of energy crystals, Ke Lan would only think that the person who designed this thing has a hole in his brain.
"It can't be a sensor door, right?" Ke Lan thought to himself and walked forward.
The airtight door did not open directly, but the autonomous mechanical spiders clinging to the wall suddenly moved.
"Huh?" Ke Lan discovered that these mechanical spiders crawling towards the airtight door were not exactly the same as the ones he had seen along the way. On their metal limbs, there were several "golden fingers" closely arranged.
Of course, the golden finger here does not refer to the cheap plug-ins used by many protagonists in online novels, nor is it the gun-holding gesture of novices that is prone to accidental discharge, but the common name for the gold-plated conductive contacts exposed at the interface of plug-in electronic devices.
Ke Lan had vaguely guessed how to open this circular airtight door.
Just as he expected, the sixty mechanical spiders corresponded to the sixty grooves on the door. According to the numbers on the internal chips, they drilled into each groove and inserted the metal limbs into the tiny holes at the bottom of the groove.
“Crack…”
A teeth-grinding friction sound came from behind the door, and the heavy metal airtight door slowly rolled to the side, revealing the entrance in front of Ke Lan.
This way of opening the door is indeed cool, but it is flashy and full of security risks. As a hacker, Ke Lan has always been distrustful of electronic devices, especially smart electronic devices. In his opinion, any program written with 1 and 0, no matter how meticulous, will inevitably have loopholes.
There is no program in this world without vulnerabilities . If there is, it’s simply because your skills are not high enough to discover it.
The more complex and intelligent a program is, the more vulnerabilities it will have.
Suppose Ke Lan traveled to a post-apocalyptic zombie novel and happened to activate a novice gift pack. Two guns were placed on the wall in front of him for him to choose: one was the HK-G11 rifle, which had a mechanical structure as precise as a watch, integrated the essence of Greater Germany's industrial standards, was expensive and well-made, and had epoch-making consciousness and advanced design concepts; the other was a Kalashnikov assault rifle that came from the industrial assembly line of a regular military factory in Eastern Europe and had almost no shining points except for its toughness. Ke Lan would choose the latter without hesitation.
The reason is that the former's mechanism is too precise, and being too precise means being delicate. It has extremely high requirements for dust and water resistance, and its own disassembly, maintenance and care are very time-consuming. Small parts are also easy to lose and damage, and it is difficult to find replacements if they are lost...
This is true for physical machines and also for virtual programs.
Ke Lan, who had been complaining in his heart all the time, stepped over the 30-meter-high circular doorway and entered the room.
Rather than a room, it would be more accurate to call it a hall... or an underground square.
This was a huge space. Under the light, the farthest point that Ke Lan could see was only about 300 meters, but he still could not see the other three walls.
The wall behind him extended into the shadows beyond his sight.
In this square, there are countless metal cabinets, each of which is filled with hard drives packed in black anti-magnetic boxes.
Seeing the hard drive, Ke Lan couldn't help but think of the hundreds of TB of treasures he had stored in the hard drive - before each mission, he would delete all of these things and the browser records completely, and then download them back bit by bit after he returned from the ruins alive.
"I am not afraid of being torn to pieces, I just want to keep my innocence in this world." There is some truth in this poem.
There are two ways of death at this time, one is called physical death and the other is called social death.
But now it seems that the Undead Crew must have collected a lot of information about me - let alone those seeds and pornographic pictures, I'm afraid these guys even know exactly what XP I like.
Thinking of this, Ke Lan's face turned red, but then returned to normal.
As long as you are not embarrassed, then others will be embarrassed. The most despicable person is invincible... The "thick" in "thick black theory" refers to having a thick skin.
Once I accept that I am a hentai, I will be invincible.
Ke Lan looked around and saw many clear steel stamped inscriptions on the ground. Those were the times when the files were sealed. The files on the shelves in front of him were sealed in the fourth month of the ninth year of the new era.
Wuhu, it turned out to be the file after the Ark just set sail——
Although he was very eager to learn about these secrets that were so old that they could even be called "ancient", he came here today for more important things... If he wasted his time and energy on unimportant things, with the capacity of this archive, he might not be able to finish reading even a corner of the archives until the damaged part of the Ark was completely repaired.
In the ninth year of the New Era, even the Undead Crew had not yet appeared, and the possibility of the existence of clues and secrets was basically zero.
Ke Lan walked along the chronological order. For some reason, with every step he took, he seemed to be able to feel the time that had long passed but had left a page of silhouette behind.
The number of files varies from year to year. In years with more work, there are more files left, and in years with less work, there are fewer files left. But even in the most "quiet" years, there are at least a dozen cabinets full of files.
Through the label on the anti-magnetic box, Ke Lan could tell that most of these files were data on the Ark's supplies and population changes... In addition, there was a large portion of observation records of the Earth and the solar system in the early archives. As the years went by, these observation records gradually decreased until they completely disappeared in the year 107 of the new era.
The people on the Ark watched with their own eyes as their former home, the Earth, was swallowed up by the aging and expanding sun.
As to why the Sun evolved from a yellow dwarf to a red dwarf billions of years in advance, there are many different opinions in the academic community, but there is still no definitive conclusion.
This topic was once a forum experience package, but with the passage of time, the memory of the Earth, the Sun and the solar system gradually faded in the memories of generations, and the popularity of this topic gradually disappeared like a star reaching the end of its life.
Now only in astronomy-related forums will someone occasionally mention this matter - for the vast majority of people on the Ark, the sudden decay of the sun is actually no different from stories such as "Nuwa mending the sky", "Jingwei filling the sea", and "Gonggong angrily hitting Mount Buzhou".
As for the disappearance of official observation records, it was probably because in the 107th year of the New Era, the Ark had left the solar system far enough away that human observation equipment could no longer see the solar system.
Ke Lan was also very interested in the Ark's navigation records, but if this thing was converted into file capacity, it would probably take 100 million TB as the unit. Even a supercomputer would get stuck when reading these files, not to mention the efficiency of the human brain.
With a sigh, Ke Lan continued to move forward in the progressive order of the years.
About half an hour later, he found an "empty space".
Among the filled shelves surrounding it, this open space, about the size of two football fields, stands out.
Not only are there no hard drives to store files, there are even empty cabinets and shelves.
"strangeness?"
Ke Lan lowered her head and looked at the ground.
According to the numbers on the inscription, this open space should have been filled with the archives of the 499th year of the New Era.
But those files have disappeared.
"This year... this year...!!!" Ke Lan tried hard to recall in his mind what happened in the 499th year of the new era. In an instant, his whole body trembled violently.
The 499th year of the New Era is a year that will go down in history for the Ark and for mankind.
This year, Ark observed a natural wormhole hidden at the edge of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way... Of course, when Ark discovered this wormhole, it was already impossible to escape the gravity of this wormhole...
Fortunately, the Ark finally successfully passed through the wormhole and successfully arrived at the extragalactic star region that had never been seen by human vision.
The Ark paid a huge price to cross the wormhole, but fortunately, the human fire still exists.
"Why did all the archives of the year 499 of the New Era disappear? A lot of things that happened in this year can be found in public archives, so why are they not here?" Ke Lan was full of doubts.
This doesn't make sense.
He walked back and forth in the open space and discovered a new suspicious point.
There are holes reserved for bolts in this open space, and those bolts are used to fix the metal cabinets that hold the hard drives.
There used to be rows of shelves here, which might have been filled with black anti-magnetic boxes.
But now, they have been moved.
