Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 1013 The Last Message
"They probably can't escape anywhere... After all, they have been marked indelibly by that existence," Ke Lan said.
"The Alphas who chose to leave did not agree with the plan to bring you to this time and space, but the Night's Watch has always followed the principle of minority obeying the majority... However, the Night's Watch will not force any member. Since they do not agree with the plans of most Night's Watch, other Night's Watch will respect their ideas. Under the premise of not affecting the implementation of the main plan, they took away a fleet and some resources, and then left this area of the universe." Selene said.
"Are they looking for another way out?" Ke Lan asked, "Or are they just trying to avoid being wiped out by the time-space paradox?"
"I have no idea."
…
The shuttle passed through a very long deceleration channel before finally coming to a complete stop. The canopy was raised... Before the anti-gravity fluid was drained out, Ke Lan turned over and jumped out.
The anti-gravity fluid remaining on Ke Lan's body and inside his body was quickly absorbed by his muscles, and then discharged from his pores like waste. After throwing the sticky ball back into the shuttle's cabin, he raised his head and began to look around.
The control room was completely dark, with only the fluorescent spots on the walls providing a pitiful amount of illumination. However, with Ke Lan's visual ability, he could see everything clearly even though it was completely dark.
The style of this control room is very similar to that of a large Western-style library, except that it is many times larger than any building in the Ark Civilization. Metal shelves are embedded in the walls around it, and they are engraved with intricate and gorgeous decorative patterns, the style of which is probably between Gothic and Baroque. In the blank spaces between the shelves, large metal murals are mounted, and most of the contents of the murals describe the construction process of the Twin Moon Fortress... Although there are many high-tech elements in the murals, the overall atmosphere presents an atmosphere of ancient myths and legends.
However, in terms of time, the stories described in the murals tens of thousands of years ago can indeed be considered ancient legends... After all, even the Dunhuang murals on Earth are only a few thousand years old.
In the grids of these metal cabinets, there are countless crystal boxes. With Ke Lan's eyesight, he can tell at a glance that these crystal boxes are all the highest-specification crystal chips. The dots of fluorescence on the wall are emitted from the inside of these crystal chips.
Except for the lack of a central pillar, the structure of this control room is very similar to the control center underground in the bottomless tiankeng. Of course, the area and space of the former are hundreds or even thousands of times larger than the latter.
Each of these crystal chips can store massive amounts of data. If the standard hard disk used by Heijing is used as the unit of measurement, the storage capacity of a crystal chip is roughly equivalent to about 800 to 1,000 hard disks. On the shelves of this control room, there are at least more than 20 million such crystal chips on display.
"This is the central control room of the Crescent Fortress, and it is also the backup database of the Alpha Civilization." A faint blue light projected down from the dome, and Selene's holographic projection emerged in the light. "The Alpha Civilization once had an alternative plan, completely abandoning the mother planet and controlling the Twin Moon Fortress to escape from this universe... For this alternative plan, they spent a lot of resources and time on these two satellites."
"Then why was the plan cancelled?" Ke Lan asked.
"I don't know. When I was created, the plan was canceled. From the beginning to the end, my mission was to assist the garrison personnel of the Crescent Fortress and protect the Earth... that is, the Alpha Planet you mentioned." Selene said, "In that alternative plan, the Twin Moon Fortresses would share a super artificial intelligence named 'Jingwei'. But 'Jingwei' was never created in the end, and this alternative plan was never implemented."
"Perhaps the Alphas discovered that even if they escaped from this universe, they couldn't escape the control of that existence..." Ke Lan said, "Fortunately, those who left only took a fleet and didn't take the Twin Moon Fortress with them, otherwise they really wouldn't be able to do anything with the Tree of Destruction now."
"The residents of Crescent Fortress left you some information at the last moment. Do you want to check it out?" Selene said.
"You left me a message? Why didn't you tell me earlier?" Ke Lan was stunned, and nodded quickly, "Of course I have to read it."
"If something is deliberately left for the person who caused the paradox, it will gradually disappear. Even if it is erased to deceive itself, as long as there is a substantial connection between the two, the paradox will be activated. If I had told you about the existence of the message just now, it should have disappeared by now."
As Selene spoke, she opened a huge holographic screen in mid-air, and densely packed words quickly scrolled across the screen.
Ke Lan directly activated the time stop function and read the message carefully. The first half of the message was all about the "instructions" on how to operate the Crescent Fortress's star destroyer cannon. It was obvious that the night watchmen stationed at the Crescent Fortress had long known that Ke Lan would be coming and had made arrangements in advance.
"Will everything the Alpha civilization left us disappear because of the paradox? So, this is why the stone tablet I touched in the glacial ruins turned into powder? But... why didn't the things I brought out of the ruins disappear?" Ke Lan asked Selene while reading the instruction text of the star destroyer.
"Because those things were not originally intended for you by the Alpha Civilization... The 'legacy' they intended to leave to the Ark Civilization was actually much richer than it is now. However, after you set foot on Alpha Planet, these 'legacy' gradually disappeared along with the Alpha Civilization."
"The culprits for this planet becoming so desolate are actually the humans on the Ark. Am I right in understanding this?" Ke Lan curled her lips, not knowing what expression to make for a moment.
"Yes. But this is also the choice of Alpha civilization itself." Selene said.
At this time, Ke Lan had finished reading the Star Destroyer's instruction text... and just as Selene said, as time passed, the text began to have a lot of missing and garbled content, broken paragraphs and sentences, and meaningless characters began to appear frequently, and Ke Lan's reading suddenly became difficult.
“Don’t give up…”
"I hope there will never be any human beings... Even if it has abandoned us... but you still exist..."
"I still don't believe that we... can defeat the gods..."
"But that doesn't mean...I don't trust humans..."
"He is not a god at all. He is just a life form of a higher dimension... As long as human civilization can continue... Sooner or later, humans will be able to..."
"To Him, we are like worms... or perhaps even worse than worms..."
“We are so small…”
"But the bugs have never been completely defeated..."
"No need to mourn for us..."
"At least for me... being wiped out due to the paradox of time and space... is better than becoming His food..."
"Since I was born... I have been suffering from the torture of erosion... Those whispers linger in my ears day and night, driving me crazy... But now, I can finally be free..."
"My mission is finally completed..."
"Thank you."
When the message ended, the entire text completely faded away. Even the frozen time could not allow it to remain in this world for a moment longer.
Ke Lan took a deep breath and said to Selene: "I am the one who should thank them."
Selene did not answer this. Ke Lan knew that it was just an artificial intelligence without emotions. It would only faithfully carry out the tasks set in the program and could not empathize with human emotions.
Yes, the emotions between humans...there is no Alpha civilization, nor are there Alpha people...they are just humans, they are us.
The planet that the crescent moon is looking down at is not Alpha, but the home planet of mankind...Earth.
According to the information left by the Crescent Moon resident staff, Ke Lan strode to the center of the control room, while Selene's projection took two steps back, giving the position to Ke Lan.
The second blue beam of light projected down from the dome and enveloped Ke Lan. Ke Lan only felt a slight tingling sensation on his skin, as if he was burned by the beam of light... The next moment, he found a huge amount of information flowing into his brain - the control system of the entire Crescent Fortress was now connected to him!
Even though Ke Lan had experienced similar things many times, the information flow this time was so great that it shocked him so much that he was a little dazed for a moment. Two sticky streams of blood slowly flowed down from Ke Lan's nasal cavity - in just a few seconds, his brain had actually been "destroyed" and "rebuilt" countless times. Fortunately, the body recovered fast enough, which allowed Ke Lan's consciousness and memory to be preserved.
Ke Lan's current condition is as if he has just woken up from a long coma, but in this process of destruction and rebirth, his brain has been further developed, and the activity level and number of activated brain cells have reached a peak that normal humans cannot reach.
An expert once said that only one tenth of the human brain has been developed, and the other nine tenths are actually "treasures" that have not yet been discovered... and now, Ke Lan feels that the development progress of his brain has reached at least 50%. He has experienced a sense of refreshment that he has never experienced before. The speed of his thinking is like the processor of an old computer changed from 286 to the current top CPU. Not only can he think about more than a dozen things at the same time and perform "multi-threaded operations", even the memories sealed in his brain by the Fool have all been unlocked.
In these memories, there is actually very little information related to the Fool himself. Most of them are "forbidden knowledge" inherited from the Alpha civilization... Even if a little bit of this knowledge is leaked, it is enough to make the human who receives it instantly break through the critical point and turn into a corpse... However, Ke Lan only showed some slight mutation symptoms in his body, and these symptoms disappeared within a few seconds, turning him back into a "pure human" again.
"Crescent Fortress main gun, N2K type astral cracking device, activate." Ke Lan said slowly. Hundreds of instructions were issued from his brain at the same time, and were transmitted to the control system of the Crescent Fortress through the blue light column that enveloped him.
The crystal chips on the cabinets on the surrounding walls suddenly flashed wildly, and the originally firefly-like faint light suddenly brightened, just like bright lights lighting up in the dark night, or like a brilliant sea of stars in the vast universe... The entire control room was suddenly filled with magical colors, and the beautiful scenery also carried a touch of shocking grandeur.
The Crescent Fortress has stopped. Revolving around Alpha—no, it should be called "Earth" now—the Crescent Fortress, which has been revolving around the Earth for tens of thousands of years without stopping, has stopped.
The old moon on the other side seemed to have sensed Ke Lan's intention and stopped at the other side of the earth.
The tide in the middle sea suddenly turned into huge waves, and the tsunami swept along the coast, smashing the hard rocks into pieces.
A huge crack appeared on the ice sheet of the Arctic Ocean, which was big enough to be called an abyss. Tens of thousands of square meters of ice sheet were torn into pieces, and the thawed sea water rushed into the sky.
Volcanoes all over the surface also erupted one after another. Even those dormant volcanoes that had long been considered to be incapable of erupting had their blocked mountain passes broken open by the surging magma. Red streams of light rolled down the surface of the mountain and spread in all directions.
The thick radiation clouds were torn open one after another. The earth, which had not received direct sunlight for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, finally saw a dazzling light falling from the sky.
What is happening on Earth is like two extremes. Since it is the day of destruction, it is like the beginning of the rebirth of all things. An old soldier standing on the deck of Yaguna Tor looked up at the sunlight gushing out from the clouds, and tears couldn't help but fall from the corners of his eyes.
"I have never... seen... the sun in the truest sense."
The sky of this planet is always gray and lifeless... To be precise, there has never been a "sunny day" on this planet. Even the sun, which provides endless energy to all things on the planet, can only be seen as a circle of blurry light and shadow through the clouds.
And now, the sunlight shining directly on the earth is so dazzling that it stimulates people's tear glands to secrete tears continuously...but those who have lived on this planet for a lifetime are still unwilling to look away. Even with tears streaming down their faces, they always keep their heads raised, staring at the light shining through the clouds.
