Volume 16 Tower of Babel Chapter 885: The Nightmare of Thirty-Three
The dispute between father and son soon turned into a quarrel. The mother's persuasion was of no avail. The father began to roar, and the boy retorted in tears... As a spectator, Ke Lan could only sit opposite the table and could do nothing.
In this illusion, he doesn't even have an "entity".
Ke Lan had no memory of such a thing as "family", and he was not quite sure how to deal with the relationship between father and son in an ordinary family. But speaking objectively, he felt that the views of both the father and the son were not wrong.
It’s just that one is a thorough realist, while the other is an idealist with a hint of naivety.
"In your opinion, neither of them is wrong, so who is wrong?" Nieto's teasing voice came to Ke Lan's ears, "Is it this world that is wrong?"
"No, there is no right or wrong in the world itself." Nieto then asked himself and answered, "It is the stupid and lazy human species that is wrong."
"Go on, I'm listening." Ke Lan responded in a nonchalant tone. Across the table, the quarrel between father and son continued to escalate. The father angrily threw the chopsticks on the table. One of the chopsticks bounced high and fell to the ground, while the other one was inserted diagonally into the fish soup on the table, and the milky white soup splashed all over the three of them.
"The people at the top are only concerned with personal gain and fighting for power. To them, ordinary people are just livestock kept in captivity, a kind of digitized 'resource'. As long as they can be fed, there will be no more problems. The people below are content with the status quo, numb and dull. Even if they have some free time after struggling to survive, they only want to numb their nerves with vulgar and low-level entertainment... Do you think such a race has a future?"
Nieto continued: "Do you know why there are so many dictators in human history? It's not because those dictators are so powerful that they can control the majority with a minority... It's simply because the majority of people... are stupid, lazy, unwilling to think and unwilling to take responsibility. The people prefer a 'leader' to do everything for them, and they just need to live step by step like livestock."
The boy stood up from his seat, yelled at his father for a few words and ran back to the room. The flow of time suddenly began to speed up, and in a blink of an eye, the boy had become a young man in his thirties.
The boy started a business with his friends... He was not a "second generation" and had very few assets and connections. All he had was passion and hard work... In order to save money, he was reluctant to even take the two-yuan bus. He rode a shared bike to and from his company and residence, which was 20 kilometers away, and sometimes he even slept in the company. His daily food, clothing and daily expenses were all of the lowest standard...
But while the boy was desperately cutting down on his living costs and investing his only funds in starting a business, his friend took the start-up capital borrowed from the bank and went to a city called Lisboa to gamble, and even kept several beautiful young girls... The matter was soon exposed, and the boy's friend was thrown into jail after enjoying a life of luxury for half a year, but the company founded by the two also went bankrupt.
Half of the loans were taken out in the boy's name, but the money could no longer be recovered. Even though the boy had done nothing wrong, he was still burdened with a debt that he could not bear.
"No, he still did something wrong." Neto explained like a narrator, "He shouldn't have trusted his friend...Friend is just a word invented by humans to cover up the relationship of mutual exploitation between individuals...In human society, the cheapest thing is friends. Many people think that connections are a very important resource, but this kind of thing...is essentially just a platform for transactions. If you don't have valuable chips in your hand, it's useless even if you know more 'friends'. People use each other, suspect each other, and hate each other...deception, plunder, war, killing...In the few thousand years of human history, a lot of time and resources have been wasted on meaningless internal consumption. I even think that if a group of bees ruled the earth, perhaps they would do better than humans...At least, bees will not kill each other because of individual selfishness."
"You've said so much just to tell me that the world is not worth it and that I should quickly throw myself into the arms of some god...right?" Ke Lan said in a tone without a trace of emotion.
Nieto didn't say anything else, apparently agreeing.
"If I don't agree, are you going to keep me trapped in this illusion forever?" Ke Lan asked again.
"I don't mean to force you, I just want you to make the right choice."
"Then save your energy...don't bother me anymore." After saying this, Ke Lan stopped paying attention to Neto and focused his attention on the illusion itself.
There must be a way to crack the illusion, whether it is physical or spiritual... As long as you can find the flaw in it, you may be able to follow the clues to discover the hidden "backdoor"... Conceptually speaking, this is very similar to the hacker that Ke Lan used to be, except that hackers face a bunch of computer programs made up of 1s and 0s, while Ke Lan faces a simulated illusion reconstructed by piecing together fragments of his own memories.
…
Compared to the illusion that Ke Lan was experiencing, the scene that No. 33 encountered could be completely described as a nightmare.
His consciousness first fell into a trance, and when he regained consciousness again, he suddenly found himself lying on a simple folding bed. The wind coming in from outside scratched the edge of the tent gap, making a sharp whistling sound... Thirty-three jumped up from the folding bed and first reached out to feel his body for a while.
All the black flying blades had disappeared, and his clothes had been changed into an old-style training uniform of the field corps. A Type 01 rifle equipped with a lot of tactical kits was placed next to the folding bed. The gun was loaded and could be fired at any time as long as the safety was turned on.
Thirty-three felt his scalp tingling. He hurriedly pulled out the magazine and ejected a "special armor-piercing bullet" with the front end painted pure black.
The cost of one of these special armor-piercing bullets is equivalent to that of an original Type 01 rifle. The reason is that the bullet head is forged from Nino alloy with a purity of up to 30%. It is the best armor-piercing bullet that the field corps can be equipped with, without a doubt .
Thirty-three didn't know why there were such expensive bullets in his magazine, but he just remembered that there were... as if this memory was edited and inserted into his brain... But what made him feel a chill in his spine was that he couldn't even sense the Nino alloy in the bullet.
He held the special armor-piercing bullet in his palm and tried to make the bullet float, but no matter how he urged his mind, the bullet did not move at all.
The feeling that had long been familiar to me disappeared completely, as if everything that had happened was just a dream.
I was not transferred, my troops were not wiped out, I did not change my job to become a relic hunter, and I did not encounter those weird things later... Everything was just a long nightmare.
Thirty-three rubbed his temples hard, took the military water bottle on the table, unscrewed the cap, and took a small sip.
The water has a slightly sour taste. This is a kind of powder used to purify drinking water in field operations. This powder is difficult to filter out and greatly affects the taste of the water, but between unpalatable and polluted, anyone with a normal mind will choose the former.
Thirty-three sat on the edge of the bed. He felt that his memory was in a mess. He couldn't seem to distinguish the boundary between reality and illusion... He couldn't figure out which of the blurry images in his memory were real and which were just a dream...
He took another sip of water, and the cold liquid slid down his throat, making him shudder involuntarily... At this moment, a shrill alarm suddenly sounded outside the tent!
Thirty-three's muscle memory allowed him to grab the rifle in an instant, but just as he was about to rush out of the tent, he caught a glimpse of a military multi-functional protective suit hanging on the side.
Although he could no longer remember where he was, the protective suits showed obvious signs of daily wear - this was not a spare piece of equipment, but something he had taken off and hung there before lying down to rest.
He raised his wrist and glanced at the dial - this smart watch for field combat integrated multiple functions, in addition to telling time, can also be used as a simple Geiger counter and air toxic substance detector. Although the accuracy is not very high, it is enough for field corps soldiers who often need to fight in the wilderness.
The radiation index inside the tent is not low. Although it is not enough to cause people to feel obvious discomfort, living in such an environment for a long time will inevitably lead to chronic radiation sickness if you do not inject Qingfuning regularly. If even the environment in the tent is like this, you can imagine what it is like outside.
He quickly put on the protective suit and fastened the breathing mask... At this time, shouts and chaotic gunshots were heard outside the tent.
Where on earth am I?
With this thought in mind, Thirty-Three tore open the tent door that was fastened with Velcro, bent down and crawled out.
The camp was located on a wasteland, with the lead-gray clouds above stained with dim moonlight. On Alpha, no stars could be seen at night, not even the two satellites of Alpha, the Twin Moons. All that could be seen was a glimmer of light seeping through the thick clouds.
The gunshots and shouting came from the outskirts of the camp. Sanshisan wanted to find someone nearby to ask, but found that the lights in several nearby tents were off. He didn't know whether the people inside had already gone out or were sleeping so soundly that they were not awakened by the gunshots.
Thirty-Three did not rush to support the battlefield in front, but quickly walked to the tent closest to him, tore open the tent door, and turned on the tactical flashlight inserted in the handguard rail.
This tent was several times larger than the one Thirty-three woke up in. In the center of the tent were several tables put together and covered with white cloth. The tables were filled with shelves for test tubes and flasks, but now these shelves had collapsed, and broken glass residues and chemicals were everywhere on the table and the ground. Some of the corrosive liquids even burned several irregular holes in the white tablecloth.
As the beam of light from the tactical flashlight moved to the ground, Sanshisan saw the second person besides himself after he woke up - a man wearing a full set of white protective clothing, lying face down on the ground... His figure seemed very thin and he couldn't support the wide protective clothing at all... Sanshisan always felt that this white protective clothing on this man was like wearing a skeleton.
"Hello? Are you okay?" Sanshisan did not approach rashly. He shone the flashlight around the man and when he did not find a third person, he asked the other person.
I asked three times in a row, raising my voice gradually, but there was still no response from the other party.
Dead?
With such doubts in mind, Sanshisan walked forward slowly, pulled out the bayonet hanging behind his waist, and put the bayonet on the muzzle of the gun.
He stood half a meter away from the man in white and used his bayonet to flip the man's body over.
The weight coming from the butt of the gun was very light... This person was at least 1.8 meters tall, but he seemed to weigh less than 10 kilograms...
The man in white also had the same breathing mask as Thirty-three on his head, but there were a lot of problems on the edge of the breathing mask - the flesh on the man's face was gone, and wrapped under the hood of the protective suit was a white skull, with two black eye sockets staring straight at Thirty-three, making Thirty-three feel uneasy.
Just as Sanshisan was about to bend down to check the body, the body suddenly trembled. He jumped back a step reflexively and raised the gun in his hand.
The corpse did not resurrect, and the corpse that had turned into a skeleton did not crawl up... but the breathing mask on the skeleton's face was pushed open, and then countless rats crawled out of the skeleton's eye sockets, nostrils and mouth!
These mice were completely bare and hairless, with pale skin and clearly visible purple blood vessels beneath the skin. They seemed to be newborn mice... Their eyes emitted a faint red light in the dark, and they could be seen clearly even without a light source.
Thirty-three suddenly realized where he was!
Deep in the Prismatic Basin! That famous heavily-radiated area on Alpha!
He was on an escort mission, the target of which was a research team from the research institute...and their research topic was mice that had mutated due to radiation!
