Volume 3: Dance of the Aurora Chapter 33. Let there be light.
The corridor was pitch black. In fact, the area where the building intersected with the ground was completely obscured by the monster's shadow. When Ai Bishui approached the core door, it took her a while for her eyes to adjust to the brightness.
Pushing open the door, you will enter the nuclear auxiliary plant .
When the nuclear power plant was operating, the fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling above her head should have been on, but now she was standing in an almost dark corridor and could only vaguely see the indicator light of the emergency exit at the other end.
In the room, she could clearly feel that the entire building was shaking rapidly with a very small amplitude. The vibration was transmitted through the ceiling to the wall, and then along the wall to her feet, making her instinctively want to escape.
After struggling for five seconds, she took two deep breaths to calm herself down, and said to the empty corridor in a trembling voice :
"Um...can you turn on the light?"
No response.
"Please turn on the light."
No response.
"Please turn on the lighting system."
Still no response.
That's strange. Before leaving, T-800 told her that both parts of the voice interaction system should be turned on. The surface ring on her body can also understand human speech. She doesn't usually have a Sichuan accent, right?
Indeed, not really. In fact, she can even distinguish L from N. In her hometown, she is considered to be someone who speaks Mandarin very well.
She thought about it for a moment. Could that sentence really be the correct answer?
“Let there be light.”
let there be light.
As soon as she finished speaking, an uneven luminous field of a pale blue color appeared in front of her eyes . It did not look like a ball or a point of light, but more like a cloud of morning mist floating in the magic forest.
The end of the amorphous light source gradually faded in the corridor, and new light fields continued to appear near Ai Bishui. When she wanted to reach out and touch it, the mist would disperse, but the flickering blue color always surrounded her no matter how she moved.
Could it be that the nitrogen atoms in the air have been ionized? Is this really not dangerous in a nuclear power plant?
Although she had all kinds of worries, she finally plucked up her courage and began to move deeper into the corridor.
There is not much space available for construction inside the nuclear island, so there is not much decoration. When walking forward inside, the view above is full of exposed steel beams and pipes. Occasionally, some eye-catching warning signs with radiation symbols can be seen on the side walls.
“Beware of ionizing radiation.”
Although the atmosphere here was irritable and noisy, Ai Bishui could clearly feel her heartbeat every minute and every second. After walking for an unknown amount of time, she finally approached the inner layer of the nuclear island, and before entering the core, she had to pass through a dressing room.
During normal operation, the staff of the nuclear power plant will take off all their clothes here and put on radiation-proof work clothes. Even their shoes and socks must be changed. Before moving deeper into the control area, they must also take an electronic thermoluminescence meter from the cabinet in the room and wear it with them. If the meter exceeds the limit, an alarm will be sounded.
That meter and the Geiger counter are not the same. The former detects the accumulated amount of radiation, while the latter detects the intensity of ionizing radiation in the environment, but both are used in the field of nuclear physics.
As the saying goes, if the Geiger goes off, all your parents’ efforts are in vain.
In addition, you need to wear a disposable paper hat and gauze gloves, and check the standard attire carefully before entering.
But now she didn't have the time, and she was also protected by alien technology, so she simply checked whether there was any jewelry or foreign objects on her body and went straight through the fourth checkpoint before entering the core.
The three huge capital letters "RCA" were clearly printed on the entrance door, which was the abbreviation .
She walked through one room after another and finally arrived at a corridor that was only wide enough for one person to pass through. What came into view were several heavy blue-green iron doors. Each door had a different string of words written on it. Those were the numbers of the nuclear power plant's reactors.
"Unit 1", "Unit 2", "Unit 3"...
Ai Bishui hesitated outside the iron gate for a few seconds and finally walked into the middle gate.
The number of pipes and instruments behind the door is obviously much greater than that on the outer layer. The entire wall is covered with various vertical and horizontal pipes and iron boxes, as well as several giant iron racks painted pure black, and the ceiling is covered with criss-crossing giant steel beams.
The ceiling here is lower than outside, and a depressing atmosphere is overwhelming.
As she continued to walk inside, she noticed five big words written on the wall: "Nuclear Auxiliary Area", which meant there must be radiation here.
Her instinct told her not to touch any of the equipment here if she wanted to survive.
She followed the signs and walked up a set of stairs, where she saw a round, heavy iron door set among criss-crossing brackets.
I pushed it gently, but it wouldn't move.
The next moment, a huge piece of metal film appeared in the air in front of Ai Bishui, wrapped around her body and then became transparent again.
She tried to push the door again, and her hand sank directly into it. Then her whole body went to the other side of the door like a Taoist priest from Mount Laoshan.
The ceiling here was much lower than outside, less than half a meter above her head. The area around her was filled with valves, pipelines, and steel beams, making even the area to stand very narrow.
At this moment, the jitter and noise in the environment were much more intense than before. Various devices were shaking and hitting the walls and floors with the rise and fall of the rhythm.
It is less than ten meters away from the core.
She trudged up the rickety stairs, shielding her head with one hand to avoid collision with the bits and pieces around her.
This narrow space filled with geometric shapes reminded her of the electron-positron collider that her department had organized a visit to before. Now it seems that the internal structures of all scientific devices give people the same aesthetic feeling, that is, rough, compact, regular, and horizontal and vertical.
As she walked, she felt sweat dripping from her cheeks. The surrounding temperature was already very high. This was because the ventilation facilities had completely failed and the heat generated in the enclosed space could not be dissipated.
Finally climbing the last flight of stairs, she stepped onto the platform and saw the core immersed in coolant under her feet. The shaking here was already very violent, and she had to hold on to the railing tightly to ensure that she would not fall.
She looked up and took a sharp breath.
A deep hole opened up in the abdomen of the protozoan, and it was surrounded by fine and dense luminous lines. Numerous but weak light spots were moving around in it, and the rhythm of their movement was exactly the same as the rhythm of the vibration of the entire building.
Several flexible, curly tentacles extended from around the cave entrance, continuously sucking nuclear fuel balls from the coolant and sending them into the cave, just like using a straw to suck pearls from bubble tea.
