Chapter 626 We are neither the best nor the worst

  Chapter 626 We are neither the best nor the worst

  When Chu Guang discovered that the communication module of Shelter No. 100 was overloaded, he almost reflexively judged that this shelter had a similar situation as Shelter No. 79 – the ghosts of the dead were wandering in the tombs that were supposed to be sleeping.

  However, the final result was beyond his expectations.

  According to the information exchanged by players on the forum, the overload of the information module was not caused by human factors as he imagined, but because the ignition of the fusion reactor caused the life monitoring module to restart and awaken the sleeping artificial intelligence, causing the “dome self-destruction program” that was terminated a century and a half ago to continue reading.

  Fortunately, his little players cleverly used the clues left by the “gravekeeper” for them. By expanding the judgment range of the life monitoring sensor, they successfully let the AI ​​manager judge the bugs in the shelter as descendants of the shelter residents, thereby terminating the dome self-destruction program.

  The rest of the things to do are very simple.

  As long as the communication module is repaired, the administrator’s authority is regained, and the piles of bugs in the database left by the sixty-year game between the “Tree Man” and the “Worker Ant” are completely cleared, the shelter can be restored to normal.

  After two centuries, this shelter is no longer suitable for a casting well. At least before the bugs inside are dealt with, it needs to continue to exist as a shelter.

  When the situation is suitable, the Alliance will re-determine the purpose of this shelter.

  However, Chu Guang still has a doubt in his mind about this shelter.

  Apart from the supervisor named Craig who died in the shelter as a human, where did the other 110 residents who uploaded their thoughts to the circuit board go?

  He did not find any traces of these 110 residents in the shelter’s database.

  They would not disappear from the shelter out of thin air after uploading their thoughts to the circuit board.

  Just as Chu Guang was thinking, he suddenly remembered that when his player first entered the shelter, Xiao Qi seemed to have mentioned that the terminal at the door had been visited in 2190.

  2190 is the 61st year of the Wasteland Era.

  This year is exactly the time when the last survivor of this shelter, the supervisor named Craig, lost his life characteristics in the shelter…

  …

  Shelter 101.

  After a few days, Chu Guang visited Dr. Method again, and the meeting place was still the cafe where they met before.

  However, unlike the last time, this cafe located in a corner of the downtown was almost full of people. It was not until he walked to the corner near the cabinet deep in the store that Chu Guang found the method waving at him.

  ”This way.”

  Walking in front of Dr. Method, Chu Guang stretched out his hand to pull open the chair opposite his seat and sat down, and said straight to the point.

  ”Thank you for your password. The legacy of Shelter 100 is a timely help to us, especially the plasma engine.”

  Hearing Chu Guang’s thanks, Dr. Method smiled slightly, picked up the coffee cup on the table and took a sip, and said in a happy tone.

  ”Really? I’m glad to help you. I think the residents of Shelter 100 will also be relieved that someone can continue to fulfill their unfinished mission for them.”

  Chu Guang sighed softly.

  ”We tried to gather enough materials to produce a prototype with the black box, and disassembled the prototype. Unfortunately, our engineers could not fully digest the technology, and could not find a production method other than the black box. We could only design a suitable aircraft for them around the prototype and the battery.” Dr. Method

  ’s face did not show any surprise, but comforted Chu Guang who was sitting in front of him.

  ”This is normal. It is a fantasy to want to produce such things independently under your current conditions. What you lack is not only the technology itself, but also the hardware conditions to realize the technology. Don’t worry about things that cannot be completed. The black box is enough to help you complete the transition from ‘nothing’ to ‘knowing the truth and the reason’, and what you have to do is to take the current path step by step.”

  When he said this, Method seemed to remember something again, so he added a sentence in a joking tone.

  ”Of course, another possibility cannot be ruled out. Those black boxes will remain black boxes for you until the end. They have changed from auxiliary tools to drug addictions that cannot be quit.”

  ”I will be vigilant against such things happening.”

  Chu Guang paused for a moment after leaving these words, and tapped his index finger on his left arm twice. Soon, a holographic interface appeared in front of him.

  Seeing the holographic image that Chu Guang pushed in front of him, Fa Fang raised his eyebrows slightly.

  ”What is this?”

  Chu Guang said concisely.

  ”Our residents found not only black boxes and administrator logs in the shelter, but also records left by the ‘trees’, ‘tree people’ and ‘worker ants’. They tried to sort out the history of Shelter No. 100 for 63 years.”

  In fact, he just copied and pasted the content discussed by the players on the forum, deleted some subjective comments, and left the relatively objective part.

  Fa Fang extended his index finger with interest, dragged the holographic screen in front of him, and slid his index finger to turn two pages.

  ”…Interesting.”

  He looked up at Chu Guang and said in a playful tone.

  ”…So in the end, the worker ants who would rather turn themselves into bugs to escape in the eyes of the tree man did not really turn themselves into bugs, nor did they really escape from the shelter. Even the poor man who survived to the end at the bottom, the ‘ignorant guy who would rather tear down the house to escape’, actually let himself be eaten by bugs in order to save the shelter he hated so much.”

  ”This is too ironic.”

  ”I think if Craig were still alive, he would definitely laugh and cry, and might even laugh at that poor guy – if they hadn’t preferred to hide themselves in the cold storage to destroy the shelter, how could Shelter No. 100 be in its current state? A group of humble bugs, even if they did a little insignificant thing at the end of their lives, it would not be enough for them to atone for their sins!”

  When he said this, he raised his voice slightly, as if he was not having a private conversation, but talking to someone sitting in a noisy coffee shop.

  Or reading someone’s thoughts.

  Chu Guang noticed that someone sitting not far from them clenched his fist on the table, and then slowly loosened it.

  Combined with the playful expression on Fafang’s face, Chu Guang confirmed his guess that this guy had seen Craig.

  Through the terminal at the door.

  After thinking for a moment, he expressed his opinion.

  ”My opinion is different from yours. As an outsider, whether it is the tree people or the worker ants, they are all residents of Shelter No. 100. Some of them want to turn the shelter into a permanent prison for the sake of power, while others are willing to destroy the entire shelter for freedom.”

  ”They used the most extreme and deadly means against each other in the conflict, turning the rules that were originally designed to protect them into a tool to persecute their own people. In my opinion, this is the reason for their ultimate destruction.” ”

  In fact, everything they did was in line with the rules of the time, whether it was concealing their own life characteristics to trigger the dome’s self-destruction mechanism, or using a bug in the program to trigger the reactor’s overload and cut off the power supply. What is incredible is that no one has thought about fixing these long-existing safety hazards, but instead they are using them as nuclear bombs to deal with other people.”

  ”Generally speaking, residents of the shelter will not go into the cold storage collectively, and it is almost impossible for a fusion reactor to be overloaded. They did all the operations that the designers had never imagined, and the result was tens of thousands of deaths and more than a century of shutdown.”

  After a brief pause, Chu Guang continued in a chatty tone as he looked at the method that signaled him to continue.

  ”The guy who called himself the gravekeeper actually realized in the end that both themselves and those high-ranking supervisors were essentially part of the shelter. The tree people did not come down from the non-existent trees, but were born from them. And their ending was not the stupidity of any one person, but everyone bears an unshirkable responsibility.”

  ”From an outsider’s perspective, I think his behavior at the last moment of his life is enough to atone for his sins. Shelter No. 404 will take over the torch in their hands, carry their memories, and continue to move forward for them to complete the mission they forgot for a while.”

  When he said this, Chu Guang’s face was quite regretful.

  Although the shelter was saved.

  But this is obviously not the most perfect ending.

  After a pause, he continued.

  ”… Of course, if the tree man who lived to the end, in the 61st year of the Wasteland Era at the end of his life, took the time to go to the bottom of the shelter to take another look, and spent dozens of minutes to understand what happened there, perhaps we would not have to wait for more than a hundred years to put an end to their grievances.”

  The answer has been written down.

  It is not difficult to copy it again.

  Even with the language barrier and the need for a translator, the Alliance players still relied on the only clues to guess the last words left by the “worker ant” who survived to the end, and took the last key he made with his life to close the system error that could cause the entire shelter to collapse.

  At this moment, a choking voice came from the neighboring table not far away.

  ”Craig… That guy would never laugh at him… If he knew what that man had done.”

  The words seemed to be squeezed out from between his teeth.

  Chu Guang looked in the direction where the voice came from, and saw a man in a gray jacket with his back to them, his shoulders twitching constantly.

  It wasn’t just him.

  The same was true for others.

  Intermittent sobbing came from another direction.

  ”I remember that kid… He became the supervisor in 1953, and he was still a young man in his early twenties.”

  ”He loved that place more than anyone else. I still remember him saying… After everything was over, he wanted to open a museum in the shelter and tell the young men of the Newcomers’ Union stories of the past.”

  ”Damn it… Why didn’t that guy come to me! Why didn’t he use my body? I’ve already decided to give up my body! Why not just use mine!” The

  once lively cafe had lost its previous cheerful atmosphere at some point, and faces were filled with confusion, sadness, and regret with their eyes closed.

  It seemed that just as he guessed –

  the 110 residents who uploaded their minds to the “Great Tree” did not sleep in Shelter No. 100, but were taken away from the hopeless shelter by someone in the 61st year of the Wasteland Era.

  That person was the method.

  He established a complete technology recycling system for the Technical Department of the Post-War Reconstruction Committee and devoted almost his entire life to it. In the 45th year of the Wasteland Era, he left the Great Rift Valley with disappointment and went to the south along a road that was completely opposite to the academy.

  Shelter No. 101 was obviously not the first shelter he visited. The access record left on the terminal outside the gate of Shelter No. 100 more than a hundred years ago was left by him!

  Facing Chu Guang’s inquiring eyes, Fang did not make any explanation, but just took a sip of coffee, just like when Chu Guang just entered the door.

  Then, he said something meaningful.

  ”What do you think is the best ending for them?” Chu Guang said

  after thinking for a moment.

  ”Every part plays its original role.”

  Fang: “What do you mean?”

  Chu Guang said concisely.

  ”It means literally, the ‘tree’ is the manager, the supervisor is the supervisor, and the residents are the residents. They actually got off to a pretty good start. The situation in other shelters may be much worse than their start, but they completely deviated from the original idea when they were actually operating. The residents closest to the tree became tree people attached to the tree, and the residents farthest from the tree were no longer even people.”

  ”Each has his own duties, you said the most ideal situation, but the actual operation may be completely different.” Putting down the coffee cup in his hand, Fafang smiled faintly and said, “Just like the post-war reconstruction committee, whether you believe it or not, it was the best way at the time. There have never been so many people of different identities who have devoted themselves to the same thing without reservation. Without it, this planet may have been ‘dead’. However, even so, it has only existed for 45 years.”

  Chu Guang said bluntly.

  ”I know that the worst choice is the easiest, and the best choice is always the hardest, so we will not become them.”

  Fafang raised his eyebrows slightly.

  ”Then which one are you?”

  He stood up from the coffee table.

  Chu Guang, who thought it was time to leave, glanced at the survivors of Shelter 100 who were crying for yesterday, and answered the question of the method.

  ”We are in between.”

  ”Neither the best nor the worst.”

  …

  The excavation of Shelter 100 was completed, and 22 black boxes were recovered from the shelter one after another, along with a large number of mechanical equipment.

  Shelter 100 left behind an amazing technological legacy, especially a series of construction equipment including the “蟞-style” engineering armor, which is more suitable for construction in complex terrain than the “KV” and “Miner” series exoskeletons currently used by the Alliance. It can even work while climbing on a nearly vertical construction surface without auxiliary equipment such as scaffolding.

  Since the supervisors of Shelter 100 originally planned to live underground for a lifetime, for a long time, the creativity of the entire shelter was focused on “how to use limited resources and space to transform the environment of the shelter into a more livable one.”

  In addition, there are those little guys called “Gabong”.

  The genetic source of these things is probably the scarab beetle, but the original DNA has been modified so that even their mothers can’t recognize it.

  They can be treated as a completely new species. The shells they shed are high-quality chitin raw materials, which can be used to produce polymer bulletproof plates inserted in exoskeletons, and can also be used to produce carbon-based integrated circuits.

  The database of Shelter No. 100 contains various experimental data on these chitin materials and complete industrial application methods.

  According to those data, the Alliance can directly use the chitin materials piled in the shelter’s patio as ore.

  Considering that there are more than 6 million insects active there, it will probably exist as a biological mine for the Alliance for a long time.

  At the same time, the ecological impact analysis of “Gabong” is also being carried out simultaneously.

  According to the judgment of the Alliance biologists, due to the special ecological environment of Xizhou City, a series of creatures including mutant water striders, warship shrimps, and even cracked claw crabs are the natural enemies of “Gabang”, so this creature has not spread to the wasteland outside Xizhou City like the Death Claw.

  However, it is precisely because of this that the “Gabang” that survived in the harsh environment will be more aggressive than a hundred years ago, and the stinger hidden in the abdomen is sharper.

  At present, the Alliance’s Biological Research Institute has referred to the suggestions of Shelter No. 404 and officially named the “Gabang” discovered in the 213th year of the Wasteland Era as the ghost face worm, and further explored the biotechnology contained in it and the industrial value of the shell.

  In short, the novel gadgets recovered from Shelter No. 100 are enough for the Alliance’s various research institutions and production units to be busy for a whole year.

  Camp No. 100.

  Looking at the piles of machines in the warehouse, I couldn’t help but sigh.

  ”Is there no normal shelter in this wasteland?”

  The scientific expedition team needs to appraise the value of the props obtained from the grave digging, and then settle the rewards obtained by the Storm Corps in this operation.

  This work will take a few days.

  Although the password and coordinates of the shelter are provided by the task, they only do the easy work of prying the coffin board, but the credit for saving the shelter is still counted on their heads, and the final silver coins and contribution points rewards will not disappoint people.

  As the head of the corps, Brother Quanshui also credited the players who went deep into the dungeon.

  Hearing the complaints of my darkest brother, Quanshui laughed.

  ”Is there a possibility that normal shelters do not need us to dig graves at all, they have completed the original plan in the past two centuries, either joining the survivors’ settlements on the surface, or becoming settlements themselves.”

  Putting aside the weird things like the Enlightenment Society, the Blue Jackets have been joining the Boulder City one after another fifty years after the Wasteland Era.

  In addition, the origin of the enterprise is also a shelter, and it is a single-digit number.

  Not to mention that the Alliance itself is also like this, and even a number of shelters that were originally in bad condition have been restored.

  ”Survivor bias?”

  I’m the darkest sighed, and my eyes suddenly fell on the metal ball riding a robot spider. I couldn’t help but continue with a smile.

  ”By the way, why did you follow me out?”

  Lingling, who was riding on the back of the robot spider, turned her head in dissatisfaction.

  ”You ask me? I want to ask you! Didn’t you agree that I would be a tour guide in the museum? So where is the Alliance’s museum? How long do I have to stay in this damn place?”

  I’m the darkest looked at it with a strange expression.

  Let this guy be a museum tour guide…

  Can we sell tickets?

  Just then, footsteps were heard outside the door.

  The two people and the AI ​​standing in the room looked at the door almost at the same time, and saw a strange man standing there.

  Not only him, but there was a large group of people following him, and there seemed to be at least a hundred people.

  They were wearing blue coats, but their skin was dull gray, like mannequins placed in an old window.

  There is no doubt that they are bionic people.

  However, I don’t know if it was intentional, they made the features of the androids very obvious, even abrupt. Not only are they all bald, but even their facial features only have a perfunctory outline. It’s

  just like Frost and Eclipse when they first came to the Alliance.

  Looking at the man standing at the door, I was the darkest and hesitated for a moment, and asked subconsciously.

  ”Who are you?”

  ”My name is… Gugel,” the man seemed to take some time to remember his name, and put his hand on his chest and saluted slightly, “We are the survivors of Shelter No. 100.”

  I was stunned, and the same was true for the fountain standing next to him, with a surprised expression on his face.

  As for the bell, it stared at the man in front of it.

  ”Gugel?! It’s you? You…are back? This is strange. My master said that all the cowards are dead and he will die soon. Why are you alive again?!”

  Looking at the bells that kept chattering, Gugel’s abstract features showed a trace of sadness. He sighed as if he didn’t want to recall any more memories and looked at Wo Zuihei and Quanshui.

  ”The people in this camp told me that I can find you here, and through you I can find the manager.”

  Commander Quanshui calmed down and asked with a strange expression.

  ”What do you… want to see him for?”

  ”We want to see him again.”

  The man named Gugel paused for a moment and said sincerely.

  ”We originally planned to rest in Shelter 101, but it can no longer hold our guilty souls.”

  ”So we thought, instead of spending the rest of our time repenting, we might as well fulfill the wishes of our compatriots who died because of us.”

  ”If you plan to rebuild the wasteland, our knowledge should be of some use, which may alleviate the torment in our hearts.”

  ”I hope he can take us in!”

  Quanshui opened his mouth and was about to say something when a loud voice suddenly came from not far outside the door.

  ”The Alliance is not a charity, we don’t take in anyone.”

  Everyone looked in the direction of the voice.

  I saw a blue power armor standing in the sun, smiling at the people gathered at the door of the warehouse.

  ”But–”

  As Quanshui expected, he changed the subject.

  ”…Anyone who desires to end the wasteland from the bottom of his heart and spontaneously decides to contribute to it, we welcome him to join!”

  ”Whether he is alive or dead.”

  Looking at Guger, whose expression was slightly moved, Chu Guang stretched out his right hand.

  ”Welcome, survivors of Shelter 100.”

  ”Tell me what you are best at, and then we can start!”

  (End of this chapter)