Alien Relic Hunter

With the slight sound of the mechanical gears turning, the elevator began to descend - Ke Lan could feel the sense of weightlessness gradually increasing. Through the glass walls on both sides of the car, he could see that the well walls were rising rapidly, one after another. The red indicator light flashed past.

The distance between each red indicator light in the elevator shaft is four meters. Ke Lan counted a total of 1,465 indicator lights before the car suddenly slowed down and stopped.

This is the deepest part of the Black Well. If the No. 0 stratum in the northern area is used as a benchmark, the depth here is more than 5,800 meters.

It is located exactly in the center of the ark.

The car door opened, and lights lit up on both sides of the dark corridor ahead.

"You have arrived at the bottom of the Black Well, the general archives of Noah's Ark." said the cold mechanical female voice.

Obviously, technology has now developed to the point where it is possible to synthesize virtual voices that are hard to distinguish between real and fake, but they still have to use such a stiff mechanical sound... Are those people in the Undead Crew Club playing retroism? Ke Lan complained inwardly and stepped forward.

Compared with the obsidian corridor in the conference room in the core area, this corridor is made entirely of metal modules and is much longer. However, fortunately, the entire corridor is completely straight, with no bends or forks. Don't worry about getting lost in it.

The soles of Ke Lan's boots stepped on the solid metal floor, making a "ta-da" sound. These sounds were transmitted to the distance along the corridor, and then turned into echoes and echoed back.

There is a faint smell of rust in the air.

Ke Lan vaguely stopped until there was a rustling sound above his head. He looked up and found a dozen mechanical spiders clinging to the heights of the two walls. Those eye-like monitors were emitting a dark red light, and then Coupled with the creepy sound made when the metal joints rub against the wall... If it were a timid guy here, he might not immediately turn around and walk towards the elevator.

Seemingly realizing 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's power and are directly controlled by the core mastermind."

"Let robots serve as guards... is it because you can't trust people?" Ke Lan complained.

Probably the AI ​​didn't know how to respond to this complaint, as the mechanical female voice didn't answer.

What a stupid AI... Ke Lan secretly complained that imperfect artificial intelligence can be classified as artificial retardation. The AI ​​that manages the black well is not even able to speak or know that the smart housekeeper of his previous residence can't speak. Which third-rate programmer trained him?

"Aren't these self-disciplined mechanical guards afraid of being invaded by viruses, Trojans, etc.?" Ke Lan asked again.

"Virus programs cannot get past the core mastermind's firewall." The AI's answer was stupid... well, or rather, very formulaic.

"Oh, really?" Ke Lan muttered. Since the other party said so, he felt a little itchy... If you have time, try to attack the firewall of your core mastermind?

In the past, this kind of behavior would have been almost the same as seeking death, but now that Ke Lan has officially become a member of the Undead Crew Club, everything is naturally different.

Finally, Ke Lan reached the end of the corridor.

A circular airtight door with a diameter of more than thirty meters. There are no handles, lockholes or password keys on the door. There are only dozens of grooves one palm deep - Ke Lan started. I thought these grooves were modeled after the places used to place energy crystals in the Alpha Ruins, but in comparison, these grooves were much larger... If they were to be filled, even the lowest level first-level crystals would be used. It would cost several hundred dollars to fill the groove.

What's more, there are a total of sixty such grooves on the circular airtight door. This is just a door, not a battleship engine. If opening the door requires such a large amount of energy crystals, Ke Lan will only think that it is designed. There is something wrong with the people who play this stuff.

"It can't be a sensor door, right?" Ke Lan thought in her mind and walked forward.

The airtight door did not open directly. Instead, the autonomous mechanical spiders clinging to the wall suddenly moved.

"Huh?" Ke Lan discovered that these mechanical spiders crawling toward the air-tight door were not exactly the same as the ones he saw along the way. There were several "golden fingers" closely arranged on their metal joints.

Of course, the golden finger here does not refer to the cheap plug-ins used by many protagonists in online novels, nor does it refer to the cute gun-holding gesture that is easy to misfire, 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 the circular airtight door.

Just as he expected, these sixty mechanical spiders corresponded to the sixty grooves on the door. According to the number of the internal chip, they got into each groove and inserted the metal limbs into the bottom of the groove. In the small holes.

"Crunch..."

A tooth-breaking friction sound came from behind the door, and the heavy metal airtight door slowly rolled to the side, revealing the entrance to Ke Lan's eyes.

This method of opening the door is indeed cool, but it is flashy and full of security risks. As a hacker, Ke Lan has always been full of distrust of electronic devices, especially smart electronic devices. In his view, any program written with 1s and 0s, no matter how rigorous, must have loopholes.

There is no program in this world that has no loopholes. If there is, it is simply because your level is not high enough and you cannot find it.

The more complex and intelligent a program is, the more loopholes it will have——

Suppose Ke Lan traveled to a certain post-apocalyptic zombie novel and happened to activate a certain novice gift package. Two guns were placed on the wall for him to choose from: one has a mechanical structure as precise as a watch and integrates a large The HK-G11 rifle is the essence of German industrial standards, has a high price, is well-made, has epoch-making awareness and advanced design concepts; the other one comes from the industrial assembly line of a regular military factory in Eastern Europe, and has almost no shining points except for the leather. Kalashnikov assault rifle, Ke Lan would choose the latter without hesitation.

There is no other reason. The mechanism of the former is too precise. Being too precise means being delicate. It has extremely high requirements for dustproofing and waterproofing. Its disassembly and maintenance are also very time-consuming, and small parts are easily lost and damaged. , it’s hard to find a replacement if lost...

This is true for physical machinery, and the same is true for virtual programs.

Ke Lan, who never stopped complaining in his heart, crossed the thirty-meter-high circular doorway and entered the room.

Rather than saying it is a room, it would be more appropriate to call it a hall...or an underground plaza.

This is a huge space. Under the illumination of the light, the farthest point of Ke Lan's field of vision was only more than three hundred meters, but he still did not see the other three walls.

And the block behind him also extended into the shadows beyond the reach of the eyes.

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 terabytes of treasures he had stored in the hard drive - before every mission in the past, he would delete these things and the browser records completely, and wait until he was alive from the ruins. After coming back, download it bit by bit.

"Don't be afraid of being shattered into pieces, but keep your innocence in the world." This poem is not unreasonable.

There are two ways of death during this time, one is called physical death and the other is called social death.

But now it seems that the Undead Crew should have collected a lot of information related to themselves - not to mention those seeds and pictures, I am afraid that these guys even know exactly what XP they like.

Thinking of this, Ke Lan couldn't help but blush, but then returned to normal.

As long as you are not embarrassed, others will be embarrassed. The most humble person is invincible... The "thick" in "Houheixue" refers to having a thick skin.

Once I accept that I am a hentai, then I am - invincible.

Ke Lan looked around and saw many clear steel-stamped inscriptions on the ground. That was the time when these files were sealed, and the files on the rows of shelves in front of him were sealed in the fourth month of the ninth year of the New Era.

Wuhu is actually the archives of the Ark just after it set sail——

Although his heart was itching for these secrets that were so old that they could even be called "ancient", there were more important things for him to come here today... If he wasted his time and energy on irrelevant things, , with the capacity of this archive, I am afraid that when the damaged parts of the Ark are completely repaired, he will not be able to finish even a corner of the archives.

In the ninth year of the new era, even the Undead Crew Association had not yet appeared at that time, and the possibility of relevant clues and secrets was basically zero.

Ke Lan walked along the era number. He didn't know why, but with every step he took, he seemed to be able to feel the time that had passed long ago but had a silhouette left behind.

The number of files is different every year. In years with more things, the number of files left behind will be more, and in years with less things, there will be fewer files. But even in the most "free" years, there are at least a dozen cabinets. 's files.

Through the labels on the anti-magnetic box, Ke Lan could learn that most of these files were data on Ark supplies and population changes... In addition, the early files also contained a large part of observation records of the Earth and the solar system, and As the years went by, these observation records gradually decreased until they disappeared completely 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 for why the sun evolved from a yellow dwarf to a red dwarf billions of years in advance, there are different opinions in the academic community, but there is still no conclusion.

This topic used to be a forum experience package, but as time goes by, the memory of the earth, the sun and the solar system gradually fades from generation to generation, and the popularity of this topic gradually disappears like a star approaching the end of its life.

Nowadays, only people occasionally mention this matter in astronomy-related forums - for the absolute majority of people on the Ark, the sudden decay of the sun is actually related to "Nuwa patching up the sky" and "Jingyun". There is no difference between stories such as "Wei reclamation" and "Gonggong's anger touches 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 is also very interested in the Ark's voyage records, but if converted into file capacity, I'm afraid it would have to be measured in billions of terabytes. Even a supercomputer would get stuck when reading these files, let alone the human brain. efficiency.

Sighing, Ke Lan continued to walk forward in the order of time.

About half an hour later, he discovered a "clearing".

Among the shelves filled with cabinets around it, this empty space about the size of two football fields stood out.

Not only are there no hard drives to store files, there are no empty cabinets either.

"strangeness?"

Ke Lan lowered his head and looked at the ground.

According to the numbers on the inscription, the files from the 499th year of the New Era should have been placed in this open space.

But these files have disappeared.

"This year... this year...!!!" Ke Lan tried hard to recall what happened in New Era 499 in his mind. For a moment, his whole body trembled violently.

The 499th year of the New Era is a year worthy of being recorded in history for Ark and mankind.

This year, Ark observed a natural wormhole hidden at the edge of the Orion cantilever of the Milky Way... Of course, when Ark discovered this wormhole, it was no longer possible to escape the gravitational pull of the wormhole...

Fortunately, the Ark finally successfully passed through the wormhole and successfully reached the extragalactic star field that had never been touched by human vision.

Traveling through the wormhole, Ark paid a huge price, but fortunately, the human fire still exists.

"Why have all the files from New Era 499 disappeared? Many things that happened in this year can be found in public archives, why are they not here?" Ke Lan was full of doubts.

This is unreasonable.

He walked back and forth in the open space and discovered a new doubt.

In this open space, there are holes reserved for bolts, and those bolts are used to fix the metal cabinet frames where the hard drives are placed.

There used to be rows of cabinet shelves here, and the cabinet shelves may have been filled with black anti-magnetic boxes.

But now, they have been moved.

[P.S. Spring is here, and it’s the breeding season of animals... Sorry, I said the wrong word, it should be spring, and it’s a good time to go on a youth tour. It’s just in time for the May Day holiday. The author plans to go out with friends tomorrow. I went on an outing and went to the next county in the morning. It will most likely be midnight when I get home, so I won’t update. I’ll ask everyone for a day off here.

It just so happened that the side effects of tenosynovitis and numbness in my fingers were a bit severe these past two days, so I just wanted to give my fingers a rest.

I also wish everyone a happy May Day holiday, but while going out to breathe fresh air, please be careful of the epidemic and pay attention to safety. 】