Star Empire

"Alert, terminal sensing array not found."

"Alert, no identifiable dead tide contamination found."

"Alert, logic error."

"Alarm, danger possibility, the underlying self-discipline mode has overridden manual, and the ejection process has begun -"

"Alarm, key judgment factors are missing, the logic circuit is unstable, and some judgments have failed."

Following the triggering of a series of warnings, the Gnaku node faced by Isatula was inexplicably burned, and the solid crystal energy shield quickly rose, but the shield looked strange - it seemed Adhered to the corridor structure where Isatula is located, the crystal energy protective layers seem to be stuck together, and it seems that part of them that should be connected together has not been torn off for some reason, and this weird twist and adhesions make the detachment process twisted and difficult.

Compared with the huge Gnaku array, even if a single isolation cabin malfunctions, even if it is completely blown up for some reason, it is impossible to shake the entire platform. But in Isatula's perception, the base he was on seemed to shake violently together with the surrounding shields. He was thrown hard onto the layers of shields that could completely isolate any information from flowing through them. He was thrown hard against the walls distributed in different spatial directions again and again, and was thrown hard again and again against the protective measures that were already full of cracks.

"Wait, rift?!"

Chaotic light and shadow flashed before the eyes, and the crystal energy shield seemed to be out of control. It became twisted and crazy. Countless tangible and invisible weird entities were torn from the mucous membrane that could not be separated. They roared and rushed towards other compartments. cabin, rush to other equipment, rush to yourself

A crisp crackling sound suddenly exploded from the bottom of his consciousness, and everything strange around him disappeared out of thin air.

"The emergency fuse isolation was not fully completed. Serious errors were detected in some facility fuse nodes and command loops. The detection results were uniform and stable, no shadows were detected, and the remaining related processes were stopped." The alarm ended abruptly after delivering the information that needed to be delivered.

Everything around it has not been destroyed. The strange phenomena that seemed to spread to other cabins before have not appeared. The one-way transmission of information from other cabins is still uniform, smooth and normal. He is still standing here alive, and the external cabin connected to the corridor that is similar to a branch has not been thrown into the void along with the isolation cabin.

The part that was once connected to the internal control system of the cabin is now a golden crystal energy shield. The shield is filled with strange patterns and ferocious curved broken crystal clusters - this may indicate that there was indeed a malfunction during the escape process. , and the fault caused some crystal energy pipe networks and information mapping connections to be broken or even shattered. The debris that spilled out and still had the possibility of its own development may have indeed undergone some unexpected interactive reorganization.

".Is that the truth, or is it an illusion or...a terminal? Check the safety again immediately!" The strange environmental impact is so real and dangerous. Even though his body and consciousness have an extraordinary foundation, facing the already discerned There was no real or false disturbance, and Isatula was confused for a moment, but his instincts worked and he was quickly calming down.

Along with the systematic search, he began to think as quickly as possible, thinking about what else he could do, thinking about the various current possibilities, thinking about whether he could dig out something from it, and whether he could convey something to the empire. .

"Retrieval, no shadows and two-dimensional patterns were found in the real environment; retrieval, no fog or cracks were identified in the existing attributes; retrieval, slight disturbances occurred in the real environment, the disturbance pattern was stable and relatively uniform, no unstable fluctuations were identified. Retrieval completed, not identified When the Death Tide becomes contaminated, the shield will be lifted."

"?!" After a slight hesitation, Isatula moved himself to the administrator's office as quickly as possible, where there was a full set of equipment compared to his own. As quickly as he could, he weaved current situations into concise and direct messages and sent them out.

"Hopefully this doesn't happen on a large scale. Next batch of individuals transferred, next batch...etc?"

The system's response seemed to be delayed, and Isatula just realized that he seemed to have forgotten something.

"This is. What day is it? What time is it?"

"This is the first batch of individuals who have entered the array for treatment. It should be a limited number of times to check the system and records. This kind of statistics cannot be blurred. The records seem to be alive or rotten? The state of the database is a bit strange. Were they really sent in?”

Isatura became a little confused. Everything seemed to have changed in a short period of time. Everything around him should have been cool and solid, but now they seemed to have become very slippery. The buttons in front of him still had their corresponding functions. It becomes crooked, as if just pinching the button that controls the opening of the cabin door will be squeezed into the environmental "lighting" control array of the corridor.

The solid floor of the office seemed to become a little soft, and Isatula felt that he might have sunk into the floor while observing from certain angles. His eyes slantly swept across a large amount of information that was still waiting. On the dome of the interactive terminal, he saw a porthole. The part corresponding to the porthole seemed to be far away and should be on the other side of this part of the individual recovery array. That seemed to be at least part of the location of the ship recovery array.

".Porthole? Where did this porthole come from? When did we need a porthole? Is there a porthole here?"

A new prompt popped up, indicating that the individuals waiting in the queue for repair had begun to be placed into the repair cabin by the system. However, to Isatula, the communication seemed far away, far away, and very vague.

He didn't care. He continued to work hard to write the report that he could gain as much as possible to the terminal that had been melted into the entire base and could no longer tell whether it was intact or rotten, but he could never send it out.

A faint reminder seemed to float from the other side of the sky: "An abnormal crystal energy reaction was detected in the stasis chamber. After searching, no dead tide pollution or uneven changes were found. Anti-neutralization and cleaning of the remaining entities began. The object exploded. Already."

Within the huge world matrix composed of many worlds anchored to each other, interconnected and accurately determining the relative distance between each other, in other parts and edges far away from the individual maintenance array, there are countless what appear to be hexagonal tubular structures. Inside the projection, ships that had been removed from the front line were being repaired.

These ships that have been attacked by death tides or death tide aggregates often have various "symptoms" that look very strange - the armor on the surface of some ships has crystallized, and those crystals that seem to be likely to break at any time are here. At this moment, it is still growing, fighting fiercely against the still relatively normal crystal energy environment in the maintenance dock and the maintenance disturbances released by the autonomous maintenance equipment.

Various weird structures have grown on the surface of some ships. Those structures are like rot and cancer that only appear in ancient life. They spread and grow outward crazily, gnawing at the still normal armor and pipes around the gaps in the ship. The net and the ship rank rules have been used for hundreds of years, thousands of years, hundreds of millions of years, or even billions of years.

The armor and internal solid skeleton of some ships were completely torn apart, and the highly active environment-shaping materials were continuously leaked out. The leaked materials were engaged in a final struggle with the invisible and qualityless mist, in the closed confinement wall. Violent explosions occurred again and again

"The maintenance environment here is becoming more and more unstable, and the substantive effects of various internal disturbances are becoming more and more bizarre."

Deep in the ever-flowing Liuguang River network, individuals corresponding to some nodes that needed to permanently monitor a certain environment exchanged some unoptimistic feedback with each other after confirming that communication was safe.

"Currently, the pressure on the maintenance area is increasing, and more and more abnormal phenomena have appeared in the ships withdrawing from the front line. These abnormal phenomena seem to have the possibility of legacy and superposition - the number of maintenance docks is still growing, and the gradual increase in maintenance Shipyards can share the pressure on existing facilities as much as possible.

If existing facilities are not given time to recover, they may begin to become spontaneously unstable over time, and may even collapse on themselves. The destabilizing perturbations of a dead tide are too dangerous and difficult to measure. "

"There is no way. At present, this type of maintenance dock with high-strength protection capabilities is already the last barrier to prevent the ship from collapsing. Before that, self-repair, free material ocean, auxiliary material ocean and active material The ocean and the corresponding strong law-level information compilation environment generator have filtered out almost all ships that require routine maintenance. Coming here means that the situation has reached a considerable level. If left unchecked, it will cause damage to the corresponding ships. In severe cases, it may further spread pollution.”

In front of these inspectors who measure operations and the overall environment, in the extremely direct and dangerous violent maintenance environment, maintainers wearing a complete set of complete and sturdy protective equipment carry corresponding drawings and powerful tools and shuttle through the atmosphere. Between the disgustingly twisted black-red patterned armor plate and the ship structure, high-frequency crystal energy burned the patterns attached to the armor plate that seemed to be alive like the sun burning the dirt on the earth. The shadows were burned away, and reality After stabilizing, the stories are no longer lost continuously, but what is left is a bunch of complicated patterns directly engraved in the properties of the material. These patterns were quickly swallowed up by the ship itself, which began to squirm and repair itself. During this time, the maintenance team in the relevant area had to exit, check its own status and recalibrate the drawings - many of these rules and regulations come from the past. There are also some experiments and some summaries from myself or others after the maintenance started, which are not yet written.

"Such a specific mode of group work is new content developed by these maintenance personnel themselves. Our rules do not specify that work must be done this way, but it is undeniable that such work does have higher safety and still good efficiency. From practical applications Judging from the method, such changes are quite successful. But we must also consider that these practices actually break the rules we once established and there are some procedural violations."

"Naturally, now we cannot use this reason to stop all teams from using these methods that are not inefficient and very safe, and we cannot use this as a reason to punish those who created these methods that may have saved a considerable number of lives. People - neither resources nor the environment currently allow us to divert existing resources to other unnecessary directions or cause losses.

But we must also face it - in terms of results, they did not make any mistakes; but there were indeed mistakes in the rotation process and action rules. We cannot always ignore all the fallacies in this because of the "correct results". Or, if we are more realistic and correct, some rules may no longer be necessary. "

“But the existence of some rules does not just hinder the occurrence of changes. When necessary, they are also key to maintaining the stability of the real environment and preventing the empire from overheating and running too fast.

Especially considering the current situation, the empire may have new frictions in many areas and areas of responsibility in the future. Some rules can protect ourselves from being too intense while protecting those frictions from being too intense. Excessively serious external impacts”

".Balance is an art as well as a technique."

"What are you deciding...?"

A brief silence brought a brief period of non-log communication to these nodes, but this brief tranquility was quickly broken - an urgent message was delivered to them indicating that a new batch of ships was in the free material ocean and Auxiliary materials are out of control in the ocean. They cause the ocean to be partially polluted and part of the "ocean surface" to be dispersed. The ocean needs to be maintained, and those ships within it that are still valuable for maintenance need to be moved here.

"The situation is not very optimistic. Although there are stasis fields to delay the damage of pollution as much as possible, such waiting itself will lead to spontaneous gathering of these contaminated ships. This may lead to further spread of pollution or intensification of damage."

"How could it be so unstable? The degree of damage to the free material ocean and the auxiliary material ocean should be relatively minor. But their occurrence is already quite serious."

"The death wave is not considered to be an actual existence with a fixed process of destruction. It is more considered to be some kind of super-metaphysical destructive trend that may even surpass all current orders. At present, there is not enough strong evidence to support our determination of the death wave. The nature of it, but according to the relevant statistical results of the empire network, we can determine that there are general rules for the way the death wave causes damage, but these rules are very unstable."

"Once their stable structure is destroyed and part of the information is activated, the actual phenomena that this information may present before it is completely destroyed may be impossible to predict at all."

".Information activation?"

"This is an ancient concept. According to the restoration history of the empire, information activation and information activation state were first used by the predecessors of civilization to explain phenomena and influences that transcend worldviews. Based on these theories, the ancestors developed the oldest mathematical rate equipment. That would be enough to support a transcendent computer that spans worlds—originally, the worlds themselves may not be able to transcend themselves if their interiors are completely cooled down."

"But the information activation state blurs the energy layer desert between some rules and rule levels. These influences with chaotic attributes can blur the barriers between levels, allowing the empire to break through the original calculation infinity limit with non-theoretically infinite resources. And so on. In short, information activation can essentially think that the world itself has a certain degree of unstable mapping groups. They will bring some chaotic effects and may cause some original fixed rules to be broken."

"Compared with the previous minor damage repair section, the main material ocean designed to repair severely polluted ships has inherently higher stability and safety, and the stable structure can better withstand the damage caused by dead tides. Damage and pollution follow linear severity development, and such linear development is closer to the predictive regression of our commonly used models and is relatively more controllable in terms of operation and understanding... The control conditions of the first two are not so stringent, This could lead to more pronounced and dramatic outbreaks of uncontrolled contamination."

"Wait a minute... why did we not approve or stop the illegal processes after they were converted? Why are we discussing these..."

"The activated oceans... may themselves contain considerable variables, and they may still follow some control theories that were not ours and started from other foundations. When the environment is stable, they are much better than our conventional technologies. The system is much more powerful and convenient, but in the face of such unstable disturbances... At least from our perspective, our basic technologies are more stable, which may mean that those technologies may indeed have considerable usage limits, or that we are now It cannot be effective..."

"Wait, have you noticed-"

"After all, we have been weak once, and according to the empire's research results, it is speculated that the fall may have lasted for a long time. Until now... maybe changes are still going on in some corners..."

"——Everyone, we must stop! Our information exchange has far exceeded the threshold!!"

".What.What?!" After a brief "crash", a violent rebound erupted, "Why. No one among us stopped each other, and the system didn't stop us either!?"

The atmosphere of the conversation seemed to become strange and abnormal. It was as if everyone was stepping on a swamp whose shell had been broken. But as consciousness woke up, everyone sank deeper together, sinking endlessly...

In the distance, the vast space-time structure containing countless people waiting for treatment and repair began to tremble at some point. A slight but sharp "sound" rose and fell from nowhere. It was certain that the space was still stable but still ringing. The boundaries of the huge space structure composed of arrays that should be clear and definite have become blurred at some point, just like a huge painting that has been wiped by an invisible hand before it is dry, and the remaining blurred picture is just A barely imprinted base.

"It must be reported quickly. The abnormal situation here has spread to... huh? It shows no abnormality... No possibility of unrealistic disturbance or realistic intensity reduction has been identified..."

"Speaking of which...you know..."

"How many waves of ships have we maintained here??"

…

"The fleet conducts time calibration to ensure that all ship communications within the fleet are maintained in good condition. All ships report their historical iterative development status, and the standard development is based on the current squadron command ship."

"Further research to determine the joint shield's information filtering capabilities and instability range..."

"Delete non-principal time-related iterations, correct own time flow rate and related perception..."

"Report, more information has been uploaded, the fleet is currently in stable condition, and relevant issues have been reported with detailed rules attached."

"It has been recorded that some warships are in poor condition, and the most serious parts have retreated for repairs on their own. The relevant backup units have entered combat status. The hulls and individuals with damage higher than the threshold have retreated, and are currently entering the repair array in sequence. "

"In order... Commander, the ships our fleet has withdrawn to the rear for repair have basically been severely damaged. If we continue to delay... they may collapse directly." Several deputy commanders and fleet inspector generals told him Expressing dissatisfaction, "There is not much redundancy left when we choose to retreat."

"...the repair system is still being expanded, and the ships and lives that are on standby to be repaired will be stopped by the stasis field as much as possible from all evolutionary trends, which can greatly extend the time they can "persist"."

"But - forget it, after all, such a thing is indeed unpredictable, and such large-scale preparations are indeed difficult to prepare quickly. But hasn't the empire experienced the outbreak of a large fault zone before? Even if history is shattered, even if that The time was extremely chaotic and no one knew the details and the full picture of the events at that time. Someone should have known about these possibilities and made some plans before this, right?"

"Plans...plans have been being made, and in order to make up for the shortcomings as much as possible, all plans are preparing backup support at a scale hundreds of times the disturbance caused by the events that have already occurred. But a death wave on the scale of the Great Fault Zone The disasters have exceeded the largest fault lines in the rational memory of the entire civilization... We may not be able to fully ensure that everything will go according to our needs even if we try to prepare for these redundancies from the beginning... …What’s more, we cannot take it for granted in the face of death tides, and even reason and logic are not stable.”

"...Indeed, the Great Fault Zone has caused a large amount of information loss, and the entire empire itself has made up for it to a certain extent...If the problems don't accumulate to a certain extent, and don't burst out in clusters with a certain density, they may not exist at all. It's considered a problem, but if the problems need to build up to the point where they explode, they're often quite serious."

"Maybe after this war, the surviving Imperial people will make new preparations based on the experience gained this time, revise and formulate some new rules, and adjust some of the formulas and constants we currently use. I just don't know that we are participating in the research and giving opinions. That part, or the part being studied, belongs to the forward fleet. The stability here is very important, but at the same time it is also very dangerous. These protective measures cannot completely guarantee that all ships, people and tools are safe."

".This is a fact, and there is nothing we can do about it. However, the empire does not restrict us from modifying and enhancing our own ships. These ships are fully equipped, powerful, and have sufficient redundancy. Our warships perform well, and they are no better than the core fleet. Or the performance of ships of the same class elsewhere is poor."

"The buffer redundancy is over. The next fleet bonus including the National Warriors, Fleet Omni-directional Enhanced Pulse Wave and Stellar Wind will sweep through here. Be prepared. Next we need to face the most dangerous pollution. , all free processes enter a modular state, all non-essential communications are closed, and silence begins."

On the front line, the entering fleet began a new round of firepower; in the distance, it poured into "this side" of the battlefield like a torrent, integrating the bonus pulse waves that had gone through various adjustments over a long period of time and swept through everyone in front. A fleet brings an extremely strong increase to all matrices.

Concepts, laws, time and space, logic, reality... all of these are said to have required special treatment, special consideration, and special calculation in the past. And now... it seems that most of the time, the fleet that I am in does not need to care too much about these, and the fleet also does not need to care too much, and does not need to talk about these major variables that seem to contain endless information every day. , action does not require considering all details and all possibilities. It is said that compared to those of the observed civilizations, one's own behavior and current "conventional thinking" will not become too complex or extensive.

It may be various super flagships and core flagships, it may even be the fleet matrix or even the imperial network itself that is responsible for the huge calculation process in the deep layers. Allocating it to this range only requires concise and clear instructions, or it may be relevant parts. It has been integrated into everything in daily life, which makes it possible for everyone to accomplish content that needed to be done deliberately in the past.

"...Why am I thinking about this?" In the command ship, some troubled souls ended part of their thinking threads, and tried their best to put more calculation capabilities into actions to deal with the current battlefield environment.

There are various protective measures including the joint shield to isolate the fleet from the fault zone, and the environment within the area demarcated by the joint shield remains stable. The fleet can still throw out its firepower smoothly, into the fault zone carrion that is filled with the fog that distorts and obscures reality and truth all the time, but the complete protective measures do not mean that the battleships and lives inside the shield Absolutely safe.

The field structure needs to be replenished every moment, the real environment needs to be calibrated every moment, a large amount of energy needs to be injected every moment, a shield projection array that absorbs a large amount of calculation redundancy, and the self needs to be constantly refreshed. Existential calculus, and narrative stability that seems more distant and vague, etc. They beat all the time, tremble all the time, and send out warnings of one kind or another all the time.

Outside the matrix, the United Shield, the golden wall that spans all directions, seems to stand at the end of the world. Countless enchanting lights and shadows, twisted ripples and ferocious squirming rifts danced wildly on the barrier.

Countless them sometimes disperse and sometimes converge, carving blasphemous records and patterns in the processor responsible for maintaining the shield. It looks like they are about to erode through the shield, but soon the environment that seems to have become the center of the "dance" will be smoothed out and everything will come to an abrupt end.

Outside the shield, the corrupted consciousness cluster and the bottom of the world's debris trembled, commanding everything they could mobilize to constantly eat away at this magnificent golden barrier. In addition to direct attacks, they are also trying everything possible to let invisible corruption and disappearance into thin air penetrate into all the gaps in the barrier and try to tear it apart completely.

It is rotting and needs more replenishment to stop itself from collapsing. The thing is very hot and will kill and destroy itself inside.

A series of wandering dragons formed by the condensed malice formed from the violent collision of large clouds. Blood-red lightning burst out from the unimaginably bright edge of the river of light. They crossed countless rotating storms and fragmented nodes and nodes along the way. There were countless soundless wails and wails, spanning the huge gap between the reference system, which was undergoing collapse and chaos, and the environment, which was still full of fragments of rules, and crashed hard into the dazzling golden barrier.

"It seems that we are the ones being studied."