Three bodies

It is the singer's job to look through the coordinate data, and it is the singer's pleasure to judge the sincerity of the coordinates.

The singer knows that what he is doing is not a big deal, just making up for it, but it is something that must be done, and it is fun.

Speaking of fun, it was still a fun place when the seed set sail from the mother world, but since the war between the mother world and the edge world began, the fun has gradually diminished.Up to now, more than 1 time particles have passed, no matter whether it is in the mother world or in the seeds, there is not much fun to speak of. The fun of the classical era is written in ancient songs, and singing those songs is not much now One of the fun.

The singer was singing an ancient song when flipping through the data:

i saw my love
I fly to her side

I held out a gift for her
that is a small piece of frozen time

There are beautiful streaks in time

Soft to the touch like mud in the shallow sea

……

The singer doesn't have too many complaints, survival requires more thought and energy.

The entropy of the universe is increasing, and the degree of order is decreasing, like the boundless black wings of the balance pen, pressing down on everything that exists, pressing down.But the low-entropy body is different. The entropy of the low-entropy body is still decreasing, and the degree of order is still rising, like the phosphorus fire rising from the dark sea. This is the meaning, the highest level of meaning, which is higher than the meaning level of fun.To maintain this meaning, the low-entropy body must exist and continue.

As for the higher end of the tower of meaning, don't think about it, you can't think of anything, and there is danger, let alone the top of the tower of meaning, there may be no top at all.

Back to the coordinates, there are many coordinates traveling in the space, just like matrix worms flying in the sky of the mother world.Coordinate picking is done by the main nucleus, which swallows all the information diffused in space, middle membrane, long membrane, and light membrane, and may one day also swallow short membrane.The main core records the positions of all the stars, matches the information with various combinations of position patterns in a dot matrix, and recognizes the coordinates.It is said that the main core can match the position pattern before [-] million time grains. The singer has not tried it, so it is meaningless.In that distant era, the low-entropy communities in the universe were relatively sparse, and the hidden genes and cleaning genes had not yet evolved.And now—

Hide yourself and clean up.

But among all the coordinates, only some are sincere.Believing in insincere coordinates often means cleaning up empty worlds, which is a waste of energy, and a little bit harmful, because these empty worlds may be needed later.Senders of insincere coordinates are really unreasonable, and they will get retribution.

There are some rules to follow when judging the sincerity of coordinates. For example, the coordinates posted in groups are often not sincere.But these laws are very rough. To truly and effectively judge the sincerity of the coordinates, it mainly depends on intuition. This cannot be done by the main core on the seed, or even by the super-core of the mother world. This is the low-entropy body Irreplaceable.Singers have this ability, which is not a talent or instinct, but an intuition accumulated over tens of thousands of particles of time.A coordinate, in the eyes of a layman, is such a simple lattice, but in the eyes of the singer, it is alive, and every detail of it expresses itself, such as the number of points to be taken, the marking method of the target star, etc. , and some more subtle details.Of course, the main core will also provide some relevant information, such as the history related to the coordinate, the direction and broadcast time of the coordinate broadcast source, etc.These become an organic whole, and what emerges in the singer's consciousness will be the coordinate broadcaster himself.The spirit of the singer crosses the gully of space and time, and resonates with the spirit of the broadcaster, feeling its fear and anxiety, as well as some unfamiliar feelings in the mother world, such as hatred, jealousy and greed, etc., but mainly fear, With fear, coordinates have sincerity—for all low-entropy bodies, fear is the guarantee of survival.

At this moment, the singer saw a sincere coordinate, which was near the seed route.This is a coordinate broadcast with a long film, and the singer does not know why he concluded that it is sincere, and his intuition is unclear.He decided to clean it up, since there was nothing more to do now, and it didn't affect the song he was singing.It doesn't matter if he is wrong in his judgment, cleaning is just like that, it is not a precise job, and absolute accuracy is not required.This is not urgent work, just do it sooner or later.This is also the reason for the low status of this position.

The singer takes out a mass point from the seed warehouse, and then casts his eyes on the star indicated by the coordinates. The main core guides the singer's sight, like waving a spear in the starry sky.Singer gripped the point of mass with forcefield tentacles, ready to pop, but when he saw the location, the tentacles let go.

One of the three stars is missing, and there is a piece of white stardust, like the excrement of an abyssal whale.

It has been cleaned up, and it's fine after it's been cleaned up. Singer puts the quality points back into the warehouse.

It's fast enough.

He started a master nuclear process to track down the source of the point of mass that killed the star.This is a job with almost zero probability of success, but it must be done according to the regulations.The process ends quickly, as always, with no results.

Singer soon learned why the cleanup came so quickly.He saw the piece of slow fog near that world. The slow fog was about half the length of the structure from that world. If you looked at it alone, it was indeed difficult to judge its source, but when connected with the broadcasted coordinates, you could tell at a glance that it belonged to of that world.The slow fog showed that it was a dangerous world, so the clearing came quickly.It seems that there are low-entropy bodies that are more sensitive than their intuition.This is not surprising, as the elder said, in the universe, no matter how fast you are, there will be someone faster than you, and no matter how slow you are, there will be someone slower than you.

Generally speaking, the individual coordinates that are broadcast will eventually be cleaned up, it's just a matter of time.You may think that this coordinate is insincere, but there are billions of cleaners in billions of low-entropy worlds, and there is always someone who thinks it is sincere.Low-entropy bodies all have clean-up genes, and clean-up is their instinct.Besides, cleaning up is just a very simple matter. There are potential forces everywhere in the universe. You only need to induce them to do things for you, which costs almost nothing and does not delay singing.

If the singer waits patiently, the sincerity coordinates will eventually be cleaned up by other unknown low-entropy bodies, but this is not good for the mother world and the seeds. After all, he received the coordinates and glanced at the world pointed to by the coordinates, which is the same as That world establishes a certain connection.It would be naive to think that this connection is one-way, and remember the great reversible law of detection: if you can see a low-entropy world, sooner or later that low-entropy world will also be able to see you, it is only a matter of time.Therefore, it is dangerous to wait for others to do everything.

The next thing to do is to put the useless coordinates into the database called "tomb" for archiving, which is also required by the regulations.Of course, the records related to it should also be put together, just like burying the relics of the dead together, anyway, this is the custom of the mother world.

One thing in the "relic" aroused the singer's interest, which was the three communication records between the deceased and another coordinate, using the media.The middle membrane is the membrane with the lowest communication efficiency, also called the original membrane.Long membranes are used the most, but it is said that short membranes can also be used to transmit information. If it is true, it will be a god.But the singer likes the original film. He feels that the original film has a simple beauty, which symbolizes the era full of fun.He often compiles the information of the original film into songs, which are always very pleasant to sing. Of course, he usually doesn’t understand anything, and there is no need to understand. Except for the coordinates, there are not many useful things in the information of the original film, just feel the rhythm That's it.But this time, the singer actually understood a little bit of this information, because some of it actually has a self-translation system!The singer can only understand a little bit, an outline, but enough to see an incredible process.

First, a message was broadcast by another coordinate, the primordial membrane broadcast, and the low-entropy bodies of that world (the singer called it the star bomber) clumsily plucked their stars, like the ancient troubadours of the mother world. Pick up a rough market piano.It is this broadcast message that contains the self-decoding system.

That self-deciphering system, too, was clumsy and primitive, but enough to enable the singer to compare it with the textual pattern of a subsequent message from the deceased, apparently in reply to the broadcast message.This is already unbelievable, but the bomber who broadcast the previous broadcast actually answered again.

Very interesting, very interesting!
Singer has indeed heard of a low-entropy world with no hidden genes or hidden instincts, but this is the first time he has seen it.Of course, these three communications between them will not reveal their absolute coordinates, but will reveal the relative distance between the two worlds. If the distance is far away, it’s okay, but it’s very close, only 410 six structural lengths, so close Pasted together.In this way, if the coordinates of one of the worlds are exposed, the other must also be exposed, it is only a matter of time.

The coordinates of the star bomber were thus exposed.

After nine time grains passed through those three communications, another record appeared, and the star bombers flicked their star to broadcast a message, which... was actually a coordinate!The main core determines that it is the coordinate.Singer turned to look at the star pointed by that coordinate and found that it was also cleared, about 35 time grains ago.Singer thinks that he was wrong just now, the star bomber still has hidden genes, because it has cleaning genes, it is impossible not to have hidden genes.But like all coordinate broadcasters, it has no self-cleaning capability [74].

Very interesting, very interesting.

Why cleaning up the low-entropy bodies of the dead didn't clean up the star-struck ones?There are many reasons.Maybe they didn't notice these three communications, the original membrane information is always unnoticed.But there will always be someone who notices in the billions of worlds, and the singer is one.In fact, if there is no singer, it will be noticed by other low-entropy bodies, it is only a matter of time.Perhaps they had noticed, but low-entropy communities with no hidden genes were too much of a threat to be bothersome.

But dead wrong!Generally speaking, if the star bomber really didn't have hidden genes, it wouldn't be afraid to expose its existence, and would expand and attack unscrupulously.

At least until death.

But specific to this one, it's a bit more complicated.The previous three communications, plus another broadcast of coordinates, and sixty time grains later, the long-membrane coordinate broadcast to the deceased from elsewhere.The chain of events builds an ominous picture that beckons of danger.Twelve time particles have passed since the removal of the dead, and the star bomber should realize that his coordinates have been exposed. At this time, the only choice is to wrap himself in the slow fog to make himself look safe, so that he can No one will bother with them.Maybe it doesn't have this ability, but judging from the fact that it has been able to pluck the stars and send out original film broadcasts, this period of time is enough for it to have this ability, maybe it just doesn't want to do it.

If it is the latter, then the star bomber is extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than the dead.

Hide yourself and clean up.

Singer turned his attention to the star bomber, and saw that it was a very ordinary star, with at least one billion time grains left to live.It has eight planets, four of which are liquid giants and four of which are solid.According to the singer’s experience, the low-entropy body for the original broadcasting is on the solid planet.Singer kicked off the big-eyed process, which he rarely does, which is ultra vires.

"What are you doing? Big Eyes is very busy now." said the elder of Seed.

"There is a low-entropy world, I want to take a closer look." The singer replied.

"It's enough to take a look at your work from a distance."

"Just curious."

"Big Eyes has more important targets to observe, and has no time to satisfy your curiosity, so go do your business."

Singer didn't continue to ask. The cleaner was the lowest position in the seed, and was always looked down upon, thinking that it was a trivial job that was easy to do.The scorners forget that the broadcasted coordinates are often dangerous, more so than the hidden majority.

All that's left is to clean up, and Singer takes that mass point out of the warehouse again.It suddenly occurred to him that mass points cannot be used to clean up star bombers. The structure of this galaxy is different from that of the previous dead galaxy, and there are dead spots. Using mass points may not be able to clean up cleanly, or even waste effort. This requires the use of two-way foils. .However, the singer does not have the authority to take the two-way foil from the warehouse, so he has to apply to the elders.

"I need a two-way foil for cleaning." Singer said to the elder.

"Give it." The elder immediately gave the singer a piece.

The two-way foil is suspended in front of the singer, in an encapsulated state, crystal clear.Although it is just a very common thing, the singer likes it very much.He doesn't like those expensive tools, which are too violent. He likes the hardest softness embodied by the two-way foil, and the beauty that can sing death into a song.

But the singer was a little uneasy, "Why did you give it to me so readily this time?"

"It's not something expensive."

"But if you use this thing too much, it's always..."

"It's used everywhere in the universe."

"Yes, it's used everywhere, but we used to be somewhat restrained, and now..."

"Did you hear something?" The elder rummaged through the singer's thought body, making the singer shudder.The elder quickly found the legend that the singer had heard. This was not a crime, it was an open secret on the seed.

It's about the war between the mother world and the marginal world. There have been battle reports in the past, but they disappeared later, indicating that the war is not going well, or even in crisis.However, it is impossible for the mother world and the marginal world to coexist, and the marginal world must be eliminated, otherwise it will be destroyed.If the war cannot be won, only...

"Is the mother world ready for two-way transformation?" Singer asked, in fact, the elder already knew his question.

The elder did not answer, perhaps acquiescing.

If this is the case, it is a great tragedy.The singer can't imagine that kind of life. On the tower of meaning, survival is above all else. In the face of survival, all low-entropy bodies in the universe can only choose the lesser of two evils.

The singer removes these thoughts from the body of thought, which is not his business, which is asking for trouble.What he was thinking about now was where the singing just now went, and it took him a long time to remember, so he continued to sing:
……

There are beautiful streaks in time

Soft to the touch like mud in the shallow sea

She spends time all over her body
Then pull me up to the edge of existence
this is phase flight
The stars in our eyes are like ghosts
We are also like ghosts in the eyes of the stars

……

During the singing, the singer picked up the two-way foil with the tentacles of the force field, and casually threw it at the star bomber.

[Bunker Era 67, "Halo"]

When Cheng Xin woke up, she found herself in weightlessness.

Hibernation, unlike sleep, does not feel the passage of time.During the whole process, there is only a sense of time in less than two hours when entering hibernation and waking up. No matter how long the hibernation is, I feel that I only slept for less than two hours, so there is always a sense of switching when waking up. It feels like I have passed through a space-time gate and entered another world all of a sudden.

The world Cheng Xin was in now was a white spherical space, and she saw Ai AA floating nearby, wearing the same tights as she was in hibernation, her hair was wet, and her limbs were splayed out limply, apparently she had just woken up.When their eyes met, Cheng Xin wanted to speak, but the paralysis caused by the low temperature hadn't passed, and she couldn't make a sound. AA shook his head laboriously at her, meaning: I, like you, don't know anything.

Cheng Xin found that the space was filled with yellow light like sunset, and this light came in from a round window like a porthole.Outside the window, Cheng Xin saw blurred streamlined and swirling stripes filling his field of vision. These stripes were distributed in parallel blue and yellow stripes, showing a world covered by wild storms and torrents.This is clearly the surface of Jupiter.The surface of Jupiter that Cheng Xin sees now is obviously different from what she saw half a century ago. It is much brighter. It is strange that the wide and turbulent cloud belt in the middle reminds her of the Yellow River.Of course she knew that a vortex in this "yellow river" might hold an earth.Against this background, Cheng Xin saw an object. The main body was a long cylinder with different thicknesses. There were three short cylinders attached to different parts of the cylinder. They were connected as a whole with the cylinder as the axis. Rotate slowly.Cheng Xin determined that this was a space city complex, consisting of eight space cities.Cheng Xin also discovered an astonishing fact: the place where they are located and the space city complex are relatively static, but the surface of Jupiter in the background is slowly moving!Judging from the brightness of Jupiter's surface, it is now clearly on the sunny side, and even the shadow of the space city complex cast by the sunlight on the gaseous surface of Jupiter can be seen.After a while, Jupiter's day-night boundary appeared, and the Great Red Spot like a strange eye slowly moved into view.All this proves that the place where they are located and the space city complex are not in the shadow of Jupiter's back sun, nor are they running parallel to Jupiter in the orbit of the sun. Both of them are now Jupiter's satellites and are orbiting Jupiter.

"Where are we?" Cheng Xin asked, at this moment she could make a hoarse voice, but she still couldn't control her body.

AA shook his head again, "I don't know, it seems to be on a spaceship."

They continued to float in the yellow halo of Jupiter, as if in a dream.

"You are on the Halo."

The voice came from an information window that just popped up next to them. There was a white-haired old man in the window. Cheng Xin recognized him as Cao Bin at a glance.Seeing his old state, she realized that she had crossed a large period of time.Cao Bin told her that it was May 67, 5 in the era of the bunker, and she realized that 19 years had passed since the last short waking up.She escaped from life outside of time and watched others age in an instant, which filled her heart with guilt. She decided that no matter what happened in the future, this would be her last hibernation.

Cao Bin told them that the spaceship they were on was the latest generation model of the "Halo", which was only completed three years ago.He said he and Bi Yunfeng were both found guilty after the Xinghuan City incident half a century ago, but both were released shortly after serving their sentences.Bi Yunfeng passed away more than ten years ago, and Cao Bin brought his last greetings to them, which made Cheng Xin's eyes moist.Cao Bin told them that the number of large space cities in the Jupiter community has increased to 52, and most of them have formed a complex. What they can see is the Jupiter-20 complex.Due to the perfection of the solar system's defense system, all cities became Jupiter's satellites [-] years ago, and they would only change their orbits and hide in bunkers when there was a strike warning.

"Life in the city has become like heaven again, but unfortunately you can't see it, because you don't have time." Cao Bin stopped suddenly when he said this.Cheng Xin and AA exchanged an uneasy look, and they now knew that his previous chatter might have been to delay this moment.

"Did the strike alarm appear?" Cheng Xin asked.

Cao Bin nodded, "Yes, the alarm came. There have been two false alarms in half a century, and they almost woke you up, but this time it's true. Children—I'm 110 years old, I can That's what I call you—children, the Dark Forest Strike has finally come."

Cheng Xin's heart tightened suddenly, not because of the blow. For more than a century, the human world had prepared everything for this, but she was sensitively aware that something was wrong.They were awakened according to the agreement, and it will take at least four or five hours to recover to this state, which means that it has been a while since the alarm was issued, but the Jupiter complex 100 outside the window neither disintegrated urgently nor changed its orbit, and continued to act as if nothing had happened. Operates as a satellite of Jupiter.Looking at Cao Bin again, the expression of this [-]-year-old man is too calm, and it seems that there is still despair.

"You're-" AA asked.

"I'm at the Solar System Early Warning Center." Cao Bin pointed behind him and said.

Cheng Xin saw a control center-like hall behind Cao Bin, and the space was almost flooded by information windows.Those windows floated all over the hall, and new ones kept pushing to the front, but were quickly covered by later ones, like a flood gushing out after a dike burst.But the people in the lobby don't seem to be doing anything.Half of the people there were wearing military uniforms. They were either standing against their desks or sitting quietly. All of them had dull eyes and the same ominous calmness on their faces as Cao Bin.

It shouldn't be like this, Cheng Xin thought.This is not like a world that has entered the bunker and is confident in the face of blows, but it is very similar to the state when the three-body crisis first appeared more than three centuries ago, no, it was already four centuries ago.At that time, in the offices of PIA and PDC, Cheng Xin could see such atmospheres and expressions everywhere, showing a kind of despair in the face of superpowers in the universe, a kind of numbness and indifference of giving up everything.

Most of the people in the hall were silent, but there were also a few people who were talking in low voices with sad faces.Cheng Xin saw a man sitting blankly, a glass on the table was poured, and the blue drink flowed from the table to his pants, but he ignored it at all.On the other side, in front of a large-area information window that is always on top showing a complex trend graph, a soldier and a civilian woman embraced each other. There were faint tears on the woman's face...

"Why don't you go into the bunker?!" AA asked, pointing to the space city complex outside the porthole.

"It's not necessary, the bunker is useless." Cao Bin lowered his eyes and said.

"How close is the particle of light to the sun?" Cheng Xin asked.

"There are no particles of light."

"Then what did you find?"

Cao Bin laughed miserably, "A small note."

[Bunker Era 66, Outer Solar System]

One year before Cheng Xin woke up, the solar system early warning system discovered a UFO passing by the outer Oort Nebula at a speed close to the speed of light, and the closest time was only [-] light-years away from the sun.The object is huge, and the radiation excited by collisions with atoms and dust in the thin air of space when traveling at the speed of light is very intense.The early warning system also observed that the object made a small turn in flight to avoid a small piece of interstellar dust ahead, and then turned again to return to its original course.It is almost certainly an intelligent spaceship.

This is the first time that humans in the solar system have seen alien civilizations other than Trisolaris.

Due to the lessons learned from the previous three false alarms, the federal government has not announced this discovery to the public. In the bunker world, no more than 1000 people knew about it.During the days when the alien spacecraft was closest to the solar system, these people were in a state of extreme tension and fear.In the dozens of early warning system observation units in space, in the Solar System Early Warning Center (now a separate space city in the Neptune swarm), in the Operations Center of the General Staff of the Federation Fleet, and in the office of the President of the Solar System Federation, people are silent He held his breath and watched the movement of the alien visitors, like a group of shivering fish hiding at the bottom of the water, listening to the fishing boats passing by on the surface.The fear of these insiders later developed to the point of absurdity. They refused to use wireless communication, and even walked lightly and spoke in a low voice... In fact, everyone knows that this is meaningless, because what the early warning system sees now is The scene a year and four months ago, when the alien spaceship had gone away.

When the alien spacecraft drifted away from the observation field of view, people were not able to breathe a sigh of relief, because the early warning system made another more worrying discovery: the alien spacecraft did not emit light particles to the sun, but emitted Another thing.This object is also launched towards the sun at the speed of light, but there is no collision radiation of light particles at all, and it is completely invisible in all electromagnetic wave bands. The early warning system discovered it through gravitational waves.This object emits weak gravitational waves uninterruptedly. The frequency and intensity of this gravitational wave are constant, without carrying any information, which may be caused by some inherent physical properties of the emitter.When the early warning system first detected this gravitational wave and located its emission source, it thought it was emitted by an alien spacecraft, but soon detected that the emission source of the gravitational wave separated from the spacecraft and flew towards the solar system at a speed close to the speed of light.Analysis of observational data also showed that the projectile was not precisely aimed at the sun, and that if it was on its current orbit, it would pass the sun just outside the orbit of Mars, a considerable error if its target was the sun .This also shows that it is different from the light particle from another aspect: in the two existing observation data of the light particle, after the light particle is launched, it is precisely aimed at the target star under the premise of considering the advance of the star's movement. There is no need to make any corrections, and it can be considered that the light particle is a light-speed stone flying with inertia.Precise tracking of the source of the gravitational waves now shows that the projectile has not undergone any orbital corrections, which seems to indicate that its target is not the sun, which also brings a little comfort.

When approaching 150 astronomical units from the sun, the gravitational wave frequency of the projectile began to decrease rapidly, and the early warning system quickly discovered that this was caused by the deceleration of the projectile.In a few days, its speed dropped sharply from the speed of light to one-thousandth of the speed of light, and it continued to decrease.Such a low speed will not pose a threat to the sun, which is another consolation. At the same time, at this speed, human space vehicles can fly in parallel with it, that is to say, spaceships can be dispatched to intercept it.

The two spacecraft "Revelation" and "Alaska" formed a formation and set off from the Neptune city cluster to detect unknown projectiles.

These two spacecraft are equipped with gravitational wave receiving systems, which can form a positioning network to accurately locate projectiles at short distances.Since the broadcast era, humans have built many spaceships capable of transmitting and receiving gravitational waves, but there are great differences in design concepts. The main reason is to separate the gravitational wave antenna from the spaceship and become two independent parts. The antenna can be different from the spaceship. The spaceship combination, the antenna can be replaced after the decay fails. The "Revelation" and "Alaska" are only two medium-sized spacecraft, but their volume is comparable to that of a large spacecraft. The main part is the huge gravitational wave antenna.These two spaceships are very similar to the helium airships of the AD century. They look huge, but the payload part is just a small piece hanging under the airbag.

Ten days after the detection formation set sail, Vasily and Bai Ice took a walk on the gravitational wave antenna wearing light space suits and magnetic shoes.They all like that, the view is better here than inside the ship, and the wide antenna surface gives it a down-to-earth feel.They are the main leaders of the first detection team, Vasily is the commander-in-chief, and Bai Ice leads the technical work.

Alexei Vasili is the early warning observer of the solar system early warning system in the broadcast era. Together with Wiener, he once discovered the track of the Trisolaran lightspeed spacecraft and triggered the first false alarm event.After the incident, Lieutenant Vasili became one of the scapegoats and was dismissed from the military. However, he was very unconvinced and believed that history would give him justice, so he went into hibernation.Sure enough, with the passage of time, the discovery of the track of the light-speed spacecraft has become more and more significant, and the heavy loss of the first false alarm incident has gradually been forgotten. Vasily recovered after waking up in the 9th year of the bunker era. Military position, and now he has become a lieutenant general of the Federal Space Force, but he is also nearly eighty years old.He looked at Bai Ice beside him, and felt that life was unfair: this person was born more than 80 years earlier than himself, a person in the crisis era, also in hibernation, and now he is only in his 40s.

Bai Ice's original name was Bai Aisi. After waking up, in order to make himself appear less behind the times, he changed his name to a mixed Chinese and English name commonly used in modern times.He used to be Ding Yi's doctoral student. He hibernated at the end of the Crisis Era and woke up 22 years ago.Generally speaking, such a long time span makes it difficult to keep up with the times, but theoretical physics has its own peculiarities.If it is said that the blockade of sophons made physicists in the AD century still not outdated in the era of deterrence, then the establishment of the circumsolar accelerator has put the basic theoretical fields of physics in a state of reshuffling.As early as the first century AD, superstring theory was considered to be a very advanced theory, and it was the physics of the 22nd century.The establishment of the circumsolar accelerator made it possible for the superstring theory to be directly verified by experiments, but the result was a disaster. Far more parts were overthrown than confirmed, including the things that Trisolaris once transmitted were also falsified, but according to the three It is impossible for their basic theories to be so wrong because of the technological heights reached by the body civilization later, it only shows that they have also deceived human beings in terms of basic theories.The theoretical model proposed by Bai Ice at the end of the crisis era is a rare thing that has been partially confirmed by the circumsolar accelerator.When he woke up, the physics community had already stood on the same starting line, and he stood out and gained a high reputation. It took him more than ten years to return to the forefront of physics.

"It seems familiar." Vasily said with an all-encompassing gesture.

"Yes, but the self-confidence and arrogance of human beings are gone." Bai Ice said.

Vasily felt the same way.Looking at the rear of the flight line, Neptune has turned into a faint blue dot, and the sun is just a small dim light cluster, which cannot even cast a shadow on the surface of the antenna.Where was the magnificent phalanx composed of two thousand stellar warships back then?Now there are only two spaceships that are alone, and the crew is less than 100 people. The distance between "Alaska" and "Revelation" is nearly [-] kilometers, and they are completely invisible. The "Alaska" is not only used as the other end of the positioning network, there is also a detection team on it, the organization is the same as that on the "Revelation", and according to the General Staff, it is a reserve team. It seems that the upper level is dangerous about this trip Fully estimated.On the edge of this cold and silent solar system, the antenna under the feet seems to be the only island in the universe.Vasily wanted to look up to the sky and sigh, but felt that it was boring, so he took out a small object from the pocket of the space suit and let it spin and suspend between the two.

"Look what is this?"

At first glance, that thing looked like a bone of some kind of animal, but it was actually a metal part. The smooth surface reflected the cold starlight.

Vasili pointed to the rotating parts and said: "More than 100 hours ago, we detected a small piece of metal floating objects near the route, and sent an unmanned spaceship to retrieve a few pieces. This is one of them. I checked, This is a part of the fusion engine of the star-class battleship at the end of the Crisis Era, the cooling control part."

"Is this a relic from the Doomsday campaign?" Bai Ice asked in awe.

"It should be, this time there is also a metal armrest on the seat and a fragment of the bulkhead."

This area is the orbital range of the ancient battlefield of the Doomsday Battle nearly two centuries ago. After the bunker project started, relics of ancient battleships were often found. Some of them appeared in the museum of the bunker world, and some were circulated in the black market.White Ice held the part, feeling a chill through the gloves of the space suit straight to the marrow.After he let go, the part continued to spin in the air, as if driven by the soul attached to it.Bai Ice looked away and looked into the distance, only to see the bottomless emptiness. Those two thousand warships and the remains of millions of people have been operating in this dark and cold space for nearly two centuries. The blood of the victim has long been sublimated from ice chips into gas and dissipated.

"What we detected this time may be more dangerous than water droplets." Bai Ice said.

"That's right, we were already familiar with the Three-Body Problem at that time, but we didn't know anything about the world where this thing came out... Dr. Bai, have you guessed what kind of thing we will encounter?"

"Only massive objects can emit gravitational waves. That object should have a large mass and volume. Maybe it is a spaceship itself... However, accidents are normal for this kind of thing."

The detection formation continued to sail for a week, shortening the distance between itself and the source of gravitational waves to 100 million kilometers.Before that, the formation had slowed down, and now the speed has dropped to zero and started to accelerate towards the solar system, so that when the projectile catches up with the formation, the two will fly in parallel.The detection work was mainly completed by the "Apocalypse", and the "Alaska" retreated to observe [-] kilometers away.

The distance continued to shorten, and the launch body was only about [-] kilometers away from the "Enlightenment". At this time, the gravitational wave signal it sent was very clear, and precise positioning could be carried out. However, at that position, the radar detection did not have any echo, and visible light Observations are also empty.Then, the distance was shortened to a thousand kilometers, and nothing was visible at the location of the source of the gravitational wave emission.

The people on the "Apocalypse" fell into panic. Before setting off, they had imagined various situations, but they didn't expect that they were close to the target, but there was nothing in their vision.Vasily asked the early warning center, and received an instruction from the center after a delay of more than 40 minutes, and continued to shorten the distance to the target until it was as close as 150 kilometers!At this time, the visible light observation system discovered that there was a small white dot at the position where the gravitational wave was emitted, and that white dot could be seen with ordinary telescopes from the spacecraft.So, "Apocalypse" sent an unmanned spaceship to detect.The spaceship flew towards the target, and the distance shortened rapidly, 500 kilometers, [-] kilometers, [-] meters... Finally, the spaceship hovered five meters away from the target, and the high-definition holographic image it sent back allowed the two The people on the spacecraft saw this thing shooting from outer space to the solar system——

A small note.

It can only be described in this way. Its official name is a rectangular membrane, [-] cm long and [-] cm wide, slightly larger than a credit card, extremely thin, without any thickness, and the surface is pure white. It looks like a piece of paper.

The members of the detection team are all the best professionals and commanders, and they all have calm thinking, but the power of intuition is still overwhelming.They were prepared to encounter a huge intruder, and some people even speculated that it was a spaceship the size of Europa. Judging from the intensity of the gravitational waves it emits, this is entirely possible.Looking at the note from outer space (that's how they called it later), they all let out a long breath, letting go of their long-suspended hearts.Intellectually, they did not let down their vigilance. This thing may also be a weapon, and it may have the power to destroy two spaceships, but it is really too unbelievable to say that it can destroy the entire galaxy.In appearance, it was so slender and harmless, like a white feather floating in the night sky.Letters written on paper are long gone, but people have seen them in movies about the ancient world, so the note has added romance to them.

Tests have shown that the paper strip does not reflect electromagnetic waves of any frequency band. The white color it presents is not the reflection of external light, but the faint white light emitted by itself, and no other radiation has been detected.Since any electromagnetic wave, including visible light, can penetrate the paper strip, the paper strip is actually transparent, and in close-up images, the stars behind it can be seen through it.However, due to the interference of its own white light, the space background is very dark, so it appears opaque white from a distance.The note is harmless, at least on the outside.

Maybe it's really a letter?

Since there was no suitable grabbing tool on the unmanned spaceship, another spaceship had to be dispatched, with a robotic arm on it, trying to grab the note with a small sealed grab.When the mechanical arm stretched the open grab to the note, the hearts of the people on the two spaceships hung again.

This scene also seemed familiar.

A strange thing happened. When the grab closed to buckle the note in it and the mechanical arm retracted, the note leaked out of the sealed grab and remained in place.Tried several times, same result. The controller on the "Apocalypse" controlled the mechanical arm to touch the note, and the arm rod passed through the note, both of which were intact, the mechanical arm did not feel any resistance, and the position of the note did not move at all.Finally, the controller maneuvered the spaceship to slowly move towards the note, trying to push it.When the hull of the boat came into contact with the note, the latter submerged into the hull, and as the spaceship moved forward, it reappeared from the stern of the boat and remained in its original state.During the passage of the note through the hull, the internal systems of the spaceship did not detect any abnormalities.

At this time, people know that the note is not an ordinary thing, it is like a phantom, and it does not interact with any object in the real world.It is also like a small cosmic datum, which remains precisely in place, and no contact can change its position or orbit in the slightest.

Ice decided to go and observe it himself, and Vasily insisted on going with him.The two leaders of the first detection team went to the same time, which caused controversy. It took more than 40 minutes to get an answer to the early warning center.Due to Vasily's insistence and considering the existence of the reserve team, everyone reluctantly agreed.

The two sailed towards the note in the spaceship, watching the "Revelation" and the huge gravitational wave antenna gradually receding, Bai Ice felt that he was leaving the only support, and his heart became empty.

"Isn't your mentor like us back then?" Vasily said, he looked very calm.

Bai Ice acquiesced to this.At this moment, he felt that he was indeed in a spiritual connection with Ding Yi two centuries ago. They were both sailing towards a huge unknown, towards the same unknown fate.

"Don't worry, we should trust our intuition this time." Vasili patted Bai Ice on the shoulder and said, but his comfort had no effect on the latter.

The spaceship quickly sailed to the note.After checking the space suits, the two opened the hatch of the spaceship to expose themselves to space, and fine-tuned the position of the spaceship so that the note was suspended less than half a meter above their heads.They carefully looked at the square-inch white plane, through which they also saw the stars behind, and confirmed that the note was a luminous transparent body, but its own light drowned out the starlight from behind, making the light through The stars it sees are a little blurry.They rose up from the boat again, so that the plane of the note was level with their line of sight, just as the transmitted image showed—the note had no thickness, and it completely disappeared from this direction.Vasily stretched out his hand towards the note, and was immediately caught by Bai Ice.

"What are you doing?!" Bai Ice asked sharply.His eyes through the mask said the rest, "Think of my mentor!"

"If it's really a letter, it may require the direct contact of our intelligent beings to release the information." Vasili said, taking Bai Ice's hand away with the other hand.

Vasily touched the note with his gloved hand in the space suit, and his hand passed through the note without any damage to the surface of the glove; Vasily did not receive any telepathic messages either.He put his hand through the note again, and stopped there, letting the small white plane divide the palm into two parts, still without any feeling, the part of the note in contact with the palm showed the outline of the palm section, which obviously did not Cut or torn, it went through the palm of the hand intact.Vasily withdrew his hand, and the paper was suspended in its original position, or flew towards the solar system with the spaceship at a speed of two hundred kilometers per second.

Bai Ice also tried to touch the note with his hand, and quickly pulled it back, "It seems to be a projection of another universe, which has nothing to do with our world."

Vasily is concerned about more practical issues, "If nothing can affect it, we won't be able to bring it into the spacecraft for further research."

Bai Ice laughed, "It couldn't be simpler, have you forgotten the story in the Koran? If the mountain doesn't go to Muhammad, Muhammad can go to the mountain."

Therefore, the "Revelation" slowly sailed towards the note, made it enter the interior of the spacecraft after touching it, and then slowly adjusted the position so that the note was suspended in the experimental cabin of the spacecraft. If the note needs to be moved during the research, then It can only be done by moving the ship itself.This kind of peculiar manipulation was difficult at first, but fortunately, the "Revelation" was originally a spacecraft for exploring small objects in the Kuiper belt, and it had excellent position control capabilities. The gravitational wave antenna was also equipped with as many as twelve fine-tuning engines. Once the AI ​​of the spaceship is familiar, the manipulation becomes quick and precise.If the world can't exert any effect on the note, it can only let the world move around it.

This is a peculiar scene, the note is in the inner center of the Revelation, but it has nothing to do with the spacecraft dynamically, the two are just overlapping and moving towards the solar system at the same speed.

After entering the spacecraft, due to the enhancement of the background light, the transparent nature of the paper strip is more obvious, and the scene behind can be clearly seen through it.It is no longer like a strip of paper, but like a little transparent membrane, showing its existence only by its own weak light, but it is still called a strip of paper.When the background light is strong, it can even be lost visually, and the researchers had to dim the lighting of the experimental chamber so that the note can stand out.

The researchers first determined the mass of the paper strip, which in this case could only be done by measuring the gravitational force it exerted, but nothing was shown on the highest precision of the gravimeter, so the mass of the paper strip may be extremely small, or even zero.For the latter case, some people guess whether it is a macroscopic photon or neutrino, but judging from its regular shape, it is obviously an artificial artifact.

The analysis of the paper strip has no further results, because after electromagnetic waves of all frequency bands penetrate it, no diffraction phenomenon can be observed, and magnetic fields of various strengths have no effect on it. This thing seems to have no internal structure.

More than 20 hours have passed, and the detection team still knows almost nothing about the paper strip, and only observed one phenomenon: the light and gravitational waves emitted by the paper strip are gradually weakening, which means that the light and gravitational waves emitted by it may be a combination of An evaporation phenomenon.Since these two are the only evidence for the existence of the note, if they disappear in the end, the note will also disappear.

The detection formation received the information from the early warning center. The large-scale scientific research spacecraft "Tomorrow" has set sail from the Neptune community, and will rendezvous with the detection formation seven days later. The "Tomorrow" has more complete detection and research equipment, which can conduct more in-depth research on the notes. Research.

As the research progressed, the wariness of the people on the spacecraft gradually disappeared, and they no longer cautiously kept a distance from it.Knowing that it has no effect on the real world and does not emit harmful radiation, they began to touch it at will and let it pass through their bodies. Some people even let notes pass through their eyes into their brains and asked others to take pictures.When Bai Ice saw it, he suddenly became angry:
"Don't do this! This is no fun!" he yelled, and then left the experimental cabin where he had worked for more than 20 hours and returned to his own cabin.

As soon as he entered the door, Bai Ice turned off the lights, trying to sleep.But in the dark, he suddenly felt uneasy, feeling that the paper would float in white light from a certain direction at any time, so he turned on the light again, and he was suspended in this soft light, falling into memories.

The last parting with my mentor was 190 years ago, and I still remember it vividly.It was dusk, and the two of them came to the surface from the dungeon and drove into the desert.Ding Yi likes this, he likes to walk and think in the desert, and even likes to give lectures in the desert, which sometimes makes his students miserable.He explained this eccentricity this way: "I like wild places. Life is a disturbance to physics."

The weather was fine that day, there was no wind and sand, and there was a fresh smell in the air in early spring.The two teachers and students lay on a sandy slope, and the North China Desert was shrouded in the setting sun.In the past, Bai Aisi felt that these rolling sand dunes were very similar to a woman's body (this seemed to be enlightened by her teacher), but now she felt that they were like a naked brain, which showed blurred grooves in the afterglow of the setting sun.Looking at the sky again, today there is actually a little blue in the grayness that has not been seen for a long time, like a thought that is about to be enlightened.

Ding Yi said: "Aisi, what I'm going to say to you today, you'd better not tell others. If I don't come back, you don't want to tell others. There is no particular reason, but I just don't want people to laugh at me." .”

"Mr. Ding, then you can tell me when you come back."

Bai Aisi wasn't trying to comfort Ding Yi, he was speaking the truth. At this time, he was still immersed in the fantasy and ecstasy of victory, thinking that Ding Yi's trip was not in great danger.

"First answer my question." Ding Yi ignored Bai Aisi's words, pointing to the desert in the sunset and said, "Ignoring quantum uncertainty, assuming that everything is deterministic, knowing the initial conditions can calculate the cross-section at any time in the future." If there is an extraterrestrial scientist, given all the initial data of the earth billions of years ago, can it predict the existence of this desert through calculations?"

Bai Ai thought for a while and said: "Of course not, because the existence of this desert is not the result of the natural evolution of the earth. Desertification is caused by human civilization. It is difficult to grasp the behavior of civilization with physical laws."

"Very well, then why do we and our colleagues want to explain the state of the universe today and predict the future of the universe just by deducing the laws of physics?"

Ding Yi's words surprised Bai Aisi, he had never expressed similar thoughts before.

Bai Aisi said: "I feel that this is something outside of physics. The goal of physics is to discover the basic laws of the universe. For example, the desertification of the earth by human beings cannot be directly calculated from physics, but it is also carried out through laws. , the laws of the universe are eternal.”

"Hey hey hey hey hey..." Ding Yi suddenly laughed strangely. Later, in retrospect, it was the most evil smile Bai Aisi had ever heard. to cover up the fear, and end up obsessing over the fear itself, "Your last word!" I often comfort myself with this, I always convince myself that there will always be a fucking untouched table in this great feast ... I just comfort myself over and over again, and I will repeat it again before I die."

Bai Aisi felt that Ding Yi had gone further, like talking in his sleep, he didn't know what to say.

Ding Yi went on to say: "In the early days of the crisis, when sophons disrupted the accelerator for the first time, several people committed suicide. I thought they were unreasonable at the time. For theorists, they should be excited to see such experimental data. But now I understand , These people know more than me, such as Yang Dong, she must know more than me, and she thinks farther than me, she may know something that we don't know now. Could it be that Sophon is the only one who creates the illusion? Is the illusion only Existing at the end of the accelerator? Is the rest of the universe as innocent as a virgin, waiting for us to explore? Unfortunately, she took everything she knew with her."

"If she had communicated with you more then, maybe she wouldn't have gone that way."

"Then I might die with her."

Ding Yi dug a hole in the sand around her and watched the sand flow down like water, "If I don't come back, all the things in my house will belong to you. Those things are very eye-catching."

"That's, especially that set of pipes . . . I don't think I'll get any of those, though."

"I hope so, I still have some money..."

"Teacher, for money..."

"I want you to use it to hibernate, the longer the better, of course, this is up to you. I have two purposes: one is to let you see the ending for me, the finale of physics; the other is... …How should I put it, I don’t want you to waste your life, it’s not too late for you to do physics when people are sure that physics exists.”

"This seems to be... Yang Dong's words."

"Probably not a lie."

At this time, Bai Aisi noticed the small hole that Ding Yi dug on the sandy slope just now, and that hole was expanding rapidly.They quickly stood up and retreated to the side, watching the bunker expand, and it also deepened as it expanded. The diameter has expanded to hundreds of meters, and a nearby dune has been swallowed by the crater.Bai Aisi ran to the car and sat in the driver's seat, and Ding Yi followed suit.At this time, Bai Aisi found that the car was slowly moving towards the pit along with the surrounding sand. He immediately started the engine and the wheels turned, but the car continued to move backwards.

As Ding Yi spoke, she let out that evil smile again: "Hey hey hey hey hey..."

Bai Aisi maximized the power of the electric engine, and the wheels spun crazily, stirring up waves of sand, but the body of the car unstoppably moved to the pit with the surrounding sand, like a piece of paper placed on a pulled tablecloth. plate.

"Niagara Falls! Niagara Falls! Hehehehe..." Ding Yi shouted.

Bai Aisi looked back, and saw a scene that made his blood freeze: the bunker had expanded to the extent that he could see, and the entire desert was swallowed by it. At a glance, the world was a big pit, bottomless and dark On the edge of the pit, quicksand pours down majesticly, forming a large yellow waterfall.What Ding Yi said was not accurate. Niagara Falls is only an insignificant section of this terrifying sandfall. The sandfall extends from the edge of the nearby crater to the other side of the crater far away in the sky, forming a long ring of sandfalls. , The rolling sand stream made a loud rumbling noise, as if the world was disintegrating!The car continued to slide towards the edge of the pit, and the speed was getting faster and faster. Ace Bai stepped on the power control panel desperately, but it was of no avail.

"Fool, do you think we can escape?" Ding Yi said with a strange smile, "Escape velocity, why don't you count it as escape velocity? Are you reading with your butt? Hehehehe..."

The car crossed the edge of the pit and fell into the sand waterfall. The falling sand stream around it was almost still, and everything was falling into the bottomless darkness!Bai Aisi screamed in extreme panic, but he couldn't hear his own voice, only Ding Yi's wild laughter.

"Wahhahahahaha... There is no untouched banquet, there is no untouched virgin, wahhahahahahaha..."

Bai Ice woke up from the nightmare, and found that he was already covered in cold sweat, and there were many drops of sweat floating around him.After he floated in mid-air and froze for a while, he rushed out and came to another high-class cabin, and after a lot of effort, he opened the door, and Vasily was also sleeping.

"General, don't put that thing, that thing they call a note in the spaceship; or don't let the 'Revelation' land on that thing, get away from it immediately, as far away as possible!"

"Did you find anything?"

"No, just a hunch."

"You have a bad complexion, are you tired? I think you're worrying too much. That thing seems...it seems to be nothing. There's nothing in it. It should be harmless."

Bai Ice grabbed Vasily's shoulders, looked him straight in the eyes and said, "Don't be arrogant!"

"what?"

"I said don't be arrogant. Weakness and ignorance are not obstacles to survival, but arrogance is. Think about water droplets!"

As if Bai Ice's last words had worked, Vasily stared at him silently for a few seconds, nodded slowly, "Okay, Doctor, listen to you. 'Revelation' left the note, pulled away from it At a distance of one thousand kilometers, only one spaceship is left to monitor it...or two thousand kilometers?"

Bai Ice let go of Vasily's hand, wiped his forehead and said, "You can figure it out, anyway, it's better to be far away. I will write a formal report as soon as possible and report my speculation to the headquarters." After finishing speaking, he stumbled Float away.

The Revelation left the note.The note passes through the ship and is re-exposed to space, where it appears less transparent white due to the dimming of the background light, reverting to the white note again. The "Enlightenment" and the note gradually moved away from each other until they were about [-] kilometers away from each other, waiting for the arrival of the "Tomorrow" spacecraft.At the same time, a spaceship stayed ten meters away from the paper to monitor it continuously, and there were two members of the detection team on duty on the boat.

In space, the intensity of the gravitational waves emitted by the note continued to weaken, and the note itself gradually dimmed.

On the "Enlightenment", Bai Ice shut himself in the experimental cabin, opened more than a dozen information windows beside him, all of which were connected to the quantum mainframe of the spacecraft, and began to perform a large number of calculations.The windows displayed dense equations, matrices, and curves. Surrounded by these windows, he was restless, like a trapped animal in a trap.

After being separated from the "Revelation" for about fifty hours, the gravitational waves emitted by the note completely disappeared, and the white light it emitted flickered twice and then went out, which meant that the note disappeared.

"Has it evaporated completely?" Vasily asked.

"Probably not, it's just that I can't see it anymore." Bai Ice shook his head wearily, closing the information windows around him one by one.

After another hour, all the monitoring did not find the slightest trace of the note, and Vasily ordered the spaceship left to monitor two thousand kilometers away to return to the "Apocalypse", but the two surveillance personnel on duty in the spaceship did not Answer the returned command, only to hear their hurried dialogue:
"Look below, what's going on?!"

"It's rising!"

"Don't touch it! Get out!"

"My legs! Ah—"

After a scream, one of the two monitors could be seen flying out of the spaceship from the monitor on the "Apocalypse", starting the thrusters on the spacesuit and trying to escape.At the same time, a bright light lit up from the bottom of the spaceship, where it was melting!The spaceship is like a piece of ice cream on a hot glass, the bottom of which melts into a pool and spreads in all directions.The "glass" cannot be seen, only the melted and spread out part of the spaceship can reveal the existence of the invisible plane.The molten material forms an extremely thin layer on the plane, emitting a bewitching color light, like fireworks scattered on the plane.The monitor flew out for a while, but he seemed to be pulled towards the plane marked by the molten material by some kind of gravitational force. Soon his feet touched the plane, and immediately melted into a bright piece, and the rest of his body was also there. Going to the plane, there was only one scream that stopped abruptly.

"All personnel enter the overload position, the current engine attitude, forward four!"

The moment he saw the monitor's feet touching the invisible plane from the information window, Vasily passed the captain of the "Revelation" and decisively issued this order to let the "Revelation" leave quickly. "Apocalypse" is not a stellar spacecraft, and its internal personnel do not need the protection of deep sea fluid when it is advancing four times, but the overweight of the acceleration still presses everyone tightly on the seat.Because the order was issued so quickly, some people did not have time to get into their seats and fell to the stern of the boat and were injured. The thrusters of the "Apocalypse" ejected a plasma fire stream several kilometers long, piercing the dark space, but in the place where the spaceship melted in the distance, the faint light can still be seen, like a phosphorous fire in the wilderness .

From the enlarged screen of the monitor, it can be seen that only a small part of the top of the spaceship remains, but it soon completely disappears into that gorgeous plane.The monitor's body is completely spread out on the plane, showing a huge luminous human figure, but his body has become a piece without thickness on the plane. Although it is large, it only has area but no volume.

"We didn't move, the ship didn't accelerate," said Revelation's navigator, struggling to speak in the overweight.

"What nonsense are you talking about?!" Vasily wanted to yell, but he could only speak in a low voice.

From the point of view of common sense, the navigator is indeed talking nonsense. Everyone on the spaceship is crushed by the acceleration overload, which proves that the "Revelation" is accelerating at a high power.It is impossible to visually judge the movement state of the aircraft in space, because the distances of the reference celestial bodies are very far away, and the parallax can not be seen in a short time, but the navigation system of the spacecraft can observe the slight acceleration of the spacecraft And sports, this judgment cannot be wrong.

The "Apocalypse" was overloaded but not accelerated, as if it was nailed to death in space by some force.

"Actually, there is acceleration, but the space in this area is flowing in the opposite direction, which offsets the acceleration." Bai Ice said weakly.

"Spatial flow? Where does it flow?"

"Of course there."

The super-heavy center white Ice was unable to raise his hand to point, but everyone knew the direction he said, and the "Enlightenment" fell into dead silence.Originally, being overweight gave people a sense of security, like fleeing danger in the arms of some protective force, but now it has become a grave-like oppression, suffocating.

"Please open the communication channel with the headquarters. There is no time, so let's treat it as our official report." Bai Ice said.

"It's already opened."

"General, you said that the thing was 'nothing, nothing in it', and you were right, it really was nothing, it had nothing in it, it was just a space, and nothing around us, The space of nothing is the same, the only difference is: it is two-dimensional, it is not a piece, but a piece, a piece without thickness.”

"Didn't it evaporate?"

"What evaporated was its encapsulating force field, which separated that two-dimensional space from the surrounding three-dimensional space, and now the two are in full contact. You remember 'Blue Space' and 'Gravity' Did you see it?"

No one answered, but of course they remembered that four-dimensional space fell into three-dimensional space, like a waterfall flowing off a cliff.

"Just as four-dimensional space falls to three-dimensional space, three-dimensional space will also fall to two-dimensional space, shrinking from one dimension to the microcosm. The area of ​​that small piece of two-dimensional space-it only has area-will expand rapidly, which triggers more Large-scale fall... We are now in a space that is falling to two dimensions, and eventually, the entire solar system will fall to two dimensions, that is, the solar system will become a painting with zero thickness."

"Can you escape?"

"Escaping now is like rowing a boat on the river near the top of a waterfall. Unless you exceed an escape velocity, no matter how you row, you will fall into the waterfall sooner or later. It's like throwing a stone upwards on the ground. No matter how high you throw it, it will always fall back. The whole The solar system is in the drop zone, from which escape velocity must be achieved."

"What is the escape velocity?"

"I've calculated it four times, it should be right."

"What's the escape velocity?!"

The people on the "Apocalypse" and "Alaska" held their breaths and listened to the doomsday judgment for all mankind. Bai Ice said the judgment calmly:

"The speed of light."

The navigation system showed that the "Enlightenment" had experienced a negative acceleration opposite to the direction of propulsion, and began to move in the direction of the two-dimensional plane. The speed was very slow, but gradually accelerated.The engines are still running at full power, which slows the fall of the spacecraft and delays the final outcome.

On the two-dimensional plane two thousand kilometers away, the light emitted by the two-dimensional spaceship and the human body of the monitor has been extinguished. Compared with falling from four-dimensional to three-dimensional, the energy released by falling from three-dimensional to two-dimensional is much smaller.The structures of the two two-dimensional bodies are clearly displayed under the starlight: on the two-dimensional spaceship, the three-dimensional structure after two-dimensional expansion can be seen, and the cockpit and fusion engine can be distinguished, as well as the one in the cockpit. Curly human body.On another two-dimensional human body, the bones and veins can be clearly distinguished, and various parts of the body can also be recognized.In the process of two-dimensionalization, each point on the three-dimensional object is projected onto the two-dimensional plane according to precise geometric rules, so that this two-dimensional body becomes the two most complete and accurate copies of the original three-dimensional spaceship and three-dimensional human body Drawings, all internal structures are arranged on the plane, without any hidden, but the mapping procedures are completely different from engineering drawings, visually it is difficult to restore the original three-dimensional shape by imagination.The biggest difference from engineering drawings is that the two-dimensional unfolding is carried out at various scale levels. All the structures and details that were once hidden in the three-dimensional configuration are arranged on the two-dimensional plane, so it also presents a three-dimensional world viewed from the four-dimensional space. infinite details.This is very similar to the fractal pattern in geometry. Enlarge any part of the picture and still have the same complexity, but the fractal pattern is only a theoretical concept, and the actual pattern is limited by the resolution. After zooming in to a certain extent, the fractal will be lost properties; but the infinite complexity of the three-dimensional object after two-dimensionalization is real, and its resolution reaches the scale of elementary particles.On the spacecraft's monitors, the naked eye can only see a limited scale layer, but its complexity and detail are already dizzying; this is the most complex pattern in the universe, and it will drive people crazy to stare at it for a long time.

But now, both the spaceship and the monitor have zero thickness.

I don't know how big the two-dimensional plane has expanded to now, only those two graphics show its existence.

"Apocalypse" accelerated to slide towards the two-dimensional plane, towards the abyss with zero thickness.

"Everyone, don't be depressed. No one in the solar system can escape, not even a single bacterium or virus can survive, and they will all become part of this giant painting." Bai Ice said, looking calm and calm now.

"Stop accelerating," Vasily said, "don't care about the time, at least let us breathe easy for a while at the end."

Apocalypse's engines shut down, the plasma fire column at the tail of the spacecraft disappeared, and the spacecraft floated in the silence of space.In fact, the spaceship is still accelerating towards the two-dimensional plane, but because it is moving with the surrounding space, the people in the spaceship cannot feel the overload caused by the acceleration, and they are all in weightlessness, breathing comfortably.

"Everyone, you know what I thought of? Yun Tianming's fairy tale, and the painting of the eye of the needle painter." Bai Ice said.

Only a small number of people on the "Enlightenment" knew about Yun Tianming's information, and now, in just a moment, these people all understood the true meaning of this plot.It's a metaphor by itself, without any meaning coordinates, because it's too simple and straightforward.It is likely that Yun Tianming thought it was a big risk for him to put such an obvious metaphor into the story, but he took the risk because the information was extremely important.

But he still overestimated people's understanding.He may have thought that, with the discoveries of Blue Space and Gravity, people would be able to interpret the metaphor.

The lack of this key information makes human beings pin their hopes on the bunker project.

The two strikes of the dark forest that humans have observed are indeed from light particles, but people have overlooked a fact: these two galaxies have different structures from the solar system. Small (only such extrasolar planets can be found with the observation technology in the AD century), the average is only 187% of the distance between Jupiter and the sun, which is closer than the distance between Mercury and the sun, almost close to the star, when the star explodes will be completely destroyed and cannot be used as a shelter; and Trisolaris, with only one planet.

The planetary structure of stars is a galactic feature that can be observed remotely in the universe, and this observation may be enough for a high-tech civilization to glance at it.

Humans know bunkers, don't they?
Weakness and ignorance are not obstacles to survival, arrogance is.

The "Apocalypse" is less than a thousand kilometers away from the two-dimensional plane, and its falling speed is getting faster and faster.

"Thank you for your due diligence. Although we have not been together for a long time, we have had a pleasant cooperation." Vasily said.

"Thank you to everyone, we once lived together in the solar system." Bai Ice said.

The "Apocalypse" fell into the two-dimensional space, and it was two-dimensionalized very quickly. In just a few seconds, the fireworks-like light once again illuminated the dark space.This is a two-dimensional picture with a vast area, which can be clearly observed from the "Alaska" [-] kilometers away.In this picture, everyone on the "Apocalypse" can be clearly distinguished. They gather together hand in hand, and every cell in the body is exposed in space in a two-dimensional state, becoming the giant painting of destruction. The first person to be drawn.

[Bunker Era 67, Pluto]

"Let's go back to Earth." Cheng Xin said softly, this wish first surfaced in her chaotic and dark thoughts.

"Earth is indeed a good place to wait for the end. The fallen leaves return to their roots, but we still hope that the 'Halo' can go to Pluto." Cao Bin said.

"Pluto?"

"Pluto is at the aphelion, and that direction is far away from the two-dimensional space. The federal government will soon officially issue a strike alert to the whole world, and a large number of spaceships will go in that direction. Although the final results are the same, the remaining There will be more time."

"How much more time?"

"The space of the solar system within the Kuiper belt will all drop to two dimensions within eight to ten days."

"I don't care about the time, let's go back to Earth." AA said.

"The federal government wants to entrust you with one thing."

"What else can we do now?"

"It's not an important thing, and there is no important thing now. Someone put forward the idea that theoretically, it is possible to have such an image processing software, which can restore the image of a three-dimensional object falling to a two-dimensional image." Three-dimensional images of objects. We hope that in the distant future, some intelligent civilization can restore the three-dimensional images of our world from the two-dimensional solar system. Although it is only a dead image, human culture will not be completely annihilated. Pluto There is a Museum of Earth Civilization built on the planet, where a considerable part of the precious cultural relics on the earth are stored. The museum is built underground on Pluto, and we are worried that during the process of two-dimensionalization, these cultural relics and stratum materials may be mixed together, and the structure may be destroyed. In order to destroy it, I want you to use the "Halo" to transport some cultural relics out of Pluto and scatter them in space, and let them fall to two dimensions separately, so that their structures can be completely preserved in two dimensions. Let’s try to rescue him...Of course, this kind of thing is close to fantasy, but right now, it’s better to have something to do than to be idle. Besides, Luo Ji is on Pluto, and he really wants to see you.”

"Luo Ji? He's still alive?!" Ai AA exclaimed.

"Yes, almost two hundred years old."

"Okay, then let's go to Pluto." Cheng Xin said, in the past, this was also an extraordinary voyage, but now it doesn't matter.

A pleasant male voice suddenly appeared: "Excuse me, are you going to Pluto?"

"Who are you?" Ai AA asked.

"I am the 'Halo', the AI ​​on the Halo, are you going to Pluto?"

"Yes, what should we do?"

"You just need to confirm, you don't need to do anything, I will complete the voyage."

"Yes, we're going to Pluto."

"Confirmed as the command with the highest authority, it is being executed. The 'Halo' will accelerate at 3G in 1 minutes, please pay attention to the direction of gravity."

Cao Bin said: "Okay, let's leave now. After the strike alert is issued, there may be collapsed turmoil. Let's contact again, I hope there is still a chance." Before Cheng Xin could say goodbye to AA, he closed the message window , At this time, they and the "Halo" are obviously not what he cares about the most.

Looking out from the porthole, several blue reflections appeared on the shell of the space city complex in the distance, which was the reflected light from the "Halo" propeller.Cheng Xin and AA fell to the side of the spherical cabin, and they felt their bodies gradually getting heavier, and the gravity generated by the acceleration quickly reached 1G.When they were still weak and able to stand up, and looked out through the porthole again, they found that the whole of Jupiter was in view, but Jupiter was still huge, and its shrinking speed was invisible to the naked eye.

After setting sail, Cheng Xin and AA began to get acquainted with the "Halo" under the guidance of the spacecraft AI.Like its predecessor, this generation of Halo remains a small starship with a maximum crew of four.Most of the space on the spacecraft is occupied by the ecological circulation system. According to conventional calculations, the ecological system has a large amount of redundancy, which can almost support the lives of four people with the capacity to support forty people.The ecosystem is made into the same four, and the Unicom runs and backs up each other. If one of them accidentally dies, it can be activated again by the remaining resources. Another feature of the "Halo" is that it can directly land on a medium-mass solid planet, which is an extremely rare design among interstellar spacecraft.Spaceships of the same kind generally use the accompanying space shuttle to land on planets. Directly entering the deep gravitational well of planets requires the spaceship to have extremely high strength, which greatly increases the manufacturing cost.In addition, because of the need to enter and exit the atmosphere, the "Halo" has a fully streamlined shape, which is also very rare among interstellar spacecraft.Based on this design, if the "Halo" finds an terrestrial planet in outer space, it can become a living base on the surface of the planet for a long time.Perhaps it is precisely because of this feature that the "Halo" was sent to Pluto to transport cultural relics.

There are also many unusual designs on the "Halo". For example, there are six small courtyards on the spaceship, ranging in size from [-] to [-] square meters, which can automatically adapt to the direction of gravity when accelerating. It can rotate independently in the spacecraft to generate artificial gravity.Each courtyard has different ecological landscapes, such as a small piece of green grass and a creek flowing through the grass, a grove with a clear spring in the middle, a small beach with waves of clear water...these The landscape is small and delicate, like a string of pearls strung with the finest things in the world of Earth, an extravagant design on a small starship.

For the "Hinghuan", Cheng Xin felt distressed and regretful. Such a beautiful small world would soon become a thin slice... But she tried her best to avoid thinking about the bigger things that were about to be destroyed. , Destruction covered the sky of her thoughts like a pair of giant black wings, and she dared not raise her head to face it.

Two hours after setting sail, the "Halo" received a dark forest attack warning officially issued by the Solar System Federation Government to the international community.The proclamation was read by the President of the Confederation, a beautiful woman of very youthful appearance, with an expressionless face.She stood in front of the blue flag of the Solar System Federation, and Cheng Xin found that this flag was very similar to the ancient United Nations flag, except that the earth pattern was replaced by the sun.The last important document in human history is very short, only more than 200 words, the full text is as follows:
The solar system early warning system has confirmed five hours ago that the dark forest attack on the galaxy has appeared.

This is a dimensional strike, which will reduce the dimension of the space where the solar system is located from three dimensions to two dimensions, which will completely destroy all life in the solar system.

The entire process is expected to be completed within eight to ten days. As of the time of the announcement, the fall from the three-dimensional space of the solar system to the two-dimensional space is still in progress, and the scale and speed are rapidly expanding.

It has been confirmed that the escape velocity from the drop zone is the speed of light.

An hour earlier, the federal government and parliament had passed a resolution to abolish all laws on fugitiveism.But the government reminds all citizens that the escape velocity is far greater than the current maximum speed of human spacecraft, and the possibility of successful escape is zero.

The Solar System Federation Government, the Solar System Parliament, the Solar System Supreme Court, and the Solar System Federation Fleet will perform their duties until the last moment.

Cheng Xin and AA did not watch any more information.Now, as Cao Bin said, the bunker world might really be built like a paradise. They really wanted to see what the paradise looked like, but they didn't.If this is coming to an end, the more beautiful the more painful, besides, it will be a paradise that is crumbling in the fear of destruction.

Halo stopped accelerating, and behind it, Jupiter became a small yellow dot.During the next few days of the voyage, Cheng Xin and AA spent the uninterrupted sleep produced by the sleeper. During the lonely voyage on the eve of destruction, just unstoppable random thoughts were enough to make people collapse.

When Cheng Xin and AA were awakened by the AI ​​from their dreamless sleep, the "Halo" had already arrived at Pluto.

At this time, the panorama of Pluto can be seen from the porthole and the surveillance screen. The initial impression of this planet is darkness, like an eye that is always closed.At this distance, the sun's light is already very weak, and the "Halo" can only see the colors of the planet's surface after entering low orbit.Pluto has a blue and black land, the black is rock, it is not necessarily black itself, but because of the dark light; the blue is solid nitrogen and methane.It is said that when Pluto was at perihelion on the inner side of Neptune's orbit two centuries ago, it was a completely different world. At that time, the ice cap on its surface partially melted, creating a thin atmosphere, which was dark yellow when viewed from a distance.

The "Halo" continued to descend. If it was on the earth, it would be the thrilling atmospheric re-entry stage at this time, but now the "Halo" is still flying in a silent vacuum, only relying on its own thrusters to slow down.At this time, a line of striking white characters appeared on the blue and black ground below:

earth civilization
This line of characters is written in a mixture of modern Eastern and Western characters, followed by a few lines of smaller characters, which are also these four characters, written in several major ancient characters.Cheng Xin noticed that the word "museum" could not be found behind these words.The spaceship is now at an altitude of about [-] kilometers. It is conceivable that these characters are huge. Cheng Xin can't estimate their size, but they must be the largest characters ever written by human beings. Each character is enough to accommodate a large city.When the height of the "Halo" drops to about [-] meters, only one of the four characters can be seen in the field of vision; the vast landing field where the "Halo" lands at the end is the Chinese character "ball" for the earth The dot on the upper right.

Under the instruction of the spacecraft AI, Cheng Xin and AA put on light spacesuits and walked out of the "Halo", went down the gangway, and stood on the surface of Pluto.In the extreme cold, the heating system in their space suits was running at full power.The landing field is all white, giving the illusion of fluorescence under the starlight.Judging from the burn marks on the surface of the landing field, many spacecraft have landed or taken off here, but now it is empty.

In the era of bunkers, Pluto was similar to Antarctica of ancient Earth, uninhabited and an inaccessible place in the solar system.

In the sky, there is a black sphere that moves quickly like a ghost among the stars. It is so large that its surface details cannot be seen clearly.This is Pluto's moon Charon, which is one-tenth as massive as Pluto, making the two almost like a binary system, orbiting a common center of mass.

The searchlight on the "Halo" was on, and because there was no atmosphere, its beam of light could not be seen, and its circle of light fell on a black rectangle in the distance - this black obelisk was the only protrusion on the white land thing.It has an eerie simplicity, like some kind of abstraction from the real world.

"I'm somewhat familiar with this thing," Cheng Xin said.

"I'm not familiar with it, but it gives me a bad feeling."

Cheng Xin and AA walked towards the obelisk - Pluto's gravity is only one-tenth of that of the earth, they were actually jumping forward.Along the way, they found themselves following a row of arrows drawn on the white ground, one after the other, all pointing to the black obelisk.When they arrived in front of the obelisk, they realized how tall it was. Looking up, it seemed that a large piece of the starry sky had been hollowed out; looking around, they found that the row of arrows was not the only one, and there were many rows of arrows radially. Convergence to the obelisk.There is a striking protrusion under the obelisk, which is a metal wheel with a diameter of about one meter.Cheng Xin and AA were surprised to find that the wheel was actually a manual thing, because the surface of the obelisk above the wheel was marked with a white line, and there were two arc-shaped arrows indicating the direction of rotation. A schematic diagram of two doors was drawn, one half-opened and one closed.Cheng Xin turned her head to look at the arrow lines that converged here. These concise and strong reminders without words gave her a strange feeling, and AA expressed this feeling.

"These... don't seem to be for people to see."

They turned the wheels clockwise, the resistance of the wheels was great, a door slowly slid open on the obelisk, a stream of gas overflowed, and the moisture in it quickly condensed into ice crystals at extremely low temperatures, and under the light of the searchlight Each one is shining brightly.They walked through the door and came across another door. There was also a manual wheel on the door. This time, a short text prompt appeared above the wheel, explaining that this was a transition cabin, and the first door had to be closed before the second door could be opened. Daomen.Cheng Xin and AA turned a manual wheel on the inside of the first door to close the door. When the searchlight was cut off, they couldn't help feeling a sense of fear. They were about to turn on the light on the spacesuit, but found that the top of the flat space was There was a dim light from a small lamp.This was the first time they saw signs of electricity in this world. In addition, as early as the end of the Crisis Era, buildings with internal air pressure could open the door directly to the vacuum area, without the need for a transition chamber.They started to turn the wheels to open the second door. At this moment, Cheng Xin had a feeling: even if the first door was not closed, the second door could still be opened. The only thing to prevent air leakage was a line of text prompts. In this low-tech environment, there was no Automatic anti-misoperation mechanism.

The impact of a gust of air made them almost fall, and the sudden increase in temperature made the mask blurred. There was a display indicating that the external pressure and air composition were normal, and the mask could be opened.

They saw a tunnel leading down, and the end was very deep. A row of small dim lights were lit in the tunnel. The light they emitted was swallowed by the black cave wall, and the intervals between the lights were in darkness.The bottom of the tunnel is a smooth ramp, albeit steep, almost 45 degrees, with no steps; this could be for two reasons: steps are not needed in low gravity, or, the path is not intended for human walking.

"It's so deep, and there's no elevator?" AA said, looking at the steep slope and not daring to go down.

"The elevator will break down after a long time. The service life of this building is designed according to the geological age."

The sound came from the end of the ramp, where stood an old man, his long white hair and beard floating in low gravity in the dim light, as if glowing by himself.

"Are you Luo Ji?" AA asked loudly.

"Who else could it be? Children, my legs and feet are not very flexible. I won't go up to pick you up. Come down by yourself."

Cheng Xin and AA jumped down the ramp, which was not thrilling due to the low gravity.As the distance approached, they saw Luo Ji's shadow on the old man's face. He was wearing a white Chinese-style gown, leaned on a cane, and was a little hunched, but his voice was very loud.

After walking down the ramp and coming to Luo Ji's side, Cheng Xin bowed deeply to him, "Hi, senior."

"Hehe, don't be like this," Luo Ji said with a smile and waved his hands, "We used to be...colleagues, right?" He looked at Cheng Xin, his old eyes showing surprise that didn't match his age, "Hehe, you're still so young. Back then, you were just a sword holder in my eyes, but later on, you gradually turned into a beautiful girl. Alas, the change was too slow, and now it’s too late, hehehehe..."

In the eyes of Cheng Xin and AA, Luo Ji had also changed, and the majestic sword-wielding man had disappeared without a trace.But they don't know that the current Luo Ji is actually the same Luo Ji who was before he became a Wallfacer four centuries ago. The cynicism of that time also seemed to have awakened from hibernation, diluted by the years and filled with more detachment. .

"Do you know what happened?" AA asked.

"Of course I know, kid." He pointed behind him with his crutches, "Those bastards all ran away, they ran away in the spaceship, and they knew they couldn't run away in the end, but they still ran, a bunch of fools."

He was referring to the rest of the staff at the Museum of Earth Civilizations.

"Son, look, our work is wasted," Luo Ji said to Cheng Xin.

It took Cheng Xin a long time to understand what he meant, but Luo Ji suppressed the thousands of thoughts that followed, and waved his hands and said, "Forget it, forget it, in fact, it's always right to enjoy yourself while you can. It's no fun, and don't worry about it. Well, let's go, don't help me, you haven't learned to walk here yourself."

With Luo Ji's [-]-year-old shambling footsteps, the most difficult thing in this low gravity is not walking fast but slow, so the crutch in his hand is more for slowing down than for supporting himself.

After walking for a while, the eyes suddenly opened up.But Cheng Xin and AA soon discovered that they had just entered another, wider tunnel. The ceiling was very high, and it was still illuminated by a row of dim lights. The tunnel looked very long, and there was no end in sight .

"Look, this is the main body here." Luo Ji raised his crutch and pointed to the tunnel.

"What about the cultural relics?"

"In the hall at the other end, those are not important, how long can those things be stored, 1 years? 10 years? At most 100 million years, most of them will turn to dust, and these—" Luo Ji used another The crutch pointed to the surroundings, "It is intended to be preserved for hundreds of millions of years. Why, do you still think this is a museum? No, no one comes here to visit, and this place is not for people to visit. All of this is just a tombstone, a human tombstone. "

Cheng Xin looked at the dark and empty tunnel, thinking that everything she saw just now was indeed full of images of death.

"How did you think of building this?" AA asked looking around.

"Son, it's because you don't know much. At that time," Luo Ji pointed to Cheng Xin and himself, "people often set up cemeteries for themselves when they were alive. It's not easy for humans to find cemeteries. It's still possible to build a tombstone. " He asked Cheng Xin, "Do you remember Say?"

Cheng Xin nodded, "Of course I remember."

Four centuries ago, while working at PIA, Cheng Xin had met the then Secretary-General of the United Nations several times in various conferences.The closest time was at a PIA briefing. It seemed that Vader was there at the time. She played a PPT on the big screen to explain the technical process of the ladder plan to Say.Sai listened quietly, without asking a single question from the beginning to the end.After the meeting was over, Sai walked by Cheng Xin's side and whispered in her ear, "Your voice is very nice."

"That's also a beauty. I've often thought of her these years. Oh, is it really an ancient person from more than 400 years ago?" Luo Ji leaned on his crutches with both hands and sighed. Part of the legacy and information of civilization after the demise of human beings can be preserved for a long time. She planned to launch unmanned spaceships containing artifacts and information. She said at the time that it was escapism, and things stopped after her death. Three centuries later, when the bunker project began , People think about it again. You know, that period was the most fearful day, the whole world would end at any time, so the newly formed federal government decided to build a tombstone while building the bunker project, and called it Museum of Earth Civilizations; appoint me chairman of that committee."

"It started out as a pretty big research project on how to preserve information over the length of geological time. The original standard was a billion years. Ha, a billion years, at first those idiots thought it was easy, it was Well, they can build a bunker world, what is this? But soon they discovered that modern quantum memory is the kind of thing that can hold a large library in the size of a grain of rice, and the information in it can only be stored for about 2000 years at most After 2000, it cannot be read because of some internal decay. In fact, this is still the memory with the best quality. According to research, two-thirds of the existing ordinary quantum memory will fail within 500 years. Now It's very interesting. Originally, what we did was a detached thing done by people with leisurely minds. It suddenly became a real problem. It has been a bit realistic for 500 years. Aren't we all people from more than 400 years ago? The government Immediately order the museum's research to stop, and instead study how to back up important modern data, so that they can be read at least five centuries later, hehe... Later, we can continue to study the museum by separating a research institution from me , or tombstones."

"Scientists have discovered that in terms of information preservation time, our memory at that time was better. They found some U disks and hard disks from the AD century, and some of them can still be read. According to experiments, if these memories are of good quality, they can store information It can be preserved for about 5000 years; especially our optical discs at that time, if made of special metal materials, can reliably store information for 10 years. But these are not as good as printed matter, good quality printed matter, using special synthetic paper and ink, 20 You can still read it years later. But that’s the end of it, which is to say, the means we usually use to store information can only reliably preserve information for 20 years at best. They’re going to store it for a billion years!”

"We reported to the government that, according to the existing technology, it is impossible to preserve 10G of graphic image information and 1G of text information (this is the most basic amount of information required by museum projects) for one billion years. They do not believe that , but we proved that it was really impossible, so they reduced the preservation time to [-] million years."

"But it is also an extremely difficult thing. Scholars have begun to look for information that has been preserved for a long time. The patterns on prehistoric pottery have been preserved for about 1 years; the murals found in European caves are about 4 Tens of thousands of years of history; the notches made by human ape ancestors on stones for making tools, if it is considered information, first appeared in the middle of the Pliocene, about 250 million years ago. But don’t tell me, it’s true The information left over [-] million years ago was found, of course it was not left by humans, but the footprints of dinosaurs."

"The research continues, but there is no progress. The scientists have obviously reached some conclusions, but they are always hesitating in front of me. I said to them, it's nothing, no matter how bizarre or outrageous your results are, there is no other way." We should accept the results. I assured them that there would be nothing more bizarre and outrageous than my experience, and I would not laugh at them. So they told me that based on the most advanced theories and Technology, based on the results of a large number of theoretical studies and experiments, through comprehensive analysis and comparison of a large number of schemes, they have come up with a method to preserve information for about [-] million years. They emphasize that this is the only feasible method currently known , it is—" Luo Ji held his crutch high above his head, his white hair and long beard fluttering, he looked like Moses who parted the Red Sea, and solemnly shouted, "Carve words on the stone!"

AA giggled, but Cheng Xin didn't. She was deeply shocked.

"Carve the characters on the stone." Luo Ji pointed at the cave wall with his crutch again.

Cheng Xin walked up to the cave wall. Under the dim light, she saw that the cave wall was densely carved with words and embossed figures.The cave wall should not be the original rock, it may have been treated with metal injection, and the surface may even be completely replaced with durable metals such as titanium alloy or gold, but in essence, words are still engraved on stone.The engraved characters are not too small, each about one centimeter square, which should also be considered for long-term preservation, the smaller the characters, the harder it is to preserve.

"The amount of information that can be saved in this way is much smaller, less than one ten-thousandth of the original, but they can only accept this result." Luo Ji said.

"It's a weird light," AA said.

Cheng Xin looked at a lamp on the cave wall next to it, and first noticed its shape: a hand sticking out of the cave wall was holding a torch.She found the look familiar.But AA is obviously not referring to this. This torch-shaped lamp is very bulky. Its size and structure are similar to ancient searchlights, but the light it emits is very weak, which is only equivalent to an ancient twenty-watt incandescent light bulb. Thick shade, only slightly brighter than candlelight.

Luo Ji said: "The back part dedicated to supplying power to these lamps is even bigger, like a power plant. This lamp is a remarkable achievement. There is no filament inside it, and there is no exciting gas. I don't know what is glowing." , but it can be continuously illuminated for 10 years! And the two doors when you came in, in a static state, it is estimated that they can be opened normally in 50 years. If someone came in again, the door had to be destroyed. At that time, the lights had been out for 40 years, and it was dark here. But for [-] million years, that was just the beginning..."

Cheng Xin took off the gloves of the space suit, and stroked the handwriting on the cold stone wall. Then, she leaned her back against the cave wall and stared at the lamp on the wall in a daze.Now she remembered where she had seen this shape: it was the tomb of Rousseau in the Pantheon of France, and a hand like this holding a torch protruded from the tomb, and now these lights were emitting a dim yellow light, which did not seem to be The electric fire is more like a dying flame.

"Son, you don't seem to like to talk." Luo Ji walked over and said to Cheng Xin, there was a kind of kindness in his voice that Cheng Xin hadn't seen for a long time.

"She's always been like that," AA said.

"Oh, I used to be talkative, but I stopped talking, and now I'm talking again. I'm chattering, kid. Didn't it bother you?"

Cheng Xin said with a absent-minded smile, "Where, old man, it's just... I don't know what to say in the face of this."

Yeah, what can I say?Civilization is like a 5000-year run, continuous progress drives faster progress, countless miracles give birth to even greater miracles, human beings seem to have the power of gods...but finally found that the real power is in the hands of time , leaving footprints is more difficult than creating the world, and at the end of this civilization, they can only do what ancient babies did.

Carve words on stone.

Cheng Xin looked carefully at the contents engraved on the cave wall. It started with a relief sculpture of a man and a woman. Maybe he wanted to show the biological appearance of human beings to future discoverers. The graphics on the metal plate are different, not only the rigid display function, but the expressions and body movements are very vivid, more or less like Adam and Eve.Behind them, there are some hieroglyphs and cuneiform inscriptions. These may be engraved directly on the ancient cultural relics. Now probably no one knows their meanings. If so, how will future aliens discover them? Do readers understand?Going forward, Cheng Xin saw a poem, and it looked like a poem from the format, but she didn't know any of the characters, she only knew it was a big seal.

"It's The Book of Songs." Luo Ji said, "Further ahead, those Latin texts are fragments of the works of ancient Greek philosophers. To see the characters we can understand, we have to walk a few dozen meters forward. "

Cheng Xin saw a relief sculpture under the large piece of Latin, which seemed to show ancient Greek scholars in simple robes debating in a square surrounded by stone pillars.

At this moment, Cheng Xin had a strange idea. She went back to the beginning of the cave wall and looked again, but she didn't find what she was looking for.

"Looking for something like the Rosetta Stone?" Luo Ji asked.

"Yes, is there no system to assist interpretation?"

"Son, this is a stone carving, not a computer. How can that thing be carved?"

AA looked at the cave wall, then looked at Luo Ji with wide eyes and said, "That is to say, they carved these things here that even we can't understand, hoping that some aliens will be able to decipher it in the future?"

The fact is that in front of the alien discoverers in the distant future, the fate of all human classics carved on the cave wall is probably the same as that of the ancient hieroglyphs and cuneiform characters, which no "human" can understand.Perhaps, no one is expected to understand at all.When the builders realized the power of time, they no longer expected that an extinct civilization would really leave something in the geological future. Luo Ji said that this is not a museum.

Museums are for people to see, but tombstones are for yourself.

The three of them continued to walk forward, and Luo Ji's crutches made rhythmic clicking sounds on the ground.

"I often come here for a walk, thinking about some very interesting things—" Luo Ji stopped, pointing to an ancient relief sculpture of a soldier in armor and holding a spear with his crutches, "This is Alexander's Eastern Expedition, when he If you walk a little further, you can meet Qin in the late Warring States period, what will happen? What will it be like now?" After walking a little further, he pointed to the cave wall with his crutches, and at this moment, The words engraved on it have changed from Xiaozhuan to official script, "Oh, it's the Han Dynasty. From here to the later period, China has completed two unifications, the unification of territory and the unification of thought. For the entire human civilization, this Is it a good thing? Especially the Confucianism of the Han Dynasty, if it is replaced by a hundred schools of thought like the Spring and Autumn Period, what will happen in the future, and what will it be like now?" He drew a big circle in the air with his crutches, "In every On a historical section, you can find a lot of lost opportunities."

"Like life." Cheng Xin said softly.

"Oh, no no no," Luo Ji shook his head repeatedly, "at least it doesn't look like it to me, I haven't lost anything, hehe." He looked at Cheng Xin with concern, "Son, do you think you have lost a lot? Then don’t lose it again.”

"There is no future." AA said coldly, thinking that this person is a bit old-fashioned after all.

They walked to the end of the tunnel, looked back at the underground tombstone, and Luo Ji sighed, "Alas, something that was supposed to be preserved for 100 million years, turned out to be destroyed in less than [-] years."

"Who knows? Maybe flat-slab civilizations in the two-dimensional world can see this." AA said.

"Hehe, your thinking is very interesting, I hope so...Look, this is where cultural relics are stored. There are three such halls in total."

Cheng Xin and AA turned around and found that the field of vision in front of them had widened again.This is not a showroom but a storage warehouse. The cultural relics are all neatly packed in metal boxes of the same size, and each box is affixed with detailed labels.

Luo Ji tapped a nearby metal box with his crutch and said, "As I said, this is not the main part. Well, most of these things are preserved within 5 years, and those statues are said to be able to preserve millions of years." Years, but I don’t recommend you move statues, although it’s easy to move here, but it takes up too much space... Well, you can take whatever you like, pick what you like.”

AA looked at the surrounding boxes very excitedly, "I suggest that we take more paintings and less manuscripts of ancient books, anyway, no one will be able to understand those things in the future." She walked to a metal box and stood on it A place like a button was pressed, but the box did not open automatically, and there was no information prompt.Cheng Xin walked over and lifted the lid of the box with difficulty, and AA took out an oil painting from inside.

"It turns out that paintings also take up a lot of space." AA said.

Luo Ji took out a pocketknife and a screwdriver from a piece of overalls thrown on a box, and handed them to them, "The main reason is that the picture frame is too big, so I took the frame apart."

AA picked up the screwdriver and was about to pry the frame, but Cheng Xin exclaimed in a low voice, "Ah, no." They saw that this painting was actually Van Gogh's "Starry Sky".

Cheng Xin was surprised not only because of the preciousness of the painting, she had seen this painting before.That was four centuries ago, not long after she reported to PIA.One weekend, she went to the MoMA in Manhattan, where she saw several paintings by Van Gogh.What impressed her most was Van Gogh's expression of space. In his subconscious, space must have a structure.Cheng Xin didn't know much about theoretical physics at the time, but she knew that according to string theory, space, like entities, is also composed of countless vibrating microstrings, and Van Gogh drew these strings.In his paintings, space, like mountains, wheat fields, houses and trees, is also full of subtle disturbances. What impressed her most was "Starry Sky". She never thought that she would see it on Pluto four centuries later.

"Let's take it apart, so you can get more." Luo Ji waved his crutches disapprovingly and said, "You think these things are worth a lot? Now even the city itself is worthless."

So they removed the painting from the frame, which may have been five centuries old, but kept the hard backing in place to prevent the canvas from being bent and ruining the picture.Then they continued to disassemble other oil paintings, and soon the empty frames were piled up on the floor.Luo Ji came over at some point and put his hand on a small oil painting.

"Leave this one to me."

Cheng Xin and AA moved the painting aside and put it on a box against the wall. When they left, they glanced back and were slightly taken aback.

That painting is the Mona Lisa.

Cheng Xin and AA continued to bury their heads in tearing down the paintings, and AA said in a low voice, "This old guy is very good, and he left the most expensive one."

"That shouldn't be the reason."

"Maybe he loved a woman named Mona Lisa?"

Luo Ji was sitting next to the "Mona Lisa", stroking the old frame with an old hand, and muttering to himself, "I didn't know you were here. If I knew, I would visit you often."

Hearing the voice, Cheng Xin raised her head and saw that old Luo Ji was not looking at the "Mona Lisa". His eyes were looking straight ahead, as if looking into the depths of time.I don't know if it was an illusion, but Cheng Xin actually saw tears in those sunken old eyes.

In the majestic tomb beneath Pluto, under the dim light that can last for 10 years, the smile of Mona Lisa looms. This smile has puzzled people for nine centuries. There seems to be nothing, like the approaching death.

[Bunker Era 67, two-dimensional solar system]

Cheng Xin and AA transported the first batch of cultural relics to the ground. In addition to more than a dozen oil paintings with their frames removed, there were also two bronze tripods from the Western Zhou Dynasty and a batch of ancient books. If they were under the normal gravity of 1G, they would definitely move It doesn't move these things, but under Pluto's weak gravity, it doesn't take much effort to carry them.When passing through the transition section, they followed Luo Ji's instructions to close the inner door first, and then open the door leading to the outside, otherwise they would be blown into the air together with the cultural relics.When the outer door was opened, a bit of air in the transition immediately froze into a flying sheet of shining ice crystals in the Plutoian frigidity.At first they thought it was the searchlights on the "Halo" that illuminated the ice crystals, but when the ice crystals flew away, they found that the searchlights on the "Halo" in the distance had been turned off, and the light from space shone on the land of Pluto, causing The Halo and the black obelisk cast long shadows on the white ground.They looked up and immediately took two steps back in horror.

There is a pair of big eyes in space staring at them.

They were two glowing ovals, their structure resembling eyes, with white or yellowish whites and dark eyeballs.

"That's Neptune, that's the sky... oh no, it's Saturn!" AA said, pointing to the sky.

Two Jovian giant planets have been made two-dimensional.Uranus orbits beyond Saturn, but since the former is currently on the opposite side of the sun, it is Saturn that first fell into two dimensions.The two-dimensionalized giant planets should be circular, but from Pluto, the line of sight has an angle to the two-dimensional space plane, so they become ellipses in the field of view.The two two-dimensional planets show a clear ring structure.The two-dimensional Neptune mainly has three rings, the outermost is the blue ring, which looks very gorgeous, like the eyelashes and eye shadow of this eye, that is the atmosphere composed of hydrogen and helium; the middle is the white ring, which is Neptune's [-]-kilometer-thick mantle was once called a water-ammonia ocean by planetary astronomers; the dark area in the center is the planetary core, which is composed of rock and ice and has a mass equivalent to that of the Earth.Two-dimensional Saturn has a similar structure, but without the outer blue rings.There are countless smaller ring areas in each large ring area, forming a fine structure.When you look closely, these two giant eyes become like two growth rings, the kind of brand-new growth rings exposed by a big tree that has just been sawed off.There are more than a dozen small circles near each two-dimensional planet, which are their two-dimensional satellites.There is also a faint big circle outside Saturn, which is a two-dimensional Saturn ring.The sun can still be found in space, and it is still a small disc with a shape that can be seen, emitting a weak yellow light; while the two planets are far on the other side of the sun, it can be seen that their two-dimensional area is huge.

But two [-]D planets have no volume, they have zero thickness.

In the light from the two two-dimensional planets, Cheng Xin and AA carried the cultural relics through the white landing field and walked towards the "Hinghuan".The streamlined and clean body of the spacecraft is like a big distorting mirror, pulling the image of the two-dimensional planet into a smooth strip. This shape itself can not help but remind people of water droplets, showing a comforting sense of firmness and lightness.During the voyage to Pluto, AA once told Cheng Xin that she guessed that there might be a certain proportion of strong interaction materials in the hull of the "Halo".When they approached, the hatch at the bottom of the spaceship slid open silently, and they moved the cultural relics into the cabin along the gangway, then took off their helmets, breathed a sigh of relief in this warm little world, and felt the comfort of returning, Before they knew it, they had already made this place their home.

Cheng Xin asked the spacecraft AI if it could receive information from Neptune and Saturn.As soon as she finished speaking, information windows flooded out, like a colorful avalanche that wanted to bury them.This scene reminded them of the first false alarm in 110 years ago, but most of the information screens that emerged at that time were organized reports by the media. Now, the news media seems to have completely disappeared, and most of the screens have no specific content. Some are blurred, some shake violently, and more are various meaningless close-ups; but some of the pictures are filled with colorful colors, and those colors are changing and flowing, presenting a delicate and complex structure, which may A two-dimensional plane is photographed.

AA asked the AI ​​to filter out some pictures with content, and the AI ​​asked them what kind of information they wanted, and Cheng Xin said they wanted the space city.The overflowing windows were emptied in an instant, and a dozen windows arranged in an orderly manner appeared soon, and one of the windows was enlarged to the front. The AI ​​introduced that this was the picture of the European No. [-] space city in the Neptune cluster twelve hours ago. Space City originally belonged to an urban complex, but the complex disintegrated after the strike alert was announced.

This picture is very stable and has a wide field of vision. The shooting location may be near a pole of the space city, showing almost a panoramic view of the city.

Europe VI space city has been powered off, only a few beams of searchlights cast a swaying circle of light onto the opposite urban area, and the three nuclear fusion suns suspended on the central axis of the city have all turned into moons, emitting a silvery cold light, apparently only for illumination No more heat.This is a large space city with a standard ellipsoidal configuration. The buildings in the city have changed greatly from what Cheng Xin saw half a century ago.The bunker world is obviously in a prosperous era. The city buildings are no longer uniform, but have different shapes, and the height has increased a lot. The tops of many buildings are close to the central axis of the city.Tree-shaped buildings have also appeared, which seem to be similar in scale to those on Earth, except that the leaves of the buildings hanging on the trees are denser.One can imagine the magnificence and splendor of the city when the sea of ​​lights is on, but now, all this is illuminated by the cold moonlight. In this kind of moonlight, the tree-shaped buildings are more like giant trees, casting large shadows, and the rest of the city is dark. Like a gorgeous ruin in a forest of giant trees.

The space city has stopped rotating, and everything is in a state of weightlessness. There are countless unfixed objects floating in the space of the city. In addition to a large number of sundries and vehicles, there are also entire buildings.

There is a black cloud belt on the central axis of the city, which runs along the entire central axis and connects the two poles.The spaceship AI draws a small box on the screen to zoom in partially, and a new window screen is generated. Cheng Xin and AA are shocked to find that the black cloud belt is actually a sea of ​​people floating on the central axis!Some of the people in the weightlessness were united into a group, some joined hands in a long line, and more people floated alone in the air.Everyone was wearing helmets, and the clothes on their bodies were also very dense. They should be space suits. When Cheng Xin woke up last time, the lightweight space suits were already hard to distinguish from ordinary clothes in appearance.Each has a small backpack that seems to be a life support system, either on his back or in his hand.However, most people's helmet visors are open, and a breeze can be seen blowing in the sky, indicating that the city still retains a normal atmosphere.The fusion sun is indeed emitting a cold light at this time, because more people gathered around the sun, perhaps to get light and a little warmth.The silver sunlight that has turned into moonlight shines through the gaps in the densely populated sea, casting mottled light and shadows on the surrounding cities.

According to the introduction of Spaceship AI, half of the more than 600 million people in Euro 300 have been evacuated from the city by spaceship or spaceship. Some of the remaining [-] million people are because they have no conditions to evacuate, and most of them are because they understand any form of evacuation. There was no hope of success in escaping.Taking a step back, even if you really escape from the two-dimensional drop zone and escape into outer space, in terms of the ecological conditions on most existing spacecraft, you will not be able to survive for long. Interstellar spacecraft that can survive in outer space for a long time are still It is the patent of very few people.People choose to wait out their final moments in places they are familiar with.

The sound of the screen was played, but no sound was heard, and the sea of ​​people and the city were in silence.All eyes were fixed on one direction of the city. That area is still the same as other areas of the city, full of buildings and criss-cross streets. There is nothing special, and people are waiting.Under the watery cold light of the sun or moon, people's faces were as pale as ghosts, which reminded Cheng Xin of that bloody dawn on the Australian continent 120 years ago.Just like that time, Cheng Xin once again had the feeling of looking down on the ant nest from a high position. The dark sea of ​​people looked like a floating ant colony.

Suddenly, there was a scream in the crowd. At a point on the equator of the space city, where people focused their eyes, a bright spot suddenly appeared, like a small hole in the roof of a black house letting in sunlight.

That is the position where Euro [-] first comes into contact with the two-dimensional space plane.

The bright spot expands rapidly and becomes an elliptical luminous plane, which is the two-dimensional space plane.The light it emitted was cut into many beams of light by the tall buildings around it, and it also illuminated the sea of ​​people on the central axis.At this time, the space city sinks on the two-dimensional flat ocean like a giant ship with a breach in the bottom.The two-dimensional plane is like the water surface in a boat, rising rapidly, and everything in contact with the plane becomes two-dimensional in an instant.The building complex is cut neatly by the rising two-dimensional plane, and their two-dimensional shapes expand on the plane. Since the plane in the city is only a small part of the two-dimensional space city, most of the two-dimensional buildings are expanded. beyond the confines of the space city.On the rising and expanding two-dimensional plane, colorful colors and complex structures are flying in all directions like lightning, as if the two-dimensional plane is a lens, peeking at the colorful giant flying past below. beast.Since there is still air in the space city, the sound of the three-dimensional world falling into two dimensions can be heard at this time—a crisp and sharp cracking sound, as if the building complex and the space city body are exquisitely carved glass products, a giant rolling Running through this city of glass.

As the two-dimensional plane rises, the sea of ​​people on the central axis begins to spread in the direction opposite to the plane, like a curtain slowly lifted by an invisible hand.This scene reminded Cheng Xin of the images she had seen of a flock of millions of birds. That huge flock of birds was like a complete living body, changing its shape in the evening sky.

Soon, one-third of the space city was swallowed up by the two-dimensional plane, which flickered wildly and rose unstoppably, approaching the central axis.By this time people had begun to fall into the plane, either falling behind due to a faulty thruster on the space suit, or giving up and trying to escape.They are like drops of colored ink falling on the water, instantly expanding on the plane, showing two-dimensional human bodies in different shapes.On a zoomed-in screen drawn by the spaceship AI, a couple can be seen embracing and falling into the plane. After two-dimensionalization, the two human bodies are arranged side by side on the plane, and the embrace can still be seen, but the posture is very strange. Drawn clumsily like a child who doesn't understand the principles of perspective.There is also a mother, holding her infant child high and falling into the plane, the child lived only 0.1 second longer than her in the three-dimensional world, and their shapes are also vividly printed on this giant painting.As the plane rises, the "human rain" falling on it gradually becomes denser, and groups of frozen two-dimensional human bodies emerge on the plane, and then most of them move out of the boundary of the space city.

When the two-dimensional plane is close to the central axis, most of the sea of ​​people has landed in the opposite city.At this time, half of the space city has disappeared into the two-dimensional space, and the visible area of ​​the two-dimensional plane has reached the maximum. When people look up, they can no longer see the city opposite them in the past. The part that is still in the three-dimensional world is pressed down.Now, it is impossible to escape from the main exit of the North Pole. Crowds gather near the equator. There are three emergency exits. The weightless crowd forms a high mountain of people near the exit.

The two-dimensional plane passed through the central axis, and swallowed up the three fusion suns in the sky, but in the light emitted by the two-dimensionalization process, the remaining world became brighter.

There was a low whistling sound, which was the sound made when the air in the space city leaked into space. At this time, the three emergency exits on the equator were all opened, and each exit was the size of a football field, leading directly to the still Three-dimensional space.

The ship AI brings another window to the foreground, a view of Euro 10 from outer space.The two-dimensional space city spreads out along an invisible plane, and the three-dimensional part of the space city appears small in the center, and is rapidly sinking toward the plane, like the back of a giant whale.On the space city in the three-dimensional part, there are three groups of black smoke spreading, which are the crowds blown out by the gust of air leaking.This three-dimensional island in the two-dimensional ocean sinks and melts continuously, and in less than [-] minutes, the Euro VI space city is completely two-dimensional.

The screen showed a panorama of the two-dimensional space city. It is difficult to estimate its area, but it must be very vast.But this is already a dead city, and it can even be said to be a 1:1 drawing of the city.All the details of the city are reflected on this super drawing, down to every screw, every fiber, every mite, and even every bacterium, are drawn with precision, the precision of this drawing is atomic Level, every atom in the original [-]-dimensional world is projected to the corresponding position on the [-]-dimensional space plane according to the iron rule.A basic principle of drawing this drawing is that there is no overlap, no occluded parts, and all details are arranged on the plane and revealed.Here, complexity takes the place of grandeur.It is not easy to read this drawing. You can see the overall layout of the city, and you can also recognize some macro structures. For example, the two-dimensional tree-shaped buildings still present a tree-shaped structure.However, the deformation of the building structure after two-dimensionalization is very large, and it is almost impossible to infer the original three-dimensional shape from its two-dimensional figure only by imagination, but there is no doubt that the image processing software based on the correct mathematical model should be able to do arrive.

On the screen, you can also see two other two-dimensional space cities in the distance.They no longer shine. These two-dimensional cities are like continents without thickness floating in the dark space, facing each other on an invisible two-dimensional plane.But the camera (possibly on an unmanned spaceship) is also dipping into the two-dimensional plane, and soon the two-dimensional Euro Six takes over the frame.

The millions of people who escaped from Euro [-] through the emergency exit also fell to the plane with the three-dimensional space falling into the two-dimensional space, just like the ant colony in the invisible waterfall.The majestic "human rain" scattered on the plane, making the human figures in the two-dimensional city densely packed.The two-dimensional human body has a large area, but it is very small compared with the vast two-dimensional building, like the countless small symbols in this giant painting that can barely see the human shape.

Many larger objects appear in the three-dimensional space in the picture. Those are the small spaceships and spaceships that flew away from Euro [-] earlier. Falling helplessly toward a plane in three-dimensional space.For a moment, Cheng Xin felt that the long blue flames ejected from spaceships and spaceships could burn through the plane without thickness, but the plasma jet was only two-dimensional first.In those areas, the two-dimensional buildings were deformed and distorted by the two-dimensional flames. Immediately afterwards, spaceships and spaceships became part of the giant picture one after another. According to the rule of non-overlapping, the two-dimensional city as a whole expanded to make way for them. It looked like It spread like a wave of water stirred up on a plane.

The camera continued to fall towards the plane. Cheng Xin stared at the two-dimensional city that was getting closer and closer, trying to find signs of activity in the city, but there was nothing. Except for the deformation in the flames just now, everything in the two-dimensional city was in a state of shock. At rest, those two-dimensional human bodies are also motionless, without any signs of life.

This is a dead world, a dead painting.

The camera continues to approach the plane, falling towards a two-dimensional human body.The splayed human body quickly filled the screen, and then complex blood vessels, meridians and muscle fibers flashed. Perhaps it was an illusion, Cheng Xin seemed to see red two-dimensional blood flowing in the two-dimensional blood vessels. But just for a split second, the image disappeared.

Cheng Xin and AA started the second trip to transport cultural relics.They now feel that it may not be very meaningful to do so, because after seeing the two-dimensional city, they know that the process of two-dimensionalization can retain most of the information in the three-dimensional world, and even if there is information loss, it is at the atomic level.Due to the non-overlapping mapping rule, the formation of Pluto will not be mixed with the cultural relics in the museum after two-dimensionalization, and the information of the cultural relics should be able to be preserved.But now that they have undertaken this final mission, they can only continue. As Cao Bin said, it is better to have something to do now than to simply wait.

Stepping out of the spacecraft, they found that the two two-dimensional giant planets were still hanging in space, but they were much dimmer, which made the new long strip of light below them very eye-catching.That band of light is made up of countless individual small spots of light, stretching across the entire sky, like a new necklace in the solar system.

"Is that the asteroid belt?" Cheng Xin asked.

"It should be, it's Mars' turn next." AA said.

"Mars is on this side of the sun now."

Cheng Xin's last words silenced the two of them. They stopped looking at the two-dimensional asteroid chain and walked silently towards the black obelisk.

Now it's Earth's turn.

When they entered the hall of the museum again, they saw that Luo Ji had already sorted out a batch of cultural relics to be transported, including many scrolls of Chinese paintings. AA unfolded one of them, ""Along the River During the Qingming Festival"." She said lightly.Now, they no longer had the awe and surprise they had when they saw the peerless treasure. In front of the grand destruction outside, this was just an ordinary ancient painting.When the observers of the distant future arrive, it is difficult to imagine that this 24 cm wide and [-] meter long painting will really have any special value in this giant painting of the two-dimensional solar system.

Cheng Xin and AA asked Luo Ji to go aboard the "Star Halo". Luo Ji said he wanted to go out and have a look, so he went to find a space suit.There is a comfortable living area built for staff, not part of a museum, with modern facilities and no design for long-term preservation.

The three of them walked out of the gate of the obelisk carrying the cultural relics, and immediately saw the two-dimensional earth.

This is the first solid planet that has fallen into two dimensions. Compared with Neptune and Saturn, the "growth rings" of the two-dimensional Earth are more clear and delicate, gradually transitioning from the yellow mantle to the deep red iron-nickel core, but its area much smaller than the former two.

Contrary to what they imagined, they didn't see blue.

"What about our ocean?" Luo Ji asked.

"It should be on the outermost circle. The two-dimensional water may be completely transparent and cannot be seen." AA said.

The three of them moved the cultural relic box and walked towards the "Star Ring" in silence.Sadness hasn't hit yet, just like a wound cut by a sharp knife, you can't feel the pain for a while.

The two-dimensional earth still showed her wonders, a white ring gradually appeared on her outermost edge, which was only faintly visible at first, but soon became clear and eye-catching.That ring is white and flawless, but its texture is not uniform, as if it is composed of countless fine white particles.

"Look, that's our sea!" Cheng Xin pointed to the two-dimensional earth in the sky and said.

"Yes, seawater freezes in two dimensions, and it's cold there," AA said.

"Oh—" Luo Ji wanted to stroke his beard, but the mask blocked his hand.

The three of them carried the cultural relics into the "Star Ring". Cheng Xin and AA noticed that Luo Ji seemed to be very familiar with the spaceship. He walked ahead empty-handed and walked to the cargo compartment of the spaceship without guidance.The spaceship AI also knows him and accepts his commands.After placing the cultural relics, the three of them returned to the living quarters. Luo Ji asked AI for a cup of hot tea, and soon a little robot Cheng Xin and AA had never seen brought it to him.

Cheng Xin asked the AI ​​to play information from the earth, and the AI ​​replied that it had only received a small amount of video and audio information from the earth, and there was no identifiable content in it.Indeed, the few windows that were open were blurred images from out-of-control camera equipment. AI added that it can provide images of the Earth taken by the spacecraft's monitoring system, and at the same time open a large window, and the two-dimensional Earth fills the picture at once.

When seeing this picture, the first reaction of the three people was that it was unreal, and even felt that the picture was randomly synthesized by AI itself to trick them.

"My God, what is this you put?" AA exclaimed.

"This is the image of the earth taken now, at a distance of 450 astronomical units, with an angular magnification of [-] times. It is the image of the earth seven hours ago."

They took a closer look at the holographic image taken by the telescopic lens again. The main body of the two-dimensional earth was captured very clearly, and the "growth rings" on it were more detailed than those seen with the naked eye. The fall may have been completed, and the two-dimensional earth is darkening.What shocked them was the frozen two-dimensional ocean—the white ice ring surrounding the two-dimensional earth on the outermost side, and they could clearly distinguish the particles that make up the ice ring, which turned out to be—snowflakes!The unimaginably large snowflakes are nothing else, they are all in the shape of regular hexagons, but the crystal branches have different shapes, crystal clear and exquisite.Seeing snowflakes at a distance of fifty astronomical units already has a strong sense of unreality, and these super-giant snowflakes are still arranged in parallel on the plane without overlapping, which intensifies this unreality. A fully patterned artistic representation of snowflakes with a strong decorative effect, making the frozen two-dimensional ocean look like a piece of stage art.

"How big are those snowflakes?" AA asked.

"Most of them are between [-] and [-] kilometers in diameter." The spaceship AI still replied in a flat and rigid voice, and it has no surprising functions.

"It's bigger than the moon!" Cheng Xin exclaimed.

The AI ​​opened several additional display windows, and each window displayed a single image of a different snowflake.In these pictures, their size loses their sense of reality, as if they are elves under a magnifying glass, and they will turn into a small drop of water immediately after the snow falls on the palm of the hand.

"Hmm—" Luo Ji stroked his beard again, and this time he did.

"How did it form?" AA asked aloud.

"I don't know, the knowledge about ice crystal aggregates on astronomical scale cannot be retrieved." AI replied.

In the three-dimensional world, snowflakes grow according to the crystallization laws of ice. Theoretically speaking, the crystallization laws of the three-dimensional world do not limit the size of snowflakes. There have been records of snowflakes with a diameter of 38 centimeters.

No one knows what is the crystallization law of ice in the two-dimensional world. This law actually allows two-dimensional ice crystal aggregates with a diameter of [-] kilometers to appear.

"There is water on both Neptune and Saturn, and ammonia can also crystallize. Why didn't you see any big snowflakes?" Cheng Xin asked.

The AI ​​replied again, no idea.

Luo Ji squinted his eyes, admiring the picture of the two-dimensional earth and said, "It's not bad that the sea has become like this, only the earth is worthy of such a garland."

"I really want to know what has become of the forests, grasslands, and those old cities?" Cheng Xin said slowly.

Sadness finally came, AA burst into tears, Cheng Xin looked away from the snowflake ocean of the two-dimensional earth, and remained silent with tears in her eyes.Luo Ji shook his head, let out a long sigh, and continued drinking tea.Grief is restrained, after all, the world with one dimension reduced is also their final destination.

There, they will always be on the same plane as their mother planet.

The three decided to start the third transport.They stepped out of the "Halo" and looked up at the sky, and found three two-dimensional planets, Neptune, Saturn and the Earth, all of which had become much larger, and the two-dimensional asteroid belt had also become thicker, which was obvious and not a hallucination.They asked the AI ​​questions and got this answer:
"The navigation system has detected that the navigation reference system of the solar system has split. The reference system [-] maintains its original form, and the navigation markers in this reference system: the sun, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto, as well as parts of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. The recognition standard is met; the second frame of reference has undergone a large variation, and Neptune, Saturn, Earth, and some asteroid belts have lost the characteristics of navigation markers. The first frame of reference is moving towards the second frame of reference, which leads to the phenomenon you observed.”

In the sky in the other direction, a large number of moving stars appeared in front of the background of the stars. Most of these stars glowed blue, and some of them trailed their trails. They were spaceships fleeing outside the solar system.Some spaceships flitted through space very close, and the light from the thrusters at full power could illuminate moving figures on the ground, but none of the spaceships landed on Pluto.

But it is impossible to escape from the drop zone. The words of the "Halo" AI just now actually described such a scene: the three-dimensional space of the solar system is like a big carpet, being dragged into the two-dimensional abyss by invisible hands, and these escaped Spaceships are little bugs crawling slowly on the carpet, and even their limited survival time can't be extended much.

"Go ahead, just take some more. I'll wait here, I don't want to miss that." Luo Ji said, Cheng Xin and AA both understood what he meant by "that", and they were afraid of seeing that scene .

After returning to the underground hall, Cheng Xin and AA hastily collected a batch of cultural relics, but did not select them.Cheng Xin wanted to take the Neanderthal skull, but AA threw it aside.

"In the future, there will be more two-dimensional skulls on this large painting," AA said.

Cheng Xin felt that what she said made sense. The earliest Neanderthals were only 10,000+ years ago. According to optimistic predictions, the two-dimensional solar system will have the first observers in a few million years. In their eyes, , Neanderthals and modern humans were already the same species at the same time.Looking at other cultural relics, Cheng Xin also felt disheartened. Whether it was for her present self or for "them" in the distant future, these things were not as meaningful as the real world that was being destroyed.

They took one last look at the dimly lit hall and left with the cultural relics.The Mona Lisa in the painting looks at their backs, smiling evilly and strangely.

Once on the ground, they saw another two-dimensional planet in space, which is Mercury (Venus is also on the other side of the sun), which looks smaller than the two-dimensional earth, but due to the two-dimensional planet The light is striking.

After delivering the cultural relics to the spaceship, Cheng Xin and AA walked out of the "Star Ring", and Luo Ji, who had been waiting outside leaning on his crutches, said, "Okay, that's all, don't move any more, there's no point in moving more."

They also found it boring, so they stood on the ground of Pluto with Luo Ji, waiting for the most magnificent scene: the two-dimensionalization of the sun.

Now, Pluto is a distant 45 AU from the sun.In the process of the two-dimensionalization of the solar system before, because the two are in the same three-dimensional space body falling to two dimensions, their distance has not changed; but when the sun touches the two-dimensional plane, it stops moving, and Pluto With the surrounding three-dimensional space falling to the two-dimensional plane, the distance between it and the sun is shortened sharply.

At the beginning of the two-dimensionalization of the sun, the details cannot be seen clearly with the naked eye, only the brightness of the distant sun suddenly increases, and the volume also increases. It seems as if the star itself is expanding.At this time, the AI ​​on the "Halo" projected a large information window outside the spacecraft, which displayed a clear holographic image of the sun taken with a telescopic lens.But as the distance between Pluto and the sun is rapidly approaching, the magnificent two-dimensional view of stars can also be seen with the naked eye.

The moment the sun touches the two-dimensional plane, the part that fell into the two-dimensional plane quickly expanded in a circular shape on the plane. Soon, the diameter of the two-dimensional sun on the plane surpassed the three-dimensional sun. This process only took 30 seconds Around, based on the calculation of the sun's radius of 70 kilometers, the expansion speed of the two-dimensional sun's edge unexpectedly reaches more than 2 kilometers per second.The two-dimensional sun continued to expand, and soon formed a vast sea of ​​fire on the plane, and the three-dimensional sun sank slowly in the center of this bloody sea of ​​fire.

Four centuries ago, at the peak of the Red Shore Base, Ye Wenjie saw such a sunset at the last moment of her life.At that time, her heart was beating hard, like a string about to break.Black mist began to appear in front of her eyes. In the western sky, the setting sun sinking in the sea of ​​clouds seemed to melt. The blood of the sun diffused in the sea of ​​clouds and space, reflecting a large piece of magnificent blood red.She said it was the sunset of mankind.

Now, the sun is literally melting, spreading its blood across the two-dimensional plane, and this is the last sunset.

In the distance, a large expanse of white steam appeared on the ground outside the landing site. The solid nitrogen and ammonia on Pluto began to evaporate, and the new thin atmosphere scattered light. The background of the sky was no longer dark, but a faint purple.

While the sun in the three-dimensional world is setting, the sun in the two-dimensional plane is rising.The two-dimensional star radiates its light energy in the two-dimensional plane, and the sunlight appears for the first time in the two-dimensional solar system.For the four two-dimensional planets: Neptune, Saturn, Earth and Mercury, the sides facing the sun are all illuminated as golden arc edges, but their illuminated parts are only one-dimensional edges.The giant snowflakes surrounding the earth melted in the sunlight and turned into white water vapor, which was blown into the two-dimensional space by the two-dimensional solar wind, and part of it was soaked in the golden sunlight, like the flowing long hair of the two-dimensional earth.

An hour later, the sun fell completely into the two-dimensional plane.

Seen from Pluto, the two-dimensional sun is a huge ellipse, compared with it, the two-dimensional planets are just a few small pieces.Unlike the latter, the two-dimensional sun has no clear "annual rings", it is roughly divided into three rings: the central part emits bright light, and the details cannot be seen clearly, this part may correspond to the core fusion zone of the three-dimensional sun; A vast ring from the core may correspond to the radiant zone of the three-dimensional sun, a seething two-dimensional ocean where countless cell-like tiny structures are rapidly forming, disappearing, splitting, and combining in fiery red light , is chaotic and restless from a local point of view, but forms a certain grand order and pattern on the whole; further outward is the convection region of the three-dimensional sun, just like the three-dimensional sun, this region is in contact with the two-dimensional space through the convection of stellar matter The heat transfer is different from the chaos in the radiation zone inside, and the convection zone presents a very orderly structure. You can see many neatly arranged ring-shaped convection loops running, which are very similar in size and shape; the outermost is the atmosphere of the sun. , the golden air flow went beyond the edge of the sun's circumference, forming a large number of two-dimensional prominences, like a circle of graceful dancers around the two-dimensional sun, changing thousands of wild and wanton dancing postures in the two-dimensional space, some " "Dancer" left the sun and drifted far away in two-dimensional space.

"Is the sun still alive there?" AA asked, and she expressed the common hope of the three, that they all hope that the sun can continue to shine on the two-dimensional solar system, even though there is no life there.

But this is just hope.

The [-]D sun is dimming.The luminosity of the core area is decreasing sharply, and soon it becomes dark enough to see more ring structures; the radiation area is also getting darker, and the boiling subsides, turning into a viscous creep; the convection rings in the convection area are deforming and collapsing , soon completely disappeared; the circle of golden gas dancers on the periphery of the two-dimensional sun dimmed like a withered leaf, losing its vitality.At this time, it can be seen that at least gravitation still exists in the two-dimensional world. Those prominences flying in space lost the support of radiation and were slowly pulled back by the gravity of the two-dimensional sun. Falling down feebly, the solar atmosphere finally became the outermost flat ring.As the sun went out, the illuminated arcs of the two-dimensional planets darkened, and the long hairs of the two-dimensional Earth's evaporated oceans lost their brilliance.

Everything in the three-dimensional world will die after falling into two dimensions, and nothing can live in a painting with zero thickness.

Perhaps the two-dimensional universe has its own sun, planets, and life, but it must be constructed and operated by a completely different mechanism.

When the three were focusing on the two-dimensionalization of the sun, Venus and Mars also fell into the two-dimensional plane, but compared with the sun, the process of the two-dimensionalization of the two terrestrial planets seemed a bit flat.The two-dimensional Mars and Venus are very similar to the Earth in the "annual ring" structure.There are many hollow areas near the edge of the two-dimensional Mars, which are the water-containing parts of the original Martian formation, indicating that there is far more water in the Martian formation than people expected.The water also later froze to an opaque white, but no giant snowflakes appeared.Giant snowflakes appeared on the periphery of the two-dimensional Venus, but the number is far less than that of the two-dimensional Earth, and they are all yellow, so they should not be crystals of water.Later, the asteroid belt on this side of the sun was also two-dimensionalized, completing the other half of the solar system necklace.

At this time, snowflakes also appeared on Pluto, small snowflakes, falling from the lavender sky.This is nitrogen and ammonia evaporated when the sun is two-dimensional. With the extinction of the two-dimensional sun, the temperature drops sharply, and the short-lived nitrogen and ammonia atmosphere is frozen into snowflakes.The snow fell more and more, and soon a thick layer accumulated on the top of the Obelisk and the Halo.Although there were no clouds, the dense flying snow obscured the sky of Pluto, and the two-dimensional sun and planets became hazy behind the snow curtain, and the snow temporarily narrowed the world.

"Do you feel like going home?" AA raised his hands in the snow and said circling.

"Well, that's what I was going to say." Cheng Xin nodded in sympathy.Like AA, in her impression, snow seems to be something only on the earth, and the big snowflakes she saw around the two-dimensional earth just now deepened her impression.This snow in the cold and dark world at the edge of the solar system made her feel the warmth of her mother star.

Luo Ji saw how they stretched out their hands to caress Feixue, and said worriedly, "You two, you won't take off your gloves, will you?"

Cheng Xin did have the urge to catch snowflakes with her hands without gloves. She wanted to feel the coolness and watch the glistening snowflakes melt in her own body temperature...but of course reason prevented her from doing so. Gloves, the feeling of the earth will disappear in an instant, and her hand will be lost at the same time.The temperature of those nitrogen and ammonia snowflakes is minus 210 degrees Celsius, which is the temperature at which nitrogen freezes. In such extreme cold, her slender hand will soon be frozen as brittle as glass.

"Children, there is no home anymore. The home has become a painting." Luo Ji leaned on a cane and shook his head.

The nitrogen and ammonia snow didn't last long, the snowflakes falling in the sky gradually thinned out, the purple color brought by the nitrogen and ammonia atmosphere disappeared, and the sky became dark and clear again.It can be seen that compared with before the snowfall, the two-dimensional sun and the planets have become larger. This is not because they continue to expand, but their two-dimensionalization has been completed, and the area has been constant. This just shows that Pluto is moving towards the two-dimensional plane. Get closer.

After the snow stopped completely, a light cluster appeared in the sky near the horizon, its luminosity increased rapidly, and soon surpassed the extinguishing two-dimensional sun.The details were invisible to the naked eye, but they all knew that was the location of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system that had crashed into a two-dimensional plane.Pluto has a slow rotation period of six Earth days, and a part of the two-dimensional solar system has sunk below the horizon. They thought they could not see the destruction of Jupiter, but now it seems that the space of the solar system is falling to two dimensions. The speed is accelerating.

They have the ship AI receive messages from Jupiter.Now, there is very little image information that can be received, and there is almost no recognizable content in it, and most of the information is audio.On every communication and broadcasting channel, there is a sea of ​​voices, most of which are human voices, as if the space of the solar system has been filled with a restless sea of ​​people, there are shouts, screams, crying, laughing... and even Someone was singing, but nothing could be discerned from the din of voices except that many people were singing in chorus, and they sang a solemn and soothing song, like a hymn.Cheng Xin asked AI if she could receive the official information broadcast from the federal government. AI said that the government's official information was interrupted when the earth became two-dimensional, and it never recovered.The Solar System Federation has not fulfilled its promise to carry out its duties until the last moment.

In the space near Pluto, escaped spacecraft are still flying by.

"Children, it's time to go," Luo Ji said.

"Let's go together!" Cheng Xin said.

"Is it necessary?" Luo Ji smiled and shook his head, pointing in the direction of the obelisk with his crutch, "I'm more comfortable there."

"Okay, old man, let's wait until Uranus becomes two-dimensional before leaving, so that we can spend a little more time with you." AA said that there is really no need to persuade him anymore.Even if he boarded the "Halo", he could delay the ending by an hour at most, and he obviously didn't care about this time; if it wasn't for the mission, they didn't care either.

"No, let's go now!" Luo Ji said resolutely, slamming on the ground with his crutches, which made him float under the low gravity, "No one knows how fast the fall will be in the future, so don't delay your business. We It's okay to stay in touch, it's the same as being together."

Cheng Xin hesitated for a moment, then nodded, "Alright then, we're leaving, we must keep in touch!"

"Of course, keep in touch." Luo Ji raised his crutch to say goodbye to them, then turned and walked towards the obelisk.In the low gravity, he seemed to be floating on the snow, occasionally tapping the ground with his cane to slow down.Cheng Xin and AA watched him off until the old figure of the wallfacer, sword bearer, and the last gravekeeper of mankind disappeared in the gate of the obelisk.

Cheng Xin and AA returned to the "Halo", the spacecraft took off immediately, the thrusters stirred up snow and fog, and soon reached Pluto's escape velocity of just over 1000 meters per second, entering space orbit.From the portholes and the monitoring screen, they saw that the original blue and black surface of Pluto is now covered with a large area of ​​snow white, and the giant words "Earth Civilization" carved on the ground in various languages ​​​​are covered with snow, and they are almost unrecognizable. . Halo passed between Pluto and its moon Charon, two celestial bodies so close they felt like they were passing through a canyon.

In this "canyon", there are many moving stars formed by the escaped spacecraft, and their speed is much faster than that of the "Halo".There was a spaceship speeding past the "Halo" from a short distance, the distance was no more than a hundred kilometers. The light from the thrusters illuminated Charon's smooth surface, and its triangular hull and thruster nozzles could be clearly seen. A nearly ten-kilometer-long blue flame emerged.

The AI ​​said: "That is the 'Mycenae', a medium-sized interplanetary spaceship that is not equipped with a cyclic ecosystem. After flying out of the solar system, even if the ship is fully loaded with supplies and has only one crew member, the survival time will not exceed five years. "

The AI ​​didn't know that it was impossible for the "Mycenae" to fly out of the solar system. Like other escaped spaceships, its survival time in the three-dimensional world would not exceed three hours.

The "Halo" flew out of the canyon formed by Pluto and Charon, leaving the two dark and cold worlds behind, and flew into the vast space.At this time, they saw the whole picture of the two-dimensional sun, and the two-dimensionalization of Jupiter has been basically completed. Now, except for Uranus, most of the solar system has been two-dimensionalized.

"Oh my God, Xingkong!" AA cried out.

Cheng Xin knew she was talking about Van Gogh's "Starry Night".Like ah, so much alike.The memory of the painting in her mind overlapped almost perfectly with the two-dimensional solar system in front of her eyes.Space is full of gigantic stars that occupy an area even larger than the space between them, but the size of the stars does not give them a sense of reality, they are like vortices in time and space.In the universe, every tiny part of space is flowing, tumbling, and trembling in fear and madness, like a burning flame, but it only emits bitter cold.The sun and planets, all entities and beings, are but illusions created by the turbulence of this space-time.

Cheng Xin now recalls the strange feeling she had when she saw "Starry Sky" twice: the parts outside the starry sky in the picture, the flame-like trees, the villages and mountains in the dark night, all showed obvious perspective and depth; The starry sky has no three-dimensional effect at all, like a giant painting hanging in the night sky.

Because the starry sky is two-dimensional.

How did he draw it? Van Gogh in 1889, the second mentally broken Van Gogh, did he really see the present with a split and delirium consciousness, spanning more than five centuries of time and space? !Or was it the other way around, that he had seen the future, and that this vision of Judgment Day was the real reason for his breakdown and suicide? !

"Children, are you all right? What are you going to do?" Luo Ji appeared in a message window that just popped up.He had taken off his space suit, and his white hair and beard floated in low gravity as if in water.Behind him is the tunnel that is going to be preserved for [-] million years.

"Hello! We are going to throw those artifacts into space, but we want to keep "Starry Sky"." AA said.

"Leave them all, don't throw them away, take them, let's go."

These words surprised Cheng Xin and AA, and they looked at each other. AA asked, "Go? To where?"

"You can go anywhere, you can go anywhere in the Milky Way, and you can even fly to the Andromeda Nebula in your lifetime. The 'Halo' can travel at the speed of light, and it is equipped with the only set of space curvature drive engines in the world."

The shock left Cheng Xin and AA speechless.

"After Vader's death, the remnants of Halo City didn't give up their efforts. Later, people were released from prison one after another, and they began to build another secret research base. Do you know where it is? Mercury. It is also a place that is inaccessible in the solar system. Four centuries ago, that Wallfacer, that one named Rey Diaz, blew up a big crater on Mercury with a giant hydrogen bomb. The base was built in that crater, and the construction process took more than 30 years. Finally, the crater used a big dome It was covered, and it was declared to be an institution that studies solar activities. Your Halo Group also resumed operations later, and with some development, it can maintain the base."

A bright light shot into the porthole, Cheng Xin and AA didn't look to see what was happening outside.The spaceship AI prompts that Uranus has undergone a "morphological change", which means that Uranus has also begun to fall to two dimensions.Neptune on the other side of the sun has long been two-dimensional, and at this time, there is no any celestial body between Pluto and the two-dimensional plane.

"No. 30 five years after Vader's death, the study of space curvature drive resumed at the Mercury base, starting from the stage of driving your 50mm hair to [-]cm. The study lasted for half a century, during which due to various The reason has been interrupted several times, and gradually transitioned from theoretical research to technology development. I will not talk about the difficulties and twists and turns during this period. In the final stage of technology development, large-scale curvature-driven experiments are required. For the Mercury base, This is a major obstacle. First, it is difficult to carry out such an experiment because of the limited strength of the base. Second, once the experiment is carried out, a large-scale flight path will inevitably be produced, which exposes the true purpose of the Mercury base. In fact, the past [-] years In the past, there was a lot of personnel turnover at the base, and it was impossible for the federal government to be unaware of the inside story of the Mercury base, but because the scale of the research and experiments was very small, and the research was all under other names, they have always tolerated it. But to To conduct a large-scale experiment, you must have the cooperation of the government. We went to the federal government, and the two sides cooperated very well.”

"Has the law prohibiting the study of light-speed spacecraft been abolished?" Cheng Xin asked.

"No, the reason why the government cooperated with us is..." Luo Ji tapped the ground with his crutches, making an even clicking sound—he was hesitating, "Let's not talk about this for now. A year ago, three sets of curvature engines After the manufacture was completed, a total of three unmanned light-speed trials were carried out. The first was the No. 150 engine. It entered the speed of light in space 10 AU from the sun, traveled at the speed of light for a while, and then returned. For the engine itself, the test flight time is only [-] minutes. or so, but for us, they didn't return until three years later. The second test was with engines two and three at the same time. Now, those two sets of engines are already outside the Oort Nebula, and the return to the solar system is expected to take place in Six years later. Installed on the Halo is the number one engine after its first sea trials."

"But why are there only two of us on the 'Halo', at least two more men should be brought along?!" AA shouted to Luo Ji.

Luo Ji shook his head and said, "It's too late, kid. The cooperation project between the federal government and the Halo Group is carried out in secret. Not many people know the existence of the curvature engine, and even more people know where the only remaining set in the solar system is installed. Less, but it is still very dangerous. The end is here, and people's hearts are unpredictable. The Halo will become the object of the whole world's competition. People will kill each other for it. In the end, there may be nothing left. Therefore, in the fight against the alarm Before the release, the "Halo" had to leave the bunker world as soon as possible. At that time, there was really no time. Cao Bin sent the "Halo" to Pluto to let you pick me up on the spaceship. In fact, he should let the "Halo" ' accelerated directly from Jupiter to the speed of light."

"Yeah, why don't you come with us?!" AA asked loudly.

"I've lived long enough. Even if I get on the spaceship, I won't be able to live much longer. It's very suitable to be a grave keeper here."

"We'll pick you up!" Cheng Xin said.

"Don't mess around, time is running out."

The three-dimensional space is accelerating towards the two-dimensional plane. In the field of vision of the spacecraft, the two-dimensional sun has already occupied half of the space. It has been completely extinguished now, and it is a vast dark red Dead Sea.At this time, Cheng Xin and AA discovered that the two-dimensional plane is not absolutely flat, it is fluctuating!There are endless long waves rolling across the two-dimensional plane. It is the similar fluctuations and warping in the three-dimensional space that allow the "Blue Space" and "Gravity" to have access to the four-dimensional space.Even where there is no two-dimensional matter, the fluctuations of the two-dimensional plane can be seen - this is a kind of self-manifestation of two-dimensional space in three dimensions, which can only be produced when the plane is large enough.On the "Halo", the spatial distortion caused by the accelerated fall has been clearly felt.Cheng Xin saw that the round portholes turned into ovals, the originally slender AA became a little chunky, and the space stretched in the direction of the fall, but Cheng Xin and AA didn't feel any discomfort. Also normal.

"Please return to Pluto!" Cheng Xin said to the AI, and then she turned to Luo Ji in the window, "We must go back, there is still time, Uranus is still two-dimensional!"

"Among the communicable commanders at present, Luo Ji has the highest command authority, and only he can command the 'Halo' to return to Pluto." The spacecraft AI replied rigidly.

Luo Ji in front of the tunnel smiled, "If I wanted to go, I would have gone with you just now. People at my age are not suitable for long voyages. Children, don't worry about me. As I said, I don't care about anything." Not lost. Ready to activate space curvature drive."

Luo Ji's last words were addressed to the spaceship AI.

"Route parameters?" AI asked.

"The extension line of the current route. I don't know where you are going. I don't think you know now. If you remember the destination, just point it out on the star map. Most of the stars within a radius of [-] light-years , the spacecraft can automatically navigate to arrive.”

"During the execution of the command, the space curvature drive engine will start after 30 seconds." AI said.

"Are we going to enter deep-sea fluid?" AA asked, but she knew in her heart that if it was conventional propulsion, with such an acceleration, any fluid that entered would be crushed into pancakes.

"No preparation needed, it's space driven, no overload."

“曲率驱动引擎启动，系统运行正常。空间扭矩：23.8。推进曲率比：3.41:1；‘星环’号将在64分18秒后进入光速。”

To Cheng Xin and AA, the start-up announced by the AI ​​was more like a shutdown, because the surroundings suddenly became quiet, and the quiet continued.They knew that the silence was due to the shutdown of the fusion engine, the hum of the fusion stack and thrusters was gone, but there was no other sound to fill it up, it was really hard to believe that something was going on.

Still, signs of a curvature drive emerged.The spatial distortion gradually disappeared, the portholes became round again, and the AA also regained its slenderness.Looking outside through the porthole, the nearby escaped spacecraft is still overtaking the "Halo", but the speed of overtaking has obviously slowed down.

At this time, the spacecraft AI broadcast an ongoing audio communication between the escaped spacecraft, probably because it felt that the content of the communication was related to the "Halo".

"Look, how did that ship accelerate so fast?!" a woman screamed.

"Oh, my God, the people in it will be crushed to flesh." A man said.

Then another man's voice appeared: "You idiots, such an accelerated spaceship will be crushed! But it doesn't, that's not a fusion engine, it's a space curvature drive!"

"Curvature engine?! Lightspeed spaceship?! Lightspeed spaceship!"

"It seems that the rumors are true. They are secretly building light-speed spaceships and escaping by themselves..."

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

"The one in front, intercept it! Crash it to death!!"

It was the woman's voice again, "Ah! They can achieve the speed of escape, they can escape! They can live! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

……

At this time, there was another scream, from inside the spacecraft, from AA: "My God! How did Pluto become two?!"

Cheng Xin turned to the information window, which displayed the picture of Pluto captured by the spacecraft's surveillance system. At this time, Pluto was far away, but she could still clearly see it. Just as AA said, Pluto and its satellite Charon had become Two, side by side not far apart.Cheng Xin also discovered that it wasn't just Pluto that was copied, the landscape on the two-dimensional plane background was also partially reproduced, as if a region was framed and copied in image processing software and then moved away slightly.

"That's because the speed of light has slowed down during the trajectory of the 'Halo'." Luo Ji explained that his image had begun to distort, but his voice was still clear. "One of the Plutos you saw was a slow The image transmitted at the speed of light. During this process, Pluto is still in motion, it moves out of the range of the track, and another image is transmitted at the normal speed of light, and you will see two."

"Slowing down the speed of light?" Cheng Xin was sensitively aware of a huge secret.

Luo Ji continued: "I heard that you realized the drive of curvature from the soap boat, so let me ask now: After the boat sailed in the bathtub and reached the opposite shore, did you take it back and put it in the bathtub to try again? "

Not at the time, Cheng Xin threw the boat aside because she was worried about Sophon, but it was easy to come up with the result.

"The boat won't move anymore, because the water tension has been reduced after the first voyage," Cheng Xin said.

"That's right, the same is true for light-speed spaceships. On the trajectory driven by curvature, the structure of space is also changed. If the same second spaceship driven by curvature is placed within the range of the first spaceship's track, it will be difficult to move forward. .In the track space, a more powerful curvature engine must be used. At this time, the space curvature drive can still make the spacecraft reach the highest speed in the track space, but this speed is much lower than the highest speed achieved in the first flight Much. In other words, in track space, the speed of light in vacuum is reduced."

"How much can it be reduced?"

"In theory, it can be reduced to zero, but it is almost impossible in practice. However, the space torque of the curvature engine of the 'Halo' is adjusted to be large enough to reduce the speed of light in the track space to a level that people can only dream of. 16.7 kilometers per second."

"This is..." AA stared at Luo Ji's image and said.

This is the black domain, Cheng Xin thought so, but didn't say it out loud.

"This is the black domain." Luo Ji said, "Of course, to generate a black domain that accommodates a star system, one spaceship is far from enough. According to calculations, more than 1000 curvature-driven spacecraft are needed to generate a black domain that accommodates a solar system. With the sun as the center, these spaceships radially accelerate to the speed of light in different directions, and the tracks they generate are connected together in the diffusion, forming a sphere covering the entire solar system. The speed of light in this sphere is 16.7 kilometers per second. This is the low-speed black hole, the black domain."

"The black field was created by the light speed ship!" AA said.

In space, a curvature-driven trajectory can be both a hazard marker and a safety statement.If the track is next to a world, it is the former; if it wraps the world in it, it is the latter.Like a man with a noose in his hand, he is dangerous; but if he puts the noose around his neck, he becomes safe.

"Yes, but this was known very late. In curvature-driven research, the experiment is ahead of the theory, you know, this is also Vader's style. Many findings in the experiment cannot be explained theoretically, without theoretical guidance , so it is difficult to consciously pay attention to some phenomena. In the early stage of research, that is, the stage of driving your hair, the wake generated by the curvature drive was rarely very weak, and it was not noticed. In fact, there were many signs at that time, such as those after the wake spread , the low speed of light caused the quantum integrated circuits of some nearby computers to fail, but no one thought about it. Later, as the scale of the experiment increased, people discovered the secret of the curvature-driven wake. It is precisely for this reason that the Federation Only then did the government agree to cooperate with us. At this time, it can be said that they are putting all their efforts into this cause, and the government has invested a huge amount of energy in the development of the light speed spacecraft, but the time is running out..." Luo Ji shook his head and sighed, and did not continue.

"From the Xinghuan City incident to the establishment of the Mercury base, there were 35 years in between, and the precious 35 years were delayed." Cheng Xin spoke out for him.

Luo Ji nodded silently. His gaze on Cheng Xin was no longer loving, like the torch of the Last Judgment Day, at least in her eyes. His gaze clearly said: Son, look at what you did.
Now Cheng Xin knew that there were three survival paths for Earth civilization: bunkers, black areas, and light-speed spaceships, of which only light-speed spaceships were the real way to survive.

Yun Tianming pointed out this way of life, but she blocked it.

If she hadn't stopped Vader, it was possible that Halo would gain independence, even if temporary and limited, leading to their discovery of the curvature-driven wake effect, which would cause the federal government to change its attitude towards lightspeed ships and, in turn, make humanity There is enough time to build the more than 1000 light-speed spaceships, and then it is possible to build the black domain to avoid this dimensional strike.

At that time, human beings will be divided into two parts, those who want to fly to the starry sky and those who want to live a happy life in the black domain.

She finally made a second mistake.

Twice she was in the position next to God, but twice she pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love, but this time no one can save her.

She began to hate one man, Vader, for keeping his word.Why comply?A man's dignity, or for her?Of course, Cheng Xin also understood that Vader didn't know the curvature-driven wake effect at the time, and his purpose of developing the light-speed spaceship, just like the unknown Star Ring City warrior said, was to fight for freedom and to become a spaceship in the universe. Fight for the free people of the world, and fight for the thousands of wonderful worlds outside the solar system.If he knew that the light-speed spaceship was the only way for human beings to survive, she believed that he would not be restricted by his promise.

But don't shirk responsibility, no matter whether she is really second only to God, as long as she is in that position, it is impossible to shirk responsibility.

When she was on Pluto not long ago, Cheng Xin had just experienced the most relaxing moment in her life.In fact, people who face the end of the world are the most relaxed. All responsibilities and burdens have been unloaded, all worries and anxieties have dissipated, and life has returned to the purest state when it was born from the mother's womb.At that time, Cheng Xin just had to wait calmly, waiting to become a part of the giant painting of the solar system in this picturesque destruction.

But now, everything is reversed.There was a paradox in early cosmology, which believed that if the universe was infinite, the gravitational force of an infinite number of celestial bodies would be superimposed, and every point in the universe would be subjected to infinite gravitational force.At this moment, Cheng Xin felt that she was really being subjected to infinite gravitational force, which came from all directions in the universe, tearing her soul mercilessly. 120 Seven years ago, the terrible vision of her last moments as sword bearer reappeared, and 40 billion years of time deposited above her, suffocating her.The space is full of eyes, all staring at her, the eyes of dinosaurs, the eyes of trilobites and ants, the eyes of birds and butterflies, the eyes of bacteria... There are 1000 billion pairs of eyes of human beings who have lived on the earth alone.

Cheng Xin saw AA's eyes and read the words in her eyes: You have finally encountered something more terrible than death.

Cheng Xin knew that she had to live. She and AA would be the only two people left in the earth's civilization. If she died, it would be tantamount to killing half of the earth's human beings. punish.

However, the voyage ahead was blank, and the space in her heart was no longer black, but the color of nothingness.What's the point of going where?
"Where are we going?" Cheng Xin murmured.

"Go find them," Luo Ji said, as his image became more blurred and black and white.

These words lit up Cheng Xin's dark thoughts like lightning, she and AA looked at each other, they certainly understood what "they" meant.

Luo Ji went on to say, "They're still there. The bunker world received a gravitational wave message from them five years ago. It's a very brief message. I don't know where they are. The Halo will periodically send out a gravitational wave calling for them." Signal, maybe you can find them, or they can find you."

At this time, Luo Ji's black-and-white image also disappeared, but his voice could still be heard, and he said the last words: "Oh, we are going to enter the painting, children, let's go."

The signal from Pluto was completely cut off.

From the screen of the surveillance system, Pluto lit up and began to spread in two dimensions. Obviously, the area where the museum is located was the first to touch the two-dimensional plane.

The Doppler effect produced by the speed of the "Halo" has been observed, and nothing can be seen from a single star, but overall, the starlight in front is slightly blue, and the light behind is reddish. This color change It can also be seen in the [-]D solar system that follows.

The fleeing spaceships could no longer be seen outside, and the "Halo" all passed them.Now, all the escape ships are raining down onto the two-dimensional plane.

The audio signals from the solar system are already very sparse, and they are all very short voices. Due to the frequency change of the signal caused by the Doppler effect, the sound sounds a bit weird, like singing:
"We're very close! Are you behind us..."

"Don't do this! Don't do this..."

"There is no pain, let me tell you, just a moment..."

"You still don't believe me until now, well, don't believe me..."

"Yes baby, it's going to be thin..."

"Come here! We're going to be together..."

……

Cheng Xin and AA listened quietly, the signal became more and more sparse, and the interval between sounds became longer and longer. After another 10 minutes, they finally heard the last human voice from the solar system:
"what--"

The cry came to an abrupt end, and for the rest of the time, everything was silent.This two-dimensional giant painting called the solar system is completed.

The "Halo" is still falling towards the two-dimensional plane, and the high speed it has reached only slows down the process of falling, and the spaceship has not yet reached the escape velocity of the two-dimensional drop zone.At this time, the "Halo" was the only man-made object in the solar system that was outside the two-dimensional space, and Cheng Xin and AA were the only outsiders. The "Halo" is already very close to the two-dimensional plane. From this angle, the two-dimensional sun has become very flat, like looking at the sea from the coast, its dark red plane that no longer glows is boundless.The newly two-dimensional Pluto became very large at this time, and continued to grow at a speed that could be detected by the naked eye.Cheng Xin looked at the delicate "annual rings" of the two-dimensional Pluto, trying to find traces of the museum, but couldn't find it, it was too small after all.The torrent of falling from three-dimensional space to two-dimensional space seemed irresistible. At this moment, Cheng Xin had some doubts whether the curvature engine could really bring the spacecraft into the speed of light. She really hoped that everything would end here, but at this moment, the spacecraft AI spoke:
"The Halo will enter the speed of light in 180 seconds, please specify the route."

"We don't know where to go..." AA said blankly.

"You can designate the route after entering the speed of light, but in the spaceship reference system, the time for traveling at the speed of light is very short, and the destination may be crossed, so it is best to designate now."

"We don't know where to find them." Cheng Xin said, the existence of "them" brightened the future, but she was still at a loss.

AA suddenly grabbed Cheng Xin's hand and said, "You forgot that besides them, there is him in the universe!"

Yes, and him.Cheng Xin was instantly overwhelmed by strong thoughts. She had never wanted to see someone like this before.

"You have a date!" AA said.

"Yes, we have a date." Cheng Xin replied mechanically, the agitation of emotion made her stay in a state of sluggishness.

"Then go to your stars!"

"Okay, go to our star." Cheng Xin said excitedly to AA.Then she asked the spacecraft AI, "Can you locate the star DX3906, which is the number at the beginning of the Crisis Era?"

"Yes, the current number of this star is S74390E2, please confirm."

A large holographic star map was displayed in front of them, covering a radius of [-] light-years around the solar system. A star was shining with a striking red light, marked by a white arrow; Cheng Xin was too familiar with that star.

"Yes, that's it, let's go there." Cheng Xin nodded and said.

"The initialization of the route is complete, and the 'Halo' enters the speed of light in 50 seconds."

The star map disappeared, switched to the external panoramic display mode, and the spaceship environment was completely hidden. Cheng Xin and AA seemed to be floating in space. AI had never used this display mode before.In front of the course is the star sea of ​​the Milky Way, which has turned pure blue at this time, which really reminds people of the ocean; behind, is the two-dimensional solar system, and the two-dimensional sun and planets are shrouded in blood-like red.

Suddenly, the universe changed drastically, and all the stars in front of them gathered in the direction pointed by the course, as if this half of the universe had become a big black bowl, and the stars were all sliding down to the bottom of the bowl, and soon gathered into a dense cluster right in front of them. A cluster of stars can no longer be distinguished, and they condense into a light cluster, emitting a bright blue light like a huge sapphire.From time to time, sporadic stars fly out of the light cluster, across the dark space and quickly fly backwards, their colors are constantly changing, from blue to green, then to yellow, when it passes the spaceship, it becomes red.Behind the spacecraft, the two-dimensional solar system and the stars condensed into a red mass, like a bonfire burning at the end of the universe.

"Xinghuan" flew towards the star that Yun Tianming gave Cheng Xin at the speed of light.