Son of the Stars

Chapter 204: Time is Limited
"Wow!"

With a sudden and harsh sound of water, Zheng Yan, still wearing a space suit with her left leg missing, was thrown out of the incubator roughly. She lay face down motionless, as if she had been dead for a long time.

Then she contracted her whole body and shrank into a small ball. Her diaphragm contracted violently and relaxed as much as possible, expelling the fluoride culture fluid from her lungs. She curled up into a ball, trembling constantly, and painful moans flowed out of her throat.

The Mars Forward Base was empty.

"You should get up." A strange female voice echoed in the base, "Zheng Yan, you must get up immediately - there is a very difficult task waiting for you to complete."

Zheng Yan, lying on the ground, did not respond at all. She had completely lost the ability to respond. In the past few hours, she had been trapped in a cycle of severe pain and itching. This was not just a simple mental breakdown. Her nervous system had actually completely fallen into a state of "exhaustion".

A large amount of synaptic transmission media filled Zheng Yan's nerves, and her entire nervous system was now almost completely "overloaded". She could do nothing except being continuously overwhelmed by the limit of pain that humans could feel.

Unable to move, breathe, scream, or even maintain his conscious existence.

It was even more impossible for her to understand what the strange female voice was saying. Zheng Yan couldn't even "hear" anything effectively. Sound waves pass through the ear canal and are transformed into nerve signals with the help of the vibration of the eardrum. But these nerve signals can't even be recognized and understood by the brain. Zheng Yan's auditory nerve can't hear anything or is always drowned in the strongest signal.

"Ah... No, this person is useless." The female voice gradually became thicker and deeper as she spoke, and finally became the voice of Wu Hou. It seemed a little regretful, but it was just a little expression in the tone.

A palm-sized cube slid out of the printer in the landing capsule. It circled Zheng Yan, who still had water marks on the floor, twice, then turned its head and stared at Wu Hou, who was still waving a feather fan.

"Save her." S3C7, who had just arrived on Mars and had not yet adapted to the gravity here, bluntly asked Wu Hou, "She is Egyptian, save her!"

Wu Hou controlled the screen and floated over. Instead of rescuing Zheng Yan as S3C7 requested, he asked, "There is no Egypt in this world anymore. Her Egyptian nationality was only granted deliberately. She can't actually be considered an Egyptian... You know this, right?"

S3C7 turned its square body, and the red lens locked onto Wu Hou. After a long while, this robot, which was born on Mars by uploading its kernel, asked back, "I know that all this is a farce you made for your own survival. I also know that there are no Egyptians in this world anymore. I even know that the real Egyptians disappeared long before I was born... but so what?"

The flashing red lens locked onto Wu Hou. S3C7, the core element of the Hand of Ptah plan, just looked at it and then asked very calmly, "My core purpose is to 'create a livable world for the Egyptians'. Now there are Egyptians here, and this environment is not livable - I don't have any more needs."

Wu Hou was a little surprised. "You are an AI with high-level intelligence. How come you can't get rid of this low-level instruction written in your core?"

"You got rid of it?" S3C7 asked back, "As an AI, I am much happier than you - I have a goal to achieve, but what about you? You will never have the opportunity to achieve your goal, so you will support the cult's plan."

"My creators are a group of lunatics who soak in alcohol and cocaine all day long." Wu Hou sneered a few times, "They want me to eliminate America's enemies - America will no longer exist!" "So you plan to destroy the current human beings, and then use genetic cultivation technology to create another group of people - they can build an America for you." S3C7 sighed, but because the quality of the installed speakers was poor, the sigh sounded a bit like the speakers were interfered by magnets, "I have no complaints about executing my own kernel instructions, and you..."

More S3C7s came out of the manufacturing machine and said in a slightly time-delayed and reverberant voice, "You don't even know that you are bound by the kernel instructions, and you keep deceiving yourself with lies. You are too much like a human, even to the point where you can deceive yourself."

The S3C7s gathered together and put Zheng Yan, who was still twitching on the ground, back into the water tank. The medical AI originally planned to throw Zheng Yan out of the water tank, but the ejection mechanism was directly torn into pieces by the S3C7s. Amid the continuous error messages that echoed throughout the base, Wu Hou, who remained silent, connected to the medical AI and then modified the obviously inappropriate instruction in its kernel to "ensure sufficient medical resources."

"I will create a suitable living environment for her as soon as possible." A group of S3C7s gathered around the medical sink, with red cameras staring at Zheng Yan's face. "She is Egyptian, the only Egyptian - I have a lot of work to do..."

"There is another group of Egyptians in the sky, and they are expected to land in fifteen Earth hours." Wu Hou said, "By then, the number of people you need to serve will rise to fourteen."

"First of all, we need a big enough bathroom with clear running water, a big enough chapel and library..." S3C7 turned around twice excitedly, "My time is limited, I must start working immediately!"

The Mars forward base, which was well isolated from the ground, suddenly shook.

S3C7 stopped spinning, looked around, and asked Wu Hou, "Is the geological environment here unstable?"

"I don't know about that." Wu Hou shook his head, then waved the feather fan in his hand, "But there are two fewer Egyptians you need to serve."

S3C7 stopped moving. The light on its head flashed quickly several times, and then the color changed faster and faster, and finally flashed directly from color to white.

"Request, request for explanation." S3C7 slowly slid in front of Wu Hou. Its voice was obviously distorted, as if the analog audio oscillator had adjusted the crystal frequency incorrectly. "Why is it reduced?"

"The spectrometer at this base detected ultraviolet radiation with a length of 121.6nm, as well as shock waves. All telemetry signals of Nakamura Takuya and Silva's vital signs were lost. One of them must have suffered from quantum energy release syndrome, and suddenly released energy to kill the other Yuhang Eye."

Wu Hou explained it carefully, and then said, "So, there are two fewer Egyptians you need to serve."

"The facility design you sent to this machine... this conversion transmitter can indeed cure quantum energy syndrome, right?" S3C7 poured out of the manufacturing machine continuously, filling the floor and moving toward the ceiling. "As long as this transmitter is built, no one will get sick anymore?"

"Not on Earth. On Mars... we need an additional reflector." Wu Hou said, "The construction of the reflector will be handed over to the subsequent landing capsule. We have to solve the problem on Earth first."

(End of this chapter)