Chapter 1,455 Lonely Journey
There are weird things everywhere in the ghost ship: a spaceship that lacks "identity", an unconventional starship structure, a facility in the core area specially prepared for carbon-based organisms, a highly silent starship system, and a planet that may have died long ago. The fragmented diaries left by the crew members of the ship are accumulating more and more bits and pieces of information, gradually leading us to a certain answer, but until the final answer is revealed, it is still difficult for me to imagine who built this spacecraft, and who built this spacecraft. What exactly happened to the spacecraft during its drifting for tens of thousands of years.
Warren Field's diaries are still being discovered one after another, but since these things are carved on the wall or other surfaces, it is difficult for us to organize them in order. We can only pick them up piece by piece. The text slowly summarizes the experiences of the old empire servant commander after he woke up alone in this exiled spaceship.
What is certain now is that the spacecraft did indeed malfunction. Although it sounds incredible that something created by Xiling Apostle malfunctioned, its awakening device did have an accident. It was supposed to be in contact with other survivors who ran away from the Empire area. The wake-up system that would be activated later was inexplicably activated, but only one of the crew members was awakened. This commander named Warren Field recorded most of what happened after he woke up: In the first few days, he Maintaining an optimistic attitude, more than ten days later, he began to complain and have negative emotions. However, these negative emotions did not seem to affect him for long. It can be seen from the diary he left that he quickly adjusted his mentality.
The next diary entry is carved on a pillar in the hall, and is followed by several incoherent texts:
"Warren Field's Diary, on the thirty-second day, after completing routine work and routine chores, I tried again to have the spacecraft audit the wake-up process. This is something I have to do again every day. The audit results are the same as before, find The reason for the early wake-up may not be that some systems left hidden dangers when the spacecraft was attacked. In order to prevent others from being woken up in advance, the main release end of the wake-up process was transferred to two backup systems. The shipboard host accepted This suggestion, it seems that it also realized that it might be faulty. Today should be a day worth celebrating. This stubborn ship-based host finally compromised to a carbon-based creature. Of course, it is more likely that the compromise has nothing to do with it, but the machine itself. I made a logical judgment, but no matter what, I should find a way to cheer myself up."
"Warren Field's diary, day 28. I was not in a good mood, but after reviewing my previous behavior and mental state, I found that the previous training was still useful. I discovered my emotional problems in time. It seemed that I needed to adjust my mood. .Loneliness is not such a fatal thing. As long as you find enough things to do, the busy life will dispel the loneliness. I have added two daily tasks to myself, including cleaning my main activity area and backing up the radar report to another place. In a data terminal. The cleaning work was originally carried out by an automatic system, but I convinced the equipment responsible for this work in the name of carbon-based organisms needing regular exercise to stay healthy. It has a much better temper than the ship-based host. I plan to spend a few days If you study food combinations, the substance generator should be able to create more weird things."
"Warren Field's Diary. On the forty-fourth day, I found that I hadn't written in a diary for a long time. This was inevitable: every day's life was the same, and nothing happened here that was different from the day before. The lack of change, There is also a lack of need to record, so in the future the diary will probably be recorded at long intervals. I will only write down things that I think are worth recording. This is a good idea. I don’t have to worry about not having enough walls in the spaceship, but I hope other people wake up and don’t complain that I carved the spaceship to look like a cave.”
"Warren Field's Diary, Day 60. Boring days are really hard, so today I did something more adventurous: I took an intra-ship shuttle and flew to a starship city twenty kilometers away for a spin. , the situation was as expected, it was all over, the damage to the spacecraft was very serious, the people in the starship city and the people in the outer garrison area should have died instantly when the attack came: the bodies of mortals are so fragile, if the people on this ship If they were all Xiling apostles, the situation might be completely different. The Xiling apostles would survive, repair the ship in a short time, and land in a certain world to start over again. But what's the use of thinking about this? What's on the spaceship? Mortal. After returning to the core area, he reset the spacecraft's energy network, reduced the energy supply to the peripheral areas, and set that if further damage occurred, the shipboard host could independently decide to completely abandon the peripheral areas. The shipboard host agreed to this plan. I started to think that the stubborn AI was actually quite cute."
"Warren Field's diary, on the sixty-first day, the pressure in the outer area has been completely relieved, and the artificial gravity has been turned off. Now the only place with living people on the ship is here. At the suggestion of the shipboard host, the jamming device was removed Concentrated in the core area, this greatly improves the silence level of the spacecraft. Now it should be more difficult to detect signs of life and thinking in the spacecraft from the outside. Even if there is a psychic assault soldier standing on the outer shell of the spacecraft, he will never be able to detect my thoughts. , which makes people feel more at ease.”
These were the diaries on the pillars. Then we searched around the hall and found no more words. It seemed that the main records were not here.
Sandora gently stroked the text carvings that had gone through tens of thousands of years, and frowned slightly: "Now it seems that this ship is indeed specially designed for escape, so it should be built after the catastrophe. Time was short, which probably explains why it did not comply with starship regulations. Thanks to those special designs, it escaped even though it was almost completely destroyed."
Lilina has given up on searching for life responses. Under the influence of some cutting-edge jamming equipment, even the life sensing power of the protoss will fail, let alone hers. So this girl came over to join our conversation: "Then why is the crew of the spaceship a human being?" Helping mortals? Aren’t the Xiling Apostles’ vitality stronger? Since they can build such a spaceship, why don’t they run away by themselves?”
"Perhaps they are all infected, so we can only let the vassals who have not been infected to escape quickly," Shandora came up with the answer without much thinking, "We have seen such examples many times, the hope of the old empire The Spirit Apostles took advantage of the fact that they were still conscious and handed over the last ship to those who were not yet infected, so of course they could run away one by one in an emergency, regardless of whether they were servants or imperial soldiers."
I frowned and thought hard for a long time. I always felt that something was not right, but when I looked up, I saw a bunch of little crows stumbling around in a chaotic line walking behind Medivh, and then I suddenly realized: Fleet!
"This ship is a single ship," I looked up at Sandora, "Whether it is the ghost ship we found or the various records found here, there is no evidence of the existence of other escape ships. As an escape team , isn’t this scale a bit small?”
If a certain region of the old empire has the ability to build this escape ship, then theoretically it also has time to build more. For the empire, it is almost impossible for the time to be so tight that only one ship can be built, and the escape team we have found so far has never been as small as the ghost ship. Even the tree elves used it to escape. It is also an entire planet fortress, carrying billions of civilians. And what about this ghost ship? There is only one ship, a ship dozens of kilometers long. It is a giant compared to the starships manufactured by other civilizations, but it can only be considered a small boat compared to the large number of fleets that escaped after the collapse of the old empire.
Sandora immediately realized this problem. She nodded: "That's true. Warren Field's diary never mentioned other spaceships, and he didn't think of looking for other spaceships, which shows that this ship did set off as a single ship back then... Although the scale of the disaster that year was very large, Big. But most of the sky areas lasted for tens or hundreds of years before dying. This time is enough for them to release more arks, unless..."
I immediately asked: "Unless what?"
"Unless this exile team has all dispersed when they set off, each spaceship has taken a different route." Sandora spread her hands, "This is also possible, although the population and resources of the single ship after dispersion will be limited. It will bring difficulties to future reconstruction, but it greatly improves the success rate of escape, and it is understandable that some emperors of the region make this decision."
I nodded and accepted this statement, and then looked around the hall: "Then let's look for other diaries. It's impossible for that Warren to only write such a few things. Most of the records should be in other places, in the workroom or something. "
The group of little crows immediately dispersed again, chattering and looking for the workroom. It was not difficult to find. After all, the workroom does not need to be hidden like the hibernation center. We soon found the passage on the other side of the hall. Access to the work area.
As soon as we entered the passage, we saw a new diary. It seemed that Warren Field had conveniently engraved it here:
"Warren Field's Diary, Day 10. I have been thinking about why I was awakened instead of others. In the end, I found that this can only be attributed to luck. Fate played a very bad joke on me. If everything goes as expected In that case, the future I am about to welcome may not be optimistic at all. I was slightly depressed for a while today just because of this matter, but when I was about to start working, I felt better: at least I can still be in the spaceship as peacefully as I am now. Walking around, breathing, eating, doing my own thing, yes, I'm still alive, better than those who were killed. When you think about it, it's not the worst thing I've faced. I think I can Keep this kind of self-comfort for a long time until one day you can get used to this kind of life. If you can really get used to this kind of life."
We walked along this passage with lights marking the direction of the work area, and finally came to a corridor with many rooms. On both sides of the corridor, we could see a gate every ten meters or so, with the words "Observation Room" on it. ", "Communication Control Point", "Food Manufacturing Room" and other words. The structure of this corridor is obviously different from that of a normal Imperial starship. It looks like an old-fashioned deep space ship, with various Functional facilities are all squeezed into a small place (for a spacecraft that is dozens of kilometers long, this corridor is really a small place). Obviously this is also specially designed. I estimate that a small cabin with full functions like this is in the spaceship. There are many more on it, so that even if the spacecraft is seriously damaged, it can still protect the people inside it under partially normal conditions. Look at the desolate and tragic appearance of the ghost ship's outer layer. These specially designed modular small worlds are really played a role.
"This is prepared for ordinary races," Sandora looked at the functional rooms. Many of them were meaningless to Xiling Apostles, such as the entertainment room and gym. The usefulness of these rooms is self-evident, "It seems that the design The infection had already spread when we arrived on this spaceship, and the builders of the spacecraft never thought of letting Xiling Apostles board this ship from the beginning."
"Boss! There is a new diary here!" Lilina ran around with a group of little crows, and suddenly found something on the door not far away. It was a food manufacturing room, with a message written in messy handwriting on the door:
"Warren Field's Diary. This sucks! The Food Synthesis Facility refuses to deliver more sub-acidic hormone drinks! That stupid machine thinks that a couple of small drinks after a meal will affect a soldier's judgment, and Is it more stupid than this? Well, I am indeed a bit greedy these days, but I need this thing to keep myself energetic! I haven't exercised for a long time, and I just looked in the mirror and found that I look like a savage. If I don't add something, I can A refreshing drink. I'm really so decadent that I can't even continue working. Although I don't know if those so-called jobs are meaningful. There is nothing in this damn place. Who are the reports I wrote for? of?"
We all looked at each other: there is no date on this diary. And it is very obvious that the person who left the diary has fallen into a state of anxiety and restlessness. When a person who comes out of a civilized society is so decadent that he breaks away from the various habits developed in a civilized society, this is a very bad person. signal.
Lilina is an expert in this area. She frowned and said in a low voice: "He has begun to give up maintaining his own image, which means that he is deviating from the behavioral norms left by civilized society. This is a slope. Once he slides down, Can’t come back.”
The records we found next confirmed Lilina's worries. There were more records in the food manufacturing room, some of which were early diaries, with dates and daily records of work and mood. But there is also a lot of nonsense mixed in there, some of which are just one sentence without a tail, which are completely the gossip of people with abnormal mental state:
"Warren Field, you are the ruler of this little kingdom. You should be happy! Go declare your dominance to those chairs in the event hall!"
"Running naked down a corridor of hundreds of meters all the way to the end without anyone coming out to stop me is so relaxing. Maybe I should have tried that kind of thing earlier where the lying idiots saw their commander It will surprise you to be so unrestrained.”
"I still insist on recording these meaningless things, okay, then I will engrave another sentence today."
"I feel a little sick. I had a fever yesterday. The medical surveillance drone forcibly dragged me into the medical room. I took a shower and cut off several kilograms of hair. But those stupid machines didn't know. What should be done more, they should put me back into the hibernation cabin! That thing is stuck, didn't the spacecraft system find it? Oh, yes, it really didn't, the hibernation system has long since malfunctioned."
"Look what I found, a pool of blood. Oh my god, there was a murder on this ship! Haha, Chief Warren, this is your own blood... Damn, it looks like I have to go to the medical bay." , why should I carve this kind of thing on the wall?”
This kind of delirious gibbering appears more and more in normal diaries. Since most of the records have no date, we have no idea how to arrange the order of these words. The only thing that can be determined is: as time goes by, The lone starship commander is slowly losing his mind.
We searched for the records left by this starship commander in several rooms, hoping to know his final outcome, but it was difficult to find clues between those gibberish graffiti and the normal diary with skewed time. The last seemingly logical record found was from the twelfth year after his awakening:
"Warren Field's Diary, Day 4325, everything went crazy. I woke up from the empty cabin and saw that I was disheveled, with hair over a foot long. I was naked after taking a shower. I walked into the workroom, and then I remembered that I should change my clothes first. This has never happened before, although it has happened before, well, I can’t remember clearly. Anyway, I am still working, observing... No matter what I am observing, My mind has been confused all day today, and it was the same before. I don’t know how many days I have been confused. It seems that I haven’t written a diary in a few months or a year. Today I recorded these things under a strong impulse. It’s nothing. Meaning. Maybe this is just a dream? I am actually still lying in the dormant cabin, waiting for the spacecraft to safely arrive at a certain world or encounter survivors who have escaped from other areas, and then be awakened, step out of the spacecraft decently, and interact with other starships Commander said hello, yes, that's it, this should be a dream. In order to prevent long-term sleep from damaging my brain, the hibernation system arranged such a dream, but obviously the Xiling apostle does not understand the physiological characteristics of carbon-based organisms. , this dream they designed is terrible, I would rather not... Oh, since it is a dream, then I will continue to work, Warren, Field Diary, Day 4325..."
Behind it are some vague and indecipherable graffiti, as well as symbols that look like passwords, but are completely meaningless after being deciphered. This is the last logical and dated record we can find in the workspace. Other than that, That's crazy nonsense.
Apparently that nonsense was written after this record.
Starship Commander Warren Field completely lost his mind in the twelfth year after being awakened alone.