Chapter 1526 Unknown Realm

After receiving the information from the drone, Hao Ren led his people to the Crystal Core Research Station.

Nowadays, this space station is no longer a simple research center. Its powerful central host and crystal resonance antenna allow the space station to assume the function of integrating and processing all information in the dream plane. The planet Tanagus serves as an important "pilot" "Under the supervision of the Crystal Core Research Station, live sample testing and various experiments on the eldest son are also conducted here. It is also the largest starport established by Hao Ren in the Dream Plane, with the "Patian" and "Asu" The two ancient spaceships "Man" are parked here. Coupled with the powerful offensive and defensive capabilities of the space station itself, it has become Hao Ren's most important base in the universe.

In order to facilitate the control of the increasingly large drone empire, Hao Ren not long ago ordered the installation of the largest "nest thinking core" in an attached tower of the space station, where hundreds of millions of drones The huge flow of thoughts flowing between them will be forwarded through the core of this nest. Therefore, in a sense, the Crystal Core Research Station is now also the "supreme ruling center" of the drone swarm - of course, structurally speaking, the drone swarm does not A supreme ruler, because it adopts a distributed thinking network, the Crystal Core Research Station can only monitor this network with the highest authority.

Hao Ren did not go to the crystal hall where the main engine of the space station was located, but came to the core of the drone swarm's lair. This device, which was "accumulated" by a large number of luminous veins and strange metal capsules, was like a device magnified thousands of times. The metal brain, the pipes and lines extending from the ceiling and floor are all concentrated on the metal brain, giving this thing a completely weird atmosphere. When Lily first saw this thing, she exclaimed: "Wow! It's so ugly!"

A bunch of messy lines appeared in front of the metal brain, and the lines slowly combined into a human face. The cluster consciousness of the drone swarm projected its own interactive interface: "I'm sorry to make you feel this way, I am not interested in 'aesthetics' Not much concept.”

"The upper-level nodes of each drone group look different. Although their basic units are unified when they leave the factory, as the fleet continues to develop, it will absorb various external knowledge to develop and evolve. In the end, it will often follow the same pattern. The original design was different. The farther away the two fleets are, the longer they have been in service, and the wider their proliferation range, the more obvious and huge the differences between them will be," the data terminal explained beside him, "Now it seems Our fleet was greatly inspired by the local environment during the exploration of the Dream Plane... After all, on any habitable planet, you can see a lot of indescribable things with tentacles and pieces of flesh..."

Nangong Sanba covered his face: "Damn it, I suddenly miss those iron mother machines with square heads and square heads that were just released back then. These things were flying all the way down the long and crooked road."

Hao Ren waved his hand and interrupted these guys who could easily stray from the topic. He turned to look at the metal brain that was supported in mid-air by a lot of pipelines and was constantly releasing a distortion field around it: "Bring it on Let’s take a look at the situation of those detectors.”

"Yes," the drone group said, and its interactive interface changed into the pictures sent back by several detectors. "Since the star map data you sent is not accurate, the three detectors each selected three The jump coordinates closest to the theoretical values ​​are used to jump. The coordinates used by the No. 1 detector should have deviated too much, causing it to be involved in space turbulence or high-energy areas in the universe during the jump process, and it is still out of contact. Status, probes No. 2 and No. 3 arrived at the target galaxy almost at the same time, and they sent back this picture..."

The first thing that appears on the holographic projection is a "channel" composed of distorted starlight. The front and rear ends of this starlight channel show a very obvious red and blue shift phenomenon, and the red and blue shifts rapidly decay within a few seconds: this is from The phenomenon of superluminal jump state back to normal space and time. This video should have been sent by the drone just after it jumped to the target galaxy.

Then the starlight on the screen stabilized, and the cold stars seemed to be stationary on the dark background of the universe. However, occasionally some streams of light appeared on the screen, and some close-up celestial bodies also showed signs of being stretched, which showed that there was no trace of elongation. The man and the machine are not stationary, but continue to sail forward at sub-light speed: they break away from the jump near the final position mark, and the next few light seconds need to be completed by conventional engines, which is also part of the detection mission.

Hao Ren watched this video attentively, which seemed ordinary at first glance, until he saw the starry sky in front of him suddenly "shake".

All the stars changed their positions in an instant.

He rubbed his eyes, thinking he had seen it wrong or the screen was stuck, but then he realized: this was the strange phenomenon observed by the drone swarm.

The starry sky was originally almost static. Without atmospheric interference, the stars in the universe would hardly flicker, and their relative positions would never change visible to the naked eye. However, just now, all the stars moved instantly. , subtle changes in brightness can also be seen on some stars whose positions have not changed much. This scene is like a continuous video that has been cut off, and the changes that were originally too slow to be observed are compressed to be completed in an instant.

"Rewind that paragraph—what just happened?"

The picture returned to the moment when the "jitter" occurred, and then played it again. This time Hao Ren was sure that everything happened instantly: when the drone crossed a certain "border", the stars changed positions.

"The drone observes a boundary. This boundary has no entity, no blocking effect, and no tendency to attack or defend. However, the observed universe is different inside and outside this boundary," explained the swarm consciousness. , "The fleet allowed two drones to observe the same direction at the same time inside and outside the border, confirming the existence of this phenomenon."

"A different universe?" Hao Ren frowned, "How is it different?"

"The positions of all celestial bodies are abnormal, and light cannot propagate continuously on a macro scale. It seems that the inside and outside of the boundary can be directly reached, but in fact there is a vast 'jump' area: on this boundary, space is discontinuous."

Hao Ren touched his chin: "What do you think caused this result?"

"By comparing and analyzing the starlight observed on both sides of the border, it was confirmed that there should have been an extremely broad space between both sides of the border. However, this space disappeared, and the dislocation problem caused by the lack of space remained. The phenomenon of 'observation horizon' means observing the same celestial body inside and outside the horizon. Even if the distance between the two observation points is only a few hundred meters, what is observed is actually what is seen when it is millions of light-years or even farther away. The scene. By letting two drones observe each other, the fleet has confirmed the existence of this phenomenon: the drone that stays outside the border observes the drone that crosses the border, and will instantly lose the latter's signal - when the signal is restored When they were established, the distance between them was already millions of light-years away. However, due to measurement inaccuracies caused by some kind of spatial distortion, it is currently impossible to determine the specific scale of the space that disappeared on the boundary."

Nangong Sanba scratched his hair: "Why didn't I understand it well?"

Nangong Wuyue was ridiculed by her brother for not studying seriously when she was a child two days ago. At this time, she finally found an opportunity to ridicule him back. She immediately hugged her shoulders and wagged her tail: "My stupid brother - I didn't understand either. "

Lily immediately looked at her with contempt: Salted fish is salted fish, and the salt content will not change after turning over.

Hao Ren knew that not everyone graduated from Peking University four times like Lily or had a database in their head like him, so he explained in a simpler way: "This is equivalent to a blank piece of paper. Drawing a continuous picture, and then we cut out a section in the middle of the white paper, and then forcibly put the white paper back together - so the original continuous picture is misaligned. We can see the cause of the misalignment at a glance in the three-dimensional space, and we can accurately Measure the size of the paper after cutting, but if there is a bug living in two-dimensional space lying on the white paper, then it can only find that when crawling forward, it suddenly enters a new world, space All the structures in are no longer continuous - this situation is moved from two-dimensional space to three-dimensional space and is what we see before our eyes. The difference is that bugs cannot observe spatial structures above two dimensions, but we can control them through technical means A higher dimension.”

The data terminal echoed from the side: "You see, my partner's technical means are not only explosive, but also non-explosive..."

Everyone: "..."

Hao Ren covered his face and put the data terminal in his pocket, and then continued to communicate with the drone: "Besides this boundary, what else is there in the target star area?"

"After entering the target star area, Probe No. 2 made a large-scale random jump and discovered a high-energy aggregate of unknown identity in the universe."

As the words of the cluster consciousness fell, another space scene appeared on the holographic projection. In the vast space, large luminous gas clouds like fog gathered together. These luminous gas clouds were light yellow or milky white. The light is almost invisible in the thin part, and the starlight on the opposite side is almost visible, and in the thick part, it condenses like a solid body. They have no fixed and unified shape, but they are basically approximately disk-shaped, and there is a large amount of light spreading out from the edge of the luminous disk. A belt of ejecta-like material.

"These high-energy aggregates are all about the same size, with a diameter of about a thousand kilometers, and are distributed in various places in the target star area. They will emit strong and chaotic electromagnetic waves, but after the drone deciphered these electromagnetic waves, it was found that they were not It makes no sense. According to the basic physical rules of the dream plane universe, the source of these 'space phenomena' cannot be explained, but no artificial evidence of these high-energy aggregates has been found."

"Other than that?"

"No more discoveries have been made yet - the target star area contains a large-scale river system and several loose galaxy structures. The scope is vast. It is impossible to complete the entire area detection and accurate scanning in a short time with two detectors. Currently, only A rough scan of the entire galaxy was carried out, and a gravity distribution map was drawn for subsequent ship jumps."

Hao Ren looked up at those weird glowing gas clouds and said softly: "It seems like a place worth visiting..."