I live in the Martian wilderness!

[Earth - BJ Space Flight Control Center - Late Night]

[Time: November 18, 2047 Earth Time]

Inside the huge command center, most of the workstations had their lights off, leaving only a few technicians on night duty, quietly monitoring the data flow.

Qin Nuannuan, however, felt no sleepiness whatsoever.

She sat in front of her terminal, ostensibly organizing the latest navigation parameters sent back by the "Spark Squad," but her peripheral vision kept glancing at the envelope icon in the lower right corner of the screen.

Two days ago, the launch window for Tianwen-1 arrived as scheduled, and she received a reply from Gu Yu.

When she saw the words "Private" and "Top Secret" in the email subject line, her heart almost skipped a beat.

An indescribable feeling, a mixture of nervousness and secret delight, instantly welled up inside her. Almost immediately, she made an excuse and retreated to her private data analysis room.

She took a deep breath, as if unwrapping a long-awaited love letter, and clicked on the encrypted attachment.

Then, the blush on her face faded at a speed visible to the naked eye.

On the screen was a girl she had never seen before.

So beautiful, almost unreal. Especially those pale green eyes, which seemed to hold a tranquil starry sky.

But this beauty felt like a tiny thorn piercing Qin Nuannuan's heart.

Who is this?

She suppressed the inexplicable bitterness in her heart and quickly switched to work mode.

I believe Gu Yu is definitely not the kind of person who would play such a silly joke on her on Mars; there must be an extremely important reason behind it.

"Sky Dome, initiate a search of the entire cultural database."

Objective: To identify the physical features of the people in the attached image.

Search scope: All films, animations, game CGs, and publicly available digital artworks worldwide since the birth of cinema.

[Command confirmed. Starting deep learning image recognition engine... Retrieval initiated.]

Over the next few hours, massive amounts of data flowed through the screen like a waterfall, ranging from classic Hollywood sci-fi to obscure Japanese anime, from European indie games to popular domestic cosplayers…

The result was a blank page.

[Search complete. Conclusion: No matching character found in Earth's existing cultural database.]

"No such person found..." Qin Nuannuan leaned back in her chair, rubbing her sore eyes. It wasn't cosplay, nor was it any known virtual character.

Could it be... someone Gu Yu has always kept hidden in his heart? An original character?

The thought had barely crossed her mind when she immediately dismissed it. No, that wasn't Gu Yu's style.

He was a pure, almost dull, engineer whose world consisted only of formulas, blueprints, and tasks. He would never go to the trouble of sending back a photo of his "dream girl."

So, only one possibility remains.

As she looked at that flawless face, a term that was commonplace in 2047 came to mind—AI-generated.

"After all, AI drawing these days can be even more realistic than reality," she murmured to herself. This seemed to be the only reasonable explanation.

Once she understood this, the little knot in her heart dissipated, and she opened the encrypted email and began to write a reply.

……

【Mars, Utopia Planitia, Oasis 1】

[Date: Martian Day 32]

Gu Yu received a reply from Qin Nuannuan.

He opened it eagerly, and when he saw the message "No such person found on Earth," his heart sank, but he was immediately seized by a huge surge of excitement!

Having ruled out all possibilities on Earth, the one that remains, however improbable, is the truth!

He continued reading.

"...The search results do not rule out the possibility that this is an unpublished original design. However, based on the high-resolution pixel analysis of the image, it is more likely that this is an image generated by advanced AI deep learning."

"Modern AI drawing is incredibly realistic; it can even mimic the style of specific artists. Look, this is an image I had Tianqiong generate in the same style. Doesn't it look very similar?"

A new picture was attached to the email.

The image shows an Eastern boy wearing a white robe of the same style, with black hair and black eyes, against a backdrop of a futuristic, brightly lit room.

Whether it's the lighting, the clothing texture, or the character's spirit, it's exactly the same as the mysterious girl picture that Gu Yu sent over, as if it were the work of the same artist.

The letter continued, "So, could this be the work of one of your favorite digital artists, but it's too niche for the database to include?"

At the end of the letter, Qin Nuannuan's tone suddenly became a little strange, with a hint of cautious teasing.

"But speaking of which, Gu Yu, there are so many online scammers these days, who specialize in using these incredibly realistic AI images to deceive people."

"You...you're not the kind of person who would have an online relationship, are you? You shouldn't be, right?"

Gu Yu looked at the question, which carried a hint of uncertainty, and couldn't help but laugh.

He could even picture Qin Nuannuan biting her lip, looking adorably conflicted, as she wrote those words.

But soon, the immense pressure of the "first contact" caused his smile to freeze.

Qin Nuannuan's deduction is perfect under Earth's logic. But she doesn't know and can never imagine a crucial premise.

"Mysterious," Gu Yu stared intently at the Zhu Rong's communication logs, "Could the Zhu Rong's communication system receive signals using an encryption method we can't recognize during off-peak hours?"

"Impossible, Lieutenant Colonel." Xuanjian's answer was resolute. "This is a contradiction in both information theory and physics. The reception of the signal itself proves its objective existence."

"The fact that the signal can be seen by our system means that it must follow some underlying protocol that we can understand, even if we cannot crack it immediately."

Xuanjian projected a complex waterfall of data onto the screen.

"More importantly, the communication module of the Zhurong is designed to only respond to specific 'commands'."

"It uses a military-grade 'dynamic frequency hopping handshake protocol' with Tianwen-1."

"This protocol is like a lock whose teeth change every second, and only Tianwen-1, which has a key with the same changing pattern, can open it."

"Any signal that does not conform to this frequency hopping sequence is just meaningless cosmic background noise to the Zhurong satellite, and the hardware layer will filter it out directly."

Gu Yu felt a chill run down his spine! He had finally touched the most terrifying and crucial part of this puzzle.

Who the other person is or what they look like is no longer important.

Most importantly—they possess the key to open the Zhurong!

This means that the owner of the photo reverse-engineered and cracked this military communication protocol, which was designed by the country's top cryptographers and was supposed to be unbreakable!

Gu Yu's voice was hoarse, almost a muttered soliloquy, "Xuan, intercepting our signals, reverse engineering a set of dynamic frequency hopping military handshake protocols, and then precisely transmitting them back in a way we can receive... Is there any country on Earth that can do that?"

The first thing that came to his mind was that former technological superpower, "The United States? Their intelligence agencies and the former NASA Deep Space Network, is it possible that..."

"No, Lieutenant Colonel." Xuanjian's answer was swift and without the slightest hesitation, shattering his conjecture.

"Based on the highest threat assessment model of the U.S. National Security Agency and the Pentagon Cyber ​​Command, even if they exhausted all supercomputing resources and obtained all the design documents of the protocol, theoretically the shortest time to crack the protocol would be... 8.5 years."

Xuanjian paused, then offered an even more disheartening conclusion: "And the other side did this without any design documents, simply by intercepting a signal once..."

"The communication protocol was cracked within a month, and that doesn't even account for how long the signal transmission took. If the signal was intercepted after a month of transmission, then the military protocol was cracked in just a few minutes..."

"From the perspective of pure computing power, this has exceeded the total computing power of all existing public and non-public supercomputers on Earth by several orders of magnitude."

Gu Yu remained silent for a long time.

He leaned back in his chair, feeling like a primitive tribal hunter with a spear who had stumbled upon a mysterious visitor in a spaceship in the jungle.

This is not a technological gap, but rather... a dimensional crushing defeat.