The stars, but they become the gray wind

After arriving at the door of Ed's room, as expected, the door of Ed's room was also not locked. The two pushed the door open, but unlike the other rooms, they were surprised to see an old man with white hair standing by the window with his back to them.

"Ed?" Kuznetsov asked in a questioning voice.

"Oh... Kuz, what's wrong? Why do you look sweaty? Have a glass of water first?" Ed took the kettle on the table and poured a glass of water into the glass on the table behind him for Kuznetsov.

"Ed...listen! Happy Valley Base?!!" Before Kuznetsov could finish his words, he noticed that Ed's movements and expressions in front of him suddenly stopped.

Kuznetsov looked at his old friend in confusion at his suddenly stopped expression and strange behavior. Then he and Parker saw a scene that he could not understand. The stream of water pouring from the kettle in Ed's hand stopped in the air above the glass. Not only that, Ed's movements and facial expressions seemed to be frozen.

"Alas... I originally thought that if I put you in an environment and scene that you are more familiar with, you would feel more comfortable. What a mistake..." A soft girl's voice suddenly came from all directions.

"After all, my setup is this: in this simulation, everything will be more in line with your subconscious expectations.")

Under the shocked gazes of Kuznetsov and Pa, everything around them was crumbling. Ed, whose movements and expression were frozen in front of them, the cabin they were in, and even the entire Martian base and the crimson Martian surface outside the window, were gradually turning into a blurry mosaic and rapidly fading away.

“What…what…is happening?!?”

"Where's the Happy Valley base? Where are the others?! Where... is this? And who are you?"

"Others? There are no others. You two are the only living people here. Everyone else is just data restored based on your two memories of those people, just like NPCs in video games."

"No... it's not accurate to say living people, because... you two have already died once!" The soft voice of the girl, whose direction could not be determined, calmly told the truth that shocked the two men.

Chapter 175 Diary of Cosmonaut Kuznetsov

"Because... you are already dead." The girl's voice, whose source could not be identified, answered.

"Dead? What do you mean?"

"It's literally dead. You'll understand if you see for yourself."

[Some memories of the death zone have been unlocked. ]

A strange memory surfaced in Kuznetsov's memory, and almost immediately gave Kuznetsov a headache.

"Hiss... What is this? Our memories of being on the Kronos asteroid?" Kuznetsov felt the suffocation in his memories. He now understood why the feelings he had felt in his dreams were so real. Because that was what had actually happened to him.

"It hurts so much! Compared to the calm Kuznetsov, Parker

He ignored his own image and cried out in pain, holding his chest. In his memory, the last scene he saw before he died was his chest being pierced by several sharp metal brackets and pipes from the tree. Along with this memory, his immersive and painful memory of the experience before his death also came back.

"So if we died in the accident mining the Kronos asteroid, why are we still standing here? What about the virtual world you just mentioned? Could it be that our brains have been uploaded into some kind of virtual simulation built by a supercomputer?"

"Bingo! I guessed right. Your bodies are already dead, but you're lucky. When the Kronos asteroid mining accident happened, our 'shell' happened to be nearby. We scanned and uploaded your brains at the quantum level shortly after your death."

"Quantum-level scanning of the brain? This kind of thing should not be something that humans can do, right?" Kuznetsov said this, and a vague guess had come to his mind.

"It's time for you to leave." The girl's voice did not answer Kuznetsov's question.

"Well... you two... let's meet outside later?" As soon as the girl's voice fell, Kuznetsov felt his body undergoing drastic changes. He lowered his head and saw that his limbs were rapidly fading, and his hands had even become translucent, and this state was spreading from his limbs to his torso, and his entire body was disappearing.

…………

Kuznetsov in the incubator suddenly opened his eyes, then choked on a large mouthful of culture fluid. He then found himself soaked in a pile of strange and sticky liquid. He instinctively struggled in the liquid.

While struggling in the culture fluid, his hand touched the lid of the cloning chamber, which was quite similar to the texture of transparent glass. Driven by instinct, he took a step back in the nutrient solution and hit the lid of the culture chamber with all his strength. However, before he hit the lid, the lid suddenly opened outwards by itself, and Kuznetsov, who jumped out of the culture tank, fell directly to the ground outside in a dog-eating shit posture.

Kuznetsov got up from the ground in a panic. At this time, the lid of another cloning chamber next to Kuznetsov's cloning chamber, which was originally closed, also opened outward, and another person who was also wet fell to the ground in a panic like Kuznetsov.

"Parker?"

"It's me... where... is this?" Parker, who barely stood up with the help of the cloning tank behind him, looked around. The two of them were in a room filled with equipment similar to the cloning chamber where they had just been imprisoned. The walls and ceiling were made of some kind of silvery-white substance, and strange green patterns were flickering on the surface of the silvery-white substance.

"Honestly, I don't know..."

"Hello." A voice sounded from behind the two of them. Kuznetsov and Parker turned around quickly in alertness. A strange octahedral translucent prism was floating in the air.

"I said, let's meet outside." The octahedron floating not far from the two of them suddenly uttered a familiar girl's voice.

"Hello, two humans, Grigory Kuznetsov and Tom Parker."

"As for where you are? I'm happy to provide you with an answer."

One of the walls of the room where the two were located slowly slid open towards them, revealing a huge transparent string window hidden behind the wall. Then, the two saw the most shocking scene that they would never forget in their lives. A huge red vortex passed by the window, looking at them like an eye.

"Is that... the Great Red Spot?!" Kuznetsov looked out the window at the gas giant planet that often appeared in countless pictures and videos of human astronomical observations. He felt extremely shocked, and at the same time, he became more certain of his previous guess.

"Welcome to Jupiter, you two."

"Are you... an alien?" Staring at the big red spot passing by outside the window, Kuznetsov was silent for a long time, and then asked the strange translucent octahedron floating in front of him.

"According to your understanding... I guess so. I come from a very distant galaxy near the center of the Milky Way."

"I came to your solar system on this ship. I saw a civilization here, so I decided to come and take a look."

"Then, I saved you."

Kuznetsov felt that the octahedron floating in the air was focusing its gaze and attention on him. He felt a little nervous. Although he did not see any equipment like cameras or sensors on this strange octahedron-shaped device, and this octahedron that was obviously not a living thing did not have organs like eyes, he just felt that the thing in front of him suddenly focused its attention on him.

"Huh... Anyway, thank you for saving our lives... I..." Having said this, Kuznetsov realized that he didn't seem to know what to say next. He had come into contact with an alien intelligent creature without any warning or preparation, and the advanced technology displayed by the other party, at least the level of human technology that Kuznetsov knew, was simply beyond the reach of this level.

"Since you don't know what you want to ask...why not spend some more time thinking about it carefully? Come and ask me after you have figured out what you want to know." said the octahedral prism floating in the air.

…………

Two white spherical drones brought suitable clothes to Kuznetsov and Parker. To their surprise, the sizes and styles of the two sets of clothes were exactly the same as the casual clothes they wore every day in the Mars base. However, when they thought that since the aliens could directly read their memories, it would not be difficult to make a pair of suitable clothes based on their memories, they felt relieved.

The translucent octahedron led the two out of the room, or more accurately, the cabin. Kuznetsov was sure that he was now on a huge alien spaceship.

In the corridor of the spacecraft, white spherical drones that were very similar to the ones Kuznetsov had just seen were flying around in the corridor. Kuznetsov could not see how these white spherical drones stayed afloat, because there was obviously gravity here. Those white spherical drones did not have devices like the blades or aerodynamic engines commonly seen on Earth aircraft. Similarly, he could not see what the octahedral prismatic device that was really leading him was.

He could not see any traces of welding or mortise joints on the surface of this translucent octahedron, which was almost a mirror. Its surface seemed to be completely smooth. He also did not find anything resembling mechanical or circuit structures on the surface or inside of the octahedron. At least based on the various evidence he had seen so far, including this octahedron made of almost completely smooth mirror surface, the spherical drones flying around in the corridor, and this spaceship that seemed to have an absurdly large interior space, all represented that this was a product of a civilization with a technological level far exceeding that of humans.

As an experienced Soviet astronaut since the era of the US-Soviet moon race, Kuznetsov felt a little overwhelmed by this, because all the training he received and all the knowledge he learned did not teach him how to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations and extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Tom Parker, who was following behind Kuznetsov, seemed particularly relaxed. As an unremarkable little character even on the Mars base, he didn't feel any pressure about being the first human to contact and communicate with extraterrestrial intelligent life. In his opinion, even Kuznetsov, the best elite in human society, didn't know what to do, so how could he, an ordinary worker who just came to participate in the construction of the Mars base, know what to do?

"I understand you humans better than you think."

"Excuse me...you are..."

"Of course, through the radio waves leaked from your planet, our communication monitoring array can monitor almost every electromagnetic wave communication sent from the earth at this distance from Jupiter to the earth." As if seeing what Kuznetsov wanted to ask, the octahedral prism floating in the air answered while leading the two of them.

"Most of the communication waves emitted by your civilization decay to the point of being completely unrecognizable before they even leave the solar system. Therefore, a civilization of your level would be ignored by us most of the time unless we passed very close."

"According to the standards you're familiar with, humanity's current size is roughly between a Type 0.75 and a Type 0.76 civilization. The civilization I come from, if we only use the Kardashev criteria, is a true Type 3 civilization."

"!!!" Kuznetsov looked shocked. If the other party was not lying, it meant that the other party's civilization at least controlled the energy power of the entire Milky Way. The gap between this and a 0.75 type civilization like the Earth was no longer the difference between apes and humans, but a huge gap between humans and single-cell organisms or bacteria.

"I imagine you're curious about why such a Kardashev Type III civilization exists within the Milky Way, yet Earth hasn't observed any signs of it, like massive amounts of thermal radiation?"

"In fact, we do have quite a number of stellar celestial projects. However, compared to those stellar celestial projects, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is currently our main base and headquarters."

"That's why you don't see things like stellar luminosity dips caused by astronomical engineering like Dyson spheres on other stars in the Milky Way."

"However, we are currently carrying out this large-scale astronomical engineering project on a considerable number of stars in the Milky Way. However, with your observation technology, it will take at least thousands of years to detect changes in these stars."

Kuznetsov's diary:

My name is Grigory Kuznetsov, a human astronaut from the Soviet Union (crossed out) Earth. Over the past few days, my companion Parker and I have experienced something unprecedented in human history. Parker and I were involved in an accident while mining the Kronos asteroid. We died unexpectedly, but at the time of my death, He somehow scanned both of our brains at the quantum level and cloned a new body through advanced biotechnology, uploading the digitized memories and thoughts of Parker and me into this new cloned body.

As a person who has received a materialistic education since childhood, I don’t know whether humans have such a thing as a soul. At least from my current understanding, I am still myself, not just a simple copy of the original me.

Regarding this question, I also asked the alien lady? Or was it a young lady? At least her voice sounded like a female?

I'm not quite sure whether extraterrestrial intelligent creatures have the same concept of gender as humans. Anyway, according to him, the brain memory, thoughts, emotions, etc. of most carbon-based creatures, including humans, are just a piece of information that can be transcribed, uploaded, and cut. There are indeed very few intelligent creatures in the universe that can be said to have souls in some sense, but humans are obviously not included in the scope of these special intelligent creatures. In his view, humans do not have such a thing as a soul. An individual who has the original memory, consciousness, and thinking in the biological body uploaded digitally can be regarded as the original individual.

I don't know if this diary can be seen by other humans besides Parker and me. I am now like Professor Analons in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", a science fiction novel I read in my childhood. Due to various accidents, I was taken on a submarine to explore unknown places that humans have never reached. I don't know when I can go home, or even maybe I will never go home. After all, in the eyes of people on Earth, Parker and I are already dead, right?

If the civilization he came from is indeed a civilization that has reached the Kardashev type III, then in their eyes, the Earth civilization may not even be a monkey, but at most just a group of microorganisms.

I don't know what He or they think of Earth civilization and me, and I haven't asked yet. As for the things I have come into contact with so far, such as this ship, the various equipment I can touch on the ship are things that can only be seen in various science fiction movies, such as the molecular printer used to make food. Thanks to its existence, Parker and I have even eaten better recently than on the Mars base. Yesterday, Parker jokingly asked the molecular printer if it could make him a bottle of high-end French wine.

As it turned out, the molecular printer actually produced a bottle of delicious French wine, and even the label on the bottle was exactly the same as the one I had seen on the store shelf.

Of course, this molecular printer can not only print food, it is better to say that making food is just one of its additional functions. It can even make a fairly complex electronic device in a few minutes. The notebook and ballpoint pen I have in my hand for recording my diary are made by this molecular printer.

Oh, and He also gave Parker and me a multifunctional tablet data terminal for navigation. Currently, the main function of the two of us is to use it to prevent ourselves from getting lost inside the ship. The interior space of this ship is really huge. Without the navigation assistance provided by this multifunctional tablet, we could easily get lost in the complex corridors and cabins inside the ship. According to Him, this tablet was specially made according to human usage habits.

I went to the area marked as Spaceport 02 on the map this morning.

Oh my god...it's huge. From my visual observation, the distance from the ground where I'm standing to the ceiling is at least a thousand meters. Can you imagine? A single-story building with a roof a thousand meters from the ground.

In one of the areas here, there are several small spaceships parked, most of which are only about 100 meters long. I moved forward and observed these spaceships closely. The outer shells of these spaceships seemed to be completely smooth mirrors, absolutely smooth. I bravely walked under these spaceships and tried to scratch the surface of these spaceships with a small knife made from the molecular printer in the restaurant. The knife was made of high-strength tungsten alloy, but no matter how hard I scratched, I couldn't even leave a scratch on the surface of these spaceships.

I have a question: What are these spaceships made of?

That night at dinner, I told Parker about this. He said, since I'm curious about the composition of these spacecraft shells, why not use the molecular printer in the restaurant to build a microscope? Perhaps we can try to observe the microscopic structure of these spacecraft shells?

This was a very good idea, at least I thought it was a very good idea until I brought my microscope back to the spacecraft at Spaceport No. 2 the next day.

When I came to those spaceships again the next day with a very small scanning tunneling microscope made by the molecular printer in the restaurant, He suddenly appeared.

I have to say, I was really scared. At first, I thought that my and Parker's behavior in the past two days made Him a little unhappy, but He said that He didn't care about Parker and my little curiosity at all. He even took the initiative to let me walk to the side of the spacecraft with a scanning tunneling microscope, and asked me to use the scanning tunneling microscope in my hand to observe the material composition of the surface of the spacecraft, and asked me to guess what the outer shell of the spacecraft is made of?

Since He wants me to do this, why not do it?

It is worth mentioning that the scanning tunneling microscope in my hand was made using the molecular printer in the restaurant. It is very small, roughly equivalent to the weight and volume of a personal laptop. If products on Earth want to achieve the same function, the size and weight must be at least close to that of a heavy office desk.

However, when I pressed the scanning tunneling microscope against the surface of the spacecraft, I was dumbfounded. No matter how I increased the magnification to one thousand times, ten thousand times, one million times, five million times, or even to ten million times, the limit of the scanning tunneling microscope, the surface of the spacecraft I observed was still absolutely smooth.

The scanning tunneling microscope in my hand is powerful enough to observe individual atoms. If it is magnified 1000 million times, and what is observed is still an absolutely smooth surface, then there is only one possibility: all the microscopic particles of the material that makes up the outer shell of this spacecraft have been nailed down at the subatomic scale.

I thought of supersolid matter like neutron degenerate state. Only this can explain why I cannot observe the existence of individual atoms on the hull of this spacecraft. Only neutron degenerate matter, in which even the atomic nucleus is crushed, allowing free extranuclear electrons to enter the atomic nucleus and combine with protons to form a substance composed of pure neutrons, is consistent with the phenomenon I observed on this thing.

But the strange thing is that the gravity and mass of this thing are normal. I told Him my guess, but to my surprise, He denied my answer.

He told me that the material that constitutes the surface of this spacecraft is produced by splitting hadrons to create individual quarks, and then using the color charge force to firmly pin the individual quarks together, using the quark confinement effect to produce a large-scale hadron material at the macroscopic level. At the same time, the mass and density of this material will not be as large as neutron degenerate matter.

The mystery is revealed: they can create individual quarks! And even pin them down with color charge? I was incredibly shocked by this answer. This thin shell is countless times harder than the strongest substance known to man. If the spacecraft were to travel at high enough speed, it could easily crash through the Earth like a bullet through a wooden board. Even if Earth civilization at this stage tried its best, it wouldn't be able to even leave a scratch on it.

He also said that because this material is powerful enough to reflect gamma-ray bursts up to Pev energy levels produced by the largest supernova explosions, this material is often used as the surface material of reflectors for reflecting ultra-high energy gamma-ray lasers, or directly as part of stellar astronomical engineering. The perfect reflection of light of all bands also makes it the most suitable material for the construction of space facilities near black holes, such as Penrose spheres.

Chapter 176: Short-term benefits or long-term development? (6000 words)

Kuznetsov was shocked by what he saw. This was quarks being taken apart and then put back together with color charge. To be able to do this, one had to understand how advanced the technology behind it was. Kuznetsov knew very well that in front of this kind of material, any technological product of mankind was as ridiculous as the stones and spears of primitive people.

I can't tell whether the prismatic octahedron has emotions like humans. If it does, it would definitely laugh at my own arrogance.

The advanced technology represented by this material may indeed confirm his words. The civilization he came from is most likely an extremely advanced interstellar civilization.

Thinking of this, a drop of sweat slid down Kuznetsov's forehead. He took a deep breath nervously and looked at the translucent octahedron still floating in the air behind him.

"Excuse me...what do you think of me or humans?")

"With our technology and development level, we may not even be considered primitive people to you?" Kuznetsov said mercilessly to himself.

"I'm just a little curious about certain aspects. I'm really not interested in your civilization."

"And... there are a few things in your galaxy that I find strange. I'm still investigating this."

"For example...are the levels of certain substances on your home planet's satellite unnaturally high?"

…………

"If he saw our true form, he would probably be shocked, right?" Kalisi temporarily disconnected from the shell and smoothed her long purple hair in front of her forehead.

"I don't think he'll be shocked. I think his first reaction will be that we deliberately made a human-shaped body that conforms to human aesthetics." Renlong observed Kuznetsov and Tom Parker who were active in areas of the ship that were usually deserted.

As a Titan ship with a length of more than 22 kilometers, the interior space of the Fantasy Light is very huge. As long as the girls don't want to see them, Kuznetsov will never be able to find the area where they are in his lifetime. Just the complex corridors and various cabins in the Titan ship alone will take at least decades to walk through the entire ship.

"By the way...are the scan results of this world's moon out yet?"

"It's out... As expected, there's something wrong with this world's moon."

"I've always found it strange...why is this world's controlled nuclear fusion technology developing so rapidly? And the mainstream method now is deuterium-helium fusion. Humanity here has barely stepped out of the Earth-Moon system..."

"If it's deuterium-tritium fusion, I'd begrudgingly agree. According to current research, after the theory of controlled deuterium-tritium fusion was proposed on Earth last century, every country invested funds, personnel, and technology far exceeding the scale of our own world."

"This world's International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project was proposed several years earlier than ours, and the investment by various countries in ITER was at least a hundred times greater than ours. Despite this investment, which completely disregarded the initial costs, this world's ITER reactor was completed in 1985, and related experiments began. Three years later, in 1988, it successfully achieved positive energy output from controlled deuterium-tritium fusion."

"But... the mainstream fusion power generation and nuclear fusion used in the aerospace field in this world now are based on the deuterium-helium reaction, right?" Renlong asked.

"This brings us to a series of negative issues with deuterium-tritium fusion. First, there aren't that many tritium isotopes on Earth. There aren't many reliable ways to obtain enough tritium to meet humanity's nuclear fusion power generation needs."

"First, lay a layer of lithium hexahydrate on the inner wall of the deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion reactor, and use the neutrons produced during the deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion process to bombard the lithium hexahydrate to produce enough tritium."

"However, this process, the tritium proliferation of the fusion reactor itself, inevitably consumes a large amount of lithium-6, and the efficiency is not ideal. The theoretical limit of tritium proliferation is only 15%, which is barely enough to maintain the fusion reactor's own tritium needs."

"What's more, this is a theoretical limit. In engineering, it's basically impossible to achieve perfection within the theoretical limit."

"The fact is that in actual operation, the efficiency of tritium proliferation does not even reach 5%, and it is impossible to maintain tritium self-sufficiency by relying solely on the fusion reactor itself."

"So that only leaves the second option? The fast neutron fission breeder lithium-6 method of producing tritium?"

"That's right, but this method still can't avoid the consumption of lithium-6 resources and the neutron radiation generated in the process."

"To maintain the tritium consumption requirements of a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor, more than one fast breeder reactor and a large amount of lithium-6 are required."