American Strategic Deception Bureau

　If the people on the Leander wanted to find a place to stay, this group of "wanderers" suggested that they try their luck in Night City.

　One of the female wanderers, who looked like a leader, used a small device she carried with her to show them a holographic projection of Night City. The sci-fi urban landscape, with skyscrapers standing tall, neon lights flashing, holographic projections everywhere, and light rail trains swimming around like fish, made the group of 20th-century British bumpkins on the Leander frigate exclaim in amazement.

　Finally, the sailors traded fruit and meat from the ship's cold storage for small items and Euro banknotes from these "wanderers" to use when they later went to Night City to gather information. Although they were initially confused as to why they had to use Euros in the United States, they gradually understood the situation after learning that the United States had been divided for many years and that Night City was a "Japanese colony" (as the British sailors understood it).

　In this way, the American "wanderers" of 2077 drove away in the twilight, while the British sailors from 1970 continued to look for useful things in the abandoned town while trying to rescue their frigate from being stranded.

　On the third day, with the help of the high tide in the afternoon, the frigate Leander finally broke free from the ground and rushed into the sea.

　Next, the captain of the Leander looked at the nautical chart and prepared to sail south to Night City. The environment near this bay was terrible. There was nothing to eat on land or in the sea, and even drinkable water was unavailable. Staying here would mean dying of thirst and starvation.

　Unexpectedly, at this moment, seven or eight American gangsters dressed strangely, covered in nails, leather jackets, and Mohawk hairstyles, drove three tattered wasteland-style modified cars, came from the end of the horizon, and pounced fiercely on this group of antiques from the last century.

　The abandoned house on the seashore

　The dozen or so British sailors in the town were killed by the bandits in the blink of an eye, and they didn't even have time to escape.

　Next, the bandits rushed to the beach and used rocket launchers and grenade launchers to set the Leander frigate on fire and smoke everywhere.

　One of the bandits' car could even drive on the water. He drove it straight into the sea, circling closer and closer to the ship. He used some high-powered future firearms to repeatedly fire at the Leander frigate. Each shot stirred up a few clusters of blood mist and even killed the first mate on the ship.

　The helpless captain could only abandon the people on shore and ordered the Leander to sail away from the coast as quickly as possible to avoid the bandits.

　As a result, the poor frigate had just sailed out of the bay and escaped the bandits' firepower when it was hit by a torpedo from nowhere.

　Just as the sailors on board were scrambling to repair the leak and save the damaged frigate, another strange green light surrounded the Leander.

　When the people on the ship opened their eyes again, their frigate, which had been hit and was smoking everywhere, had reappeared on the Thames.

　The entire ship lost 42 people in this adventure, 25 of whom were injured to varying degrees, and 23 of the dead were not even brought back with their bodies.

　However, compared with the casualty rates of Columbus's discovery of the New World and Magellan's circumnavigation of the world, the number of casualties on the Leander was considered very small.

　"Wait, there were only a few bandits who attacked the Leander frigate? And they weren't equipped with heavy weapons?"

　After a cursory glance at the report, Prime Minister Heath, somewhat bewildered, asked the MI5 official, "If that's the case, why is a missile frigate and over a hundred sailors no match for their small force? Can't even the naval guns suppress these bandits?"

　“Your Excellency, Prime Minister, the frigate Leander was not in combat readiness when it sailed to the future world.

　The Leander was preparing for a fleet review when the accident occurred. The ship had no ammunition at all. The missile launchers were loaded with dummy missiles, and the original artillery shells had been replaced with training rounds. The ship's actual weapons consisted of just a dozen guns, and they had very little ammunition.

　In addition, because the incident happened suddenly, many sailors on board were on leave, resulting in a serious shortage of personnel on the frigate and poor operation..."

　After hearing this explanation, Prime Minister Heath finally understood.

　Generally speaking, for safety reasons, the planes and tanks participating in the parade do not carry ammunition, and even the soldiers hold empty guns.

　Similarly, ships participating in the naval review will try their best to unload their onboard ammunition if conditions permit, so as to avoid accidents.

　——If someone chooses to take advantage of the opportunity to cause trouble and shoot the president or shell politicians during the review, the consequences will be terrible.

　This is not just groundless worry, but there have been many bloody real cases!

　From ancient times to modern times, many great figures have been assassinated during military parades!

　For example, Romulus, the founding emperor of Rome, and Sadat, the modern Egyptian president.

　But no one could have imagined that the USS Leander would end up on the California coastline a hundred years later!

　This is embarrassing.

　No wonder a warship with a displacement of over 2,000 tons would be so weak against a mere handful of bandits...

　It turns out that this frigate is completely unarmed!

　Of course, what Prime Minister Heath didn't know was that with the backward technology of 1970, even if the Leander frigate was fully equipped with missiles and artillery, it would probably be ravaged and overwhelmed by the cyberpunk gangs of 2077.

　Putting aside other things, just the smart bullets that can turn, how are you old antiques from the Cold War era supposed to defend against them?

　Could the anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft missiles of the Cold War era hit cars on land and hovercraft in the sky? I'm afraid it would be difficult, right?

　Unless the frigate does not approach the coastline and the sailors on board do not go ashore, the bandits of the Luan Dao Society in the Bad Land will be left with nothing but helpless sighs.

　But if the frigate really keeps sailing in the open sea, then it will encounter another kind of danger...

　However, Prime Minister Heath now focuses all his attention on the map of the United States in the 21st century brought back by the Leander frigate from 2077, as well as the newspaper and magazine photos from the world of Cyberpunk 2077.

　After personally witnessing the various high-tech gadgets, or rather, high-tech junk, brought back from a hundred years in the future, Prime Minister Heath was completely convinced that this was the true future. He immersed himself in it, his imagination running wild, while stroking his chin and muttering to himself, "The Soviet Union changes color, the United States disintegrates, Europe returns to its peak, and the European Space Agency explores space... All this sounds so pleasant! But why is the leader of the European Community not Britain or France, but Germany? Were both world wars fought in vain?

　Well, let’s get ready and go to Windsor Castle to meet the Queen! It’s obviously not possible to not inform the monarch about such a big thing…”

　-

　"They were banished to the outskirts of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077? Is this bad luck for them? Or luck?"

　Meanwhile, in a luxury hotel in London, after working Marita to the point of sweating and passing out, Ferry lazily lay on the large bed, took out a magic crystal ball, and cast a spell to peek into the otherworldly adventures of the Leander frigate...

　Uh,

　It's really a bit of a flop.

　Of the 60 hours of adventure in another world, almost 58 hours were spent with the ship stranded and unable to move.

　Despite arriving in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, they didn't even reach Night City, the main plot stage, nor could they even see Night City from afar. They just stayed in the badlands in the suburbs for three days and encountered a bandit gang called the Luan Dao Hui... In the end, nearly half of them were killed or injured.

　But despite this, it can be said that they were lucky to be able to land in such a harsh and inaccessible land in the first place.

　If the Leander frigate had really landed directly in the crowded Night City from the beginning of the journey, I'm afraid not a single person would have returned!

　If the vibrant and bustling Night City is a golden haven for rockers, mercenaries, and kabuki sex dolls, then the "Badlands" surrounding this metropolis is a desolate and sparsely populated dead zone. Due to excessive human exploitation of oil fields, the large-scale dumping of hazardous waste, and the deliberate pollution and destruction by large corporations, the Badlands are perpetually shrouded in a foul-smelling wind, and almost no ordinary crops can grow on this soil.

　Therefore, no farmer would be able to set up a farm and settle on such a toxic land.

　On the other hand, it was precisely because the Leander frigate had traversed such a desolate place that it had been able to pass through those few days in relative peace, collecting so much intelligence, data, and samples without anyone knowing. It was only at the very end that it was attacked by a local violent group with malicious intent.

　If it were in Night City, let alone the private soldiers of Arasaka, Militech or Kanto, just a small team of cyberpunk "Edgewalker" mercenaries could easily subdue and capture everyone on their entire frigate!

　——The price of the fresh meat, vegetables and fruits stored in the ship’s cold storage in the Night City market alone is enough to mobilize the top mercenary groups!

　Of course, all of this is speculation after the fact. The fact is that the HMS Leander has successfully completed its "future world adventure" and returned to London with a huge reward. I believe this will surely attract great attention in the UK and even across Europe...

　And Firi also succeeded in fooling the British to a considerable extent.

　As for whether the British could draw unique insights from the "future artifacts" found in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, leading to a new technological explosion and a new industrial revolution, Firi believes the possibility is unlikely, given the vastly different eras and technological conditions.

　Just as a monkey with a tablet can only use it to crack nuts, so the ancients in the Middle Ages could only use a tablet as a mirror.

　The British during the Cold War could only treat the prosthetic limbs and computers in Cyberpunk 2077 as precious collectibles and could not imitate them at all.

　Thinking of this, he yawned, put away the crystal ball, and lay down to rest again.

　But at the same time, the most distinguished person in the whole of Britain couldn't sleep at night because of this...

　Chapter 534: MI5 is the Regicide!

　Windsor Castle, London, England

　The evening glow, like a delicate painter, uses the softest brushstrokes to paint the gardens and towers of the castle with orange.

　The yellowed lawns and woods in the distance, under the reflection of the setting sun, rippled with golden color, like the breath of the earth.

　As the residence of the British royal family, Windsor Castle is surrounded by beautiful scenery everywhere, like a huge oil painting created by a famous artist.

　The essence of the beauty of the English countryside is gathered in one place, making people linger and be intoxicated.

　However, the owners of Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, and her husband Prince Philip, turned a blind eye to the beautiful scenery around them at this time. They only focused their attention on a pile of photocopied documents and several "science fiction items" sent by Prime Minister Heath, and were worried about it.

　Although Queen Elizabeth II wanted to dismiss everything she had just heard as a ridiculous hoax, the scrapped prosthetic limbs and robot wreckage placed before her by the Prime Minister, with their astonishingly high-precision integrated circuits, were clearly beyond the reach of current technology.

　Especially when she heard with her own ears the strange music, one after another, pouring out of a music player that was only the size of a matchbox but could store hundreds of rock songs (a gadget that British sailors had exchanged fruit for from the "wanderers" in the Bad Land), and the holographic pictures of vehicles, drinks, food and other commodities, which were projected from another miniature machine of the same size...

　Queen Elizabeth II finally had to admit that the frigate on the Thames did indeed travel a hundred years into the future.

　And it brings back a lot of explosive content, future information that can completely brighten or blind your eyes.

　"The collapse of the United States? The decline of the Soviet Union? Europe regaining dominance over most of the world? Even the United States is using the euro? It's incredible!"

　Prince Philip examined a Euro note in his hand, issued in 2071, and marveled, "It seems we no longer need to worry about the Soviet threat to Europe. They will eventually return to their historical normalcy and become a refueling station and raw material warehouse for European civilization..."

　——In the world of Cyberpunk 2077. Although the Soviet Union did not disintegrate after the Cold War, it just did not disintegrate: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the upheaval in Eastern Europe still happened in the eighties.

　The end of the 19th century happened, and the Soviet Union's sphere of influence retreated all at once to within its own borders.

　Moreover, in the following days, a bloody and brutal civil war broke out between the Soviet Wehrmacht and the mercenaries of Su Shihua. What was even more unbearable was that the final result of this Soviet civil war was that Su Shihua's private soldiers won and purged the Soviet army.

　After the civil war, the Soviet Union became a puppet of the energy giant Supec, effectively surrendering to capitalism. While the Kremlin's red flag finally fell to the ground, beyond that, little of the Soviet spirit remained.

　The Soviet Union in the cyberpunk world is truly just a red imperialist regime, and its revolutionary and progressive nature has completely disappeared.

　Therefore, according to the timeline of "Cyberpunk 2077", the result of the Cold War is that the United States and the Soviet Union are both defeated, Japan turns around, and Europe returns to its peak... At first glance, such a future timeline seems to be very beautiful and bright for Europeans.

　But the question is, are the British considered European?

　Therefore, for the British islanders on the British Isles, the revival of Europe may not necessarily be good news for them.

　After all, starting from five hundred years ago, Britain has been like a troublemaker, trying desperately to keep Europe divided and limit the strength of European powers: first, it joined forces with the Netherlands to fight Spain, then joined forces with France to fight the Netherlands, followed by joining forces with Germany to fight France, and in the 19th century, it started a big game with Russia, and then the two world wars that stifled Germany's rise... In the end, it lost all its wealth and became a small follower of the United States.

　It is conceivable that in the future unified and rising Europe, Britain will be in an embarrassing and marginalized position.

　Not to mention, the ones who will lead the future Europe and dominate the future earth a hundred years from now will not be the French who have been in a love-hate relationship with the British for many years, but the Germans who launched and lost two world wars. Even the status of the Italians at that time was much higher than that of the French.

　(Cyberpunk 2077's Biotech is an Italian company headquartered in Rome.)

　In addition, Japan also broke free from the control of the United States at that time, became a superpower in the Pacific Rim, and even colonized the west coast of the United States!

　How should I put it? Looking at the map, it looks like a denial and a retaliatory attack on World War II!

　The three defeated Axis powers all held their heads high a hundred years later; while the victorious Allied powers were in a worse state than the previous one.

　The more a country benefits from World War II, the more miserable its situation will generally be in the future world of Cyberpunk 2077.

　As for the British Royal Family of Windsor, their future fate in this timeline is so bleak that even the usually calm Prince Philip is livid, and Queen Elizabeth II completely disregards royal etiquette and almost holds her face and screams like a groundhog:

　"Labor movement? Scottish secession? Martial law? Cartel? My sister, son, and grandson were all killed by traitors? And the granddaughter who inherited the throne by chance is very likely not Andrew's daughter, but a bastard from nowhere?"

　Oh my God! Why did my family suffer so much? This fate is even more terrible than World War II!

　Although she regretted that she could not live to hear the bells of the new century, Queen Elizabeth II also did not want to see her son suffer the same fate as King Louis XVI of France, and she was even more unwilling to sit idly by and watch her true descendants being killed by MI5 agents more than 30 years later.

　Only a granddaughter of unknown ancestry and suspected to be an imposter was left, who sat on the throne wearing a crown and became the so-called Queen Victoria II.

　It was a strange thing. How could Britain still have a military government and a group of Cromwells who dared to chop off the king's head thirty years later?

　Queen Elizabeth doesn't want such a bleak and bloody future! ! ! !

　(In the world view of Cyberpunk 2077, Queen Elizabeth II did not live very long and only lived until the end of the 20th century.

　Shortly after her death, the newly crowned King Charles was overthrown and executed by the "Martial Law" army, along with most of the royal family. MI5 agents raided the country and abroad, killing nearly everyone of royal descent, with the exception of Prince Andrew's daughter, who remained missing.

　After that, the British government was ruled by a military government for more than a decade, until it was overthrown by a coup in 2016 when the monarchy was restored.

　But the new queen, whose lineage is questionable, is nothing more than a puppet of the corporate cartel, and Britain has since entered the cyber age dominated by giant corporations.

　Naturally, Queen Elizabeth II, who considered herself to be at the forefront of history, reacted immediately by taking proactive action, preparing for the future and identifying those traitors and ambitious individuals who would harm the royal family and overthrow the state. Even if they couldn't be executed without guilt, they would at least be placed on a special list and their use restricted.

　But unfortunately, Prime Minister Heath shook his head and said that this was impossible because it was impossible to figure out who did it.

　Although the Californian seaside town the USS Leander arrived at had long been abandoned and devoid of human life, the newspapers, magazines, and books the British sailors found in the ruins were mostly published after 2030, after the Fourth Corporate War had concluded.

　At that time, the British Martial Law Rebellion and the Restoration of the Royal Family had already

　It happened "many years ago".

　Moreover, for Americans, all of this was still a "foreign affair," and the records in newspapers and magazines were even more vague.

　Therefore, the MI5 agents scoured the American magazines and newspapers they brought back, summarizing the information and only then were they able to piece together a glimpse of what Britain was like in that turbulent period at the turn of the century...and the more they summarized and gathered, the more they became conflicted and almost uneasy.

　According to these documents, the British "National Martial Law Agency" was a secret service established in 2000 to suppress the labor movement and the Scottish independence movement. Shortly thereafter, the agency turned its attention to the massacre of the royal family, dissolved Parliament, and imposed military dictatorship on the country for over a decade. As for the military dictator who led the Martial Law Agency, there is no specific record in the existing documents.

　It seems this far-right group lacks a single, commanding leader, but rather a collective leadership of generals and Conservative MPs, with the nominal leader changing frequently. Consequently, there are no detailed accounts in newspapers and magazines, leaving the current Queen and Prime Minister unable to identify the culprit.

　What made MI5 sweat even more was that according to the description of these "future data", during the period of martial law in Britain, the butcher who was responsible for hunting down royal family members around the world and wiping out the loyal British aristocracy family by family was none other than their own MI5 agents!

　In other words, among the people in MI5—except for those old men who were about to retire, any newly recruited young agent who could make it to the year 2000 without retiring would most likely be ordered to carry out the mission of exterminating the royal family and royalist nobles in the future!

　What should I do if I suddenly realize I might be a future traitor? Urgent! Waiting online!

　PS: My immediate boss already knows about this!

　In short, after learning what their department had done thirty years later, the entire MI5 felt that its future was bleak.

　Because the Queen of England is not a toy like the Emperor of Japan. If she really gets angry, she can really turn the British government upside down!

　——Although both are constitutional monarchs of island countries, the actual power status of the British Queen and the Japanese Emperor is worlds apart.

　On the surface, the Japanese royal family still retains many industries and enjoys a high status in the country.

　But in fact, ever since the old Japanese Empire was hit by two atomic bombs and Emperor Showa announced Japan's unconditional surrender on the "Tsuru Sound Broadcasting" on August 15, 1945, the political influence of the Japanese royal family in Japan has been automatically wiped out.