And so it was that the military's power armor pulled Ning Yongxue back from the brink of death, while Spindrift Humanitarian Rescue rescued him from the rubble of the slums and transferred him to a massive private medical spacecraft.
The ship was a kilometer long and hundreds of meters wide, shrouded in fog so thick that even the head and tail were hard to make out, and its size was mind-blowing. To Ning Yongxue, the most frightening thing was not the sheer size of the ship, but the fact that this magnificent vessel belonged to a private company, perhaps even a family business that had been passed down for hundreds of years.
It was truly a marvelous thing, and it was an even more incredible feeling to imagine such a behemoth being passed down from generation to generation by the same family.
Putting aside the deeper meaning behind it, from an aesthetic point of view alone, this airship truly fulfilled Ning Yongxue's imagination of the future back then. Unfortunately, the weather was overcast, and before he had a chance to take a closer look, he was carried into an ambulance and sent into the corridors of the airship.
It seemed to have rained heavily last night, and a thick fog filled the surroundings; the air was humid and stuffy, and people's breath was tinged with water vapor. Stretching along the metal corridors were rows of stretchers and refugees, among them cripples, the blind, the variously handicapped and demented - slum dwellers who had survived the attack. Most of these people were pale, with red eyelids and mute expressions.
Not far away, Ning Yongxue once again saw the flickering green light. Clearly, this was the start of another round of scanning. He wondered in boredom if there would be a new round of shooting.
The wounded on stretchers moved forward slowly, head to tail, with no end to the line in sight, filled with dying wounded. In addition to the striking military power armor and private company medics, there were large numbers of staff weaving in and out, their uniforms emblazoned with the Spindle Corporation logo on the back. Most were operating terminal devices in their hands, which looked like translucent screens extending outward, insubstantial and of varying sizes, but with a basic graphic logic similar to that of the light screen Ning Yongxue had initially seen.
This further mocked his unfounded speculation about the future of the rice cooker. As an "Ancient One", these terminals were indeed marvelous in his eyes, in line with his fantasies of technological advancement back then. However, compared to his unrealistic expectations of a tube in the back of his head, and the dashed hopes he had later, these devices were a disappointment to him.
If the official control of technology is so strict, then perhaps the implanted chip that displays information on the inside of the eyeball is also an illegal modification? Unregistered and forbidden?
If one wanted to use such technology legally, what information exactly needed to be registered? What qualifications and documentation would be required?
And most importantly, how many years of tedious review and approval would it all take? How many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people would have to compete for the same position of being qualified to receive a legal modification?
Do we have to wait until we die of old age to get what we want?
Technological progress certainly amazes Ning Yongxue, but compared to his own situation as a newly minted bottom-feeder, it is difficult to say whether many things are regression or progress. History was not necessarily a spiral upwards, but could also be a spiral downwards, and the only thing that continued to rise was perhaps only the technology itself.
He doesn't even have a citizen ID.
Out of hunger, exhaustion, mental sleepiness and physical injuries, or perhaps because of the marvelous feeling of the current encounter, Ning Yongxue passed out halfway through the journey.
For a long time, he lost his sense of time and space, going to sleep and waking up again, waking up and going to sleep again, his mind in a state of chaos, not knowing how long had passed.
Was it just a few minutes? Or days? He couldn't tell. He slept by the window, and could vaguely see the sun rising and setting outside the window, and the stars revolving around him.
Most of the time, Ning Yongxue stared at the starry sky outside the window, using his hazy consciousness to develop unrealistic fantasies about the cosmic century.
Sometimes he also stared at the gray ceiling, realizing that he couldn't move a muscle, just like his situation in the future world. He could always see the gray dome of the sky spinning endlessly, as if one night followed another, but day never seemed to come.
It was during this senseless staring that he noticed a figure stationed under the night sky.
I don't know when, but the shadow had been standing beside him. It was illusory, like a phantom in the fog, and no matter how much one gazed at it, one could not really see it.
It tried to speak to him, but somehow it seemed to have hundreds of voices in its throat, and hundreds of minds, and the sounds it made were hundreds of simultaneous calls.
"--Who are you?"
And so it was that the military's power armor pulled Ning Yongxue back from the brink of death, while Spindrift Humanitarian Rescue rescued him from the rubble of the slums and transferred him to a massive private medical spacecraft.
The ship was a kilometer long and hundreds of meters wide, shrouded in fog so thick that even the head and tail were hard to make out, and its size was mind-blowing. To Ning Yongxue, the most frightening thing was not the sheer size of the ship, but the fact that this magnificent vessel belonged to a private company, perhaps even a family business that had been passed down for hundreds of years.
It was truly a marvelous thing, and it was an even more incredible feeling to imagine such a behemoth being passed down from generation to generation by the same family.
Putting aside the deeper meaning behind it, from an aesthetic point of view alone, this airship truly fulfilled Ning Yongxue's imagination of the future back then. Unfortunately, the weather was overcast, and before he had a chance to take a closer look, he was carried into an ambulance and sent into the corridors of the airship.
It seemed to have rained heavily last night, and a thick fog filled the surroundings; the air was humid and stuffy, and people's breaths were tinged with water vapor. Stretching along the metal corridors were rows of stretchers and refugees, among them cripples, the blind, the variously handicapped and demented - slum dwellers who had survived the attack. Most of these people were pale, with red eyelids and mute expressions.
Not far away, Ning Yongxue once again saw the flickering green light. Clearly, this was the start of another round of scanning. He wondered in boredom if there would be a new round of shooting.
The wounded on stretchers moved forward slowly, head to tail, with no end to the line in sight, filled with dying wounded. In addition to the striking military power armor and private company medics, there were large numbers of staff weaving in and out, their uniforms emblazoned with the Spindle Corporation logo on the back. Most were operating terminal devices in their hands, which looked like translucent screens extending outward, insubstantial and of varying sizes, but with a basic graphic logic similar to that of the light screen Ning Yongxue had initially seen.
This further mocked his unfounded speculation about the future of the rice cooker. As an "Ancient One", these terminals were indeed marvelous in his eyes, in line with his fantasies of technological advancement back then. However, compared to his unrealistic expectations of a tube in the back of his head, and the dashed hopes he had later, these devices were a disappointment to him.
If the official control of technology is so strict, then perhaps the implanted chip that displays information on the inside of the eyeball is also an illegal modification? Unregistered and forbidden?
If one wanted to use such technology legally, what information exactly needed to be registered? What qualifications and documentation would be required?
And most importantly, how many years of tedious review and approval would it all take? How many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people would have to compete for the same position of being qualified to receive a legal modification?
Do we have to wait until we die of old age to get what we want?
Technological progress certainly amazes Ning Yongxue, but compared to his own situation as a newly minted bottom-feeder, it is difficult to say whether many things are regression or progress. History was not necessarily a spiral upwards, but could also be a spiral downwards, and the only thing that continued to rise was perhaps only the technology itself.
He doesn't even have a citizen ID.
Out of hunger, exhaustion, mental sleepiness and physical injuries, or perhaps because of the marvelous feeling of the current encounter, Ning Yongxue passed out halfway through the journey.
For a long time, he lost his sense of time and space, going to sleep and waking up again, waking up and going to sleep again, his mind in a state of chaos, not knowing how long had passed.
Was it just a few minutes? Or days? He couldn't tell. He slept by the window, and could vaguely see the sun rising and setting outside the window, and the stars revolving around him.
Most of the time, Ning Yongxue stared at the starry sky outside the window, using his hazy consciousness to develop unrealistic fantasies about the cosmic century.
Sometimes he also stared at the gray ceiling, realizing that he couldn't move a muscle, just like his situation in the future world. He could always see the gray dome of the sky spinning endlessly, as if one night followed another, but day never seemed to come.
It was during this senseless staring that he noticed a figure stationed under the night sky.
I don't know when, but the shadow had been standing beside him. It was illusory, like a phantom in the fog, and no matter how much one gazed at it, one could not really see it.
It tried to speak to him, but somehow it seemed to have hundreds of voices in its throat, and hundreds of minds, and the sounds it made were hundreds of simultaneous calls.
"--Who are you?" It asked the question.
He saw the figure bend down by his hospital bed, and saw it bend its index finger and gently extend it toward him. Its fingertip missed his forehead like a knife, penetrating deep into his skull unimpeded. It was hard to describe the sensation, as if he were a puddle of liquid, a jar of viscous plasma, and it was trying to find the unknown drowning at the bottom in its own jar of plasma.
"--Where did you come from?" It asked again.
Hundreds of people screamed within it, and at the same time, Ning Yongxue felt an exogenous fear flooding into his brain, coming from many, many individuals, only not from himself. These exogenous fears flowed in all directions, filling a section of the cerebral spine, bifurcating in his cranial vessel and becoming more and more finely tuned. They kept lengthening and stretching in every direction, seeming to fill his entire body until all memories and personality were covered.
He was powerless to stop the whole process, as bizarre pictures gradually filled in and filled his senses.
At first, there was nothing but darkness in all directions, then he saw a pale beam of light flicker up in the distance, and in an instant it turned into thousands of beams that penetrated the vast expanse of space. The immense cosmic space station unfolded before him, and in every sense fulfilled Ning Yongxue's conjectures.
The mechanically constructed dome was so vast and incredibly high that it was far beyond the buildings he remembered from the past. Vertical walls of gray metal rose upwards, disappearing into a darkness that was in turn obscured by the countless containers and giant mechanical arms spread across the walls, floors, and ceilings, cutting into large and small rectangles and parallelograms.
But outside of the artificially ordered structure, something different flowed around. They were deeply disturbing. Those things sloughed up from the bottom like sludge, and upon closer inspection, the outline actually resembled a layered beehive. Every foul orifice in the hive opened outward, spewing screaming bloodstains that had lost their form.
He turned his neck with difficulty and saw swarms of black power armor parade past, stepping out with a booming metallic crash. He saw great swaths of sludge spreading across the deck, and saw countless blood vessels, windpipes, hearts, lungs ... and all manner of writhing human tissue stuffing the space in the sludge, and each piece of moving human tissue had lost its owner. They looked as if they were attached to the sludge, as if each had acquired an independent life.
He also saw countless human faces floating in the sludge, crying, pleading for help, and making strange noises. There were also several ownerless uniforms floating by in the tide of sludge, with the clear words written on the back, "Toller Space Station."
Excluding the marvelous aesthetic experience, what was the essence of this sight? Ning Yongxue couldn't help but think, some sort of out-of-control scene of genetic experiments involving cutting-edge technology? According to the space game terminology from back then, could it be that someone really wanted to genetically ascend?
Before he could think about it more, there suddenly came an abrupt whispered question that was particularly abrupt and even a bit of a buzzkill:
"--Give me your nutrients."
"--This won't do." Ning Yongxue said mentally, and at the same time was startled by himself. Probably because of the instinctive reaction that arose from hunger, in short, he was awakened.
He gasped and coughed as he regained consciousness. "Why am I dreaming about this?" He couldn't help but think, "Why does this place always get weirder than I thought?"
Within moments of waking up, he saw a shadow looming over his head, the ceiling light outlining it clearly, in the exact same pose as the phantom in his dream. Perhaps because of the giddiness of his brain, the sight inexplicably brought with it a few moments of terror. Then he noticed a small, dirty finger against his brow, turning it slowly, imparting some sort of exogenous drowsiness.
Was this hypnosis? Or something more sinister?
Probably because he suddenly opened his eyes, the finger actually trembled in surprise and almost poked him in the eye. "Uh... hello?" Ning Yongxue heard a child's voice, even though he was now a scavenger brat as well, "Did you have a nightmare?"
He knew with his ass that it was a dumb comment. Ning Yongxue managed to regain his composure from his trance and barely managed to support himself. Before his body weakened to the point of muscular degeneration, he grabbed the little thing beside him that was trying to back away and clutched the man's wrist.
He had to stop this guy's pathetic attempts at fleeing from his crime, telling the other man that if begging for forgiveness would get him forgiveness, what was the point of having a police officer? He didn't exert too much force, but the other person seemed much more vulnerable than him, and before he could even open his mouth, he heard the other person cry out in a small voice of pain, but trying to get him to let go was definitely a dream.
Ning Yongxue settled down a bit and focused his eyes to the side, only to see a little girl with a full head of blonde hair. She was smaller than him, more wretched, dirtier, and thinner than him, and she could barely see her eyes or face under the cover of her disheveled hair.
He wanted to voice a rebuke to this person for scamming the nutrients, but he opened his mouth but couldn't spit out words, only a fit of coughing. She struggled hard, and Ning Yongxue didn't let go, just yanked her to her death.
For one thing, this little kid has committed a crime, and for another, the future world he is in is really confusing, not only is it so huge that it is ridiculous, but all kinds of rules and orders are also indifferent, and the value of the individual in it is so small that it is unbelievable. Even if the scene in the dream was comparable to a horror story, it was always a chance to get in touch with the unknown.
If he let her run away, some things would not be easy to do, and the key to the unknown might be on the thin wrist he was holding. Although if he really opened the door to the unknown, he might also merge into that pile of sludge and float around, his whole body organs acquiring independent wills in droves, declaring that he would never again be Ning Yongxue's slave, never again accepting his oppression and exploitation,-but at least the former was more romantically whimsical, when compared to receiving a lifetime of aid money in the slums.
It wasn't usually rationality and the tendency to avoid harm that drove his actions. Anyway, what she had to do with the earlier nightmare, Ning Yongxue couldn't say. However, since she was jumping on his bedside with the intention of tricking him out of his nutrient quota by evil means, she was definitely more special than he was.
Of course, then again, what could be so special about him, an ancient turd who only daydreamed all day long, even if he was hit by a dump truck into some future world?
In between his thoughts, the gate opened, and a man's booming voice also came from the doorway, and Ning Yongxue vaguely felt as though he had heard it before. Then he remembered that the voice had come from some military figure who had shot down an illegal reformer.