After several hours of hyperspace voyage, the Juguiyantai finally left the hyperspace state in a brand new star area. Accompanied by a ray of light that suddenly illuminated the space, the warped space opened, and the silver-white inspector ship slowly emerged from the space gate.
"Arrived at the outpost lair of LB-35, automatic navigation terminated."
Nolan's voice awakened Hao Ren from the star map. He raised his head and saw that the simulated projections around the bridge were gradually opening up, and the external monitors projected the panoramic view of the spaceship outside to the surroundings of the control platform.
He found that the spacecraft had reached an unfamiliar space surrounded by dust clouds. The space background here has a slightly lavender tinge, perhaps some kind of thin, ungalactic primordial gas clouding the place, and a series of sharply defined bright gray bars can be seen in the distance Belt, that's where new stars are brewed. And in front of the Juguiyantai's sailing direction, he saw the foothold built by the drone group here.
There is a huge and weird metal fortress floating in the space. It looks like a persimmon with several protrusions. It is a nearly circular structure with a radius of several kilometers, a central depression and surrounding bulges. This huge fortress is gray-white and dark-black, with a lot of metal and rock mixed together, making it look like some kind of weird civilization relic. A large number of flickering lights can be seen on the edge of the fortress. There are many pipe-like things protruding from the place where the lights are most dense. Some busy drones come and go in and out of those pipe openings, like busy worker bees.
And in the sunken place in the center of this huge fortress, you can see several huge antenna-like structures, which are placed in a protective net of self-defense artillery, and there are combat drones patrolling and guarding around, although this All firepower is "civilian grade", but they still appear majestic.
This is the nest built by the drone swarm. It does not conform to the aesthetics of human beings. It looks like a huge ant nest piled up with metal and stones. The machines just built this thing according to the principle of convenience and ease of use. But they don't know how to decorate their homes. This fortress is considered a relatively large one among the nests of the drone group. Originally, it took a long time for a group of outpost drones to build a base of this size. But the fleet of the LB-35 sequence was lucky to find an asteroid with a suitable size and hardness, so they hollowed out the celestial body and built their own multiplication factory and various facilities inside.
The Giant Turtle Rock Terrace slowly flew towards a large platform on the edge of the weird fortress, while Nolan's voice continued to broadcast on the bridge: "Automatically navigate to the drone's nest, and the welcome and guidance signals have been recognized. Enter The port entry process, the main thruster is stopped, and the auxiliary thruster is running—do you mean I have to report these things to you in such a stupid tone every time?"
"Don't interrupt other things when reporting the status of the spaceship." Hao Ren glanced at the small Nolan projection floating on the navigation map, "Shall we follow the instructions?"
Nolan pursed her lips and waved her hands, using her first-person perspective to watch the Giant Turtle Rock slowly approaching the strange fortress that looked like an ant's nest. A large number of drones—including the original LB-35 fleet and those who just arrived from nearby A few nodes came running to support the drones—flying around her like a swarm of guards near the lair. Nolan's tone couldn't help being a little weird: "I think this place is scary, especially the nest in front, like a bug's nest."
Lily also had a slight comment on this: "Why didn't I know that the place where these drones gather is so gloomy?"
In fact, most of Hao Ren's attention was attracted by the weird drone nest: this was the first time he saw the nest.
Although he was the one who initially released the mother planes of these drones and gave them expansion and reconnaissance instructions, he had only ever met face-to-face with the wandering fleet formations in the universe, or simply communicated with the fleet consciousness directly on the communicator some. He has never seen what these drone breeding factories look like in person like today.
The fleet expanded until today, and he saw the first completed lair node with his own eyes. To be honest, the appearance of this lair is indeed a bit different from what he expected.
He thought it was more like a coffin. After all, the technology-side items issued by the Xiling God Department are basically coffin-shaped.
Under the traction of the guidance signal, the Giant Turtle Rock Terrace slowly stopped on the platform, and a set of mechanical devices floated up from under the platform to hold the spacecraft firmly. Then Hao Ren and his party left the ship. Step into the depths of the lair through a conduit.
In order to welcome the "Fleet Commander", the lair has adjusted itself after receiving the visit order from the superior. It has built a temporary inner atmosphere and constant temperature system, so that Hao Ren and the others can feel more comfortable when walking inside. There are two chubby small drones coming out from the core of the lair to greet their masters. They are two "rogue probes". The places where internal inspections and mechanical maintenance are carried out, just like the autonomous machines in the Giant Turtle Rock Terrace.
Hao Ren was walking in the tunnel corridor under the leadership of the rogue Tanji. Originally, he inspected the lair just casually. But he didn't expect to see something so interesting here. The interior of the drone lair is as eerie as its exterior, devoid of any human aesthetic. The machines only built wide tubular passages and reinforced brackets as needed, so metal and primitive asteroid rocks were entangled without modification, making the inside of the fortress look like the digestive system of some huge steel monster .
The lights are bright inside, and the busy fleet shuttles endlessly through the various holes and ducts, creating a busy scene.
Lily looked at such a scene but muttered: "It feels like the villain's base."
Before Hao Ren could say anything, a stiff voice suddenly came from all around: "It just happens to be similar, ma'am."
Lily let out a "wow", and she saw a huge, shapeless face floating in the air in front of her. This face was projected with light blue light, surrounded by countless streams of light. It turned out that everyone had unknowingly arrived at a large lair chamber, where several main pipes converged to form a huge oval space, and many mechanical devices were operating in a low voice in this chamber. They all have the characteristics of Xiling, but because they are placed in such a place that looks like a worm's nest, everything looks a little weird.
"Hey, the fleet," Hao Ren greeted this face. Although he also felt that the atmosphere in the lair was weird, he had checked all the relevant information in the inspector's manual before releasing the drone, and later followed Many colleagues have consulted about the fleet, so he looks very calm, because he knows that this thing is like this, "Speaking of which, this is the first time I have seen your 'nest'."
"It's an honor for the crew," the huge face trembled, showing an ever-changing smile, but the voice was still rigid, "I didn't expect that the commander would suddenly want to enter the nest himself, so I hurriedly built the ecological environment, I hope The environment is comfortable."
"Uh, it's pretty good," Hao Ren scratched his hair, "I just wanted to take a look at it, but I didn't expect to cause you such trouble."
"The crew doesn't think it's a 'trouble,'" said the big blue face stiffly. "It's within my capabilities, so it's a regular load."
"Okay, let's not talk about this." Hao Ren knew that the thinking of the fleet was relatively rigid, so he directly brought up the topic, "Is there any update on the traces of the lenses that were tracked before?"
"Less than twelve hours have passed since the initial discovery of those traces, and no probe has sent back any more information. The search area is being expanded, and it is expected that further discoveries will take 24 hours at the earliest."
"Well, as I thought, it really isn't that easy," Hao Ren rubbed his chin and muttered, but he didn't get impatient because after seeing the drone's lair, he suddenly discovered that there are also many things that can be used here. Killing the time by myself, it seems that I won’t be bored while waiting for the news of the "opening outpost", "Then just wait, I finally have the opportunity to understand the work of the drone group. By the way, you just mentioned' Just happens to be similar'? You know what Lily said?"
A large number of holographic projections immediately appeared around the chamber, and on those projections were all kinds of video clips—from humans or other alien races, movies, TV dramas, animations, games, and simple video clips, depicting various A story of a drone swarm mutiny or an intelligent robot running amok. Some of them are clearly fantasy, but others are disturbing: they look a bit like real-life documentaries.
Everyone looked at these short films that were suddenly displayed, and they all didn't know what to say, but except for Lily who was nervous, the others seemed very calm: because these guys don't watch science fiction movies at all, and Izaks even I don’t know what is AI runaway...
The corners of Hao Ren's mouth twitched: "So you can still collect these... By the way, don't you think these things are weird?"
"I can connect to the main data network of the Empire. It is my personal hobby to collect these cultural works. They reflect the interesting part of the thinking process of the basic native races, and some of them reflect the 'civilization form'," the group consciousness replied with a straight face. "The rebellion of the drone swarm and the continuous development of AI leading to out-of-control plots are very interesting and worth discussing. It looks like a serious documentary literature, but it also has an overhead romantic part. It is a hot topic on our forum."
Hao Ren was stunned for a while, and the last sentence of the group consciousness made him stunned: "Your... forum? What kind of forum is yours?"
He suddenly discovered that even though he had read a lot of manuals and asked his colleagues a lot of homework, he still knew very little about the drone empire he had created.
This increasingly powerful AI has become more and more like a living person. (to be continued~^~)