(Well, if I don’t need anything else, I just need a few monthly passes—I feel that this month’s monthly pass is not enough...)
As the most special and important planet in the shadow space, the home planet Gaia is rarely open to the outside world. For ordinary people in the shadow city, the upside-down land hanging above their heads is just a beautiful background, which is beyond reach. , It is said that there are many urban legends related to Gaia in Shadow City, such as the continent on the surface of Gaia is made of diamonds, such as a goddess living on Gaia, such as the current Shadow City is actually cut from Gaia What came down—these wild thoughts without knowing the truth always give people a refreshing feeling. Although few of them are reliable, I think this is more or less a kind of culture in Shadow City: people of all races are bored. Those unaware imperial facilities make up stories, and then take it back to their own world and publish it as a collection of fairy tales and ghost novels to cheat money.
The alternation of day and night on the surface of the mother star is carried out according to the universal time of the empire. When Sandora and I left Avalon, the sky just started to darken, so when we arrived on the mother star, it happened to be shrouded in sunset, because It is not affected by the space environment itself, and at the same time, there is a filtering mechanism of the planet shield, so the sky on the parent star is the same as the shadow city, which is artificially manufactured by simulation devices. Today, the administrator of this planet has set up a A beautiful theme package, the glow of the sky is perfect like a picture scroll, the silver-gray alloy land under our feet spreads to the horizon, and the end of the line of sight in the other direction is the lush rolling mountains. The combination of these scenes is unexpectedly harmonious, It even gives people a shock of desolation and vastness out of thin air.
Sandora always laughs at herself that the apostles of Xiling know nothing about art, but in my opinion, many of the things they created unintentionally are enough for shallow-sighted humans to marvel at them as magnificent miracles.
The current location of myself and Sandora is near the equator of the mother star. There is a small artificial continent with a roughly rectangular shape. The facility that Sister Gaia mentioned is underground on this continent. The square we are standing now looks like It is an extension of a large facility group. The alloy ground under our feet shows that they are the bases of standard imperial bases, and a few kilometers behind us, we can see huge silver-gray buildings pointing towards the sky like neat swords.
"That's one of my redundant processing arrays, which was just set up a few days ago," just as his sight fell on the neatly arranged buildings like sharp swords in the distance, a voice with ethereal inspiration suddenly came from beside him. I turned my head and saw a light blue translucent figure standing beside her. The slightly fluctuating halo behind her indicated that this image was just projected. Make improvements on the mother star and enhance its own functions. Now the research center is carrying out many large-scale projects. Bubble said that her type of mainframe is not good at handling huge repetitive tasks. It happens that my core architecture is specially designed for this kind of Designed for big data missions, so I plan to help her and her host network share some of the data pressure. More similar arrays are being built on the home planet—well, I should have reported this to you."
I thought about it, and the report I saw two days ago seemed to mention that Gaia was adding some modules to itself on the mother star, so I suddenly said: "Oh... that's what you said, I remembered, I want to Got up, just didn't expect those things to look like this after they were built-you know, my impression of mainframe facilities has always been that kind of pyramid, I thought you built yourself a group of new broods."
Sister Gaia smiled, and the light on her body flickered slightly: "I can no longer use the standard brood, Your Majesty. Now I rely on these self-designed auxiliary equipment to work, which is probably a blessing in disguise. I lost the shackles of the standard body." , I think my scalability is many times stronger than that of ordinary hosts. I can spread my own plug-ins on the entire planet, use the planet's psionic well to recharge myself, and don't have to worry about overloading. Well, the only disadvantage There is no way to use a universal socket, and there must be an adapter device to communicate with other hosts, but fortunately, there are only two types of hosts in the empire: I and Bubble, and the adapter device is also very simple."
I look at Gaia and feel that this topic is delicate. From my own point of view, the beautiful phantom sister in front of me is really not in a good state. She will lose her body forever, and she is not even allowed to use puppet prosthetics. She can only be fixed on the planet in the state of a program and soul. It is definitely not something to be happy about, but Gaia in front of her doesn't seem to care about this situation at all. She has lived in this state for countless tens of thousands of years, and may continue to do so, but she is Smiling, expressing satisfaction that she can still continue to work—maybe she really has no regrets, after all, I have communicated with her on this topic more than once, knowing that she will not force a smile on this matter Comfort anyone: this is not the style of the Apostles of Xiling. It can only be said that the way of thinking between different life forms is really different. As a person... well, as a void creature, by the way, it is really difficult to understand the remaining human worldview. thinking process.
In the end, I decided not to worry about the world view for the time being, and mentioned the crystal to Gaia: "Sandora and I came to see that big rock—I heard that you have already placed it?"
Gaia showed a happy smile: "Yes, Your Majesty, thank you for your efforts, the Heart of the World has returned to its original location. I will guide you, the resettlement facility is right below..."
After the voice fell, Gaia's projected body turned into a series of streamers and quickly sank below the alloy earth. Sandora and I looked at each other: "... Did she forget something?"
After a while, Gaia really came up again, and smiled awkwardly at Sandora and me while opening the portal: "I'm sorry, Your Majesty, I haven't led anyone into this place for tens of thousands of years... I forgot gone."
I chuckled: "It's okay, I'm actually used to it. When I was at home, Anwena took me to see her newly researched dishes. Basically, every time I bumped into the kitchen wall..."
Gaia's face was stunned, and a line of words appeared on his head: "NowLoading..."
I think this is another manifestation of apartheid!
The security facilities for storing crystals are deep underground, and should have entered part of the mantle. The parent star Gaia is a customized planet. Its mantle itself exists as a storage point for various facilities with relatively high security requirements. In fact, there are more factories and data processing cores on this layer than the surface of the parent star. something like that. We entered the underground world of our mother star through the portal on the surface, and what we faced was an unprecedentedly vast mantle space. A few kilometers above the head is a layer of alloy dome with a slight inner curvature. On the dome, sparsely distributed lights and slowly changing psionic energy pipe network can be seen, which should be the physical part of the energy network that supplies energy to surface facilities. And under the dome, there is a large hole in the mantle that can't be seen at all. The height of this hole is probably more than ten kilometers. fainted. I can't see any "ground" here that can isolate people from the underground magma below, but I am indeed stepping on something down-to-earth, which should be a transparent mask. I find this design to be rather ghastly, especially for those with acrophobia, claustrophobia, fall phobia, flame phobia and agoraphobia, this place magically puts everything that makes people feel scared The landforms and landscapes are all integrated into one piece—it can only be said that Gaia really does not have human psychology. When she transformed this planet, she came based on practical and convenient standards.
On the invisible "earth" at the foot, there are a series of huge buildings lined up. Gaia introduced the situation here: "This is the No. 1 large cavity, and there are a total of 20 such buildings in the mantle. Hole No. 1 is actually the smallest one. The main part of the data center in the sky area is stored here—of course, this data center is going to be remodeled now, because the 15th sky area has been disintegrated, and the structure of the data center is not It meets the needs of the current empire-ruled area, so I plan to reorganize it as a backup database for the research center in the future. As for the current data center in the new empire-ruled area, it is still maintained by Paobao. Well, this project It will be finished soon, I've started construction, look over there is..."
Gaia led us up into the air, quickly passed by huge data centers that looked like erected dominoes, and then suddenly slowed down, pointing to a rectangular building not far away. I saw that the outer shell of the building had been disassembled, revealing its complex internal crystallized structure. The dim psionic energy was slowly flowing between those dazzling crystal grids. It seemed that the facility was still in operation. But has entered the minimum standby state. And on this "construction site", a group of self-discipline machines are busy.
Self-discipline machines are the largest number of "residents" on the parent planet Gaia. Gaia regards them as their own children. I noticed that Gaia had a faint smile on his face when he looked at the busy robots. , and then she pointed to one of the largest self-discipline machines that seemed to be the commander of the team and said, "Your Majesty, do you still remember it?"
"This is..." I was a little dazed for a while, but after seeing the modified plug-in that hadn't been completely removed from the self-discipline machine, I immediately reacted, "Ah, it was brought out from the ruins of the old empire's deep diving port! Has it worked again?"
"It requested it on its own initiative," Gaia smiled. "The thinking of autonomous machines is very simple, but they also have basic thinking. Even if they have no personality, they still like to work. This kid applied for a restart on the third day after he came here, and now it It's one of the best."
I watched the little robot—well, maybe it should be called the big robot—flying excitedly around the construction site below to help dismantle the data center, and felt relieved that it, too, had returned to its favorite way of life.
"By the way, you are really busy every day." I glanced at Gaia and couldn't help but say.
To be honest, Gaia usually doesn’t have a high sense of presence by her side. She can’t leave her home planet, and naturally she can’t attend any meetings. The only thing that can appear in the headquarters’ office is her report. Misconceptions for the unintelligible: Gaia is not active in the ruling hierarchy of the Empire. But this is a completely wrong impression. On the contrary, Gaia is as busy as a workaholic like Sivis and Tavel every day. She took care of the home planet by herself, and at the same time completed the project of reorganizing the ancient home star and various central facilities of the new empire. Bubbles and mass-produced Bubbles share a large amount of complicated data tasks. In many fields that are difficult for outsiders to notice, Gaia takes care of everything conscientiously. Only when you go to the home planet and see the busy data centers and factories, and see various reconstruction sites, will you really realize it. this point.
But in the face of my sigh, Gaia just said indifferently: "My idle system resources have not been fully utilized, and I should find a way to speed up the reconstruction of those ancient facilities on the parent star. To achieve synchronization with the Shadow City Command, it has many logical hosts that are still in good condition and cannot continue to be idle. Well, my work efficiency needs to be further improved... "
A standard Xiling apostle.
We came to the place where the crystals are stored.
This place is located in the center of the underground cavity. The crystal storage facility is a building that looks similar to the surrounding data centers, but is nearly twice as large in size and has a more complicated surface structure. It can be guessed that this building and the surrounding facilities should belong to the same system. Gaia quickly confirmed this conjecture: the large rectangular building in front of me was the host computer of the data center in the 15-day area of the year, and it managed 122 servers neatly distributed throughout the hollow, receiving the 15-day data center of the year. The information uploaded from all channels in the sky area, and after preliminary processing, it is sent to Gaia, each dedicated host array, all levels of command and administrative departments, and the emperor himself of the sky area according to different priorities after preliminary processing. Its functional positioning is similar to the present Shadow City's mass-produced bubble mainframe array, of course, is a little more powerful than the latter, after all, the 15-day area back then... But it is larger than the entire new empire today (excluding the macro world part).
"Because I lost the ability to manufacture mass-produced mainframes, I started to manufacture this huge server," Gaia told us about the origin of these square facilities. At the same time, this should be the reason why the number of other facilities on the mother planet far exceeds the standard. The origin of various data processing facilities, "They are a little troublesome to set up, not as easy to use as mass-produced hosts, and do not have the construction function, but because I can be infinitely expanded, connecting them with these servers can greatly improve them. efficiency, so this system has been working very well—the performance in certain batches of repeated data processing is even better than that of the general-purpose Xiling host. As for the construction project of the fifteen-day zone that year, it was handed over to those who endured Specially designed self-discipline machines. Thinking about it now, the work back then was actually more arduous than it is now... "
Under the introduction of Gaia, we came to the core of this data center. What we saw in front of us was a hall that looked like a computer room. The area was about the size of two basketball courts. , in the center of the rectangular hall with a large number of cabinet-like equipment distributed on both sides, is the huge crystal that has just returned to its place. It is floating on a gravity-free platform that protrudes from the ground and is sunken in the middle. With unpredictable light.
"This crystal was originally part of a data center."
Gaia should have activated some equipment in the hall. I heard a low humming sound coming from behind the wall, and then the slow rotation of the crystal gradually stopped, and some bright blue beams like scanning lines came from zero gravity. Projected onto the crystal under the platform, after a while, a large number of holographic projections appeared in the midair in front of the weightless platform: complex diagrams, incomprehensible machinery, and large sections of text. This appears to be a newly opened database.
"Isn't this the heart of the world?" I asked a very idiotic question while my head was cramping. Sure enough, before I could take it back, Sandora gave me a blank stare: "So you really put us I forgot what I told you—the heart of the world is an invisible conceptual thing. It is an information entanglement point, but it will be attached to a certain entity. This crystal is the carrier of the heart of the world, but Why can't it have its own function?"
"Didn't I realize it for a while?" I smiled mischievously. In order to relieve the embarrassment, I turned my attention to Gaia again. "Is this something like a database?"
The main functions of the data center are two, one is to temporarily store information from all over the sky area, and the other is to process them. The first impression I got from the crystal in front of me was the former: there are indeed many databases in Xiling Technology It looks like a piece of crystal.
Of course, the internal structure of these databases is not as simple as the appearance
"There are some core database functions, as well as secondary cache and basic source instruction calling functions," Gaia nodded, "It is one of the core components of the data center, and its functions are not limited to temporarily storing data. You can see Make it a 'hard disk' with the right to screen information—you should understand it better."
"Oh..." I agreed casually, and slowly approached the crystal that was in the state of direct reading, still remembering Sandora's guess at that time:
This crystal seems to be conscious, and it has chosen a route out of the old empire by itself.
I put my hand on the crystal, it was cold and trembling slightly.
If you are really conscious, now that you are home, can you communicate with us? RS