imperfections

Chapter 121

Zhanlu's system is very complicated, even if the part backed up at home does not have most of his functions as the mecha core, it is far beyond Lu Bixing's cognition and common sense of "artificial intelligence" - this is not surprising, Zhanlu is in When Beijing Xingshang followed Lin Jingheng, except for Lu Bixing, no one else could see that he was not human at all.

It is said that Zhanlu is made of deformable materials on his body, and each gram is worth 600 million first interstellar coins. No one can afford this kind of cost except the Central Committee of the Alliance, and how sophisticated technology is required to be worthy of him What about the "skin"?

Lu Bixing had imagined it before, but now, he found that he was still too optimistic.

Zhanlu was like an insoluble problem. Lu Bixing searched all the materials he could get his hands on, but the more he studied, the more hopeless he felt. He felt as if he had stepped into a boundless swamp. It was difficult.For three full months, there was no progress.

This is not the first time that Lu Bixing has experienced failure. He also had a whimsical plan to design a mech suitable for aneurysm.Also after countless attempts, it finally ended in failure.However, that was just one of his thousands of dreams when he was young and frivolous, like a boy in the ancient earth age looking up at the sky, even if it brought pain, the pain was hot and beautiful after all.

But now, if he can't fix Zhanlu, he doesn't know what else he can do.

On the hundredth day when Lu Bixing shut himself up at home, in the morning, the glare of the sun woke him up from the sofa. Wrapping him inside, Lu Bixing sighed, pushed away the soft cloth covering his chin, sat up, and stared at the corner of the sofa to wake up.

Suddenly, his scattered eyes gradually focused, and he found that under his finger, there was a hair that had fallen into the crack of the sofa.

Lu Bixing sat up straight suddenly, and the deformed sofa quickly followed him and tightened its skin.Then, he bent down almost reverently, carefully pinched the strand of hair, pulled it out with one hand, and followed it with the other.

The hair is not long, the cylindrical hair root is very straight, and it is a special brown color. When viewed in the dark, it is close to pure black.

It was left by another owner of the house.

Lu Bixing held the hair and stayed there for three hours. It was not until the home medical cabin in the living room warned him that he came back to his senses like a dream. He clamped the hair with tweezers and put it on the After a while, as if feeling reconciled, I found a printer, printed a bead with resin, and wrapped the hair in it. At first glance, it looked like A crystal-clear hair crystal, put it close to your body.

Then he got up to brush his teeth while flipping through the notes he had written the night before.

After a night, he felt that he was talking nonsense yesterday, so he decisively deleted the notes in his personal terminal, and splashed a handful of cold water on his face.

This is the hundredth time he has deleted his notes.

Lu Bixing inadvertently raised his head and glanced at the mirror, and suddenly felt that the person in the mirror was a little strange—the stubble was all over the place, his clothes were disheveled, there was a fresh water stain on his chest, and he was wrinkled and hadn't been changed for a few days, his cheeks were sunken, His hair, which he hadn't had time to take care of for a long time, was almost hanging down to his shoulders, and the curly hair looked more and more messy, still dripping listlessly.

Lu Bixing is used to paying attention to his image. Seeing his bearish appearance, he instinctively stayed for a while, but he couldn't bring himself to clean up, so he patted the wall a few times out of sight and out of mind, and turned the mirror over past.

Just then, someone knocked on his door.

The electronic housekeeper is dead, and only the original built-in functions of the smart home are left. With a cold mechanical sound, the door popped out word by word: "Visitor: Mint, registered as: your student, whether Reception."

Lu Bixing sighed: "No."

He really didn't want to see her, not because he had any complaints about the little girl, anyone who stayed in a house isolated from the world for a hundred days would become unwilling to see her.

The gate was quiet, but after a while, his personal terminal was not quiet - the reminder of "Guardian Duties" lit up on the personal terminal.

Mint still has [-] months to turn [-]. Although she is no different from an adult in a special period, she is still a minor in law. According to the Union Minor Protection Law, the legal guardian of a minor cannot miss out. Sever contact with the ward without reason.

Lu Bixing propped his hands on the pool, lowered his head, and "sneered" in a ridiculous way: "...The Alliance Minors Protection Law."

He turned on his personal terminal, directly entered the system, and deleted all the alliance-related laws and regulations, and the thing finally became quiet.

But Lu Bixing closed his eyes, remained silent for half a minute, and went to open the door for the girl.

It wasn't just Bo He who was waiting at the door, all four students had arrived before Bo He called out "Teacher Lu", but couldn't make a sound, and stood at the door and started crying.

Lu Bixing's eyes passed among the students and fell on his small garden. He saw that the gardening robot and the dancing robot had been repaired, recharged and oiled, and the shell was cleaned. The grass was gone—no wonder he was woken up by the sun early in the morning—the courtyard was planted with flowers, a large area of ​​lush greenery, which was overly lively and aesthetically gaudy.

"Don't cry." Lu Bixing tried hard three times, but he couldn't force himself to laugh, so he felt a little guilty, so he had to let them in, "Did you tidy up the flower garden? Thank you."

"Teacher," White said, "let's help you, okay? Let's help you fix Zhanlu's system together."

Lu Bixing thought to himself, with your half-knowledge level, you can help repair robots and serve tea, what else can you do?

But before he had time to decline, Douji spoke up with red eyes: "But I don't know anything... Teacher Lu, let me pour you coffee."

Lu Bixing: "..."

These four young boys are the only survivors of Beijing Star. They wandered all the way with him and grew up desperately. At this moment, they huddled around him like four trembling little stray animals. Lu Bixing couldn't laugh or cry, he didn't know what to do. what to say.

He is not like Lin Jingheng, who wakes up every morning for routine training, but he has another kind of self-denial. Even if all thoughts are lost, he is still a teacher and a guardian. He would rather wrong himself than hurt the hearts of the children. Nodding and agreeing: "Okay, I'll leave the coffee to you later."

Unexpectedly, this soft-hearted nod of the head tore a hole in the Qianli River embankment - in the first few days, four students came to him at regular times every day, and Lu Bixing was inconvenient to be sloppy in front of the students, so he forced Keep your spirits up, at least make yourself look like a human being.

These little hooligans are so honest that they are not like them anymore. They come in and out quietly, and they don’t talk much when they come. used things.Students don’t understand advanced technical papers, so they really work diligently to serve tea and water. They don’t understand and don’t ask casually. If they have questions, they go to the small room next door to discuss in a low voice, and then leave in the evening Before that, carefully tell Lu Bixing the results of the day's discussion for reference.

Of course, these four cobblers can’t stand up to half of Zhuge Liang. The things the students put forward are very naive. Not only are they not helpful, but Lu Bixing has to spend half an hour every day to correct their common sense mistakes... It’s invisible Let him say a lot more.

Then gradually, the people in the engineering department began to follow the minors to his house with a shy face.

At the beginning, there were only one or two people, and then they came. In the end, there were more and more people. It wasn’t until one day that Lu Bixing’s house ran out of coffee that he realized that almost all the core R&D personnel of the entire engineering department had come to report.

Lu Bixing stood behind the small bar in the stairwell, held up the empty paper bag of coffee beans inexplicably, slapped away the coffee machines that were circling around him, and looked down at the engineers who gathered in the living room of his home for a meal .

He didn't have so many tables and chairs in his house, so a few older engineers took them up, and the others either sat on the floor, or stood beside him with an electronic pen, holding a meeting around his dead electronic housekeeper.

"Hey," Lu Bixing knocked on the metal stair railing, the downstairs was quiet for a while, and the engineers collectively looked up at him, "I said, everyone, if I remember correctly, I seem to be on a long vacation, not the office address of the engineering department. Have you changed it to my house? There is a shortage of supplies, everyone eats rations, and the young master’s house doesn’t have that much surplus food, and half a year’s coffee reserves have been ruined by you, so let’s leave quickly.”

"It's okay, Mr. Lu, we have applied to the chief, and I will give you a few bags of coffee beans." An old engineer stood up and said, "The chief told me that if Zhanlu's database cannot be repaired, we will have at least a hundred years of technology development. Detour, you can't exclude us."

Lu Bixing scratched his hair. This excuse was purely because he wanted to ask for leave and used it to fool the chief——Zhanlu’s database mostly stored the technology of the alliance. Lu Bixing had actually seen it before. Practical, besides, is the financial resources and productivity of the alliance before the war comparable to that of the eighth galaxy?What the alliance can achieve does not mean that the current eight-galaxy system can also achieve it. Technology cannot achieve it, but it is just a small interesting paper.In terms of value, it is actually not as useful as the farm model left by Hope—otherwise Lin Jingheng would have shared it long ago.

Lu Bixing prevaricated and said: "Whether cutting-edge technology can be applied or not depends on whether there is productivity as the basis. The top priority of the eighth galaxy now is to restore production and order. The chief probably misunderstood, Zhanlu...Zhanlu should belong to a Long-term strategy, what should you do, don't waste time with me..."

"Mr. Lu," another young engineer interrupted him, skipping the official language, and said, "You don't need to explain. In fact, we know that it's all an excuse for you to ask for leave. You think repairing the Zhanlu database is your private matter. I don’t want to let everyone do my private affairs—but no matter what others do, I came out of Hongxiaxing in the backcountry, from a man-made ecosystem maintenance worker to an engineer in the engineering department, because I am willing to follow you, and you also chose me."

"I don't have time for work, we can come back after get off work."

"Mr. Lu, you told us that the engineering department is a team."

"Mr. Lu, isn't the purpose of our department 'always challenge the more difficult'?"

"It's more difficult here, here we come."

Lu Bixing held the empty paper bag of coffee beans, opened his mouth and closed it again, looking at these people, his tongue seemed to froze and he couldn't utter a word.

"We're all here."

Even though the eighth galaxy is poor and remote, there are still many civilian engineers who are as wild as Lu Bixing. They have accumulated dust on those disgraced planets for many years, and they were dug out hastily, and they were dragged into the troubled times, ignorant.

At this point, it finally gradually revealed its due edge.

The one you haven't given up on won't give up on you either.

"The home of General Lin and Engineer 001" is not big, and the home design is a space for three or four people. It is no problem to entertain relatives and friends occasionally for dinner, but it is very stretched to accommodate the entire engineering department.

The basement is fully occupied by their group. The non-mainstream engineers of the eighth galaxy lie on the physical training machine in the basement in various postures like big monkeys every day—three people sit on the treadmill, and the weightless balance training machine is used. It turned into a small conference room, with four or five people crowded inside and still unwilling to be honest, arguing and arguing in a hurry, without the demeanor of a cultured person at all, full of obscenities full of eight-galaxy characteristics flying everywhere, an engineer After being squeezed out, he activated the training device in a fit of anger, and those colleagues who were insulting him suddenly seemed to have entered a front-loading washing machine, suffered a collective concussion, and entered the medical cabin.

After hearing the news, Lu Bixing really didn't know what to say, so he had to put up a "family rule" at the door, the first one was bold and bold "Take your mouth, don't touch it", and quickly moved all the "dangerous items" to the attic temporarily.

The attic was originally a sun room. In order to protect some special instruments, Lu Bixing covered the glass roof and windows. The little robots finished their work faithfully and stood against the corner of the wall.

Lu Bixing turned around and looked around the dimly lit surroundings—these things belonged to Lin, standing silently in the shadows, as if the person was gazing at him gently and quietly.

At that moment, Lu Bixing's heart moved, and the memory seal that was strictly guarded was loosened. He suddenly couldn't control himself to think about Lin Jingheng, and those people he hadn't seen for a long time who were deliberately ignored by him. , can't miss, he still has so many things to do, the whole engineering department is downstairs under him, he can't get out of control now.

Like a drug addict, he walked around the attic a few times anxiously, trying in vain to push back the open gate in his heart, lit a cigarette for himself tremblingly, and devoured it, but still It didn't help, so he twisted the burning cigarette butt on his arm, and the smell of burnt flesh came out immediately.

He gasped like a drowning man, trying to regain his control through the pain.

After calming down a bit, he locked the attic as if fleeing, hurriedly got into a small room, treated the wound roughly, pulled down his sleeves, and plunged into the massive amount of data like a normal person.

The core scientific research force of the eighth galaxy rose up under such pressure.

In a blink of an eye, a Dovoto year passed by, and it was a year of suffering.From the commander-in-chief to the general public, everyone was saving money to the extreme. Conflicts broke out more than a dozen times in the galaxy. Director-General Edward acquiesced in Lu Bixing's practice of "resuming the death penalty" when acting as an agent, and publicly executed a group of smugglers who made fake nutritional needles.

Uncharacteristically, the chief executive stood up, amended the constitution, and forcefully implemented a series of decrees, as if he was anxious to clear up something for future generations.

When Venus revolved around the eighth sun and returned to the position of the day when the transition point was detonated fourteen months ago, Chief Edward officially announced that this day would be designated as Independence Day. From then on, the eighth galaxy abolished the Nova In the new calendar, Independence Day is used as the first day of the year, and the orbit of Venus is used as the annual calendar standard, and the length of a year is changed to 436 days.

Lu Bixing and his unconventional team of engineers have finally made staged progress——

After 436 days, Zhanlu, who was backed up at Lu Bixing's home, successfully restarted for the first time.

The familiar voice sounded in the living room and the basement: "Hello, I am the artificial intelligence Zhanlu, I am sorry, due to a system failure, I cannot serve you now, and I am about to enter the self-repair program, which is expected to take about [-] hours, please Wait patiently, and ensure the energy supply—”

The messy engineers in the basement howled collectively, some whistled loudly, some slapped the wall and laughed, some just lay down on the ground without closing their eyes for three days and three nights. In the bag, the small specimen bead with condensed hair seemed to be on fire, burning his skin scorchingly, and his cold blood boiled.

Where is Lin now?

Before the eight-galaxy transition point exploded, did you leave him a message... even if it was just a useless exhortation?

Lu Bixing felt that just thinking about it like this would drain his soul, and his whole body wanted to collapse to the center of Venus's earth along the gravitational force.

The restarted Zhanlu was quietly running his own program, and Lu Bixing clocked his [-]-hour countdown at the gate, so that engineers could take a look at the progress when they passed by his house every day to go to work.

He slept in the dark for three days and three nights, every bone was crisp. After getting up, he shaved his beard carefully, let the household robot cut the hair that hangs down to the shoulder blades, put on a flat shirt and coat, and went The command center approached the chief and Turan to sell fake reports.

Before leaving, he called Turan: "General Turan, where is my father?"

Turan looked into his eyes and saw that he had used more than 400 days to wear away the nightmares and blood scabs in his eyes bit by bit, revealing a clear luster, as if it was the same as before, but also completely different.She personally led Lu Bixing to the cemetery next to the base: "We found the wreckage of his mecha."

Lu Bixing looked down at the statue on the tombstone, and saw the engraved epitaph next to it: "It's okay, kid, anyway, I picked you up from the trash can."

Turan walked away quickly as if fleeing, no matter whether he was crying bitterly or being strong, she dared not peek at him.

A long nightmare seems to wake up like this...

like.

Lu Bixing returned to the headquarters, and the chief's burden was relieved a lot. Zhanlu's countdown to self-repair continued to decrease, and everything seemed to be developing in a good direction.

It took 860 seven hours, a little longer than expected, and Zhanlu completed self-repair.

Everyone in the engineering department... Turan, even the chief who just came out of the medical cabin, came to the home of "General Lin and Engineer 001", waiting for a miracle to happen.

"Hello, Principal Lu," Zhanlu's voice sounded in the crowded house, "Although there is no entity, I feel very relieved to see you again. You have worn down a lot."

Lu Bixing's eyes suddenly turned red and he was speechless.

Turan asked the question everyone wanted to know: "Zhanlu, how is General Lin? Is your subject following him?"

Zhan Lu was silent for three seconds: "Captain, on our way back to the underground channel, we were accidentally ambushed by interstellar pirates. They detonated the jump point, the entire Seventh and Eighth Allied Forces were wiped out, and the general's command ship was blown up..."

Turan's legs softened.

"My main body has been incinerated in the explosion."

They climbed over the mountains, over hell, climbed out step by step, towards the other side of the mountain, the end of the road...

But found nothing at the end.

Hope once said: "Men originate in faith."

Lu Bixing was shaking his wits with him at the time, and answered casually: "People are also ruined by their beliefs."

A prophecy.