Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 269 Under-Ice Signal

On the last day of the three thousand-day countdown, the number turned to zero.

The entire control center was packed with people, even more than on launch day. Some stood in the aisles, others watched the broadcast in the adjacent conference room, and engineers in the back row moved their chairs to the very front, their knees almost touching the control console. No one spoke loudly. The only sounds were the tapping of fingertips on keyboards and the low hum of the instrument panel fans.

The telemetry data on the large screen is not real-time. It takes thirty-three minutes for the signal to travel from the Maverick probe to Hangzhou. At this moment, in Jupiter's orbit, the Maverick probe is performing the most critical maneuver of its three-year journey: braking and ignition. If the ignition timing is off by more than one second, the probe will either be dragged into Jupiter's atmosphere and burn up, or fly out of the Jupiter system and disappear into deep space.

There will be no second chance.

Zuo Cheng stood in the last row of the control hall. No one around him spoke; the only sounds in the hall were the countdown and the beeping of the instruments. Yu Ying stood beside him, her hand resting on his arm.

"Brake ignition has been initiated." The voice from the loudspeaker was as calm as a weather forecast.

Zuo Cheng glanced at the system panel. The solar system node status monitoring was silently updating; the signals from the two Martian nodes were stable, while the energy index of the Europa node was fluctuating slightly. The Lone Wolf's coordinates were slowly tracing an arc at the edge of Jupiter's gravitational field, its speed was decreasing, and its orbital eccentricity was converging. His breathing unconsciously kept pace with the speed at which the arc on the panel was extending.

The braking ignition lasted for forty-two minutes.

For forty-two minutes, no one left their seat. Chen Hao gripped the armrests, his knuckles white. Shen Yiming stared at the screen, his glasses reflecting a dense array of telemetry data. Forty-two minutes later, the Lone Ranger entered an elliptical orbit around Jupiter's poles. The moment the signal returned to Hangzhou, a line of green text appeared on the telemetry screen: Orbital acquisition successful, deviation 0.3 seconds.

0.3 seconds. Shen Yiming's first reaction wasn't to shout, but to take off his glasses, wipe the lenses, put them back, and say something in a very soft voice.

"The lone wolf has emerged."

The Tianqiong Interplanetary Communication Network was officially established thirty-three minutes after the signal arrived. From the control center in Hangzhou to the relay satellite in Mars orbit, and then to the newly deployed relay node in Jupiter orbit, a series of green indicator lights lit up on the screen in sequence. Chen Hao was the first to stand up, followed by the engineer next to him, and then the entire hall. This time, no one shouted; everyone simply stood, clapped, and looked at each other. For the first time, humanity possessed a continuous data link across three planets. There was a thirty-three-minute delay, but the data itself was continuous, like a transparent thread stretched from Earth to Jupiter.

Yu Ying wrote a line in her notebook: "Earth, Mars, and Jupiter three-planet link, completed." She pushed the notebook in front of Zuo Cheng. Zuo Cheng wrote a line below: "Not enough. Next is Europa."

The Lone Ranger lander release procedure began the day after orbital stabilization. The lander detached from the orbital module and plunged into Europa's thin atmosphere at nearly six kilometers per second. Europa lacks a thick atmosphere; its surface is directly exposed to space. There were no parachutes. The entire process relied on retro-rockets to forcefully decelerate using propellant in the vacuum, with every step critically vulnerable.

The lander successfully touched down less than one kilometer from the node coordinates. Fifteen minutes after touchdown, the first image of Europa's surface was transmitted back to Earth. The greyish-white ice plains were riddled with crisscrossing cracks, resembling a frozen net of lightning.

Shen Yiming stared at the screen and said, "It looks like a closed eye."

The ice-melting drill was activated on the fourth day after landing. The Lone Wolf AI took complete control of the entire process autonomously; humans could not command it, and the thirty-three-minute delay meant that any real-time instructions were impossible. It descended alone into the ice, using the residual heat from its nuclear propulsion to generate high-temperature steam exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius, advancing deeper at a rate of approximately 300 meters per day.

The ice layers were far more complex than anticipated. The drill pierced through a layer of pure water ice, a layer of salty ice, a layer of ice mixed with organic deposits, and a layer of ice filled with frozen air bubbles. Each layer was like a page of geological history, recording the evolution of Europa's ice layers over tens of millions of years. The lone driller packaged the data from each layer and transmitted it back to Earth. People at the control center lined up every day to read this data, like watching a TV series that only released one episode a day. Yu Ying printed out the chemical analysis reports for each layer and pasted them on the wall, from the surface of the ice to the bottom, layer by layer.

Four months later, in the early morning, the drill bit pierced the last layer of ice.

Four months. From beginning to end, the lone driller never sent back a single voice message, not a single word of description. It simply drilled silently, transmitting environmental data and drill status daily. Until the early hours of the last day, the scene suddenly changed.

The drill bit broke free from the last ten centimeters of the ice, and then the entire field of vision suddenly unfolded. Beneath the ice was a liquid ocean.

It is not dark.

It is lit.

The entire ocean floor is covered with luminous lines, densely packed and interconnected, forming a hexagonal grid covering the seabed. Each hexagon is approximately 300 meters on each side, emitting an extremely pale blue light, identical to the nanometer storage units seen in Martian cubes, only on a scale billions of times larger. The entire seabed is a giant holographic memory, quietly operating beneath the ice for four billion years.

No one spoke in the control center. It wasn't that they didn't want to speak, but that they couldn't find the words. For a moment, the entire floor was so quiet that you could hear the air conditioning vents blowing.

After the image stabilized, the Lone Wolf AI transmitted the first set of environmental data. The seawater temperature was approximately four degrees Celsius, and the salinity was twice that of Earth's seawater, exhibiting a stable liquid water cycle. The results of the spectral analysis made Yu Ying stand up from her seat; those hexagonal luminous grids were not naturally formed. They were some kind of ultra-large-scale nanostructure, operating with extremely low power consumption. The power consumption was so low that the entire grid covering the seabed of Europa consumed less electricity than a single incandescent light bulb.

The system panel automatically popped up in Zuo Cheng's mind. The line of text he had been waiting for for three thousand days appeared on the screen.

The Origin Network Europa Node, Sentinel Monitoring Station, has been activated.

Status: Fully functional.

Operating time: approximately four billion years.

Current command: Awaiting wake-up confirmation.

There was a line of small text on the panel, not a system notification, but a comment from the sentry post itself. Zuo Cheng zoomed in on the comment and his pupils contracted slightly.

The comment contains only one sentence: Seed number 177, please read the next layer of encrypted information.

The entire solar system map was updated synchronously in that second. Europa's marker changed from semi-active to fully operational, and all five nodes flashed simultaneously on the interstellar map. System notification: The exploration progress of Stage 3 has advanced from 80% to 85%, and the interstellar perception range has expanded from Mars orbit to the Jupiter system.

Zuo Cheng turned to look at Yu Ying. Yu Ying was already analyzing the spectral data of the hexagonal grid. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, her expression shifting from shock to focus, and then from focus to an expression Zuo Cheng had never seen on her face before—a mixture of fear and awe.

"An encryption layer," Yu Ying said in a low voice, "at the very bottom of the spectral data. It's not the creator's code, it's another set of codes. More concise, more direct, like a simplified version designed for an emergency."

She spent nearly a day running a complete decryption using the cross-decoding algorithm newly developed by the quantum team. The decrypted information consisted of only one sentence. Yu Ying turned the screen towards Zuo Cheng.

The screen displays: Seed number 177. Please make a choice. Option A: Send a positive confirmation signal; the founder will send a guide fleet within one generation. Option B: Remain silent. Countdown remaining: one year and four months.