116: Chapter 117 Good Neighbor

The first thing Sergeant Hark did upon arriving at the colony wasn't to hold a meeting or look at a map; it was to crouch down and touch the floor.

When his gloved palm pressed against it, he felt a vibration—faint but steady. The resonance of the air circulation system was being transmitted through the dome's metal skeleton to the ground at a frequency of about three hertz.

A normal person's ears couldn't hear it, but their bones could feel it. The residents living here had likely long since grown accustomed to this omnipresent humming, but his knees told him this frequency was slightly higher than standard operating conditions.

Equipment aging, or perhaps an overload.

He stood up, wiped the dust from his gloves onto the side of his thigh, and turned to look at the six people behind him.

"Is the registration point set up yet?"

"It's set up at the East District entrance, two windows."

"Make it four. I don't want to be in line until tomorrow."

The deputy opened his mouth to say something—likely that they were short-staffed and four windows would require eight people when they only had seven—but seeing that Hark had already walked away, he closed it.

Hark walked toward the residential area of the East District. At the first corner, his power armor scraped a strip of paint off the prefabricated wall panels. White powder fell onto his boots; he glanced down but ignored it.

There were people in the corridor. It was after-work hours, and residents were walking from the communal cafeteria toward their quarters. Most people stepped aside toward the walls when they saw him, not out of fear, but because his armor was too wide; if they didn't yield, they'd have to press themselves against the wall. One middle-aged man was half a step too slow. As Hark's shoulder armor brushed past his arm, it kicked up a gust of wind. The man instinctively pulled his hand back and then muttered something while staring at Hark's retreating back.

Hark heard it but didn't look back.

He was walking and counting at the same time.

From the East District entrance to the corner of Corridor 3: one hundred and forty steps. The stride of the power armor was about seventy centimeters, making the total length ninety-eight meters. The corridor width was less than 1.8 meters, and his armor was eighty-five centimeters wide.

This meant there was less than fifty centimeters of clearance on either side of the corridor. Two unarmored adults could barely pass side-by-side; if armored, they could only go in single file.

This width would be lethal during an emergency evacuation.

He noted this down in a notebook—a physical, paper notebook. His pen was an ordinary carbon pen. He didn't use electronic devices to record things; the advantage of electronic devices was easy retrieval, but the disadvantage was that it was also easy for others to retrieve.

He stopped when he reached the T-34 Intersection of Corridor 3.

He didn't stop intentionally; his feet stopped on their own.

Standing in the middle of the intersection, the sound of breathing inside his helmet suddenly became very clear. The hum of the air circulation system was still there, but it seemed a bit further away. There was no one else in the corridor; both the left and right directions were empty, and the overhead lighting was working normally.

There was nothing there.

But the skin on the back of his neck tightened.

He turned in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle, looking in every direction for three seconds. He checked the ceiling, the floor, the walls, and the ventilation grilles.

There was nothing.

He drew a question mark on the T-34 line in his notebook, tucked it away, and continued walking.

Lynn had arrived three hours earlier. When she arrived, the West District administration building contained only a duty officer and a cleaning robot undergoing a self-check. Now, the third floor of this building had been transformed into a small data hub, with eight monitoring terminals lined up against the wall, each running the initialization program for an AI scanning node.

She sat in front of the middle terminal, her tablet lying flat next to the keyboard. On the screen was a progress report for the first round of biometric collection.

Collection target: All registered population of the West District.

Completed: 99.2%.

Reason for incompletion: 0.8% of personnel were in an uninterruptible state (sleeping/bathroom/medical) during the collection period.

She signed the bottom of the report and wrote six words in the remarks column: "Complete within twenty-four hours."

After signing, she archived the progress report and opened the parameter configuration page for the second phase.

Active Monitoring Mode, real-time tracking. Monitored items included body temperature, heart rate, gait rhythm, and voice spectrum. The anomaly threshold was set to two standard deviations from the baseline.

Two standard deviations is the standard starting line for anomaly detection in statistics, covering 95.4% of the normal fluctuation range. This meant that only the 4.6% of extreme cases would be flagged for attention.

She thought about the number for two seconds and then confirmed it.

Outside the window, a garbage disposal robot was sweeping along its route. As it passed a streetlamp, the light traced a clean arc across its metal shell before disappearing.

She wasn't looking out the window; she was looking at her data.

The colony's night cycle began at 21:00.

The dome's lighting system transitioned from white light to deep blue, its brightness dropping to fifteen percent of its daytime level. The light in the corridors became thin and cold, flowing along the walls.

East District, Corridor 3, T-34 Intersection, 21:17.

A man walked over from the south side, wearing a work jacket with his hands in his pockets. His walking speed was normal, his breathing rate was normal, and his ID badge hung on his chest with the name "Joel K-4471."

He reached the intersection and turned right.

His shadow didn't follow.

His body had already completed the turn and entered the eastward corridor, but the shadow remained on the southern wall, maintaining a straight-ahead posture for 0.4 seconds.

Then the shadow accelerated, caught up with the body, and realigned itself beneath his feet.

The camera above the T-34 Intersection recorded this frame.

The data was transmitted back to the AI monitoring hub in the West District and compared with Joel K-4471's baseline profile. Gait rhythm match: 99.7%. Body contour match: 99.9%. Motion vector match: 98.8%.

The shadow delay was labeled as "projection phase difference caused by lighting angle switching."

Risk rating: Negligible.

Processing: Auto-archive.

A new entry was added to the "Environmental Data" folder of the AI log, placed between the system self-check log and the temperature fluctuation record. Its font size was exactly the same as the other records—no highlighting, no red marking—it just sat there quietly.

Joel K-4471 walked through a door at the end of the eastward corridor.

After the door closed, the lighting above the T-34 Intersection flickered.

It flickered for 0.2 seconds and then recovered.

This flicker was not on the AI's list of monitored items.

Sergeant Hark's patrol had ended. He returned to the temporary command room in the East District. His notebook was spread out on the table, a carbon pen held between his index and middle fingers. Next to the question mark on the T-34 line, he added another word.

Light.

He closed the notebook with a light movement, placing the carbon pen on top of it with the cap facing right.