31: Chapter 31 Aliens Revealed, Secret of Immortality Exposed

As these words pierced through the sea breeze atop the tower and fell into Elon Musk's ears, Edward took the opportunity to hand over the tablet.

Elon Musk's neck stiffened slightly.

He took the tablet, lowered his head, and swiped the screen to wake it with one finger.

Before the video even started playing, his mind had already pieced together the fragments: "Long Life—Immortality—Legacy—Fifty-Year Hydroelectric Deficit—Chain of Silencing—1947."

He had always detested politicians, especially those who sat on congressional benches for generations, monopolizing resources through inheritance rather than ability.

The conclusion was vague, but it was enough to make his knuckles turn an unconscious, cold white as he held the tablet.

The tablet screen lit up.

There was only one video file on it, with a filename consisting of a string of randomly generated characters.

Elon Musk pressed the play button.

The footage showed the B2 underground parking garage of the Las Vegas City Hall.

The timestamp showed it was from a few days ago.

The surveillance angle was standard, covering most of the garage area.

The footage was not blurry; it recorded everything clearly:

A silver-grey Porsche Cayenne was parked in a "Reserved" spot.

Young Link Warren was sitting in the driver's seat.

Then, the iron grate cover of the ventilation duct was pushed open from the inside without being touched.

A small, greyish-white humanoid creature with a massive head slid out from the duct, its movements silent and its posture eerie.

Then it raised its head, and from its two large, pitch-black eyes, a ghostly blue light suddenly emitted,

that light hitting the camera's photosensitive element like an abyss surrounded by two balls of cold flame.

Then, it raised a finger at Link in the Porsche, placed it to its lips, and made a shushing gesture.

Elon Musk did not make a sound.

But his thumb pressed hard against the edge of the tablet, leaving a faint sweat mark on the metal frame.

Then came those two Men in Black—two Men in Black whose movements were far faster than any human—who silently dashed out from the same duct opening.

A ghostly blue arc of electricity flashed from the hand of one of them, and the Grey Alien collapsed to the ground.

Next was the grey bag, the struggle inside the bag, and then the sound of high heels.

A middle-aged woman in a grey suit crouched down to check the condition of the Grey Alien in the bag,

then stood up, walked to the Porsche, pulled open the car door, and flipped over an ID badge: "Federal Urban Pipeline Maintenance Department," along with a badge on the back that he had never seen before but could feel carried immense authority.

Then came the warning.

Then, everything vanished.

The ventilation duct cover was reinstalled,

the parking garage returned to its dim, deathly silence,

leaving only the fear lingering on the face of the young man in the driver's seat after he had shed all his old confidence and old perceptions.

The video was very short.

Less than five minutes in total.

But these five minutes confirmed that every link in the chain of assumptions he had just made remained unbroken.

Aliens were real.

The Federal Government knew about this.

No, not the government, but some secret agency under the government that didn't exist on any organizational chart.

The fifty-year deficit in hydroelectric resources at the Hoover Dam had all flowed into this alien research base.

All those who knew were silenced, spanning from 1944 to 1997, and it was still operating during that time.

That black hole might still exist to this day.

Elon Musk remained silent for a long time.

The sea breeze blew his hair over half his face, and he didn't bother to brush it away.

His hands holding the tablet were motionless, only his thumbs involuntarily rubbing against the edge of the screen,

a mechanical, overly frequent motion that betrayed the immense load his brain was under at that moment.

His eyes never left the screen, his brows were tightly furrowed, and his Adam's apple was moving slightly.

He was an engineer, as well as a physicist and computer scientist; he could tell at a glance whether the video was real or fake.

And now, his eyes told him that this video was real.

Every frame was real.

The metadata, the lighting and shadow relationships, the motion vectors of the pixels—they did not constitute any traces of forgery.

Meanwhile, his brain was deducing backwards at a near-frantic speed.

He saw a complete chain:

An alien spacecraft that crashed in 1947, hidden in a base beneath the Hoover Dam; a group of people stealing alien technology, and a group of people who had been silencing witnesses for nearly eighty years to cover it up.

He also thought of a possibility,

a possibility more incredible than all the commercial expansions and political confrontations he had engaged in to date.

He looked up from the screen at Edward.

His voice was a full octave lower than before, carrying a long-lost hoarseness,

the trace left on his vocal cords after the adrenaline had rapidly receded.

"So that's it... researching alien technology."

"This resource black hole that has lasted for half a century has never disappeared."

"It was just shut behind an invisible door, and those of us on the outside never knew where the door was."

He paused for half a second, then added, enunciating every word,

"These people... they obtained the spacecraft wreckage, they have living specimens, they have alien technology far beyond our own..."

Edward did not respond.

He stood up, walked a few steps forward, and leaned against the stone railing on the other side of the lighthouse roof, his gaze crossing the grey-blue horizon of the Gulf of Mexico, as if looking at something very, very far away.

His movements and rhythm were completely different from when he was eating with Walsh on Chestnut Street earlier,

back then he was probing, laying out plans, using small doses of topics to adjust the reactions of another politician.

But now, he was simply speaking,

speaking a truth that no longer needed to be hidden.

"In the fishing cabin at Gold Lake, when my staff and I first reached the conclusion that the Deep State was secretly researching alien technology at the bottom of the Hoover Dam,"

Edward's voice was stretched thin by the sea breeze, but his tone remained steady,

"when I was eating with Walsh on Chestnut Street, and from his silence, pushed the authenticity of this matter to a point where I could no longer deny it,"

"when I knew that everyone who learned of this secret would be silenced—from Gore, who went mad at the door of a bar in 1944, to you and me, tracking clues between Washington and Las Vegas today,"

"I always thought that those people in the Deep State were actually just a bunch of hicks."

"Very tacky, very stupid, very unimaginative."

"It's the twenty-first century; there are plenty of ways to make someone shut up."

"Give him money, give him power, give him an appointment letter from a government department, pull him into your own camp—wouldn't that solve everything?"

"Why must you kill them all?"

He turned around to look at Elon Musk.

"But when I was flying from Las Vegas to Texas, I sat by the cabin window and looked down..."

"Looking at those farmlands cut into checkerboards, those cities shrunk to the size of matchboxes, those interstate highways spreading out like silver ribbons in the desert... I tried to put myself in their shoes."

"I asked myself, if I were the one who obtained the alien technology, what would I do?"

He stopped.

His gaze met Elon Musk's.

Seagulls circled outside the stone railing, letting out a sharp cry.

He released his hand from the stone railing, which he had been gripping until it turned white, pressed the heel of his palm against the mottled limestone, and spoke in a tone as slow as spitting out an old fish bone.

"The first thought that popped into my head was, surprisingly, 'Legacy'."

"The very word I just told you: a legacy of a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years."

"I didn't hesitate for a single second; even I was startled by myself."

"Just these two words, as crisp as if they were carved into my bones."

"A family like mine, which has only been passed down for a little over a hundred years in Nevada, would instinctively jump to the option of 'Legacy' without hesitation when thinking about this question..."

"What about those people in the Deep State?"

"Their families probably existed before the United States was even established, passed down for nearly three hundred years."

"When they were researching alien technology under the Hoover Dam, what would be the first thought to pop into their minds?"

Elon Musk didn't speak, but his lips moved slightly.

The scientist-like sternness on his face had cracked open.

The sharpness in his eyes was now mixed with a highly complex emotion.

He associated it with immortality, associated it with ruling.

He squeezed these four words out of his throat as if swallowing a hard object—

"Immortality."

Edward lifted his hand from the stone platform, folded it in front of him, his expression one of either a smile or a deeper kind of pity.

He replied softly: "Yes, immortality."

"So how could the secret to immortality possibly be leaked?"

"If it were me, if it were anyone in that position, they would do the same thing."

"Kill everyone who knows, leave no one behind."

"Block all clues leading to the bottom of the Hoover Dam, leave nothing behind."

"The secret to immortality must never be leaked."

He continued steadily, every word like a gavel falling in a courtroom.

"That's why Gore had to suffer a sudden heart attack; the secret buried in that dam, bought with the lives of one hundred and twenty workers, must never leak out from his mouth."

"That's why Kramer had to jump off a building after being scared out of his mind."

"That's why that reporter had to vanish into thin air, their name becoming a cold, icy number in the missing persons file."

"Killing all the way down, leaving no possibilities!"

When he stopped, he noticed that Elon Musk's expression had changed completely.