159: Chapter 159 Three-Line Cooling Comparison

August 31st, 5:30 AM.

Having prepared for departure, Jiang Lin looked at the printed checklist and checked the seals and serial numbers of the nine boxes one last time.

The expedition platform box, underground exploration box, cryogenic and thermal inertia box, communication relay box, PMCU interface box, cooling bypass reverse box, life support box, risk isolation box, and paper data box.

Every box's weight, center of gravity, strapping method, and relative position during teleportation had all been calculated.

He used nylon straps to connect the nine boxes into a single unit, standing himself at the center of the array.

[Reality-side preparation complete.]

...

Only ten minutes remained of the countdown in his field of vision.

Jiang Lin calmly watched the numbers ticking in the upper right corner of his vision, quietly waiting for the moment they hit zero, just like the previous ten times.

The instant the numbers jumped to 00:00:00:00, the world silently turned a page.

Jiang Lin opened his eyes.

He stood in the center of Outpost Assembly Room One.

Beneath his feet was the rough composite floor that had been repeatedly polished.

A slight muffled pressure from the teleportation still lingered in his ear canals; he subconsciously swallowed, his chest wrapped in a familiar lingering trace of weightlessness.

He exhaled his breath, which condensed into a small puff of white vapor in the biting cold air, quickly dissipating into the cold light.

The overhead lights turned on one by one.

The first.

The second.

The third.

The light shifted from cold white to steady.

A few seconds later, the low-power status screen on the wall automatically refreshed.

[Photovoltaic array: low-light standby]

[Battery pack: nighttime power supply mode]

[Wind turbine group: low-speed compensation]

[Water cycle: normal]

[External temperature: -17.4°C]

[Indoor temperature: 6.2°C]

[MPS-Agent α: standby task queue recovering]

[Latest automatic inspection: three hours ago on the Wasteland side]

Jiang Lin lowered his head.

The nine boxes neatly appeared around him.

The electric dirt bike, folding trailer rack, drone case, and mobile workstation also landed together in the assembly room's preset zone.

Nothing was missing.

Nothing had overturned.

Nothing was damaged.

He picked up the paper checklist on top and put a checkmark after the first line.

Afterward, he walked over to the wall and turned on the master control console.

The system recognized his manual access, and a familiar line of text popped up on the screen.

[Welcome back, Jiang Lin.]

This was the fixed return interface of MPS-Agent α.

The screen refreshed.

MPS-Agent α began loading the task index sealed at the end of the previous round.

[Task index recovering...]

[G-Explorer-B long-term maintenance log: complete]

[PMCU-17 offline cache index: complete]

[Northeast Seventy-Three risk map: v6]

[TM-7 outer ring structural sketch: incomplete]

[Dark Dust String hypothesis folder: sealed]

[FDSO-2076 A fragment: pending review]

[New reality-side data: detected]

Jiang Lin plugged in the encrypted hard drive.

The newly added reality-side files were read into the offline environment.

The system was not connected to the network.

Nor could it possibly connect to the network.

However, the file structure, hashes, timestamps, and task tags were quickly incorporated into the index by MPS-Agent α.

A few minutes later, a new task list was automatically generated on the right side of the screen.

[Recommended priority rearrangement]

1. Outpost full-station manual review.

2. Unpacking of teleported supplies and contamination isolation.

3. G-Explorer-C expedition platform assembly.

4. Northeast Seventy-Three second expedition preparation.

5. PMCU-17 offline cache secondary indexing.

6. TM-7 outer ring high-pressure phase-change cooling network target modeling.

7. Star-tide preliminary engineering reverse-engineering notes archiving.

Looking at this ranking, Jiang Lin put on his work jacket, put on his gloves, and began performing the full-station manual review.

First stop, the power room.

The photovoltaic main inverter was running stably.

The battery pack voltage was normal.

The wind turbine group's nighttime compensation power was slightly low, but within the allowable range.

Bearing vibration for the number three wind turbine was 2.1% higher than the last record; MPS-Agent α had marked it yellow, but it hadn't triggered the maintenance threshold.

Jiang Lin listened for thirty seconds.

The sound was indeed a bit dry.

He wrote on the maintenance sheet:

[Number three wind turbine bearing: schedule maintenance within the eleventh cycle, does not affect pre-expedition preparation.]

Second stop, the water cycle.

Water tank margins were stable.

The filter layer pressure difference rose slightly.

Algae control was normal.

Condensation recovery efficiency dropped by 1.7%.

This wasn't urgent.

But if this round of Wasteland time lengthened again, the minor decline in the water cycle would turn into trouble on a scale of several years.

He added a note:

[Replace the primary filter layer before the expedition.]

Third stop, the maintenance room.

PMCU-17 was still lying on the isolation rack.

It was more silent than any record on the reality screens.

Two point four meters long, eighty-five centimeters wide, fifty-five centimeters high.

The dark grayish-black composite shell absorbed the light.

The large-area ceramicized ablation zone still looked like a solidified black scar.

The left alloy structural shell had collapsed.

The broken cooling interface at the rear was sealed by a transparent dust cover, inside which layers upon layers of multi-layered high-pressure pipelines looked like a severed giant blood vessel.

The cross-section of the optical interconnection tail cable at the bottom, which was Physics missing, was uncomfortably detailed under the microscope cover.

Jiang Lin stood before it without immediately turning on any equipment.

He just looked.

This black monolith was not TM-7.

It wasn't even the brain of TM-7.

It was merely a peripheral maintenance computing unit.

A severed nerve on the outer ring service layer.

Yet it was this severed nerve that gave him a timestamp more than seventy years later than reality, gave him the Seventh Canopy Station, gave him the moon-back observation link, gave him FDSO-2076 A, and also gave him that low-confidence inner-ring frozen-state life-support record.

Jiang Lin reached out and gently tapped the edge of the shell through the transparent cover.

The sound was dull.

Like tapping on something that had been dead for a long time yet still refused to fully surrender its secrets.

MPS-Agent α popped up a prompt at the edge of the screen.

[Detected new reality-side task: Artemis I 2022-08-2 bleed notes]

[Linkable historical fields: RING-3 COOLANT STATE; THERMAL_PHASE_BYPASS; PHASE_CHANGE_ROUTING_FAILURE]

[Establish comparison index?]

Jiang Lin chose:

[Establish, read-only.]

On the screen, three sets of fields were expanded side by side.

On the left were the cooling process entries from reality-side aerospace news.

Engine bleed.

Chilldown.

LH2.

Launch window.

Scrub.

In the middle were the cooling state fragments in the PMCU-17 cache.

PHASE_CHANGE_ROUTING_FAILURE

THERMAL_PHASE_BYPASS

RING_3_COOLANT_STATE

CAPILLARY_PRESSURE_DROP

OUTER_LOOP_OVERLOAD

On the right were the experimental records left by Jiang Lin himself when piecing together the external cooling bypass from the nineteenth to the twenty-third year.

Shell partition thermal excitation.

Infrared thermal diffusion path.

Silicon-based synthetic fluid.

Mining station hydraulic pump.

External bypass pressure fluctuations.

Emergency diagnosis layer wake-up temperature threshold.

The three columns were not equivalent.

One was the reality aerospace launch system.

One was the wreckage of a future underground computing array.

One was a temporary patch pieced together by Jiang Lin using Wasteland junk.

But they all pointed to the same thing:

If the thermal state did not close, the system shouldn't continue moving forward.

Jiang Lin wrote in the task notes:

[The body temperature of the number three engine is not a metaphor.]

[The health status of a high-energy engineering system is primarily manifested in temperature, pressure, flow rate, phase-change boundaries, and reading reliability.]

[The TM-7 outer ring secondary expedition should prioritize finding the "honest readings" of the cooling network.]

Jiang Lin turned off the strong lights in the maintenance room, leaving only the low-power inspection lights.

Then he turned and left.

9:40 AM.

Outpost review complete.

The palms inside his work gloves were lightly sweating, and his lower back felt a familiar soreness and swelling from long hours of bending over to check pipelines and squatting down to listen to bearings.

He braced himself against the corridor wall and paused for two seconds to steady his breathing before continuing toward the assembly room.

There were no major faults.

Two medium-priority maintenance tasks and seven low-priority flags.

None of these affected the expedition preparations within thirty days.

Jiang Lin returned to Assembly Room 1 and began unpacking.

The supplies brought back from reality were divided into three layers of isolation.

The first layer went directly into storage.

Living provisions, paper documents, and basic tools.

The second layer required calibration before storage.

Sensors, recording boxes, communication relays, and thermal infrared modules.

The third layer required separate isolation.

Cooling bypass reverse boxes, PMCU-17 interface boxes, and unknown environment samplers.

Once these devices came into contact with underground pipeline residues, crystals, or unknown dust in Northeast Seventy-Three, they could no longer be brought directly back to the living quarters.

The Outpost was small.

Contamination isolation had to be done in advance.

Jiang Lin recorded the seal, serial number, weight, and unpacking time of every single box.

MPS-Agent α automatically generated the storage manifest.

But he still wrote down the key items by hand once.

Repetition was very inefficient.

But handwriting forced him to go through the logistics logic of the supplies all over again.

He did not trust single records.

He did not trust single sensors.

He did not trust single decision chains.

Every important matter had to have a secondary path.

At 11:20 am.

He ate his first meal since returning to the Wasteland.

It was heated mashed potatoes plus stir-fried Soybean, at a temperature that was just right without burning his mouth.

Jiang Lin ate very slowly, chewing every bite at least twenty times.

The memory of hunger from the early days of the Wasteland made it hard for him to treat any hot meal lightly again.

The hollow, contracting feeling in his stomach slowly subsided, and the chill in his fingertips from holding the utensils gradually warmed up.

After finishing, he did not rest for long.

On the first day of the eleventh Wasteland, the real work was just beginning.

The assembly bench for G-Explorer-C was cleared out.

The four main leg modules, two auxiliary stabilizing legs, foot sensor array, low-power main control, inertial navigation module, communication interface, thermal infrared sensor, magnetometer, and low-frequency vibration pickup were laid out one by one.

This was not a brand-new design.

Rather, it was the compressed result of the expedition experience of G-Explorer-B.

Model B pursued "walking to".

Model C pursued "bringing back".

Bringing back what?

Not large chunks of samples.

Not heavy equipment.

Not seemingly astonishing remnants of future technology.

But evidence.

A temperature curve.

A section of low-frequency vibration.

A crystal sample from the cooling pipeline.

A thermal infrared image deep within the fissure.

A magnetic field boundary that could not be explained by natural geology.

A state remnant matching the PMCU-17 cache records.

G-Explorer-C did not need to be brave like a human.

It only needed to be conservative enough.

Slow enough.

Able to come back alive.

Jiang Lin picked up the first foot module.

Serial number: C-Foot-01.

Install.

Lock.

Wire.

Calibrate.

Record.

The second.

The third.

The fourth.

The movements were slow, repetitive, and clean.

Inside the assembly room, only the sound of tools contacting metal remained.

At three in the afternoon.

MPS-Agent α completed the alignment of the Northeast Seventy-Three Risk Map v6 with the newly added real-world tasks, generating the first version of the secondary expedition recommended route.

On the screen, the contour lines of the off-white collapse zone, thin-shell surface markers, historical fissure openings, PMCU-17 excavation points, known relay placement points, thermal inertia anomaly zones, and low-frequency echo anomaly edges were layered on top of each other.

Right in the center, there was an area marked in deep red.

That was the core collapse zone.

Entry prohibited.

On the southwest side, a narrow yellow route bypassed the thin-shell area, approaching the old fissure opening.

On the northeast side, an orange area was marked by MPS-Agent α.

[New inferred area: Possible presence of residual breaks in the outer ring cooling trunk line.]

Confidence: 0.19.

Basis:

PMCU-17 cooling interface orientation.

Collapse shear direction.

Surface thermal lag differential residual.

Low-frequency geoacoustic echo boundary.

Outer ring service layer structural hypothesis.

Jiang Lin stared at that orange area.

It was not very high.

But it was a bit higher than [INNER_RING_FREEZE_KEEPALIVE_RECORD].

What did this mean?

It did not mean there must be pipelines there.

Nor did it mean the TM-7 inner ring entrance could be found directly there.

It only meant that under the existing evidence, it was more worthy of dropping a disposable environmental recording box there than anywhere else.

Jiang Lin accepted the suggestion, but did not immediately set it as the primary target.

He wrote in the mission plan:

[The orange zone is only a candidate point, and approaching it by force to increase confidence is prohibited.]

[If surface contact feedback is abnormal, G-Explorer-C must retreat immediately.]

[Cutting modules must not be used, fissures must not be expanded, and unknown load-bearing structures must not be damaged.]

After writing this, he remembered the NASA rocket left on the launch pad.

The body temperature of Engine No. 3 was not up to par.

So it stopped.

Northeast Seventy-Three was the same.

If the surface did not give him conditions to pass, he would stop.

If the relay link was unstable, he would stop.

If the thermal infrared results could not rule out natural explanations, he would not force an explanation.

If the records in the PMCU-17 cache could not match the on-site evidence, he would admit it might just be a fault artifact.

The Wasteland had given him a long time.

But a long time could not be used to cultivate stubbornness.

Evening.

The wind outside the Outpost began to pick up.

Fine red sand tapped against the outer baffles, making a dense, light rustling sound.

Jiang Lin stood at the door of the assembly room, watching the semi-finished G-Explorer-C resting quietly on the lifting platform.

It had not yet been fully fitted with its outer shell.

The main control was exposed.

The wire harnesses were temporarily fixed.

Its six legs looked like some kind of mechanical animal that had not yet awakened.

On the screen, the expedition plan still remained at the first version.

[Northeast Seventy-Three Secondary Expedition Preparation: Incomplete]

[G-Explorer-C Assembly Progress: 37%]

[Communication Relay Test: Pending Execution]

[Cooling Bypass Reverse Sampling Process: Pending Generation]

[Risk Isolation Chamber: Pending Cleanup]

Jiang Lin was not in a hurry.

This round of the Wasteland had just begun.

There might be ten years, twenty years, or even longer ahead.

He had time.

But time did not equal something that could be wasted.

He turned back to the workbench and opened the PMCU-17 cache index.

No new data was read.

He simply placed that low-confidence record back at the very top.

[INNER_RING_FREEZE_KEEPALIVE_RECORD]

Confidence: 0.127.

Non-real-time link.

Non-real-time signal.

Non-current operation proof.

Serving only as a secondary expedition trigger condition.

Jiang Lin looked at it for a few seconds.

Then he wrote down the first execution guideline for this round of the Wasteland beside it.

[Do not treat remnants as answers.]

The second.

[Do not treat conjectures as evidence.]

The third.

[Do not treat what can be done as what should be done.]

After finishing the third, the sound of the wind outside the Outpost suddenly grew heavier.

The rotation speed of the distant wind generator units automatically increased.

The wall status screen refreshed.

[External wind speed rising]

[Wind generator unit output increasing]

[Battery charging power increasing]

The base remained stable.

Jiang Lin turned off the index table and picked up his tools again.

G-Explorer-C still had four wire harnesses left unorganized.

At night, he had to complete the first round of calibration for the foot sensors.

Tomorrow, he would work on the indoor link of the communication relay.

The day after tomorrow, he would do the low-temperature start test.

Northeast Seventy-Three would not run away.

That silent array underground would not disappear just because he was a few days slower.

It had already waited for many years.

Or rather, it had already been dead for many years.

Jiang Lin did not yet know which statement was more accurate.

He only knew that this time, he would walk toward that off-white collapse zone with a better machine, clearer questions, and stricter red lines.