177: Chapter 177 Echoes from Twelve Kilometers Underground

On the twelfth trip to the Wasteland, March 24th of the 23rd year, early morning.

In the maintenance room, the torque wrench completed its final force-limit release.

Jiang Lin released his hand and re-secured the inspection cover on the left rear joint of the G-Explorer-C.

This machine had been sleeping in the Outpost for many years.

Its original silver-gray shell had long since lost its luster.

The ventral guard plate retained long scratches gouged by gravel during the eleventh expedition, the right front foot tip had been replaced twice, and the waist rotation sealing ring had also been replaced once.

Jiang Lin did not repaint it.

Scratches do not affect sealing and structural strength.

Every single trace corresponds to a fault record; covering them would instead destroy the baseline for checking material deformation and crack propagation.

Beside the maintenance platform, the expedition supplies had already been sorted and grouped.

All six communication relays went into the task rack of the G-Explorer-C.

Among the twelve disposable environmental recording boxes, six entered the side compartment, and the remaining six were sealed in dustproof boxes and fixed to both sides of the electric motorcycle.

The low-frequency impact hammer, geophones, fiber optic cables, folding anchor frame, spare joint drive boards, and isolation probes were also disassembled into modules suitable for being carried by the motorcycle side racks and the G-Explorer-C task compartment.

Projected on the wall was the latest map of Northeast Seventy-Three.

The broad orange zone left by the eleventh trip to the Wasteland had been compressed by a 1-TiB heterogeneous cluster into a dark red region over eight hundred meters wide.

[Horizontal Error: ±420m]

[Estimated Depth

[Determined Nature: Outer Ring Common Signal Source]

Placed on the map, over eight hundred meters was just a red blotch.

When dropped into the real ruins, however, it was enough to cover dozens of collapsed buildings and millions of cubic meters of complex landfill.

Direct excavation was meaningless.

The Outpost lacked heavy machinery capable of handling this volume of earthwork, and the underground load-bearing structures, cooling branch lines, and power supply lines had not yet been confirmed.

A single shovel down might unearth the answer, or it might make the weak signal that had persisted for over twenty years disappear completely.

Jiang Lin wrote the controlled task copy, checked by MPS-EvidenceGate, into the G-Explorer-C.

The complete model remained at the Outpost.

The task copy carried by the G-Explorer-C retained only path selection, relay deployment, detection actions, and preset fault branches.

If the return battery level dropped below forty percent, the mission would terminate.

If no new evidence could be established for ninety consecutive minutes, it would fall back to the last reliable node.

If the foot contact confidence fell below the boundary, abandon the shortest route.

All actions that might damage load-bearing structures would wait for Jiang Lin's confirmation.

[Task Payload: Passed]

[Joint Status: Passed]

[Local Task Copy: Locked]

[Communication Relays: 6]

[Return Battery Boundary: 40%]

The G-Explorer-C stood up from the maintenance platform.

Six mechanical feet pressed onto the ground in sequence.

Dust fell from the gaps between the joints and guard plates.

The rolling shutter door of the maintenance room rose upward.

The morning wind wrapped in the fine sand of the Wasteland poured in close to the ground.

Jiang Lin straddled the electric motorcycle.

The G-Explorer-C retracted its six feet and secured itself to the low transport rack at the rear of the motorcycle.

As the electric motorcycle drove out of the Outpost, twenty-four new photovoltaic modules were slowly raising their output in the morning light.

The computing cluster in Workroom No. 2 entered its minimum maintenance state.

Power supply shifted to water circulation, air filtration, and expedition communication.

Computing power had completed its mission for this stage.

The remaining answers required a machine to walk out and find them personally.

Two days later.

Northeast Seventy-Three collapse zone.

The electric motorcycle stopped under a fractured viaduct.

Continuing forward, the original road had disappeared.

Half of the bridge deck was obliquely inserted into the ground, with steel rebars protruding from the cracked concrete.

The wind passed through the hollow cavities of the bridge, emitting a low moan every few seconds.

The dark red candidate zone was located in the center of the ruins ahead.

Observed from the surface, this area was utterly inconspicuous.

Broken floor slabs, half-buried pipelines, metal curtain walls, and weathered gravel were mixed together; the only stably reproducible difference was that the surface temperature at night was 0.7 degrees Celsius higher than the surrounding area.

Jiang Lin arranged ten environmental recording boxes around the candidate zone.

Ten branch lines were connected to the same set of optical fiber time bases, round-trip delays were calibrated one by one, and synchronization residuals were suppressed to within twelve microseconds.

The G-Explorer-C carried the low-frequency impact hammer on its back and entered the red zone.

The alloy hammer head dropped for the first time.

The vibration propagated outward along the gravel, broken floor slabs, and underground pipelines.

The ten recording boxes captured the waveforms in sequence.

Change position.

Strike again.

Change direction.

Record again.

Over three days, more than a hundred impact points covered the candidate zone.

The strongest echoes were always concentrated in the center of the red zone.

According to conventional judgment, that place was most suitable for excavation.

Yet Jiang Lin rearranged the arrival times of the ten recording boxes.

The time the northern recording box received the waveform was nearly four milliseconds earlier than the result calculated based on the propagation speed of the gravel layer.

The synchronization error was only twelve microseconds.

Those four milliseconds came from underground.

A continuous medium with a significantly higher propagation speed was channeling distant vibrations into the center of the red zone.

It might be a metal pipeline.

A high-density load-bearing beam.

Or it might be a section of an unbroken engineering shell.

The center of the red zone was simply the location where the signal leaked to the surface most easily.

The source was still further north.

Jiang Lin extracted the abnormal propagation path separately.

It passed through the dark red region, extended along the northeast direction, and gradually disappeared at the edge of the candidate zone.

More than three hundred meters away was a shallow slope covered by sand and soil.

That place was far from the strongest echo point, leaving only a faint color close to the background value in the original model.

Jiang Lin put away the folding workbench and straddled the electric motorcycle again.

The G-Explorer-C followed behind.

The shortest route from the center of the red zone to the shallow slope was only a little over two hundred and eighty meters.

When the G-Explorer-C advanced to one hundred and thirty-seven meters, the pressure build-up speed at the right front foot tip suddenly slowed down.

The chassis inclination angle rose by 0.17 degrees.

The low-frequency echo attenuated prematurely.

[Contact Confidence Decreased]

[Thin Shell Probability: 0.31]

[Stop Advancing]

The other five mechanical feet expanded outward simultaneously.

The fuselage lowered.

The right front foot slowly lifted.

The moment the foot tip left, the original position sank downward by less than two centimeters, and a tiny crack extended toward the northeast.

The task copy generated three routes.

Continuing to probe along the crack had the shortest distance.

Detouring to the west increased the distance by more than one hundred and ten meters.

The G-Explorer-C chose to detour.

The six feet moved laterally along stable load-bearing points, cutting from the west side of the shallow slope into a low-lying area obscured by the shadows of gravel.

A short wall protruded less than half a meter from the sand and soil.

Jiang Lin stopped the motorcycle.

The G-Explorer-C scanned along the wall.

Both the surface magnetic field and temperature were close to the background, but continuous high-rigidity echoes existed beneath the wall.

That fast propagation path extending from the center of the red zone happened to pass right through the bottom of this building.

A small engineering facility was buried beneath the shallow slope.

The entrance was completely pinned down by collapsed prefabricated slabs.

Jiang Lin cleared the loose soil at the corner of the wall and found a faded maintenance logo.

The pattern belonged to the same system of markings as those on the shell of the PMCU-17.

[Candidate Structure: Outer Ring Cooling Branch Line Maintenance Facility]

[Estimated Horizontal Distance to Common Signal Source: 286m]

[Underground Continuous Channel Probability: 71%]

The prefabricated slabs above the entrance weighed over ten tons.

Jiang Lin did not attempt to force it open with his existing equipment.

Over the next eighteen days, using the shallow slope as a temporary advance point, he rode the electric motorcycle back and forth to the Outpost four times, transporting the disassembled hydraulic lifting frames, mechanical shims, steel brackets, winches, and independent power supplies to the site in batches.

All large structures were reassembled beside the shallow slope.

The lifting process lasted for four days.

Every time the prefabricated slabs were raised by three centimeters, Jiang Lin paused once to check the pressure, displacement, and slope subsidence.

After raising them by sixty-five centimeters, three sets of mechanical shims were jammed into the gap.

The hydraulic system was partially unloaded.

The floor slabs did not fall back.

Sixty-five centimeters was already enough.

The G-Explorer-C lowered its fuselage to the minimum and squeezed through the gap into the facility.

Inside was a tilted maintenance duty room.

Tables and chairs were pushed to the corners of the wall, and a control cabinet had detached from its base, smashing onto a downward-opening metal door.

The G-Explorer-C bypassed the control cabinet and found a dust-covered circular vertical shaft at the rear of the room.

The shaft cover was printed with three sections of identification.

[Outer Ring]

[Cooling Branch Line]

[NE-73]

The candidate number in the map had fallen onto a real facility for the first time.

After the shaft cover was hoisted away, a chill slowly drifted up from below.

Before descending into the shaft, the low-frequency impact hammer was uninstalled from the task rack.

The G-Explorer-C connected to the independent power supply module and completed a full energy replenishment.

Jiang Lin then rechecked the temperatures of the six joints, the foot tip zero points, and the status of the communication relays, confirming that the heat accumulated from the previous surface mapping had dissipated, before attaching the load-bearing rope to the back of the robot.

The laser ranging fell to the bottom.

Thirty-seven meters.

The first communication relay was fixed at the shaft mouth.

The second was lowered to twelve meters.

The G-Explorer-C connected the load-bearing rope, and its six mechanical feet alternately stepped across the shaft wall maintenance ladder, descending slowly under the load reduction of the rope.

Twenty-four meters.

The third relay lit up.

Thirty-six meters.

The G-Explorer-C landed at the bottom of the shaft and continued moving forward along a narrow downward-sloping passage.

Fifty-two meters.

Sixty-eight meters.

The fourth relay completed deployment.

At seventy-nine meters, the passage was cut off by a twisted isolation door.

Severe squeezing had occurred above the door body, curving inward at the center, leaving only a gap less than seventy centimeters high at the bottom.

The G-Explorer-C could pass by lowering its fuselage.

Yet the rotating joint at the end of the fiber optic cable could not withstand the sharp angle under the door.

If dragged forcefully, the joint would likely jam.

Jiang Lin attempted to cut the side edge of the door.

Less than three seconds after the blade touched the metal, the vibration sensors on the door frame and the roof alarmed simultaneously.

The isolation door bore a portion of the load above.

Continuing to cut might cause a secondary collapse.

The camera passed through the gap and captured a faint amber reflection deeper inside.

It lit up once every forty-seven seconds.

This was consistent with the anomaly cycle in the PMCU-17 cache.

Jiang Lin opened the offline task page of the G-Explorer-C.

[Remaining Battery: 78%]

[Estimated Relay-Free Working Time: 16h]

[Mission Return Boundary: 48%]

[90min Consecutive No Valid Evidence: Return to Last Relay]

[Structural Sampling: Disabled]

The robotic arm retained only three permissions: probing, opening doors, and deploying relays.

Jiang Lin unlocked the mechanical lock at the end of the load-bearing rope.

The hook landed on the passage floor, its sound carrying a long way.

The G-Explorer-C lowered its body and sent its six mechanical feet through the isolation door one by one.

Eleven meters later, the video feed was interrupted.

Only a single message remained on the status page.

[Offline Task Copy: Executing]

In the first hour, the fourth relay received two short handshakes.

In the second hour, communication vanished.

In the fifth hour, a slight vibration came from the shaft wall.

In the ninth hour, the sun sank behind the ruins.

By the twelfth hour, the G-Explorer-C had exceeded the initially estimated return window.

At thirteen hours and twenty-seven minutes, the status light of the fourth relay suddenly flashed.

[NE-Relay-04: Forwarding Request Received]

The signal source was not the G-Explorer-C.

Yet its protocol shell shared the same origin as the PMCU-17 maintenance network.

A few seconds later, the fifth relay came online.

The G-Explorer-C had established a new link behind the isolation door.

The first return log had only four lines.

[Strongest Signal Direction: Southeast]

[Judgment: Metal Pipeline Multipath Propagation]

[Valid Facility Markers: 3 locations]

[Selected Path: NE-73-B2]

The G-Explorer-C did not chase the strongest signal.

It followed the wall maintenance numbers, heading in the direction where the signal gradually weakened.

Nineteen minutes later, the second log arrived.

[Current Depth: 91m]

[Closed Maintenance Corridor Discovered]

[Identifiable Isolation Interface Discovered]

[Requesting Controlled Handshake]

Jiang Lin checked the task signature and permitted it.

The isolation probe issued the handshake sequence of the PMCU-17 shadow maintenance bus.

The first seven times were all rejected.

On the eighth time, the length of the return packet changed.

On the ninth time, the unknown device sent back its identity information.

[OR-MAINT-NE73]

[Status: Emergency Maintenance]

[Main Link: Isolated]

[Local Maintenance Power: Available]

The common signal source was confirmed.

It was an outer ring maintenance dispatch node.

The G-Explorer-C continued to request the local topology.

Seventeen seconds later, a clearer mechanical vibration came from underground.

The video bandwidth jumped from zero to one hundred and twenty-seven kilobytes per second.

In the first frame of video was a circular isolation door exceeding four meters in diameter.

The mechanical lock had retracted halfway, and the remaining part was jammed by deformed guide rails.

The G-Explorer-C used its robotic arm to prop against the door edge, cooperating with the surviving drive mechanism to expand the opening to seventy centimeters.

The camera poked in through the gap.

Behind the door was a relatively well-preserved underground maintenance station.

Two tracks passed through the center of the platform, extending into the deep darkness.

Parked beside the tracks was a flat unmanned maintenance vehicle.

The vehicle body was about seven meters long, with two folding robotic arms retracted on both sides of the cargo platform, and an amber indicator light on top flashing once every forty-seven seconds.

The platform lighting lit up segment by segment along the tracks.

The guide markings on the wall appeared accordingly.

[Outer Ring Cooling Maintenance Line]

[NE-73 Dispatch Station]

[TM-7 Shell Docking Section]

The local topology returned the next known node.

[Target: TM-7 Shell Maintenance Interface]

[Line Distance: 12.6 km]

[Isolation Doors Along Line: 4]

[Track Status: Unknown]

The G-Explorer-C deployed the sixth relay outside the circular door, and then exited the maintenance station in accordance with the return boundary.

Two hours later, the G-Explorer-C returned to the bottom of the shaft.

Remaining battery: forty-three percent.

New wear appeared on the right front foot tip, and a guard plate was missing from the back task rack.

Main structure intact.

Mission data intact.

Jiang Lin reconnected the load-bearing rope and hoisted the G-Explorer-C back to the shaft mouth.

After the right front joint finished cooling down, the task data was transferred to the Outpost main archive, and the six relays continued to remain underground to maintain the communication link for the next entry.

That dark red candidate zone, over eight hundred meters wide, finally shrank into a definite node.

[OR-MAINT-NE73]

The road was underground.

In April of the 23rd year, Jiang Lin entered OR-MAINT-NE73 in person for the first time.

The identification number of that unmanned maintenance vehicle was:

[OR-MV-073-04]

The vehicle was close to being scrapped.

[Traction Energy Storage Health: 4.7%]

[No. 1 Brake Actuator: Locked]

[No. 3 Wheelset Temperature Sensor: Failed]

[Cooling Circuit: Insufficient Pressure]

[Continuous Operating Distance: Less than 900m]

It could not finish the 12.6 kilometers.

But on the equipment identity page, a set of statuses still remained green.

[Maintenance Unit Identity: Valid]

[Revocation Record: None]

[Offline Recovery Eligibility: Reserved]

[Security Unit Response: Normal]

The PMCU-17 could only read partial statuses of the outer ring.

The NE-73 dispatch node could only control the local area.

Neither of them had the permission to open the TM-7 shell maintenance port.

However, this vehicle belonged to the TM-7 native maintenance system.

Even if traction, braking, and cooling all failed, it was still a faulty maintenance unit waiting to return to its team.

The vehicle itself was the credential to enter the maintenance port.

Jiang Lin compressed the repair targets into five items.

Traction.

Braking.

Communication.

Basic safety control.

Native identity unit.

Over the next year or so, OR-MAINT-NE73 became the second workshop outside the Outpost.

Jiang Lin rode an electric motorcycle back and forth to Northeast Seventy-Three, transporting battery modules, pump assemblies, cables, metal profiles, and machined parts into the underground in batches.

The first external boost unit triggered protection within 0.4 seconds.

The second set successfully established the bus voltage, but the locked brake wheels dragged a white mark across the track surface.

Jiang Lin dismantled the brake actuator, replaced the solidified lubricating material, remade the seal rings, and ground the worn rollers one by one.

On the nineteenth reassembly, the brakes fully released.

The external cooling loop retained the original cold plate, replacing only the pump assembly, pressure feedback, and isolation pipelines.

When the No. 3 wheelset lost its temperature sensor, G-Explorer-C carried an external infrared module to monitor it alongside the vehicle.

The first long-distance test failed at 420 meters.

The external energy storage responded to the power required by the original traction controller seventeen milliseconds slower.

Jiang Lin did not modify the vehicle's control core.

He added predictive compensation on the power supply side, allowing the original system to continue seeing the familiar bus response.

Three kilometers.

Five kilometers.

Ten point four kilometers.

By June of the 24th year, OR-MV-073-04 finally completed the NE-73 track round-trip test.

[Traction: Restored]

[Braking: Restored]

[Local Communication: Restored]

[External Energy Storage: Temporary Engineering Status]

[Native Identity Unit: Unmodified]

[Permitted Task: Single Offline Recovery Verification]

While repairing the maintenance vehicle, Jiang Lin also used in-wheel motors, independent battery packs, and Outpost inventory profiles brought from the Real World to build a foldable dual-track electric drive platform.

It did not connect to OR-MAINT-NE73, nor did it call any control interfaces of the maintenance vehicle, accepting only local manual commands.

During the full-load test, carrying Jiang Lin, G-Explorer-C, and necessary support supplies, it drove continuously for over thirty kilometers on the NE-73 track.

Once OR-MV-073-04 was recovered, detained, or incapacitated by TM-7, this platform would be responsible for the return trip.

The maintenance vehicle originally had no cockpit.

Using aluminum alloy profiles, old dampers, and wear-resistant cushions from the Outpost's inventory, Jiang Lin built a low seat at the front of the cargo platform.

Beside the seat was a manual power cut-off lever.

At his feet were an independent air cylinder, an emergency communicator, and a set of mechanical braking devices.

Secured at the rear of the cargo platform were G-Explorer-C, four communication relays, traction wheel clamps, folding bridge plates, support supplies, and environmental recording boxes.

The foldable dual-track electric drive platform that had completed the full-load test was secured at the very end of the cargo platform.

It used an independent battery and controller with a rated range of thirty-eight kilometers, and did not connect to any unknown networks.

If the maintenance vehicle was recovered by TM-7, this platform would be responsible for bringing Jiang Lin and G-Explorer-C back.

June 29th of the 24th year.

OR-MV-073-04 called the native offline recovery template.

Battery degradation, brake lockup, sensor failure, and task interruption records were realigned by MPS-FaultLedger.

The application was signed by the vehicle's own security unit.

[Origin: OR-MAINT-NE73]

[Destination: TM-7 Shell Maintenance Port]

[Route Distance: 12.6 km]

[Task Nature: Faulty Unit Offline Recovery]

The amber indicator light lit up.

The contactor closed.

Three maintenance lights on both sides of the track turned green one by one.

The unmanned maintenance vehicle drove into the darkness.

The first isolation door opened normally by the NE-73 node.

The second door was jammed by a deformed guard plate.

Jiang Lin and G-Explorer-C used two jacks to relieve the stress, moved the guard plate outward by four centimeters, and the vehicle slowly passed underneath with less than ten centimeters of top clearance.

Behind the third door, the track settled.

The left rail was raised by thirteen centimeters, and the right rail was offset outward by six centimeters.

Jiang Lin laid down the folding bridge plates and changed the six sets of wheel frames to pass through section by section at low speed.

The maintenance vehicle advanced only five centimeters each time.

Twenty-seven minutes later, the last set of wheel frames crossed the deformed section.

After ten kilometers, the direct communication of NE-73 completely disappeared.

Messages could only be forwarded step by step through relays along the way.

Twelve point four kilometers.

The passage began to widen.

The walls receded to both sides, and the top disappeared beyond the illumination range.

The last two hundred meters were a straight section of track.

At the end of the track stood a giant black wall with a gentle arc.

Embedded right in the center was a twelve-meter-wide maintenance port door.

TM-7 Shell Maintenance Port.

Jiang Lin successively submitted the PMCU-17 shadow handshake and the NE-73 regional identity.

[External Maintenance Node: Insufficient Identity]

[Regional Scheduling Authority: Not Applicable]

[Request Denied]

The port had electricity.

The system was still running as well.

It did not accept external identities.

Jiang Lin closed the isolation probe and switched OR-MV-073-04 into the offline recovery state.

The vehicle security unit read its own fault ledger.

The amber indicator light flashed three times consecutively.

[Maintenance Unit: OR-MV-073-04]

[Task Status: Interrupted]

[Remote Scheduling: Long-term Lost Contact]

[Fault Records: Traceable]

[Application Type: Native Offline Recovery]

Application submitted.

Twenty-seven seconds later, a low-frequency vibration came from beneath the track.

Two sets of inspection arms rose from the ground.

One set scanned the vehicle body number.

The other set contacted the hardware identity interface at the rear of the vehicle.

A hardware response that could not be replicated by ordinary communication was sent into the TM-7 shell.

[Maintenance Unit Identity: Confirmed]

[Offline Recovery Program: Initiated]

The inspection program did not end there.

The scanning range continued past the vehicle shell, covering Jiang Lin, G-Explorer-C, and all external devices on the cargo platform.

[External Accompanying Individual: 1]

[Identity: Unregistered]

[External Accompanying Device: 1]

[Device Identity: Unregistered]

[Permitted Activity Range: Recovery Platform]

[Deep Transit Permission: Closed]

[Unknown Interface Write Permission: Closed]

The system first closed the rear passage, extracted the air around the vehicle through an independent sampling port, and completed external pollution checks and pressure balancing on both sides.

Eleven minutes later, a thin slit appeared in the center of the twelve-meter-wide port door.

Clean, dry air flowed slowly out from the pressure-balanced door gap.

The port door continued to recede to both sides.

The darkness was sliced open by illumination.

A recovery platform over forty meters wide appeared at the end of the track.

Mechanical interfaces of various sizes were arranged along the edge of the platform.

Overhead hoisting equipment hung in mid-air, with no obvious corrosion visible on its surface.

Further away, a silver-gray arc-shaped structure rose from beneath the platform, crossed the boundary of illumination, and continued extending into the darkness.

Its surface was densely arranged with maintenance hatches, sealed interfaces, and pipeline covers.

Deeper within it, another vague arc-shaped outline could be seen.

Laser ranging reached the upper limit of its range, yet still could not find the top.

[Deep Arc-shaped Structure: Nature Unknown]

[Deep Transit Permission: Closed]

Jiang Lin did not continue applying for permission.

G-Explorer-C first sent two environmental recording boxes into the port.

Temperature, air pressure, gas composition, and radiation readings remained stable.

OR-MV-073-04 subsequently crossed the threshold.

When the wheelsets entered the maintenance port track, the guide lights on both sides lit up simultaneously.

The inspection light strips on the silver-gray arc surface awakened step by step, climbed upward along the arc-shaped structure, and finally disappeared into the dark heights.

The maintenance vehicle parked in the recovery position.

Two sets of fixing arms rose from beneath the platform to lock the vehicle body in place.

That amber indicator light, which flashed once every forty-seven seconds, changed its rhythm for the first time.

[Recovery Complete]

[Awaiting Inspection]

Jiang Lin opened the TM-7 access precondition checklist.

[Outer Ring Common Signal Source: Confirmed]

[Physical Entry Route: Confirmed]

[Shell Maintenance Port: Entered]

[Deep Structure Nature: Unknown]

[Deep Transit Permission: Closed]

The first three items were completed in turn.

Mechanical running sounds came from deep within the recovery platform.

A closed lifting structure descended slowly from the darkness.

[Faulty Unit Pending Inspection: 1]

[Reading Local Fault History]

[Inspection Task Generating]

The maintenance port was preparing to repair OR-MV-073-04.

Jiang Lin had originally removed the folding track platform at the end of the cargo platform.

However, a set of statuses lit up again above the recovery position.

[Inspection Target: OR-MV-073-04]

[Fault Domain: Traction / Braking / Energy Storage / Cooling]

[Maintenance Data Scope: Local Equipment and Recovery Platform]

[Deep System Data: Inaccessible]

The next second, a new index appeared in the vehicle's local maintenance interface.

[RING-3_LOCAL_THERMAL_SERVICE_PACKAGE]

The data package served only this inspection.

It did not open the TM-7 main array, nor did it provide the complete design drawings of the outer ring cooling network.

The readable content covered only OR-MV-073-04, the recovery platform, and nearby cooling branches.

Vehicle cold plate interface.

External energy storage thermal budget.

Traction module allowable temperature rise.

Recovery platform branch pressure.

Phase change buffer unit remaining capacity.

Fault branch isolation sequence.

And how the platform redistributed cooling capacity among different equipment after the inspection task began.

Jiang Lin stopped his actions.

He sent the data package into the isolation terminal.

The first status table unfolded.

[Equipment Thermal Load: 37%]

[Local Branch Flow Margin: 61%]

[Phase Change Buffer Remaining Capacity: 82%]

[Expected Inspection Cumulative Thermal Load: 14.7 MJ]

[Branch Bearable Cumulative Thermal Load: 19.3 MJ]

[Permitted Task: Execute]

The second status table belonged to the recovery platform.

OR-MV-073-04 occupied only a very small portion of the platform's cooling capacity.

The remaining interfaces had no equipment.

Yet the inspection system did not simply shut down idle branches.

It registered all the remaining heat absorption capacities of those branches into a constantly changing resource table.

[BRANCH-01: Available Thermal Capacity]

[BRANCH-02: Recovering]

[BRANCH-03: Isolated]

[PHASE-BUFFER-04: Takeover Permitted]

When the traction controller of OR-MV-073-04 entered diagnostic load, the temperature rise slope of the first branch began to rise.

The platform did not wait for the temperature to cross the line.

The third branch exited standby mode early.

The phase change buffer unit took over the short-term thermal peak.

Another set of maintenance interfaces that originally had no tasks was temporarily designated as a heat release path.

Throughout the process, the inspection system did not change the maintenance target.

What changed were the paths available for heat to use.

Jiang Lin placed these states side by side on the screen with the old fields in the PMCU-17 cache.

[THERMAL_PHASE_BYPASS]

[RING-3 COOLANT STATE]

[CAPILLARY PRESSURE DROP]

[OUTER LOOP OVERLOAD]

In the past, he could only confirm from fractured flakes and incomplete logs that the TM-7 outer ring possessed heat flow redistribution capabilities.

Thus, MPS-HeatRouter was born.

What it solved was where heat should be directed after a local thermal abnormality occurred inside a machine.

The service package before his eyes demonstrated another layer of structure.

How much thermal margin a piece of equipment still had.

How much heat a cooling branch could still swallow.

How long the phase change buffer needed to recover.

Where the next section of computational load would generate a thermal peak.

After a certain branch failed, which tasks must be downscaled, which tasks could be migrated, and which checkpoints must be saved in advance.

These data were placed in the same resource table.

Computing power had a margin.

VRAM had a margin.

Power supply had a margin.

In the TM-7 scheduling system, how much heat a cooling branch could still absorb was likewise a resource that could be consumed, recovered, and redistributed.

Jiang Lin looked toward the depths of the maintenance port.

Large areas of structure were still in darkness there.

Deep permissions were not opened.

The data that the local service package could provide was also very limited.

Yet it had filled in a piece previously missing from MPS-HeatRouter.

Heat flow routing could only tell the system where heat could go.

The new method also had to answer:

When it needed to go.

Which task it should make way for.

How much longer a branch could support.

After a branch failed, how computational tasks retreated along with the heat.

Jiang Lin created a new project directory in the isolation terminal.

[MPS-ThermalFabric_v0.1]

[Chinese Name: MPS Thermal Fabric]

Layer One.

[Internal Thermal Buffering of Equipment]

Layer Two.

[Cooling Branch Thermal Capacity Ledger]

Layer Three.

[Joint Scheduling of Computing Tasks and Cooling Capacity]

Layer Four.

[Branch Fault Isolation and Task Migration]

He did not copy future material parameters.

He did not copy TM-7's high-pressure phase change medium.

Those microchannels, capillary structures, and phase change materials could not be manufactured by the Real World for the time being.

What could truly be brought back was how this system understood heat.

Jiang Lin wrote the first reality constraint under the project objectives.

[Only use materials and components that can be procured, processed, and maintained long-term in 2022.]

Second.

[Adapt to the 170HX heterogeneous computing cluster.]

Third.

[Objective: When a single cooling branch fails, tasks can be downscaled, migrated, and rolled back.]

On the recovery platform, the inspection program for OR-MV-073-04 had already begun.

The pump assemblies hummed lowly.

Branch pressures were redistributed.

Amber indicator lights lit up sequentially along the vehicle shell.

Jiang Lin did not continue applying for deeper permissions.

What this door handed over was already enough.

That batch of mining cards allowed Jiang Lin to piece together the computing resources required for Real World adaptation.

MPS Thermal Fabric would answer how these computing powers could operate long-term within power supply, heat dissipation, and fault boundaries.

He started the folding track platform.

The electric drive wheels slowly pressed onto the return track.

The maintenance port light strips behind him were still lighting up section by section on the silver-gray arc surface.

On Jiang Lin's terminal screen, the new project status stopped at the first line.

[Current Status: Architecture established, reality dimensionality reduction pending verification]