195: Chapter 195 A Civilization with Only One Version

The last day of the sixth month.

Northeast Seventy-Three Maintenance Well, thirty-seven meters underground.

The heavy isolation door had only retreated twenty-four millimeters.

The sound of gears inside the door frame then stopped.

G-Explorer-C stood guard on the north side of the door, its six mechanical feet pressing against the ground, the low-power status lights on its body flickering on and off.

A maintenance power line passed through the gap at the bottom of the door, connecting to its belly.

Over the past six months, it had relied on the meager power provided by the OR-MV-073-04 maintenance port to maintain its dormancy.

The joint lubrication status had dropped to yellow, two sampling points of the right rear foot pressure array were lost, and a long scratch scraped from when it squeezed through the gap back then still remained beneath its belly.

An extra line of status appeared on the portable terminal in front of Jiang Lin.

[Channel Unlocked: Complete]

Twenty-four millimeters—not even a single toolbox could be passed through.

This underground system was only responsible for retracting the latch bolts.

As for how crooked the isolation door had become under the collapse and compression, it evidently didn't fall under the jurisdiction of [Unlock].

Jiang Lin recalled the structural scan.

The load borne by the upper part of the door panel had no significant change, but the three sets of locking teeth in the lower left corner had all disengaged.

Six months ago, the door also served as half a load-bearing wall, and any cutting would trigger the isolation program of OR-MV-073-04.

Now he could at least move it without first arguing with a futuristic maintenance system about who understood this door better.

After the hydraulic support frame propped against the door frame, he dismantled the most severely deformed lower guide rail and stuffed two thin hydraulic jacks into the newly released gap.

G-Explorer-C tightened the aramid rope on the other side, and every time the door panel moved five millimeters, Jiang Lin would stop to re-measure the upper strain.

Three hours later, the widest part of the gap reached sixty-one centimeters.

This still could not be counted as opening the door; it was only enough for a person to take off their backpack and sidle past between the door frame and the rock wall.

Jiang Lin first pushed the storage box, independent power supply, and one-way optical shutter one by one to the north side, and finally crawled through the door gap.

When his clothes brushed against the door panel, a layer of rust dust fell into the back of his neck, drilling all the way down his spine.

G-Explorer-C yielded half a step backward.

Jiang Lin turned up the brightness of his headlamp and saw the footprints behind it.

Six months ago, this machine squeezed in from under the door, completing the maintenance port access, signal monitoring, and relay deployment alone in the darkness.

Since then, every forty-seven seconds, it sent that unanswered request back to the Outpost.

There was no wind or water current blowing the fine dust behind the door, and the six rows of footprints extended from the twisted door frame all the way to OR-MV-073-04, their edges still maintaining their shape from back then.

Jiang Lin switched the right rear foot of G-Explorer-C into degraded mode and redistributed the foot-end weights.

The maintenance power line withdrew from the belly, and the interface sealing cap was refastened.

Six months of low-power trickle charging kept the battery at ninety-four percent, enough to walk through this section of the road and enough to retreat back along the original route.

"Let's go."

The robot turned its body and headed north along its old footprints.

OR-MV-073-04 remained on the south side of the isolation door.

When Jiang Lin came over, the dark red indicator light beside the maintenance port that had been lit for six months had turned green, and the custody credentials and complete route map had also been written into the disposable controller.

After crossing the isolation door, the northward route on the map finally changed from gray to a readable state.

Three point seven kilometers, nine failed maintenance zones.

The red line in the map passed through the fractured cooling branch, two unlit equipment corridors, and a non-functioning vertical transfer shaft.

Nine gray diagonal stripes marked the locations where the old route was broken.

Jiang Lin's task had shrunk to one thing.

Bring the receiver to OUTER CACHE-07, keep the facilities along the way as they were, and bypass them whenever possible.

Jiang Lin turned off [Original Path Priority] on the map and changed the transit destination to [Arrival].

The first eighteen hundred meters thus saved most of the repair work.

The collapsed air duct did not need to be lifted back to its original position; G-Explorer-C found a low-profile passage from beneath the support.

The equipment corridor where the accumulated water flooded over the ankles didn't need to be drained either; after passing the insulation test, the man and machine waded across along the edge of the maintenance platform.

The automatic door of the third failure zone was already jammed together with the wall, but the cable hole next to it was enough to dismantle the outer frame and detour from the old wire trough.

They spent eleven hours crossing the first five gray areas.

The knees of Jiang Lin's protective suit were stained with mud and water, and the towing box containing the 8TiB storage array knocked out white marks in the lime and rust debris.

The system guide lights remained lit ahead, very low in brightness, appearing every twenty-odd meters, like someone used a box of low-power red thumbtacks to nail three point seven kilometers into the underground.

The sixth failure zone was located at 2.41 kilometers.

Here, it ironically looked the most like an intact road.

The roof plate had not collapsed, the bundle of tubes on the wall was still fixed in the supports, the ground was flat, and only a thin layer of ash had accumulated.

Three dark red guide lights lit up sequentially straight ahead, and the route given by OUTER CACHE-07 passed straight through the center of the ground.

G-Explorer-C walked under the first light, its front right foot lifting seventeen centimeters and pausing in mid-air.

The foot-end contact diagram on the terminal changed rapidly.

[Forward Support Confidence: 0.62]

[Adjacent Foot-End Echo Difference: Out of Limit]

[Low-Frequency Echo: Multi-Layer Separation]

[Forward Command: Rejected]

The robot lowered its body, and the three feet on the left side spread outward.

The lifted front right foot retracted to its original landing point, and then moved sideways along the base of the wall onto a load-bearing rib exposed from the ground.

This was an action it had performed thousands of times on the thin-shell composite panels at the Outpost.

Switched to a real underground passage, the action was even slower than during testing.

With two fewer sampling points on its right rear foot, the margin it reserved for itself was also larger.

Jiang Lin stopped three meters away.

The red guide light still pointed straight ahead.

The route terminal had not updated either; the ground in the system was as intact as the layer of ash before his eyes.

He connected a safety rope from the wall anchor point and sent a low-frequency pickup to the front of the robot along the load-bearing rib.

The first impact echo returned at forty-three millimeters, but the second dropped all the way below seventeen meters.

There was no continuous structure between the two layers of signals capable of bearing weight.

Jiang Lin retreated inside the anchor point and drilled an eight-millimeter hole at the edge of the ground with an extended drill rod.

When the drill bit passed through the surface layer, the resistance suddenly disappeared.

A small pinch of ash that fell down the edge of the hole took a long time to hit the metal component below, and the sound bounced back from the depths, making it impossible to distinguish the landing point.

The fiber optic probe hung down along the drilled hole.

On the screen was first a concrete cross-section, followed by corroded steel bar ends.

Further down, the light illuminated a thick pipe obliquely inserted into the darkness.

The vertical transfer shaft originally located below the ground had collapsed entirely, and the passage only had a surface layer more than forty millimeters thick and local sediments, barely maintaining the appearance of a flat ground.

The light of the guide light fell on this thin shell, revealing a red dot the size of a pinhead from the drill hole.

Jiang Lin marked this section of the route as permanently prohibited, and wrote the previous echoes, drill hole positions, and G-Explorer-C's rejection records together into the field map.

The system accepted the map annotations, but the original red line still did not disappear.

What it preserved was the pre-cataclysm topology, and it was not responsible for proving whether the ground could still support people two hundred years later.

Behind the west wall was an abandoned cable maintenance corridor.

The entrance was blocked halfway by the tube bundles, and the internal width was only one point two meters, but the structural scan showed that it bypassed the transfer shaft along the continuous load-bearing ribs.

Jiang Lin removed the handles on both sides of the towing box, and G-Explorer-C folded its mechanical feet, squeezing into the cable corridor one after the other.

This detour added six hundred and eighty meters of walking distance.

When returning to the main channel, the red guide lights picked up from the other side of the fault beneath their feet.

The seventh and eighth failure zones only had numbers left on the wall, and the ninth was a branch road blocked by falling rocks.

The detour line had been marked by OUTER CACHE-07 itself, and Jiang Lin went down one level along the old maintenance ladder and climbed back to the main corridor from the other end.

When the odometer reached 4.42 kilometers, the remaining distance on the route map dropped to zero.

The end of the passage was just a low equipment chamber embedded in the bedrock, less than twenty meters long, with a roof plate only half a body height higher than Jiang Lin.

Six groups of grayish-black boxes were arranged along the wall, their outer shells showing no seams, and their surfaces covered with a thin layer of frost.

Five groups of cabinet units went completely dark, while the innermost group glowed with a dark red status band.

The identification plaque at the entrance had only half its power supply remaining.

[ OUTER CACHE-07 ]

[ Freezing Preservation ]

[ Valid Data Blocks: 0.7316 ]

[ Latest Full Audit: Unavailable ]

[ Pending Handover ]

Three point seven kilometers away, such a warehouse was waiting for Jiang Lin.

Out of the six groups of cabinet units, five had died, and the surviving group had lost about a quarter of its data.

The main array of civilization's spark was still distant, leaving before him only a cache rescued by the outer ring system.

Jiang Lin pushed the transport container beneath the status band.

The temperature here was only nine point three degrees Celsius.

Inside the cabinet units, an extremely low-power heat transfer was still migrating outward, and the long-downgraded freezing loop behind the wall sent it to OR-MV-073-04, after which the maintenance network searched for nodes capable of catching the heat.

Over the past six months, the eight water storage tanks, three loops, and four rows of phase-change thermal boxes outside the Outpost had caught the tentatively extended hand from this warehouse.

The maintenance port was hidden at the bottom of the cabinet unit.

G-Explorer-C cleared the frost and dust from the surface, and its probe read out four sets of interface definitions, three of which had already failed.

Jiang Lin fixed the unidirectional optical shutter in front of the only remaining functional optical port, dismantled the transmission module in the receiving equipment, and used a mechanical relay to separate the custody credential line from the data line.

Data could only flow from OUTER CACHE-07 to his storage array.

The custody credential could answer four preset states, and any out-of-range write would directly collide with the disconnected Physics interface.

He turned on the independent power supply.

The dark red status band on the cabinet unit lit up a small section from left to right.

The maintenance terminal first recognized the credentials forwarded by OR-MV-073-04, and then verified the three capabilities declared six months ago.

[ THERMAL CAPACITY: ACCEPTED ]

[ STORAGE CAPACITY: ACCEPTED ]

[ CUSTODY SCOPE: ISOLATED COPY ONLY ]

[ Local Custody Identity: Confirmed ]

[ Opening Scope: OUTER RECOVERY LAYER-0 ]

The eight hard drives of the storage array came online one by one, with their initial capacities all at zero.

The first batch of transmitted data was only nineteen point six megabytes.

Jiang Lin waited until the optical shutter was Physics disconnected before connecting the index disk to another terminal.

A dependency graph marked with damage filled the screen.

Millions of fine lines grew upward from the bottom layer, green nodes accounted for only about seventy percent, yellow nodes could be recovered through redundant blocks, and the remaining gray areas were permanently lost.

The primary directory was retained completely.

Metrology and calibration ranked at the very front, followed by material identification and processing, energy, water and public health, agriculture and food, basic medicine, engineering standards, communications, data preservation, and basic education.

High-density computing, deep-space observation, advanced materials, and large-scale orbital facilities were also in the directory, but most of the content stopped at higher dependency layers, and current custody permissions only opened up to names, dependency relationships, and damage status.

Jiang Lin clicked on the first green node.

Starting from the predicament where the original metrology chain was completely severed, the content of the first green node was very unpretentious.

How to regain a trusted ruler, a trusted scale, and a clock with clearly defined error boundaries.

The page first requested registration of the capabilities still locally available.

[ Sustainable Power ]

[ Repeatable Length Baseline ]

[ Mass Comparison Equipment ]

[ Basic Machining ]

[ Material Composition Analysis ]

[ Trained Maintenance Personnel ]

Jiang Lin filled them in item by item, and when it came to the final column, he entered the number 1.

The dependency graph re-contracted.

Paths requiring multi-person cross-operation, continuous chemical production, and a complete medical system were moved to the back, while paths that a single person could verify and shut down without destroying existing tools in case of failure were ranked to the front.

The first recommended content was the on-site calibration of a torque tool.

The terminal did not directly give a standard value.

It first asked to which level the existing weights could be traced, how the lever arm length was verified, whether the fulcrum friction could be measured independently, and how much the ambient temperature would drift during a single calibration.

Listed at the bottom of the page were seventeen common failures, among which the sixth was precisely using the same unverified measuring tool to simultaneously measure input and output, ultimately obtaining a result that looked mutually consistent.

Following each failure were observable symptoms, permissible conclusions, and the scope prohibited from extrapolation.

Jiang Lin flipped back a dozen pages.

Machine tool geometric accuracy, water quality treatment, low-grade stainless steel identification, sterile container verification, crop seed preservation, low-voltage DC network reconstruction...

Each item started from things still verifiable close at hand, first restoring measurement, then restoring processing, and only subsequently allowing the scale to be pushed upward.

The route did not require the user to believe the archives, but only required obtaining a set of independently verifiable results according to the methods left behind by it.

At the bottom of the index was a fully recoverable data packet.

[ CIVILIZATION RECOVERY KERNEL / LOW-DEPENDENCY ]

[ Logical Capacity: 612.4 GiB / Recoverable Completeness: 1.0000 ]

[ Original Records / Failure Witness / Dependency Tree: Included ]

[ Local Capability Mapping: Not Established ]

The final item was still [ Not Established ].

The archives could tell him what a certain technology depended on, but could not prove to him that the materials, equipment, and processes therein could be reproduced identically under the industrial conditions of 2022.

This debt had to be paid back by himself.

Jiang Lin chose to receive.

A very slight structural vibration emanated from within OUTER CACHE-07. Far away over seventy kilometers away, the first group of pumps in the Outpost isolation zone started simultaneously, and the thermal front entered the eight water storage tanks.

The temperature curve on the maintenance terminal rose by zero point four degrees Celsius, stopping within the declared range.

The data passed through the unidirectional optical shutter and was written into the array.

The initial speed was only seventeen megabytes per second. After the repair of defective blocks began, the speed once dropped to five megabytes, and the yellow area on the cabinet unit status band increased accordingly.

Twenty minutes later, the read scheduling avoided two groups of shards with excessively high error-correction burdens, and the speed stabilized at thirty-two megabytes per second.

Jiang Lin adjusted the terminal refresh interval to ten minutes and sat down against the outer wall of the equipment bay.

The compressed biscuits were hard enough to hurt his teeth in the low temperature. He broke off a piece, held it in his mouth, waited for it to fully absorb moisture, and then swallowed it slowly.

G-Explorer-C crouched beside the entrance to replenish power.

The two failed sampling points on the right hind foot still displayed as gray, and the rejection record of the front right foot had been sealed into the evidence chain of this mission.

It had walked across that thin shell illuminated by the red light and had also brought Jiang Lin here.

Now all six mechanical feet were retracted beneath the machine body, resembling an old device that had finally found an outlet.

Five hours later, the writing of the first batch of core files was completed.

Jiang Lin switched the array to a read-only snapshot and recalculated the shard roots using two sets of offline verifiers respectively.

The first set took forty-seven minutes, and the second set was nine minutes slower.

The two sets of results were consistent with the root verification delivered by OUTER CACHE-07.

He then randomly selected three recovery paths and unfolded the original records, dependencies, and failure witnesses layer by layer.

There were no broken chains between the files, and the underlying materials referenced were also all contained within the data packet.

The read-only snapshot was lifted, and the remaining shards continued to be written.

At ten thirty-seven in the morning of the next day, the capacity number of the receiving end exceeded 612.4 GiB.

After the final error-correction block landed on disk, the write lights of the eight hard drives went out simultaneously for two seconds, and then the second group of handed-over data began to enter the array.

The maintenance terminal updated its status.

[ CIVILIZATION RECOVERY KERNEL / LOW-DEPENDENCY ]

[ Integrity Verification: Passed ]

[ Handover Sequence Number 0001: Completed ]

[ Local Valid Replica: 1 ]