Chapter 254: Ice Age

Over there, Tang Er Ta is chatting with Fang Xiaoxiao.

Speaking of small talk, Tang Er, who had been the captain of the Heresy Handling Bureau, was always extra vigilant towards NPCs, or monsters, like Fang Xiaoxiao, whose movements were suspicious, and couldn't help but bring in a bit of a tortured tone in his words.

"How did you know we went to the Observatory, and saw another Fang Xiaoxiao?" Tang Er played a condescending interrogation, "I have a feeling you're getting pretty good at being dug up."

Fang Xiaoxiao didn't seem surprised that Tang Er hit to interrogate him, and just smiled miserably, "Because it's not the first time I've been dug up, and they monsters don't just want to test alien humans, but they want to test us humans on how we react to our in-group counterparts."

"In the early days when we were thrown in the ice chasm, these monsters hadn't filled the snow to bury us."

"They wanted to do a project on how humans could survive in a Jedi environment with limited resources, and they told us that over three days they would gradually fill the snow into the ice rift, and that during that time the humans who could grab resources to escape would be released, and those who couldn't would be permanently frozen."

He closed his eyes with great difficulty as he spoke, tears sliding down his face, "In order to mislead these monsters' perception of humans, and thus make them kill each other while simulating humans, tending towards extinction, we simulated a realistic scene of resource grabbing, brutally maiming each other."

Fang Xiaoxiao took a deep breath, his hands holding the cup couldn't help but tremble as he lowered his head to take a sip of the hot water, Tang Er hit notice that his teeth were full of congealed blood stains, as if he had torn into his prey.

"We ...... focused our resources on the youngest members of the team, let them escape, and three days later, we were buried by snowfill."

Fang Xiaoxiao's always melancholic expression could not hold back its hideousness as he said this, and he roared like a wounded beast making noises from its throat, hoarse and sad:

"We thought that was the end of their experiments! But we didn't realize that they had marked the young members of the team that had left, kept tabs on the young members, and then when the young members couldn't control their emotions and turned back to save us, the monsters took up a new interest in their research, and they misdirected them so that they went and dug up another ice rift!!!"

Fang Xiaoxiao was shivering all over:

"...... The things have set up a control control group, and they've got two monsters morphing into the likenesses of these young players who escaped to dig this ice chasm of ours, while inducing those young players to dig another ice chasm filled with monsters morphing into our likenesses... ..."

"They want to know in whether human victors are more likely to believe that the losers they save are of their own kind, or whether human losers are more likely to believe that the victors who save them are of their own kind ......"

Tang Er hit opened his mouth, he looked at Fang Xiaoxiao s numb look and couldn t help but soften his tone, "So ...... what are the test results?"

Fang Xiaoxiao's face was expressionless, except for an ugly, stiff smile at the corner of her mouth, and tears constantly streaming from her empty eyes:

"We identified [the winners] after we were dug up, but those kids didn't identify the [losers] they rescued, and after they lived with the monsters they rescued for two months and had sex with two of them, those two kids were brought to us to reveal the results."

"These kids went crazy, they killed themselves by pouring fuel oil on themselves, burning it and jumping into the strong acid."

"I know there's a Fang Xiaoxiao among the humanoid monsters they're modeling to deceive these children."

Tang Er hit a moment of silence and continued, "How are you sure that we who came to dig you up aren't monsters?"

Fang Xiaoxiao moved her eyes sluggishly for a moment and muttered, "You can't be monsters because these monsters only mimic humans that have already appeared, there's no way to mimic brand new humans, and I've never seen you guys in Antarctica."

"And they've tested our ability to tell if the [people] digging us up are of the same kind, and won't make a second or third effort at such things, and even if they do come to dig us up, it's usually in protoplasmic form, and they don't turn into people anymore."

Bai Liu, who was carrying out the excavation work over there, waved his hand, signaling Tang Er to call over.

Tang Er hit the concentration and looked at Fang Xiaoxiao who was sitting motionless on the sled for a long time, even if he knew that this graduate student was just an NPC, in the end he still patted his shoulder with some reluctance, "...... You rest well here, don't run around. "

After saying that, he jogged over to Bai Liu's side and truthfully reported what Fang Xiaoxiao had just told him.

Mu Sicheng could not stop his goose bumps and rubbed his arms furiously.

Bai Liu pondered, then revealed a smile that sent even more chills down Mu Sicheng's spine, "It seems the situation is a bit more complicated and interesting than we thought, I probably know what this Mr. Edmund is trying to do, but I still need to get in touch with Mu Ke over there to see if he's found anything like the old professor's diary to corroborate my suspicions. "

Mu Sicheng was a bit confused, "So we, still digging?"

"Dig." Bai Liu ordered dryly, smiling lightly, "Dig it all up and bring it back to Tarzan Station, and we'll all come together and face off to see who the monster really is."

Mu Sicheng : "!!!"

Edmund Observatory.

Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi dumped almost all the books and materials of the whole observatory, reading them one by one according to their names, leaving some light reading to Liu Jiayi, while some specialized deep reading tasks were undertaken by Mu Ke, and then handed over to Liu Jiayi for the integration of information after translation.

It's a good thing that graduate students live here at the Edmund Observatory, and there are a number of primers in the habitation pods that make it slightly easier for Mu Ke to look at the data from these experiments, barely having a toolkit to look up.

"Mainly specialized books on meteorology and biology, and quite a few sociology books." Mu Ke rummaged through the bookcase he'd dragged out of Edmund's living cabin, flipping through it quickly, briefly skimming the contents, mostly reading the annotations.

Then he suddenly gave a start, pondered for a moment then spoke, "It seems that this Prof. Edmund is very dissatisfied with the politics and authorities of Country A, writing such words in their country's recent history books about praising human rights and emancipation."

Liu Jiayi probed over and read, "-Parallel exploitation of labor is the primary human right of capital. (Note 1)."

Mu Ke flipped again, "It's here too, written next to the chronicle of the Bachata War, a battle that Country A waged with the other side's private development of biochemical weapons."

Liu Jiayi reads word for word: "-Order without freedom and freedom without order are equally destructive (Note 2)."

Mu Ke continued to rummage around the Observatory and found a private fax between Edmund and the Tarzan Observatory in a criminal records file in the archives room, wrapped in a yellow no-open seal that read: [Copy of Edmund's evidence of treason].

Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi looked at each other and tore off without hesitation.

The fax records inside are organized by date and are very straightforward.

October 1st:

You are right my friend, I have tested these body parts and it, or they, are indeed not to be used in any scientific research, they are ethically wrong, mentally tainted, and against my basic moral code as a human scientist.

I can see why it was sealed here, it really shouldn't be out there, and I'll try to convince the "bandits" who took your chests to return all three of them to you unharmed (well, maybe not unharmed).

You have done a dangerous and great thing, and in a hundred years, all mankind should honor you by carving you into a jie fang monument! (Last time you and I talked, your warrior honor roll is called a jie fang monument, right?)

Congratulations and happy founding of your country!

October 7th:

I apologize that I may not be able to return your boxes for a while.

It's a bit strange to say that this is the first time I've been forced to implement my own research on my own in my own.

The feeling now is that I have no sense of taste or warmth, I will suddenly fall comically when I walk, I have a little problem with balance because my cerebellum has been given a makeover (but before the makeover, falling was a regular thing for an old guy like me) Other than that it's fine, I have the feeling of turning into a baby Warm Whale, maybe I should go down to the sea and have a close kiss with a real baby Warm Whale right now?

After all, I'm no longer afraid of the cold, and I'm no longer human, so being a whale in the deep ocean might be a good choice for me.

Hey, I can quite enjoy the way they rub up and down on the rocks when they molt and get itchy, it's almost exactly the same as me, an old guy with no way to reach out and scratch my back rubbing around on the closet.

Don't worry about the case, they still need me to do research and I can always think of a way to return it to you.

October 17th:

Oh, my God. Are you guys intimidated by me?

The kid named Xiao Xiaofang was bawling his eyes out as he hugged my broken leg, and I remembered that he was studying meteorology and that I had supervised his thesis before.

I have to say that was a really bad paper, many parts of the image don't even have units in them, the formatting of the literature citation is riddled with errors and omissions, and I really don't know how the kid got into grad school and still made it to Antarctica (no offense to the kid's advisor for being a waterboy).

This time they drove a snowmobile and dragged me along by the neck in a leash to scrub away in the snow, it was just a punishment for yet another attempt to steal the box, or a daily test of my organism's ability to withstand the elements, after all, I was now the most successful of all the transformations, and a criminal, and there was no more exciting subject of experimentation for the group than I was - a tradition in our country.

Though in the end my limbs rolled off my body like rusty pennies, it was painless as it was already cold and stiff, so let the boy not cry for me.

The look on his face as he howls loudly while chasing my scattered legs and feet can be so sad to watch, he calls out to me teacher, God, I swear it's the most delightful thing I've heard in a month, and even though he's crying I can't help but smile from behind the snowmobile.

It's been a long time since anyone called me teacher after I was branded a criminal.

Don't worry about me, I'll figure out what to do about the case, the fax contact is still relatively secretive, and the paper makes these idiots think I won't be so bold, I'll let you know if I make any progress.

December 17th:

I think they found out I was secretly faxing you guys, so I had to suspend it for two months.

Well, maybe I was arrogant and underestimated the intelligence of the group, and faxing is indeed not safe.

This may be the last time I maintain my human will to send you a fax, my friends, please allow me, an old bone, to ramble on and on about my life, I hope you don't find me tiresome, after all, I just can't find anyone else to talk to.

I came to the South Pole thirty-three years ago, and at that time this observatory was not called Edmund's Observatory, I forget what it was called, but it was not as well known as Edmund.

The man who put me on the Polaris icebreaker was a veteran of the Peninsular War (he wasn't old at that time, but he looked so pale at that time that I always teased him about it).

He was one of my few friends.

After all, a nerd like me couldn't really find a second person who would talk to me in those adventurous gold rush days.

Fifteen years after my arrival in Antarctica, he left me for good because of his war-related disability and the embarrassment of his life, and then returned every penny of the yearly subsistence I had sent him (which he insisted was a loan) without moving a penny before he died.

The doctor told me that he gave up the treatment voluntarily because after the war he was always tormented by the pain and had all those bloody dreams, which is normal for many soldiers.

But I know it's not such a simple reason, my friend died because of another war.

His only reason for going to war was to end it.

He was taught, lied to, and used by public opinion and politics to go to war using justice and kindness, thinking that every stab he stabbed and every shot he fired was to save more ordinary people held hostage and hurt by war.

But he was also deeply aware that the people he was killing were just as innocent as he was, and it pained him so much that the only thing that could convince him to continue was the slogan of the time - let this be the last war we experience, let's put an end to this chaotic and unfair world.

He thought this was the end, but wars were being waged in a steady stream, and the day when the world he had hoped to see never seemed to arrive.

Until the war fifteen years ago, a brutal war of aggression initiated by a country he trusted, completely destroyed him, and he knew that what he had been doing was unjust.

is disgusting, filthy, and the ugliest thing like everything he hates.

He was just a politician whitewashed as an executioner, and he couldn't allow himself to live like that, so he told me, and he couldn't last.

I didn't know how to reply to him, I had always been all about reading, and the only brave thing I had done in my life was to run away from everything to come to Antarctica.

Many people in Antarctica stood up and held protests against the waging of this war in the bitter cold (Note 3), and I stood in the crowd with my hands shivering holding up the [NO WAR] display sign, looking up at the approaching polar night, the cold snow almost burying me.

All we could seem to do was protest, which of course ultimately didn't do much good.

As I was going through his suicide note, I saw that he wrote to me, [Antarctica must be nice, though bitterly cold, cold, and never sunny, there must be no war there, it's a pure land, I hope you don't bring your remembrance of me, of an ugly war/criminal, to this pure land to contaminate it].

But it wasn't really like that; the South Pole was as cold as he thought it would be, but not as pure as he thought it would be.

Everyone who comes to this pure land harbors the grandiose ideal of wanting to save humanity and alleviate the global crisis.

We have carefully recorded data, marked the skin of whales and the anklets of penguins, determined year after year that these creatures have declined in number to less than fifty percent of their original numbers with age, watched with apprehension as a thousand-foot glacier disappeared into the sea in an hour, and yelled at the high politicians at every meeting like an alarm clock on a clock. -hard climate, global warming, human crisis.

And they always give a careless and sleepy perfunctory listen, while righteously trotting them out on the next TV screen to pull the flag, while continuing to ambitiously plot one war at a time that can be contaminated on a large scale.

Inside or outside, it's not about right or wrong, it's about their tenure and personal interests.

I can guarantee that none of these guys can name the rise in average global temperatures over the last year.

You, my friend, may be tired of reading this and think I'm such a long-winded old man, but allow me to wearily, wearily continue to ramble on.

I was born in a country known for individual freedom and democracy, as if everyone's freedom of behavior could be respected.

Making sacrifices for the group is what individual heroes need to do, most people just need to spend their lives chasing their own interests to achieve.

But my friends, I know beyond any doubt, as do you, that man continues as a species, as a group, and that no species can pursue freedom in isolation, and that freedom will be meaningless when the group does not exist.

We're the only heroes who can't do it.

The group values we seek are not recognized in any way in our society, like the lone whale out of the group who sees an impending volcanic eruption, a tsunami, but can only warn the other whales of the impending disaster with an odd frequency that they cannot understand and do not care to listen to the exhortations of us strange whales.

They're going after the one sea fish in front of them, the clump of krill, volcanoes and tsunamis don't matter to them, that's for heroes.

It's like I'm living in Satow (note 4), a land of absurdity, entertainment to the point of death, and narrow-mindedness toward disintegration.

The Observatory's funding faced the possibility of another budget cut last year, simply because our current leaders do not believe in global warming and the greenhouse effect.

Many times I drift off into a trance where what I'm doing isn't some great work to save humanity, but is just a product of political maneuvering - just like my friends.

I envy you, my friends, that you are not alone in this battle, that your community knows the responsibility you bear and has not shied away from bearing it with you.

You are not [heroes], but [vanguards].

There was a bright, luminous country in the eyes of every young man who asked me for guidance at Tarzan Station, and how beautiful it was, the snow at the South Pole wasn't even that pristine, and it reminded me of the time my friend sent me aboard after watching Titanic, and he smiled and waved, and yelled, and didn't hit the icebergs, and watched out for the presence of my Ruth on the ship, and his eyes were that luminous.

Species go extinct eventually, and so do humans, my friend, and I'm sure you and I are incredibly sure of that, it's the destiny all living things are doomed to, just like humans are doomed to die eventually.

But it is up to us to decide when, where, and how we will perish.

I would like to see the future see us hugging and dying from the cold in the freezing cold, and I would hate to see the devastated ruins where the last two people on earth stick their spears into each other's hearts in a fight over their prey.

Forgive me, my friends, for choosing you in the midst of despair, and for doing to you what the arrogant God has done to mankind.

The corpse contains energy that can turn the world upside down, it's as if it was created for my desires and wishes, and when it's particleized it can have unprecedented meteorological and biological impacts, so instead of letting it fall into other people's hands, I'll be the one to write the endgame.

For the first time, I have used my knowledge in such a sinister way to cool the globe and extinguish the human race.

I might actually be crazy.

Still, I hid a hint of my insanity by researching creatures that could adapt to the situation, and then selecting you, adding your genes to their mix, and letting them test you, to see if you could be the ones to continue the Starfire.

Feel free to resent me, my friends, as I smoked my rifle as if I had lifted a vodka, and drove those in the house, paralyzed by my two months of obedience, into the freezing cold, ordering them not to take any clothes or food with them.

Funny enough, although I had endured all sorts of inhuman tortures from them, my request for the freedom to obtain a gun for self-defense was still honored up to this moment; asking for a gun was no big deal in the eyes of this group of people guarding me; after all, they didn't feel that I, a civilized scientist, had the courage to fight back, and so they graciously granted me the freedom to defend myself.

That's probably the only good thing that freedom has brought me, although that freedom breaks the rules of the Antarctic.

I held the gun next to the creatures I had taught to crouch according to the snow, waiting quietly with me for these humans to report in the snow and die as coldly as I wanted them to.

And I'm back in the room now writing this fax for you to put the final nail in the coffin of this ghastly plot I've been hatching since August 10th.

Soon, those creatures will reach your territory ......

(Addendum: I made sauerkraut according to your method, but it failed, God, your vegetable production is really harder than biochemical experiments, I was ready to make it ready for you as a strategic reserve for the cold winter, but I don't recommend you to take these two vats of sauerkraut for safety reasons.)

Your friend - Edmund.