novelhk Chapter 53 Wet Components
Chapter 53 Wet Components
After leaving Saibanus, the Black Pearl plunged into the subspace.
Liu En sat in a chair in his private workshop, his eyes half-closed. A field of energy flowed slowly around him, like an invisible layer of mercury, seeping through the hull and reaching the churning chaos outside. The things in the subspace—those particles that were indistinguishable as matter or something else—were decomposed, absorbed, and stored as soon as they entered his perception range. The reserves of universal atoms in his warehouse were increasing, at a much faster rate than a few months ago.
While maintaining the field, he focused his attention on higher-dimensional space.
The blueprint for the Dead Core hung there, like a disassembled precision clock. He had completely dismantled the processor beneath Dulob Sand, breaking it down into atoms, into data. All that data was there: the arrangement of logic gates, the branches of the decision tree, the topology of the bus. He didn't rebuild the machine. He didn't want to create a living AI. That thing had lain underground for millennia, licked by the whispers of the warp, growing a layer that shouldn't have been there. He isolated that layer in a corner of the database, refusing to touch it.
All he wanted was its skeleton.
The Imperial standard Thinker array is too rigid. IF-THEN, it follows a single path relentlessly. It gets stuck on ambiguous instructions, waiting for someone to type them in. The Dead Core, however, is different—it can choose its own path, handle multiple threads simultaneously, and adjust its strategy on the fly. This isn't magic; it's a victory of its underlying architecture. The data bus is multi-channel with conflict detection, allowing for rerouting if one is blocked. The storage is lattice-based, allowing access to related nodes from a single node, eliminating the need to navigate through directories one by one.
These are exactly the things Liu En needs. By integrating them into Galos's computing hub, he won't need to personally issue commands for every single one of the millions of machine servants.
Saibanus's resupply was interrupted for only two days. The crew went ashore for some fresh air, and the veterans of the garrison washed the sand off their power armor before returning to the ship. Kara drew up a new watch list, and Phyllis checked the supply inventory. The Black Pearl didn't stay long and went back into warp space.
The Thinker Array on the Black Pearl isn't exactly high-end. Back in Lucis, he pieced together its blueprints bit by bit from scrap heaps and maintenance missions. It wasn't a military model; it was just standard equipment found all over the world. But through his repeated improvements, its computing power now far exceeds the standard configuration. The lattice is denser, and the latency is lower.
But Garros's appetite was too great. Millions of servants, tens of thousands of mission nodes. Even if the Black Pearl's array were increased thousands of times, it still wouldn't be enough. He needed a much larger scale of wet cores—not the low-level servant wet cores with their decision-making limits welded shut by doctrine, those things were safe but clumsy. Nor was it a complete self-awareness like a dead core, that thing had been standing on the edge of awakening for thousands of years, just one step away from becoming a demon.
What he needs is something in between.
Andros Project.
This thing was hidden in Marcus Ambrose's promotion file. Marcus himself was its product—an embryo selected from Voss's servitude assembly line, infused with a complete thought model in a nutrient tank. He wasn't taught; he was a thinker deliberately cultivated. The technical path of that project wasn't weapon blueprints, nor production line plans; it was directly modifying the developmental blueprint of the nervous system.
From hundreds of thousands of embryos, only a dozen or so were selected. The rest were either destroyed or transformed into mech servants. Voss's requirements were too demanding; they wanted a super brain, one in ten thousand. But Liu En didn't need to be one in ten thousand. His requirements were infinitely lower. He didn't need a complete body, nor self-awareness. He only needed a brain with complete thinking abilities but that would never ask "Who am I?", to work in nutrient solution until it was worn out.
He stood up from his chair, walked to the workbench, sat down, replaced a data board, and pulled up the expansion plan for the Garros computing hub. He had revised that plan many times—from centralized to distributed, adding redundancy to the data bus, and changing the coupling method between wet components and electronics.
Now he's incorporated the decision-making framework from the Dead Silence Core. The branching model replaced the rigid priority scheduling, lattice storage optimized the data indexing, and dynamic preemption logic replaced the fixed queue.
The blueprint split and reassembled in his mind. A new array gradually took shape: starting with a few thousand wet cores, eventually reaching millions. The decision-making architecture came from the dead core, the thinking ability from the Andros Project, and the computing power allocation from his own improvements.
The cultivation parameters for the first batch of wet component cores have been finalized. The cultivation cycle, the nutrient solution formula, the data infusion window—all the technical details are in his mind. He closed his eyes, his consciousness withdrawing from his body and flowing into Enpu's body through a higher-dimensional anchor.
In Garros, the foundation for the dome was still being dug. The first batch of engineering servants had been off the production line for some time, with new models emerging daily. Currently, tens of thousands of servants were busy throughout Garros, and the numbers were still rising. He stood beneath the dome of the underground computing hub, dozens of rows of Thinker mainframes' standby lights forming a dark red vein in the darkness. He turned and walked deeper into the passageway. The field moved with him, and the atoms of the rock strata quietly unfolded in his perception.
The new underground space had already been marked with its coordinates. Not far from the computing hub, right next to the energy heart. A three-kilometer-diameter dome, its fine gold framework rising one by one from the rock strata, with ceramic steel lining filling and shaping the framework. Hundreds of supporting columns stretched from the ground to the dome, flanges aligned perfectly with the bolt holes in the floor. Lighting panels were embedded in the dome, filling the entire space with cool white light.
In the center of the dome, rows of cylindrical glass nutrient tanks rise from the ground. These aren't the production line tanks; they are specially designed wet-component culture units. They are lined with multiple layers of composite material, and the outer shell is transparent ceramic steel. The bottom of each tank connects to a nutrient solution circulation port, and the top is a closable, sealed cover housing data perfusion electrodes and physiological monitoring probes. Tens of thousands of these nutrient tanks are arranged in rows, occupying most of the cavity. Below is a small, independent plasma reactor and a set of Thinker auxiliary arrays.
Enpu gazed at the nutrient tanks neatly arranged under the light. He scanned them—the material, structure, and interface specifications all met expectations. The cultivation cycle would take two months, after which there would be tens of thousands of wet components. If half of them were合格 (qualified/compliant), it would be considered a success.
Consciousness was withdrawn, returning to the private workshop on the Black Pearl.
Liu En leaned back in his chair, eyes closed. There was still a long journey to the derelict spaceship. The wet components in those incubation tanks needed another two months to mature. Tens of thousands of brains, tens of thousands of new computing nodes, tens of thousands of systems capable of autonomous decision-making and adaptive scheduling. This was Galos's first step in truly surpassing the Empire in forging a world—not because of computing power, but because each of those tens of thousands of brains possessed complete human thought abilities, yet would never develop self-awareness. Not because they were locked in, but because that ability had never developed from the very beginning.
The architecture of the Dead Core has been disassembled and grafted into a new array blueprint.
Marcus wrote at the end of the file: "Thinking is the only thing that can make one forget the passage of time."
He shut down all the indexes of higher-dimensional space, sinking himself into a semi-dormant state. The purple light curtain outside the window surged behind the glass, while the force field of the void shield operated steadily around the ship's hull. The ship's vibrations were gentle, like the breathing of some behemoth. The field maintained a minimum level of spontaneous operation, with omnipotent atoms continuously flowing into the warehouse, decomposing, archiving, and storing.