Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 264 Mariner Canyon

Seven months later.

The moment the probe entered Mars' gravitational field, all the screens in the control center lit up simultaneously. Dozens of data streams were refreshing in parallel. The largest screen in the center displayed images of the Martian surface transmitted back by the lander. The northern rim of Mariner Canyon stretched across half of the Martian surface like a giant scar, its reddish rock walls etched with layers left by billions of years of weathering. The image began to descend from an altitude of four thousand meters, the canyon walls transitioning from blurry to sharp.

"Atmospheric inflow." The controller's voice rang out over the loudspeaker. His voice was flat, but the knuckles of his fingers gripping the microphone were prominent.

The surface temperature of the thermal protection system soared. 1200 degrees Celsius. 1800 degrees Celsius. 2100 degrees Celsius. The lander's outer shell was enveloped in a layer of incandescent plasma, and the signal was lost two seconds after entering the atmosphere. The entire control room fell silent. The waveforms on the screens turned into noise. The countdown timer began to tick—180 seconds. Three minutes of complete loss of contact. No one could do anything in those three minutes. The probe would either pass through the atmosphere on its own or become a meteor in the Martian sky.

Chen Hao stood behind the control panel, his hands gripping the table. Seven months had passed since he last held the armrests like this. Yu Ying sat at the data analysis table, her eyes fixed on the blank signal window. Zuo Cheng stood in the last row, in the exact same spot he had been in on launch day.

One hundred and twenty seconds. Ninety seconds. Sixty seconds. No one spoke. The instrument's cooling fan whirred. The countdown numbers ticked.

Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten seconds.

The signal is back.

The parachute deployed. The speed decreased from Mach 5 to subsonic. The heat shield separated. The lander's eight cameras simultaneously captured images of the Martian surface—orange-red rocks, wind-eroded dunes, and fissures left by dried-up ancient riverbeds. The retrorockets ignited at an altitude of thirty meters. The lander successfully touched down in a flat area on the northern rim of Mariner Canyon. The tilt angle was less than two degrees.

No one spoke in the control room for thirty seconds.

Then Chen Hao stood up. He shouted. Not any words. The exact same shout as seven months ago. Everyone shouted along. Some jumped up, some hugged the person next to them. Yu Ying covered her mouth, her eyes reddening. Zuo Cheng's lips twitched. A very slight curve.

The first Mars rover, Explorer 1, drove off the landing platform two hours after landing. Its target coordinates were a natural cave on the north wall of Mariner Canyon. The rover slowly advanced across the rugged rocky terrain at a speed of less than two meters per minute, its six titanium alloy wheels carving the first tracks on an extraterrestrial planet in the reddish sand.

The cave entrance appeared at 4 p.m. Martian time. Explorer 1 turned on its headlights and drove inside.

Symbols are carved on the cave walls.

Wholesale symbols. Exactly the same as those in the Taklamakan caves. Exactly the same as those in the Sahara ruins. The same writing system, the same arrangement pattern, the same depth of engravings. Yu Ying stood up from her seat and walked to the large screen. Her hand rested on the edge of the screen, her fingertips trembling slightly.

Deep within the cave lay a pedestal. Its shape was familiar—the same design as the one Chen Xinghe had touched in the Sahara ruins. Yu Ying visibly trembled when she saw it. She remembered something. Everyone present remembered something. That pedestal had sat silently in the Sahara ruins for four billion years; when Chen Xinghe placed his hand on it, it triggered a series of events. And today, in the caves of Mariner's Canyon on Mars, the same civilization had left behind a second pedestal.

The plate on the pedestal is not an inscription plate.

It is a metal cube.

It is approximately 20 centimeters on each side. The five sides are made of smooth alloy material, gleaming with a faint silver-blue sheen under the rover's lights. There is a groove on the sixth side. The groove is a precise rectangle, with its length and width proportions perfectly matching those of the NX series chips.

The system panel automatically popped up in Zuo Cheng's field of vision.

Origin Network Mars Node, Mariner Canyon Station, activated. Node Type: Data Relay Station. Function: Connects the Earth's node network with the outer solar system node network. Current Status: Semi-active, awaiting data extraction.

The rover's robotic arm carefully removed the cube. Specialized scanning equipment then performed a full-dimensional imaging of the cube. When the scan data was transmitted back to the control center, Yu Ying's breath hitched.

The cube isn't solid inside. It contains millions of nanoscale hexagonal units arranged in an extremely precise three-dimensional mesh. Each hexagon is less than fifty nanometers in diameter, and the mesh has over ten thousand layers. Yu Ying quickly ran a set of calculations on the computer next to her. Her fingers paused three times on the keyboard.

She looked up at Zuo Cheng.

"This is a holographic data storage device," she said softly. "Its storage density is about ten million times that of the most advanced solid-state drives. If all the data in this cube were read, its capacity would be roughly equivalent to one hundred Libraries of Congress."

The control room fell silent. Data from one hundred Libraries of Congress. All the information left behind by a civilization four billion years ago in a Martian canyon cave. Not a book. A library. A library hundreds of times older than the history of human civilization.

Yu Ying lowered her head again and continued analyzing the scanned data. Her finger slid across the touchpad, zooming in on a group of hexagonal cells. Then her finger stopped.

The hexagonal cells inside the cube are not arranged randomly. A repeating pattern appears at regular intervals. She zoomed in on one of the patterns and realized it wasn't a pattern at all.

It is a series of sentences written using a system of engraved symbols.

She ran the first translation using the cross-validation algorithm from Origin Decoding. When the translation appeared on the screen, her fingers hovered above the keyboard for a long time. Zuo Cheng walked over.

There is only one line of text on the screen.

"When you read this, please check if the Europa monitoring station on Earth is already operational. If not, press the sixth face of the cube. It will tell you how to activate it."

Zuo Cheng stared at that line of text for a long time. Europa. Europa. An icy moon in the solar system, hundreds of millions of kilometers away from Mars. The founding civilization prioritized activating it above all other information. What did this mean?

Yu Ying turned to look at him. Her eyes were bright.

"The Europa monitoring station," she said, "is not an ordinary node."

Zuo Cheng nodded. If the first sentence in a four-trillion-byte data set is a confirmation of whether a specific node is online, then that node is not an ordinary data relay.

It is the Sentinel. The only pair of eyes open in the entire solar system network. It waited four billion years. Waiting for a qualified civilization to knock on its door. The buffer period was shortened from fifty years to five.

Zuo Cheng shifted his gaze from the screen to the silvery-blue cube in the Martian image. One hundred Libraries of Congress. The first sentence was a warning. What were the remaining ninety-nine and a half Libraries of Congress containing?

He didn't know. But he did know one thing.

Europe must come first.