Chapter 8 Chapter VII

This planet won't be around for long. Daedalus Alpha was once a vibrant green planet, but now it looks more like a half-melted fudge.The biosphere that originally covered the surface of the planet no longer exists, and orange-yellow magma and bright red iron-nickel matter continue to pour out from cracks and craters all over the remaining crustal surface, like blood flowing from a wound.The atmosphere, dominated by nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, is rapidly being lost, while the oceans, without the protection of the atmosphere, have frozen into ice-blue crystals.In the northern hemisphere of the planet, most of the crust and mantle materials no longer exist, and the remaining star matter is splitting and disappearing at a speed visible to the naked eye, as if being gradually swallowed by an invisible giant mouth.

A silvery sphere less than ten kilometers in diameter hovered above the dying planet's wound—no, it wasn't really here at all.Except for a layer of ultra-high-density shell in a neutron degenerate state, most of its matter has nearly infinite quantum states at the same time, and it exists not only here, but also in countless timelines where it may exist above; each particle that constitutes it exists in the three-dimensional space inside the sphere, but not completely exists here.Every second, more planetary matter is poured into space dismembered into elementary particles, which are then transformed into the computing power of this vast quantum system containing millions of consciousnesses.

It is Ronan, it is Hanbi, it is Ralph Trent, it is Buck, it is Ronan's elite marines, it is the many saints who live in the "sanctuary", and it is those who have been sleeping for thousands of years. The "soul" of the universe is every intelligent life that once lived on Daedalus α.It is the great embers after the nirvana of two civilizations, and it is an organism that can expand computing power and intelligence almost infinitely.It exists for one purpose only: to solve a problem that could never be solved otherwise. The "Pulse" problem is theoretically solvable, but the computing power and intelligence required to solve this problem far exceeds the limit that all civilizations can achieve during the interval between two "Pulse".In the previous life of the Quinn civilization, they had already realized this and formulated corresponding countermeasures—but it was also clear that even so, what it got was only a glimmer of hope, a little uncertainty.This is a gamble that has been kicked off 80,000 years ago, and the bet is every soul in this universe.What is the chance of winning?It has absolutely no answer to this question.

When the core of Daedalus α was finally exposed to the universe, it stopped thinking about this problem—it has been delayed for a full eighty thousand years, and now, every qubit is very important to it, No point should be wasted on such pointless questions.All it has to do is expand, calculate, expand, calculate again, until this hiatus ends in three million Earth years. At that point, it will discover the answer to that question for itself.