Chapter 10 Chapter 6 The Dream of Truth and Falsehood

Diana's mind was filled with electrical movement.Of course, this is true of all human brains.But her brain activity is much more complex than that of ordinary people.She was thinking: If there is a technology that can break through the laws of physics and achieve super-light speed, is it possible to break through one law of physics and other laws of physics at the same time?For example, long-distance transmission?During Tino's final rounds, Diana asked, "Dominique, am I safe here?" "Safe, Miss." Tino replied, "We will do our best to keep you safe." "What if the murderer can be teleported directly into my room?"

Tino looked puzzled, "But Miss—" he said, "No one can do that." "You're right," Diana said, sitting up a little on the gel bed, and it felt good: the gel lightened the load of gravity: "Is Iago out there?" "Of course, miss." "Let him in, and I'll say goodnight to him." Tino went out, and after a while, Iago came in.He stood by the bed, a posture of standing at attention. "Oh, sit down, Iago," reproached Diana. "You're just standing there to impress me—and I don't have any." "I would rather stand, miss," answered Iago.However, beads of sweat had already appeared on his forehead, and the muscles in his legs were trembling slightly as he tried to keep upright.

Pride, Diana thought, that's it.Well: she's not going to insist anyway. "I-a-gu-" Diana said slowly, "do you think the most notorious killer in the solar system will show up in my bedroom out of nowhere and kill me?" "No," answered Iago, in a grave tone. "Oh, come on, Iago. You heard Madam Joad too. You were there." "Still, I don't quite understand what that gentleman is supposed to be. More like a legend, I think." Diana smiled, "You're right, of course. It's all politics, isn't it? It's all about a power struggle between the MOH family and the company, isn't it? They want to scare us, I guess. Killing Eva and I will Harm the Argents to the benefit of our enemies, I suppose. By the same logic, there would be a small gain in terrorizing us. But jeez!—if you really want us dead, just take the whole city out of orbit. Wouldn't it be more convenient to blow up the island?"

"In that case—" Iago slightly shifted his weight between his legs, "it would be an act of war." "But what if you just want to go to war?" Diana said wearily, sliding deeply into the gel.It was a very real problem, she thought, but she was exhausted, sleepiness was beginning to take hold of her body, and even the most urgent worries failed to tighten the strings. "The basis of any family power is influence," said Iago. "If any of your enemies or any organization wants to uproot your family from Ulanov's ruling system, physical annihilation is not enough. Yes. It is necessary to occupy your position, which means they need your information. Without this, they cannot strengthen their power."

"Indeed," said Diana.Sleepiness strikes, hello, sleepiness! "This is just my understanding, miss." Iago continued, his tone hypnotic like a lullaby, "Of course I don't have much professional knowledge-but I remember that there is a lot of extremely valuable information stored in the structure of this house , destroying it destroys that information." "So——" Diana didn't pay attention, her attention had already drifted to one side, "is it reasonable to send a ninja killer to sneak in here and stab me in the heart and cut off Eva's head? Thoughts?" But these few words can only be regarded as murmurs.Iago made an ugly bow with trembling legs, turned and left the room, locking the door.

Diana fell asleep. She dreamed of a tree, a baobab tree that filled the entire solar system. According to the logic of the dream, the tree became a space for human activities, like a church in the Middle Ages or a stadium for the Martian Olympics.The tree is as high as the orbit of Saturn, and the detail on the trillions of leaves would baffle any artist who wishes to ink it on paper.All important people live in trees; great ancestors, various MOH families, corporations, executives, police, army, engineers...all are easily visible, all in the branches, like birds in trees same.But in her dream, Diana also saw that each leaf was a figure in a strange green costume, male and female; they had green barrel suits on their torsos and legs, and green cloak.There are trillions of such individuals, all clinging to their petioles and branches.Then, Diana noticed that there was a strong wind blowing, and everyone was rolling up and down. The countless poor people in the system were in danger of being blown away, so they held on so tightly.Of course, Diana knew that there could only be one kind of wind in this dream, and that was the solar wind.So she lowered her head and looked down the trunk, where the roots of the big tree rested on the sun.Of course, Diana thought: what else could it be?The sun still burns brightly, even though it is entwined with tree roots as thick as hundreds of Jupiters.The solar wind blows continuously from beneath the feet.As she observed, the matter of the sun changed again.The light began to fade, and gradually turned into blood red, the color of red pepper, and the color of lava.Someone was there, she squinted against the solar wind, looked again, looked again.There was a man there, huge, unbelievably big.She knows who it is.It couldn't have been anyone but Jack Glass himself; and Jack Glass was holding an ancient book, cradled to his chest.Jack Glass raised his head, looked at Diana, and spoke directly to Diana, even though Diana was hiding in the high branches.He didn't shout, he didn't scream, there was a vacuum around him - but Diana heard it very clearly.

"The sun is turning into a sea of ​​blood and glass," he said. "The roots of this tree are sucking the life out of the sun." "What is this tree?" cried Diana.But Jack Glass didn't answer, and the crimson gradually turned dark brown.The sun gradually solidified and cooled, turning the color of granite cooled by lava on the seabed. "By the time the sun's life is drained—" Jack Glass snarled suddenly, "the sun will die, the sun will die. Dying now!" "Trees can't die," Diana said. "Critical information is hidden in the branches. Confidential information is hidden in the tree."

"Too late," said Jack Glass.The sun became so dark that it was impossible to tell which part was the black sun and which part was the black roots; Diana knew that death was running up the branches and trunks, and that before long the trees would wither and turn to iron and soot.Jack Glass was still visible, standing among the tangled roots, but he stood out against the black background like a God in Eden.Eva wants to shout to the following: Who are you?Why do you want to kill me?What she most wanted to ask was: What is your book?But she knew that the contents of that book, written on pages of bleached animal hides, were all the secrets of FTL.The answers to the first two questions are also in the book.So, as the green leaves on the surrounding branches withered, she asked instead, "What is this tree?"

Diana woke up suddenly and opened her eyes.Someone was in the house, with her, but invisible.Immediately to the left, perhaps to the right, a voice whispered, "You are the tree." Diana screamed, trying to sit up and look around, but the gel made it harder.She ordered the lights to come on, then looked around. There was no one else in the house. The door panel lights up, and Tino appears in the doorway (hooded, as a sign of humility), asking if she's all right and if she needs help? Diana's heart beat like a leaf in the wind. "It's all right," she replied. "I'm all right. But now I see how Jack Glass managed to slip through so many security measures and get into my room without teleportation at all."

"Need me to stay, miss?" "No," Diana said, ordering the lights to be turned off, and sank back into bed again. "It's just a dream, just a dream." Eva is also dreaming. She didn't fall asleep right away.After eating dinner and praying, she checked her room on the first day, but she found that she was not very sleepy.It was a day full of events, and maybe it was Ms. Joad's visit that made her feel uneasy, or maybe it was just that there was an unresolved problem and the lack of data needed to solve it.This is also a problem for her.It didn't hurt her so much to die.If it was someone she knew, she might be upset; she wasn't a monster, but it had to be someone she cared about.But it was just someone she didn't know, and it would be dishonest to pretend that the death of someone she didn't know had an emotional impact on her.What she didn't like was the problem, the feeling that she couldn't solve the dilemma.This in turn prevented her from completing the research she was doing.

So, she connected to her virtual reality account, played for more than an hour, and then studied the abnormal supernova for a while.Her main theory has to do with Pauli's principle, which postulates that, in very improbable, and therefore extremely rare—but not impossible—physical circumstances, the degeneracy pressure of certain microheavy matter in certain states would Causing catastrophic shear forces.She worked on the newly laid out equations for a while, and borrowed the house's vast computing power (it was night, and it was idle anyway) to solve several million regular equations.At the heart of neutron dedensification—assuming that is the case—is a series of asymmetries under certain rules, but she thought that standard asymmetry theory couldn’t handle problems of the scale she wanted to solve.She searched several speculative websites, but none of them were useful.Only then did she realize—as often happens to people who devote themselves to research—that she was tired.So she quit IP and went to bed.At first, she did nothing but focus on how to breathe steadily in a gravity environment.Some things she didn't notice, didn't notice what? There was something about this stupid murder that caught her attention.She doesn't need to plug into VR anymore; it's enough to look at the data loaded into bId.She quickly checked the location of the relevant personnel.On the first day of arrival, after the servants settled down, no one entered or left the servant's room all day.Several bodyguards and Iago are moving together so that they can help each other in an emergency, and the data history tab shows that they have always been in the main house.No one went outside.The murderer must have been one of the servants in the servants' room (if logically ruled out).There is no other explanation.Not even Jack Glass could have fallen from the sky through a gap in the molecular roof. Joad was trying to distract them on purpose, that's for sure.Even the name Jack Glass in her mouth does not refer to the specific person who is using this name, but to refer to the type of "dangerous murderer", and the things he did are not All a single person can do. Eva went through it all in her head, and got ready for bed.At first, sleep was timid and reluctant to come; but this state did not last long. She is dreaming. Neurons in the brain fire and transmit electrical impulses, like a breeze sweeping the leaves of a dusty tree. Eva was in her MOHmie's house, in space, but not alone, her MOH sister was there too.Next to my sister was a stranger, a man.She didn't know the man's name. "I have invented a new method of transporting people from the surface of the planet into space! As you must have noticed, the plasma chamber is very heavy; the free-fall chamber is expensive, dangerous and wasteful." "What's your new method?" Eva wanted to know. "What do you think?" said the stranger. Eva wondered if that person's skin was as dark as it looked, or if it was because of the dark green light in space.Do they know each other?She felt that she should know that person. "I think? Astrophysics is my specialty, I have half a dozen PhDs in it," she said to the stranger. The stranger laughed, "Of course, but what you study are the stars in the distance. Those stars that should not have exploded but exploded! I'm talking about technology that has more to do with the earth!" "Tell me," Eva urged. "Oh, roughly equivalent to space origami, that's it. If this place is crammed into that place, then that place must be crammed into this place. The universe is infinite, and ordinary geometry doesn't apply in this kind of folding. " "It doesn't make sense at all," Eva said. The stranger gestured.Eva saw that his hands were red.She looked carefully again, only to find that the skin on her hands was gone, as if she had taken off a glove, the contraction of the muscles and the tendons underneath were clearly visible, and they looked very smooth and glowing with blood. A door, I'll show you." A door made of light appeared in the air.Eva felt no fear at all. She pulled the rope protruding from the door and walked in without any effort.The other end was pitch black, and there was still gravity, and she fell to the flat ground all at once.where is thisShe thought, but she knew where this was—the darkness around her was piled with lumber and tools and machinery.This is the storage room where the squire was killed - there were people in it. "Who?" she yelled. "Leron," said a voice.Eva subconsciously wanted to look up the name on the bId, but it was only in a dream, she didn't bring a bId—in fact, she never had a bId, it was so strange.But this is not a big deal, she has already remembered the name.Lelong was the squire who was killed. "I can't see you," Eva said. "No one can see the dead," Leron replied.Even so, a misty figure began to emerge in midair, what seemed to be his head.Eva could see his face clearly, his face was shining like an angel. "How do you do it?" Eva asked. "You are an expert in studying the stars." Le Long replied, "I am not." The shapes that could not be seen before gradually revealed their original shape under the light—two gardening robots, quietly and motionless, were faintly visible on her right.All around seemed to her to be piles of containers and spheres, in all sorts of strange shapes.There are strange blades inlaid on the walls and hooks on the ceiling. "I have to warn you," Eva said, feeling a sudden sense of urgency to warn Lelong of the danger, "someone is coming to kill you! You must get out of here quickly! We don't know why, and we don't know who Did it, but it could have been the notorious Jack Glass." Lelong shook his gleaming head.His light became stronger and stronger, the shadows receded gradually, and the light flooded everything around, dazzlingly bright. "Run!" Eva cried. "I have nowhere to go," Lelong said. The hammer appeared in mid-air behind him.With no one to hold it, the hammer flew toward him; it flew in a parabola.All Eva saw was the black diamond-shaped mass (of which black dwarfs might be made) colliding with Leron's gleaming head.The force of the impact shattered his skull, and she even caught a glimpse of the pulp-red brain matter and Leron's twisted, grotesque face.The pressure creates a subatomic reaction (the principles of which she knows as well as any living person).There was silence all around, and the whole head exploded, dazzling white light in all directions.Eva was so stabbed that she couldn't see anything.She is bathed in a sea of ​​light, the light blowing in her hair and whispering in her ears.Everything is white. she woke up. For some reason, she felt her sister wake up in her room.She said hello to Diana's bId, and the reply came right away. "I just had a dream," she said. "Me too," said Diana. "I dreamed that I met Jack Glass. What about you?" "I was talking to the servant who was killed. His head went supernova, right in front of me! I almost never dream of something like this," Eva said. "But it did give me a definite belief." "What belief?" "This murder—" Eva said slowly, and she felt that what she said was incredible, "it is related to my research, and the two can be linked together." Diana thought for a moment before replying, "My dear sister, I'm having a hard time seeing what the two have in common - one with a servant's head smashed on Kaukura and one with millions of light years Outer stars explode—how can this be connected?" "It's my intuition," Eva said. "It makes me uncomfortable, it always does. It's not my way, it never was. But it's what it is, and I feel sure." "Good night, dear sister," Diana said via bId. "Good night, dear sister," Eva replied. But Diana didn't fall asleep right away.Her temples were throbbing with excitement.Before falling asleep, she connected to the private virtual reality again. This interface allows her to access the data domain, but it does not have the function of sending and receiving messages.Of course, this is also a protective measure.In theory, no one knows where she and Eva are now.In fact, Ms. Joad's visit has shown that the Ulanov family knows—but even if the Ulanov family knows everything, it is normal.Of greater concern are the other MOH families, and the various subordinate organizations (companies, militias, sects) and everyone else.Those people shouldn't know that the temptation to hit the Argent family's weakness is too great. Diana's bId is a sophisticated security system.But she herself is smarter, and she was born with the ability to shuttle through complex systems.She can rely on intuition to navigate through complex chaotic algorithms, which no artificial intelligence can do.The hardest part isn't getting past the comm shield; it's getting through without anyone seeing. It took her twenty minutes, that's all.She then set up relay nodes to relay the message while protecting her location. Anna Tonks Yu was sleeping in her mansion orbiting Mars.A message alert woke her up: Anna Tonks Yu—Diana's rival, sworn enemy, and love of her life. "Diana!" cried Anna, "is that you? You stupid and ugly girl, you woke me up!" "What's wrong with your hair?" Diana replied. "It looks horrible, you might as well cut it off." There was a delay in their communication, and Diana played Go with the house's artificial intelligence to pass the time.The delay didn't bore her; on the contrary, she found it to be the spice of conversation—love without expectations isn't love. "Did you wake me up to harass me?" Anna yelled, waving her arms. "This hurts feelings—I'm going to sue you in every court under Ulanov." "I'm going to beat you when we're married," Diana said. "Like an old-fashioned spouse who sticks you." The game screen is at the bottom left of the viewing angle.Diana closed the game and reopened the 3D version. "If you hit me, I'll kill you." Anna said respectfully, "It must be self-defense." "Then the last thing I'll see will be your stupid big pie face!" exclaimed Diana, adding, with glee, "Oh, I love you, I love you to death!" The emotional flame dies out while waiting for a reply, but as soon as the countdown hits zero, the fire flares up again. "I love you too, Daddy. Is that why you called me? Take such a risk! You shouldn't have called. I might find out where you are and sell you to your Enemies. Only I would never do that, because if I did they would kill you—and the only one who could kill you is me." Of course, it is impossible for them to get married.Two MOH families are never tolerated.Even if the two families agree, the Ulanov family will feel that the marriage between the information giant and the transportation giant within the system is too threatening.Both Anna and Diana knew this; but Diana knew more—and a good deal of the tension and heat between them was due to the impossibility of it—she didn’t know that Anna understood human nature as deeply. insight.If all obstacles were removed, the love between the two would surely wither immediately, but that didn't matter. Diana broke the news to her. "I have a real-life murder mystery to solve here," she boasted. After finishing speaking, she closed the game, put away the chessboard, and waited for Anna's response during the delay. Anna did not disappoint her. Anna's mouth opened into a big "O". "Impossible!" she cried. "Real-life murder—where? You don't want me to lose my mind?" "On my doorstep! One of our squires, his skull was smashed, as dead as the Death Star." Time delay passed. "It's amazing, amazing. This is the most amazing thing. Have you solved it?" Anna asked. "Do you need my help? I'm the best puzzle solver in the entire solar system, you know." "Parana!" said Diana. "I have to go, my dear. When I have solved it, I will send you all the data in a package. Of course, the solution is in a separate package— —and see what you've got." Her IP vibrated, signaling that the buffer network she'd built was about to collapse.She disconnected.