Chapter 2 Chapter One

On the day the Armada sailed off the Web for battle, the last day of life as we know it, I was invited to a banquet.That night, on the more than 150 planets in the ring network, banquets were held everywhere, but only this one was the most important. I signed the letter of acceptance through the data network, and looked at my most beautiful formal jacket to make sure it was clean.Then take a bath, shave calmly, and dress up carefully. Finally, through the one-time touch display in the invitation chip, it is remotely transmitted from the hope star to the whale center at the appointed time. At this time, the hemisphere where the whale's heart is located is in the evening, and the omnipresent light light illuminates the hills and valleys of the Deer Park, illuminates the gray towers of the central government buildings that extend far to the south, and illuminates the Tethys River Weeping willows and glowing fire ferns line the banks, also illuminating the white colonnades of the government building itself.Thousands of guests are congregating here, security greets everyone in unison, checks our invitation codes against DNA patterns, and then with a graceful wave of arm and hand, points us the way to the bar and restaurant.

"Mr. Joseph Seven?" The guide confirmed to me politely. "Exactly." I lied. "Master Yueshi, CEO, wishes to see you later in the evening. We will let you know when she has time to see you." "OK." "Besides the snacks or entertainment provided, if you have other requests, just speak up, and the ground supervisor will try to help you." I nodded with a smile, left the guide behind, and walked forward.Before taking a few steps, he had already turned around to receive the next guest coming off the terminal platform. There is a low hill in front, and I stand on it with a wide view.Thousands of guests are strolling on hundreds of acres of newly mowed lawns and roaming in the artistically shaped forest.In front of me lay a wide stretch of lawn, shadowed by the trees on the river bank, where there were formal gardens; above the lawn rose a magnificent government building.A band is playing in a distant courtyard, and hidden speakers carry music to the furthest reaches of Deer Park.A series of electromagnetic convoys circled from the remote transmission gate in the distant sky, one after another.For a few seconds, I watched the brightly-clad passengers disembark from the platform next to the terminal walkway, almost fascinated by the strange airship; The hull of the millboat also emanates from the rococo decks of floating barges and the metal hulls of ancient skimmers.They look very quaint, and they have appeared long before the old land perished.

I walked slowly down the long, gentle slope to the Tethys, passing a wharf where passengers were disembarking from various rafts, and the scene was amazing.The Tethys River is the only river that runs through the ring network. It flows through the permanent teleportation gate and passes through more than 200 planets and satellites. Those who can live along its banks are the rich and powerful people among the overlords.This can be seen from the ships along the coast: large crenellated cruisers, three-masted ships sailing at full sail, and some five-story barges, most of which seem to be equipped with suspension devices; Tailored for their teleporters; small mobile islands imported from Maui; pre-Exile sports speedboats and submarines; assorted hand-carved nautical electromagnetic vehicles from Renaissance Arrow; and Some of the latest omnibus speedboats, their silhouettes blurred beneath the seamless reflective oval exterior of the containment field.

The guests who stepped off these ships were as glamorous and memorable as their vehicles: individual dress styles spanned a wide spectrum, including those clearly untreated by Paulson, dressed in pre-Policy Conservative evening dresses, as well as guests whose bodies have been shaped by the most famous foundation artists on the Internet, they wear the most sought-after fashion clothes of Whale Heart this week.I kept going and ended up at a fairly long table, and by the time I got to the end, there were plates piled high with roast beef, salad, space squid slices, parvati curry and freshly baked bread.

The evening glow gradually faded, and dusk fell.I found a place by the garden and sat down, watching the stars appear one by one in the sky.Lights from nearby cities and government buildings darkened the view of the Armada tonight, but the night sky in the center of Whale was the clearest it had been in centuries. A woman next to me looked up at me with a big smile, "I'm sure we've met before." I smiled back, making sure we had never met.She was attractive, maybe twice my age, about fifty-seven or eighty-eight, but thanks to money and Paulson's treatments, she looked younger than I did at twenty-six.Her skin is very fair, almost transparent.The hair is tied in an upturned braid.The soft clothes she was wearing revealed most of her chest, which was flawless.Those eyes were cold.

"Perhaps we have," I said, "but that seems unlikely. My name is Joseph Seven." "Of course," she said, "you're an artist!" I am not an artist.I am...was...a poet.But since my real personality came back from the dead a year ago, I've taken on Seven's identity and called myself an artist.These are documented in my global file. "I remember." The lady smiled.She wasn't telling the truth.She obtained this information by accessing the data network with her expensive communication interface. I don't need to visit... The word is awkward and redundant, and even though it has a slightly archaic rhyme, I can't help but find it corny.I closed my eyes in thought, entered the data network, slipped through the gorgeous and unreal global barrier, gradually slipped under the waves of surface data, and followed her shining access umbilical cord to trace the dark distant depths, where "Safe and reliable" information flows.

"My name is Diana Froome," she said, "and my husband is the Secretary of Transportation for Dracon 7." I nodded and took her hand that was outstretched.She didn't mention the other point at all, the fact that her husband was the number one idiot in the League of Die Scrubbers on Heaven's Gate before he was promoted to Draco by the political background...nor did she mention that she was called Tiny Tiny before she changed her name Ci, who used to be a prostitute, was hired as a dancer by a lung tube agent in Zhongchi Badlands...didn't tell me that she was arrested twice for abusing flashbacks, and beat a family doctor halfway through the second time Seriously injured... and didn't tell me she poisoned her half brother when she was nine years old, just because he threatened to sue her stepfather that she was dating a mudflat miner called...

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Froome," I began.Her hand was warm, but the handshake took a little longer. "Isn't this exciting?" She took a deep breath. "What did you say?" She opened her arms and made a movement, enveloping the entire night, the newly lit fluorescent ball, the garden, and the crowd. "Ah, parties and wars and all that," she said. I smiled, nodded, and tasted the roast beef.It's rare food, good quality, but too salty, reminiscent of what's in the Luthers clone tank.The calamari also seemed to be the real deal.The waiter came over to serve champagne, and I raised my glass and took a sip.Taste a little off.High-quality wine, Scotch whiskey and coffee have been the three irreplaceable scarcity items since the death of the Old Land. "Do you think this war has to be fought?" I asked.

"Of course, of course bloody must," said Diana Frome, when she opened her mouth to speak, when her husband answered for her.This person just came from behind and sat on the simulated log that we had dinner together.It was a tall man, at least a foot and a half taller than me.But wait, I'm short.As far back as I can remember, I once wrote a self-deprecating line describing myself as "...Mr. When I was alive, the average height of a man was only 5.6 feet, so I could only be considered slightly short at that time, but now I am ridiculously short, because the average height of men living on planets with normal gravity levels ranges from 6 feet to 6 feet. Feet to seven feet.On the other hand, in terms of musculature or physique, I obviously couldn't claim to be from a high-gravity planet, so I'm a short guy in everyone's eyes. (What I have just told you is in terms of the units of measurement I use to think about things...Since my rebirth in the Web, my thinking has undergone countless changes, and thinking in metric systems is by far the most I feel Most difficult. Sometimes I don't even want to try.)

"Why did the war have to be fought?" I asked Diana's husband, Hermond Froome. "Because they're goddamn asking for it," said the big man indignantly.His molars rattled and his face was tensed.The neck is negligibly short, and the stubble under the skin is lush, obviously withstanding all the barrage of depilatory creams, blades and razors.Those hands are twice as big as mine, and many times stronger than mine. "I see." I said. "Those bloody Ousters are asking for their own fucking trouble," he repeated, repeating the final conclusion of his argument with me. "They messed with us in Brescia, and now they're messing with us again, somewhere... somewhere..."

"Hyberian," said his wife, but she never took her eyes off me. "Yes," echoed her noble husband, "Hyberian. They want to fuck us up, and now we have to go there and show them that the Overlord can't stand that kind of thing. Understand?" I remember, as a boy, being sent to John Clarke's academy in Enfield, where there were a lot of dumb-brained, hard-fisted thugs like Froome.When I first got there, I either avoided them or groveled at them to make peace.But since my mother died, the world has changed. I clenched the stone tightly in my small hand, stood up from the ground staggeringly, and chased after them, even though they punched and kicked me, making my nose bloody and my teeth loose , I am not reluctant. "I understand." I said softly.The plate is already empty.I raised the remaining bad champagne in my glass to Diana.Froome toasts. "Draw me a picture," she said. "Excuse me, what did you say?" "Draw me a picture, Mr. Seven. You're an artist." "I'm a painter," I said, gesticulating helplessly with my empty hand, "but I don't have a stylus with me." Diana Frome reached into the pocket of her husband's tunic and handed me a stylus. "Draw me a portrait. Please." I drew a picture of her.The portrait takes shape in the air between us, its lines undulating and twisting like neon fibers on a linear sculpture.A small group of people gradually gathered around and watched.When I finished, there was a burst of gentle applause one after another.Well done, it accurately reproduces the sultry curve of the woman's long neck, bridge-high braids, prominent cheekbones...even a slightly provocative gleam in her eyes.In order to adapt to the role of this body, I received RNA therapy and studied corresponding courses, which is the highest level of my current painting level.The real Joseph Seven would have drawn better...he's done a lot better.I still remember the sketches he made of me when I was dying and lying in bed. Lady Diana Frome's face beamed with approval.Hormond Froomecho glared at me disapprovingly. Suddenly there was a loud cry, "There they are!" There was a murmur and gasp from the crowd, and then fell silent again.The fluorescent balls and the park lights are dimmed until they go out.Thousands of guests raised their eyebrows and looked at the sky.I erased the portrait and put the stylus back in Hormond's tunic to cover him up. "It's the Armada." Said an elderly man wearing a black military uniform and looking quite noble.He raised his glass to point to something for her young female companion. "They just opened the portal. The scout ships will go in first, followed by the escorting torch ships." The military teleportation gate should be somewhere in the sky, but standing on our commanding heights, we can't see it anyway. I imagined that it should look like a rectangular abbreviated point in the star field.But the molten trail of the scout ship was clearly visible—at first it looked like twenty or thirty fireflies, and then it looked like glowing spider webs.Then, the main drives were ignited, and they swept across the Earth-moon path of the Whale system like dazzling comets.When the torch ship was transmitted to our eyes, the crowd made a sound of breathing at the same time, and their flame trail was a hundred times longer than that of the scout ship.The night sky in Whale is streaked with red and gold mottled from the zenith to the horizon. Somewhere there was a burst of applause, and within seconds the fields, lawns, and groomed gardens of the Deer Park, the government building, were filled with wild applause and wild cheers.Well-dressed billionaires, government officials, and members of wealthy families from a hundred planets have forgotten all that militarism and war-loving desires that have been dormant for more than a hundred and fifty years are now completely filled the heads of these people. I didn't applaud.Not being noticed by anyone around me, I drank my glass - now this is not a toast to Lady Froome, but a tribute to the folly of my race that persists - and I poured out the rest champagne.This stuff is really bland. Overhead, the more important ships of the small fleet had teleported into the system.I checked the data network a little (its surface is now covered with waves of data one after another, until it is as turbulent as an ocean covered by a storm), and I have learned that the main force of the space armada of the military department includes more than one hundred ships Highest-performance gyro ships: Dark attack carriers, with their launch arms bundled together to look like they're throwing guns; 3C command ships, like black crystal meteors that are both beautiful and awkward; bulbous destroyers that look like they're overblown Torch ships; ring defense pickets, they contain more energy than matter, and the wide concealment shield is now set to total reflection-the bright mirror reflects the whale star cluster and hundreds of stars around them. Burning wakes; fast cruisers swimming among ships like sharks among roaming schools of fish; lumbering troop transports carrying thousands of Army Marines in their zero-gravity compartments; dozens of A supply transport ship—three-sail fast battleship; fast counterattack fighter; torpedo artillery positioning radar; And probes, like a dream. Around the fleet, speedboats, solar jammers, and private interstellar ships controlled by the traffic control within a safe distance passed by from time to time. Their solar sails absorbed sunlight and reflected the brilliance of the Armada. The guests on the ground of the government building cheered and applauded.The gentleman in the black uniform of the military department wept silently with joy.Nearby, hidden cameras and wideband imagers broadcast the moment to all the planets in the Ring, and—through the meta-light—to dozens of worlds outside the Ring. I shook my head, still sitting there. "Mr. Seven?" A guard stood beside me. "What's up?" She nodded toward the administration building. "Master Yue Shi, CEO, wants to see you now."

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