55: Chapter 55 Starfire Base

Time rewinds to a few months ago.

The light from the phone screen reflected off Chen Youhua's calm face.

In the video, a vlogger was reviewing the latest smart speaker in an exaggerated tone, claiming its comprehension was astonishing.

In his eyes, this level of intelligence was fundamentally no different from a child playing with building blocks.

Nearly a year had quietly passed since he had delivered that electronic life—the one that had shaken the nation's highest academic halls and was sufficient to determine the fate of humanity.

During this year, he seemed to have withdrawn from the surging torrent of the times, retreating back to the life trajectory an ordinary young man should have.

His student status at Z University had been silently graduated; his traces in the online world were gently yet thoroughly erased by an invisible hand, leaving only scattered fragments with deliberately suppressed heat that only the most persistent seekers could find.

He spent most of his time with his parents, like a young man who was truly unemployed upon graduation, eating home-cooked meals and soaking in the study.

The bookshelves were packed with a wide variety of books.

Quantum physics, neurobiology, obscure philosophy, and even agricultural meteorology...

His memory was like an unsaturated sponge, greedily absorbing everything.

In his leisure time, he would scroll through videos and watch the various aspects of the human world, like an outsider observer, feeling through the screen the world he had personally propelled yet temporarily detached from.

Until this afternoon.

He was curled up on the sofa, reading a popular science book about paleontology extinction events, with the window's sunlight spilling warmly over him.

A lean young man wearing an ordinary jacket appeared silently at the living room doorway like a shadow.

He was one of the team members responsible for his daily security, code-named "Mountain Eagle."

"Mr. Chen,"

Mountain Eagle's voice was low and clear, carrying an unquestionable sense of formality.

"I have received a notification. The main construction and core debugging of spark project have been completed. The first full-link trial run will take place in 72 hours."

He paused, looking directly at Chen Youhua.

"The higher-ups have instructed me to invite you to be present for the ceremony."

A stone was cast into a calm lake.

Chen Youhua closed the book, his fingertips feeling the slight coolness of the paper.

Spark...

That home for electronic life, built upon the layers of shackles theory he had delivered and carrying the nation's highest expectations and secrets, was finally about to welcome its first heartbeat.

"Understood."

Chen Youhua's voice was very calm, but an inexpressible glimmer flickered deep in his eyes.

Of course he would go.

That was his creation, his responsibility, and a vital cornerstone of the future of humanity according to his rational deductions.

When saying goodbye to his parents, Mother Chen nagged while stuffing boiled tea eggs and washed fruit into his backpack, while Father Chen patted his shoulder with worry in his eyes, but even more pride and trust.

"Be careful on the road, and come back early."

Chen Youhua nodded, a surge of warmth and a faint sense of guilt rising in his heart.

He knew that his seemingly free seclusion was actually under the most rigorous wings of the state machine.

The journey to the destination was exceptionally quiet.

The black sedan drove smoothly on the highway leading to the mountainous region of Southwestern Zhejiang.

Outside the window, the familiar Jiangnan hilly landscape undulated in the twilight.

Chen Youhua leaned back against the seat, closing his eyes to rest.

Occasionally, a few seemingly ordinary private cars would flash in the rearview mirror, following at a distance like loyal escort frigates.

He didn't need to open his eyes to sense that they were Mountain Eagle's teammates.

This pervasive protection had never slackened from the moment he delivered the Spark; he had long since grown used to it, even becoming somewhat numb.

The destination was not any location marked on the map.

The sedan turned into an inconspicuous forest fork, passed through several hidden checkpoints for facial, iris, and dynamic password verification, and finally drove into a massive tunnel entrance disguised as a landslide management project.

The interior of the tunnel was brightly lit and appeared bottomless.

Getting out of the car, they transferred to an internal dedicated shuttle.

The air carried the characteristic coolness of the underground and a faint scent of mixed metal and ozone.

At the end of the tunnel was a massive elevator platform door with a cold, hard metallic luster.

The door slid open silently, revealing an elevator car as spacious as a small meeting room.

Mountain Eagle stepped forward to swipe his card, and a complex verification procedure began.

The elevator doors closed, and a slight sensation of weightlessness followed.

It wasn't rising, but sinking rapidly.

The numbers on the display jumped quickly: -100 meters, -200 meters, -300 meters... finally, it came to a steady stop at -450 meters.

The doors opened again.

Even with Chen Youhua's brain, armed with countless knowledge, the sight before him was enough to bring a momentary sense of suffocation.

This was not a simple base; this was a city of steel buried deep within the mountain and the Earth's crust!

The dome was high and distant, supported by high-strength alloy grids and embedded with massive light sources simulating natural light, which spilled down evenly.

As far as the eye could see was a massive platform of inestimable area, extending downward layer by layer, like the interior of a honeycomb infinitely magnified.

Each level was not empty but occupied by dense, varied giant equipment.

Liquid cooling pipes as thick as pythons shimmered with a faint blue light, rows of server matrices emitted a low and constant hum, indicator lights flickered like stars, and complex cables like vines in a steel jungle crisscrossed on precision bridges, leading to unknown depths.

A massive electronic screen was embedded in the central space, jumping in real-time with a sea of data streams that would make an ordinary person dizzy at a glance.

Technical personnel in uniform moved like worker ants through the vast equipment, debugging. The sounds of footsteps, commands, and equipment operation intertwined into a low and majestic underground symphony.

"This..." Chen Youhua rarely showed a moment of daze.

He had only provided the core concepts and theoretical framework; as for the specific design of the physical carrier, he had only given a rough description.

"Needs to be deeply buried, needs scale, needs redundancy, needs absolute security isolation."

He never expected that the nation would, in just one year and with such staggering boldness and execution, turn a subterranean fortress straight out of science fiction into reality!

And it was right beneath his hometown!

"Shocking, isn't it?"

A familiar and sonorous voice came with a hint of a smile.

Chen Youhua looked toward the source and saw Academician Zheng walking over with large strides.

Having not seen him for a year, this pillar of the Institute of Information seemed a bit thinner, but he was in high spirits, his eyes still as sharp as an eagle's.

He didn't waste time on pleasantries, coming up to give Chen Youhua a solid bear hug, his large hand slapping his back forcefully.

"You kid! Hiding at home in leisure has made your bones soft, hasn't it?"

Academician Zheng released him and looked him up and down, his tone carrying the special intimacy and teasing of an elder toward a junior.

"Pity my old bones; this past year, without seeing wind or rain, I've been huddled in this sunless big tin can acting as a foreman!

I've even grown several white hairs! Every day I'm wrestling with reinforced concrete and supercomputers; it's more tiring than when I used to lead graduate students!"

Chen Youhua was a bit embarrassed by the words and rubbed his nose, rarely showing a bit of the shyness and guilt typical of his age.

"Old Zheng, you've worked hard... It's mainly that you and the team are too capable and the project blueprint was too perfect. I felt... like I really couldn't help much."

This wasn't entirely polite talk.

After the delivery, aside from occasionally answering some extremely core theoretical questions through the highest-level secure lines, he had indeed been like an hands-off manager.

"Don't give me that!"

Academician Zheng laughed and scolded, then turned serious, his eyes gleaming with an ardent light.

"Come! Let me quickly take you to see your child! Let's see if us old folks and the engineers have raised your masterpiece crooked!"

The two walked side by side, moving through the vast and precise steel jungle.

Academician Zheng personally acted as a guide, knowing everything like the back of his hand.

He pointed toward several devices in the depths that looked like small reactors.

"Independent dual-circuit thorium-based molten salt reactor power supply, plus three sets of ultra-large physical flywheel energy storage arrays, ensuring Spark has at least 120 hours of self-sustainability under any extreme circumstances. The mountain itself is also the best physical barrier and heat sink."

They came to an area isolated by multiple layers of high-strength transparent materials, inside which was a lattice structure shimmering with a dreamlike light.

"A heterogeneous computing array newly designed based on your theory; the thinking and memory models have dedicated physical hardware channels, completely isolating the possibility of cross-infection.

Cooling uses a supercritical carbon dioxide closed loop, with efficiency several times that of traditional water cooling, and it's silent."

Academician Zheng's expression became exceptionally solemn as he pointed to rows of black cabinets with unusually complex structures, covered in sensors and fuse devices.

"This is the heart of the Black Box. Hardware-level encryption, physical network isolation; it only has the data feeding port and result output port that we unidirectionally set for the outside world.

Behavioral fuse mechanisms are spread throughout the system. Any abnormal behavior attempting to break through the shackle logic or physical isolation—even a microsecond-level abnormal signal—will trigger physical-level fusing and isolation.

For the monitoring of data flow, we have adopted a combination of human and machine. As long as the data is abnormal or the data flow is incorrect, human supervision will immediately take over. Supervision is handled by two real people in shifts, and the destination of every piece of data will be tracked to the end."

Chen Youhua walked, looked, and listened in silence.

His eyes, tempered by knowledge to be exceptionally sharp, scanned every detail. His hyper-memory brain, like the most precise scanner, compared what he saw and heard with his theoretical framework and original concepts at a millisecond level.

The more he looked, the deeper the shock in his heart became, alongside an almost helpless sense of admiration.

Watertight.

They had truly made it watertight!

The resources mobilized by the state, the wisdom invested, and the extreme pursuit of security far exceeded what he had imagined during his theoretical planning.

What he had thought of had been executed to the extreme.

The details and potential risk points he hadn't thought of were also covered one by one by this vast and precise system, with layer upon layer of defense.

Those self-checking robots, those physical fuse points, those backups that were redundant to the point of being luxurious.

This was not just protecting Spark; it was constructing a Wall of Sighs to isolate unknown risks.

"How is it? Great Genius Chen, is it still worthy of your notice?"

After visiting the core area, standing on the highest viewing platform of the central control tower and overlooking this underground wonder symbolizing the peak of human wisdom and power, Academician Zheng asked half-jokingly, yet with a hint of undetectable tension in his tone.

After all, the young man before him was the source and final judge of all this.

Chen Youhua did not answer for a long time.

He looked at those silently operating massive machines, feeling the faint vibration coming from deep within the earth beneath his feet, carrying the hope of humanity's future.

Finally, he slowly let out a breath, his voice carrying an unprecedented solemnity:

"Breathtaking, Old Zheng. Much more... perfect than I imagined. I... can't find any faults."

He paused, as if weighing his words, then added in a very soft voice that was like a stone cast into a deep pool.

"It's just... looking at this cold steel and these precise shackles, I suddenly wonder, inside there... will it feel lonely?"

The smile on Academician Zheng's face froze slightly, then turned into a complex sigh.

He patted Chen Youhua's shoulder and did not answer the question.

Perhaps only Spark itself, which was about to be ignited, could provide the answer to this question.

And the answer would be revealed in 72 hours.