205: Chapter 205 Fake Corpse Search, Father Dies and Son Witnesses

Those nine-to-five office workers no longer clocked in on time.

A young man wearing a wrinkled white shirt and a crooked tie stood on top of the shelter of an abandoned bus stop, holding up a piece of cardboard torn from the entrance of a convenience store with both hands, on which was scrawled with a marker:

"Former JPMorgan financial analyst, proficient in Excel modeling and VBA automation, able to work 80 hours a week, seeking a logistics dispatch position with the alien fleet, willing to accept any salary."

Beside him,

another middle-aged woman held an even simpler piece of cardboard with only three lines of text:

"Registered nurse with twenty years of ICU experience, capable of handling unknown biological trauma, seeking a military medical position, bringing my own rations."

Across the street, in front of a closed clothing store,

a man wearing a suit jacket, who looked like he used to manage a team of hundreds in a glass-walled office building, sat on the ground.

The man leaned against the sheet metal panel of the rolling shutter door, with a wrinkled advertising banner spread across his knees, densely covered with words:

"Master's degree, years of frontline management experience, strong sense of responsibility, no family burdens, willing to undertake all assigned missions."

Next to him, someone was even squatting there, helping him correct some scattered grammatical errors in the phrasing on the advertising banner.

After the door of a convenience store was pried open, later arrivals casually set it on fire.

At this moment, the flames had already spread to the sign of the adjacent laundromat.

Someone stumbled out carrying a box of sports drinks from inside and threw it into the surrounding crowd of onlookers; the box smashed onto the ground and split open, and the liquid flowed all over the cracks of the sidewalk bricks.

No one went to catch it, no one went to grab it.

Everyone just stared blankly at the pile of buildings gradually being swallowed by the flames and the sports drinks scattered on the ground changing color.

The store owner sat on the curb, with the last pried-open empty cash box from the register placed beside his hand.

He watched his store of several decades burn into an expanding patch of charred black marks, his expression as calm as all the burning air around him.

A dark gray Chevrolet Suburban drove slowly into this neighborhood along a street almost impassable due to abandoned vehicles and various kinds of trash.

Richard Heinlein sat in the front passenger seat, wearing an unmarked dark gray casual jacket.

Kevin Mosby gripped the steering wheel, carefully bypassing a trash can pushed over in the middle of the road and several pools of unknown liquid, while whispering a string of curses.

In the back seat, Ali Wu rolled down the car window a crack, using a portable spectrum scanner to scan every face on the street one by one,

but not for recording, rather to find a silhouette that closely matched that non-existent person.

They drove around the nearby blocks several times repeatedly, but never found a suitable one.

Fabricating a hero scientist out of thin air wasn't something where you could just pull anyone off the street;

at the very least, their appearance had to be decent, facial features proper, gentle and wise, possessing a scholar's demeanor, and looking capable of making the entire American public generate trust and feelings of kinship at first glance on newspaper front pages.

And currently, every face on the streets of Sunset Park in Brooklyn was either deformed by chemical erosion or soaked in prolonged despair until only hollow blankness remained.

Heinlein placed his hand beside the car door handle, preparing to get in and have Mosby turn around to go to the next district.

Suddenly, a high-on-drugs addict stumbled out from the street corner, throwing himself straight down at Heinlein's feet.

The side of his face pressed against the concrete road surface, pupils dilated, complexion ashen, lips already turned to a morbid dark purple.

The edges of the old sweatshirt on his body were stained with various unwashed long-term stains mixed with chemical odors.

But the corners of his mouth wore an extremely happy smile,

a kind of happiness that formed an extremely unsettling contrast with the despair happening all around humanity,

like someone drowning in the deepest nightmare suddenly entering a certain transcendence of never waking up again in the final second.

He stopped breathing amidst convulsions.

Kevin Mosby squatted down, used gloved fingers to check the carotid artery, and pulled back the eyelids to check the state of the pupils.

A moment later, he straightened up and said softly to Heinlein:

"This person is dead, just died."

Heinlein stood in place, lowering his head to look at that body that had just breathed its last and hadn't yet cooled down.

Under the hazy street lamp, at a certain moment, that face suddenly touched the depths of his memory—the exact same outline as the death portraits of previous generations of scientists that had appeared countless times in black-and-white educational newsreels.

He pulled his hands out of the side pockets of his casual jacket, letting them hang at his sides, and remained silent for a very long time.

Then he raised his head, looking at Mosby and Ali Wu, who had long since withdrawn her gaze from the portable spectrum scanner to look at him.

"He's the one."

"Decent appearance, gentle temperament, and in his eyes the lingering glow of a scholar who spent years toiling in the laboratory before finally stopping."

"When he was alive, we couldn't find such a person; now that he's dead, this face is Sophus Tesla."

Mosby didn't hesitate, just nodded, and made a gesture to the gray modified ambulance at the street corner that had long been waiting for orders.

Several CIA field operatives, also dressed in casual clothes, quickly took out a body bag and stretcher from the back compartment, expertly and swiftly transferring the newly deceased body from the ground into the sealed bag, and then carrying it onto the vehicle.

Heinlein had just turned around to leave when he suddenly raised his right hand slightly, stopping everyone.

Having worked in this line of work for half his life, he had long been inversely trained by the environment to have an intuition sharper than any electronic sensor.

On this street, someone had been watching them just now—

not a casual glance from a passerby, but a directional gaze that could be sensed, like a tracked target locked back into the intersection of multiple fields of view.

He turned around, navigating a maze of turns along that almost completely exposed narrow alley, searching for a long time among a patch of abandoned beer warehouses and a half-collapsed old freight station,

and finally found the person who had been staring at them in the corner between two scorched concrete walls.

A teenager of about fifteen or six years old, wrapped entirely in a dirty old hoodie,

whose shoulder edges and sleeves had long been worn into holes by wind and sweat stains, with the forefoot of his sneakers peeled open halfway, and a hard scab from an old scratch on his forehead not yet fully fallen off.

His hands were crossed over his chest, his entire body shrunk into the corner of the wall, trembling slightly in the night wind.

Heinlein bent down slightly, his tone steady but lowered to the absolute minimum, deliberately wiping away all the cold hardness from his teeth that had accumulated from professional habits into a sense of instinctive oppression.

"Just now, were you watching us?"

The teenager nodded, his voice small and hoarse: "It was me."

Heinlein softened his voice again and continued to ask: "Why?"

The teenager loosened the arms crossed over his chest, letting them hang down at his sides, then looked at Heinlein's face and slowly said:

"The person you just put into the bag and carried onto the car is my father."

At that instant, the air suddenly froze for a moment.

Kevin Mosby stood behind Heinlein, slowly lowering the hand that had been resting near the holster at his waist back down to his side.

Ali Wu gently placed the portable scanner she had been holding onto the old wooden box beside her.

The CIA operatives all fell silent in that second.

Heinlein looked into the teenager's eyes devoid of any tears, reached his hand into the inner pocket of his jacket, took out two thousand dollars he carried with him, and placed them neatly in the teenager's hands.

He clasped the teenager's hand and gently closed it, then straightened his waist, looking at the thin, small figure standing among the scorched concrete walls, trembling slightly in tattered clothes.

"I don't know you, and you don't know me."

He slowly dropped his right hand, which had just moved away from the teenager's hand, back to his side, turned, and walked toward the alley entrance without looking back once more.

Mosby and Ali followed closely behind, successively plunging into the dim street that still occasionally emitted sporadic shattering sounds in the distance.

Heinlein's pace did not slow down.

He knew more clearly than anyone else:

As the million-strong fleet of Zeta Star approached the Solar System day by day, encounters similar to this teenager's would only continue to play out in this world at an increasingly faster speed.

People had collectively plunged into despair;

words like family, relatives, parents, and children had long lost all warmth in this spiritual ruin shrouded by the constantly collapsing countdown.

Just like that homeless man who had drunkenly collapsed on the roadside, high on drugs until his last breath with a smile still hanging on the corners of his mouth,

this teenager was his biological son, yet even in his final moment, he had completely sunk into another illusory sweet dream.

There was no farewell, not even a second glance at his son.

To him, when the million-strong fleet pressed down and the end was near, no matter how well the child was taken care of, what use would it be?

The ultimate answer was the same anyway.

Therefore, doing anything was meaningless.

Such was the general trend; Heinlein knew all this, but ultimately, he was powerless as well.

...

New York, United Nations headquarters, Security Council chamber.

Around that world-famous circular conference table sat representatives from fifteen member states and dozens of observer states.

Diplomatic officials and media reporters in the horseshoe-shaped gallery were all in place.

On the giant LED screen, real-time tracking data of the jump trajectory of Zeta Star's million-strong fleet, jointly submitted by multinational astronomical observation agencies, was scrolling.

At this moment, an emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly was being held in this conference hall,

with only one core topic on the agenda:

[All humanity united to face the crisis of the Zeta Star expeditionary fleet.]