Chapter 555

This is...

Alice, with tears in her eyes and biting her lip, moved her finger and clicked it.

A moment later, Christina's big face appeared on the screen.

[Alice, if you see this video... then I guess you have succeeded. As for me—]

[I'm sorry, maybe I can't accompany you to the end.]

[You know, the night before we set off for the Antarctic, you slept very soundly.]

[That AIC, "Drifter," told me about the "Black Hole Furnace" and everything about you.]

[You might have known that information long ago, but I have a different understanding of it.]

[The essence of the "Black Hole Furnace" is a machine that has the ability to write our memories and our visions into the next world.]

[Remember the documents we found earlier?]

[The information put into the furnace will be preserved in the singularity forever and become the initial blueprint carried by the newly born universe.]

[Your final task is to be the person who starts it.]

[All your joy and unwillingness, all your love and pain, will turn into the purest information flow, becoming the key to opening the new world—a world where people don't need to sit around a campfire and fear the darkness.]

[In other words, us, or rather, you.]

[Not just to create a new world—but to transcend it.]

[Alice, you have to cross heaven.]

[When I was in junior high school, the teacher mentioned a very interesting physics term called "Poincaré recurrence."]

[The state of a system will return to its initial state after experiencing a long enough time;]

[After a time longer than long, a universe identical to ours will appear.]

[I believe you have also heard of this concept; at that time, I thought this was the ultimate romance of cosmology.]

[Now it seems that maybe you are about to start this recurrence in another way.]

[But one thing is the same, and that is that we will eventually meet again.]

[I am a child born in heavy rain. I have been lost, about myself, about everything in the world.]

[I don't know what the meaning of this black-and-white world is, or where it is going—I was just walking in the rain in vain, looking for something I never possessed.]

[But now I finally understand.]

[I understand what I am chasing, Alice. Not just rainbows.]

[Then, goodbye. Please remember our agreement and walk to the final ending.]

[If, 13.7 billion years later, you and I descend on this world again, then—]

[Come find me, I will always be waiting for you.]

Tomorrow's chapter will be updated earlier.

"What a miserable Alice."

"I once thought that in the end, Christina and Alice would save the world together... but I didn't expect Christina to go reunite with her family one step ahead of Alice, leaving only the agent lady alone."

"Well, Alice was born in the most glorious era of human civilization, witnessed the decline of human civilization during the Great Fade, and also experienced the decline of human civilization in the Great Rain Era, eventually becoming the last human in the apocalypse; the symbolic meaning on her is already full."

"After talking with 'Drifter,' Christina probably foresaw the ending and accepted it calmly.~"

"Direct blades hurt people limitedly, echoes hurt people infinitely; Christina's final message is like stacking DoT."

Alice quickly put away the terminal, forced herself to stand up, let her gaze linger on the exoskeleton debris and gray-white embers under the gate one last time, and then left.

She still had life to lose; it wasn't time to give up yet.

And the moment she made the decision, the meaning in the words left by "Drifter" finally became clear.

[...It can be a fire of destruction, bringing the whole world into an abyss of no return; it can also be a fire of nirvana, burning the whole world, but bringing hope to the new world...]

[...The choices you make are not for this world, but for a greater future...]

And Christina told her:

[...The information put into the furnace will be preserved in the singularity forever and become the initial blueprint carried by the newly born universe...]

[...All your joy and unwillingness, all your love and pain, will turn into the purest information flow, becoming the key to opening the new world...]

Alice frowned slightly, then her expression gradually relaxed, and a hint of sadness still remained between her brows.

This mission is really hard, Christina, "Drifter," and the overseers... Alice complained in her heart.

Everyone pinned their hopes on her, letting her become the trigger to ignite the spark of creation.

Alice didn't know what kind of mood she was in as she walked into the depths of the building, entered the server room, found the floor plan of the entire building, and then came to the last door.

Is it sadness? Is it calm? Is it happy? Or what...

She didn't know.

Maybe all of them.

Or maybe none of them.

And as the identity verification passed, when the silver-white door opened, an incredibly huge super machine rushed into her eyes like a falling star.

Alice was stunned by this magnificent and somewhat strange machine for a moment, and quickly recognized its identity—

"Black Hole Furnace."

She came before the "Black Hole Furnace."

And she could only see a small part of this facility.

This giant machine was composed of multiple composite structures stacked together.

Structural parts almost filled every corner of the internal space, they meshed and operated in an orderly manner, making a roar that shook the entire space.

Thousands of pipes extended from it, countless lines climbed along the grooves preset on the machine body, and a mixture of machine oil flowed in the pipes.

Between the mechanical structures, magic arrays with flowing light filled the gaps, moving with the structure, rotating and changing along the established orbit, as if breathing slowly and flickering.

Part of this machine was not connected to any structure, but simply floated in mid-air.

The upper part of the main body of the machine showed a cavity structure.

Specifically, it was a spherical cavity woven from thread-like structures, with the ends of countless pipes and lines converging here.

In the cavity, a small black hole was slowly rotating, as if it were an eye watching the world.

The space around it was distorted, and the light bent and stretched at the edges, forming a strange halo.

And within it, a semi-exposed singularity, beyond the event horizon of the black hole, was able to be observed by Alice with the naked eye, and countless glowing particles rotated irregularly with it as the center.

This picture was incredibly strange, far beyond Alice's understanding and cognition of relativity.

Above this huge machine was another more exaggerated, larger transparent protective cover, which isolated the "Black Hole Furnace," the console at the bottom, and the outside world.

Alice looked at that machine for a long time.

"This is the 'Black Hole Furnace'. Isn't it?"

No one answered her.

"This story is going to end here. This is the ending, isn't it?"

No one answered her.

"Are there any other plots, any reversals? If there are, take them out quickly, okay?"

No one answered her.

"What else do I need to do?"

"Take a photo, adjust the parameters, pull the lever. Then the world will end, and then be reborn, is that it?"

No one answered her, but she knew in her heart that it was.

She was just wandering.

"Is this a story that belongs only to me? Are everyone else just passersby?"

No one answered her, but she knew it wasn't.

Alice walked slowly to the protective cover, raised the camera on her chest, aimed at the console, and pressed the shutter.

A photo began to wash out instantly.

"I... with everyone, this trip at the end, is not just for the Foundation, or the world. Right?"

No one answered her.

No one could answer her.

Alice reached into the photo, passed through the barrier of the protective cover, and quickly operated the various buttons and joysticks.