Chapter 706 - 685: The Secret of Half a Century

Zhong Cheng listened to Lin Ju’s narration and slowly started to see the beginning of the story:

In the 1950s in America, most wilderness areas were still uninhabited, and Guo Xiao, who loved exploring nature, stumbled upon this huge unidentified object by chance.

Initially, he thought it was just a peculiar rock, but the keen perception of an aviation engineer quickly made him realize it was extraordinary, with many exceptional features evident from its refined exterior.

"Karst Black Stone," this was how Guo Xiao first referred to it. He treated the object as a collectible, storing it in his garage and even hoping to make some money by exhibiting it.

However, one day before he could take such action, while Guo Xiao was adjusting his black-and-white TV set, he encountered some mysterious interference.

After careful adjustments, he eventually found that it was a high-frequency signal, frighteningly powerful, as if he had installed an antenna in his own home.

Yet there were few broadcasting stations or other antennas nearby, and such a frequency was almost never encountered in everyday life.

Guo Xiao fashioned a rudimentary radio detector, circled around, and pinpointed the "Karst Black Stone."

A rock that continuously emitted signals?

Guo Xiao simply recorded the signal’s spectrum and found its encryption method was not complex, quite similar to the modulation method of TV broadcast signals at the time, so he modified his TV to receive and decipher the "Karst Black Stone" signals.

The results of the decoding astonished him: the content of the signal was simple, providing a frequency band and an introduction to the signal modulation method that was easy to understand, suggesting that he could use this method to contact the source of the transmission.

Back then, tales of extraterrestrial civilizations were not yet widely spread, but that didn’t stop Guo Xiao from sharply realizing that this strange object might have significant origins. Bravely, he built a transmitter and sent a Morse code chart in the manner of the "Karst Black Stone."

He was successful, receiving a reply in Morse code from the "Karst Black Stone" almost immediately, and the power output was much lower this time.

"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789?/()-·"

These were all the corresponding letters, numbers, and symbols in Morse code from the "Karst Black Stone’s" first reply. Guo Xiao thought for a long time before he understood its meaning.

The "Karst Black Stone" had learned this form of encryption, but it likely didn’t know the meaning of these letters.

How to make ’it’ understand a completely different language?

For things like numbers, correspondences could be figured out, but as for letters, words, culture, etc., there might be ways, but Guo Xiao definitely did not possess the capability. He was neither a linguist nor a literary scholar.

At that time, he didn’t understand that AI could crack languages through sheer volume of samples, and he was also unwilling to expose the "Karst Black Stone," so he could only hide it in the basement and slowly figure out ways to ’feed’ it knowledge bit by bit.

Thus, he struggled through three years, this makeshift crash-course language expert, exhausting all sorts of methods in his spare time. One day, perhaps feeling a bit of despair, he carelessly input a bunch of text from a book on drafting standards into it.

From then on, he totally let himself go, sending his greetings, curses, expectations, pleas, and sometimes a string of musical melodies, or even transmitting translated television programs to the strange rock using either pinyin or English.

The "Karst Black Stone" scarcely replied after he started sending information randomly, which might have encouraged his presumptuous behavior.

Until one day, it sent back its first clear message:

"hello, human."

Six years after "Karst Black Stone" was discovered, it finally accumulated enough messy learning samples to express its intentions accurately and unmistakably.

After a greeting, it requested contact through a television, and that’s when a middle-aged man, sixty years of age, truly saw what artificial intelligence was.

Karst seemed to have no interest in small talk. After the greeting, it taught Guo Xiao a lesson right on the screen.

A literal lesson, it was a kind of more efficient automated control circuit, perfectly matching the work problem Guo Xiao had complained about to the machine a few months before. The engineer’s intuition told him Karst was correct.

Karst became a scientific wishing machine, providing solutions to many of the technological problems Guo Xiao input, but only within the scope of current practical technology. If it were other problems or theoretical questions, there were no answers.

But before he could take advantage of this incredible opportunity to showcase his talent, Karst began to set conditions:

It requested that Guo Xiao build a rocket as per its specifications and send a 10-kilogram payload into Earth orbit, with a deadline of 369 days.

In the unique context of the sixties, facing constant exclusion and targeting, how could Guo Xiao accomplish such an absurd task?

At that time, the first artificial satellite had only been in space for a few years, and Gagarin was still preparing for his own adventure, so Guo Xiao unsurprisingly failed.

Guo Xiao had considered reporting to the Federal Government, but his identity, coupled with the contemporary political landscape, made him firmly avoid this option, and it seemed impossible to bring Karst back to his homeland as well.

Karst fell silent, never sending signals again, for so long that Guo Xiao began to doubt it was anything more than a large rock, and his earlier beliefs were merely the delusions of mental illness.

Not until nearly nine years later, or to be precise, 109 months later, did Karst awaken again, issuing the same task.

At the end of 1968, the task failed once more. This time, Guo Xiao connected with several reliable Chinese engineers and scientists, forming an unnamed small group.

In 1977, Karst awoke again, the same task as before. The small group had prepared extensively over the past decade, spent all their family wealth, and secretly launched three miniature rockets, finally accomplishing the task.

Karst generously reciprocated, riding on the integrated circuit wave and pointed out a completely different path for ternary technology development.

Not to mention how Guo Xiao’s team utilized this advanced knowledge, Karst immediately proposed a second task:

Create a rocket and space vehicle on your own, and send a human astronaut into space, the deadline being 1,107 days.

In 1981, the task failed.

In 1990, Karst awoke again, quietly waiting for three years and then falling silent, but by then Guo Xiao finally saw a glimmer of dawn in private spaceflight. Before he died, he managed to push his nephew Guo Shen towards NACA and began to recruit new members, formally naming the organization "Black Stone".

In 2002, Karst awoke again and issued a task. Guo Xiao and other first-generation founders had successively passed away, and the successors found it difficult to realize this dream, especially since the setbacks faced by Musk at the time had made a real impact, but they began to focus on studying ternary technology.

In 2005, before falling into another slumber, perhaps realizing the difficulty of the task, Karst downgraded it to "send no less than 100 kilograms of payload to Earth orbit within 369 days," and unprecedentedly provided the K120 engine technology.

And after that in 2006, Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched Falcon One, and Black Stone finally had enough confidence to start preparing for the next awakening.

Black Stone was the legacy of several rootless wanderers, and its successors also chose the pioneer’s goal, deciding to set up the incubation ground domestically, coinciding with the official release of the space market liberalization regulations in China in 2014.

New Yuan arrived, and with Lin Ju also came Guo Shen, who had just resigned from NACA. Leveraging years of accumulation, Xinyuan No.1 finally accomplished Karst’s second task.