Little Mushroom

——Then there was the sound of something breaking.

Tang Lan frowned, and strode out.

The screaming continued, and the sound of fighting came out.

The boy flinched suddenly. He grabbed An Zhe's arm, as if seeking protection, but said, "Don't be afraid, someone has turned into a monster. Brother Tang can beat him."

They looked out through the open door, a human figure was rolling in the central clearing, dense tentacles and bumps bulging on his back, the features on his face were distorted and deformed into a gray edema, and his limbs were wildly outward. Attack, another body part turned into vines to fight with him, Tang Lan joined in, and he was subdued after a while.

"Lock it up." Tang Lan said.

——The thing was taken down, and Tang Lan returned to the room.

"We have human consciousness now, but we can't tell when we will lose it." The boy whispered: "So I cherish the time when I can be a human."

At this time, there was a sound outside the window. An Zhe looked down and saw a large instrument lit up in the open space in front of the main building.

"Mr. Polly seems to be working on this these days," the boy said. "It looks different from previous studies."

An Zhe looked there, and there was a dazzling red light between the machines. He asked, "What is this?"

Tang Lan didn't speak, he looked out the window.On the top of the mountain, the aurora and the starry sky become so low and so clear that they seem to be within reach.

In the room, there was silence.

After a long time, Tang Lan suddenly spoke.

"Mr. Polly is a scientist of the fusion school," Tang Lan said softly, "The fusion school believes that one day, they will find a way to peacefully integrate the genes of humans and monsters, so that people will not become monsters with only instincts, but also possess Strong body, able to adapt to the current harsh environment."

"It's like this." He showed An Zhe his arm, which had some black scales on it: "The human body is indeed too fragile."

"Later, before it was successful, the fusion faction's experimental product ran away. The giant leech infected the water source of the base, and half of the entire base died because of this-the base has never allowed any similar experiments since then, the fusion faction The scientists of the fusion faction have also become sinners of the base." He said slowly: "However, other research has no results, only fusion sounds like there is still a glimmer of hope. So the scientists of the fusion faction defected, they left the base, and wanted to find A place where experiments can continue."

"If they want to study fusion, they must do in vivo experiments. Once they do experiments, they will create those intelligent monsters that have acquired human thinking but are not human. The base will not allow this to happen, so they have been sending troops to intercept and kill them. Finally, they finally found this place." Tang Lan looked up at the vast starry sky: "The Highland Research Institute is a ruins. It was originally a place where man-made magnetic poles were studied many years ago. This place is behind the abyss, and the terrain is so high that armored vehicles cannot drive Now, there are still a lot of ready-made equipment, some of which can cause magnetic interference to the surroundings, making military aircraft and radars ineffective. The research institute has settled down, and they have continued to study while taking in alien species, and it has continued until now."

An Zhe asked: "Have you found a way to integrate now?"

Tang Lan shook his head.

"I can't find a pattern," he said. "At first they thought it had something to do with will, and later they thought it had something to do with the types of foreign genes, but they were all wrong. People with weak wills can wake up in a daze, and plants with weak polluting abilities can swallow people's blood." The will, after being infected by a very powerful monster, does not necessarily lose consciousness. The reason for retaining the will is just luck. Later, the magnetic poles failed and the overall pollution proved that this may have nothing to do with genes. Gold and iron can also pollute each other. An iron atom Under the microscope, it inexplicably became something we couldn’t understand. My husband said that the previous research was all wrong, and we need to find a new way of analysis.”

An Zhe also heard the same argument from Dr. Ji, and he said, "The base thinks the same way."

Tang Lan didn't speak for a long time.

"An Zhe," he suddenly called his name, and said, "Can you feel a kind of fluctuation?"

An Zhe nodded, he could always feel it.

"After becoming a different species, many people can feel it," Tang Lan said softly, "And it's getting stronger and stronger."

In the morning, An Zhe opened his eyes from the bed.He had a splitting headache, and his dream was full of wilderness, the howling sound of vibrating eardrums, the patter of animal claws stepping on the mud, and crying—I don’t know whose crying it was.In the jungle, Youyou refracts the fluorescence of the beast's eyes. He is running away from something like crazy, looking for something, but he can never escape, never find it.That gigantic, empty wave still haunts him like a shadow, it seems to be in every corner of this world, even the dew on the tip of a leaf is its incarnation.

An Zhe tried his best to support his body with his arms. Sitting up was very difficult. His bones seemed to be rusted. Will stop forever, so he knows that he is one step closer to an irresistible death.

An Zhe hugged the quilt and sat on the bed for a long time before he felt that his condition had recovered.He looked blankly at this warm room—what happened yesterday was still like a dream, and today he felt a little more real. He came to a human world in another sense, and the people here treated him very well—but he The original intention of leaving Lu Feng was to prevent Lu Feng from witnessing his own death.

What about the people here who are friendly to him?

An Zhe had a sore nose, and he felt guilty, but before he could make any further choices, there was a knock on the door.

It was the boy from yesterday, carrying a breakfast tray with steaming enamel cups and bowls.

"You didn't wake up in the morning, and we didn't call you." The boy said, "Uncle Shu made potato soup again, you want to drink it."

An Zhe said "thank you".

As he said that, the boy put the tray on the table. He looked down at the rich soup. Small pieces of potatoes were floating in the soup. It and the shredded bacon gave off a mild aroma, which mixed with the In the white mist, it curled up and spread throughout the room.

——Unexpectedly, he never thought of leaving again.

The life of the research institute is not as orderly as the base. People do not have fixed tasks and positions, but they have a spontaneous division of labor.The institute took him in, and he knew that he had to give something in return. He wanted to do something hard, and the people in the institute welcomed him very much.

At first, he would go out and collect edible plant roots with the boy in a safer area. Later, his body could not bear the cold wind, so he could only stay at the base to help plant or cook.Later, he couldn't even support such a job.The people in the institute all thought that he was suffering from some kind of unidentifiable disease—this was a common thing, in this world, any disease could happen, even the whole world was terminally ill.

Polly came to see him that day.From that day on, An Zhe lived with Polly Jean in the white building on the west side of the main building.Although his body is gradually weakening, his mind is still clear enough to be a qualified assistant.There is also a silent Indian man in Polly's laboratory as an assistant. He is good at repairing various equipment, and his name is Kodd.

This is a fortified laboratory with machines on all sides. The machines are connected to display screens. The largest one - its optical cable line extends from the laboratory to the ground and is connected to a device called "Simpson cage" outside.

The main components of the Simpson cage are four five-meter-high mechanical towers, just like the miniature version of the two white towers outside the research institute, and the shape of the two white towers——An Zhe looked at them for a long time and confirmed that they were the same as the one at the base. The giant artificial magnetic poles have many similarities.He immediately thought that the Highland Research Institute was the place where the artificial magnetic pole was originally developed.

The four towers form a rectangle more than ten meters long and twenty meters wide. When the Simpson cage is activated, the entire cubic space surrounded by them will be filled with a scorching red light similar to a high-frequency laser, like a scarlet sea ​​of ​​flames.Everyone at the institute knew not to walk into the open Simpson cage, or you would die an ugly death.

From the laboratory manual, An Zhe learned that the "Simpson cage" was the most cutting-edge masterpiece in the field of high-energy physics at the peak of human science, and it directly contributed to the success of the artificial magnetic pole.

"Until now, we don't know the reason for the geomagnetism. Some people speculate that it is because of the flow of molten iron in the earth's liquid core, and some people think that it is the rotation of the electric layer in the mantle, but there is no strong enough evidence. We don't know what it is. The reason, so we can’t know the reason for its disappearance, which is beyond the limit of our cognition. Similarly, we can’t reproduce the electromagnetic field unless we create a magnet that is half the size of the earth.” Polly explained to him: "But one of the laws of physics we have is that magnetism is produced by electricity, and the movement of charges produces a magnetic field."

"One of the contributions of the Simpson cage is that it can present the wave force field between elementary particles, so as to analyze the way they interact, and then reproduce some phenomena. So we got the inspiration for artificial magnetic poles - you lack physical knowledge, I There is no way to explain it more profoundly. Simply put, the two artificial magnetic poles emit pulse waves of special frequencies, which cause the resonance of charged particles in the solar wind, just like we hold a horn and tell them, please go that way. So the particles The resonance and motion create a magnetic field, and the earth is protected."

An Zhe nodded, he understood, but only to the extent that he understood.His work does not require him to master advanced knowledge of physics, he only needs to be optimistic about the instrument.

Sometimes, Polly calibrated the frequency of the Simpson cage outside, another assistant followed him, and An Zhe was the only one in the white building.He sat there with the low night sky outside the window.The machine hummed monotonously, and the spectrometer connected to the Simpson cage drew complex curves, and it was unclear what was being recorded.

Those curves were noisy, tangled, without any rules, and for no reason he thought of those chaotic and terrifying lines drawn by Sinan in the Garden of Eden on paper.Closing his eyes, feeling the increasingly violent fluctuations of nothingness, feeling the passing of life day after day, he would be afraid, but sometimes he felt that he was gradually approaching eternity.

When Polly came back, he began to analyze those chaotic curves. An Zhe tried his best to pick up the thermos and poured him a cup of hot water.

"What are you doing?" he finally asked.

"I want to find that thing," Polly said.

Looking at the screen, An Zhe asked, "...What is it?"

"Something that changes the world."

"It must be everywhere, and if it's in this world, it's in the Simpson cage," he said.

An Zhe frowned slightly.

Polly picked up a compass at hand: "We can never see the magnetic field, but the direction of the compass can tell us that it exists. The same is true for other invisible things in the world. Our knowledge is too shallow, so we can only follow them those appearances projected on the world."

"Look here." Polly highlighted a smooth curve: "Everything in the world is interacting, and there is a lot of information in the traces of interaction. Like this line, it, like a compass, represents a magnetic field."

"We assume that the world is changing because something huge is coming... But the magnetic field can resist it to a certain extent—since the magnetic field can resist it, it must have a similar magnetic field presentation. Polly's gray-blue eyes looked at the messy screen with fascination: "It's grand, beyond our cognition, it changes the essence of this world, but it's in it. I think, it must be There is a specific receiving frequency, and the shadow it casts on the real world can be seen."

An Zhe asked, "And then?"

Polly shook his head slowly: "We must first know what it is before we can think about ways to deal with it."

But can it really be found?

An Zhe looked at the screen in confusion.

As if knowing what he was thinking, Polly spoke.

"Although it is very slim, but..." He only finished speaking halfway, and sighed softly, "After all, we have created many masterpieces that are unimaginable to human beings before."

An Zhe read the fluctuation of his tone, and repeated his last sentence: "A masterpiece unimaginable for human beings."

Then he watched the twinkle in Polly's eyes fade away.

Polly Jean looked at the boundless wilderness outside the window, the sky full of gray haze, and the howling of wild animals from all directions. There were strange fluctuations in the voice, which could not be interpreted by human sound spectrum.

"Only for human beings." He said softly, "Before we were shattered, we thought we understood the whole picture of this world."

At that moment, An Zhe saw in his eyes the loneliness that spanned the ages.