Age of Cosmic Exploration

Chapter 234: Codes

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Because of the creator’s particles, neither party knew about how the other party’s negotiation was going. Therefore, the Observer and the merchant spacecraft had to keep going back and forth between the two main ships to inform their civilizations of the negotiation progress. This was a calming balm to the nervous mankind, allowing them to focus completely on the negotiation happening on the Hope.

In this period, human representatives had accompanied the few alien merchants to look at the actual products to ensure that mankind really did wish to trade these items and weren’t swindling the merchants for naught.

Anyway, the negotiations lasted for more than a day. In fact, Ying’s group had to take a break in the middle of it to return to the Observer to rest and to sleep. The negotiations had reached an impasse. The space merchants realized the trade was not in their favor, but mankind didn’t have anything else available to be offered. Regardless, the negotiations had to go on, as there was no other choice.

At 2 PM of the second day, a manager in the homeostatic room found something weird in the statistics of the Hope’s daily water usage. The spike in statistics wasn’t anything instantly alarming. In fact, it just looked like a stray line of code.

The manager was ready to shrug it off, but the more he thought about it, the more uneasy he felt. Every program on the Hope was directly connected to the Hope’s central mainframe. In other words, if there was anything wrong with the programs, it would mean that there was something wrong with the central mainframe. This was not a joking matter, but if it was serious, it could affect the Hope’s life support system, and that was related to the lives of tens of thousands of people!

Therefore, he didn’t dare to be careless and repeated the checking done on the systems. However, the code had disappeared. The manager had a bad feeling about this. This might've been a glitch in the system, but he couldn’t just ignore it. After all, his life might hang in the balance if anything bad were to happen.

The manager thus reported this incident to his superior. They treated it with due diligence. Members from the Workshop were sent to check out the anomaly. In the end, they did discover the weird code. It was an encrypted code, the encryption being a quantum lock that they had not seen before.

They felt that this was something more than what they could handle, so the manager’s superior passed it on to his superior. The incident slowly climbed up the bureaucratic ladder until it finally reached Yao Yuan’s ears. He wasted no time and formed an expect tech group to conduct an all-rounded checking and diagnostics.

The report arrived very soon. The code was similar to the alien merchant’s signal, because they used the same quantum lock. Of course, the content most likely was different, but it was certain that this mysterious code had come from the space merchants as well.

This was a highly suspicious situation. Could it be that the merchants had discovered that their ploy was trounced by Ren Tao and Xiao Niao and they had sent out these stray codes as a disturbance?

This was the most logical conclusion. Therefore, Yao Yuan took the report and headed to the meeting room where the negotiations were still going on. He was caught up in his own thoughts, so he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. When he neared the meeting room, his feet suddenly slipped, and he flailed in mid-air before landing on the floor with an embarrassing fall.

The fall scratched his forehead, causing it to bleed. Yao Yuan searched the floor for the culprit and found a glass pebble, but why would he find one there? This corridor was close to the Hope’s bridge, so under normal circumstances, normal civilians and children wouldn’t be allowed near. Furthermore, cleaning was done daily, so why was there a glass pebble there?

As Yao Yuan struggled to stand up, a large shadow passed him. It was one of the space merchants, the large, four-armed gorilla. The 3-meter-tall creature lowered his head to glance at Yao Yuan. Yao Yuan couldn’t tell what the other party’s expression was because the gorilla was wearing a space suit, but for some reason, Yao Yuan knew it was condescension…

When Yao Yuan straightened himself, the gorilla had already left. Yao Yuan saw something in the gorilla’s condescending behavior, so he rushed towards the surveillance room. The people there were still trying to unlock the quantum lock.

Yao Yuan didn’t waste time on greetings but ordered them to speed up the decryption process. He needed to know what was the purpose and meaning behind the codes. There was a bad omen rising up within him, and for some reason, he realized that the key to understanding everything was to solve this quantum lock!

In the next few hours, the process for the tech team slowed down considerably, so much so that he had to take Zhang Heng off the Observers’ unit to work on the decoding. After all, he was the go-to expert for anything computer on the Hope. Plus, encryption was his specialty.

However, this quantum lock proved too difficult for him to handle as well. Unlike other coding locks, this quantum lock was prone to changing and adapting to the hacking. Even with the central mainframe’s aid, it was an uphill battle dealing with this lock. The biggest issue was that if the lock wasn’t hacked in one go, it would reset itself.

Faced with little to no progress, Zhang Heng proposed another method: abandon the force hacking and instead use the junkyard signal issued by the space merchants earlier as a cipher to understand the codes via compare and contrast. However, this method would require a ton of repetition; even with the whole team working on it, it would take almost 3 hours to complete.

If that was the case, Yao Yuan stopped rushing them. He stood to the side and waited patiently; however, he was suddenly contacted by the business negotiators.

"Captain, these alien merchants’ tones suddenly became much more aggressive. They are complaining that the negotiation have been going on for far too long, accusing us of not showing them any sincerity. They asserted that they will only trade one thing for the 5th revolution technology. It is a take it or leave it kind of situation."

Yao Yuan knew instantly that something had gone wrong, but he still hadn’t figured out what. There was something clawing at his mind, but at that moment, he asked in a hurry, "Well, what is it that they want?"

"Cosmic adaptors… The Homo Evolutis!"

The sentence made Yao Yuan’s skin rise with goose bumps. It was the thing him, Ren Tao, and Xiao Niao were worried about, that the space merchants had a technology that could detect the presence of Homo Evolutis. This was the scariest situation. If this was true, there was no way these negotiations would end in peace.

The urgency of the situation pulled Yao Yuan out of the surveillance room. He rushed to the meeting room, and when he entered, he saw the business experts in the middle of a heated argument with the 10 space merchants. When they saw Yao Yuan, they immediately relayed all the information to him. The alien merchants had lost their patience and demanded to purchase the human cosmic adaptors. They demanded to have at least half of the Homo Evolutis to be up for trade or the negotiation was off. They had gotten so aggressive in their language that their tones had become nothing more than condescension and insults.

As soon as Yao Yuan switched on his language translator, a stream of insults and scolding came into his ears. A fury rose within him immediately, but he suppressed it with force and told the merchants, "I’m sorry, but unlike the space merchants conglomerate, humanity only has one main life form, so we will not have our own up for trade…"

The giant brain alien retorted, "Don’t be so stupid. In space, survival is the most important. We will provide you the best technology from Level 3 and 4 civilizations, and in return you only need to hand over half of your cosmic adaptors. This is a steal. As the leader of your civilization, how can you be so blind? Furthermore, the worms that your species are, shouldn’t you be more courteous when you’re facing a species obviously superior to you?"

Yao Yuan’s fury flared up even more, but he didn’t react rashly. After all, this was a communication between two civilizations. He suppressed his rage and replied, "We have many other things we’re willing to trade: the minerals, DNA prints, everything you see in the warehouse can be traded, but our people are definitely not for sale…"

The big brain alien suddenly started issuing a series of calls that sounded like a duck’s quacking. The other merchants gave out their own weird calls as well. The leading big brain alien said, "But what we want now are the cosmic adaptors, nothing else."

"Do you want me repeat myself? Our cosmic adapters are… not for sale!"

Yao Yuan had already narrowed his eyes. It was definitely not the look of kindness. Just as he finished, his communicator rang. The urgent voice of the person came through. "Captain! The recent update from the surveillance room is that the code doesn’t have the same frequency as the rest of the space merchants’ signal. It matches…

"The frequency from Old Earth! They’ve met the other group of humans that escaped from Earth!"

At that moment, all of the lights on the Hope blinked out of power, but they returned almost instantly. However, after that little incident, the people on the Hope realized that they had lost control of the central mainframe!

The Hope was being taken over by the central mainframe!