Chapter 213 - Sol Three Hundred and Twenty-Seven, Reuniting With You In Another Universe (1/2)
Chapter 213: Sol Three Hundred and Twenty-Seven, Reuniting With You In Another Universe
Tomcat waved the scrap paper in its paw and sat back. Clearly, Tang Yue was proud of being a feces-creating machine. He was the only working fertilizer generator on this barren planet. Just on this point alone, his importance made him unparalleled. Tang Yue had finally found himself a domain in which he completely beat Tomcat—defecating.
However, Tomcat didn’t wish to vie for supremacy in such a meaningless domain. It only mattered if Tang Yue’s feces could evenly cover the entirety of the Isidis Planitia; otherwise, it was meaningless towards the environment and ecosphere.
Tang Yue took out a piece of biscuit from the cabinet, poured himself a small cup of water, and circled behind Tomcat. He bent down and looked at the screen.
“What’s this?” Tang Yue pointed at the diagram on the screen. There were brownish-yellow and black blurry spots which he couldn’t identify. “A remote sensing image of the Martian surface?”
“No.” Tomcat shook its head. “Something more beautiful.”
“What?”
Tomcat moved the mouse and zoomed out of the picture.
Tang Yue finally identified it. It was a leopard cat in a sultry pose as it lay on a boulder, looking back at the camera.
“Why are you looking at something like this at such times? Shouldn’t you be refining the docking plan? Aren’t you doing calculations?” Tang Yue was appalled. “You’ve been looking at this female cat all this while?”
“It’s a male leopard cat.”
“It’s even a male!?” Tang Yue felt as though he was suffering from a cardiac arrest.
“Why are you making such a fuss. This is my computer’s screensaver. The picture comes from National Geographic. The workstation is carrying out calculations in the background.” Tomcat casually tapped the keyboard and a series of numbers and diagrams appeared. “But this is an extremely difficult job. I’ve designed many different plans. In terms of viability, they were rejected at the verification phase… I have to say that your wedding is probably the hardest one in human history. The most difficult-to-traverse hundred kilometers.”
Tang Yue sat down with his lunch, peeling open the vacuum pack and took a nibble.
“Lass, have you eaten?”
“A little,” Mai Dong replied. “I’m not too hungry.”
“How’s the oxygen and water?”
“There’s 280 hours of oxygen left. There’s still enough water,” Mai Dong said. “You don’t have to worry about me. I can definitely last until Tianzhou arrives.”
When she said so, the United Space Station was hurtling past the Martian surface. The blinding sunlight burst out from the horizon behind her. It was another dawn, but half an hour later, the sun would set.
In near-orbit, dawn was forever chasing after dusk. With the space station’s altitude lowering, dawn could finally reach dusk’s tail.
“Tang Yue, do you believe in parallel universes?”
“Parallel universes?”
“Yeah. Long ago, I read Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell and A Brief History of Time. The books describe the Universe as not being the only one. There are many, many parallel universes in this world. Some universes might be identical to ours,” Mai Dong said. “Do you think there will be a universe where the Earth didn’t vanish?”
Tang Yue took a bite of the biscuit. No one knew if parallel universes existed. There was no way of proving it, nor was there any way of validating it.
“I believe they do.”
Since it was just a theoretical hypothesis, he might as well be a little more romantic.
If Earth was really skewered by some alien civilization, could there be a situation in another universe where the shot missed? If the muzzle was off by just a few arcseconds, the bullet would brush past Earth.
Tang Yue continued letting his mind wander. Since there was a universe with a perfectly fine Earth, there was bound to be such a situation:
A universe with a quarter of Earth obliterated.