Chapter 954 (2/2)
The old man pointed with a trembling finger at a corner in the room. Hao Ren saw an old device sitting there that looked like some apparatus for medical treatment.
“Every 10 years, I woke up. I would perform a blood test, and check the conditions of my skull.” The old man lowered his head and continued slowly. “Through a small window in the room, I could see the 150 thousand little cradles of life, knowing that our bloodline was held in stasis, waiting for the right time. That gave me the courage to continue on. Every time I woke up from hibernation, I would make a note on the number of times I’ve done so. I told myself, when I pass the 10th time, we’ll be able to start over … Until the day I woke up and marked 11 times in my notebook, and found the Vault’s mainframe to be unusually quiet.”
The room went quiet.
“Systems failure.” Hao Ren sighed. “The fusion reactor had a radiation leak. It spread to the entire bridge. The Vault’s mainframe awakened al the children in the hibernation pods. Perhaps it thought that the children would be better off inside the sanctuary than sleeping forever in the hibernation pods. But the mainframe missed yours.”
The old man’s wrinkled face settled in a complicated expression. He was not exactly smiling, or being sad, but it was also not an expression of surprise. Like Hao Ren, he sighed quietly. “I knew that it was a systems failure, but now I finally knew the details.”
Lily found all of this hard to accept. “It should never have happened. The Vault’s mainframe algorithm was at fault. The Vault’s location was also less than ideal. It’s separated from the sanctuary by the fusion reactor. If only you had more time to study the problem … Sigh, forget it.”
Lily could not continue on, because she knew that the people on the ark had done their best – They were dying, and they had limited options on the location to build the vault. No one knew how long they hold on to their lives before the disease took over. No one knew if they would live to see the day the vault was completed. When the Ultimate Vault was in operation, only a scant dozens of adults were still alive. They could not thoroughly test the entire system, and they had no time to plan for contingencies.
It was all a gamble, in the hopes that their plan would work.
However, no one was immune from the hands of fate.
“How did you carry on after that?” Vivian stared at the old man’s face. It was deeply wrinkled, dry, and thin. That face was only about 20 years old when it first entered this room, a face of youth. There was no sign of that youth now. “How … How long were you awake?”
“A long time, I tried to stay awake. At first, I forced myself to wake up every 1 years, and continued with my health checkup, praying that the next time I woke up, the children would already be greeting there by my door to greet me. As time passed, I eventually gave up and began to live without care, eating and drinking as I liked … I was lucky that they left enough food for me. Since I was the only on the ship left who needed to eat, they put all the leftover food supplies in this room, since they wouldn’t be needing them very soon.” The old man looked he was about to break down crying. “Really, I wasted a lot of time, but later I found this way of life to be even more difficult than just dying, so I went back to sleeping, and switched to waking up every 30 years. This continued for a long time until I found my hair turning white, and the wrinkles started appearing on my skin. I became afraid, and then I realized that not only was I wasting my own time, I was also wasting the time of the children outside. So, before I started my final round of hibernation, I did something very important … Oh, right, that’s right, I remember now, it’s important, very important!”
The old man was suddenly agitated. He pointed towards another corner of the room. The smile on his face seemed to bring back the youth he once had back to him. Hao Ren ran there and saw a long desk, with a lot of manuscripts arranged neatly on top.
When piled up together, the manuscripts would probably reach about half a meter tall.
As if these manuscripts were not impressive enough, the walls around the desk made Hao Ren stare in stupefaction – the walls, floor, furniture, and any visible surface around him were covered with writings and diagrams. He followed those writings away from the desk, and soon realized that they covered almost half the entire room – the interior lighting was dim, and the walls and floor were blocked by so many other miscellaneous things that he never noticed the writings before.
Behind Hao Ren, the old man stood up with effort and spread his arms out slowly. His eyes were glowing with pride. “Our … History.”