Silent Ark

Chapter 35: 9 Subjects

"I've seen it."

What are the contents of the attachment?

Zhou Muyuan did not answer.

Shen Qingci detected something in Lin Fan's voice—not anger, not disappointment, but something calmer.

It's like a person making thirty moves in a chess game, finally forcing their opponent into their predetermined position.

"Attachment number CDL-009," Lin Fan said. "Professor Chen Dunli's personal notes are dated fourteen days before the incident."

He looked at Shen Qingci.

"Captain Shen, have you seen it?"

"No," Shen Qingci said. "I only read the main text of the plan."

Lin Fan pulled another document from the pile and handed it to her.

"Take a look."

Shen Qingci took it.

It was a handwritten notebook, the handwriting neat but somewhat messy—the writer's hand was shaking at the time.

There were water stains on the edges of the paper; I'm not sure if it was water or something else.

The first page of the notes contained only one line of text:

"After Yao Chong called me, he observed that the thickness of the skin, according to physical laws, was decreasing at a rate of 0.7% per day."

Shen Qingci turned to the second page.

"The decay is not linear, it's exponential. According to the current decay curve, in about 1,100 days, the skin will completely disappear according to the physical laws of the earth."

"At that time, the fundamental forces that maintain atomic structure will no longer exist, and all matter will disintegrate."

"This is not a prediction, it's observation, and I've verified it three times using data from CERN."

"One thousand one hundred days, approximately three years."

"If humanity cannot leave Earth within three years—"

The third page is blank.

Only the last line, written at the very bottom of the page, with characters twice the size of the preceding ones, as if the writer was pressing down hard on the pen under some extreme emotion: "It's not an escape, it's the continuation of the species."

Shen Qingci placed the notebook on the table.

No one spoke in the meeting room.

Zhou Muyuan took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with the corner of his shirt.

His movements were slow, as if he was using them to buy time to think.

"I've seen this notebook," he said.

"And then?" Lin Fan asked.

"Then I ran his calculations again." Zhou Muyuan put his glasses back on. "The decay curve, the data source is the environmental monitoring records of CERN's seventh-generation collider in the three months before the event. The model he used is..."

He paused for a moment.

"The model he used wasn't a standard model. He built it himself."

"What model?"

"A model describing the 'skin thickness' of physical laws," Zhou Muyuan said. "He parameterized the stability of physical laws—fitting the rate of change of fundamental constants such as the speed of light, fine structure constant, and gravitational constant into a unified decay function."

"What about the fitting results?"

"R² equals 0.997".

Chu Chen stopped writing.

What does an R-squared of 0.997 mean? In physics, a model with a goodness of fit of 0.997 is almost certainly a model that describes the true laws of nature.

"I verified his data," Zhou Muyuan said, "using CERN's publicly available environmental monitoring records, plus global physical constant observation data collected by my own team over the past two months."

"result?"

"R² equals 0.993".

He paused for a moment.

"It's a bit lower than his because his data only goes up to three days before the event, while mine extends to the present. The decay of physical laws is accelerating—his model underestimated the rate of acceleration."

"So the actual situation is worse than he predicted?" Shen Qingci asked.

"Yes," Zhou Muyuan said. "According to the latest data, it's not 1,100 days, it's 980 days, about two years and eight months."

The meeting room fell silent again.

This silence lasted even longer.

Chu Chen put down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling.

Lin Fan tapped his fingers lightly twice on the table.

"Director Zhou," Shen Qingci said, "you just said that the warp drive requires negative energy at the level of Jupiter. This calculation is based on current laws of physics."

"right."

"If the laws of physics are decaying—if the fundamental constants are changing—then isn't the demand for negative energy also changing?"

Zhou Muyuan looked at her.

"This is something I haven't calculated yet," he said.

"But Chen Dunli had already calculated it."

Zhou Muyuan remained silent.

"His plan didn't specify the exact parameters of the warp drive," Shen Qingci said. "But in his notes—CDL-009—the third page was blank, with only the last line."

"right."

"That blank page isn't empty," Shen Qingci said. "It's that he deleted the content himself. Look at the paper—there are pen marks, but no ink. He wrote it in some way and then erased it."

Zhou Muyuan picked up the notebook and looked at it under the light.

indeed.

There are very faint indentations in the blank space of the third page, as if someone wrote on it and then erased it with an eraser.

"What do you want to say?" Zhou Muyuan asked.

"What I want to say is," Shen Qingci took back her notes, "that Professor Chen Dunli deleted some things when he submitted the plan. He didn't forget to write them down; he deleted them on purpose."

Why?

"Because he knew the plan would be evaluated. He knew the evaluators would say 'impossible,'" Shen Qingci said. "So he removed the things that would cause the evaluation to end prematurely—such as the specific parameters of the warp engine—leaving only the conclusions and deadlines."

The conclusion is 'species continuation'. The timeframe is 'three years'.

He wasn't submitting an engineering proposal. He was submitting an ultimatum.

Zhou Muyuan leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

After a long time, he opened his eyes.

"I need to recalculate," he said, "the negative energy requirement of the warp drive under the condition of decaying physical laws."

"How long will it take?" Lin Fan asked.

"Two weeks."

"We don't have two weeks," Lin Fan said. "The total deadline is 980 days. Every day wasted—"

"I know." Zhou Muyuan stood up, picked up his folder, "but I won't use a potentially wrong number to guide a plan that could save a species. That's a physicist's bottom line."

He walked to the door and paused.

"There's one more thing." He didn't turn around. "In Professor Chen Dunli's notes, there's a parameter in the fitting function of the decay curve—the model that describes 'skin thickness according to physical laws'—that I still can't explain."

"What parameters?"

"Initial conditions," Zhou Muyuan said. "His model requires an initial value—the original thickness of the skin before it begins to decay, according to physical laws. This value is not fitted from the data; it is set by him."

"What value did he set?"

Zhou Muyuan opened the door.

"Infinity."

He went outside.

There were four people left in the meeting room.

Lin Xiaohe looked down at her notebook, which was filled with densely packed data.

Chu Chen leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the light tubes on the ceiling.

Lin Fan's fingers stopped tapping.

Shen Qingci looked at the notes on the table.

On the blank space of the third page, the creases are faintly visible under the light.

She gently touched the marks with her fingers.

The handwriting was very light, but the outlines of a few words were still discernible.

The first character looks like "no".

The second character looks like "是".

The third word—

She pulled her hand back.

"Captain Shen," Lin Fan said.

"Um."

"There's one name on the list of people involved in Project Silent Ark that I need you to confirm."

"Who?"

"Yao Chong".

Shen Qingci's expression remained unchanged.

"Professor Chen Dunli designated him as the project leader in the plan," Lin Fan said. "The reason was—"He glanced at the document, "'The only living sample that simultaneously experienced the observer effect and the decay of physical laws in the event, its sensory data has irreplaceable reference value for the plan.'"

"Live specimen," Shen Qingci repeated.

"These are Professor Chen Dunli's original words."

"I know."

"You need to contact him."

Shen Qingci stood up.

"I know where to find him."

She walked to the door.

"Captain Shen," Lin Xiaohe suddenly spoke up.

Shen Qingci stopped.

"The parameter Director Zhou mentioned—the initial condition, infinity—" Lin Xiaohe pushed up her glasses, "If the thickness of skin according to physical laws is infinite before decay, that means—"

"That means it shouldn't have had any thickness in the first place," Shen Qingci said. "Something with thickness can't decay from infinity. Unless—"

She didn't finish speaking.

Unless that "infinity" is not a physical quantity.

It is a promise.

A promise that is being broken.

She pushed open the door and walked into the hallway.

The cold white light shone overhead, its brightness constant and without any fluctuation.

But Shen Qingci felt that the light was a little dimmer than yesterday.

Perhaps it was just her imagination.

Maybe not.