bacchusnovels Chapter 296 Interstellar Heartbeat
Chapter 296 Interstellar Heartbeat
Translating a five-thousand-character alien language is no task that can be completed in a single night. Yu Ying assembled a team of forty-seven people—linguistics, semiotics, computer science, web coding—everyone she could muster. One month. The result of a month's work was just one sentence. But that sentence silenced the conference room for a full sixty seconds.
In the first twenty days, only sixty characters were deciphered. Some in the team began to suspect that it wasn't a language at all, but some kind of mathematical sequence. Yu Ying rearranged all the symbols on a whiteboard and studied it for an entire afternoon. At 3 a.m. on the twenty-first day, she drew a line on the whiteboard, aligning the alien symbols and the Creator's code bit by bit. The underlying symbol structure was based on the same mathematical framework. The Creator's code was the ancestor, and this alien language was the descendant. They were of the same origin. Yu Ying woke up everyone she could. After confirming the relationship, the decoding speed jumped from three characters per day to eight hundred per day. The lock that couldn't be unlocked in twenty days was opened in one night. On the twenty-ninth day, forty-seven experts had completed the translation of all five thousand and seventeen characters.
Yu Ying projected the complete translation onto the conference room screen. After the projector lit up, no one spoke. Chen Hao later recalled that moment, saying that among the forty-seven people in the conference room plus Zuo Cheng, their breathing was so soft that it was inaudible.
That wasn't a self-introduction. It was a reply. We are the current hosts of the 106th node of the Web, calling ourselves the Listeners. Our civilization achieved Web-weaving perception four million years ago, and completed the full activation of the Web in the solar system direction three million years ago. In those three million years, we heard you fail seven times. The first time was six hundred million years ago, during a global glaciation. The second time was four hundred million years ago, during supernova radiation. The third time was two hundred and fifty million years ago. The fourth time was one hundred million years ago. The fifth time was sixty-five million years ago. The sixth time was seventy thousand years ago. The seventh time was twelve thousand years ago. The eighth time, that is, with you, we heard your heartbeat growing louder and louder starting a hundred years ago. We don't know what you look like, what language you speak, or what your civilization is called. But we have waited for you for forty million years. You are not the only ones in the universe waiting for an echo.
Zuo Cheng stood in front of the screen for a long time after reading the last word. Forty million years. Seven failures. Each failure meant the extinction of an entire species. And everyone who heard it heard it. Yu Ying walked to his side and placed her hand on his arm. Zuo Cheng turned around and said one word. A reply. The entire message consisted of three sentences. Thank you for waiting for us so long. We've only just learned to walk, and we're learning to run. We're on our way.
The reply was sent via the seventh node deep-space broadcast array. This time, it didn't take forty-seven seconds. The quantum entanglement channel had been established and maintained after the initial handshake. The instant the reply was sent, the signal from the Centaurus direction changed from periodic broadcasting to a continuous, stable carrier wave. The channel was now permanently open. You can speak at any time.
A system panel popped up with a notification: The first practical operation of the interstellar communication console has been completed. The quantum entanglement channel in the Centaurus direction has switched from passive reception to active maintenance. The solar system node's status has changed from offline to online. The 40 million-year web-weaving record of the Centaurus node can be retrieved. Zuo Cheng looked at the last notification and took a deep breath. 40 million years. That's the web-weaving history of an entire civilization. From today onwards, he can now open it. The system notes appeared: Interstellar communication has moved from theoretical verification to routine operation. The web-weaving solar system node is now an online node. It has begun exchanging background data with other web-weaving nodes.
Tan Yue wrote his daily log on the Pioneer. If the universe were a giant empty house, what humanity just heard wasn't an echo, but rather someone from the next room knocking on the wall. He said he'd been there all along. After finishing his log, Tan Yue sat by the porthole, gazing at the stars for a long time. He didn't know which direction Centaurus was in. But he knew there were people in that direction.
Lu Yunfei did something no one expected. He accessed the Web of Consciousness on the Pioneer's communication terminal, attempting to connect to the Centaur node's consciousness interface via a quantum entanglement channel. The consciousness network's long-range extension blades were unlocked, but had never been tested in practice. The success rate was extremely low. Shen Yiming asked him if he was sure he wanted to try. Lu Yunfei replied, "If someone knocks on the wall, someone has to open the door." He felt no delay when the connection was established. 0.04 milliseconds. Exactly the same as within the solar system. Distance was indeed ineffective for the consciousness network, even across 4.2 light-years. He sensed an existence within the consciousness network. Not visual, not auditory, but a perception more primal than either. Like another person breathing in a room. He couldn't see them, but he knew they were there. He sent out a very simple consciousness pulse. "Hello." The other party didn't respond verbally. They replied with an equally simple consciousness pulse. That pulse carried a set of data, not characters, but a direct, untranslatable perception. It took Lu Yunfei a full minute to understand what he had sensed. Then he spoke a sentence across the entire channel. The voice trembled. It wasn't one person. It was an entire civilization. Hundreds of millions of consciousnesses, all connected to the web. They were waving at me simultaneously.
Three seconds. That colossal presence lasted only three seconds. The connection was severed, not from the human side, but from the listener's side. A brief message arrived: "We cannot speak with you for long. Your web is a child just awakened; our web is an elder who has lived for forty million years. Too much talk from the elder will frighten the child. We will return when you are ready. Every day, someone is waiting for you on this end of the channel."
After the message, the signal from the Centaurus direction returned to a continuous, low-power heartbeat. But this time, the heartbeat pattern changed. It wasn't a periodic broadcast, but a looping message. The message contained only two words: "Waiting for you." The listener embedded these two words into the foundational layer of the human network's heartbeat signal. As long as humanity's network continues to receive, this message will exist forever. The longest wait in the universe has become the shortest sentence. The people at the control center gradually dispersed. Han Lu glanced back at the door as she left. Zuo Cheng was still sitting there. The two words on the panel flickered, like breathing.
Zuo Cheng looked at the two words on the panel and wrote a comment in the system log: "They waited forty million years. We won't make them wait that long again. I promise."