Chapter 114: A Bountiful Harvest

After a tiring day, Du Qiu returned home and soon received a call from Ning Shuangshuang.

“I saw the article online. Do you need me to check out that big V for you?”

Du Qiu could hear the concern in Ning Shuangshuang’s voice, which warmed his heart.

He spoke softly, “I suspect this is just an appetizer; there might be more attacks on me or my company later on. Let’s wait for these guys to all show up before you help me investigate.”

“Okay, your invention is too revolutionary, attracting attention is inevitable. Be careful on your own, you don’t want the small-timers to steal from you.”

As they spent more time together, Ning Shuangshuang had become more talkative, which cheered Du Qiu up.

“Mhm, don’t worry, I have a strong security net set up at both the company and home. Anyone attempting to do something untoward will be caught red-handed.”

“Uncle is helping you file an application with the authorities. Given that Dream Technology and Xingguang Precision are providing ultra-high precision machining center equipment to aerospace and military enterprises, we’re planning to get our security department involved to guard key areas against spy infiltration.”

“Can you be assigned to my company?” Du Qiu asked excitedly.

“What are you thinking?” Ning Shuangshuang chided, “Our team doesn’t handle such routine security tasks.”

“Sigh, that’s too bad. Otherwise, we could see each other often,” Du Qiu said with regret. “By the way, how about I take you to meet my childhood friend Yu Donghua and his wife this weekend?”

Ning Shuangshuang had heard Du Qiu mention Yu Donghua before and knew his nickname was Big Fish.

“People their age shouldn’t be called by nicknames. I’ve been quite busy recently, so maybe another time.”

Ning Shuangshuang suddenly felt nervous inside. Her relationship with Du Qiu seemed very stable and aligned with her desires. She enjoyed the peaceful feeling, but the thought of meeting Du Qiu’s close friends made her feel insecure, so she made an excuse.

“Then some other time. Big Fish and his wife have already returned to develop their careers in the country; we’ll have plenty of opportunities to meet in the future.”

“Right, it’s getting late. You should rest early and not stay up late.”

“Okay, you too,” she replied.

After hanging up, Du Qiu went to wash up.

A few months ago, because he couldn’t connect to the dream, and he had to rush the production of Tiangong Model I, Du Qiu often worked back-to-back shifts, thoroughly exhausting himself.

Fortunately, sleeping on the crystal pillow, even though he couldn’t connect to the super-machine of the alien civilization, he could still roam the starry sea, which prevented his headaches from flaring up.

Last night, not only did he reconnect to the super-machine, but he also seized the opportunity to take down the Maintenance Worker.

Tonight, he was going to verify if he could connect directly to the Maintenance Worker. Du Qiu was quite nervous about it.

After all, from the perspective of the alien civilization, two intelligent machine consciousness upload modules were now active. What would happen when he connected?

After washing up, Du Qiu set up his crystal pillow and went to bed.

Five minutes later, Du Qiu entered the dream state on schedule.

He was still traveling along a fixed star route, too fast to recognize the surrounding constellations.

Otherwise, with all his map drawing, he should’ve guessed the direction of the alien civilization by now.

For now, Du Qiu could only deduce the part from Earth to the Pleiades cluster. The rest of the route was uncertain to him.

This route was only matched by referring to the legends of the Maya civilization and identifying their general location in advance.

During this journey, Du Qiu felt as if he had accelerated a bit more.

After passing through the endless dark area again, suddenly he saw two white vortexes!

The two vortexes were close to each other. Du Qiu’s consciousness did not directly enter like before but stopped in front of them.

Obviously, this required Du Qiu to make a choice.

Du Qiu thought about the numerous production bases on the resource planet. If all those super intelligent machines had activated their consciousness upload modules, there would be a sea of white vortexes.

What should he do then? How would he make his choice quickly?

How had the intelligent life-forms of the alien civilization, who designed this consciousness upload feature, contemplated over this? Didn’t they have any identification method?

While Du Qiu internally complained, he examined the two white vortexes carefully.

When his consciousness touched one of the vortexes, he suddenly received a message: “Producer 10220028801 modified!”

Aha! It turned out that pausing his consciousness in front of this white vortex and then touching it would reveal the corresponding identity information.

Thinking this way, Du Qiu touched the other vortex and indeed received a message: “Maintainer 8220010126!”

Once Du Qiu was clear which vortex was the Maintainer, he didn’t delay and entered that vortex with his consciousness.

The next moment, he arrived as expected at the Maintainer’s intelligence core.

From his experience descending into the sub-intelligence core, Du Qiu understood that doing so in the intelligence core gains respective permissions. Otherwise, he couldn’t even get information about functions with added permissions.

Therefore, Du Qiu quickly descended into the Maintainer’s intelligence core and utilized its computing power to study the status of the Maintainer within the production base.

In Du Qiu’s memory, Producers were at the bottom tier, Fabricators were a level higher, and Maintainers were yet another level up, with Energy Suppliers being the highest rank in the base.

Du Qiu knew the smooth operation of the entire production base was tied to the powerful energy supply of the Energy Suppliers.

He recalled that the first time the super-machine was shut down and restarted, he obtained some information about the energy sources of the alien civilization from the energy module.

Currently, in reality, Du Qiu was developing a smarter robot, but the energy issue had become the greatest challenge.

If he could acquire corresponding energy technology from the Energy Supplier, Du Qiu believed he would have the confidence to truly develop interstellar technology.

With Earth’s outdated rocket technology and corresponding energy techniques, it was difficult to even leave the solar system, let alone enter interstellar space.

However, Du Qiu had just obtained the Maintainer and was not eager to learn about the higher-level Energy Supplier – who knows if there might be higher-grade monitoring measures there.

In Du Qiu’s view, this alien civilization must be a high-level civilization, but even high-level civilizations have low-level technologies.

For instance, this production base Du Qiu felt was at best a level four civilization.

Perhaps the alien civilization also had some considerations for doing so.

Otherwise, if the technology was too advanced for Du Qiu to study or replicate, he would truly be in despair.

As Du Qiu gradually understood the functions of the Maintainer, his attention turned to the intelligence core program.

He discovered that the Maintainer’s intelligence program was clearly of a higher intellegence level than the Producer’s he encountered before.

With Du Qiu’s understanding of artificial intelligence, this intelligence core program should have reached the level of strong artificial intelligence.

It made sense that Maintainers, which dealt with more complex situations than the super-machine Producers, required higher intelligence; otherwise, they would be unable to maintain the normal operation of a production base.

From a software perspective, the Maintainer’s intelligence could be even higher, but this was limited by the hardware of the intelligence core itself.

This level of intelligence programming was exactly what Du Qiu needed.

He eagerly memorized these intelligence programs, confident they would bring significant help to his current research on artificial intelligence.

While studying the functions of the Maintainer, Du Qiu discovered that the square area where the Maintainer was located was not only the Maintainer’s working platform but also its backup data center.

In there was an enormous database, meant for the Maintainer to consult various materials while dealing with issues.

After understanding the basic situation of this database, Du Qiu almost fainted with happiness.

This database almost completely encompassed all the scientific knowledge applied within the production base and was systematically organized.

With access to this database, Du Qiu was confident that developing a level four civilization was just a matter of time.

This was indeed a tremendous harvest!

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