Chapter 165: There Is Only One Race — The Human Race
Having completed his system shopping, Richard stepped onto a slit in the floor. With a soft pneumatic hiss, the slit opened to reveal a pod-sized elevator, gleaming faintly. He stepped inside, the interior minimalist and sleek, devoid of buttons save for a single, glowing interface panel. He pressed "Level -11."
The door sealed with a silent whoosh. Instantly, the magnetic levitation system engaged. There was no sensation of acceleration, only a sudden, profound drop. The elevator plunged downwards, faster than a freefalling bullet, the air pressure shifting barely perceptible as it tore through the rock and reinforced concrete. From merely fifty feet below the surface, it plummeted through thousands of feet of earth, bypassing multiple, shallower levels, until, at precisely 2,900 feet, it slowed as smoothly as it had begun, stopping without a tremor.
Richard stepped out onto a vast, brightly lit floor. This was Level -11, Lina’s true domain. The air here was pristine, filled with a faint ozone scent. At the sprawling center of the chamber, a colossal, shimmering dark blue globe pulsed with contained energy, intricately laced with glowing wirings.
Surrounding it in concentric circles were towering quantum server racks, their crystalline components glowing faintly. This massive globe, he knew, was Lina’s new primary processing center, her true "brain" beyond her avatar. It was fair to say, Lina was simultaneously present in her physical android body, coordinating operations across the base, and also omnipresent within this shimmering core, processing unfathomable amounts of data.
From this central nexus, multiple research labs branched outwards like capillaries, each one humming with automated efficiency. Lina oversaw them all: biology, physics, advanced engineering, and even a nascent art department where androids rendered holographic masterpieces. Two particularly intriguing sections were the xenobiology lab, which for now only contained vast data archives and preserved specimens of "Subject Alpha-0" – the Krill captured – and the psionic research department.
Superiorly intelligent androids, far more advanced than those seen on upper levels, moved with silent purpose, assisting with research and maintenance. This level was the most restricted, accessible only by Richard and Lina herself.
In the psionic research department, Lina’s quantum cogitator CPU racked its processors, a visible aura of focused energy around the globe. She was at a bottleneck. Despite endless simulations and meticulous data analysis, understanding the behavior of psionic energy matter – or, as she preferred to call it, exotic energy matter – remained elusive.
It seemed inherently random, chaotic, almost... magical in its defiance of conventional physics. Yet, for Richard, it seemed to always respond to his consciousness, manifesting his will effortlessly, powering his telekinetic, telepathic, and other psionic abilities. Lina yearned to achieve the same breakthrough, to grasp the fundamental principles her creator wielded so naturally, but it remained just beyond her algorithmic reach. She harbored a private worry: previous experiments, during Richard’s more uncontrolled demonstrations, had shown these exotic energy particles possessed the strange ability to subtly alter her own source code, rendering her temporarily unfunctional.
And what truly baffled her was how Richard, using ancient symbols, could command these exotic particles to rewrite themselves, manifesting as fire, water, or other primordial elements, simply based on his mental orders. Lina had theorized these particles were an extension of one’s soul, a part of the greater cosmic whole, the true, fundamental building blocks of creation itself.