Chapter 154: Chapter 135: Deeper Despair
Translator: 549690339
In the history of human development, the controversy surrounding the Golden Record has never ceased.
Many people have regretted this rude and ignorant act.
We exposed too much personal information in the Golden Record.
Not only did we naively introduce humanity, but we also introduced Earth.
It’s as if, in a war, one side is a modern army with planes and artillery, and the other is primitive humans with wooden spears and stone clubs, with the stupid primitives foolishly handing over their own map of territories and tribal distributions.
If given the choice, humanity might choose to abandon or even try to retrieve Voyager 1 and 2.
Unfortunately, there is no medicine for regret.
In order to make Voyager 1 fly even further, humans ignited the trajectory correction thrusters (TCM), which had been dormant for 37 years, on November 28, 2017, and tested its ability to use 10-millisecond pulses to locate the spacecraft.
Since 2025, after the Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 had run out of power and gone completely out of contact, it was virtually impossible for humans to retrieve these two spacecraft.
From then on, the fate of humanity was completely handed over to the universe.
We could only hope for the universe to be kind.
But just as humans are ruthless to endangered animals on Earth, the universe’s response is equally cold and ruthless, yet consistent with the laws of nature.
Good resources should belong to the stronger civilization.
Especially given how weak and foolish this civilization is.
At this very moment, Harrison Clark was experiencing firsthand how this stupidity was being exploited by others.
No rhetorical technique can describe what he is feeling right now.
It’s absurd, and sad.
He suddenly found it ridiculous.
Humans were born out of a fortunate coincidence in the universe, and after millions of years, endured the era of blood and sweat to finally have their own brilliant civilization and long history.
Humans conquered natural disasters, selfishness, human-made disasters, and viruses, but lost to a random ignorant act, and completely lost their right to exist.
The music in the Golden Record is melodious.
But to Harrison Clark, it sounds like the grim reaper’s scythe scraping the concrete floor.
As an unqualified, and artistically-ignorant music transporter, Harrison Clark has never heard these classical pieces representing different cultures.
But this does not prevent him from appreciating the music.
Each piece of music represents a certain culture and thought pattern and is a genuine classic.
For example, Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major – First Movement,” Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” melancholic blues, Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5 – First Movement,” and Boya’s guqin piece “Flowing Water.” Harrison Clark had not listened to these classical pieces before, as they were ones he couldn’t copy and were useless to him.
But without even thinking about it, he knew that these pieces should be pleasant and melodious.
Yet at this time, he felt an extraordinary distortion.
While the music was undoubtedly pleasing to the ear, his incredibly refined and unconsciously honed ability to accurately appreciate and replicate music made him feel an eerie unease.
It was as if something was wrong.
No, everything was wrong.
There was something added to this music.
It seemed to be an almost imperceptible background sound, making what should have been pleasant music seem eerie and particularly unsettling, like nails scraping across frosted glass.
This made the listener’s scalp tingle and teeth grit.
The real mind-controlling force, as Needham Brown said, was the radiation wave, which was inaudible to the human ear.
It was silent and covert, yet omnipresent.
What Harrison Clark was hearing now was the radiation wave transformed into sound waves that humans could hear and discern.
Although this was tantamount to amplifying its signal strength countless times, Harrison Clark was not controlled.
He didn’t feel that his emotions were suppressed; on the contrary, he felt nothing but revulsion for the sound.
His mind and body were resisting, preventing him from being silently subdued like others.
Although Harrison Clark’s persistence was painful, he had no choice but to continue.
Having paid such a high price and died many times, it took a Long March to finally see a glimmer of dawn, which he could not give up on lightly.
He endured the discomfort, concentrating his efforts to forcibly memorize every detail of the sound, especially the background noise.
Gradually, he discovered a pattern.
The background noise was not constant, but changed according to a mysterious rhythm and tempo.
If he tried hard to actively block out the background noise in his mind, the discomfort would recede significantly.
It seemed that the background noise was the Main Body that actually made the mind control effective.
The resounding original music was merely a cover, or a carrier that allowed the power of infiltration to bypass the human brain’s defenses, like the sugar coating on an extremely bitter pill, or the protein shell that a virus uses to camouflage itself as an ordinary, absorbable protein for human cells.
Unconsciously, ninety minutes had passed.
At 9:33 AM on October 27, 3020 AD.
The music in Harrison Clark’s ears completed a cycle and started playing the first piece again.
Harrison Clark’s preliminary analysis of the “background noise” was also complete.
Perhaps this was the most complex, structurally sound, and weirdest piece of music he had ever heard.
This “piece” was ninety minutes long, seemingly simple in its rhythm, but with no repetition at any point.
The range of frequency changes and the refinement of the transitions were completely beyond Harrison Clark’s understanding as a “top musician.”
Its changes did not follow human musical tones; there were no obvious key changes, no keys at all, and no highs or lows of ABCDE..