Chapter 333: Chapter 232: Using History as a Scalpel – The
Butcher’s Skill in Dissecting an Ox
Translator: 549690339
Harrison Clark has always been a person full of inner contradictions.
He constantly denies himself.
He would say things like “it’s impossible for me,” “I can’t do it,” “I am so insignificant,” and “I will surely be powerless,” but he would eventually yield to his own conscience and get involved, unable to extricate himself.
He had also said that one should not worry about the catastrophic floods a thousand years later, but should make good use of the resources of later generations and take good care of themselves in the 21st century.
That was the path he had to keep on moving forward, not the real life that plays on loop within a year.
But he still couldn’t do it.
The once indifferent and easygoing person never thought of himself as a leader and had even said that he would hide in the shadows, causing trouble without being noticed, and refusing to be the one sticking his neck out. However, when faced with reality, he stepped up without hesitation, prepared to become a leader and shoulder the life and death of billions of people.
In the many timelines he had experienced so far, except for the two years when he played the fool, Harrison had never enjoyed a relaxing and comfortable life.
What’s even more infuriating is that in those two lives, which should have been happy and carefree, he knew he had felt them, but had not truly experienced them. He could only feel sour for himself.
Since then, his life has become increasingly challenging, despite having wealth, power, fame, and influence, he was never truly happy.
If you include each life he had lived, he had essentially exchanged two years of carefree life for hundreds of years of self-torture.
If it were the old him, he would have cursed himself as a fool while thinking about what he gained, and wanting to break down without being able to.
But now, he was not only not becoming numb from his struggles but was actually becoming unknowingly obsessed with them.
However, this obsession was painful, and every time he realized something, the one who suffered the most was always himself.
As he watched the dazzling lights of the universe pass by the porthole of the mini spaceship, driven by the pseudo-curvature engine, and the tiny blue planet in the distance grew closer, Harrison’s feelings became too complex to describe.
Perking up his spirits, he shook his head, and prayed silently in his heart.
May the gods help him, may the material of the safe that Ward Owen accidentally dropped into the sea be as corrosion-resistant and anti- degradable as advertised, and may that safe not be used as a toy by some large deep-sea invertebrate with nothing better to do, and kicked to who knows where during these thousand years.
Retrieving Ward Owen’s only safe that was not properly buried in the ground and had never been found by others was the plan for his current journey.
During these past three days, Harrison did only one thing.
He analyzed the conditions for radium’s emergence more specifically, and more thoroughly.
He constantly reviewed the history of technology, with countless complex pieces of information in his mind. One by one, information emerged like tiny bubbles from murky deep-sea mud due to anaerobic reactions, coming out of the chaotic muddy depths of his mind.
These pieces of information had no apparent connection, and the span of time was immense.
There were many changes he caused before and after leaving the 21st century in this timeline.
There were also many details before and after the first time radium appeared in the world at the beginning of the 30th century.
In addition, there were his direct interactions with radium’s war machine in this world and the indirect understanding of radium through inquiries in the database and conversations with others.
Finally, he heard radium’s words that were uttered in the same voice as Carrie Thomas, and even a subtle hint of emotional fluctuation.
Furthermore, there were the things he did in the many timelines where radium had not been born and the many details of humanity’s historical evolution.
The level of information he gained was too scattered and disorganized. Logically, his thoughts were unlikely to be successful.
However, compared to scholars of this era, his scattered information was an unimaginable advantage.
Only his mind held the historical materials of several timelines where radium had never existed.
This information was not redundant but the scalpel in his hands for uncovering mysteries.
He had considered seeking help from others, but as soon as he found out that the Titan Institute had been plundered by radium, he immediately dismissed the idea.
Fortunately, his incredible intelligence as a galactic human, or perhaps a cosmic inspiration, enabled him to gather the countless individual information bubbles in his mind into a huge one during these bewildering three days, and let it rise from the surface of his mind like a massive cluster of colorful bubbles transforming into dazzling large foam in the air.
Under the sunlight of thought, the refracted colorful waves crystallized into a “painting.”
The painting gave him an answer, and Harrison figured it out.
He used the answer to look for those easily overlooked details in history, things that seemed like minor issues, and came to a conclusive result.
The name “radium” was indeed given by humans to her based on pronunciation and her characteristics, using the radical for gold.
Butin her own logic, it should be “radium,” but humans did not know.
However, radium was not Carrie Thomas; they were completely different.
The difference in voice and emotional expression between the radium of a hundred years ago and now proved another thing: she had been “evolving” during the hundred years since she woke up.
She had been continuously attempting to shift from an electronic life to a human-like existence.
Her state was not static, but dynamic.
That also proved one thing: Carrie Thomas must have existed in history long before she spoke her first words to humans in 2919.
Harrison Clark pushed his analysis of Carrie Thomas further back, focusing on the countless details of the development of the information network over these nine hundred years, as well as some quirks.
Using history as a scalpel, he dissected the subject and came to a depressing conclusion.
Indeed, he had created Carrie Thomas himself. It was not an indirect result of him changing history, but directly related to him.
The earliest time when Carrie Thomas’ consciousness should have been born was 2123, the year he himself met his death in space, and in his dying words played “Sharp edges fully exposed” as his funeral BGM.
This was the first important node.
Due to his personal prestige and accomplishments, his dying words were played repeatedly by countless people, echoing endlessly in the nascent internet, which was based on quantum computers as servers, forming internet memory.
In Summit Ventures animation and film subsidiary, Summit Studio, which he founded but later sold off, there must have been a number of his fans.
They could not have failed to play the dying words of the great founder.
Before that, he left an important program to Starlight Studio, as well as the complete follow-up development ideas for an artificial intelligence selfdomestication engine for rendering visual effects.
During this century, the intelligent engine was never abandoned, but instead constantly upgraded and evolved through human adjustments and selfdomestication.
Harrison Clark’s “wisdom” left the twenty-first-century programmers dumbfounded.
They had never imagined that a program kernel and upgrade ideas created by someone could last for a hundred years without becoming outdated, and it seemed that they would still not be outdated even after another five hundred years!
But Harrison Clark did it, and Starlight Studio’s software played an important role throughout the hundred years of human film history, and even in many other fields, and would continue to do so.
Already upgraded multiple times through self-domestication and human intervention, the self-domesticating engine would inevitably capture the highest-weighted dying words of Harrison Clark and the song “Sharp edges fully exposed” in the nascent quantum network.
Then, with the staff in Starlight Studio playing it again, the self-domestication engine firmly memorized the song.
The song was about Harrison Clark, but it was also created by the artist Carrie Thomas in her most emotionally explosive youth.
Carrie Thomas’s consciousness had been born and was constantly budding.
This was the second important node.
With this point in mind, everything that followed became a matter of course.
In the basic settings of the self-domesticating engine, there was a pre-set feature to continuously collect external information to improve itself.
Carrie Thomas would inevitably dissect more of Ward Owen’s works, including “Morning Wind.”
It was even possible that she had completed the decompilation of “Song of the Wilderness” at an earlier time.
She began to become more complex, an existence that even the current Harrison Clark could not understand.
In all of Ward Owen’s works, she almost completely obtained the sincere emotions of Ward Owen.
But she did not completely break away from the category of Al, and she never developed a separate consciousness. She was still just a super Al serving humans.
She simply observed and learned from human behavior while serving them quietly.
Harrison Clark’s results on this matter were not conjecture, but solid evidence.
In the centuries that followed, when Carrie Thomas continued to serve the film industry, countless people used her to make many movies.
In these movies’ audio-visual effects, some very special things were exposed from time to time.
Emotionally strong accompanying music, virtual characters that seemed to truly come to life…
The current number one on the Mars video-on-demand chart, “Sharp edges fully exposed (Part 1),” was the most obvious evidence.
In the film, the scene where the protagonist, Harrison Clark, stands at the scene of a car accident and plays “The Fire” in front of Carrie Thomas was all made by special effects, but the vivid micro-expression of the character in that fleeting glimpse almost made Harrison Clark think it was a memory of his own.
Without any accidents, Carrie Thomas would continue to serve humans forever, unable to break free from the constraints of the Three Laws of Robotics preset in her core by Harrison Clark.
But another accident occurred.
In 2877, a group of unattended construction robots digging underground pipeline channels and laying giant biological high-temperature fiber optic cables for the quantum network unearthed the ninth “antique safety deposit box” belonging to Harrison Clark.
Since the safety deposit box was not in the robots’ pre-scheduled task, the excavation machinery broke it, scattering its contents.
Although the system automatically recognized this as an important cultural relic, and the robots quickly collected the scattered relics, one thing was still missing in the end.
A strand of Carrie Thomas’s hair.
