rpbooks Chapter 282 Two Years
Chapter 282 Two Years
Time is a wondrous curve. In the Sahara, every day felt stretched to its limit; in the face of the countdown, every day felt compressed to the point of suffocation. But once the countdown ended, time suddenly returned to its original speed—neither too fast nor too slow, just enough to build a spaceship.
Two years.
402 Tech's annual revenue grew from $50 billion to $80 billion. All seven business lines were profitable, and its global user base exceeded one billion. Annual patent licensing revenue surpassed $15 billion. Its valuation officially surpassed $100 billion. Han Lu wrote a note on the quarterly report: "Not the peak. It's the mountainside." Zuo Cheng replied below in pencil: "I know. We'll see even higher ahead."
In the past two years, 402 Deep Space has accomplished what everyone thought was impossible. They assembled a full-size interstellar spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Fifty modules, ten launches, each docking a space ballet precise to the millimeter. The assembly engineers accumulated over 12,000 hours of on-orbit work, with zero serious malfunctions and zero casualties. Fang Ze once said something at a meeting that no one disagreed with: "What we are doing now is not spaceflight, it's civilization."
The stellar nuclear fusion process has progressed from a 500-second self-sustaining combustion to continuous operation for over 3,000 hours. The plasma propulsion engine has accumulated over 20,000 hours of operation in unmanned testing with zero failures. Zuo Cheng checks the propulsion test monitoring data weekly, and every week he sees the same number in the same spot: zero. Over two years and more than a hundred weeks, zero. Once, Shen Yiming stared at the latest test data in the lab for a long time, then said, "This isn't an engineering miracle. This is a comprehensive breakthrough in three fields: materials science, plasma physics, and quantum feedback control. Each one alone is worthy of a Nobel Prize." After he finished speaking, he put the report into an archive folder, labeled: 402 Deep Space Internal Document, Not for Public Release.
The final section of the Pioneer, the crew living quarters, was successfully docked on a clear morning. As the last piece of skin on the orbital assembly platform was welded in place, all six assembly engineers in orbit removed their helmets and embraced in the zero-gravity compartment. The monitoring footage was transmitted to the ground control center, and the entire hall fell silent for a moment before Chen Hao stood up. He didn't applaud; he simply stood up and looked at the complete outline on the screen. 137 meters long, 12 meters in maximum diameter, and weighing 480 tons. From the 400-ton design draft to today, the weight had increased by 80 tons; every kilogram was essential: an additional radiation protection layer, an upgraded consciousness bridging array, and redundant life support modules prepared for long-distance deep space travel.
"Four hundred and eighty tons," Chen Hao said. "The International Space Station weighed four hundred and twenty tons and took twelve years to build. Ours weighs four hundred and eighty tons and took two years."
Fang Ze chimed in, "Because we didn't have the twelve countries negotiate with suppliers for every single screw."
Zuo Cheng stared at the Pioneer on the screen. It hovered quietly in near-Earth orbit, appearing as a sleeping metallic whale on the monitor. Sunlight streamed in from the side, casting faint shadows along the welded seams of the hull's outer skin. Each line was a mark left from a docking. Ten launches, fifty dockings, ninety-nine welds.
On the last page of the technical report, Fang Ze wrote down the spaceship's core data. The plasma engine's specific impulse was fifty times that of a chemical rocket, capable of accelerating the spaceship to 0.5 percent of the speed of light. The life support system had a five-year closed-loop operating lifespan, with a standard crew of six. 0.5 percent of the speed of light meant that reaching Proxima Centauri would take approximately eight hundred years. This spaceship was not an arrival star. It was a pioneer. Its mission was not to reach another star, but to prove that humanity could leave its own star system. The next generation of spaceships would be the arrival stars. Fang Ze added a short note below this: The next generation is already on the drawing board.
Han Lu presented the final cost report for the Pioneer at the board meeting. The total research and manufacturing cost was $23 billion. Of this, $18 billion came from Human Bonds, which were subscribed to by over two million individuals and institutions worldwide. The minimum subscription amount was $1,000. Approximately one in every 30,000 people on Earth has purchased Pioneer bonds.
Han Lu displayed a world map on the screen. Over two million subscribers were marked as dots, densely distributed across continents worldwide. The highest density wasn't in New York, Tokyo, or London, but in a small town on the Texas map. She paused for a moment, then played a recording. A retired high school physics teacher from Texas had left a voice message during the subscription process.
"I'm seventy-three years old. When I was teaching, I told my students that they might see humans land on Mars someday. I didn't tell them the truth. If I had, they probably wouldn't have believed me. What I meant was that they might see humans leave the solar system. I won't live to see that day. But spending a thousand dollars to buy a ticket to the stars for a young person I've never met is the best retirement gift I can think of."
The entire conference room remained silent. Han Lu turned off the recording, offered no comment, and flipped directly to the next page. The next page was a screenshot of the remaining quota on the first day of the initial sale; the $20 billion quota had sold out within three weeks. A small line of text at the bottom stated that the largest number of subscribers were not institutional investors, but individuals from around the world, with a median subscription of $6,000. For the first time, humanity had not used taxes or military spending to fly into space. It had used every single person's $1,000.
That night, Zuo Cheng stayed at the Deep Space Tracking and Control Center until dawn. Pioneer hovered quietly in near-Earth orbit at an altitude of 400 kilometers, slowly rotating on the largest monitoring screen. Beside him was the window of the Web control panel. For two years, the nine nodes of the Web had been operating quietly, with a total data throughput exceeding forty times the total data throughput of all human internet networks since its activation. Most of the data consisted of self-checks and maintenance protocols within the Web, but there was a faint anomaly: extremely short signal clutter occasionally appeared between the Titan Switch and certain nodes outside the solar system, lasting less than a nanosecond before disappearing. System note: Suspected remnant of interstellar quantum entanglement.
As he was looking at the signal, the door to the telemetry and control center was pushed open.
Yu Ying walked in. She was wearing a loose coat and stood at the door without approaching. The fluorescent light overhead shone on her, casting a long shadow that stretched all the way to the ground at Zuo Cheng's feet.
The moment he turned to look at her, he knew something was wrong. It wasn't work-related. Yu Ying's face didn't have the expression she usually wore when she came in to discuss data; instead, it was a quietness he'd never seen before, a quietness tinged with a faint warmth. She didn't seem to be there to discuss any conclusions; it was as if she were carrying a star whose name she hadn't yet told him.
She said one sentence.
The Pioneer on the screen continued to spin quietly. The only sound in the room was the low hum of the instrument's cooling fans.
Zuo Cheng put down all the documents he was holding. The documents were scattered on the table, and one page had slipped next to the keyboard, but he didn't pick it up. He stood up, walked to the door, very close to her, close enough to smell the faint scent of the night breeze that had just been brought in from outside on her coat.