Relic Base.
Inside the two-story command center built north of the altar.
"According to the data sent back by the Advance Team, the environment beyond the Space Gate is that of an extraterrestrial planet."
"The planet has a magnetic field strong enough to protect its atmosphere from direct radiation. Its atmospheric pressure is 0.9, so our personnel can work there without pressure suits."
"The technical team is about to cross the Space Gate to conduct a more detailed survey and take measurements."
"The engineering team is also ready. They're expected to cross the Space Gate in an hour and begin construction of the Frontline Base."
Reports streamed into the command center, with its many screens and control consoles. The Atlas employees at their stations were watching conditions on the alien world closely.
At the front of the command center's second floor, a central console stood beside the windows. Its holographic screens and 3D images gave the person in charge of the entire base firsthand intelligence.
That person was also the owner of the entire Atlas Corporation. Sui Yang remained silent, his expression betraying neither pleasure nor anger.
The employees in the command center could not begin to guess what their boss was thinking.
In fact, Sui Yang felt no negative emotions at all. He certainly had no intention of easing his own stress by losing his temper with his employees or blaming them.
At a hundred and fifty years old, he rarely experienced intense swings of emotion. But when he thought deeply, he inevitably put the employees around him under invisible pressure.
What occupied his thoughts was the world beyond the Space Gate.
The abundance of blue-skinned plants and animals, the atmosphere and gravity that allowed people to go without pressure suits, and the gas giant overhead all pointed to a landmark film from his previous life—
Avatar.
The alien world beyond the Space Gate was Pandora, roughly 4.37 light-years from the Solar System and close enough to Earth in mass and size to be considered its sister world.
As the technical team surveyed the area and took measurements, more and more details appeared on the holographic screen before him.
Everything indicated that the alien world was Pandora.
There was plenty worth acquiring from Avatar.
For one thing, the human faction in the film had achieved a degree of interstellar travel. The ship called the Venture Star took "only" 5.9 years to travel from Earth to Pandora.
That sounded like a long time, but it meant the Venture Star reached 0.74 times the speed of light, just 0.16 short of the threshold for near-light-speed travel.
At their closest, Earth and Mars were 0.0000058 light-years apart. At the Venture Star's maximum speed, a trip from Earth to Mars would take just thirty-seven to thirty-eight minutes.
The Venture Star had to deploy its photon sail and accelerate continuously through space to reach 0.74 times the speed of light. Even so, the nuclear fusion and Antimatter Engine technologies behind it would be enough to let humanity colonize the Solar System or mine resources rare on Earth but common on the Moon, Mars, and in the Asteroid Belt.
Then there was the Valkyrie aerospace transport, which resembled a large space shuttle. It could reach orbital velocity and enter a planet's low orbit without a rocket booster, greatly increasing humanity's capacity to transport personnel and supplies.
In Avatar 2: The Way of Water, ships like the Venture Star, seemingly so frail they might break at a touch, even proved capable of entering and leaving an atmosphere under their own power.
The Valkyrie transport's airframe was also made of an exceptionally strong nonmetallic composite. It had high tensile strength yet weighed only a quarter as much as an old space shuttle.
All this showed that the humans in Avatar had overcome numerous limitations in materials science.
Beyond the technologies related to interstellar travel and colonization, there were numerous Exoskeletons and large vehicles. One field in particular caught Sui Yang's attention: bioengineering.
The so-called "Avatars" were actually a type of "miner" developed by the Resources Development Administration, or RDA—the largest unofficial human organization in the film—to make it easier to extract rare minerals from Pandora Planet.
Pandora held Room-Temperature Superconducting Ore. The "floating mountains" Roach and Soap had witnessed were suspended because of that special mineral. It was immensely valuable, and it could also drive human technology to new heights.
But unlike Pandora's native animals and its intelligent humanoid inhabitants, the Na'vi, humans could not move about on the planet's surface without breathing masks. They would lose consciousness after twenty seconds and die within four minutes.
The Avatar Program was born from the desire to create a workforce of miners who could labor and dig without breathing masks, subsisting on food found on Pandora.
The humans in the film had already confirmed that twins, or human-animal hybrids sharing the same DNA, could establish a sensory and conscious connection.
Using genes from human participants who donated blood and tissue samples, RDA crossbred them with Na'vi genes and successfully cultivated Avatars as a "new species."
RDA also used cloning technology, and Avatars displayed something resembling dream activity while in their amniotic tanks. In reality, though, each Avatar was only a shell, with neither a soul nor a personality. Only its face and physique were inherited from the human who had supplied the genes.
Sensory-link technology then allowed a human consciousness to transfer into an Avatar's brain and control its body.
Each Avatar could only be piloted by the specific human who had supplied its genes. But if another pilot's genes were similar enough to the Avatar's, they could still "unlock" and pilot it.
In the film, the male protagonist's twin brother had been the original pilot. RDA recruited the protagonist at short notice only because his brother had died unexpectedly.
But with each Avatar costing over five billion dollars, RDA decisively abandoned its original plan to use them as miners. Instead, it used them as a bridge between humans and the Na'vi, hoping to peacefully persuade the Na'vi to move so humans could extract the Room-Temperature Superconducting Ore beneath their homes.
The fact that they could cultivate Avatars and create a new species convinced Sui Yang that the humans on the other side were already highly advanced in bioengineering.
From aerospace, bioengineering, and advanced materials down to individual equipment, weapons, and vehicles, there was plenty that Atlas in the Main Universe should adopt immediately.
Sui Yang knew Avatar so well because, before crossing over, he had spent a period studying and analyzing its plot and setting.
By rights, the human forces in the film should have crushed Pandora Planet's Na'vi, whether one went by how impressive they looked or what they were capable of. Unfortunately, humanity still suffered a crushing defeat.
Aside from the plot working against them and the protagonist betraying humanity to become a willing traitor to his species, there was one factor more important than any other: Pandora itself possessed a consciousness of "its" own.
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