The technicians on site did their best to restore these consoles and Information Terminals, which had been abandoned for tens of thousands of years and might have suffered severe damage. Most of them crashed soon after startup: their internal Core Components seemed to have been destroyed by energy surges far beyond their design limits. Perhaps when the Workstation was separated from its main body, surges in the primary conduits damaged the sensitive equipment here. Or perhaps an accident had occurred inside the Sample Analysis Room, leading to this place's abandonment. In any case, what had happened at this Workstation—and even in this universe—was now impossible to verify. We could only hope to get some answers from the few devices that had barely started up and had not yet burned out.
"They'll probably last thirty minutes at most. Their cores are partially damaged, and the data transfer failed too. I'm extracting whatever intelligence may be important according to the priority of the records in these devices," the senior technician said as he operated rapidly in front of a humming Data Terminal. The side armor of the antique machine had already been removed, and the crystallized grids inside kept bursting with abnormal psionic sparks. It was a symptom of a failed system safety lock, but at least the thing was still barely running. Before its irreparable processing core burned out, it could still provide basic query services. Soon, trembling words appeared in the center of the holographic display above the Data Terminal: Operator identity verified. Extracting recent system logs... Clock verification failed. Unable to connect to data network. Running in offline mode. System time reset to initial date. This unit can provide limited query services.
"Search for the last research project conducted locally," I said immediately.
"Keywords: search, local intelligence, final research."