Comparative Studies

Wu Zunliang sat in the spacious mobile surveillance vehicle. Screens and projections from three directions continuously displayed images, charts, and data, painting his body in multicolored light.

This mobile surveillance vehicle had originally been used to monitor and analyze real-time footage from the Wilderness. Now that the field collection work had reached a temporary conclusion, they were using it for graphical processing.

At the very least, they had to package the results of more than half a year of hard work in order to persuade those investors best at thinking with their eyeballs and balls—this was how their early backers assessed and handled their own kind.

Naturally, professionals were responsible for this sort of packaging. The lab dogs under Wu Zunliang had been completely relegated to grunt work, merely lending a hand.

Before the three projection screens, seven or eight men and women of varying ages were breaking apart and reassembling the research team's various results from the past half year. Rigorous Logic had given way to more intuitive, impactful visual effects, all in service of those nearly absurd, dreamlike speculations.

Wu Zunliang began rubbing his brow. On one hand, the sight annoyed him; on the other, he was already a man over ninety. Even at the end of the twenty-first century, when average life expectancy had surpassed one hundred, he was no longer at an age brimming with energy. Since returning from the Wilderness Laboratory hundreds of kilometers outside the city, the convoy had been jolting along rugged Mountain Roads for six or seven hours, nearly shaking his stomach and intestines out of place.

Ding Zhiying, Old Ding, who was five years younger than him, had already fallen asleep with his head tilted back, drool running down his neck. Wu Zunliang did not laugh at him. He would not