The preparations before leaving were actually quite simple. All they had to do was make it look as though everyone inside the facility had died in the crash, while ensuring the facility itself had sustained logically consistent damage during the impact, completely concealing the truth about the "landing unit"—being a master of disguises was an essential skill.
Faking the personnel's deaths was not difficult, because Hao Ren and his companions had never shown themselves before the Corruptors from beginning to end. Thus, the Corruptors had no idea who was controlling the drone swarm. Previously, everything active on the surface of Nakdal Fortress had been drones and Autonomous Mechanical Units of various types. If the Corruptors had monitored the fortress's surface at the time, all they could have seen were those mechanical life-forms.
So all they had to do was leave a pile of Autonomous Mechanical Unit and drone shells in the command station.
Before coming here, Hao Ren had asked Nolan to use the factory module aboard the Giant Turtle Rock Platform to produce a large number of Autonomous Mechanical Units and initial-model drones without central chips installed. He had now placed these things throughout the command station, creating the illusion that they were the operators of the facility.
At the same time, he had erased every trace related to humans from the Central Control Room. The ergonomic chairs and handles, as well as the manual control panels, had all been burned into a pile of dregs by an automatic meltdown program set up in advance. These had been the only objects in the entire command station that bore traces of human activity.
The plan had been meticulous from the very beginning. Only drones, Autonomous Mechanical Units, and Guardian Giants had been active before the Corruptors, while Hao Ren and