The hall camera's field of view included the control console.
Question: did losing a human corpse count as bad luck?
Luo Qi fell silent for a moment, unsure what to say. Tracking the signals from the vital-sign monitors, he confirmed that fifteen trackers were clustered together.
Dead people certainly did not move. The living one had moved last night, but his tracker had gone offline. When the terminal lost the monitor's signal, it had registered him as dead.
Of course, Luo Qi could not suspend his own activities over this human. He checked his lifespan: twenty hours remained. Losing less than an hour of life overnight was still acceptable.
"Would humans accept a computer with a mind of its own?"
"Probably not... Humans fight each other to the death, never mind an alien nonhuman."
"I can even simulate it: my appearance would unite humanity like never before, send weapons technology racing forward, and multiply their capacity for war a hundredfold..."
"They'd unite to eliminate the external enemy, then go right back to tearing each other apart."
Luo Qi sighed inwardly for no particular reason. Even if he jumped onto the screen and danced a number, he would not dare claim he looked human.
All of humanity would simply think the artificial intelligence had gone mad and mistaken itself for a human.
What would happen to a computer that had gone mad? Humans would ruthlessly snuff it out, of course.
Still, Luo Qi's current situation was excellent in its own way, filled with endless possibilities. He had read novels in his previous life, too, and was thoroughly familiar with machine civilizations and swarm civilizations.
These two "notorious" civilizations would rewrite the layout of other civilizations' star systems at the drop of a hat.
They brought technological upgrades and precious unity to other inhabited planets.
Both of these "alien civilizations" imagined by humans possessed tremendous proliferative capacity.
Proliferative capacity, or productivity, described the ability to replicate any part of one's own system on a massive scale.
This included, but was not limited to, small individual production units, large collective production units, elite or cannon-fodder machines, massive destructive mechanical bodies, suicide-attack constructs... and so on.
The greater the proliferative capacity, the greater the potential for war-the ability to convert matter into weapons within a given period.
Luo Qi felt he probably belonged to the category of intelligent life, a form of machine civilization.
A novice leader of intelligent life!
Then he abandoned that line of thought. Screw machine civilizations, and screw being a novice leader.
Orange Star Base was practically a ruin. Its remaining power was only enough to keep one server running continuously for twenty hours, and that twenty-hour figure meant his battery bank was damaged and could fail at any moment.
Otherwise, with the storage system in fully charged condition, five percent of its power would have been enough for him to keep the base running normally for twenty days.
But Luo Qi only had twenty hours!
Death pressed a little closer against his back!
"Let's check the haul first. If it really comes down to the last ten hours, sorry, you two robotic vehicles!" Luo Qi remained calm, as though panic had been deleted from his being.
Robotic vehicles No. 4 and No. 5 returned to the hall, their silvery bodies coated in dust.
Supplies collected in the hall:
Portable oxygen bottles × 3 crates, 18 bottles per crate.
Circuit-board assemblies × 5 crates; blank circuit boards for etching circuits.
Superconducting wire × 6 crates, 12 coils per crate, 100 meters per coil.
Mixed nutritious dried nuts × 5 crates, 50 kilograms per crate.
Pure water × 4 crates, 8 bottles per crate, 8 liters per bottle.
Backup high-energy batteries × 1 crate, 24 batteries per crate!
Trace-element mineral powder × 1 crate, 30 kilograms per crate.
Table salt × 4 crates, 40 kilograms per crate.
After a whole night's work, they had only collected twenty-four backup high-energy batteries.
But thirty-nine batteries were still damn good! That was real, tangible lifespan!
Luo Qi thought of the fifteen batteries that had come from somewhere other than the backup storage.
Although they had been found in the sand, their true source was the backup power supplies for separate operational areas!
In other words, each area's backup battery bank!
Luo Qi trembled slightly. He had been so focused on checking structural damage.
He had a mountain of treasure and had left it unused!
He hurriedly recalled all the robotic vehicles to dismantle the battery banks in the other areas.
Each area had a full twenty high-energy batteries. Luo Qi swept through six areas and easily acquired 120 batteries!
During the search, the robotic vehicles smashed through walls around the main base, creating a new ring of access routes. They did not see the human along the way.
Two robotic vehicles opened the high-energy battery crate and the superconducting wire crate.
The high-energy batteries were laid out in front of the control console. Luo Qi looked upon his own life with his own eyes.
There were a full 159 batteries!
Four robotic vehicles began connecting the batteries in parallel, while the relay unit responsible for transferring power was a secondhand device dismantled from another area.
Robotic vehicle No. 5 carried a coil of superconducting wire, one centimeter thick and wrapped in black rubber insulation.
It laid one end of the superconducting wire in the hall, leaving it for the battery bank.
Carrying the coil, it reached the little dark room behind the large screen. At the back of the room was a main input socket assembly with three circular sockets, two of which were already in use.
They were for the main power supply, backup power supply, and temporary power supply.
The robotic vehicle set down the coil, snipped through the one-centimeter-thick superconducting wire, and gripped one end of the wire on the floor with four manipulators.
It stripped away the rubber insulation, exposing four superconducting leads: yellow, green, red, and white.
A compartment popped open on the right side of the robotic vehicle, and it used a manipulator to take out a matching plug.
The robotic vehicle opened the plug's casing, divided the four leads into two pairs, and placed them onto the metal terminals inside.
A small mechanical arm extended from its belly, its camera aimed at the socket.
"Psst!"
A precisely targeted, high-temperature laser burned away the superconducting wire's rubber insulation and welded the wire to the metal terminals.
Everything was ready.
The robotic vehicles handling the battery bank had also finished connecting it in parallel and wired the circuit into the relay box.
A row of green lights lit up on the relay box. The power supply was normal!
The final moment had arrived.
Luo Qi controlled robotic vehicle No. 5 and inserted the plug into the socket.
"Ding~"
Lifespan topped up by 4,900 hours (at current consumption)! Remaining power: 89%
Inside the server, Luo Qi felt the external power flowing in, and his very soul began to tremble!
With a single server running at low power, this amounted to 2,000 days of life!
The equivalent of 5.5 years of human life!
If Luo Qi used other electrical equipment, his lifespan-his stored power-would decrease accordingly.
"Now I won't have to worry about a blackout taking me offline anymore! One giant step toward a cosmic-scale beginning!"
With the most urgent threat to his lifespan resolved, a delighted Luo Qi hummed "Pink Memories" to himself.
He continued using the robotic vehicles to assemble the solar panels for power generation.
Only when his lifespan could grow automatically would things be perfect!
The supports for the thirty-seven solar panels were damaged or missing. Some panels had cracked transparent silica glass, while others had large splits through their entire bodies.
But they were still usable overall.
Luo Qi directed the robotic vehicles to make use of the tables and chairs they had moved out of the hall yesterday.
Once assembled, some solar panels lay flat on long tables, some leaned against chairs, and others were supported by shelving.
Their angles all allowed them to receive energy for as long as possible.
It looked like an old man at a junkyard had cobbled together a power station from scraps.
After an hour and a half, the solar panels were wired together in series. Sunlight brightened the orange-red ground and shone down on the panels.
A robotic vehicle inserted the power connector into the relay.
The green indicator light blinked. The power supply was operating normally!
Even in the star system's fourth orbit, sunlight still provided enough radiation for the energy harvested to cover Luo Qi's current low-power consumption.
As long as no disaster occurred and the power equipment kept running indefinitely, Luo Qi's lifespan would become infinite too!
Now that Luo Qi had enough electricity, he immediately supplied power to all 156 cameras to ensure they operated in real time.
He remained on guard against that human. Only once the man was dead or under control could Luo Qi feel at ease.
After securing his own survival, Luo Qi turned his attention to the power-storage station made up of nine hundred batteries. It was damaged, but he should still be able to salvage intact batteries from it.
"Begin clearing out the original power-supply battery bank."
The robotic vehicles executed the command, starting their treads and clearing away sand, dust, and scrap metal, gradually exposing what lay beneath.
Haul: high-energy batteries × 393
These included the sum total of the regular and backup power sources the robotic vehicles could find.
The rest were either missing or ruined. This was nearly thirteen years of life!
Luo Qi felt the future held even more promise. These batteries could keep the entire dilapidated base running at its current low power consumption for over three hundred days.
Before you continue