Chapter 144: In Blink of an Eye

Two months passed in the blink of an eye…

The two civilizations maintained a strict radio silence, and it was entirely unclear how long this fragile peace would last.

“The enemy fleet is hiding behind Sedna. With zero infrared leakage, they’ve completely vanished from our sensors,” Austin said, his voice laced with deep unease. Austin and his security team had been on high alert for weeks, and Jason was equally anxious.

When the Viridian Empire’s vessel parked on the far side of Sedna and shut down its main engines, it became practically invisible to standard human observation arrays. The Federation soldiers remained on constant standby, fully prepared for a sudden war.

Austin strongly advocated for the rapid development of more powerful observation instruments, even if it meant cannibalizing their rarest salvaged materials. Humanity’s current sensor tech left them blind, and they had no way of knowing if the Viridians were currently watching them. This severe information asymmetry created a suffocating sense of insecurity. What if the enemy was quietly preparing an ambush?

“Don’t worry, the assembly of the alien quantum computer will be finished today,” Jason said, patting Austin on the shoulder to reassure him.

The assembly was taking place in the low-gravity sector of the Noah, where engineers were carefully combining human architecture with advanced alien components to build a state-of-the-art quantum supercomputer. These alien artifacts were currently impossible for humanity to replicate; every piece used was one less available for future research, making them incredibly precious.

However, if this hybrid computer booted up successfully, the Federation wouldn’t need a hardware upgrade for decades. If the system proved stable, countless stalled research projects could finally resume. Of course, the Noah’s central mainframe wouldn’t be replaced by this new machine. Because it relied on extraterrestrial black-box tech, no one knew if it possessed hidden flaws or how stable it truly was. When it came to critical life-support and security, humanity only trusted its own creations.

Regardless, Jason had to exercise extreme caution. The server room housing the quantum computer was heavily fortified; even a tactical nuclear strike might not breach its walls. The interior was also rigged with multiple automated security countermeasures.

Nearly a hundred technicians were buzzing around the server room, laying complex fiber-optic cables, installing external interfaces, and prepping the massive liquid cooling systems. Half an hour after Jason and his entourage arrived, a heavy transport rover drove into the facility, carrying a pristine, refrigerator-sized precision instrument.

This was the core of the quantum computer! It functioned like the CPU in a standard computer, but it was forged entirely by an ancient alien civilization. Miraculously, the core itself hadn’t been severely damaged in the crash; otherwise, human engineers wouldn’t have stood a chance of repairing it.

The massive, 200-square-meter server room was entirely human-built; only the core CPU was an alien artifact. The facility was divided into several specialized zones: a liquid nitrogen cooling block, massive solid-state storage arrays, a cache processing sector, and the main uplink terminal. Thousands of thick fiber-optic cables snaked across the floor, linking every component together. The primary reason for this massive infrastructure footprint was the severe compatibility issues between alien and human tech. Hundreds of researchers had worked around the clock for two months to finally bridge the digital gap.

“If the boot sequence holds, it should be capable of manipulating 100 to 130 photons simultaneously!” Jason felt a surge of adrenaline as he read the final engineering report. The absolute minimum threshold was 100 photons, which meant its base computational output would be 2^{100} operations per cycle. This blew past his wildest expectations, reaching an astronomical magnitude of roughly 10^{30}!

That was trillions of times faster than the Federation’s most powerful existing supercomputer!

Dozens of senior scientists were gathered outside the secure room, eagerly awaiting the machine’s activation. While they were still bitter that their prized alien materials had been requisitioned for this project, they couldn’t deny the allure of such raw computing power. After all, this hybrid machine would revolutionize their research capabilities. For the foreseeable future, humanity wouldn’t have to worry about processing bottlenecks.

“Initiate boot sequence!” Jason ordered.

Once the final connections were secured and the main breakers were thrown, a soft, ethereal blue light pulsed from the primary terminal. The quantum computer was successfully drawing power.

The room held its collective breath. A successful power-on didn’t guarantee the system could actually process data; they still had to run a computational stress test! No one knew if the human-alien digital interface would actually hold.

The lead engineers imported a massive, highly complex quadratic matrix from the server and tasked the quantum core with calculating its determinant using a conventional brute-force algorithm.

If they had run this specific algorithm on the Noah’s central mainframe, it would have taken roughly a century to process! But now, with a soft beep, the result populated on the screen the exact millisecond the enter key was pressed.

The logged processing time was exactly 0.0133 seconds!

A human blink took longer than that calculation! Pure joy erupted among the scientists, followed by thunderous applause. Any lingering resentment over their stolen materials vanished instantly. The calculated determinant was perfectly accurate, confirming that the system’s operational speed had indeed reached 10^{30} calculations per cycle!

What did this mean for the Federation? It meant endless brute-force algorithms, flawlessly accurate simulations, and unimaginably detailed structural models! In reality, many of physics’ greatest lingering mysteries could be solved simply by brute-forcing the math.

“Director, I formally request priority access to this mainframe!”

“I’m submitting a request as well!”

“Get in line, my department was here first!”

The scientists suddenly realized the implications and swarmed Jason, shouting their demands. With this kind of unfathomable processing power, decades-old research blocks could be smashed in seconds; naturally, they were desperate for access.

“…This quantum computer still needs to undergo a rigorous stability testing period before it goes into official, full-time operation,” Jason said loudly, raising his hands to calm the mob. “Once it’s cleared, departments with critical scientific tasks can schedule server time. The Lake Light Supercomputing Center will handle the queue and allocation.”

Upon hearing this, the mob of scientists instantly abandoned Jason and swarmed the terrified director of the Lake Light Supercomputing Center.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Jason slipped out of the server room. He headed straight for the Astronomical Observatory, where the alien Gravitational Wave Telescope awaited! Due to a severe lack of computing power, the invaluable instrument had been collecting dust. But now… the game had changed!

The primary reason he had forced the quantum computer project through was to bring the telescope online.

After establishing a dedicated, high-speed fiber-optic uplink with the new quantum core, the Gravitational Wave Telescope was officially powered on. Both of these salvaged artifacts were impossibly high-precision instruments with surprisingly low power consumption rates, further highlighting the massive gap between human and alien engineering.

“The gravitational pull of an object is directly proportional to its mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between it and the observer. However, the universe is filled with an infinite number of mass sources, creating a deafening background noise. We must set specific mass and distance parameters to filter the data…”

The speaker was Professor Thomson. He had been studying the dormant telescope for months and was vibrating with excitement now that it was finally functional.

“Target mass: 10^{23} to 10^{28} kilograms. Target distance: within 0.1 light-years… Initiate scan!” Jason inputted the parameters.

Instantly, a pristine, three-dimensional image rendered on the main display. Eight distinct, glowing spheres of varying sizes appeared on the screen, radiating faint, ripple-like waves. They were all moving slowly in their respective orbits…

The third planet from the center Earth was clearly visible. Even though it had been subjected to a catastrophic apocalyptic event and torn apart, its total mass source still remained largely within the same orbital path.

“These are the eight major planets of our solar system, from Mercury out to Neptune,” Professor Thomson explained, mesmerized by the real-time gravitational map. “The Sun is not rendered here because its sheer mass vastly exceeds the upper limit of our search parameters.”

It was the first time humanity had ever witnessed the cosmos through the lens of pure gravity.

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