The Way to Human Immortality (Part 2)

A Quinjet cut through the clouds and came to a stop above the base.

As Skye activated hover mode and kept the Quinjet suspended in place, she said, "Wang said we need to block all signals and intercept all data the moment we get here. Don’t let Zola escape. Fitz, now. Immediately!"

"Uh, I started seven seconds ago."

More than a dozen devices activated at once. High-tech equipment intercepted the base’s signals, routing all data into Fitz’s computer.

Fitz worked while staring at his screen, then suddenly cried out, "Huh? There are no wireless signals here? Not even a network cable? Wait, I detected weak signals. One is the boss’s implanted communicator, and the other is S.H.I.E.L.D.’s test-version implanted communicator. I remember that thing still had unresolved issues. They already put it into use? Aren’t they worried something will go wrong?"

"That’s not the point."

Skye turned to Fitz. "Wang told us to find out how this place communicates with the outside world. Did you find anything?"

"Uh, I’m checking."

After nearly a minute, Fitz finally said, "A satellite signal was transmitted here earlier. A batch of data was uploaded for several minutes, but the speed was very slow. It feels like a transmission port from twenty years ago."

Skye quickly asked, "Which satellite?"

"It’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. communications satellite, responsible for communications across more than a dozen states, including New York. It was launched by the Lemuria Star three years ago. Huh, the data transmission has a highly professional encryption system. I can’t crack it," Fitz said.

"I’ll do it."

The Quinjet was already hovering, so Skye handed control over to the AI and began using the aircraft’s onboard supercomputer to crack the communications encryption. At the same time, she said, "Fitz, find a way to boost the signal and contact Wang."

Fitz nodded. "I’ve got that."

The two of them got to work separately.

Skye frowned slightly. Something felt very strange.

The data transfer speed was incredibly slow. Compared to modern transmission efficiency, it was like a snail crawling beside Angry Birds.

The problem wasn’t the communications satellite, but the upload port.

What kind of ancient equipment would have to be used for it to be this slow?

Yet despite the sluggish transmission speed, the encryption method was peculiar. She had never seen anything like it. It belonged to none of the known patterns and was extremely difficult to crack.

It was like a top hacker using a boxy desktop computer from twenty years ago. The more she looked at it, the more out of place it felt.

If she hadn’t recently exchanged knowledge with Tony and learned quite a bit from the Darkhold, she really wouldn’t have had much confidence.

Her ten fingers flew across the keyboard without pause, clattering away. With the cracking program she and Tony had written together, the difficulty was manageable.

There was something else she needed to do.

That S.H.I.E.L.D.—or rather, Hydra—communications satellite had to be hiding countless secrets. If she could successfully infiltrate it, she would learn what Zola had been doing lately.

That was important, but cracking it would be truly difficult. Fortunately, Skye had experience.

"The signal booster is active. Uh, the boss’s communications have been restored."

The moment Fitz finished speaking, Old Wang’s voice came through, distorted by static from the poor signal. "Fitz, is it done?"

"Uh, the signal blocking? It was finished ages ago!" Fitz slammed the Enter key, raising his right index finger high.

Old Wang said, "Then come down. I’ve got a big treasure to show you."

A big treasure?

Fitz’s eyes lit up. "Okay, boss. We’ll be right there!"

Skye quickly landed the aircraft in an open area, then led Fitz inside. Before long, they found Old Wang at the elevator.

After glancing at the utterly despondent Sitwell, Skye hurriedly asked, "Wang, should we deal with this guy? Or leave him to map—"

"We’ll talk about that later."

Old Wang pointed at the elevator. "Let’s deal with this first. Then I’ll take you down to see something good."

There was no emergency stairwell. The elevator was the only entrance and exit to the underground area.

Once he knew the signals had been blocked and Zola could no longer contact the outside world, Old Wang immediately restored the power system. The elevator was operating normally.

The elevator required a password, which was beyond Old Wang. They needed a professional.

Skye was very good at this. She took out her phone, launched a program, and scanned the elevator’s password panel. The program cracked it automatically, and a four-digit code soon appeared on her screen.

"8530."

Skye entered the code, and the elevator doors opened.

The elevator only had two floors, but it went very deep—dozens of meters down.

It descended quickly and reached the bottom level in the blink of an eye. When the doors opened, they saw a massive computer room.

It was enormous. So enormous that even with Skye’s current eyesight, she could not see its boundaries.

The entire room was filled with outdated equipment. Every machine had stopped operating. Though Old Wang had restored the power system, he had not restored power to the equipment in the computer room. Zola…

was still shut down.

"Is this… equipment from the seventies?"

Fitz knew quite a bit about this field and recognized these antiques at a glance. "I saw them in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s archives. I even took one apart when I was in middle school. I used my allowance to buy some cheap parts and modify it, improving its performance a hundredfold…"

"Where is this?" Skye, the "high school dropout" and "penniless orphan," interrupted expressionlessly.

"Zola’s body."

Old Wang smiled. "We’re inside Zola’s body right now, and everything you see…"

He pointed at the computers, the mainframes, the entire computer room, everything around them. "…is the world’s earliest consciousness storage device!"

Zola was undoubtedly one of the greatest geniuses in the world.

His intelligence was on the same level as Banner and Tony Stark’s—among humanity’s very finest. In genetics, gene science, high-energy physics, computer technology, even weapons manufacturing, he made other scientists green with envy.

To upload his own consciousness into a database in the 1970s using equipment that lagged decades behind modern technology was simply unimaginable. The difficulty was probably comparable to a broke, carless, homeless guy with parents and erectile dysfunction somehow winning over the perfect ten daughter of the world’s richest man.

Even now, no country or laboratory had been heard of successfully uploading consciousness—

including Azeroth Laboratory.

Fitz had only completed brain mapping and memory uploading. To create a new brain capable of carrying those memories and thereby form a complete consciousness, they would still need a breakthrough in virtual technology and the creation of the Framework.

Yet Zola had accomplished it.

It was simply unbelievable!

As a world-class scientist, Fitz naturally understood just how difficult this was.

Technology in the seventies was not advanced enough. Ten thousand old computers combined could not compare to a single modern supercomputer.

Fitz understood better than anyone just how massive the amount of data making up a person’s consciousness truly was.

Several decades of memories from an ordinary person required an incredibly vast database to store—equivalent to decades’ worth of high-definition film, except it would not be flat footage, but three-dimensional.

And it was not merely a 3D movie. There was all kinds of other data as well.

Human consciousness was complex. It was not just memory.

If not for the Darkhold, even if he were given ten or twenty years, Fitz would not have had the confidence to create a consciousness storage device like this.

The technology of the 1970s had not been sufficient, so Zola had forcibly assembled all this equipment into a supercomputer—a vast database.

Fitz had never believed that the power of one person could surpass the entire world, but now he had no choice but to believe:

This world had held Dr. Zola back.

Dr. Zola had been at least fifty years ahead of the whole world.

If the hardware had not failed to keep up, Dr. Zola would have achieved human immortality more than thirty years ago.

In another form.

In a virtual world.