bigabreads Chapter 278 The First Awakening of Weaving the Web
Chapter 278 The First Awakening of Weaving the Web
In the second week after the Titan node was activated, something unexpected happened to the system.
Zuo Cheng was awakened in the early morning by a vibration from the system panel. It wasn't a warning, nor a task notification; it was a panel background color he'd never seen before—a deep blue. The entire panel had turned dark blue, with only one line of text: "Network weaving and time synchronization activated. Trigger source unknown."
When he arrived at the control center, Yu Ying was already there. She had noticed the panel anomaly in the middle of the night and driven over herself, her hair still untied. On the large screen, six activated nodes simultaneously sent timestamps to the internal network without any human intervention. The nodes were located at the core of Earth, the dual relays on Mars, the sentinels on Jupiter, the switch on Titan, and the Kuiper Navigation Station. The six nodes were distributed across six different locations in the solar system, the two furthest being more than four billion kilometers apart.
The time synchronization results for the entire network appeared a fraction of a second later. The time synchronization error of the six nodes was less than one femtosecond.
One femtosecond. Ten to the power of negative fifteen seconds. Shorter than the time it takes for light to travel through a single hair. Six nodes distributed throughout the solar system, their internal clocks more precise than any man-made atomic clock, their synchronization error after alignment so small it requires quantum physics to describe. The web has never lost time. It has maintained its own heartbeat for four billion years, waiting until enough nodes awaken to resynchronize.
Yu Ying stared at the set of numbers. "This wasn't something we awakened."
"Yes. It's itself."
The second thing the Web did after its autonomous awakening was to send awakening commands to the remaining two inactive nodes. The Kuiper Belt's second and third nodes had only 19% and 12% of their remaining energy, respectively, far from sufficient to be stimulated individually by the consciousness probes. However, with the combined relay signal from all six nodes, two machines that had been dormant for billions of years were simultaneously activated.
The system panel popped up continuously over the next few minutes. Web Master, 8/9. Kuiper 2 node activated, function: remote energy relay. Web Master, 9/9. Kuiper 3 node activated, function: deep space early warning array. All nodes of the Solar System Web are now activated.
The instant the nine nodes connected, a new notification appeared on Zuo Cheng's system panel. Its format was unlike any previous system message. It wasn't blue, green, or gold. It was white, the font was the original script of the Founding Civilization, and the automatically translated result floated below the original text like a faint layer of light.
Welcome home, Origin Node 177. Control of the web has been transferred to the current activator. You are no longer a guest. You are the host.
The entire control center was so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat. Twelve words. Four billion years of waiting were summarized in twelve words.
Yu Ying was the first to finish reading and the first to react. She didn't speak, but simply took a screenshot of the prompt on the screen and saved it to a new folder. Folder name: Web Control Protocol.
The core of the control permissions is an interface called the Web Weaving Protocol. When Zuo Cheng opened the interface panel, he realized this wasn't a user interface. It was a cognitive extension. Through the Web Weaving Protocol, he could remotely configure the functional parameters of any active node, establish dedicated communication channels between any two nodes, and invoke the Web's global energy and data transmission network. The bottom menu entry was labeled with only two words: History.
He opened the history of the web weaving.
The records begin from the day the solar system's origin node was activated, approximately 4.43 billion years ago. The first few pages are symbols, untranslatable, resembling the logs of the founding civilization during their initial web-weaving experiments. Then comes a long period of blankness. Tens of millions of years without a single record. Then comes an interruption, and then more blankness. The vast majority of the universe's time is blank.
He quickly flipped to the last few pages. The records from the last tens of thousands of years became denser. The web documented every key milestone of Earth's civilization: the discovery of fire, the invention of writing, bronze smelting, the carbon emission curve of the Industrial Revolution, the electromagnetic pulse characteristics of the first nuclear explosion, and the blurry television signal sent back from the moon by Apollo 11. The timestamp of the first Celestial Satellite entering orbit was accurate to the millisecond.
The Web has been watching all along. It just hasn't spoken. For four billion years, it has recorded everything from the first campfire to the first quantum satellite, like a doctor constantly monitoring the vital signs of a comatose patient, waiting for the day he opens his eyes. On the day Apollo 11 sent back signals from the moon, the Web recorded every characteristic of the signal—carrier-to-noise ratio, frequency shift, Doppler broadening. Then, it silently added a note below that line: "Today, the host civilization has left its home planet's gravitational field for the first time." No celebration, no exclamation mark, just a calm log. But it wrote. It recorded every visible milestone over four billion years.
Yu Ying opened the index of the Legacy Package. After the nine nodes were connected, the Web distributed the Founder's Legacy Package to all active nodes, unlocking all the Founder's technical data stored in each node. The total data volume of the Legacy Package was approximately one thousand times the total amount of human knowledge, encompassing a complete technological system from basic physics to cosmological engineering. The first record in the index made Yu Ying's breath catch in her throat.
A classification system for cosmic civilizations. The Founders categorized civilizations in the universe into twelve levels. Earth is currently at level eight, possessing rudimentary intergalactic travel capabilities. At its peak, the Founders' civilization reached level eleven, possessing the ability to construct intergalactic networks and establish consciousness network communication capabilities. The subpage lists the key indicators for levels eight through twelve. Level nine requires complete intergalactic autonomy. Level ten requires intergalactic travel. Level eleven requires a consciousness network. Level twelve can be summed up in one word: Infinity.
Yu Ying turned the index to the next page. Next to the description of level twelve was a very faint symbol. She zoomed in and realized it wasn't a definition, but a note. The note was only one line long, written with extremely low energy in the footer of the level twelve definition page, as if it had been added later. We didn't reach level twelve. This wasn't even a verifiable hypothesis. But the seed was sown. Perhaps you will.
Late at night, Zuo Cheng sat alone in his office. The progress bar for the Web Weaver on the system panel was full, its background a soft white. In the corner of the panel was a line of small text: "The conditions for the eleventh branch to sprout have been unlocked. The first two are complete—nine nodes activated and Web Weaving control permissions granted. The third is still incomplete: contact with at least one Web Weaving node signal from outside the solar system."
He scrolled through the history of the Web on the panel, turning to the first page. The record began without text, only a stream of raw data encoded by the Creators. He decoded it using Origin Decoder. It was the first record the Creators civilization had written into the Web system four billion years ago. It contained only one sentence.
I hope that you, the reader of these words, are no longer alone.
He stared at that sentence for a long time. Satellites streaked across the sky outside the window, as bright as every night, as bright as the first night. Four billion years ago, someone wrote these words on a planet before its oceans had grown. Today, someone reads them. The four billion years in between were not waiting. They were belief.