April 24, 2131, GMT 17:18, Moon, Chang'e 6 Underground Experimental Complex, Radiation Zone Entrance Corridor H-1
In this dim corridor, Ling and his team walked, and even though no one wore leather shoes or high heels, the corridor still echoed with the sound of footsteps. They could also faintly hear the sound of the motion sensor light switch hidden in the footsteps. Perhaps this was due to the strong sound-absorbing ability of the lunar soil. There were posters on the walls, and the dates on them seemed to be the latest, such as "Celebrating the May 1st Interstellar Workers' Labor Day in 2131." It seems a bit inappropriate to say that this is an abandoned facility. But despite the well-maintained surroundings, the floating lunar dust still hinted that there were only a few AIs maintaining daily operations here. And with so much dust, I'm afraid those AIs wouldn't last more than a few days.
The spacesuits of Ling and his team were obviously thinner because the thermal insulation gas had been sucked out and stored in pressure tanks. But they still couldn't take off their helmets because the air quality had not yet reached the quality required by the Health Commission. However, since they had switched to filter mode, Ling still believed that he was breathing lunar air. It must be said that compared to the air in the basements on Earth, there was not much difference, except that there was obviously no damp smell, after all, where on the moon would water be produced out of thin air?
Due to lack of time, the following content is only an outline of the upcoming story.
Ling and his team were stopped by an AI outside the radiation zone because Ling's personal radiation dose had reached its limit. Later, upon further questioning, it was revealed that it was a brain CT scan requested by a social care institution (the purpose was to imply problems with the visual center), which used up half of the standard dose. Then Ling was left alone outside, quietly reminiscing, which also brought up a strange point: Ling couldn't remember clearly what the world looked like before the age of 7.
The group of people entering the radiation zone broke his contemplation and told the story to the trapped navigator with mixed feelings. A quantum entanglement communication was quickly sent to the solar system portal, and the information was further deciphered by the other party. Due to the advancement of human space technology and the lack of progress in underground technology, it took a whole month to fully prepare. (Background of the story: The Eternal Alarm Clock and other documents told contemporary humans that the trapped navigator could only wait silently for death, but later humans developed hibernation technology, sent hibernation chambers to the center of the Earth, and docked them with the trapped underground exploration spacecraft, allowing the navigator to wait for over 100 years. And one month later was the date when the hibernation chambers would start, so humans should just be able to catch up with the rescue.)
After a brief training, several astronauts boarded the device to go to the center of the Earth. But halfway through, they suddenly felt desperate because they discovered that during the 100 years, humans had once made a unified adjustment to the calendar. In other words, if they followed the time in the Eternal Alarm Clock to rescue, humans would be a whole month late. At this time, after awakening, the food in the cabin would only last for three days, and considering that a person can survive without eating for seven days, it means that by the time they start the rescue, everyone would have starved to death. Both the astronauts and the ground command center fell into a state of depression.
But in the end, they decided to give it a try because a researcher suddenly mentioned that there had been a person in history who survived for 30 days without eating, so there might still be hope. So it was another thrilling motionless docking of the spacecraft, and several astronauts successfully entered the cabin for search and rescue. However, they did not find any remains of the navigator, and the hibernation chambers were also empty. Some suspected that the navigator had committed suicide after leaving the chamber, but there was no record of the hatch being opened...
However, the astronauts did not return empty-handed. They found a video tape in a corner of weightlessness. After returning to the ground, they went to the Internet Archive and found an exhibit that could read this type of video tape.
Through the video tape, the truth was finally revealed. The Eternal Alarm Clock was not an "memo" written by the official for future humans. It was just a tragedy recorded by some kind-hearted people on the internet using advanced technology, and they sought help from future humans with better technology. They did not know the true situation: in fact, the exploration of the Earth's core was much more difficult than what was publicly disclosed. After the engines were shut down, all of their former colleagues were engulfed by lava in front of their eyes, and the navigator did live alone for a period of time. But she realized that her future life was meaningless. She didn't want to accept it. She saw the darkness around her—she realized that she was no different from a blind person...
It was this kind of thought that made her realize what she had to do before ending her life. She knew that the spokesperson would say that she would continue to sleep in the center of the Earth, but she also understood that hibernation technology was not mature at all. Instead of sleeping in the hibernation chamber and never waking up, she knew that she could only find eternal life in the raging fire. So she coordinated with a few highly confidential individuals and decided on a strategy: she would devote her life, which had no hope of finding any light, to the cause of bringing light to all the blind people who could never see the light. She brought her eyes with her, and what she brought was not just her own eyes.
What was sent was not a hibernation chamber, but a complete neural analysis chamber. Because there were some experiments that required extremely inhumane live human experiments to observe the changes in nerves and eyes, in order to find the cause of blindness, and with this data, train an intelligent model to find light for blind people and help them regain their vision.
"This experiment is extremely painful because we need to observe the complete reaction of the nerves, so no anesthesia can be used."
"And you will not be able to see anything."
"It's okay, someone will put eyes on me, and they will bring eyes to them. As for me, I can't see anything here anyway."
On June 19, 2029, the incineration program of the neural analysis chamber was started. Fifteen minutes later, the ashes were scattered into molten nickel-iron, forever accompanied by the Earth's magnetic field and gravity.
On July 1, 2029, a Huggingface user named THEyes submitted a 30GB "FixerT00.ckpt" model file. The next day, they committed a README.md and wrote the following paragraph:
"This model is trained on a large amount of live animal visual data and can analyze the causes of blindness based on eye tracking images and brainwave detection results. It is linked with GPT-5 to propose practical treatment plans."
Ling finally understood. After asking many times, the social care system believed that his mind had reached the level where he could accept this fact and told him: in fact, Ling or Qiu came from the industrial age. After being diagnosed with a high probability of a visual impairment disease, he was frozen as an embryo. Although human hibernation was not yet mature, the freezing of live embryos could be maintained for a long time. Although his parents had long passed away, due to the establishment of the social care system, his disease was eventually treated by a derived version of the model contributed by the navigator from the center of the Earth. However, because he had damage to both the optic nerve and the eyeball system, he needed to develop until the age of 7 to have normal vision like his peers. The system took special care of him, placing him with other children who temporarily couldn't see due to similar treatments, and actively gave him psychological suggestions. At the same time, they appropriately utilized the characteristic of not having deep memories before the age of 7, so Ling didn't have a profound impression of the darkness before the age of 7. He just felt that his childhood was very dim, and he rarely saw things.
The video tape was sent back to Earth, sealed in a vacuum case, and placed in a museum. Through genetic editing, genes that could cause blindness or even myopia were permanently removed from the human genome. The initial version of that AI model was stored in a flash drive, vacuum-sealed, along with a device that could read it, and also placed in the museum.
(The End)