Chapter 171: Shuttle Voyage
Xiang Chuan curiously looked at the scenery outside the window.
She had always believed that the night sky she saw in the countryside during her childhood in the 21st century was the cleanest and most beautiful one she had ever seen in her life. Looking out, it seemed as if the entire visible range was covered by stars, and in the distance, she could even see the Milky Way like a ribbon of light.
Now, the shuttle she was riding had left the mothership’s virtual atmosphere and entered space, and Xiang Chuan was seeing for the first time what the starry sky looked like without the obstruction of the atmosphere and clouds.
Back when she was still lying in her rental room, agonizing over the summary report file for the weekly meeting, social media would occasionally show news about the homeland space station, but by then Xiang Chuan had already lost the bit of expectation she had as a child for the distant space exploration. After growing up and actually experiencing the speed of social technological progress, she had already prepared herself for the possibility that she might not get to go into space even for a glance before dying of old age in her lifetime.
Things are unpredictable. Who would have thought she would sleep all the way to 30,000 years later, and now the space she had fantasized about countless times with her elementary school classmates as a child was just one window away.
Chou Manman, sitting next to her, looked curiously at Xiang Chuan’s excited expression as if her whole body was about to stick to the window, and asked, “Xiang Chuan, why do you look like you’ve never ridden a shuttle before?”
Of course I haven’t! Xiang Chuan shouted in her heart, but for the sake of her life, she certainly couldn’t say it directly.
The government did not restrict the residents of various fleets from using the local area network or space-time network to access the public external cameras of the mothership or escort ships to enjoy the scenery of the fleet navigating in the universe, nor did it prevent merchants from launching products that simulated the cosmic environment in real time. However, due to various possible unexpected external situations, such as passing through asteroid belts or incidents caused by magnetic fields, the internal environment simulation systems of the mothership and escort ships simulated a starry sky similar to that of Earth at night to avoid unnecessary panic. Therefore, the ones who could often see the real universe were only those who frequently worked on the outer hull of the ships or at the spaceport.
Students, due to learning needs, often watched the footage from external cameras in real time or used simulation devices to simulate the current environment of the fleet. Xiang Chuan’s own room had a small device, though it was now almost completely forgotten by her.
So although they did not directly contact the universe like the outer hull workers, the specific image of the concept of space was deeply imprinted in the students’ minds, and now riding a shuttle would not make them make a fuss over the scenery outside the window.
There was not even one as excited as Xiang Chuan.
“I only learned when I was browsing information before that in ancient times, 99% of people never actually entered space in their entire lives, and some children even had to imagine what the universe looked like. After reading a lot of such text, I guess I was somewhat influenced by them?”
Xiang Chuan pressed her hand against the window. She now felt very wondrous; the space that people in the 21st century yearned for and feared was now just a few centimeters away from her. This feeling was truly too amazing.
“Teacher Zhu mentioned in Chinese language class that people in the past lived only on Earth. Is that really true?” Nancy asked curiously from across the aisle, and the other classmates also looked at her curiously.
“Yes, people lived on Earth before. The original apes evolved into humans, and for a long time afterward, they could not leave Earth’s ecosystem, so they could only gaze at the starry sky. Later, civilization developed, technology progressed, and some countries—in modern terms, like fleets—developed countries invested funds and talent to build space stations in space, cultivate plants that could grow in space, and even exploration of the nearest moon and Saturn to Earth could only be done by machines.”
“Looking at the universe from a planet’s surface? Wouldn’t that be boring to death?” Ainuo, sitting in the seat behind her, said disdainfully.
“That’s true for us, but observations of the universe in different eras have different discoveries, and for people back then, it was still valuable for research. And it wasn’t boring either, because Earth was always orbiting the sun, so the starry sky one could see was fixed and unchanging. The record file I have is more than 2,000 years after that, and even earlier humans who studied the starry sky discovered patterns in the arrangement of stars. They grouped the stars together to form eighty-eight ‘constellations’ and compiled stories for these constellations, which have been passed down ever since.”
“Eighty-eight?! What kind of stories are they!” Hearing there were stories, Chou Manman immediately perked up. She was currently agonizing over the script for their club’s first performance and desperately needed some dramatic stories. Among the three books Xiang Chuan had publicly released before, The Count of Monte Cristo suited her taste the most, but that novel was a bit too long for drama. Now hearing that even more ancient humans had created eighty-eight stories, she couldn’t sit still—eighty-eight of them! There must be some that matched their club’s story!
[Ahem, please remain quiet during the shuttle voyage and do not disturb students from other classes.]
Class President Lu Daiqing, sitting in the frontmost seat, had at some point turned on the broadcast and connected to the terminals of everyone in Class Eight Grade One. His voice came from each person’s terminal into their ears. Chou Manman then remembered that their class was now in the same cabin as Class Nine and Class Ten. Looking around, students from the other two classes were either leaning on their chairs catching up on sleep or glaring angrily at the seats on Class Eight’s side because they had just been woken up. This made her shrink her head involuntarily, not daring to shout anymore, afraid of inciting public outrage.
Looking at the now quiet cabin, Xiang Chuan could continue watching the scenery outside the window.
There was still a certain distance between the production escort ship and the mothership. When building the escort ships back then, in order to ensure that the escort ships would not be affected by the wake of the mothership during navigation, the designers put a lot of effort into the gravity and repulsion adjustments between the mothership and the escort ships, as they needed to both avoid the escort ships being caught in the mothership’s wake and ensure they weren’t too close, or they would be pulled over by the mothership’s gravity. From the time the first model of escort ship was built, the balance of gravity and repulsion between the main ship and escort ships has been continuously adjusted based on different environments, and even now 30,000 years later is no exception. No one knows what special situations might interfere with communications between the escort ship and mothership during navigation in the unknown universe.
The voyage time of the shuttle would also vary depending on the gravity and repulsion adjustments between the mothership and the escort ship. This voyage was somewhat long, lasting until nearly seven o’clock, when the shuttle finally entered the port of the Fourth Production Escort Ship.
Seeing the shuttle’s windows gradually closing, Xiang Chuan could only reluctantly pull her attention back from outside the window.
