Chapter 108: Compression
Seven days passed in the blink of an eye.
Tong Zheng, wearing a spacesuit, was in the camp that had already been pumped into vacuum, watching Jiang Yang with full seriousness.
Jiang Yang was also wearing a spacesuit. But his spacesuit seemed damaged, with gas rapidly leaking out.
After the training over the previous few days, Jiang Yang already clearly knew where the fault point was and how to handle it.
But the tape in his hand seemed to be blocked by an invisible power, always unable to stick down.
He knew that once he stuck the tape down, it would mean he had completed the final training subject, the training for the spacesuit damage emergency handling subject.
And this would also mean that Tong Zheng had completed his mission and would leave.
Jiang Yang raised his head and saw through the helmet that Tong Zheng’s expression was still calm and firm.
He gritted his teeth and forcefully stuck that section of special tape onto the damaged area.
The gas leak immediately stopped.
“Comrade Jiang Yang, you have passed the final assessment.
From now on, you need to survive on this planet by yourself.
I hope we can meet again in the next life.”
……
Placing Tong Zheng’s corpse in the moon dust pit, letting him lie side by side with his previous comrades, and then carefully burying him with moon dust, a flash of bewilderment crossed Jiang Yang’s face.
From now on, the entire moon…
No, the entire solar system, even the entire universe, might only have me as the remaining human.
Invisible loneliness and solitude surged toward Jiang Yang like tides in this vacuum environment completely devoid of air, then completely enveloped him.
Walking out of the cave where the camp was located, Jiang Yang climbed to the top of the gorge, leaned back against the rocks sitting on the ground, gazing at the countless stars in the vast starry sky, at the boundless desolate land, at that blue planet in the sky, remaining silent for a long time.
At this moment, he seemed to recall many things, but none of them formed completely, merely fragments.
Those fragments quickly switched in his brain. One moment it was the scene of him calling friends to eat in the restaurant, the next it turned into him in the rocket, being firmly pressed to the floor by overload pressure, and the next again, it became him walking in the passage wearing a spacesuit.
Chaotic and messy, like a tangled mess, impossible to cut or unravel.
Jiang Yang just sat there quietly like this, always gazing at that blue planet, not knowing how long he stayed.
Until the low battery alarm of the spacesuit sounded, he was startled awake from this chaotic state.
He got up, returned to the camp, took off the spacesuit to charge it, took out a nutrition pack, ate some food, and Jiang Yang fell asleep covering his head.
After an unknown amount of time, Jiang Yang woke up.
“Captain Tong…”
Calling out with no response, he suddenly sat up, then reacted that yesterday he had already buried Tong Zheng next to the camp.
Putting on the spacesuit and leaving the camp, Jiang Yang came to the spot less than ten meters nearby.
Here, the moon dust had piled up into the shape of a small hillock, with a stick erected on it, and an A4 paper on it writing “Tomb of Aerospace Hero”.
For some reason, upon arriving here, the feeling of bewilderment, helplessness, depression, and dejection in his heart slowly disappeared, and the beliefs he had persisted in before slowly reaffirmed.
Saluting, Jiang Yang turned and returned to the camp.
Time to work.
One very clear thing was that the suspected text information obtained from that floating city had inestimable value.
He must remember all these texts and bring them to the next life.
However…
Probably not to mention 60 days, even a year, he couldn’t possibly remember them all.
—If used sparingly, the remaining supplies on the moon at this moment were enough to sustain Jiang Yang for about 90 days. But Tong Zheng suggested he not do that, but eat full and well, persisting for 60 days.
Because under huge mental pressure, if physical condition worsened even a bit, even an iron man would collapse.
“60 days to memorize two thousand alien symbols whose meanings are unknown, and also remember the order of these symbols…”
This task was very difficult. But fortunately, before the astronauts left, they collectively used their wisdom to tailor a special memory method for Jiang Yang.
Compression.
Just like the compression program on a computer.
A good compression algorithm can compress the file size to a fraction of the original without losing file data.
And at this moment, the alien civilization symbols that Jiang Yang needed to memorize were all composed of line segments and dots overall.
Upon statistics, based on different lengths of line segments and different sizes of dots, they could be divided into two major categories and 12 minor categories in total.
Numbers from 0 to 9, plus letters a and b were assigned to each of these 12 minor categories, and then information on single font arrangement, multiple fonts’ front-back order, etc., was added, so each character was replaced by Jiang Yang with a 19-digit string.
Through algorithm traceback, any string could be restored by Jiang Yang to the original alien character, and he could clearly know its position in the entire “article”.
But at this moment, memorizing 2000 19-digit strings was still an impossible task.
Jiang Yang then proceeded to perform a second compression on it.
Because among these 2000 strings, each string was composed of fixed symbol combinations, with a lot of identical parts.
And as long as there were identical parts, they could be merged through the algorithm, greatly reducing the data volume.
Thus, after several compressions, Jiang Yang finally compressed these over 2000 alien characters into one image.
An image full of various colors and different sized color blocks.
At this step, the image memory method that Jiang Yang had learned and mastered before could come into play.
As long as he remembered this image and the multiple compression algorithm he used and brought them to the next life, then through the algorithm’s “decoding”, this image could be restored to the original characters.
By this step, a month had already passed.
Jiang Yang placed this image in a fixed position, repeatedly strengthening the memory by viewing it at irregular times, and also began his other task.
The overall shape, architectural shapes, and arrangement of that underground chamber also needed to be memorized.
During the previous exploration process, the astronauts had filmed a large amount of image and video information. At this moment, these things became Jiang Yang’s nourishment.
Time quietly passed in Jiang Yang’s continuous memorization.
Whenever his brain was fatigued, Jiang Yang would come to the resting place of Tong Zheng and others to stay for a while, or climb to the top of the gorge to look at that azure blue planet for a while.
If that didn’t work, Jiang Yang would take out the firearms and wildly shoot on the desolate and dead silent lunar surface, or use high explosives to blow up a few hillocks for fun.
Until the 40th day, Jiang Yang drove that electric tricycle and came again to that passage.
