I Have A Super USB Drive

by <unknown>

  From a generation-defining advent like the age-reversal treatment that cured the curse of old age to the Blacklight vaccine that saved billions of people in the world. After that came hundreds of cancer-targeted drugs, then the cure to Alzheimer's disease... Blacklight Biotechnology had completely taken over the biomedicine sector in the Earth Federation!

  This was why plenty of scientists regularly hung around the official website of Blacklight Biotechnology. This was the communication and discussion hub for thousands of scientists and researchers. Blacklight Biotechnology also made sure to invest its resources to manage the forum in an organized manner so that the scientists had an ideal spot for their discussions. The forum of Blacklight Biotechnology had at this point become a sacred hub of scientific knowledge exchange for scientists from all over the world.

  There were six sections on the homepage of Blacklight Biotechnology's official website, namely:

  Bio-pharmaceutical, bionic medical, service and security, electronic technology, mineral resources, and military and aerospace. The six major sectors were represented by six colors which were respectively green, white, gray, yellow, black, and blue. Everything was recognizable at one glance.

  At this time, there was a large flashing exclamation mark icon on the military and aerospace sectors.

  The giant exclamation mark drew the attention of countless people around the world and they immediately selected it.

  A five-minute-video immediately popped up. The title of the video jumped at the screen in the form of an enlarged, bolded text:

  Ares Project - Mars Scientific Colonization Expedition Officially Commences!

  The first thing that appeared on screen when the video was played was a futuristic spaceship with two gigantic dual-jet engines installed on both sides of its hull. The spaceship sparkled and glowed with silvery rays. It seemed like a magnificent work of art framed on the display.

  It was the designated spacecraft of the Ares Project. The spaceship that would send humans to Mars, it was the Ares.

  The picture of Ares only appeared for several frames before it was cut out. The video continued with the slow, somber tone of a man speaking.

  "Human beings have existed for millions of years since their first appearance on Earth. We have dreamt of great visions for millenniums.

  "In ancient times, when humans gazed upon starry sky, they always imagined what the stars and moons were made of. Were they astral embodiments? Were there other lands out there? What kind of tales were there in the places above...

  "We conjured stories and fables such as the story of The Goddess Chang's flight to the moon and The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. We've written myths and stories of space travel..."

  A profound montage of different folklores and mythologies started to play on-screen following the tempo of the narrator's narration...

  "Mankind first embarked on their venture into the stars in the sixteenth century. It first started with simple observations using inventions such as telescopes. It was not until the 1960s that humans landed on the moon for the first time..."

  Suddenly, a man dressed in a medieval robe appeared on the display. Under the moonlight, he polished the lens of a telescope using his robe and suddenly paused mid-motion. He then slowly raised his head and pointed the telescope at the moon outside the window. He had an expression that seemed like he was mesmerized by what he saw through the lens...

  A deep and heavy accordion sound played through the speakers after that. It was a somber, grave tune that represented a significant starting point in history.

  "Every time mankind takes another step forward in space discovery, it's marked as another significant milestone in the history of space travel..."

  The video flashed and showed the scene of the first human rocket launch, then the first landing on the moon. The black and white pictures intertwined into one another and despite the poor resolution of these pictures due to the era in which they were produced, it was clear that history was being made at these points in time.

  "But there has never been such a day as now when mankind has come this close to other extraterrestrial planets..."

  The narrator suddenly altered his tone. The background tunes of the grand piano suddenly picked up momentum as well. Like a pebble dropped into a still pool, the ripples were starting to form and spread across.

  The spaceship that appeared during the first segment of the video appeared on screen again. It was coated in a paint of bright silver and a string of texts detailing its statistics appeared on the screen.

  "Ares. Length: 52.3 meters. Width: 21.1 meters. Height 15.5 meters. Weight: 780 tons. Fitted with four engines and powered by two nuclear engines.

  "The spacecraft is divided into three floors including the bridge, medical bay, laboratory, and six living rooms. It can carry 16 passengers.

  "The spacecraft can also carry about 200 tons of cargo and about 20 tons of fuel..."

  The video started to show a clip of the Ares taking off. Columns of radiant blue lights burst out of the large reactor engines mounted along both sides of the spacecraft.

  Propelled by this tremendous force, the spacecraft started to rise and accelerate gradually...

  This clip was a digital render but it was extremely realistic to a point where one would easily confuse it with the real thing unless they were informed beforehand.

  "We're entering a new era. Where you and I stand now is the footnote of one era. This moment that we're witnessing is the new exclamation point that will usher the new era. From today, mankind will officially enter the era of cosmic immigration..."

  The trombone blared aggressively, mixed with the rowdy cheer of an excited crowd, the volume of the male narrator was slowly rising as well!

  "From today, the status of mankind will officially leap from being what was once 'native planet dwellers' to 'interstellar travelers'!

  "From today onward, the earth that we call home will no longer only be home, but be known as the origin of human civilization!

  "From today on, we'll enter a new chapter of the book of mankind. Join us as Blacklight Biotechnology brings all of us into the new age and rewrites history as we know it!"

  The background music picked up in momentum and volume, bringing the video to an exclamation point as it approached the end. After that, the music slowly died down and soon faded out.

  In the end, the only music that lingered was a low, dragged-out hum that seemed to drain away all other sounds in the world.

  The end of the video was marked with a giant black sentence stamped on top of a white display - registration for being a colonist of Project Ares begins on 1 July 2028!

  Within an hour of the release of this video, the traffic of Blacklight Biotechnology's site skyrocketed from around a hundred thousand to tens of millions of times per hour. Even the website's server crashed momentarily due to the sheer amount of traffic that overloaded it!

  The same video was also reposted across tons of major websites and media outlets, immediately spreading the news to the world.

  [The new age of mankind? Blacklight Biotechnology has launched an extraterrestrial colonization program. Earth will no longer be the only home for mankind] - The Wall Street Journal.

  [The only company in the Earth Federation that has what it takes to legitimize space colonization. Blacklight Biotechnology has sped out the development of technology by another fifty years] - BBC News.

  [Movie or real life? Blacklight Biotechnology's "Ares Project" draws comparison to popular cult classics like "Alien" and "Prometheus Project". How far away are humans to space colonization? ]- Tencent News.

  [Will Blacklight Biotechnology become the single most influential body in the history of mankind?] - Sina Express.

  [Space travel, to infinity and beyond! We've waited decades for this, Buzz Lightyear's claims are no longer a pipedream!] - YouTube News.

  The people were once again in a frenzy!

  As early as two years ago, Blacklight Biotechnology had de
veloped rocket technology and successfully sent a manned spacecraft to the moon. This also marked them as the third faction to send humans to the moon over the last century, trailing after Northern America and the North Sea Continent. Blacklight was the first private enterprise to send humans to the moon.

  As a token of respect and support, the Earth Federation passed the application of Blacklight Biotechnology and allowed Blacklight to become the first company in the world to have space colonization qualifications.

  However, Chen Chen was not content only with this. Over the next two years, Blacklight Biotechnology regularly flew rockets into space and to the moon where they would establish the first interplanetary research station on the moon for their crew of scientists. It was also open to scientists from all continents in the world to allow for further space research conducted outside of Earth.

  By this point, there were nearly fifty researchers stationed on the moon all year round. Blacklight Biotechnology had designated spacecraft with charted routes to the interplanetary research station to transport supplies for the researchers bi-annually.

  The reason why Blacklight Biotechnology could regularly transport between space and the earth was not merely due to their significant budget nor was it due to borrowed technology from SpaceX. It was due to the development of their "inertial confinement fusion reactor" technology.

  It was a nuclear reactor that could convert fuel into energy only with the use of lasers. After the reactor was miniaturized, it was rendered into an engine with nuclear power thrust.

  At one point, Chen Chen used the inertial confinement fusion reactor to charge the USB drive. However, the power generation of this was inferior to the later developed super tokamak reactor.

  However, due to the incredibly intricate design process of the super tokamak reactor, Chen Chen decided to let out this technology to the four major continents. With the collaborative efforts of Blacklight Biotechnology and the major continents, they were able to achieve a breakthrough in this stem of technology and successfully put it into commercialized use.

  Meanwhile, the inertial confinement fusion reactor remained the optimal choice for replacing thrust engines for spaceships. It allowed for spaceships to travel to other planets that were once considered unreachable at an extremely efficient fuel usage.

  Just as Chen Chen had once declared - the day the inertial confinement fusion reactor was fully developed was the day that mankind's interstellar travel could commence properly.

  Since the day Chen Chen made that declaration, Blacklight Biotechnology had secretly invested insurmountable amounts of time, effort, and research force into developing the inertial confinement fusion reactor. In the end, the engines for the Ares spaceship finally came to fruition.

  The inertial confinement fusion engine was essentially a reduced version of the inertial confinement fusion reactor. Superconducting material was used to design a spherical shell where another tiny sphere formed with a mixture of deuterium and tritium was injected into the reaction chamber 2 million joules were ignited with a concentration of 192 electron beams onto a deuterium-tritium pellet with a measured diameter of less than few tenths of a millimeter. Each laser was activated at a regular interval of an average of three-billionths of a second. This triggered extreme high temperature and pressure that subsequently triggered a significant nuclear fusion reaction. This process generated enough thrust for the spacecraft to operate.

  Based on data obtained from the experiment of the Ares spacecraft engine, the velocity generated could reach up to 7 percent the speed of light in vacuum conditions. With a total weight load of 500 tons, it could reach a maximum speed of 38.6 million meters per second, which was close to matt speed.

  The engine would detonate what was two hundred and fifty 0.001 gram nuclear per second and maintain this continuously...

  Since such innovation was too abrupt, Blacklight Biotechnology held off on disclosing the existence of the inertial confinement fusion engine to the outside world. He only claimed that the Ares used nuclear engine technology and was preparing to lead mankind's first landing on Mars to establish a scientific research station. This led to a hurricane of public reception.

  Blacklight Biotechnology continued to remain a silent stance when countless people on the Internet raised questions regarding this mentioned "nuclear engine technology".

  If Blacklight Biotechnology chose to maintain its silent disposition, not a single person in the world could force them to reveal their secrets...

  Chapter 505: Mars Landing |

  As soon as Blacklight Biotechnology made the announcement of Ares' expedition, the ones who had been paying attention to this and concerned about the fate of mankind found reason to finally breathe a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, even the demographic who were not concerned with the latest science and technology developments also learned of the announcement from various media outlets. In an instant, Blacklight Biotechnology once again became one of the most trending topics online, even entering the top ten list of Sino Weibo's trending topics!

  Sina Weibo trending topics:

  1. Xiao Zhan's finger cut - 100 million hits.

  2. Zheng Jie's toilet clog - 60 million hits.

  3. Chase the light, brother TV Show - 45 million hits.

  4. EXO announces new tour - 30 million hits.

  ...

  10. Blacklight Biotechnology to set foot on Mars - 1 million hits.

  In the Ares Project promotional clip, in addition to the preview of the Ares spacecraft transporting people to Mars, there was also an advertisement for the registration to enlist as colonists placed in the final segment. When the netizens clicked the link attached at the end of the video, they were redirected to the website of Blacklight Biotechnology. The giant tagline was stamped at the heading of the page -

  Ares project colonists registration officially opens 1 July 2028!

  Based on the information provided, Blacklight Biotechnology will be recruiting ten thousand people as the first inhabitants of the planned colony on Mars. With the Ares' mounted nuclear fusion engines, it should only take a week to reach Mars.

  This travel duration to Mars was worlds ahead of what it was in the past. When mankind first invented space probes to explore the terrain on Mars, it took more than half a year for them to arrive at the atmospheric layer of Mars.

  With the nuclear fusion engines, it took at least twenty-five times faster. Furthermore, this was not the extent of what the nuclear fusion engines were capable of. This was merely the infancy stages of its official adoption in spacecraft. Within several decades or centuries, there was the hope of mankind elevating the speed of their spacecraft to subluminal speed.

  For now, a week-long journey was as good as it got. It was not much different from a cruise ship trip.

  This open registration had garnered the interest of countless people all over the world. In the Western parts of the world, many people were in tune with the spirits of solo traveling so this was treated as a similar endeavor. Meanwhile, while the reception in Eastern regions was not as fervent, there were still a lot of tech-savvy young people submitting their applications.

  Furthermore, Blacklight Biotechnology had given their word that the first batch of Martian colonists would be given statues equivalent to Blacklight Biotechnology employees. This meant that each one of the colonists would be paid monthly salaries reaching up to tens of thousands of dollars. In addition, this was just the basic salary before including various bonuses and associated subsidies.

  The first group of colonists would also be entitled to a large range of benefits. This included housing on Mars and sufficient food and water. All expenses would be covered by Blacklight Biotechnology unconditionally. If the colonists got married and had children on Mars, their offspring would also be entitled to high-standard education.

  This extremely generous benefit was incredibly tempting for countless people. In just one day, millions of people had filled out the registration form.

  However
, there were certain entry barriers to becoming a colonist. Due to the emergence of XTN robots and cyborgs, the colony did not have much demand for manual labor. There were designated robots to complete tasks such as cleaning, regular plantation work, and factory tasks. Blacklight Biotechnology only needed specific talents with special skill sets.

  The list of skills required ranged from mechanical maintenance, software development, engineering experience, designing experience, certain scientific backgrounds, and so on. This meant that most white-collar workers would not be fortunate enough to be selected as the first of colonists.

  It was midnight in a room on the outskirts of Zhongzhou District in the Central Continent. A haggard-looking man with dirty stubble was smoking a cigarette, silently staring at the computer screen in front of him.

  The immigration application form to Mars was filled out on the computer display -

  Name: Wang Wei. Gender: Male, Age: 27. Education Background: Department of Biological Sciences, Haizhou Jiaotong University...

  The light was not turned on. The room was drowned in complete darkness save for the bright LED display of the computer that shone harshly on the man's face.

  He stared at the promotional clip on the Blacklight Biotechnology official site. His eyes became dull and hazy as if he was reminiscing on something.

  As the steady puff of cigarette smoke filled his vision, he seemed to jog his memory back to approximately seven to eight years ago, during the days of his university life.

  After zoning out for some time, he suddenly felt a scorching sensation burning into his lips which snapped him back to reality. He quickly plucked the last of the cigarette away from his scalded lips and jammed it repeatedly into an almost full ashtray.

  After he ensured that he had filled out the form in its entirety, he scrolled to the bottom of the page and moved his cursor to the "Submit" button. However, something was stopping him from clicking his mouse and submitting the form.

  It was right around this mark when he started to hear footsteps approaching him from somewhere in the house.