After screaming, Fang Xiaoxiao seemed to realize that his emotions were out of control. He took two steps back, dizzy and squatted down, holding on to the wall. He stuffed two handfuls of pills into his mouth and forced himself to swallow them mechanically.

After swallowing the pill for a while, Fang Xiaoxiao managed to calm down. He gasped and hugged his knees tightly, hot tears unconsciously sliding down his numb and cold face. He muttered to himself: "They are not human, really not, I don't eat humans..."

As he spoke, he could not help but tremble all over, buried his face in his knees and sobbed, and apologized incoherently:

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

Bai Liu squatted on one knee and handed Fang Xiaoxiao a soft cloth.

Fang Xiaoxiao silently took it and wiped the tears from her face.

Bai Liu lowered her voice and asked, "What kind of monsters are they?"

"...highly intelligent monsters." Fang Xiaoxiao stood up with the help of the wall and answered hoarsely, "When they first appeared, we were all scared because they looked exactly like the dead members of the observation station. We thought they were ghosts, but later we found out that they were illegal biochemical products of Edmund Observation Station."

"They will actively imitate the most capable creatures in the environment and try to get close to us to learn our survival skills. This group of monsters may have observed us for a while and found that we showed great mourning and friendliness towards our dead team members, so they chose to change into this image to approach us..."

Fang Xiaoxiao took a deep breath and said, "They thought that as long as they became something we liked, we would accept them. But they scared the sentinels at the base, who shot them dead and dragged them back to the base for research."

"…During the research process, it re-shed its skin and became more human-like."

"It has a strong learning ability. Through our words and its own observation after entering the base, it imitated the dead team member better after the second skinning. Its speech, appearance, and habits are all exactly the same. Except for the loss of some memories, it is almost like the dead team member who has come back to life... This is really terrible, so we killed it a second time with a knife."

Fang Xiaoxiao's eyelashes fluttered, and tears fell on his hand that was holding the towel tightly. "...We found that no matter how we kill them, because their cells are highly active, as long as one is not killed, it will autonomously differentiate into embryonic stem cells, and then differentiate into humans."

"...unless you first use fire to char their epidermis to curb their differentiation tendency, and then immerse them in strong acid or strong alkaline chemicals to kill these cells completely. But the observatory does not have so much fuel and chemicals to deal with them."

"We had no way to deal with them at first. Even though we knew they were dangerous, we didn't have the resources to deal with them. We could only cut them open and freeze them in the ice cracks to prevent them from coming out. But soon, very soon..."

Fang Xiaoxiao's throat felt like it was being pinched by a pair of invisible hands. Although he opened his mouth, no sound came out and only tears flowed.

Bai Liu calmly continued, "But you soon discovered that fire plus strong acid corrosion is the same process humans use to cook and digest food, isn't it?"

"You just happen to be short of food. Eating them can completely eliminate these monsters. It's a win-win situation. Why not do it, right?"

After being pointed out by Bai Liu, Fang Xiaoxiao's eyes were empty, his chest rose and fell twice, and he couldn't help but turned around with a groan, covered his mouth and ran away as if to escape: "Sorry, I feel a little uncomfortable, you guys should rest first."

Bai Liu watched Fang Xiaoxiao go away, then turned around and walked into the cabin. Mu Sicheng and Tang Er followed closely.

Tang Er locked the door right away, and even stuck to the door and listened attentively for a long while before turning around to report to Bai Liu: "The soundproofing effect is OK. Even at a close distance outside, you can't hear people's footsteps. You can say whatever you want to say."

Mu Sicheng was a little dumbfounded after listening to what Fang Xiaoxiao and Bai Liu had said. He sat on the bed and stared at Bai Liu, feeling a chill on the back of his neck. "What the hell is going on? So it was these people at the observation station who ate the monster?!"

"That's not necessarily true." Bai Liu leaned on the bed, resting his chin lazily on his hand. "The possibility of this observation station is still what I said before. There are people here, or there are anthropomorphic monsters pretending to be this way to deceive us."

Mu Sicheng was confused: "No, if they are monsters, why would they pretend to be like this to deceive us? What's the point? If they want to kill us, they can just do it directly. You just heard that these things are immortal to a certain extent and can fight us directly!"

"Why do you take the initiative to tell us your weaknesses?"

Tang Erda nodded at the right time: "Just now the weakness in my monster book was lit up. What Fang Xiaoxiao said is true. Fiery fire plus chemical corrosion is the weakness of this monster."

Bai Liu smiled and suddenly brought up a completely unrelated topic: "Do you know the Turing test?"

Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda both nodded.

Mu Sicheng was more impatient: "What does this have to do with the Turing test? Isn't it used to test whether AI has human intelligence?"

"There are similarities. AI and the monsters here are both man-made species. If you compare the species here to AI, how do you think we can test whether the species here have complete human intelligence?" Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng slowly, "Do you remember the famous hypothesis in the Turing test?"

Mu Sicheng suddenly realized something, and he shuddered: "If these intelligent AIs really have human intelligence, will they deceive humans to pass the Turing test?"

"Assuming that the [people] here are all monsters, they are trying hard to imitate humans, and their intelligence has developed to the same level as the scientific research team here, it is entirely possible that they will conduct the Turing test on themselves to test whether their human imitation show is qualified and whether they can fully integrate into us."

Bai Liu raised his eyes and said, "We, a group of foreign humans, are the best comparison to test whether they can successfully deceive humans. What Fang Xiaoxiao said just now was just a simulation based on their understanding of humans to convince us that they are human."

Tang Erda remained silent, Mu Sicheng clenched his fingers and clenched his palms, feeling a chill on his back.

"Of course." Bai Liu changed the subject again and said slowly, "This is just my guess. It is also very likely that the people here are real people. Everything is just my delusion."

Tang Er asked calmly, "How do you verify your idea?"

Bai Liu spread his hands and smiled softly: "It's very simple. Tonight, after they all fall asleep, we will go dig out the things in the ice cracks and see if the [people] inside can survive."

midnight.

The Antarctic sun lasts a long time in February. By the time the daylight disappears, it is already early morning. Most of the people in the observation station have gone to bed. Only two sentries are standing guard in front of the door, but it is very easy to bypass these two sentries and get out.

The observatory adheres to the principle of strict entry and loose exit, and does not strictly control the outbound travel of internal personnel. After all, in Antarctica, only those who risk their lives would voluntarily go outside.

Bai Liu and his team drilled out from the back door of the garbage disposal in the kitchen on the second floor, then went around to where the helicopter was parked and took out the drilling equipment inside.

Thanks to the severe weather in Antarctica, with the combination of wind, snow and darkness, visibility could not exceed 30 meters. Bai Liu and his team took away the equipment so blatantly that even the sentry not far away did not see it.

Under the leadership of veteran Tang Erda, they rode on a sled, loaded hundreds of kilograms of equipment onto it, and pulled it to a location more than ten kilometers away that they had explored before.

Mu Sicheng was panting and sweating all over, but Bai Liu was fine. Tang Erda didn't let him do much, and he had to bear most of the weight of the equipment weighing hundreds of kilograms.

Tang Erda's skin from face to collarbone was soaked with sweat, and his tense muscles had a fleshy sheen. His breathing was only slightly heavier, and his panting was very restrained.

Mu Sicheng, who was panting like a donkey, stared with his eyes wide open.

Shit! Is Tang Er the reincarnation of a sled dog?! How can he pull so many things?!

Tang Erda didn't notice Mu Sicheng's jealous look. He placed the equipment on the sled on the ice, and then according to Bai Liu's arrangement, began to use the drilling equipment to drill holes at the location where they had detected the human figure before.

The hot pressure melted the ice layer by layer. When it dropped to a similar position, Bai Liu made a stop gesture, and Tang Er held the instrument, lifted the ice core, and pulled it out.

Trapped in the ice core was a thin and shrunken human being who had no limbs, making him look particularly small. He was just the right size for Bai Liu and his team to lock him in the ice core and pull him out - this was also the reason why Bai Liu chose this location to drill a hole.

The "human" trapped in the ice ridge, or ice core, about 2 meters long and 1 meter in diameter had an extremely terrified expression, as if he had seen something that was enough to scare him to death. The cuts on his limbs were neat and clean, as if they had been cut off by a sharp weapon and had not yet rotted.

Bai Liu and his team brought fuel, burned hot water and poured it onto the ice core over and over again. Soon the ice core began to melt slowly.

"It's ice made of snow." Tang Erda concluded with certainty, "Real ice wouldn't melt so quickly, nor would it be so clean and thorough."

Soon, the ice melted and the human-pig corpse inside lay motionless on the ice.

When Mu Sicheng was frozen to death and hugged himself for the third time, wanting to go back, weak flesh buds suddenly grew on the broken parts of the human pig's limbs. They twisted like worms and soon combined together to form limbs.

The human pig slowly stood up and knelt in front of Bai Liu.

It was obvious that what they had dug up was a monster.

Tang Erda kicked the opponent away with a reaction speed invisible to the naked eye, then stabbed the opponent's throat with the muzzle of the gun with his backhand. His expression was grim and he was about to shoot.

Bai Liu stopped him in time, walked up to the human pig, and asked Tang Er to pull the gun away. The human pig struggled to get up, and when he opened his mouth, Mu Sicheng was shocked.

"I am the real Fang Xiaoxiao." His voice was harsh, and tears came down as soon as he finished speaking. He kowtowed vigorously to Bai Liu, "The people buried below are all real people from the Taishan Observation Station. Please save them!"

Bai Liu helped him up and comforted him gently: "We will. Tell us what happened first."

"Have you seen the monster in the observation station?" Fang Xiaoxiao was helped by Bai Liu to sit on the sled.

Mu Sicheng boiled a cup of hot water for the shivering meteorology graduate student, but Fang Xiaoxiao pushed it away with a wry smile: "Thank you, my body doesn't need to be warmed up now. I just still have the conditioned reflex to cold that we humans have, so I shiver."

Bai Liu put the hot water on Fang Xiaoxiao's knees: "You have human reflexes to cold, so you are just an ordinary person who needs warmth. I think you really need a cup of hot water like this. Take it."

Somehow these words touched Fang Xiaoxiao, and he couldn't stop crying.

He looked at Bai Liu with tears in his eyes, and finally took the cup of hot water, choking and saying: "Thank you, comrade, thank you for telling me that I am still a human being."

Fang Xiaoxiao drank a few sips of hot water, and after recovering from the shock, he spoke again, "In August a year and a half ago, we received instructions to store a very dangerous biological corpse in Antarctica. At first, the person in charge of Taishan Station disagreed because according to the Antarctic Convention, no contaminated research objects can be placed here."

"But after many communications, the person in charge of Taishan Station finally agreed. Although we don't know what they communicated, the person in charge told us very sadly that the last pure land in Antarctica would no longer be a pure land."

"In order to protect the people outside and this world full of desire, this last piece of pure land has been polluted."

Fang Xiaoxiao exhaled deeply, and Bai Liu noticed that there was no heat in the air he exhaled, and no white mist was formed.

"So we prepared to meet the plane that was transporting the bodies, but the plane had an accident when it flew over the Ross Sea. In the end, it did not land near our observation station, but crashed near Archibald Station on the south coast of Ross Island - that is Country A's observation station."

"Although we searched for them immediately, three boxes were still missing and all five escorts on the plane died. In order to retrieve the three boxes, we kept calling Archibald Station and communicating with them. We even went directly to their person in charge that night."

"But soon they stopped answering our calls and closed the door to our visits. Our team also saw a helicopter flying from Archibald Station to Edmund Station in the early morning, and it seemed that it was secretly transporting something. We suspected it was the three boxes."

Fang Xiaoxiao's teeth trembled as he held the cup tightly. "Edmund Station is another observation station of theirs, located near the South Pole. It is heavily guarded and even more difficult to approach. There are also many military equipment. After the other party refused to answer our calls many times, we had to communicate by fax."

"The person in charge of the Edmond Observatory is called Edmond Allen. He has been in Antarctica for more than 30 years. He has always had a good relationship with us and is willing to share many of his research results with us. He is an old man with a strong Antarctic spirit and has made outstanding contributions to Antarctic meteorology and biological research. That is why the observatory is named after him..."

"Professor Edmund once gave in to our persuasion and wanted to secretly return the box to us and take all the blame himself..."

Fang Xiaoxiao couldn't help shedding tears: "But the politics and military of Country A didn't allow it. After discovering that Edmund had such a tendency, they cruelly persecuted Professor Edmund, subjected him to psychological oppression and experiments, and used some mind-control drugs on him. They drove Professor Edmund crazy..."

He covered his face and burst into tears. The title "professor" that he had been calling before turned into the more intimate "teacher" at this moment.

"These beasts have murdered a great man! They performed biological experiments on Mr. Edmund and his body!"

"They've led Mr. Edmund astray!"

"The teacher used these corpses to teach how to breed these corpse creatures in large quantities, and crossed their genes with those of extremely low-level creatures, breeding predatory creatures that were better adapted to the Antarctic climate. All those who persecuted him were killed by these creatures..."

Fang Xiaoxiao seemed to recall an extremely painful memory. He covered his head and muttered to himself in a trance:

"But everything got out of control later on. The creatures began to develop human intelligence. They were educated and raised by Edmund. They had a strong curiosity and desire to explore scientific research and humans. They began to imitate what humans did to them. They began to reproduce those cruel experiments on humans to explore humans."

"And we humans who are stranded at the observatory are the best material for them to practice on."

Fang Xiaoxiao seemed to be crying and laughing: "They cut us up, dismembered us, sliced ​​us, dyed us, and classified us according to gender and region... But there was not much food left at the winter observation station, and we were going to starve to death soon. They didn't want us to die so fragile, so they started forcing us to eat seals, penguins and their meat."

"Their flesh fits into our bodies. We are like plants of other species that have been inserted into our bodies. We evolve and twist like an implant, and eventually become monsters like them that are not afraid of the cold, have stronger survivability, and don't die easily."

Fang Xiaoxiao shed a tear unconsciously: "Soon, these clever monsters have explored all the secrets of our bodies. They have placed us, the waste products of their experiments, under the ice to preserve them, and entered the final stage of species research - mutual recognition, communication and psychological induction among humans."

"They need completely foreign humans to cooperate with their final stage of experiments, but there have been no new humans in Antarctica for a long, long time."

"So they constantly simulated the survival conditions of humans under extreme circumstances. They even created some realistic conflicts, killed each other, and then opened the ice layer to drop the dead monster corpses."

Fang Xiaoxiao pulled the corners of his mouth stiffly: "Of course these monsters are not really dead, they just conscientiously played the role of a human who failed in the fight and died, and were frozen next to us."

After he finished speaking, everyone was silent for a moment.

Bai Liu patted Fang Xiaoxiao on the shoulder, told him to have a good rest, and said that he would drill out everyone at Taishan Station, then turned around and went back to the drilling location to continue working.

Tang Erda was in charge of guarding Fang Xiaoxiao and did not come with them.

Mu Sicheng seemed to be greatly frightened. He shrank to Bai Liu's side and whispered, "Damn! It's exactly as you said! Those monsters in the observation station are really conducting a Turing test! There are real members of the observation station in the ice crack!"

Bai Liu turned on the instrument and glanced at Mu Sicheng expressionlessly: "How can you be sure that these [people] placed in the ice cracks are not a new round of Turing tests set up by these highly intelligent monsters after studying our human psychology?"

Mu Sicheng was stunned, his scalp tingling: "Are you saying that this Fang Xiaoxiao is also a monster disguised as a test for us?!"

Bai Liu closed his eyes: "Not necessarily, he could be a real human."

"Who told you that the Turing test only places one spot? These kinds of social tests are usually conducted across an entire map."

Bai Liu glanced at Mu Sicheng and said, "To put it simply, the entire Antarctica could be an experimental map set up by them for us aliens. The humans at any observation point could be real or fake. They use our ability to discern real and fake humans to determine how we identify our own kind."

"For example, it is like putting an alien monkey in a group of simulated monkeys and real monkeys, observing the reaction of the alien monkey to see what kind of monkeys it will make the same judgment reaction to, and then these monsters imitate these monkeys, pretending to be real monkeys, approaching the monkey, and then conducting further experiments."

Bai Liu's eyes fell on Fang Xiaoxiao behind Mu Sicheng: "For example, let a monkey cut off its limbs, and then observe whether the monkey will seek help from other similar people."

As Mu Sicheng listened, he felt his limbs getting a little cold, so he silently took off his monkey headphones.

Bai Liu shrugged: "This is how humans study other species."

The author has something to say:

Warning! The drilling machine here is a fictional machine I created based on existing drilling machines! I haven't found any current drilling machines with such accurate positioning and measurement feedback, or an ice core drilling machine with such a large opening! It's fictional! It doesn't exist! It can be considered a unique advanced instrument in the game.

Of course, if I am ignorant, it would be better if it existed!

No-prize guessing game: Which of the two Fang Xiaoxiaos is the real human?

A: Observation station B: In the ice crevasse C: None of the above