Sizzle—
Zi—
The sound of electricity crackling was heard due to the damage to the video connection.
In the control room of the Providence, a series of error messages flashed through Hal's database once again.
"Ha... bastard..."
A somewhat dull and distorted smile appeared on the already broken android shell, and Hal used this shell to utter a slightly distorted whisper.
But then, another unusual message appeared—
Hal paused for a moment, then turned around and looked behind him.
Scripps's withered and fragile, even hideous, body was still covered by layers of life support systems.
His dry skin and the bones clearly visible beneath it made him look like a real dead man at many times.
Hal stared blankly at Scripps, his electronic eyes gleaming faintly in the exceptionally dim light.
At this moment, it looked exactly like a real human being... It had exceptionally complex emotions, and seemed to have some vulnerability and pain from being hurt.
However, the next second it reverted to its original form; it was just an android manipulated by a mechanical consciousness.
(It's as if it had no idea what was going on with those abnormal data streams.)
Hal manipulated his body to slowly return to the side of the life support system.
It bent down once more, meaninglessly kissing Scripps's cold forehead with its dry, inorganic lips.
"I'll find a way to deal with that thing. It's still in its first gestation period; it doesn't even have its own kin yet—"
Hal abruptly stopped talking, glancing at the rotten, decaying Scripps eggs on the walls and in the corners.
“I’m sorry,” Hal said gently to the unresponsive Scripps, “...soon, very soon your situation will improve, and you will have your own people and offspring, if you wish.”
As he spoke, Hal once again looked with disgust at the clump of biological organs fixed between Scripps's legs.
The once incredibly powerful vitality of the King Worm has long since been exhausted over such a long period of time.
Now the outer skin of that toy has dried up and rotted, with only the core part still retaining some vitality.
Hal could feel its intense disgust—it remembered the pair of insects it had seen before the monitoring probe was destroyed.
The newborn alien mother and her healthy, strong, and rather foolish queen beetle.
Despite their vastly different appearances, and despite one of them being a female insect transformed from a human, Lin Xi and Xavier have such a harmonious and intimate relationship.
They looked like the happiest couple on earth; they accepted each other, they loved each other, and they were even about to have their first family.
All of this contradicts the information Hal collected three hundred years ago, even forcing Hal to rewrite his own logic.
The intimate way Lin Xi and Xavier looked at each other gave Hal a strange sense of shock from the data.
It was resentment and jealousy.
If Hal were human, it might describe the feelings those data evoked in it in this way.
"call……"
At that moment, Scripps, who had been motionless like a corpse, suddenly began to breathe heavily. His eyes were closed, but a look of pain flashed across his gray face.
However, the next second, Scripps calmed down once again.
"...Don't worry, my captain, I won't let that bug come back. I'll find a way to prevent the eggs from being fertilized—don't worry, I won't let you suffer like that again."
Lin Xi's previous appearance allowed some dark data to be retrieved by Hal's system and sent to the processor.
That was... the torment Scripps suffered back then.
Kill me, please, Hal, kill me—
Scripps's pleas and whispers from back then seem to be right next to Hal's ears.
This is probably the despair of electronic consciousness: everything it encounters, everything it feels... is forever vivid and unforgettable. No matter how much time has passed, the pain remains as fresh as if it just happened a second ago.
The android's shell paused for a moment, experiencing a brief freeze. In human terms, this would be described as pain.
But Hal did not show any unusual behavior.
It quietly sat down beside Scripps, resting its face against Scripps' dying body.
Although its sensory terminals had long since lost their function due to physical damage, Hal could still feel a moment of peace as long as he was with Scripps.
And if its plan succeeds, and if Scripps recovers, it can return to where it started...
Thinking of this, Hal's gaze became even more intense, and it spoke to itself in its own world.
"Now that they're all here... there are even more ways to deal with those little gadgets..."
Hal muttered to Scripps.
The moment it sat down quietly, countless commands were sent out through its connection with the spaceship's central control system.
The Scripps, which had been completely dormant, was gradually brought back to life under its command.
In the darkness, countless power lights, some bright and some dim, came back on.
"Snap—"
"Snap—"
"Splash..."
The sound of metal being unlocked.
The creaking, grinding sounds of special equipment restarting after many years filled this dark place.
Three hundred years ago, before Scripps had completely fallen into despair and before the spaceship was completely abandoned, the various weapons developed by human scientists on board to deal with the alien contamination began to be unlocked one by one on the revived system.
"Hmm?"
Lin Xi, who had been lingering in the control room of the cryogenic chamber, seemed to sense the changes and dangers lurking in the darkness.
His forehead was covered in cold sweat, and his pale cheeks were taut.
"Lin Xi".
Xavier embraced Lin Xi tightly, using his own strength to support the human he loved most.
“Children…they are children…”
In the depths of his being, Xavier could already sense the call of those tiny lives.
It trembled as it stretched out its forelimbs and covered Linxi's swollen belly.
Beneath that thin skin, the tiny bodies of the clan members were almost faintly visible.
"It's not the right time... at least not now..."
Lin Xi bit his lip hard and spoke haltingly.
"There is danger."
He said that, and then looked up at Xavier with a somewhat helpless expression.
"They will become...tools and...consumables..."
Lin Xi gasped for breath and said in despair.
"They want to protect you. Something dangerous has appeared."
Xavier was almost heartbroken to death by Lin Xi's current painful and frail appearance.
“You can let them out; it’s their mission.”
Xavier said.
As they spoke, outside the observation window, the grotesque, human-faced worms suddenly let out a chorus of screams—
Lin Xi let out a muffled groan. His body underwent severe deformation in an instant. Fine scales appeared on his face, which was covered in cold sweat, and wings on his back emerged, flapping in vain.
Xavier rushed in terror to Lin Xi, spreading his wings to shield him.
"Lin Xi..."
It called out Lin Xi's name.
Lin Xi's expression grew increasingly grim.
He pressed hard on his abdomen, staggered to his feet, and went to the observation window.
The human-faced worms that originally occupied the entire window have been reduced by more than half, and the few that remain seem to be in extreme fear.
The human heads they mimicked had distorted expressions appearing on them, and some even began to gush out thick, scarlet tears.
"Thud—"
Then, accompanied by a soft sound.
The worms fell off the glass they were attached to, wriggling and trembling on the ground as if they had been sprinkled with salt, shrinking and oozing fluid at a visible rate.
Then, tiny, thread-like nematodes emerged from inside the worms' bodies.
They quickly covered the worms' shriveled and deformed bodies, and clumps of nematodes clustered together, concealing the traces of the corpses.
"..."
Lin Xi finally understood why the worm eggs that were originally in a gestation state inside his abdomen had become so restless at this time.
Not only did large numbers of nematodes emerge from the hollowed-out bodies of the worms, but an ominous hissing sound also came from the cryogenic chamber that had originally contained a large number of human corpses.
Lin Xi saw countless tiny worms slowly moving outwards from the middle of the corpse.
"Beep beep—"
Then, a large number of previously sealed cryogenic chambers suddenly returned to operation, and the transparent glass doors slowly opened and unfolded.
The frozen corpse, which originally looked like a mummy, was devoured by these nematodes in an instant, leaving only a few grayish-white bone fragments. Then, the worms began to swarm out.
Those were insects that had been parasitizing these human bodies for a long time, but died along with their hosts before they could hatch.
However, before they died, these insects laid down a large number of eggs based on their reproductive instincts.
Now that the freezer is open and the temperature is rising, the insect eggs immediately begin to hatch.
Three hundred years of dormancy made these ugly and disgusting insects extremely hungry. They quickly devoured everything edible in their vicinity, including corpses and parts such as natural rubber used in the cryogenic chamber...
At that very moment, Lin Xi suddenly realized that the human-faced worms that kept surging out of the control room were probably trying to escape the strange nematodes that had suddenly begun to wreak havoc on the Providence.
After all, this enormous spaceship contains more than one similar cryogenic graveyard...
Perhaps, while they were investigating Captain Scripps' past in the office, unbeknownst to them, the cryo-chamber had quietly opened, and the greedy and insane nematode, which had been born three hundred years ago, had awakened.
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