Chapter 253: Ice Age

After screaming, Fang Xiaoxiao seemed to realise that he had lost control of his emotions. He took two steps back, crouched down dizzily against the wall and shoved two handfuls of pills into his mouth, forcing himself to swallow them mechanically.

A few moments after swallowing the pill, Fang Xiaoxiao was barely stable, gasping for breath and clutching his knees, hot tears sliding unconsciously down his numb, cold face as he muttered, "They're not human, really they're not, I didn't eat them ...... "

As he spoke, he shuddered, buried his face in his knees and choked back sobs, apologising incoherently.

"Sorry, sorry ......"

Bai Liu crouches down on one knee as he hands Fang Xiaoxiao a soft cloth napkin.

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

Bai Liu relaxed his voice: "What kind of monsters are they?"

"...... highly intelligent monsters." Fang Xiaoxiao stood up holding onto the wall and replied hoarsely, "When they first appeared, we were terrified because they looked exactly like the dead members of the Observatory and we thought they were ghosts, but later found out that they were the offending biochemicals of the Edmond Observatory."

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

Fang Xiaoxiao took a deep breath: "They thought that if they became the image we liked, we would accept them, but it scared the sentries at the base, who shot them dead and dragged them back to the base to study them."

"...... During the research process, it molted a second time and changed to be more human-like."

"It was a great learner, and through our words and its own observations after entering the base, it imitated the dead team member better after its second molt, to the point where its speech, appearance and habits were identical, except for some of its memories, it was almost as if the dead team member had come back from the dead... . it was so horrible that we killed it a second time with a knife."

Fang Xiaoxiao's eyelashes fluttered and teardrops fell onto his own hand clutching his cloth scarf: "...... We found that no matter how they are killed, because their cells are highly active, as long as one is not killed, they will go on to differentiate on their own to form embryonic stem cells, which will then differentiate into humans. and then differentiate into humans."

"...... Unless their epidermis is first charred by fire to curb their tendency to differentiate and then soaked in a strong acid or alkaline chemical to kill these cells completely, but the Observatory simply doesn't have that much fuel or chemicals to deal with them."

"We didn't have the resources to deal with them at first, even if we knew the damage they were doing, we had to cut them open and freeze them in the ice chasm so they couldn't get out, but soon, very soon ......"

Fang Xiaoxiao's throat felt like a pair of invisible hands were choking him, and although he was opening his mouth, no sound came out, only tears.

Bai Liu calmly takes over: "But soon you discover that fire combined with strong acid corrosion is not the human process of cooking and digesting food?"

"It just so happens that you are short of food, so eating it would be just the thing to completely dissipate these monsters, why not kill two birds with one stone, yes?"

When Bai Liu pointed it out, Fang Xiaoxiao's eyes were hollow, her chest heaving twice, she couldn't help but turn around and cover her mouth as if to run away: "Sorry, I'm not feeling well, you guys can rest first."

Bai Liu sees Fang Xiaoxiao off, then turns and enters the cabin, followed by Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda.

Tang Erda locked the door with her hand and listened to the door for a long time before turning to Bai Liu and reporting, "The soundproofing is fine, you can't hear people's footsteps from close range, so you can say anything you want."

Mu Sicheng had just listened to Fang Xiaoxiao and Bai Liu, and now he was a bit dumbfounded, sitting straight on the edge of the bed and looking at Bai Liu with a chill on the back of his neck: "What the hell is going on here? So this group of people from the Observatory ate the monster?

"That's not necessarily true." Bai Liu leaned back on the bed, lazily propping his jaw in his hand, "The likely scenario for this observatory is still what I said earlier, what's here is human, or maybe it's all anthropomorphic monsters here, disguised to deceive us."

Mu Sicheng was perplexed: "No. If they are monsters, why are they disguised in this situation to deceive us? What's the point? If they want to kill us just do it, you just heard it, this thing is to a certain extent immortal and can fight us directly!"

"Why even bother volunteering to tell us your weaknesses?"

Tang Erda nodded in due course, "I just lit up the weakness point in my monster book, and what Fang Xiaoxiao said is true, blazing fire plus chemical corrosion is this monster's weakness."

Bai Liu smiles and abruptly brings up a completely unrelated topic: "Do you know about the Turing Test?"

Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda both nodded their heads.

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

"There are similarities, the ai and the monsters here are both man-made species, if the species here is analogous to the ai, how do you think you would test that the species here is fully human intelligent?" Bai Liu looked slowly at Mu Sicheng, "Remember the famous hypothesis in the Turing test?"

Mu Sicheng shuddered as he realised something: "- if these intelligent ai do have human intelligence, will they resort to tricking humans to pass the Turing test?"

"Assuming that the [people] here are monsters that have tried so hard to imitate humans and have developed a level of intelligence that is on a par with the scientific crew here, it is entirely possible that they will perform their own Turing tests on themselves to test whether their human impersonation show is up to scratch and whether they can fully integrate with us."

Bai Liu raised his eyes, "And we, a group of alien humans, are the best control to test whether they can successfully fool humans, and those statements just made by [Fang Xiaoxiao] are just a simulation they can make to convince us that they are human based on what they know about humans."

Tang Erda is silent, and Mu Sicheng curls his fingers around his palm, a chill running down his back.

"Of course." Bai Liu spoke again, slowly, "It's just my guess, and it's also quite possible that the people here are people, and it's all just my delusion."

Tang Erda calmly asked, "So how do you verify your idea?"

Bai Liu spread his hands and smiled lightly, "It's simple, tonight when they're all asleep, we'll go dig in the ice chasm and see if the [person] in there can come to life or not."

At midnight.

The Antarctic sun lasts a long time in February and by the time the daylight disappears, it is already early in the morning and the personnel in the observatory are largely asleep, with only two sentries still standing guard at the door, but it is a simple matter to get around them and get out.

The Observatory adheres to the principle of strict entry and exit, and does not strictly control the going out of its internal staff; after all, in Antarctica it is a desperate man who would voluntarily go outside.

Bai Liu and the men then went through the back door of the first floor kitchen where the rubbish was disposed of, then went around to where the helicopter was parked and took the drilling equipment inside.

Thanks to the harsh Antarctic weather, where visibility could not exceed thirty metres with the wind, snow and night, Bai Liu was not seen by the sentries not far away when they took the equipment in such a blatant manner.

Led by Tang Erda, a veteran, they pulled hundreds of kilograms of equipment on sleds to a site they had previously explored, more than ten kilometres away.

Mu Sicheng was panting and sweating, while Bai Liu was fine, and Tang Erda didn't let him do much, as he carried most of the weight of the hundreds of kilos of equipment.

Tang Erda's skin is now drenched in sweat from face to collarbone, his taut, hard muscles glowing with a fleshy sheen, his breathing only slightly heavier as he gasps for breath with great restraint.

Panting like a donkey, Mu Sicheng's eyes glazed over.

Shit! Tang Erda, what the hell is a sled dog? Can you pull things like that?

Tang Erda, unaware of Mu Sicheng's slyly jealous gaze, placed the sled's equipment on the ice and then, as Bai Liu had arranged, began drilling the holes where they had previously detected the figure using the drilling equipment.

The heat pressure melted the ice layer by layer and when it was almost down, Bai Liu made a stopping gesture and Tang Erda held the instrument down, lifting the ice core up and pulling it out.

Trapped in the ice core was a small, narrow human with no limbs, so he was small enough to be pulled up by Bai Liu and his team locked in the core - which is why Bai Liu chose this site to drill.

The "human" trapped in the 2m-long, 1m-diameter ice prism, or ice core, has a horrified expression, as if he has seen something strong enough to scare him to death, and the limbs are neatly and cleanly cut off, as if by some sharp instrument, without decay.

Bai Liu brought fuel and poured hot water over and over on top of the ice core, and it wasn't long before the core began to slowly melt.

"It's ice made of filled snow." Tang Erda concludes with certainty, "Real ice doesn't melt this fast and it's not this clean and thorough."

It did not take long for this ice to melt away and the body of the human swine inside lay motionless on the ice.

As Mu Sicheng froze for the third time and hugged himself to get back, weak flesh sprouted from the severed limbs of this human pig, wriggling like worms, and soon united to form a limb.

The pig slowly rose and knelt in front of Bai Liu.

It was clear that this thing they had dug up was a monster.

Tang Erda kicked her opponent away with a speed of reaction not visible to the naked eye and backhanded him with the muzzle of her gun into his throat, looking cold and stern, looking ready to shoot.

Bai Liu stopped him just in time and went to the pig, asking Tang Erda to pull the gun away.

"I am the real Fang Xiaoxiao." His voice was hard, tears were falling just as he said this, and he kowtowed to Bai Liu, "Those buried down there are the real Tarzan Observatory personnel, please save them!"

Bai Liu helped him up and gently reassured him, "We will, just tell us what happened."

"You've seen the monster at the observatory, haven't you?" Fang Xiaoxiao was helped to sit on the sled by Bai Liu.

Mu Sicheng boiled a cup of hot water for the shivering meteorology graduate student, but Fang Xiaoxiao pushed it away with a bitter smile: "Thank you, my body doesn't need to be warmed now, I just still have a residual human conditioned reflex to cold, that's why I'm shivering."

Bai Liu put the hot water in Fang Xiaoxiao's lap: "You have a human reflex to cold, so you are an ordinary person who needs to be warmed, I think you do need a cup of hot water like this, take it."

I don't know how these words touched Fang Xiaoxiao, but he couldn't stop the tears from falling.

He looked tearfully at Bai Liu and finally took the cup of hot water, choking back a sob, "Thank you, comrade, for telling me that I am still a human being."

Fang Xiaoxiao took a few sips of hot water to slow down before speaking, "A year and a half ago in August, we were instructed to store a very dangerous biochemical category of corpse on this side of the Antarctic, and at first the head of Taishan Station did not agree because according to the Antarctic Convention, no contaminated research material could be placed on this side. "

"But then after many communications, the head of Tarzan Station finally agreed, and although we don't know what they communicated, the head told us sadly that this last piece of clean land in Antarctica would no longer be clean."

"To protect those outside and to protect a world full of desires, this last piece of pure land is still polluted."

Fang Xiaoxiao exhaled deeply, and Bai Liu noticed that there was no heat in his exhalation, no white gas forming.

"So we prepared to pick up the plane that was transporting the body parts over, but the plane had an accident while flying over the Ross Sea and instead of landing near our observatory, it ended up crashing near Archibald Station on the south coast of Ross Island - that's where Country A's observatory is. "

"Although we immediately went over to search for them, three of the crates were missing and all five of the plane's escorts died, and we kept calling Archibald Station to communicate in order to retrieve the three crates, and even went directly to their head that night."

"But soon they started not answering our calls, closed their doors to our visits and our team saw a helicopter flight from Archibald Station to Edmond Station in the early hours of the morning, suspiciously sneaking something over, which we suspect was the three boxes."

Fang Xiaoxiao's teeth chattered as he clenched his cup: " Edmond Station, another of their observation stations, is located near the South Pole and is heavily guarded and even more difficult to get to, along with a lot of military equipment, and we had to communicate by fax after the other side repeatedly refused to answer our calls."

" The head of the Edmond Observatory is Edmond Allen, who has been in Antarctica for more than 30 years and has always been very close to us, willing to share many of his findings with us, a very Antarctic-minded old man who has made a remarkable contribution to the study of meteorology and biology in Antarctica, which is why the Observatory is named after him ......"

" Professor Edmond at one point relented after we persuaded him to try to sneak the box back to us and take all the fault himself ......"

Fang Xiaoxiao couldn't hold back his tears: "But the politics and the military of country A didn't allow it, and after finding out that Edmond was inclined to do so, they brutally persecuted Professor Edmond, subjected him to psychological repression and experiments, and also used some mind control drugs on him, they drove Mr. Edmond crazy ......"

He covered his face and bawled, and the name he had been calling him "Professor" turned into the more intimate "Teacher".

"These bastards have mutilated a great man! They conducted biological experiments on Mr Edmond in relation to the body parts!!!"

"They're forcing Mr Edmond down the wrong path!"

"Using these corpses, the teacher began to teach the breeding of these corpse creatures in large numbers and crossed their genes with those of the very low creatures, breeding predatory creatures more adapted to the Antarctic climate, and all those who persecuted him were buried under these creatures ...... "

Fang Xiaoxiao seemed to think of an extremely painful memory as he covered his head and muttered in a trance-like state of mind.

"But then it all went out of control and those creatures began to develop human intelligence, they were brought up by Edmond, they had an exuberant curiosity and exploration of scientific research and humans, they began to imitate what humans did to them, they began to explore humans by reproducing those brutal experiments on them. "

"And we, the humans stranded at the Observatory, are the perfect fodder for them to practice on."

Fang Xiaoxiao seems to be crying and laughing: "They cut us up, dismember us, slice us, dye us and sort us geographically by sex ...... but there is not much food left at the winter observatory and soon we are going to starve to death, they don't want us to die a fragile death so they start forcing us to eat seal penguins and their flesh."

"Their flesh fits into our bodies, and we evolve as if cuttings of other species have been inserted, embedded in the body in a general twisted way, eventually becoming monsters that are as impervious to the cold as they are, more capable of surviving and less likely to die."

Fang Xiaoxiao A tear fell deliriously from her face: "Soon these clever monsters had explored all the secrets of our flesh, and they placed us, the experimental rejects, under a layer of ice to preserve them, and entered the last stage of the species' research - the human mutual recognition communication and mental induction."

"They need completely alien humans to go along with the last phase of their experiments, but no new humans have been here in Antarctica for a long, long time."

"So they keep simulating the survival of humans in extreme situations, they even realistically create some conflicts and then kill each other and then open the ice to throw down the bodies of the [dead] monsters."

Fang Xiaoxiao gave a stiff tug at the corner of her mouth, "Of course these monsters didn't really die, they just played the role of a defeated and dead human in a dedicated struggle and were frozen next to us."

When he finished, everyone was quiet for a moment.

Bai Liu patted Fang Xiaoxiao on the shoulder and told him to get some rest, said he would drill everyone out of the Tarzan station, and then turned back to his work next to where he was drilling.

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

Mu Sicheng, on the other hand, cowered next to Bai Liu as if in shock and said quietly, "Shit! It's really just like you said! Those monsters at the Observatory are really doing the Turing test! The real Observatory members are in the ice chasm!"

Bai Liu opened the instrument and gave Mu Sicheng an expressionless look, "How can you be sure that these [people] placed in the ice chasm are not a new round of Turing tests on us, set up long ago by these highly intelligent monsters who have studied our human psychology?"

Mu Sicheng was stunned and his scalp tingled, "You mean this Fang Xiaoxiao is also a monster pretending to test us?!"

Bai Liu restrained his eyes, "Not necessarily, he could also be a real human."

"Who told you the Turing test only places one loci, these types of species sociality tests are usually done in a whole map."

Bai Liu scans Mu Sicheng: "In short, this entire Antarctica could be their experimental map for us alien humans. "

"To use an analogy, it's similar to putting an alien monkey within a group of simulated and real monkeys and observing how the alien monkey reacts to see what kind of monkeys it will react with like judgement, and then these monsters mimic these monkeys and pretend they are real monkeys to get close to this monkey before further experimentation."

Bai Liu's eyes fall on Fang Xiaoxiao behind Mu Sicheng: "For example, let a monkey cut off its limbs and then see if the monkey will seek help from others of its kind."

Mu Sicheng felt a little chill in his limbs as he listened, and silently removed his monkey headphones.

Bai Liu shrugged, "That's how humans study other species."