The Tomb of Seven Billion Humans
This was the last time that he would be far from the sun, and this time, far away, there would be no return.
As the distance grew farther and farther away, and the sun grew dimmer and dimmer, Hawke's mood, for no apparent reason, grew a little heavier.
The road ahead was long, and what awaited Hawke would be a long journey of ten and a half light years, a long time of six thousand and three hundred years.
What kind of strange things would be encountered on the journey? What kind of dangers would he encounter? Hawke did not know. But Hawke decided to set off anyway. What dominates a scientist's mind is a mad desire to explore, so mad that even his life can be sacrificed.
So instead of choosing to continue his development in the solar system, Hawke chose to set off immediately after gaining the ability to sail interstellar.
In fact, to be precise, Hawke's current technology can only be described as having gained the ability to navigate interplanetary. For at the speed of nuclear fusion power, an interstellar voyage of a thousand years at any one time would be enough to turn away all creatures with a lifespan of less than ten thousand years. However, after Hawk and the computer combined, he was able to use the technology of interplanetary voyage to launch an interstellar voyage, relying on this almost cheating method, as he had abandoned his physical body and was left with only his spirit, which had an almost endless lifespan.
It has been calculated that the minimum threshold for interstellar voyages is five percent of the speed of light, or 15,000 kilometres per second. In this case, it would take about two hundred years to travel from the Solar System to the Celestial Court IV system, which is within acceptable limits compared to the life expectancy of humans at that time.
However, until a new generation of engines was developed, the speed of 15,000 kilometres per second was a bit of a luxury for Hawke.
Returning once more from Jupiter to Titan, Hawke did not land. On Titan, two large photonic computers had been transplanted to the Sun and the Voyager, and the base was now entirely in the hands of the computer that had been on the small ship at the beginning.
Although to the current Hawke, this computer was really too backward, the computing speed was really too slow, but now on Titan, all ninety-nine bases had ceased to function, all kinds of machinery had been sealed off, only some simple maintenance tasks remained, left to this computer to do, it was enough.
Titan's atmosphere, with its extremely low oxygen content and low temperatures, meant that there was no need to worry about rusting and damage to machinery. Hawke hoped that the machinery and equipment would last for a long time, that they would still be intact after thousands and thousands of years.
Because a large part of the Venusian atmosphere has been stripped away, resulting in a lower temperature on the surface, it is likely that intelligent life will evolve on Venus in the infinite future. So Hawke hoped that the things he had left behind would point the way to the evolution of intelligent life on Venus, and by the way, leave a little evidence of the existence of humans in the solar system.
Looking out into space at Titan, shrouded in mist, Hawke's heart was overwhelmed with emotion.
"Twenty years have passed." Hawke silently counted in his heart.
In the blink of an eye, twenty years had passed since he left Earth.
During these twenty years, a lot of things had happened, and the time when he was on top of the Earth, living carefree, still seemed like yesterday.
The past flowed through Hawke's mind one by one.
The fear of being away from Earth for the first time, the fear of facing the collision of the Wooden Moon, the surprise of eating a big meal for the first time, the struggle on Titan, the excitement of mastering controlled fusion technology, and so on and so forth, one after another.
"Let's go, let's go, within the solar system, as safe and comfortable as it is, how can you achieve great things without weathering the storm. Let's go, let's go, the boundless universe, that's the ultimate goal of my exploration."
Throwing a thousand thoughts out of his mind, Hawke manoeuvred the huge fleet and flew towards Saturn.
In the Saturn system, Hawke would make one last fuel refill, and then, Hawke would leave the solar system and set off on a long voyage towards Sky Court IV.
Hawke went on a fuel refueling frenzy, staying in Saturn's atmosphere for half a month until it just couldn't fit any more, before leaving Saturn.
After a final fond glance at Titan, Hawke resolutely moved on, racing towards the outer solar system.
By this time, Hawk had already loaded half of the entire fleet, including the three Prefecture-class ships, the Faraway, the Sun, and the Sky Court, as well as nearly five hundred Village and Country-class ships, with various supplies. Hawke even had the intention of loading the entire fleet with supplies if he didn't have to maintain manoeuvrability for some of the ships in case of possible surprises.
Within this time, Hawke had learned a profound lesson. In cosmic space, the places where meteorites fly around are not the most dangerous places, the empty places are the most dangerous places. Because there, any star was at least a thousand years' voyage away, there was nothing there, and in the event of an accident, you could not possibly get any supplies to replenish yourself, you could only wait for your energy to run out and then die, turning into a cold block of cosmic stone, drifting with the waves in infinite light and time.
And that's just the galactic level voyage, if it was a river level voyage it would be even more terrifying. There, to get a piece of scrap iron, you might need to travel at the speed of light for millions of years.
It is the long hours of light that are the greatest enemy of interstellar voyages.
Hawke was lost in thought, thinking about random things as he manoeuvred the fleet into slow acceleration. At the beginning, when leaving Earth, Hawke used to be incomparably eager to leave the solar system, but when it was really time to leave the solar system, Hawke's heart became fond of it instead.
Hawke remembered someone. It was a girl, very young, beautiful, energetic, innocent and lovely. It was back on Earth, and this girl was a researcher in one of Hawke's research institutes.
The girl liked Hawke, but Hawke was so focused on science that he didn't care about love between a man and a woman, and even criticised the girl severely for the incident, causing her to leave Hawke's institute in disgust.
Hawke has never thought that he did wrong, but at this time, Hawke's heart surprisingly born a little regret.
"She's ... dead now, isn't she? Along with seven billion humans, into death. But it seems that since she left the Institute, and then until the destruction of the Earth, during this period, a total of seven years, I have not gotten any information about her, and I do not know what happened to her afterwards."
Hawke thought, manipulating the Sun's three-dimensional colour projector and weaving a human figure out.
In the middle of the Sun's cabin, the figure of a girl gradually appeared as the 3D colour projector moved.
"Well, no, her eyes should be a bit bigger. Uh, well, a thinner waist, a straighter nose and bigger breasts ..."
Hawke modified the various data, and gradually, the 3D colour projector projected, in the air, the figure of a faintly smiling girl.
She stood there like that, her eyes full of tenderness as she looked ahead, as if she had a lot to say.
Hawk generated a code, and after executing it, the girl made a sound.
"Chief Xiao, are you alright?"
The voice was gentle, shy and timid, exactly the same tone as the words she spoke on top of Earth.
Hawk looked at her figure in a daze and murmured, "Ellie, I'm fine, I'm still alive, and you?"
"I'm dead, ah, I died twenty years ago." The girl said with a faint smile.
"Yes, you are dead, you died twenty years ago, and I, on the other hand, have been given infinite life. But I no longer have a body." Hawk spoke grimly.
It was a risky act to divorce the body from the spirit. When he was on Earth, Hawke happened to obtain an unknown substance from the cosmic space, and after studying it intensely for a few years, he took the great risk of stripping his spirit from his body. Before fully grasping all the qualities of this substance, Hawke would not dare to take any more risks.
In other words, even if there were another body, Hawke would not choose to combine with it. Because if he did, Hawke would not be able to get out, and Hawke would be restricted by his body again, and would live and die.
"Ellie, wait for me, when I have fully mastered the human genetic code, I will bring you back to life." Hawke muttered.
When he had left from above Earth, Hawke had stockpiled the human gene pool and sperm bank, but when he had avoided the collision with the Wood Moon, he had been hit by a meteor and lost it all.
"I'll be waiting for you oh." Ellie smiled faintly, and after saying those words, Ellie's body instantly turned into a shadow of light and disappeared.
"When you come back to life, I will accept your confession." Hawk whispered, staring in awe at the piece of light and shadow that Ellie's body had transformed into.
"Phew ..." Retracting his mind from his infinite thoughts, Hawke sighed lightly, leaving these distracting thoughts behind, and continued to maneuver the massive fleet to escape towards the outer solar system.
Gradually, a few months passed by.
Hawke's fleet had reached the orbit of Uranus.
"It's almost time to reach the orbit of Uranus, here, leave a tombstone of human civilization." Hawk thought.
The orbit of Uranus was about 2.7 billion kilometres from the orbit of Earth. Looking at the Sun from Uranus' orbit, it was just a bright spot in the sky, no longer visible as essentially different from the rest of the stars.
With a sigh, Hawke built a tombstone from his own stockpile of metal, and used fusion technology to build a battery - one that would last at least millions of years - to supply energy to a long-lasting lamp.
The tombstone, which will orbit the sun on a cycle of 130 years, will remain lit for a million years, illuminating a line inscribed on the tombstone.
"The Tomb of Seven Billion Humans!"
"One of the human race, Hockley!"