Starting from South America, speeding through the world

Chapter 277 Chao Wen Dao

Schmidt leaned weakly against the back seat.

Rainwater, vomit, and his own cold sweat soaked through his pajamas.

His gaze lingered for a long time, and the warmth of the corpse still lingered in his palm.

"Then what was that just now?"

After a long pause, Schmidt finally spoke, his voice hoarse and broken.

Zhou Yi didn't turn his head, but raised the small box in his hand and shook it.

"This? The document calls it 'ARC'."

“ARC?”

"Adaptive Relay Core"

That's not what I meant.

"But... how did it just suddenly appear in your hands?"

"You...you didn't even take it from your pocket—"

"Please stop testing my patience, Mr. Schmidt."

Zhou Yi sighed. "Do you know anything about the so-called EAM system?"

"I do not have."

"what?"

“I…I’ve never heard of this abbreviation before,” Schmidt said, shrinking back.

Zhou Yi flicked his wrist, and the thing vanished into thin air once again.

He turned his head and carefully observed the expression on Schmidt's face.

"Emergency Action Message".

"It is the final release mechanism in the nuclear strategic strike command chain."

"Responsible for encoding the authorization information and broadcasting it to the execution platform."

"In the early warning response state, it can be used for automated command broadcasting."

As soon as he finished speaking, Schmidt's pupils contracted.

"You mean Erweiterter Befehlskanal extended instruction channel?"

"That was the experimental code name for our early remote command fault tolerance scheme."

“Very good.” Zhou Yi chuckled. “It seems you haven’t completely forgotten about these things.”

There was dead silence in the car.

Raindrops pattered against the dark glass.

Ketterle stared intently at the road ahead, remaining silent.

After a dozen seconds, Zhou Yi suddenly spoke again.

"So, let's make an assumption." He deliberately slowed down his speech.

"If an instruction decoding algorithm with fuzzy matching capabilities could automatically recover truncated EAM data packets based on dynamic key mapping and fault-tolerant channel reconstruction protocols..."

"Do you think it's possible to complete a pseudo-authorization path overwrite without needing the original broadcast source?"

Schmidt's breath hitched, and his face turned deathly pale.

Zhou Yi tilted his head: "From your performance, I realize that this is actually quite feasible."

"You...you're insane." The shock in Schmidt's eyes was almost tangible.

"You want to hijack the entire country's nuclear arsenal?"

“I didn’t say anything,” Zhou Yi said expressionlessly. “I just made a theoretical assumption.”

"No, this is not something you can do!"

Upon hearing this, Schmidt suddenly raised his voice, as if trying to convince himself.

"Even if it's connected, key authentication is still required, from the Imperial Security Council, and authorization from the Führer himself!"

"You can't get that signature, you simply can't get into Führungsnetz—"

“That’s not something you should worry about, Colonel Schmidt.”

Zhou Yi moved closer and lowered his voice.

"Thank you for your cooperation tonight; you helped me resolve many of my questions."

He gripped the back of the man's head and pressed his left hand against his lips.

"So be it."

"This is the end of what's between us."

"Goodbye."

Schmidt's already limp body suddenly twisted violently.

A muffled "woo-woo" sound came from his throat, as if he was struggling to shout something.

Zhou Yi narrowed his eyes. "Don't tell me you're only now trying to beg for mercy."

"Because the final answer will definitely be—'no'."

He was about to tighten his grip, ending this pointless conversation. But in the next second—

No. No.

The man shouted desperately and shook his head frantically.

Zhou Yi paused slightly.

Taking advantage of that slight opening, Schmidt quickly blurted out all his words like beans spilling from a bucket.

"It's that thing you were just now. It...it's not. In those few seconds, without you reaching out, it just appeared. That was it."

"I want to ask you, how did you do that?"

Zhou Yi did not respond immediately.

He pondered for a moment, then patted Cattel on the shoulder.

How much longer until we reach the Lake District?

"Less than fifteen minutes."

Zhou Yi leaned back into his seat and summoned the box again.

“Mr. Schmidt,” he said, “congratulations, you have a lucky day.”

"Because I'm in a good mood, I'm going to tell you something really interesting."

First, do you believe in the concept of 'parallel worlds'?

Schmidt didn't dare to say a word.

"We are not talking about philosophy, nor hypothetical physics."

"I mean real, parallel historical branches."

"For example, in a certain timeline, Germany lost the war in 1945."

"You and your engineering colleagues were taken to the United States."

"That operation was later called Operation Paperclip."

"There, you helped promote von Neumann's architecture."

"The address decoding logic of early ENIAC has been corrected."

"He also designed a prototype module for the inertial navigation software for the later Apollo project."

"Later, you helped build the EAM framework that we are talking about today."

"You mean I'm living a completely different life in another world?"

Schmidt stared wide-eyed in disbelief.

“That’s right.” Zhou Yi nodded.

"In that world, your name appeared 108 times in the technical documents."

“There is a paper titled ‘Multi-Path Signal Decoupling in Triple-Redundant Secure Channels under Terrain Reflection Interference’ that I find very interesting.”

"It completely solves the problem of optimizing and separating third-order redundant signals under terrain reflection interference, which you can't handle now."

Upon hearing this, Schmidt disregarded everything else.

He had completely forgotten his previous fear, and his chest heaved violently.

"You, you beg, you tell me—"

“The algorithm uses dynamic weighting,” Zhou Yi said simply.

“Constructing a perturbation vector space based on Bayesian inversion.”

"The key is that you haven't realized yet that the tiny phase shift of V-band signals under oblique propagation at extremely low orbits can actually serve as a natural entry point for adaptive weights."

Schmidt was stunned by the sudden answer, his mouth moving slightly, but his mind remained blank.

"So that's how it is. So that's how it is," he murmured to himself.

Outside, the sound of tires running over gravel could be heard.

The car began to slow down slowly.

Zhou Yi let out a soft breath.

"It's almost time."

He raised his hand to straighten his cuffs.

"Goodbye."

"Mr. Schmidt."

Click.

The man's neck was snapped, and his head drooped limply to his shoulder.

The rain was still falling, without any sign of stopping.