Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 895 - 140: The Tape

Chapter 895: Chapter 140: The Tape

"Damn..."

This was the first thing David said to Xiang Shan after returning to the office in a daze.

The engineering research center was now much emptier. Over the past few months, those who wanted to leave had gradually done so. The team had shrunk significantly, and many project groups had merged. Many technicians with military backgrounds began to fill the lowest vacancies. These technicians were not scholars and rarely did research work, but after a period of training, they were enough to undertake the tasks ordinary researchers needed to do.

And the scholars who stayed behind were automatically promoted.

For Xiang Shan, this was a significant advantage. Given his age and experience, he wasn’t supposed to hold this level of position. After returning to the Republic, he could directly obtain the rank of assistant researcher and could immediately await the review for an associate researcher position. If he achieved some results here over a few years, he could even skip this step.

In the Republic, scholars who could achieve this title before the age of thirty were considered to have "immeasurable prospects."

But for Xiang Shan, the biggest advantage of this "exceptional promotion" was that it made research more convenient. Many materials that were previously inconvenient to access could now be directly reviewed.

However, even so, the materials he had were still not as timely as David’s.

Xiang Shan remembered that these days were when the Rama Project disassembled the only complete alien machine. Clearly, such a thing was not going to be placed in a large auditorium and taken apart in full view of everyone; that was unrealistic.

Although the process of dismantling this thing would undoubtedly be very ceremonial, not all scholars could see it in the first instance. Xiang Shan did not have that capability now.

Xiang Shan could only lead some of his researchers to continue organizing and studying the data of those remnants.

Xiang Shan smiled at David and asked, "What happened? Did you find something amazing?"

David and Xiang Shan’s desks were very close. Now that some people had left, the per capita office space in this research center had three desks. It was said that when there was free time, partitions would be made so that some scholars could have personal office space. However, since Xiang Shan and David were the kind of friends who got along well, they just expanded their "territory" to pile up materials and documents but still sat in their original places.

"I should have thought of it earlier. Those guys..." David stared at Xiang Shan, even with bloodshot eyes: "What they used was a piece of crap scanner. They used tapes."

"What..." Xiang Shan was stunned.

"Tapes." David repeated: "The small robots inside Argon don’t need to worry about work efficiency, nor do they have the need for repeated overwriting and erasing of stored information. These small robots aren’t using electronic scanners to recognize signals... they’re most likely briefly magnetizing the surfaces of those copper plates to directly convert symbols into specific magnetic signals recorded on tapes. Their memory is a tape recorder."

Xiang Shan was stunned: "But we didn’t find any traces of tape on the outside..."

"Radiation," David said in a low voice, "some polymer materials will degrade faster under radiation. The mechanical remnants outside the core area might have been there thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and some metal parts have fused together due to transmutation. These things aren’t afraid of radiation, but polymer materials don’t have that strong radiation resistance. By the time we entered, the tapes inside the outer remnants, the base of polymer film, had disappeared, and even the magnetic material particles had demagnetized. It’s been too long."

"But the machine in the core area is different. Its base is aluminum alloy. Even though it’s stuck together and can’t be separated anymore, you can still roughly tell what it is."

Xiang Shan suddenly realized: "Damn... you mean... some of those seemingly meaningless mechanical structures might be alien tape recorders?"

In fact, even in the mid-21st century, Earthlings were still using tapes.

On professional machines.

Tapes actually have lower unit capacity costs, higher stability, and lower storage environment requirements than hard disks, making them easily suitable for long-term backups. In fact, with human technology now, the capacity of a box of specialized tape has easily surpassed 500TB.

However, tapes indeed have disadvantages compared to disks. Tape modification and rewrites are not as good as disks, and it’s only capable of linear reading.

At the same time, humans have indeed manufactured professional machines with hundreds of tapes inserted internally.

"But structurally speaking, those small robots can’t hold many tapes..." Xiang Shan found it hard to accept, "Such simple and rigid devices can’t support complex artificial intelligence... right?"

"Time can make up for it," David said, "You know... the one thing these guys have the least shortage of is time."

The few drawbacks of tape include "speed." The information written on tape can only be read linearly.

If tape were to support an artificial intelligence, the time it would take to react would likely be quite long. The machine might take a considerable amount of time to rewind, just to find the preset response method for the current situation.

However, the robots inside Argon have no shortage of time at all.

"I guess the magnetic head records something like this..." David casually picked up a roll of transparent tape with an applicator and pulled it across his desk. A row of tape stuck to the desk. David scratched his head: "That’s probably the gist. There should be a device that retracts the tape. That’s about it..."

Xiang Shan took out an oil-based pen, casually wrote a few words on the desk, then took the tape and pulled it across the desk, immediately tearing it off.

The line of words appeared on the tape.

"Like this?"

"Magnetizing the area where a symbol is located while bringing the tape close to it... there might be slight discrepancies in the specific details, but that’s roughly the principle," David said, "Moreover, during this process, there should be no direct contact between the tape and the surface of the copper plate, perhaps with a distance of a fraction of a millimeter. Otherwise, we would have detected substantial friction marks on the semi-surface detection. Hmm, it might also be that the magnetic head senses electromagnetic signals and then transforms them through pure mechanical structure before recording them on tape."

Xiang Shan held his head: "You’re actually right... This way, recording a symbol takes a long time... but they have plenty of time."

In Xiang Shan’s original impression, the black cabin inside the Argon core should be swarming like a hive with numerous machines coming in and out, working alternately, orderly, bustling but not chaotic.

But thinking carefully, why would these machines be busy?

They faced a long journey lasting tens of thousands or even millions of years.

In the darkness, only several magnetic heads worked slowly and steadily.