Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 922 - 157: Attack

Chapter 922: Chapter 157: Attack

Whales are mammals and they need to breathe. Their bodies are highly adapted to the ocean environment, enabling them to breathe only once every several minutes. However, unlike all terrestrial mammals, they must actively decide when to breathe.

Terrestrial mammals can breathe subconsciously, but whales cannot. They must decide when to surface and breathe.

For whales, sleep also seems to be a problem.

Different kinds of whales use a variety of ways to solve this problem. Each type possesses one or several special skills related to sleep.

For instance, the rhythm of whales active in the deep sea is almost completely detached from the day-night cycle. They can be active at any time, day or night.

Some whales have mastered another skill. They can sleep in small increments, achieving deep sleep for tens of minutes, several times a day.

Of course, the most magical and common skill is "letting half the brain rest."

Most whales, including almost all dolphins, can let one hemisphere of their brain sleep while the other remains active.

Naturally, this obviously causes a strong discomfort in the prosthetic body’s central chip. Many early operational bugs were related to this.

The left and right brains of humans have relatively clear distinctions, and both can only wake or sleep synchronously.

Yet humans with deficient corpus callosum could exhibit a fascinating phenomenon.

After seeing something on the left side of their vision, these individuals could not verbally describe the object correctly, or might even feel they hadn’t seen it at all, yet their hand could accurately point to its location, as if their hand and mind belonged to two different wills.

When asked to have their left hand and right hand copy simple three-dimensional shapes, these right-handed subjects could only use their left hand to complete the task, while the right hand could only draw two-dimensional lines without any sense of space.

However, later research showed that these differences appeared with human growth. Scientists once found special volunteers with congenital corpus callosum absence, proving that the right brain could also possess language capabilities, and the left brain could have spatial imagination.

But in dolphins, this divergence is much smaller.

The structure of the corpus callosum in dolphins and the connection modes between the two hemispheres of their brain differ significantly from humans.

Ola Freeman also considered basing the development plan for dolphin chips on these differences. However, as a pure biologist, he never managed to implement those ideas.

He even contemplated installing neural prosthetics in the corpus callosum to reconstruct a user-device interaction mode to avoid the impact of dolphins’ half-brain sleep nature.

Nonetheless, from Xiang Shan’s perspective, who participated personally in human central chip development work, many of Ola Freeman’s ideas were excellent and could serve as directions for exploration.

Of course, for Ola, these belonged to projects requiring large resource investments for research and might not yield results immediately.

As for Xiang Shan, naturally, he thought about those transformation concepts for the corpus callosum and their potential application in Martial Studies.

Among the numerous data left by the Eighth Martial God, some were related to this area of the brain. Though the Eighth Martial God’s attention was not focused here, he aimed more to study inheritable Inner Strength in artificial neural network models. But there were still some records.

——Maybe further investigation is needed in the Scientific Knight Order’s database for relevant information...

——Or, the Six Dragons Sect...

Xiang Shan thought so.

During the research process, Xiang Shan also touched upon another concept mentioned in Ola’s research records—Whale’s Dream.

The murmurs whales generate while half their brain is asleep.

It remains unknown if this is a phenomenon only modernized whales experience after intelligent enhancement, or if ancients whale ancestors possessed this trait.

Whales’ rhythms have nothing to do with the sun and moon; their sleep happens in small quantities many times; and at a time, only half of their brain enters sleep...

In other words, as long as the community size is large enough, within the same timeframe, there’s always a small portion of the whale population in a state of sleep.

The murmurs emanating from these sleeping whales—this whale language—would diffuse far along seawater, until received by another whale half-brain in a dream-like state.

According to Ola Freeman, once a whale’s half-brain falls asleep, their language undergoes subtle changes.

This whale language becomes a Creole language, infused with various types of different whale languages. When a whale half-brain drowses off into dreaming, the parts of this language that don’t align with the innate traits of their species reduce significantly—but do not disappear; whales have already adapted to thinking using this mixed language.

And this murmuring inexplicably affects other similarly half-brain dreaming whales of the same species, even causing dreaming whales to communicate using this evolved new language.

These half-awake whales seem to not only exist in the same reality, but also share the same dream.

But with two hundred years passing by, the language’s acquired effects seem to strengthen generation after generation. Different kinds of whales seem also to communicate with each other within the murmurs.

When the left hemisphere and right hemisphere are asleep, even the changes in language have distinctions.

Similar phenomena have been observed both in killer whales and dolphins.

Ola once thought about utilizing virtual reality to study killer whales’ dreams. However, due to the stark difference between this sleep mode and human brain operations, when killer whales begin dreaming, the prosthetic body’s central chip frequently reports errors, making it difficult to maintain stable connections.

It’s said that adult killer whales, who abandoned their bodies to escape hunger, initially found it very uncomfortable, but ultimately accepted the reality of "sleeping amid numerous error warnings."

And as Xiang Shan learned whale language and utilized the switch on the artificial neural network in his mind to simulate whale thinking, he began to experience a brand-new mental operation mode.

Gradually, he began to immerse himself into whales’ that "dream."

He heard the obscure infrasonic lurking echoing along ocean currents and hidden amidst the earth’s rumble and the surge of the sea...

He heard...

"Dolphin’s lament?" Xiang Shan suddenly opened his eyes. He interpreted the message flowing along the ocean currents.

Under his feet, whale Hopetman accelerated, emitting a low roar. Meanwhile, Kledec and Hikashi called out briefly, seeming to be in a manic state, surging rapidly toward a certain direction.

"What’s happening?" Xiang Shan was very surprised: "Have you been attacked? By whom? Why?"