The two waited for a long time at the door with their rifles pointed at the entrance not far away.
But after a long wait, there was nothing.
“Someone entered the power room to replace the fuel rod? That’s impossible… Li Wang is guarding the entrance of the fallout shelter; no one should’ve been able to come in.” Jiang Chen put the rifle behind his back. He took out a drone terminal from the storage dimension and placed it behind a wall.
Ten Hummingbird drones flew out from the “hive” and hovered around the walkways.
“Why did you take out the drones?” Sun Xiaorou was curious.
“It feels eerie being so empty inside. Let the drones guard us. We can search for useful information in the meantime.” Jiang Chen set the patrol order on the terminal, scanned the dark entrance, and walked toward the door.
When he passed through the metal door, he saw a skeleton in a director’s uniform. There was a pistol along with a diary beside him. It looked like a suicide.
“Someone came here before us not long ago.” Sun Xiaorou used her gun to poke the chest of the skeleton before she spoke with her eyebrows furrowed.
“Why do you say so?” Jiang Chen picked up the diary on the ground.
“These clothes, don’t you find something odd about them?”
“What’s odd?”
“The office of the director is the command center of the fallout shelter. The door we just passed by has a UV bacteria cleansing device installed, making this room free of bacteria. Inside a sealed environment without bacteria, the decomposition of bodies is extremely slow. While ten years is a long time, it’s not long enough for his body to have become this,” Sun Xiaorou said.
It made sense.
While ten years was a long time, the body shouldn’t have decomposed to this extent. And based on Sun Jiao’s memories, the director should’ve been in the camp above ground, leading security forces in fighting the raiders. There was no reason for him to be there.
For some reason, someone dragged the body of the director from the surface back down to the shelter. Or maybe they used some other body and just changed the body into the director’s uniform.
Jiang Chen examined his surroundings, attempting to look for some clues from the environment.
Unfortunately, he didn’t possess any detective skills.
“Someone came here, moved the body of the director here, and took something out,” Jiang Chen muttered while looking at the diary in his hands. “And also left this diary.”
“That’s the only explanation.” With her finger on her lips, Sun Xiaorou’s eyebrows knitted together. “Perhaps Federation’s president came here already and changed the fuel rod in the power room when he came. That’s why the fallout shelter suddenly lit up when we activated the door to the director’s office? Since he already got what he wanted here, then he naturally wouldn’t mind Ji Yucheng leaking the password and just wanted to kill him to protect the secret to eternal life… But that doesn’t make sense. If he really wanted to keep that a secret, there was no reason for him to leave a diary as a clue.”
Jiang Chen fell into deep thought staring at the diary in his hands.
He pulled out a chair to sit down and flipped the diary open. He was surprised to discover the bottom of each page was blocked out by dark squares in black pen. The dates were artificially hidden for some unknown reason.
<The first week the fallout shelter closed, we could still receive messages from the outside. Out of consideration for people’s emotions, we decided to only report the good news and censor battle reports disadvantageous to the PAC. We also encouraged people by saying that the nuclear war would end soon, that NATO was no match for us.>
…
<This is the first year we spent New Year’s in the fallout shelter. From today onward, we couldn’t receive any messages from the outside. The battlefront has already been retracted to the Hucheng area. Out of safety considerations, the fallout shelter entered radio silence and completely cut off contact with the external world.
This feeling is inexplicable. It feels as if civilized society entered a forest and the outside is completely dark to us. In order for us to survive, we have to strangle our own throats, stuff our ears to not make any sounds, and distrust any information that could be fake.
Until we reach the year the lock expires, the door of the fallout shelter won’t open.>
<One year and three weeks. Work every day is around the same, and the food is also similar. In order to ensure the diary entries aren’t too boring, I changed to writing once per week. But it looks like the boring days are about to be over; today, someone came to see me and said he was an observer and academic from the Han Science Institute. He declared that in order to fulfill the orders given by PAC, he wanted to cooperate to conduct experiments in the fallout shelter.
He did show me a signed document from my superior.
Since I was bored, I agreed to his request. The one condition I set was not to endanger the lives of the fallout shelter residents. As the director of the fallout shelter, that’s my duty.>
<One year and four weeks. The experiment has started. While it’s an experiment, it only requires conducting regular blood checks of every resident. It doesn’t interfere with the lives of the residents at all. I noticed he had a list of names; some names had circles drawn. I asked him the meaning of the circles, but he didn’t tell me.>
<One year and five weeks. One week into the experiment, he came to see me and told me it was time to conduct the next round of experiments. I asked him what he needed and he told me to arrest the people on the list with symbols.
It was ridiculous. While I’m the director, that doesn’t mean I have the authority to do whatever I want.
He threatened me and said this is the highest order from my superior. Once the fallout shelter is locked down for the long-term, the plan must be executed. If I reject the order, it would be viewed as treason.>
<Okay, I gave in. You can bear witness to all the consequences. This damn mission, dammit!
I unwillingly told everyone that the survivors on the list were diagnosed with a dangerous genetic disease; they’ll be forced to enter the hibernation chamber to wait for future treatment.
There is a little girl on the list. It’s too cruel to take away the child from her parents, so I took her name off the list… Did I do a good deed?
Fortunately, the mission was successfully completed without causing massive panic in the fallout shelter. The XXX experiment officially began, and all the frozen popsicles in the hibernation chambers are his experiment subjects.>
…
<One year and nine weeks. I finally discovered today that the “observer” named by my superior has authority equal to mine in the fallout shelter. I can call security robots, but he can order the security robots to drop their weapons. As for how I found out… fine, we were in conflict. He asked me for the little girl I took out from the list, and I demanded him to release data from the experiment. He rejected in the name of confidentiality, so I took a step back and demanded their health statuses, but he also rejected that.>
…
<This is too evil! What did I discover?! What did I do?! How could he lie to me to perform such heinous acts?! I can’t wait any longer. We have to do something. Even if the robots listen to him, my soldiers are still loyal to me!>
<Today, I organized the security forces. We attacked the lab and found the bodies of the people on the list.>
<All the people who entered the lab reached a tacit agreement to keep what they saw a secret.
I discovered in a confined environment that people are far more fragile than they think.
We can’t drag this on any longer; we have to leave this place.
Once this place reaches the lowest possible standard of confinement, we’ll leave.
The darkness is suffocating.>
…
<I refuse to execute an order to sacrifice some people in exchange for immortality.>
There were many pages torn from the diary, and it only recorded the first two years after the fallout shelter closed.
But just from the brief sentences, Jiang Chen still managed to decipher the information hidden in this diary.
Another observer?
Academician Qin was one too. He used Fallout Shelter 027 to simulate changes in a civilization in an isolated environment.
He began suspecting that all the fallout shelters performed near-crazy experiments.
“Xiaorou?” Jiang Chen put down the diary and deeply inhaled.
“Mhmm?”
“Do you still remember life in the fallout shelter?”
“Most of my memories are cloudy, but I remember everything about sister clearly. Sister was really cute back then.”
“It’s not about Sun Jiao… do you remember that a lot of people went missing one year?”
Sun Xiaorou shook her head and facepalmed at Jiang Chen’s question.
“Brother in law, notice the time. The diary recorded that the experiments were completed one year and nine weeks after the closure. I wasn’t born yet.”
Jiang Chen took a moment to process that before he realized.
He closed the diary and stood up.
“It’s getting late. Since there are no clues here… it’s time to go.”
Sun Xiaorou still wasn’t convinced. She searched the office carefully but still couldn’t find any useful clues.
She gritted her teeth and had a defeated expression.
“Looks like we came here for nothing.”
“Not necessarily.” Jiang Chen patted the diary. “We still managed to find some useful information.”
“The diary might not be true. Both the location of the diary and the obvious changes make it look too coincidental,” Sun Xiaorou reminded him.
“I know.” Jiang Chen nodded. “But this is the only clue. We just need to find that observer… if he’s alive.”
The whereabouts of the observer weren’t recorded in the diary. Perhaps it was recorded originally but ripped out. If he wasn’t dead, the secret of immortality should be in his hands. But when he thought about that, Jiang Chen began to have a headache.
It was more difficult to find someone in the wasteland than fighting the Mother of Death Claws.