Chapter 447: The Missing People
To be honest, Sister Xue didn't know if she was ready to accept the truth, but she naturally and almost completely instinctively accepted Shen Chao's invitation to visit. This is also one of her special skills, always relying on instinct to make choices that are most beneficial to her goals in complex and changeable situations with a lack of references.
After boarding the shuttle, they quickly took off, and Shen Chao first took Sister Xue to the nearby city of New Dubai. More than half of the personnel transported by the bunker plan live here, and it's a good place to explain.
"Is that ......?" After seeing the Burj Khalifa through the porthole in the shuttle, Sister Xue asked uncertainly. In the Mass Effect plane, the Burj Khalifa still exists. And it is written in the textbook as a "famous construction project in modern times".
But the problem is that on Earth on the Mass Effect plane, Dubai is a city that has long been in decline, and the desertification is so strict that no one lives there at all. There, the Middle East has been in a prolonged recession since it ran out of oil.
Later, after the establishment of Star Alliance, the people of the Middle East in the Mass Effect plane immigrated to the economically developed regions of East Asia and North America, and the city of Dubai has long become a ghost town. And now the city of Dubai is not only a landmark version of the Burj Khalifa.
In addition, all the buildings here are still very new, and there are quite a few aircraft of different sizes passing through the sky above the city, which looks quite busy. It's not at all what Sister Xue should have in her impression. Shen Chao naturally knew this, which is why he brought Sister Xue here at the first stop.
"Be patient, this is just the beginning. You'll also see more weird stuff. Shen Chao sat aside and patiently persuaded. He has seen a lot of doubts like Sister Xue's in others, and he is not as anxious to explain as he was at the earliest.
Soon, their shuttle landed at a newly built landing site in the heart of the city, and in order to accommodate the increasing number of flying vehicles from all dimensions, various areas of the new city of Dubai have set up landing sites of various sizes.
The main channel for the transportation of goods in the new city of Dubai is now air, so air traffic is busier than before the crisis. The various vehicles on the ground are now only responsible for commuting in the city and for a few people's outings.
However, as with the Mass Effect plane, due to the fear of accidents, the landing site for large ships can only be built on the outskirts of the city, and the landing field in the city can only land aircraft such as shuttles or small landing ships.
After the shuttle landed, they walked out of the landing site. Soon they came to the more densely populated business districts. With the fact that I am a mutant from the legendary plane, the total purge and the introduction of immigrants from other planes. New Dubai and several other cities with more concentrated populations have greatly recovered their former prosperity.
Although the population density is still not as high as before the crisis, the sense of social stability has been restored to most of it. Ordinary people on the streets are no longer armed with weapons as they did half a year ago. Except for the police and their assistants, there are basically no people with guns on the streets in the city.
It's not very dense, and it's not even as crowded as it was when the market first opened a few months ago. The whole market even looks a little depressed. This is because the entire planet is now covered by a free high-speed satellite communications network.
The logistics network of spaceships and shuttles in the air is mainly controlled by the subordinate institutions of the Parliament. A small number were contracted to newly established private institutions. This temporarily ensures low logistics costs and high efficiency.
With the support of a high-speed full-coverage network and a high-speed transportation system. The trade of goods on this planet is very much done on the basis of peer-to-peer. From the place of production directly to the hands of the users, it became difficult for the rentier middle class to survive.
As a result, the market area that had been very popular for a while was depressed. Changes like this take place in all corners of the council-controlled district, and there are always people happy and some worried! Even Shen Chao looked fresh. Sister Xue, who came for the first time, was even more unaccustomed to it.
The reason why Sister Xue is not used to it is mainly because of the calm and peaceful atmosphere here, the galaxy of the entire Mass Effect Plane has entered the stage of full preparation, and there are busy crowds and a depressed social atmosphere everywhere. It was hard for him to imagine seeing such a leisurely crowd in any corner of the galaxy now, let alone Earth, which had begun to prepare for war in the first place.
When she observed the pedestrians on the road, the pedestrians were also looking at them, of course, mainly at Shen Chao beside her. Although Shen Chao doesn't often appear in public, there is no doubt that everyone knows him and knows that the person who can follow him must be an important person. So although many people noticed him, they didn't dare to lean over if they were fine, at most to say hello from afar.
Seeing that he was noticed by the crowd, Shen Chao habitually smiled and waved to the crowd. As the most famous and powerful person in the world. After a long period of practice and use, this set of movements has become part of his instinct.
It was only recently that he really understood why the famous political leaders were all poker faces. It's not that anyone is born with facial paralysis, but it's really tiring and nerve-numbing to do such stylized movements and expressions every day.
Some people say that being a public figure is addictive, but Shen Chao has a different view on this issue. He hates appearing in public the most now, every time he is watched by people, he has to respond to everyone's gaze and evaluation with a smile.
Fortunately, he didn't need to stay in front of the crowd for too long, and after making his way through the more densely populated business district, they soon came to the martial law area near the Burj Khalifa. This is still the official office of the Temporal Council, and the two nearby blocks are restricted areas.
And, of course, more importantly, this is where many of the aliens and humans sent by the bunker program work. The aborigines of this world are still not very accepting of aliens as their neighbors, and there are often inexplicable social conflicts in small or remote settlements where humans and aliens are mixed.
Therefore, most of the aliens sent by the bunker project will eventually apply to work for the Space-Time Council, because in this way, they can at least be more concentrated with their own "kind" and form an independent cultural circle.
And regardless of the plane or race, people who work for the Council can always easily obtain a higher social status, and aliens from the Mass Effect plane generally have a higher level of education and knowledge, and are very popular with the subordinate departments of the Council.
So while these aliens are not popular with residents in many small settlements, they generally have a higher standard of living than the indigenous people in New Dubai, the heart of the parliamentary government. Ostensibly, the city's natives also accepted these strange-looking guests.
As for how many people in the background are jealous of this, or even more disgusted with these aliens, this is not something that Shen Chao can control. Although the council has also introduced some measures to alleviate the misunderstanding between the two sides, it turns out that there is still a long way to go to make the ordinary humans of this world fully accept the alien plane.
You know, in order to avoid this situation, at first the bunker plan only accepted humans, but later the Citadel Council asked Shen Chao to accept refugees from other races to prove the feasibility of his plan for other races.
Therefore, after that, basically every batch of manpower sent will have aliens, the largest number of which are Asares and Salareans, and there are also some Krogan people, but Shen Chao refuses to accept Touareg people.
It's not that he has any personal prejudice against the Touareg, but because the Touareg are a left-handed race and can eat something completely different from that of humans, which is a right-handed genetic, and similar problems do not exist in most other alien races. In order to simplify logistics, he never accepted Touareg refugees.
With Shen Chao leading the way, the access control and checkpoints on the road were naturally smooth all the way, and it didn't take long for them to reach the Burj Khalifa after entering the martial law area. In the office area here, Sister Xue met aliens engaged in various jobs and many compatriots from the Star Alliance.
Indeed, as Shen Chao said, these people are very safe, although not everyone likes to live in this strange world, but the environment is indeed as promised before they came, and it is completely free from the threat of the reaper.
After visiting here, Shen Chao also took Sister Xue to a military base hundreds of kilometers away to introduce their latest research results on Reapers. Due to the long-term plan to counterattack the galaxy and eliminate the Reapers, they have never given up on the research of the Reapers, and many important items and personnel are in this inconspicuous remote base.
They had long discovered that the space-time gate could effectively isolate a form of wireless communication and energy transmission, so they experimentally brought some people who had been confirmed to be indoctrinated or about to be indoctrinated back to quarantine for research, and found that as long as they were out of the Mass Effect plane, these people would slowly get rid of the influence of indoctrination.
The most famous of these people is Jack, who is known as the "Phantom Man" in the game's story. Haber, a few months ago, his Cybalist's destructive investigation into the bunker plan disrupted Shen Chao's plans.
In order to take revenge on the group and eliminate the impact of this incident, Shen Chao organized an operation similar to the eradication of the Shadow Broker, directly raiding the main base of the Phantom Man shown in the game's plot, and kidnapping him, leaving only a chaotic Cyblos behind.
A few months after being "kidnapped" by the expedition, the Phantom Man was forced to undergo a full physical examination and treatment, although he was very uncooperative with the expedition's interrogation of him. At this time, the Phantom Man was not indoctrinated, but he did have some physical signs and strange synthetic implants in his body.
These characteristics made him the most important sample for research on the reaper's edification steps. But during the observation of this plane, he gradually became a counterexample of the gradual steps of indoctrination, and became a key sample of the success of the confrontation against indoctrination! (To be continued......)
PS: First of all, thank you for the "chen0083, loneliness, moonlight and shadow" and the "valky" children's shoes that were rewarded after yesterday's update, I will work hard to code the word, and strive for another chapter tonight.