Earth, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia, 24 hours before the start of the beacon tower.

　　Professor Clemens Scott, sitting in front of the office computer, was lost in thought as he watched the pictures on the screen.

　　 In the picture, on the snowy ground, a dark spire bursts out of the ice, looking incompatible with the surrounding environment.

　　 Clemens brought his face close to the screen and whispered to himself: "What the **** is this...?"

"No one knows." A young woman in a researcher's white coat walked into the office with two cups of coffee in her hand and a thick envelope under her right arm. She only heard her say to Clemens: " It suddenly appeared on the Antarctic Peninsula three days ago."

　　 Clemens looked back at the woman and asked, "Liz, tell me the details of the discovery again."

　　 Lis put the coffee on the table and said: "Three days ago, about two hundred kilometers east of Alexandria Island, on the west coast of the Weddell Sea, a magnitude 5.3 earthquake occurred in the center of the Antarctic Peninsula."

　　 "Since the area is not in an active area of ​​the crustal tectonic plate, and there are no sudden disasters in the surrounding area, Esperanza Antarctic Station sent a scientific expedition team to investigate the area and found this..."

　　 Lis pointed at the black spire on the screen with her chin.

　　 Clemens took a sip of coffee: "Does the scientific expedition team have any conclusions?"

Liz: "They inspected this black thing on the spot and found that it was neither like a metal nor a common carbon family, and its source was located in a very deep underground, even exceeding the limit that the machine could detect. ."

　　 Clemens raised his head: "Did they take samples?"

　　 Lis: "They tried to take samples with tools at hand, and found that no matter what tools they used, they couldn't take even a small sample."

　　 Clemens frowned, was silent for a while, and suddenly asked Liz: "Apart from these vague pictures and images, there are also specious speculations. Isn't there any other data?"

　　 Liz shrugged: "You know those people."

　　 Clemens fell silent again.

　　 Liz squatted down, looked at the picture on the screen, and said with emotion: "Can you imagine? There is such a building buried underground...If it weren't for the earthquake, I'm afraid no one would have discovered it."

Clemens took another sip of coffee and slowly said: "The radius of the earth is 6,371 kilometers, and the deepest underground position that humans currently explore is only 12 kilometers below the surface. In other words, humans’ current understanding of the underground is, It only stays at 0.2% of the earth’s radius. Further down, humans don’t know anything about it."

　　 Lis cast her gaze to the huge black tower on the screen: "Don't you really think that this building extends to the center of the earth?"

　　 Clemens shook his head and said, "I don’t know, it’s the minimum duty to keep the unknown in our line."

　　 Liz leaned down with a smile, slowly put her hand on Clemens’s leg, and said softly: "I was in your eyes the night before, but I never saw the word reserved..."

　　 Clemens was a little embarrassed, reaching out his hand to touch Liz's cheek.

"dad…"

　　 A little girl in a pink dress, standing at the door of the office, disrupted the rhythm of the two.

　　 Clemens hurriedly sat upright, concealing his panic with a cough, and said to the girl: "Alice, didn't you go to the exhibition hall? Why did you come back suddenly?"

　　 Alice glanced at Liz, then at her father, and said, "I have read them all, but if you want, I can go back and watch it again from the beginning."

　　 Looking at Clemens's wry smile, Liz smiled and said to Alice: "Let your father continue to work, I'll take you downstairs, where a batch of doll machines have just arrived."

　　 Liz took Alice's hand, put the thick envelope she had brought on her desk, and said to Clemens: "I almost forgot. You have an urgent letter. I got it for you."

　　 Watching Liz and Alice leave the office, Clemens sighed.

　　 He focused his attention on the letter, and first looked at the destination on it.

　　 The letter was sent from an unknown town in Norway, but Clemens opened the letter and discovered that the text in it was actually in Russian.

　　 After reading the body of the letter, Clemens understood what was going on.

　　 The sender is a geographer who is familiar with Russia. Three days ago, there was an earthquake in Murmansk, Russia. During routine screening of the source, the geographer discovered an amazing thing.

　　 Opening the photo in the letter and seeing the contents inside, Clemens opened his eyes round for a moment and his mouth slightly opened.

　　 In the deep underground scene, there is a huge black tower, which penetrates the soil layer and pierces the ground straight, exactly the same as the one on the Antarctic Peninsula.

　　 Clemens opened the back of the photo, and the bottom blank space marked a line of small characters—photographed at the Kola ultra-deep borehole.

　　The shooting time was exactly three days ago.

　　 The second black tower?

　　 Clemens looked at the photo, and was stunned there with no clue, his head was full of question marks.

　　 He began to look up the information, comparing the data again and again, and found that the truth of the matter was far more complicated than he thought.

　　 When he logged into the national geological database and searched for the black giant tower or the underground giant tower as a keyword, the returned results were all empty.

　　 But when he checked the database update records, he found that the relevant search bytes obviously had traces of artificial shielding.

　　 Someone above wants to hide something.

　　 But Clemens is more worried about why he wants to cover up than what is being covered up.

　　 Just like that, Clemens sat at his desk, smoking a cigarette and thinking until he got off work.

　　 The moment Alice and Liz stepped into the office, Clemens decided to put aside all their clues so that they would not be able to see the clues.

　　 walked in front of Alice and looked at the rabbit doll in her hand. Clemens smiled and said, "Have you ever thanked Liz?"

　　 Alice looked at Liz, and then said to her father, "I believe she wants to hear your response more than my thanks."

　　 Clemens took a halt, then looked at Liz with a bit of helplessness in his eyes.

　　 Liz patted Alice on the shoulder, and said to her: "Your father is off work, he will take you home soon. Go, wait for him in the hall, and he will come later."

　　 Looking at the girl's back, Liz said softly: "She has a maturity that her peers don't have."

　　 Clemens said: "This is my fault. I can't stay with her all the time because of work. I can imagine how lonely she is."

　　 Liz turned to look at Clemens: "You can't live in memory forever. Alice needs a mother, and I also need a promise."

　　 Clemens wanted to say something, only to find that Liz had turned and left.

　　 Half an hour later, Clemens drove the car, Alice sat in the back row, and the two drove towards home in silence.

　　 Looking at the scenery under the sunset on the street, Alice was holding a rabbit doll, UU reading www.uukanshu.com suddenly said: "Will Liz be my new mother?"

　　 Clemens, who was thinking about things, heard this, slammed on the brake and stopped at an intersection.

　　 Clemens: "That's an adult's business..."

　　 Alice looked at the shops and parks on the street, and whispered, "I don't mind her coming to my house."

　　 Clemens used silence again to cover up his embarrassment.

　　 Alice did not speak any more, and turned her gaze to an old beggar at the intersection.

　　 That old beggar, wearing a robe full of holes, his beard and hair are all tangled together because they have not been taken care of for a long time.

　　 There are few teeth left, and his eyes have long been blind.

　　 He sat in the corner of the intersection, with an empty iron plate in front of him, quietly waiting for other people's charity.

　　 Suddenly, the old beggar suddenly turned his head and "looked" in Alice's direction.

　　 He struggled to find a wooden sign that he had prepared from behind, and raised it above his head tremblingly.

　　 The front of the wooden sign says-the day of apocalypse is approaching.

　　 Soon, he flipped over the wooden sign and wrote another sentence on the opposite side-Accept your fate.

　　 Alice was taken aback by this scene, she hurriedly retracted her head under the car door, repeating silently in her heart: He is blind, he can't see me.

　　 The car left, the old beggar dropped the wooden sign in his hand, stood up and danced, laughing happily.

　　 Under the strange gaze of passers-by, the old beggar opened his mouth and shouted: "It's coming! It's coming!"

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