Chapter 846: Chapter 91: The Dolphins
Hikashi continued to dive deeper. A certain discomfort crept over her. The pressure around her now exceeded what her ancestors could endure. Yet, for tal-based dolphins, this was still bearable.
But the seawater was accelerating her body heat loss. The waste heat emitted by her internal battery, artificial heart, and other organs barely managed to sustain her.
It was said that the skin of older dolphins in her group had beco numb, even inferior to artificial skin.
While lanting, Hikashi quickly swallowed the squid in her mouth to prevent the delicious juice from being taken away by the hateful seawater. At the sa ti, she constantly reminded herself to restrain herself and not eat everything.
Then, several beams of ultrasound gently swept across Hikashi’s skin. It was dolphin language, like poetry.
So dolphins were searching for them.
“Hikashi, oh Hikashi, why have you gone silent for three minutes?” The leading Kledec softly reprimanded. If this were converted to human-perceived audio, it would sound more like a sobbing accusation. But in the dolphins’ perception, this was already anger.
Hikashi spat out the remainder of the squid she had been eating: “Prey.”
What Hikashi brought caused all the dolphins to pause their activities. The complex protein synthesized from animal cells ford an intricate aroma in their sensory organs. Since weaning, the dolphins were in a long-lasting state of hunger. The occasional gathered bits of fish paste might not have relieved the hunger, but instead, made the “appetite” grow vigorously.
“Hunger” had been parasitizing on them for decades.
They couldn’t care about anything else, even discarding the chanical arms on their bodies and lunged forward to tear the spiky squid tentacles.
Kledec almost lost his mind as well. But as a leader, he restrained his appetite, trying hard to calm his subordinates and fairly distribute the food. The squid had ten tentacles. The longest and most succulent two were respectively given to two dolphins. The remaining four dolphins each received a couple of tentacles along with so bits of at. The rest of the leftover was swallowed by Kledec.
As the food mixed with seawater slid down the throat into the stomach, Kledec’s stomach didn’t feel much comfort, instead it urged like a parasite, pushing the “host” to seek more food.
“The instant pleasure” and “the tornt of hunger” clashed within Kledec’s brain.
Then, the dolphins gradually cald down.
A normal dolphin needs to eat four to eight percent of its body weight in food a day, roughly seventeen kilograms or so. These tal-based squids often weigh less than three kilograms.
“Alright, next ti you can eat it yourself.” Kledec said, “Not eating it won’t kill us, it’s just rather uncomfortable…”
Perhaps to calm himself, Kledec deliberately used encoded human language.
“Keep working, folks, we need to work for our ho now!”
The dolphins cheered, picked up their equipnt again, and began approaching the silent submarine.
This was the result of the “outside humans” warring. Just a few days ago, Hopkins heard the violent commotion in the distance and then discovered this scene from afar. The “outside humans” were fighting among themselves. A gigantic entity assaulted a relatively small thing and then abandoned it.
So Hopkins began to sing. The song in infrasound waves floated far with the help of the resonator. And at that depth, the transmission speed of sound was quite fast.
The dolphins gathered around.
They had to dismantle all the collectible electronic devices within a limited ti. With slight modifications, these devices could form new whale-artiodactyl prosthetic bodies, which were quite vital for their group.
The humans outside seed divided into two factions that never shared intelligence, so upon discovering missing parts, they would speculate that the opposing side took them away to cover sothing up, never considering that there existed intelligent creatures under the surface capable of stealing those easily manufactured electronic components—yes, the dolphins’ target was the components.
Under Kledec’s command, the dolphins swam back into the sunken dium submarine, searching for objects that could move by themselves, and those parts that wouldn’t be damaged when the shell was dismantled underwater.
The prosthetic body wreckage couldn’t be moved. These usually had serial number records, possibly even built-in tracking devices.
The tools used by the dolphins were collars worn around their necks, equipped with several chanical arms that could quickly disassemble so objects.
Looking at these human bodies, Hikashi felt more uneasy.
“What’s the matter, my dear friend, why are you so uneasy now?” Kledec couldn’t bear it any longer and stopped his work.
Hikashi sighed: “I might have been exposed to an outside human.”
“What do you an by ‘might’?”
“The humans and detection machines we’ve seen were like this…” Hikashi pointed at the prosthetic body wreckage on the ground with pointed snout: “Or they were square-shaped, but this thing didn’t look like either. From the side, he just looked like a hollow trash. And back then, that human-like thing was right before a squid…”
For dolphins, the elongated seaweed was a kind of “semi-transparent” dium. Its blocking effect on sound waves was far less than its effect on light waves. That squid was so evident to Hikashi’s senses.
In that instant, the hungry dolphin forgot everything.
Kledec was silent for a mont, then shouted: “All dolphins! Countdown of half an hour, then we et up with Hopkins! Leave! Go ho!”
Then, he patted Hikashi’s fin with his tail: “Relax my friend, it’s not your fault. I’d go crazy seeing that squid as well… in this aspect, we’re inferior to humans.”
Humans have more developed advanced functional areas and can more easily suppress instinctive reactions. But dolphins only recently gained intelligence. Their intellect sotis still needed chip assistance. Sotis Kledec couldn’t help but ponder whether he was a dolphin or a soul within the chip, residing in the body of a dolphin.
And human’s prosthetic body chips were designed this way at the base level. When an instinctive reaction simultaneously occurred with the judgnt from an advanced functional area and was strong enough, that Command would have the highest priority, even surpassing various safety restrictions set up. The original designers believed that the safety restrictions of prosthetic bodies were human-made, unable to cope with all sudden situations. In certain extre cases, losing self-rescue ability due to safety restrictions was too disastrous for humans.
——That would affect the company’s reputation.
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