I really didn't expect them showing yet another murder straight from the beginning. Only this time it didn't happen in the UK, but instead the DI went to Switzerland, to the CERN to study the case. Even though the Intelligence Agency is a private facility, and it doesn't have an international agreement on doing the studies. Maybe this world didn't go through the Brexit.
32 boffins are dead, and probably a much bigger number has given up on their projects because committing a suicide is a much bigger step. The most important thing they found was the alien VR helmet, allowing the DI to finally have his hands on the device.
The Oxford Five obviously were on top of things, discussing the deaths as if all of it had been blasted over the news cycle instead of omitting out the details, because let's be honest, the murder investigators don't ever release all the things. They are vague for a reason.
It surprised that the Five didn't talk much more than casually mentioning it, before WIll and Jil were left alone, and Will the coward made a move towards his love interest without telling her that he's about to die. Not that they allowed it to go much further as Auggie found Jack's VR helmet and got her head chopped off. More importantly, she said, "What the ef is wrong with you? We don't have this technology. Where did this come from? That thing is hacking your brain."
All of them important questions and observations. I also liked that Will pointed out that someone broke into Jack's place and left the alien device along with the invitation card, and Jack just took it as normal. Auggie made Jil and Jack to promise that they'd stop playing the game, but that was obviously a lie because the game had already consumed Jil's life. Completely.
She even had made a full whiteboard on the matter and were raving about it to Jack in a video conference, where the DI had got himself access to simply spy on the two dumpties. The surprise was that the pair managed to get into the same session together when they donned the helmets during the call, and they were transported to Jack's VR reality to see a Pope in England, along with his aids wearing modern glasses.
To me, it was another WTF moment, just like character with the glasses showed on his face when Jil started explaing yet another theory. Actually this time she explained the 3-body problem as 3 member strong celestial system where the planet revolves around a star and its orbit is interfered by another star ... outside the planetary orbit. Only the Pope didn't accept it as Earth went through a end of the world by 3 stars appearing on the sky turning the VR earth to a melting planet, where Jack and Jill could still breathe relatively easily.
The DI talking to his boss after the session revealed that the helmet has a retinal, brain and oxygen scanners. All without visible electronics. The boss made a clever observation, when he said, "It's recruitment tool..." but for what?
Not that was the only intriguing detail as Auggie went back to talk to her employer, who put her sponsored work visa status in the agenda, making her to restart the project, and when she did it, the countdown returned. It even remembered on how time was left in the clock. Frantically, seeing that she shut it down.
The important detail here is, why does the aliens want to mess with the top scientists?
Not that we got an answer to that as Jil and Jack went to another session, this time in Level 3, with two players instead of one. And this time they went into heart of Great Khan's Empire to present their solution, to only encounter another pair who did do human computations with millions of soldiers in the field 'waving' flags to do ones and zeros.
It worked, but our mind is not capable of deciphering the data on fly. It's just not possible, because our brain is not wired in that way to see the binaries in the vast field they used to do the calculations. The whole thing was another fantasy. An interesting one, because Jil pointed out, the calculations weren't going to work without knowing 3 stars starting parameters. Thanks to it, the pair has figured out the meaning of the game is survival of civilization and because of it, they've advanced to level 4.
Maybe more importantly, for the story sake, we got to see MiB talking to an alien via old school transmitter. Talk where he explained from his perspective humanity, and the alien replied that people need to learn again to be afraid as if it wasn't already a thing in this paranoid world.
So J&J got another invitation to play the next level, but the twist in the plot was that they were going to do it at the front of the alien girl. In the game, the avatar revealed that the aliens are coming and they want to take over the world because "if one survives, we all survives." Almost as if the aliens are saying that 3-body problem is present everywhere.
That boggles my mind. Just like the alien girl claim that the aliens are coming from 3-body star system, just 4 light years away. It turned out to be the Alpha Centauri.
Alpha Centauri is a triple star system located just over four light years, or about 25 trillion miles, from Earth. While this is a large distance in terrestrial terms, it is three times closer than the next nearest Sun-like star.
The stars in the Alpha Centauri system include a pair called “A” and “B,” (AB for short) which orbit relatively close to each other. Alpha Cen A is a near twin of our Sun in almost every way, including age, while Alpha Cen B is somewhat smaller and dimmer but still quite similar to the Sun. The third member, Alpha Cen C (also known as Proxima), is a much smaller red dwarf star that travels around the AB pair in a much larger orbit that takes it more than 10 thousand times farther from the AB pair than the Earth-Sun distance. Proxima currently holds the title of the nearest star to Earth, although AB is a very close second.
A new study involving long-term monitoring of Alpha Centauri by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory indicates that any planets orbiting the two brightest stars are likely not being pummeled by large amounts of X-ray radiation from their host stars.
www.nasa.gov
Jack was the dumpty one after the session, because he denied aliens and their game. Jil couldn't give up, and therefore she got an invitation to another location, to another session. Jack on the other hand got murdered by the alien girl.
oh dear, oh dear...
www.scifinow.co.uk
