Chapter 22: Brain Mass
"Twenty-one thousand..."
Tom muttered the number, sighing softly.
Although under his control, there was no internal friction or communication cost between Clones, allowing them to work and think with maximum effort and efficiency, even at full capacity, twenty-one thousand Clones could only achieve ten times the production and development capability of an ordinary Human Civilization population.
By this calculation, his current total production and development capability was roughly equivalent to a population of 210,000 ordinary people.
While 210,000 people seemed like a large number, it was still completely insufficient compared to the massive scale of an industrial society.
If the industrial system were complete, such a small number of people could only handle the production requirements for a specific product in a specialized field under a major industrial category.
For example, in the automotive industry, this many people would be doing well just to handle the glass industry.
This would also have to be under the premise of high automation.
And now, his overall technological level was only roughly equivalent to the period of Human Civilization’s Second Industrial Revolution.
As a result, the productivity that these 21,000 Clones could achieve was even lower.
Several years ago, after he first felt the existence of an "awareness limit," he had always been thinking about and experimenting in this area, trying to understand and control this special ability he possessed more deeply.
Although there wasn’t much progress, there were always some peripheral gains.
For instance, Tom now clearly understood that the consciousness connection between himself and the Clones also had a speed limit.
Its information transmission speed was consistent with the speed of light, which is 300,000 kilometers per second.
When the distance increased, for example, for a Clone located on the other side of Loshen Star, he would experience a delay of approximately 6.7 milliseconds, because the distance between them was about 2,000 kilometers.
However, Tom did not yet know what the carrier of this information transmission was.
But at this stage, it could at least be confirmed that it was not electromagnetic waves. Because if it were electromagnetic waves, some Clones located in special areas, such as underground, should have already lost contact with him.
At the same time, his special ability seemed to be closely related to the "quality" of his brain.
Even if they were all his Clones, using the same gene editing plan and the same culture tank cultivation plan, there would always be slight differences in the cultivation process, which led to slight differences between different Clones.
Some Clones’ brains might be a bit smarter, meaning their "quality" was a bit higher, possessing higher logical thinking ability, reasoning and associative ability, data processing ability, etc., while some Clones were a bit worse.
"Perhaps, the higher the quality of the brain, the more Clones can be controlled simultaneously?"
With this conjecture, even though the number of connections was already close to the limit, Tom did not stop cultivating Clones.
So, half a year later, the latest batch of 2,000 Clones was cultivated.
After Tom tried to connect again, he found that his connection limit had indeed been reached.
Including the main body where his consciousness resided, he could only connect to a maximum of 21,155 Clones.
The remaining approximately one thousand Clones could not be connected, just like a car that could no longer carry more weight.
Tom decisively transferred his consciousness to another Clone and began to try connecting again.
This time, the number of Clones he could connect to indeed changed, becoming 21,159! Four more than the previous body!
After changing to another body again and trying to connect again, Tom found that the number he could connect to this time became 21,006, which was 153 fewer than the previous one!
After a round of experiments, Tom found that the number of other Clones that each Clone could connect to was different, with slight variations.
The difference between the most and the least was more than 800!
Tom selected four representative Clones and went to a room, placing a set of extremely complex cognitive ability test questions in front of them.
Then, Tom first entered the body of the Clone with the fewest connections, and without using the abilities of other Clones, began to do this set of 500 test questions, then the second body, also without using the abilities of other Clones.
After completing all the test questions for the four bodies, the final results were presented to Tom.
The body that controlled the fewest Clones, relying solely on its own brain ability, scored 85 points on the test, while the other three Clones scored 85.2, 85.5, and 85.9 respectively!
It was indeed so!
At this moment, his previous conjecture was fully verified.
So, the plan to increase his connection limit was very clear.
By cultivating higher-quality Clones, he would be able to control more bodies and brains simultaneously!
At the same time, cultivating only a few high-"quality" Clones might not be enough.
Firstly, if an accident occurred and this high-quality Clone unfortunately died, he would be forced to transfer to another Clone, but due to the reduced quality, the Clones he could originally control would suddenly become uncontrollable, which would be a big problem.
Secondly, the Clone’s brain is also his brain. The higher the brain quality of each Clone, the greater his ability.
Overall, he still needed to improve the brain quality of all cultivated Clones as much as possible.
This way, not only would his overall ability be higher, but if an accident occurred and he was forced to transfer, he would not suddenly lose too much control over his Clones.
To cultivate high-quality Clones... he would need sufficient biotechnology.
And biotechnology is obviously related to his overall technological level.
Chemistry, medicine, mathematics, physics, computational science, etc., not a single major discipline can be missing.
It would be almost impossible to develop biotechnology independently, detached from the overall technological foundation.
"But fortunately, at this stage, I don’t have to rely on the progress of overall technology to improve biotechnology.
The Shenkong (Deep Space) Spaceship has sufficient biological basic theories and gene editing equipment. With these things, at this stage, it should still be possible to optimize my genes and plan a gene scheme for Clones with higher-quality brains.
As long as the technical level of the culture tanks keeps up, there will be no problem in truly cultivating high-quality Clones.
It’s just that at this stage, I can’t build such precise culture tanks."
Tom felt a slight headache.
He had not forgotten that his first Clone culture tank was modified from facilities for cloning livestock, the second to fifth sets were cobbled together from those for cultivating small animals, and the culture tanks he built later were even more rudimentary.
To cultivate high-quality Clones, he could not be so casual.
"Even if I can’t build it, I have to. For the next period, I’ll prioritize tackling culture tank technology."
He made up his mind.