There was no air around him, only flowing numbers.
"Chen Zhuo... Chen Zhuo..."
His mother’s call reached him, transformed into a kind of drawn-out, low-frequency electronic tone.
Chen Zhuo tried to respond, but when he opened his mouth, what came out wasn’t sound, but a stream of bubbles.
Each bubble contained a symbol from physics.
These symbols crowded and collided around him.
Suddenly, a massive gear appeared before him.
It was the planetary gear he had drawn in class.
But now, it had become impossibly massive, like a mountain of steel that blotted out the sky.
The gear began to turn.
"RUMBLE—"
The sound of each tooth interlocking was like a clap of thunder.
To his horror, Chen Zhuo found himself between the two interlocking gears.
He was so small.
He was like a tiny ant, watching helplessly as the massive steel teeth bore down on him.
’No... This doesn’t conform to mechanical principles...’
He screamed in his nightmare, trying to refute the illusion with logic.
’Based on a force analysis, there should be a film of lubricant... The pressure shouldn’t be this immense...’
But logic failed.
The massive gear descended mercilessly, crushing him.
Agony.
It wasn’t physical pain, but the agony of his mind being forcibly formatted.
Then, the scene changed.
He fell into a river.
It wasn’t water. It was a current of electricity.
A golden, scalding current.
Countless blue electrons swarmed him like piranhas.
They had sharp teeth, each one engraved with 1.6×10−19 C.
"You’ve crossed the line."
An electron shrieked at him.
"Your vessel can’t withstand this voltage!"
"BZZZT—"
The current coursed through his body.
He convulsed violently in his feverish hallucination.
「In the real world.」
The emergency room of City First People’s Hospital.
"Hold him down! The boy’s having a seizure!"
the doctor yelled.
A sweat-soaked Chen Jianguo desperately pinned down Chen Zhuo’s flailing legs while Liu Xiuying, crying so hard she could barely stand, clutched the red scarf in her hand.
"Doctor! What’s happening to him? He was fine when we left the house!"
"It’s a febrile seizure!"
The doctor administered a sedative to Chen Zhuo while shining a penlight into his pupils.
"His fever is too high—39.8 degrees! Any later and he could have suffered brain damage!"
Chen Jianguo looked at his son on the hospital bed—pale-faced and burning up—and his heart felt like it was being twisted by a knife.
He was a simple man; he didn’t understand medicine.
But he could sense that his son was going through something terrible.
Even in his unconscious state, Chen Zhuo was still mumbling incoherently.
Chen Jianguo leaned in to listen.
He thought his son was calling for "Papa" or "Mama."
But what he heard were a few words that made his blood run cold:
"Damping... insufficient... heat dissipation... system crash..."
Tears immediately welled up in Chen Jianguo’s eyes.
He suddenly remembered the look in his son’s eyes that night as he’d licked the battery.
It was a reckless look, the look of someone determined to burn himself out completely.
"It’s my fault... It’s all my fault..."
Chen Jianguo slammed a fist into the wall, his knuckles splitting open and dripping with blood.
"I should have stopped him... He’s only seven years old... How could I have believed him when he said, ’I’m not tired’!"
After an unknown amount of time, the chaotic nightmare of geometric violence and digital assault finally began to recede.
The sedative and antipyretic began to take effect.
Chen Zhuo felt as if he’d been flung from a giant centrifuge and had landed hard on a bed of soft cotton.
The world fell silent.
The suffocating sense of overload vanished, replaced by the extreme weakness of being completely hollowed out.
It was like a forest after a wildfire, with nothing left but smoldering ashes.
Chen Zhuo slowly opened his eyes.
His gaze fell upon a stark white ceiling and a metal stand holding an IV drip.
The fluid fell, one drop at a time.
"DRIP... DROP..."
Chen Zhuo subconsciously began counting the seconds in his head.
The moment the habitual calculation surfaced, a piercing pain shot through his temples.
Chen Zhuo squeezed his eyes shut in pain and mentally slapped himself.
’Stop,’
he told himself.
’Stop calculating. Any more and I’ll really crash.’
A warm hand settled over the back of his own.
Chen Zhuo turned his head.
It was his mother, Liu Xiuying.
She had fallen asleep slumped over the edge of the bed. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles, and tear tracks stained her cheeks.
She was clutching Chen Zhuo’s hand tightly, so tightly it was as if she feared he would fly away if she let go.
On the other side, his father, Chen Jianguo, was asleep on a small stool. He was leaning back against the wall, his head tilted up and his mouth slightly agape, letting out soft snores.
A dark stubble shadowed his chin. He was still in his work clothes, which gave off a familiar scent of machine oil and an even stronger smell of smoke.
It seemed he had smoked quite a bit in the hallway.
The clock on the wall pointed to six in the morning.
January 1, 2000.
The first ray of sunlight of the new century streamed through the hospital’s grimy window, illuminating Chen Zhuo’s pale face.
Chen Zhuo gazed out the window.
The world hadn’t ended.
Computers hadn’t exploded. Nuclear missiles hadn’t launched.
The sun rose as it always did.
Only he had nearly burned out his own delicate little machine on this turn-of-the-century night.
Chen Zhuo twitched his fingers.
The sense of a rift between his hardware and software had lessened, but it was still there.
This fever, like a violent force-shutdown, had taught him a brutal lesson.
He’d always thought reincarnation meant returning to the novice village with a brain that could endlessly comprehend everything, ready for a massacre.

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