The autumn wind in Huizhou carried a distinct chill.
The leaves from the trees lining the main campus road had fallen, covering the ground and rustling underfoot.
In the stairwell of Dormitory Four, the sound of heavy footsteps and labored breathing echoed.
"I can’t go on."
Chu Ge gritted his teeth, the veins on his arms bulging.
He was hugging a massive cardboard box.
Inside the box was a monitor he had just hauled back from Bainao Hui.
These big-headed monitors from 2002, with their thick plastic casings, were dead heavy.
With every step Chu Ge took up the stairs, his body seemed to sink a little lower.
"Move, move, my legs are giving out."
Chu Ge leaned against the wall at the turn of the stairs, bracing a corner of the box against it for support as he gasped for air.
Wang Dayong was walking ahead of them.
He had a computer tower hoisted on his shoulder and was carrying another huge, blocky package in his hand.
Inside was the laser printer Chen Zhuo wanted.
Dayong had done farm work back home for years, so this weight was manageable for him. But he was a big guy, and the stairs were narrow, making the climb difficult for him too.
"Chu Ge, you gonna make it?"
Dayong stopped and looked back at Chu Ge, who was leaning against the wall, his eyes rolling back in his head.
"Where’s that motormouth energy you had at the electronics market, when you were haggling with the vendor and picking out a graphics card?"
Chu Ge waved his hand weakly.
"Are mental and physical labor the same thing? That son of a bitch tried to trick me with a bulk-packaged CPU. I had to go at it with him. Who knew this monitor would be so fucking heavy?"
Chen Zhuo was bringing up the rear.
He was carrying two large plastic bags filled with a silent keyboard, a mouse, a power strip, an ethernet cable, and a few new reams of A4 paper and spare toner cartridges.
He looked at Chu Ge’s teetering form.
"If you don’t hold on tight and drop that monitor," Chen Zhuo said teasingly, "we’ll just have to use it as a fish tank tonight."
"You’re something else."
Chu Ge rolled his eyes.
"If it’s a fish tank, I’m shoving you in it first."
He took a deep breath, readjusted his grip on the box, and gritted his teeth as he continued climbing toward the second floor.
Pushing open the door to Dorm 215, Chu Ge plopped the monitor right onto Chen Zhuo’s desk.
It landed with a dull THUD.
The desk wobbled.
Chu Ge collapsed into a chair, sprawling out and gasping for breath, without even the strength to grab a glass of water.
Dayong placed the computer tower under the desk, then heaved the heavy laser printer onto it.
"How is this thing heavier than the tower?"
Dayong shook his sore arms and patted the off-white casing of the printer.
"It has a drum cartridge and a heating and fuser assembly."
Chen Zhuo put down the plastic bags and started unwrapping the cables.
"It’s full of metal parts. They didn’t skimp on materials."
The dorm room was a bit of a mess.
Dayong helped push the books on Chen Zhuo’s desk aside, clearing a large space.
Chen Zhuo took out a box cutter and sliced through the tape on the monitor box.
He lifted the heavy beast out and placed it in the center of the desk.
Dayong helped with cable management nearby, bundling the long black cords with a zip tie and tucking them behind the desk.
Finally, Chen Zhuo unpacked the laser printer.
He removed the protective foam and pulled out a few orange plastic strips used to secure the components.
He snapped a new black toner cartridge into its slot and closed the cover.
Everything was ready.
"Plugging it in."
Dayong was squatting on the floor, holding a newly-bought six-outlet power strip.
He plugged in the cords for the computer tower, the monitor, and the printer one by one.
Then he plugged the power strip’s main plug into the wall socket.
Chen Zhuo nodded.
He pulled out his chair, sat down, reached out, and pressed the power button on the computer tower.
A green indicator light came on.
The WHIRRING of the fans starting up came from inside the case.
The monitor screen flickered, and the black screen of the motherboard’s self-test appeared.
Next, Chen Zhuo’s hand reached for the HP laser printer beside it.
He pressed the button gently.
"WHIRRR—"
A low startup sound came from inside the printer.
It was the sound of the motor engaging the gears.
In that exact instant,
the old incandescent light tube on the ceiling suddenly let out a faint SIZZLE.
Immediately after, the lights in Dorm 215 dimmed drastically.
Chu Ge jumped in fright.
He had been relaxing in his chair with his eyes closed, but now he shot straight up.
"Holy shit! It’s gonna trip the breaker!"
Chu Ge stared at the light on the ceiling.
Dayong was frozen too, still squatting, his head down, staring at the power strip in his hand, terrified it would start sparking.
The light tube flickered twice, its tungsten filament glowing a faint red.
The voltage was being pulled to its absolute limit.
After two or three seconds,
as the printer’s internal heating element finished preheating, the machine switched to standby mode.
The low hum gradually subsided.
The light on the ceiling flickered once more.
The lights returned to their normal brightness.
The room was quiet for a few seconds.
Only the steady whir of the computer fans remained.
Chu Ge let out a sigh of relief, patted his chest, and sat back down.
"Holy crap."
Chu Ge looked at the now-quiet, off-white machine on the desk, a sense of lingering fear in his heart.
"You scared me. I thought for sure it was going to trip the breaker."
Chen Zhuo looked up at the light tube.
"The startup power draw is a bit high."
Chen Zhuo kicked the power strip under his feet further back under the desk.
"Dayong, from now on when I’m using the printer, let’s try not to plug in the immersion heater."
Dayong stood up, dusting off his hands.
"Sure. We don’t use it that much anyway."
On the computer screen, the classic blue sky and white clouds of the Windows XP desktop had appeared.
It was accompanied by the crisp startup sound.
The dorms at Keda already had campus internet. After plugging in the ethernet cable Dayong had just connected, the two little computer icons in the bottom-right corner began to flash.
Chen Zhuo opened Internet Explorer, expertly clicked on the settings, and entered a proxy server’s IP address and port number.
"What are you setting up a proxy for?"
Chu Ge leaned over, watching Chen Zhuo type on the keyboard.
"The campus network’s international bandwidth is too narrow. Without a proxy, some websites won’t open."
Chen Zhuo hit Enter to confirm.
The browser reloaded. The page loaded slowly.
It scrolled down bit by bit.
A white background, blue hyperlink text.
It was an extremely simple webpage, with no fancy images, just a dense list of text in English.
arXiv
The latest preprint papers in physics, mathematics, and computer science uploaded daily from all over the world.
Chen Zhuo typed a few keywords into the search box.
The page changed.
He clicked on the paper submitted by the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study that he hadn’t managed to copy a few days ago.
The title was long, concerning the boundary problem of multidimensional topological manifolds.
Chen Zhuo clicked download.
The file, only a few dozen kilobytes, downloaded in seconds.
He opened the file. The screen filled with English text and complex mathematical formulas.
Chen Zhuo barely looked at the screen. He moved the mouse directly to the top-left corner and clicked "Print."
The paper tray made a soft sound.
A fresh, blank sheet of A4 paper was pulled in, emerging as printed pages of the paper.
Chu Ge pointed at the machine, his voice full of mock despair.
"You spent thousands of yuan to build such a top-of-the-line machine."
Chu Ge then pointed to the stack of paper in Chen Zhuo’s hand.
"And your big plan for it tonight is to just download from the campus network and use it as a print driver?"
"Uh-huh."
Chen Zhuo placed the stack of papers on the desk.
"I’m only using it to download and print right now because that’s as far as my train of thought has gotten."
He glanced at Chu Ge.
"When I get further along in my deductions and need it to process enormous, low-level matrices, I want this machine’s processing power to be waiting for me, not the other way around."
Chen Zhuo paused for a moment before twisting the knife.
"I paid a premium for redundant processing power and stability. I’d rather not be in the middle of a critical calculation late one night when a smell of burning plastic suddenly pours out of the case, forcing me to run around the hallways with it, looking for a fan to cool it down."
Chu Ge was instantly speechless.
He rubbed his nose and coughed dryly twice.
「Night fell.」
In the late autumn of Huizhou, the wind grew strong at night.
A draft of cold air occasionally slipped through the cracks in the window.
The main light in Dorm 215 was off.
Wang Dayong lay in bed, letting out steady, low snores.
On Chen Zhuo’s desk, a black lamp was lit.
A warm, yellow circle of light shone on the desktop.
The stack of Princeton preprints lay spread out in the center of the light.
Chen Zhuo sat in his chair.
He held a pencil in his hand.
When he read, he entered a state of extreme stillness.
His eyes scanned down the page, line by line, following the English words and formulas.
He turned the first page, then the second...
The thinking of this Princeton group was impressive. They were attempting to define an absolute boundary for a multidimensional topological manifold within the existing framework of string theory.
’A very impressive topic.’
’The logic is rigorous, and their use of mathematical tools is elegant.’
Until he reached the core of the derivation.
Chen Zhuo’s gaze froze.
In the middle of the page, the formulas suddenly became exceedingly complex.
To handle an unavoidable Singularity in a continuous integral, the authors had introduced a massive renormalization process.
A series of calculus symbols, limit notations, and compensation parameters were piled together.
It took up nearly half the page.
It was like a sleek, modern glass skyscraper that, halfway through construction, was suddenly found to lack sufficient load-bearing capacity.
So, the architects were forced to strap a ring of concrete pillars to the building’s exterior as a patch.
Chen Zhuo’s brow furrowed slightly.
It wasn’t that he thought they were wrong.
The professors at Princeton weren’t the type to make elementary mistakes. The result of their derivation was logically self-consistent.
’It just felt a bit... clumsy.’
Chen Zhuo tapped the pencil gently against the desk.
He recalled the reverse tree diagram for low-level data retrieval he had drawn for Chu Ge a few days ago.
And the unilateral release topological matrix Lu Jia had written on a draft paper to break an infinite loop.
’A continuous flow of water, when blocked, will overflow. It becomes infinite.’
’That’s why the Princeton group used renormalization to forcibly patch the dam.’
But.
’What if, near the Singularity, the flow of water was instantly cut off, turned into discrete, individual droplets?’
’In the most fundamental data logic, there is nothing that cannot be divided.’
Chen Zhuo’s mind leaped between the macroscopic continuity of physics and the discrete nature of low-level computer algorithms.
He didn’t immediately grab a fresh sheet of scratch paper and start calculating frantically.
’This problem was huge.’
’The algebraic geometry tools involved were only a vague outline in his mind; he would need to consult more materials.’
He wasn’t in the habit of pulling all-nighters to grind through a problem.
Chen Zhuo gently put down the paper.
He picked up the wooden pencil.
Next to the bloated, complex renormalization formula,
he drew a small question mark.
Then, he closed the twenty-odd pages of the paper.
And slid it into his desk drawer.

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