A somewhat rusty, industrial-sized floor fan had appeared in the lab.
It was the kind of industrial fan you’d only see in the back kitchen of the school cafeteria. Its blades were green, and the wire cage was coated in a layer of old grease.
Zhang Yuan had borrowed it from god-knows-where. It was now placed next to the main control computer’s desk, plugged in and cranked to its highest setting.
The tremendous WHIRRRRR of the fan completely drowned out the noise from the cooling fans of the several Pentium microcomputers.
In pursuit of maximum cooling, Zhang Yuan had removed the side panels from the cases of the two computers handling the main computational tasks.
The green motherboards, dense arrays of capacitors, and the RAM sticks slotted into their sockets were all completely exposed to the air.
The large fan blasted air directly at the two computers with their guts exposed.
The wind was so strong it sent papers and discarded printouts on the desk RUSTLING loudly. Zhang Yuan was shirtless, a towel of some long-forgotten color draped around his neck, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the monitor.
"Where are we at?"
Lin Fang, his senior who was in charge of the car body’s lateral flutter model, walked over with a cup of water. She had to ask loudly; the fan was so noisy you couldn’t hear anything otherwise.
"Zero point zero zero eight seconds."
Zhang Yuan wiped the sweat from his forehead, his eyes glued to the progress bar crawling across the screen like a snail.
"That’s one-thousandth of a second more than yesterday."
"What’s the memory usage?"
"Ninety-three percent."
Zhang Yuan gritted his teeth.
"And it’s still climbing."
Lin Fang sighed, placed her cup on a nearby metal rack, and pulled up a chair to sit behind Zhang Yuan.
This was the fourth day since their group meeting.
For the past four days, the entire research group had been caught in a state of desperate madness.
No one went back to the dorms to sleep anymore. When they got tired, they’d lie down for a bit on the cots set up nearby. As soon as they woke up, they’d gather around the main control computer again.
To get this nineties-era microcomputer to run that damned continuous partial differential equation, Zhang Yuan and the others had tried nearly every crude method in the book.
First came physical cooling.
They opened windows, used fans, and someone even suggested getting ice blocks from the cafeteria kitchen to put under the computer cases. They gave up on that idea, fearing condensation would drip onto the motherboard and cause a short circuit.
When physical cooling proved largely ineffective, they started to push the boundaries of what was permissible in fluid dynamics.
"Senior..."
A guy with glasses sitting at another computer turned his head, his tone tentative.
"What if... we lowered the initial air density parameter inside the tunnel just a tiny bit? Like, by just five-hundredths of a percent. Macroscopically, there shouldn’t be much of a difference, but we could save a lot of computing power."
Zhang Yuan didn’t even turn his head as he cut him off.
"No."
Zhang Yuan’s voice was a bit hoarse, but it carried an unyielding stubbornness that left no room for negotiation.
"Air density is a fixed parameter. Whatever the standard for normal temperature and pressure from the wind tunnel lab is, that’s what it is. If you dare to change the air density today, tomorrow you’ll dare to change the train’s initial entry speed. That’s called falsifying data, not adjusting parameters."
The guy with glasses, having been shot down, ruffled his hair in frustration and muttered under his breath.
"We can’t just keep waiting around like this. How many RAM sticks have we burned through this week already?"
Chen Zhuo was sitting at a secluded workstation near the door.
By the time the after-blast from the fan reached him, it wasn’t as fierce, but it was still enough to make the copy of Fundamentals of Aerodynamics on his desk flutter noisily.
He put down his gel pen, stood up, and walked over to the water cooler to get half a cup of warm water.
As he turned to walk back, the stray wind from the industrial fan made him squint.
Chen Zhuo stopped, his gaze falling on the computer case with its cover removed.
The wind was incredibly strong. A few of the colorful ribbon cables plugged into the motherboard were shaking violently in the blast, and the plastic connectors looked like they were about to come loose.
Holding his cup, Chen Zhuo pointed at the case.
"Senior, this fan is definitely powerful."
Zhang Yuan didn’t look up, his attention completely fixed on the screen.
"You bet. I had to sweet-talk the head chef at Cafeteria Number Two for ages before I could haul it back here."
"It’s powerful, all right."
Chen Zhuo glanced at the ribbon cables on the motherboard, which were trembling faintly with the wind, and said slowly,
"But if it were any closer, I reckon this computer might disconnect before it spits out a result."
Beside them, Lin Fang, who had been frowning with worry, couldn’t help but let out a snort of laughter.
Zhang Yuan froze for a second. He turned to look where Chen Zhuo was pointing and immediately saw the motherboard’s ribbon cables shaking wildly in the gale, on the verge of disconnecting at any moment.
A cold sweat broke out on Zhang Yuan’s back. He scrambled to his feet and frantically dragged the large fan backward.
"You brat. You’re usually so quiet, but then you just have to hit me with a line like that out of the blue."
Zhang Yuan shot Chen Zhuo an exasperated look.
The words had barely left his mouth.
BEEP—
A sharp beep echoed from the open computer case.
The expression on Zhang Yuan’s face instantly froze.
Almost everyone lunged for the monitor at the same time.
On the screen, the progress bar, which had crawled to 0.009 seconds, was frozen solid. Then, the display distorted for a moment before turning a hopeless, solid blue.
A string of white error codes pulsed on the blue screen.
Memory Overflow.
Memory overflow.
It crashed again.
Zhang Yuan stood there dumbly, his hands still in the position of having just moved the fan.
After a long moment, he collapsed into his chair like a deflated ball.

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