Lin Fang stood between the two of them, watching as Zhang Yuan translated Chen Zhuo’s mathematical formulas into computer language, line by line.
Over half an hour later.
Zhang Yuan pressed the final Enter key.
"Translation’s done. No syntax errors."
Zhang Yuan stared at the prompt on the screen.
Chen Zhuo nodded.
"Go ahead and import the model data. Let’s see what the machine can do."
Zhang Yuan took a deep breath. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pant legs, moved the mouse, and clicked "Run."
The fans inside the four black cases instantly kicked up an octave, like something was roaring within them.
The image on the screen flickered.
The command line window, which had been frozen, began to refresh as lines of green data scrolled rapidly past.
"It’s moving!"
Lin Fang’s eyes lit up, and she unconsciously clenched her fists.
Zhang Yuan let out a long sigh of relief and leaned back in his chair.
"I told you it would work! When you want to crush a problem from a higher dimension, you’ve got to rely on the Discrete Matrix. As long as the machine is running, we’ve got a chance."
Chen Zhuo said nothing. He was looking at a tiny progress bar in the bottom right corner of the screen.
It read "1%."
"Looks like we’re pulling an all-nighter."
Zhang Yuan rubbed his face.
"Lin Fang, can you go buy me a few packs of cigarettes and make some strong tea? This machine is probably going to be running for a while."
"Okay, I’ll go."
Lin Fang grabbed the keys from the table and walked quickly out of the lab.
Chen Zhuo leaned back in a folding chair, watching the nearly motionless progress bar.
"Senior Brother, don’t celebrate too soon," Chen Zhuo said.
Zhang Yuan turned his head.
"What’s wrong?"
"The difference in mesh count between a 2D slice and a 3D model isn’t simple addition."
Chen Zhuo pointed to the incredibly dense model of the car’s front end on the screen.
"It’s an exponential multiplication. When you imported the model, did you check the total mesh count?"
Zhang Yuan froze for a second. In his haste to run the program, he hadn’t looked closely at the parameters.
He quickly pulled up a background monitoring window and glanced at the statistics.
Zhang Yuan’s expression froze.
"Forty-two million mesh nodes?"
Zhang Yuan’s voice was tight.
Last year’s 2D model had, at most, a couple hundred thousand mesh nodes.
"Yeah."
Chen Zhuo nodded.
"To ensure fluid precision on the 3D surfaces, the mesh has to be sliced finer. That’s over forty million nodes, and each one requires high-order matrix multiplication."
Zhang Yuan looked at the four servers humming beside him, and suddenly, the sound was no longer so pleasant.
"It... It can finish, right?"
Zhang Yuan asked uncertainly.
"Depends on whether these machines can take it," Chen Zhuo said.
Lin Fang returned with the cigarettes and tea.
The three of them began to wait in the underground lab.
For the first few hours, the atmosphere was still relatively relaxed. Zhang Yuan was even in the mood to chat with Chen Zhuo about video games.
But as time passed, the smell of something burning in the air grew heavier.
By eleven o’clock that night, the progress bar was still stubbornly stuck at "1%."
The green data stream on the screen scrolled slower and slower, as if it were sinking into some kind of quagmire.
"This can’t be right."
Zhang Yuan stubbed out his cigarette.
"It’s been four hours. How has it not even gotten through one percent?"
"The memory’s about to max out."
Chen Zhuo pointed at the monitoring window.
Memory usage had reached 98%. The page file was constantly reading from and writing to the hard drive, and the drive’s activity light was flashing frantically.
"Restart the monitoring program. Leave only the main process running."
Zhang Yuan’s fingers struck the keyboard with force.
No one slept that night.
「The next morning.」
Lin Fang returned from the cafeteria with breakfast for three. The steamed buns and soy milk sat on the table, gradually growing cold.
The progress bar still read "1%."
Zhang Yuan stood up and paced twice around the server rack. He reached out and touched the metal casing of one of the servers, then immediately snatched his hand back.
"It’s burning hot."
Zhang Yuan frowned.
"Crank the AC."
Lin Fang grabbed the remote and turned the air conditioning down to its lowest setting. Cold air blasted from the vent, but it couldn’t compete with the heat radiating from the machines.
Chen Zhuo sat in his chair, eating a cold bun.
He watched the screen, knowing the system was on its last legs.
"It’s still calculating."
Zhang Yuan stared at the command line window. Every ten seconds or so, a new line of data would appear on the screen.
"It’s slow, but as long as it doesn’t crash or throw an error, we’ll wait. Even if it takes a month."
「The third day.」
The smell in the lab had become foul.
Zhang Yuan’s eyes were swollen like peaches. Lin Fang, wrapped in a military-style greatcoat, dozed in a chair.
Chen Zhuo was still in the folding chair. He hadn’t gone back to his dorm. Over the past three days, he would occasionally nap with his head on the desk, but he spent most of his time observing the patterns in the data.
Two in the afternoon.
Suddenly, a long BEEP echoed from the direction of the server rack.
Immediately after, as if on cue, the other three servers also let out piercing alarms.
Zhang Yuan shot up from his chair.
Lin Fang was jolted awake, the greatcoat sliding to the floor.
The screen on the central computer froze.
The command line window stopped scrolling. The cursor vanished.
Then, the entire screen flickered and turned a solid, despair-inducing blue.
A string of white English characters appeared on the blue background.
Fatal Error: Out of Memory.
Following that, the hum of the four servers’ fans gradually faded, and the hard drive lights went dark.
It had crashed.
Zhang Yuan stood numbly before the screen. His lips moved, but no sound came out.
He reached out and began frantically mashing the Enter and Backspace keys. The keyboard produced a chaotic CLATTER.
The screen remained blue, with white text, completely unresponsive.
"Reboot."
Zhang Yuan’s voice was raspy. He reached for the power button on the main tower.
"Don’t, Senior Brother."
Chen Zhuo stood up and grabbed Zhang Yuan’s arm.
Zhang Yuan turned to look at Chen Zhuo, his eyes frighteningly red.
"Reboot it and keep going! We can resume from the checkpoint!"
"There is no checkpoint. It was a memory overflow. The last three days of data are all garbage fragments. Nothing was saved."
Chen Zhuo let go of Zhang Yuan’s arm.
Lin Fang covered her face.
Three days and three nights of grueling work, running at full capacity, all for three simple words: Out of Memory.
Zhang Yuan slowly retracted his hand. His back hit the edge of the desk, and he slid down, slumping into the folding chair.
He fumbled for the cigarette pack on the table and shook it forcefully. It was empty. He crumpled the pack into a ball and slammed it against the wall.
"This is how it ends?"
Zhang Yuan kept his head down, his voice thick with frustration.
"Forty million mesh nodes... even the machines couldn’t handle it. What leverage do we have in the negotiations now?"
The underground lab fell into a dead silence.
The cold wind from the AC blew as the four machines sat there, silent.
Chen Zhuo walked over to the server rack and pressed his hand against the black metal casing.
It was hot.
So hot it hurt his palm.
This was the mark of hardware that had struggled at its absolute limit.
Chen Zhuo pulled back his hand and turned to look at the dejected Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang.
Chen Zhuo walked to the desk, picked up the two A4 pages on which he had written the matrix formulas, glanced at them, then slowly tore them to pieces and threw them into the trash can.
The sound of the paper scraps falling was sharp in the quiet lab.
"Senior Brother," Chen Zhuo began.
Zhang Yuan didn’t look up.
"The old tools are useless."
Chen Zhuo said calmly, looking at the top of Zhang Yuan’s head.
Zhang Yuan lifted his head, his eyes bloodshot.
"What did you say?"
"I said the Discrete Matrix is useless."
Chen Zhuo pointed at the blue-screened monitor.
"We’re using a 2D mindset to slice up 3D geometry. The mesh count explodes exponentially. Even if we networked every computer lab in the university, we still couldn’t compute the complex multiplications for forty million nodes."
Lin Fang stood up and walked over to Chen Zhuo.
"Chen Zhuo, are you saying this path is a complete dead end?"
"Yes."
Chen Zhuo looked at them both.
"As long as we keep trying to slice up a continuous three-dimensional manifold, computational power will always be a bottomless pit."
He paused.
"That’s the reality of the situation. The machine doesn’t lie. If it can’t run, it can’t run."
Zhang Yuan gritted his teeth.
"So we’re just supposed to accept this? Take this disaster to the higher-ups, tell them we can’t figure it out, and let them name whatever price they want?"
"I didn’t say we should accept it."
Chen Zhuo turned and looked at the whiteboard covered in equations.
"I need to try a different approach. Let me think."
Chen Zhuo walked back to his backpack, zipped it up, and slung it over his shoulder.
He glanced back at Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang, the corner of his mouth suddenly twitching into a slight smile.
It was a faint smile, one that seemed out of place in the oppressive atmosphere of the lab, carrying an unseasonable sense of ease.
"Look on the bright side—at least the motherboards didn’t fry. Go get some sleep, Senior Brother. These damn machines need a couple of days off, too."
With that, Chen Zhuo pushed the door open and walked out.

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