In the lab, two floors underground, time lost all meaning.
The only way to tell day from night was by the frequency of Zhang Yuan’s trips to the washroom to splash water on his face.
The tap of chalk on the whiteboard became the most monotonous, yet most stable, metronome in this sealed space.
Chen Zhuo stood before the whiteboard, a piece of white chalk in his right hand and the notebook in his left.
He didn’t write quickly. After every complex line of algebraic group mapping formulas, he would pause, glance at the draft in his notebook, run the logic through his mind, and only then continue transcribing it onto the whiteboard.
Behind him, the clatter of a keyboard was as dense as falling rain.
Lin Fang sat at her computer, her eyes glued to the whiteboard. With every complete algebraic expression Chen Zhuo wrote, she would rapidly deconstruct it in her mind and transcode it, via the computer, into lines of low-level C code.
Whenever they encountered a logical leap that was too great, Zhang Yuan would slide his chair over, discuss it with Lin Fang in low voices, and finalize the transcoding format.
Chen Zhuo was up front making the bricks, and the two of them were behind him, laying the wall.
The first day, progress was smooth.
The conventional geometric surfaces were successfully mapped into simple polynomial coefficients. Watching the stable memory usage on the monitoring backend, Lin Fang let out a long sigh of relief.
The second day, then the third.
As the geometry of the train’s front became increasingly complex, the difficulty of the algebraic transformation began to multiply.
Chen Zhuo spent longer and longer standing in front of the whiteboard.
Sometimes, to derive a smooth transition for a boundary condition, he would stand there motionless for half an hour, leaving Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang with nothing but the sight of his back.
Zhang Yuan started losing his hair in clumps. Every time he ran a hand through his hair, he would come away with a few strands. He would sweep them to the corner of his desk and stare at them blankly.
The air in the lab grew fouler. The ashtray overflowed with crumpled paper balls. To stay awake, Zhang Yuan bought two large jars of instant coffee and started mixing it directly with cold water.
Then came the dawn of the sixth day.
The rhythm suddenly broke.
The chalk in Chen Zhuo’s hand stopped mid-air, hovering before an unclosed parenthesis.
On the whiteboard, the algebraic mapping for the complex fluid vortices at the train’s rear had come to a halt right here.
Chen Zhuo frowned.
He took half a step back, eyed the overall flow of the formula, then picked up the eraser and wiped away the last two lines he had written.
He tried a new approach, writing down a few new symbols.
Less than two minutes later, he stopped again.
Chen Zhuo sighed and picked up the eraser once more.
Zhang Yuan, sitting at his computer, sensed something was wrong. The sound of typing had long since ceased, and Lin Fang was also anxiously flexing her stiff wrists.
"What’s wrong?"
Zhang Yuan stood up and walked over to Chen Zhuo, looking at the spot on the whiteboard that had been wiped so many times it was turning gray.
Chen Zhuo turned, tossed the chalk into the tray, and dusted his hands.
"Zhang Yuan, this way’s a dead end."
Chen Zhuo’s voice sounded tired but remained calm.
Zhang Yuan’s heart sank like a stone.
"What do you mean, a dead end?" Zhang Yuan stared at the whiteboard. "Hasn’t it been going smoothly? The memory isn’t even close to overflowing."
Chen Zhuo pointed to the spot where he had gotten stuck.
"The streamlining on the front of the train is all regular, so the mapping of the algebraic variety is smooth. But at the tail, fluid separation produces extremely complex shedding vortices. To perfectly map this topological structure into algebraic space, we’re missing a rigorous boundary homology proof right here."
Chen Zhuo looked at Zhang Yuan.
"Mathematically, this is an unresolved Singularity. My chain of logic is broken."
A dead silence fell over the lab.
Only the hum of the server fans could be heard.
"Broken..."
Zhang Yuan repeated blankly, his eyes losing focus.
He turned to look at the calendar on the desk. Today was already the sixth day. At most, they had less than three days left before their time slot at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Supercomputing Center began.
If the underlying algorithm was stuck here, all their previous effort would be for nothing.
Zhang Yuan suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe.
He grabbed his hair, spun around twice on the spot, and kicked the nearby wastepaper basket.
Crumpled paper balls scattered across the floor.
"Chen Zhuo, just think! Try again!"
Zhang Yuan’s voice trembled, his eyes alarmingly red.
"You’re the genius, think! We don’t have time to go through the literature! My God, at this point, I’d be fine if you just made up a proof!"
Lin Fang, still in her chair, lowered her head.
She knew that asking a mathematician to invent a theory on the spot was, in itself, the raving of a madman.
Chen Zhuo was not infected by Zhang Yuan’s frantic energy.
He quietly watched Zhang Yuan pace the lab like a caged animal, waiting for him to finish kicking the wastebasket and vent his frustration.
"Pulling your hair out won’t solve the equation, Zhang Yuan."
Chen Zhuo’s tone was gentle, carrying even a hint of his usual dry humor.
Zhang Yuan stopped and stared blankly at Chen Zhuo.
"If you were at the School of Mathematics and ran into a dead-end Singularity like this, what would Professor Li Jianming have you do?"
Zhang Yuan asked, his voice weak.
"First, we’d discuss it. If that yielded no results, he’d have me lock this whiteboard away."
Chen Zhuo turned back to the formulas.
"Then I’d go to the library and read for half a year. Or find someone who knows."
Zhang Yuan gave a bitter laugh and slumped into a chair.
"Half a year... Dean Fang can’t even wait three more days in the Capital City."
Chen Zhuo walked back to the whiteboard and picked up the broken piece of chalk again.
"That’s the School of Mathematics’ way of doing things," Chen Zhuo said.

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