In that conference room in the Capital City.
The trade official from a certain Western country stood up from his chair, forced a smile at the person in charge across from him, and snatched the briefcase his secretary handed him, forgetting even the list placed in the center of the table.
The entourage behind him also rose.
The conference room door CLICKED shut.
The person in charge across the table picked up the list the other party had forgotten, slowly turning one page, then another.
Finally, he closed it calmly.
He casually fed it into the inconspicuous paper shredder by his feet.
Meanwhile, on the domestic internet.
Beneath the notice from National Power Equipment—a message of fewer than 800 characters—the comment count had just broken three million.
The two hashtag topics, [#NationalPowerQiming] and [#HuaWeiXinghe], were fixed at the top two spots on the trending list.
Someone wrote on their Moments feed.
"Thirty years."
"In these thirty years, our people have finally, slowly, straightened our backs."
The number of likes skyrocketed.
At the same time, over at the Wall Street Journal, an article originally scheduled as the headline for that day’s Asia edition was pulled at the last minute.
The article’s headline circulated for a while among a few domestic content aggregator accounts.
"Huaxia’s 28-nanometer Lithography Machine: A Promise That Will Never Be Kept"
The preview paragraphs clipped from beneath the article, along with the headline, were screenshotted by domestic netizens and posted to Weibo.
The top-voted reply was just one sentence.
"That headline from your editorial department is already out of date."
「Jinling.」
Li Dong had just walked out of a small diner.
Just now, he and Shen Che had a simple meal of roast duck noodles.
Neither of them spoke the entire time, just stared at the news on their phones.
When it was time to pay, Shen Che raised the small cup with the last of his tea and gently clinked it against Li Dong’s.
"Not bad."
Those were the only two words he said.
Li Dong gently returned the gesture.
Neither of them said anything more.
Just then, Li Dong’s phone vibrated.
It was a call from Gao Wen.
"Teacher Gao!"
"Kiddo."
"Did you see the news?"
Li Dong answered with a smile.
"I saw it, Teacher Gao."
On the other end of the line, Gao Wen let out a chuckle.
"You’re not mad that your teacher stole your credit, are you?"
Li Dong shook his head.
He knew Gao Wen couldn’t see the gesture, but he did it anyway.
He lowered his voice and said earnestly.
"Teacher Gao, I should be thanking you."
The line was silent for a second, then Gao Wen laughed.
"Alright, let’s not talk about that."
"I’m heading back to Yan University tomorrow."
"Are you on campus?"
Li Dong glanced at Shen Che across from him.
"Teacher Gao, I’m still in Jinling right now."
"I probably won’t be back for another two or three days."
Gao Wen hummed in agreement on the other end.
"Alright."
"I’ll be at Yan University for a while, then."
"Give me a call when you get back."
"Okay."
Gao Wen hung up.
The line from the announcement replayed in Li Dong’s mind: "the joint research team for high-performance computing and low-level algorithms, led by Professor Gao Wen."
Then he whispered.
"Thank you."
For the next two days, Shen Che took Li Dong to visit several related labs in Jinling.
On the morning of the third day, Shen Che personally saw Li Dong off at the high-speed rail station.
Li Dong boarded the train and found his window seat.
Outside the window, the city of Jinling slowly receded.
The train picked up speed.
「Just after Li Dong left Jinling.」
Zijin Mountain, in the small duty room at the end of the third-floor hallway of the Dark Matter Particle Detection Collaborative Innovation Center.
Researcher Zheng, who had just started his night shift, leaned toward the main screen with a cup of instant coffee in hand.
His job for the night was simple.
Take the new batch of data transmitted back from the Wukong Satellite today, load it into the routine inversion pipeline, run it overnight, and hand it off the next day.
This kind of work was done on a rotating basis within the team.
Everyone running the data shared the same expectation...
On most nights, this pipeline was a calm little river; no one expected it to make any waves.
But tonight, less than forty minutes into the run, the top-right corner of the main screen let out a soft BEEP.
A medium-sized red exclamation mark popped up.
[High-Energy Arm Event Rate Anomaly].
Researcher Zheng put down his coffee, clicked on the alert, and pulled up the corresponding energy band histogram.
On the graph, the tail end above a dozen or so TeV, which should have been completely empty, suddenly had several small, solitary bars.
They weren’t dense, nor did they form a clear pattern.
But there they stood, quietly.
In his three years of working shifts in this room, Researcher Zheng had never seen anything in that position.
Researcher Zheng stared at those little bars for a long time.
His first reaction was the same as anyone else in this line of work.
’Illusion Peak, of course.’
The team had seen plenty of spikes produced by the routine inversion in statistically sparse regions.
Out of ten such spikes, all ten would be false positives.
He subconsciously moved his mouse over the "Mark as False Signal" button.
But his finger paused.
He glanced at the auxiliary monitoring panel next to him.
High voltage stable, temperature stable, the silicon microstrips weren’t acting up.
The calorimeter’s energy leakage rate was also fine.
The various readout channels, each viewed individually, were all clean.
Researcher Zheng hesitated.
In the end, he still packaged the event data.
He moved it to the "Awaiting Re-verification" shared folder.
Then he casually wrote a line in the notes field.
[Suspected high-energy event, unusual amplitude.]
[High probability of being an Illusion Peak under routine inversion, but false signal determination is inconclusive. Re-verify after new algorithm is integrated.]

Comments

Loading...