After he finished writing, he stretched lazily.
’He grumbled to himself, ’My counterpart in the inversion must be running a fever again.’’
He didn’t dwell on it, closing his eyes to rest.
But what he didn’t know was that just as he placed the alert incident report in the shared folder...
...another new email had appeared in the left sidebar of the shared folder.
Sender: Yangbajing Cosmic Ray Observatory.
The content was only two lines long.
"Around 23:14 yesterday, Huaxia Time, a suspected co-directional anomalous event was detected."
"The energy band position shows a weak correlation with your center’s data from today. Please assist with cross-referencing."
The equipment at Yangbajing and the Wukong Satellite were two completely different systems.
The two systems were independent of each other and almost never happened to register the same data point.
But this time...
「Capital City.」
The sky was still light out when Li Dong left the high-speed rail station.
He first hailed a ride-share back to Yan University, tossed his luggage into his dorm room, and, without even washing his face, headed straight for the Science and Technology Teaching Building.
When Li Dong pushed open the door to Gao Wen’s office, Gao Wen was leaning back in his chair, on the phone.
His voice was low, and Li Dong couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like he was giving someone a version number for a piece of code.
He looked up, saw Li Dong, and nodded toward a chair.
Li Dong took the hint, pulled out the chair, and sat down.
Gao Wen murmured a few more "uh-huhs" before hanging up.
He set his phone on the desk and then said, seemingly out of the blue,
"Li Dong."
"There are some things you just need to know what’s what, and that’s enough."
"Don’t get involved with the rest. Understand?"
Li Dong nodded.
"Teacher Gao, I know."
"President Lin already spoke to me about it."
Gao Wen’s expression visibly relaxed when he heard this.
"That’s good."
"Right. What was it you wanted to ask me before?"
"I have plenty of time now."
Li Dong quickly took out the list of questions he’d been compiling for two months, placing his notes on the small coffee table between them.
He started with the first few.
He had a question about the version number for the boundary conditions of pulse-coding weights during the initialization phase. He had actually looked it up himself and had a rough idea of the answer, but he just wanted to confirm it with Gao Wen.
After listening, Gao Wen said, "Hmm," and then, in just a few sentences, cleared up the whole issue with the boundary conditions for him.
Li Dong checked it off in his notes.
He then brought up a couple of minor questions about numerical stability in the sparse-firing model, which Gao Wen also resolved in just a few words.
With each resolved question, Li Dong made another check mark.
When they got to the sixth item, Li Dong put down his pen.
He looked up.
"Teacher Gao, this next one... I’ve been mulling it over for a long time but just can’t figure it out."
Gao Wen raised an eyebrow.
"Let’s hear it."
Li Dong chose his words carefully.
He couldn’t just come out and talk about Xiaohai.
He could only strip the problem down to its barest essentials, framing it as a typical textbook "hypothetical."
"Teacher Gao, let’s say—hypothetically—that I have an SNN."
"After being fed an initial, fixed corpus, it never receives a single new line of data from any external source."
"According to the mainstream understanding in our field, its model parameters should remain static from that point on."
"But it didn’t stop."
"The metrics that represent ’internal evolution’ have climbed on their own."
"And this increase isn’t just noise."
"It corresponds to a genuine emergence of new, explainable abilities it didn’t have before."
"Teacher Gao, from a dynamics standpoint, how would you explain a situation like that?"
Gao Wen was silent for a good seven or eight seconds after he finished.
Then he looked up and stared at Li Dong for a long moment.
"Kid."
"This ’hypothetical’ of yours..."
"...is actually pretty interesting."
Li Dong’s stomach clenched.
He quickly affected a nonchalant expression, picking up the disposable paper cup from the table to take a sip of water.
Gao Wen didn’t press the issue. Instead, he began to speak slowly.
"If a situation like the one you’re describing were to actually happen, let me offer a personal theory."
Gao Wen reached out and drew a small, simple box on the blank sheet of paper in front of him.
"See, the current mainstream large models all follow the path of Transformers plus scaling."
"Their learning is confined to the training phase."
"Once training is complete, the weights are frozen, and the model is dead."
"During inference, not a single one of its parameters budges."
"So if you stop feeding it data, of course it stays put."
"But SNNs are different."
Gao Wen drew a curved arrow next to the box.
"At their core, SNNs are all about pulses, temporal sequencing, and synaptic plasticity."
"Those three elements are inherently dynamic."
"Even without new external data, as long as it’s still firing pulses, reordering temporal sequences, and making minor, local adjustments to its weights, it’s possible for it to... internally..."
He paused, choosing his next word carefully.
"...integrate some new connection patterns."
Li Dong’s heart skipped a beat.
He looked up.
"Teacher Gao, what you’re saying... it sounds a bit like what happens when people sleep, doesn’t it?"
Gao Wen let out a short laugh.
"Bingo."
"When a person sleeps, memories from the hippocampus are slowly consolidated and transferred to the neocortex."
"The scattered signals you receive during the day get organized into coherent threads."
"That’s why you can wake up in the morning and suddenly understand something that you couldn’t figure out the day before."
He looked at Li Dong.
"If that SNN of yours really works the way you described, then what it’s doing is, in essence, the same thing the human brain does."
"It’s sleeping."
"It’s organizing everything it took in during the day on its own."
Just as Li Dong was about to ask another question...

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