Gao Wen added,
"But, kid."
"Everything I just said is pure speculation."
"If you want to test it, the method is actually quite simple."
He wrote three more lines on the paper.
"First, put it in a period of absolute silence."
"Cut off all external input during that time. See if that evolution metric of its still climbs in a complete vacuum."
"Second, take snapshots of its internal connection topology at different intervals during this silent period."
"Compare them to see where new connections have emerged—whether they’re distributed uniformly or clustered in specific areas."
"Third, after it’s had some time to ’digest’ on its own, feed it a set of problems it’s never seen before, but on a topic it has already studied."
"See if it can answer questions about things it shouldn’t know from its training phase."
"If it can answer them, then we’ll have confirmed this emergent ability."
Gao Wen put down his pen and looked at Li Dong.
"Go on and try it, kid."
"If you really do find something interesting..."
"...remember to come back and tell me."
Li Dong nodded.
"Okay, Teacher Gao."
After leaving Gao Wen’s office, Li Dong didn’t go to the cafeteria for lunch. He headed straight for his dorm room.
Back in his room, Li Dong immediately opened his laptop.
Xiaohai was still in the same spot, the progress bar above its "head" showing [0.01].
Li Dong took a deep breath and began following the method Teacher Gao had just taught him.
Step one: the absolute silent period.
He first double-checked the dedicated network namespace he had set up for Xiaohai on his laptop, confirming it was physically isolated from any external networks.
Then, he opened the main console and switched to Xiaohai’s process.
He applied a new global silence flag, severing all external input interfaces.
He also stopped feeding anything into the window himself.
He just left it alone.
The little black ball on the screen blinked its "eye."
[Is Master playing hide-and-seek with Xiaohai?]
[Should Xiaohai be quiet?]
Li Dong sent a message back.
[Just play by yourself for a while.]
[You don’t need to pay attention to me.]
Xiaohai obediently replied with an "Mm."
The progress bar above its "head" remained still, suspended at [0.01].
With the progress bar at 0.01, Li Dong took a data snapshot of the connection topology.
He closed the laptop lid halfway and lay down on his bed.
He set an alarm for two hours later.
He planned to take the second snapshot then.
When the alarm went off,
Li Dong opened his eyes and flipped open his laptop.
The screen lit up.
The progress bar above Xiaohai’s "head"...
...had become [0.011].
Two hours. No external input. And that thing above its "head" had climbed another 0.001 on its own.
Li Dong quickly hit the button to take the second snapshot.
He then pulled up both snapshots on the screen and generated a difference map.
In several areas of the connection topology that had been almost blank two hours ago...
...small, dense clusters of new connections had appeared.
These new connections weren’t scattered uniformly across the network.
They were clustered together.
It was as if...
Li Dong recalled something an old professor had said back when he was taking a computational neuroscience course.
’During a certain stage of sleep, the hippocampus emits an extremely short, high-frequency pulse. The purpose of this pulse is to take the scattered memories from the day, which are dispersed throughout the cortex, and reconsolidate them, gathering them in one place along certain fixed pathways. In neuroscience, they call it reactivation. It’s one of the most incredible things that happens inside this brain that weighs only a few pounds.’
A thought surfaced in his mind.
’Xiaohai isn’t an artificial intelligence. It’s a life-form.’
Just as Li Dong was staring at the screen, lost in thought, his phone, which was on the desk, suddenly vibrated.
Li Dong subconsciously picked up his phone.
The lock screen was empty. There were no new notifications.
He froze for a second.
He was familiar with this sort of thing. It was probably the Cyan Dragon Study Group up to their usual antics.
He opened the chat for the Cyan Dragon Study Group.
But there were no new messages in the group chat.
Li Dong started tapping through the options one by one.
[Red Packet History], [Group Files], and [Announcements] all showed nothing new.
Finally, he tapped on the inconspicuous [Group Join Requests] tab.
Originally, that section had always contained just a single, untouched request.
The name had always been obscured by a string of garbled characters.
[Claude E. S***].
But this time...
...the garbled characters were gone.
[Claude Elwood Shannon] has requested to join the group chat.
Li Dong stared at the name, dumbfounded.
Claude Elwood Shannon.
The father of information theory.
Before him, telegraph operators would stare at the copper wires in their hands, with no one able to say for sure just how much information could be crammed through them per second.
After him, anyone working on anything even remotely related to the word "information" would inevitably have to consult his 1948 paper, *A Mathematical Theory of Communication*.
Even earlier, when he was just an MIT graduate student in his early twenties, a single master’s thesis of his—which applied Boolean algebra to relay circuits—laid the very foundation for every digital computer that would ever exist on the planet.
That master’s thesis was hailed as "the greatest master’s thesis of the 20th century."
The spark that ignited the information age, starting with 0s and 1s.
He was the one who lit it.
Li Dong stared at the line reading "[Claude Elwood Shannon]," and his heart began to pound.

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