Chapter 141: Bad Sectors and Tick Marks

The time in the lower-right corner of the screen flipped to 03:14. In the silent main room, the whir of the case fan was magnified without mercy, like a tractor climbing a steep slope with too little oil. Lin Chen stared at the red error message rolling across the terminal: MemoryError. One hundred twenty-eight thousand four hundred rows of data, all loaded into memory at once. This secondhand laptop, with its 512 MB of RAM, simply could not take it.

He stopped typing. The swelling in his left knee had spread down into his calf. The skin was stretched tight and shiny; when he pressed a fingertip into it, the dent took a long time to spring back. He rolled up his pant leg and wrapped yesterday's frozen ice pack in a towel before pressing it to the joint. The piercing cold crept upward along his nerves, barely suppressing the dull pain lodged deep in the seam of the bone.

He could not brute-force this. A memory overflow meant the data-reading strategy itself was wrong. He deleted the loop logic he had just written and reopened his dog-eared copy of Core Python Programming. Stream processing. He switched to the csv module's iterator, reading in batches of five thousand rows. Read one batch, clean one batch, use a dictionary for temporary aggregation, write the result, then clear the memory. The amount of code tripled, but memory usage could be pushed back under the safety line. He typed: def chunk_aggregate(filepath, chunk_size=5000):. His fingers had gone stiff from hovering over the keyboard for so long, and his wrist joint gave a faint click. He rolled the wrist once, then kept going.

Outside the window, the sky shifted from pitch-black to gray-blue. From the tail end of the village came the first crow of a rooster. The script made it through the first sandbox test run. He gulped down half a cup of cold boiled water, and a wave of acid rose in his stomach. Thirty-five point three yuan had become eight hundred twenty-eight point three. That was only a number in the ledger. The real test was delivery. What Old Zhao wanted was not something that "ran," but something stable. Lin Chen added a logging module, writing each batch's processed row count, elapsed time, and number of anomalies into report.log. If something went wrong, he would be able to pinpoint the exact line. It was a fallback for himself, and a sign of seriousness for the client.

At 7:40 in the morning, the minibus lurched into the county seat. Lin Chen carried his computer bag on his back, not daring to put weight on his left leg, shifting all his balance onto his right leg and a hard wooden stick he had found as a crutch. The teahouse on the old street was not open yet, but Old Zhao was already sitting on a low stool outside, smoking. When he saw Lin Chen, he pinched out the cigarette, stood up, and moved aside from the doorway. "Come in. The boss is picking up the report at nine."

Lin Chen plugged the flash drive into Old Zhao's desktop computer. Ran the script. The progress bar crawled forward. Old Zhao stood beside him, saying nothing, just watching the screen. Ten minutes later, the terminal flashed: [INFO] Report generated successfully. Total rows: 128400. Old Zhao opened the resulting Excel file. Pivot tables, classified summaries, formatting alignment—everything exactly in place. He flipped through several sheets, then dragged all the way to the bottom and checked the week-over-week figures for several stores.

"Faster than the three people in the finance office," Old Zhao said, turning his head and flicking ash into an enamel mug. "The boss looked it over. No complaints. The monthly arrangement is set. Twelve hundred a month, delivered every Monday morning. Five hundred in advance, the rest settled at month-end. You in?"

Twelve hundred. In a county town in 2010, that was about a factory worker's monthly wage. Lin Chen did not nod right away. He looked at the log file on the screen. "If the source data has merged cells or hidden columns, the script will skip them and record it. The people entering the data on your end need to standardize the format. Otherwise, cleaning time will double, and the report will be distorted too."

Old Zhao laughed, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes bunching together. "You little bastard—setting rules before the work even starts. Fine. I'll tell the boss. I'll keep an eye on the data-entry side. Take the money." He counted out five red hundred-yuan bills from the drawer and pushed them across.

Lin Chen took them. His fingertips brushed the rough edges of the notes. He did not refuse. He put the money into his inner pocket. Added to the previous 828.3, his balance had broken fifteen hundred. The chronic tightness in his stomach finally eased. But he knew this was only the beginning. Twelve hundred bought his time and his skills, not freedom. He had to turn this process into something solid. Otherwise, when the data volume grew again next month, both his old laptop and his worn-out knee would give out.

When he stepped out of the teahouse, the sunlight was blinding. He did not head straight back to the village. He turned into the pharmacy beside the county hospital and bought two boxes of diclofenac sodium sustained-release tablets and a roll of elastic bandage. Then he went to the Xinhua Bookstore and picked up Practical Python Data Analysis and Advanced Excel Functions and VBA. When he checked out, the cashier glanced at the frayed edges of his computer bag but asked no questions.

The ride back to the village felt slower than the trip in. Under the medicine's effect, the numbness in his left knee had turned into a heavy, dulled ache. He sat in the last row of the minibus with the new books spread across his knees. The smell of fresh ink from the pages mixed with the gasoline in the carriage. As he watched the fields slide backward outside the window, he worked through his next move in his head. The machines at the internet café could not handle big data. The main room at home was too noisy; Xiaoman's coughs and his mother's footsteps would break his concentration. He needed a quiet desk, and a secondhand desktop machine capable of handling heavier computation. On the edge of the county seat, in the urban village, there were partitioned single rooms for one hundred fifty a month. One month's deposit and three months' rent: six hundred. Add the medicine and the books, and he still had nine hundred left. Enough to hold out for two months.

He took out his ledger, crossed out the old entry, and wrote:

August 10. Expenses: medicine 38, books 45, bus fare 6. Income: 500 (advance). Balance: 1539.3. Plan: rent a single room, buy a secondhand desktop.

The tip of the pen paused. He thought of Xiaoman's picture book, of the firewood by his mother's stove, of his father's silent cigarette butts. Money could buy medicine. It could buy time. But it could not buy peace. Once he stepped onto the road of technology, there would be no turning back. He had to move faster than time, faster than pain, faster than Old Zhao's patience.

By evening he was back in the main room. Wang Guiying was feeding Xiaoman his medicine. When she saw the medicine box in his hand, she paused for a moment. "You went to the county again? How's your leg?"

"I'm fine. Bought some medicine." Lin Chen set down his computer bag and plugged the laptop into the power strip. The fan suddenly let out a sharp scraping shriek, followed by a steady ka-da, ka-da of mechanical knocking. The hard-drive activity light began flashing wildly, and the screen froze solid. His heart clenched. He held down the power button to force a shutdown. When he started it again, the BIOS self-check passed, but the system froze once more as it tried to load. Bad sectors. After continuous heavy reads and writes, the aging drive head had finally given out.

He sat in the dark, listening to the hard drive's dying clicks. The source files for one hundred twenty-eight thousand rows of data, the source code for V3.0, the debugging records from the past half month—they were all on that drive.

There was no backup.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. A text message from an unfamiliar number:

"Student Lin Chen, the admission notice for the Provincial Institute of Technology School of Computer Science summer training camp has been issued. Please pay the 800-yuan training fee before August 15. Failure to do so will be treated as a withdrawal. Note: outstanding trainees may receive internal referrals to top-tier major tech firms."

He stared at the screen. The hard drive kept clicking.

Eight hundred yuan. The training camp. A referral to a major company.

He slowly stood up, walked to the water jar, and scooped out a ladle of cold water, pouring it over the burning-hot computer case. Beads of water slid down the metal shell and dripped onto the floor.

The road ahead was still long.

But half the staircase had suddenly broken away.

He dried his hands and went back to the table. From the drawer he pulled out a Phillips screwdriver. Twisted off the side panel. Dust burst into his face.

He had to save the data.

And he had to do it tonight.