Chapter 170: Official Seal and Threshold

The bus lurched through the old quarter, and Lin Chen leaned against the plastic seat in the back row, the shockproof case laid across his knees. The swelling in his left ankle had already climbed into his calf. Every time the bus hit a speed bump, the fascia felt as if it were being scraped again and again with coarse sandpaper. He did not rub it. He only adjusted his breathing and shifted his weight onto his right leg. Outside the window, the shadows of the plane trees slid backward in a blur, like stretched strips of film. He closed his eyes and replayed the conversation in the provincial bureau conference room: the deputy director’s rhythm of tapping the table, the scratch of the recorder’s pen over the page, and that one sentence—run it for a full quarter, and if downtime drops by fifteen percent. The numbers were cold, but they were also the only pass he had.

By the time he got back to the single room he rented, it was already six in the evening. The room was less than ten square meters: a folding bed, a chipped desk, a secondhand monitor. He set the shockproof case on the floor and tended to his foot first. When he rolled up his trouser leg, the skin around his ankle was stretched shiny and tight, dark bruising spread underneath it. He soaked a towel in cold water and pressed it there for ten minutes. Only after the sharp sting eased a little did he spray on the medicated mist. The liquid seeped into his skin and brought a brief coolness. He opened his mistake notebook and wrote: 18:15 Soft-tissue contusion in ankle worsening. Ice compress effective. Must limit prolonged sitting; stand and move every forty-five minutes. The pen paused. He closed the notebook and switched on the computer.

The screen lit up, and the standard provincial template lay silently on the desktop. A Word document, Song typeface, small four-point, fixed line spacing. He had already filled in the first few pages with project background and technical route. Then his eyes moved to the third page, where two boldface fields stood like a pair of gates: Applicant Unit (official seal) and Signature of legal representative or authorized signatory. Blank. At present he existed only as an individual. No company, no corporate account, no tax registration. The system did not recognize lone-wolf heroics. It recognized only qualified entities.

He leaned back in his chair, fingers tapping the desk without thinking. Forging an official seal was a red line. If he was caught, not only would the pilot qualification be void, he might carry a criminal record for the rest of his life. Borrow one from the factory? Director Wu’s words still rang in his ears: “The factory doesn’t feed idle hands.” Old Li in the equipment section cared only about project settlement. He would never endorse an outside application. That left only one road: the university channel. The School of Computer Science at Provincial Institute of Technology had an office for industry-academia collaboration. Professor Zhou’s lab had provincial-level technology-transfer qualifications. If he could attach himself under the name of a “student innovation practice project” or a “laboratory industry partnership,” the problem of the official seal could be routed around. The price was that intellectual property ownership would have to be redrawn, profit distribution would have to follow the university’s rules, and he would have to accept the lab’s progress reviews.

There was no better choice. He opened the document and began polishing the application line by line. Technical language had to be translated into administrative language. He changed “sliding-window filtering” into “time-series-based smoothing of anomalous data,” and “offline caching mechanism” into “local data preservation plan for offline environments.” In the cost-estimate sheet, he listed hardware purchases, deployment labor, and quarterly maintenance fees, every item accurate down to the single digit. The financial-guarantee field he left blank for the moment; in the remarks section he wrote: Application intended through the green channel of a university technology-transfer center; financial procedures to be coordinated by the partner laboratory. The handwriting was neat and gave no extra explanations. He knew the reviewers looked only for a closed loop of logic, never for emotional setup.

At nine that night, the first draft of the document was finished. He saved it, exported a PDF, and renamed it: Provincial Smart Manufacturing Pilot Application_V1.0_Lin Chen.pdf. Then he opened the code editor and pulled up the source for V3.0. The class structure of the logging module had already been wrapped up, but when he simulated a high-concurrency data stream, he found the memory-usage curve beginning to creep upward after two hours of runtime. It was not data piling up. It was delayed garbage collection caused by circular references. He checked line by line and found, in the callback of the DataLogger class, a temporary dictionary reference that was never released. He added a del statement, explicitly triggered gc.collect(), and ran the stress test again. The memory curve settled back down smoothly. He appended a line to the version log: Fixed memory leak in V3.0 logging module. Four-hour stress test shows no overflow.

At eleven twenty, he opened his email and drafted a new message. Recipient: Professor Zhou. Attachments: the application PDF, a compressed archive of the V3.0 core code, and a summary of the field operation logs. The body had only three paragraphs: Professor Zhou, hello. The first draft of the provincial pilot application has been completed according to the standard template. As I do not have corporate qualifications as an individual, I would like to apply through the laboratory’s industry-academia channel, with the official seal and financial procedures coordinated by the school. The technical route and cost estimate are attached. If feasible, I can bring the full set of materials to the lab on Thursday for a report. In addition, V3.0 has fixed the memory leak in the caching module and can now connect to the data interface of the Yangtze River Delta project. Looking forward to your reply. He checked it three times for typos and attachment links, then clicked Send. The screen showed Delivered.

He closed the computer and leaned back in his chair. The room was quiet, disturbed only by the occasional rumble of trucks outside the window. His left foot had started aching dully again. He got up, poured himself a cup of warm water, and drank it slowly. He felt neither anxiety nor anticipation. He simply listed tomorrow’s tasks on a note: 1. Print three copies of the application; 2. Prepare the laboratory presentation PPT; 3. Confirm the field definitions in the Yangtze River Delta interface protocol. One thing at a time, one step after another. Since leaving Qingshi Village for the provincial capital, that was the only law of survival he had ever verified.

His phone screen suddenly lit up. It was not Professor Zhou. It was a number from Old Chen at the Equipment Division of the Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology. The message was brief: The template’s financial-guarantee clause has been routed through the university green channel. Mentor signature and a laboratory risk-sharing agreement are required (quarterly downtime reduction must reach at least 12%, otherwise the pilot will be terminated). Bring the full materials on Thursday. The interface protocol for the Yangtze River Delta project has been sent to your email as well; we’ll review it together on Thursday.

Lin Chen stared at the screen, thumb hovering over the keypad. A risk-sharing agreement. A tolerance line of twelve percent. He replied: Received. Materials are ready. I’ll be there on time Thursday. Sent. He set the phone back on the desk and got up to switch off the light. In the darkness, he slowly lay down, his left foot propped on a folded towel. Outside the window, the wind passed through the anti-theft bars with a faint hum. He closed his eyes, his breathing even. The next step was Thursday’s visit to the lab. And the threshold written into that risk-sharing agreement was already carved into his mind.