Chapter 203: Twelve Hours of Jet Lag

At three in the morning, the boarding gate in Terminal 3 of the Capital Airport was already more than half empty. Lin Chen sat on a row of metal seats, his left foot propped on the handle of his carry-on, cushioned by the hem of his coat. After the anesthetic wore off, a dull pain began climbing up from his ankle, like a rusted saw rasping back and forth through the seams of his bones. He closed his eyes, adjusted his breathing, and focused on the static-laced hum of the boarding announcements.

Four hours of sleep wasn’t enough to beat jet lag. It was only enough to keep basic metabolism going. He took out his phone. The screen lit up, and pinned at the top of WeChat was his mother Wang Guiying’s profile picture. Her last message was from 21:15 the previous night: “The prescription’s signed off. Xiao Man took the medicine and is sleeping deeply. Go with peace of mind. I’m here at home.” He stared at the line for several seconds, but didn’t reply. Some things, once spoken across an ocean, only became useless weight. He switched to the work group chat. Director Li had sent a string of English abbreviations and a schedule, demanding a location sync within two hours of landing. Lin Chen replied with a simple “Received” and switched his phone to airplane mode.

Boarding. Sitting down. Fastening the seatbelt. The dull thud of the cabin door sealing shut cut off every signal from the ground. He leaned back and listened as the engine roar steadily climbed. When weightlessness hit, he instinctively clenched the armrest. His left foot spasmed uncontrollably. He bit down on his back teeth and made no sound. The business traveler in the row ahead had already put on noise-canceling headphones. A flight attendant pushed the meal cart past, bringing with it the smell of coffee and hot towels. Lin Chen asked for a cup of warm water and pulled out his error notebook from the side pocket of his backpack.

He flipped to a blank page and wrote: “2014.05.26 04:15 CA985 takeoff. Variables: jet lag / foot injury / remote monitoring. Solution: force a split schedule, fixed contact window every day at 22:00 (Beijing time). Technical observation priorities: compute scheduling / data pipeline / open-source ecosystem.” The tip of his pen paused. Then he added another line: “Bottom line: no overreach, no disconnect, no collapse.”

He closed the notebook and put on his eye mask. Sleep came in fragments, shredded into shallow stretches by turbulence and the restless turning of the passenger beside him. He dreamed of the disinfectant smell in the county hospital corridor, of the Excel sheet Old Zhao had sent twisting into gibberish across the screen, of the crooked little stars Xiao Man had drawn. When he woke, the light beyond the window was already blinding white. The announcement said they would soon be landing at San Francisco International Airport.

Immigration took nearly two hours. The customs officer stamped his passport with a crisp click. Lin Chen dragged his suitcase out of the terminal, and California sunlight hit him full on—dry, bright, salted faintly by the wind off the Pacific. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with air that felt entirely foreign. On the smooth concrete, the pain in his left foot seemed almost to float under the heat of the sun. He flagged down a taxi and gave the hotel address.

The driver was Latino, and lively Spanish pop played on the radio. Lin Chen leaned against the window, watching the palm trees and low detached houses go by. Unlike the crowded overpasses and glass curtain walls back home, the streets here felt almost too wide, too empty. He lowered his eyes to his watch: ten in the morning local time, two in the morning in Beijing. His body clock was tearing at him from the inside. A wave of acid rose in his stomach. He twisted open a bottle of mineral water and took two long swallows to suppress the nausea.

The hotel sat at the edge of Silicon Valley, a standard business room. He swiped in and, before anything else, pulled the blackout curtains shut and set the air conditioning to twenty-two degrees. When he took off his shoes and socks, his left ankle had swollen into a thick ring, the skin an unhealthy dark red. He dug out a bottle of Yunnan Baiyao spray and an elastic bandage from the bottom of his suitcase, sat on the edge of the bed, and wrapped it with practiced hands. The cold liquid seeped into his skin, bringing a brief numbness. Leaning against the headboard, he closed his eyes and rested for forty minutes. When the alarm vibrated, he got up on time, splashed his face with cold water, and changed into a clean shirt.

At one in the afternoon, he arrived at the visitor center of the campus exactly on schedule. Director Li’s local contact was a Chinese technical manager surnamed Chen, who spoke at high speed in a blur of Chinese and English. After less than five minutes of pleasantries, they went straight to business. Manager Chen handed him a temporary access card and an internal tour map.

“Headquarters opened three labs today: distributed computing, the central data platform, and the AI frontier group. Follow the route. Spend forty minutes at each stop. If you have questions, write them down—we’ll review tonight. Don’t take random photos, and don’t ask about sensitive architecture.” He paused, then added, “Director Li already mentioned your domestic workload is crushing. This trip is for you to observe more and talk less. Just bring back ideas that can actually land.”

“Understood.” Lin Chen took the badge. His fingertips brushed the cold plastic edge.

The first stop was the central data platform. Behind the enormous glass curtain wall stood rows upon rows of silent server racks. Indicator lights blinked at a steady rhythm, like some kind of precise mechanical heartbeat. Standing in the observation area, Lin Chen let his gaze sweep over the architectural diagram on the wall. Data cleansing, feature extraction, model training, service deployment—the entire chain automated end to end. There were no nodes requiring human intervention, only pipeline-style flow. He thought of the V3.0 scripts he’d stayed up all night to write, thought of all the dirty data his team had brute-forced through with regular expressions and manual rules. Here, data wasn’t being “cleaned.” It was being “fed.”

He took out his notebook and jotted quickly: “ETL fully managed, outliers isolated automatically, metadata version-controlled. Back home we’re still using scripts + manual verification. The gap isn’t in algorithms, it’s in the engineering foundation.” The pen scratched softly across the page. He wrote fast, his handwriting neat, stripped of excess emotion.

The second stop was the AI frontier group. The whiteboard at the end of the corridor was crammed with formulas and sketches. Several young researchers were gathered around a screen, discussing vanishing gradients and activation function optimization. Lin Chen stood outside the door and watched through the glass for a while. He didn’t interrupt. His gaze merely settled on a test machine in the corner. Open-source deep learning framework code was running across the screen, the logs scrolling at dizzying speed. He recognized several annotated lines—architectural ideas that had still been circulating in preprint papers just months ago.

He lowered his head and wrote in his error notebook: “Compute stacking + data scale = brute-force aesthetics. But engineering deployment demands compromise: latency, cost, interpretability. Domestic business scenarios are too fragmented for direct copying. Need subtraction, not duplication.”

By four in the afternoon, the tour was over. Lin Chen returned to the hotel, his left foot now so swollen he couldn’t fit back into his leather shoes. He changed into slippers, opened his laptop, and connected to the hotel Wi-Fi. The dizziness from the time difference began to rebound viciously, his temples throbbing. He forced himself to open the shared drive and started organizing the day’s notes—sorting the architecture photos, annotating them, extracting the modules that could be transplanted.

At seven in the evening—ten in the morning Beijing time—he called Wang Guiying.

The ringtone sounded three times before she answered. In the background were the noise of a hospital corridor and the rattle of cart wheels over tile.

“Mom.” Lin Chen’s voice was slightly hoarse. “How’s Xiao Man today?”

“He took the new medicine. No episode. He’s just sleeping a lot—you can’t wake him.” Wang Guiying’s tone was level, but the exhaustion underneath couldn’t be hidden. “The doctor said that’s a normal reaction. We observe for three days. Is everything going smoothly on your side?”

“Smooth enough. Saw a few labs. There are some ideas we can borrow.” Lin Chen paused. “Do we still have enough for the medication?”

“We do. Your dad settled the advance from the autumn harvest, and with what you sent last month, it’ll last us to the end of the month.” Wang Guiying paused for a moment. “Chen, don’t push yourself too hard. Does your foot still hurt?”

“Much better. I’m spraying the medicine on schedule.” He didn’t say more, only changed the subject. “Tomorrow I’ll be sitting in with the core group. Signal might be bad. If anything comes up, leave me a message. I’ll check at night.”

“Alright. Have you eaten?”

“Yeah. I’m hanging up.”

The call ended. The screen went dark. Lin Chen leaned back in his chair and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. The air conditioner hummed in a low drone. He opened the drawer, took out half a pack of compressed biscuits he’d brought from home, and bit into one. The dry crumbs caught in his throat. He drank some water and forced them down.

At nine that night, he received an email from Director Li. Attached was an internal technical briefing titled Q3 Business Line Architecture Adjustment Preview. He opened it and skimmed quickly. The core content could be reduced to a single line: “The traditional data-cleansing module will be phased out and fully integrated into AI-driven automated pipelines. The domestic team must complete migration of the tech stack before Q4, or face a 30% budget reduction.”

He stared at the line, his fingers frozen on the trackpad.

A 30% budget cut.

That meant layoffs. It meant project restructuring. It meant the old systems in his hands—the ones still being held together by manpower and scripts—were about to be thoroughly eliminated. And his foot injury, his younger brother’s medication, the domestic team’s handover—everything was pressing down on this exact point in time.

He closed the laptop and walked to the window. Pulling back the curtains, he looked out over the nightscape of Silicon Valley. In the distance, the traffic on Highway 101 flowed ceaselessly, taillights linked into a red river. No neon. No clamor. Only a cold, orderly calm. He took out his phone, opened the error-notebook app, and created a new entry:

“2014.05.26 21:30 Variables: accelerating technical iteration / budget cuts / worsening foot injury. Solution: abandon the obsession with manual cleansing; pivot to automated framework packaging. Time window: 45 days. Risks: team adaptation pain, pressure on the cash flow. Bottom line: no layoffs, preserve core business, leave a way out.”

When he finished writing, he turned off the screen. A sharp stab of pain shot through his left foot. He looked down and saw a dark stain seeping through the edge of the bandage. He didn’t deal with it. He only drew the curtains shut again and lay back down on the bed.

Tomorrow was the sit-in session. An architect from the core group would be sharing the scheduling logic for large-scale clusters. He needed to stay clear-headed. He needed to remember every parameter. He needed to turn that distant code into something that could actually run back home.

Outside the window, a night flight dragged its vapor trail across the sky, the engine noise low and lingering. Lin Chen closed his eyes, his breathing slowly evening out. The jet lag was still tearing at him, but he had long since learned how to find a foothold inside the cracks.

Under his pillow, the phone screen gave off a faint glow.

It was an automated push notification from the county hospital system: “Patient Lin Xing, nighttime monitor alarm: blood oxygen saturation briefly dropped to 88%. Auto-wake activated. Condition has stabilized. Family is hereby notified.”

He didn’t see it. Sleep had already dragged him down into deep water.

And twelve hours away, on the other side of the planet, the monitor’s steady beeping went on.