Chapter 210: Markers and Milestones

He didn’t light the cigarette. Lin Chen held it between his fingers, turned the plastic lighter halfway around in his palm, then slipped it back into his pocket. The motion-sensor light in the corridor had gone out; he stamped his right foot, and it flickered back on, a harsh white glow spilling across the terrazzo floor and picking out the dust on the soles of his shoes. He lowered his head and looked at his phone screen. Old Zhao’s chat window was still resting on last night’s message: “We have compliance credentials. Billing is by node.”

His thumb hovered above the keyboard. He couldn’t just ask for a price. He had to break down the requirements into modules the other party could evaluate. He opened a memo and typed them out one by one:

1. Initial requirement: de-identification and cleansing of medical texts, average 5,000 entries per day, peak 20,000. 2. Environment requirements: Ubuntu 14.04, Docker container isolation, each node must have 16 GB VRAM, support for a CUDA 7.0 base environment. 3. Network: intranet tunneling, data must not leave the domain, localized storage. 4. Settlement: tiered pricing based on actual GPU runtime, first-month trial period settled at 70%. 5. Breach terms: if a node is down for over 2 hours, that day’s fee is waived; if our scripts cause excessive resource usage, we make up the difference at market rate.

He checked it over once. The logic was airtight, the responsibilities balanced. He copied the text and pasted it into the chat box, then added one more line at the end:

“Brother Zhao, I’ll bring my own scripts and won’t touch the underlying drivers. I can pay the initial deposit. If this works, I’ll bring the test environment over and run it through. Would tomorrow afternoon be convenient for you?”

He hit send.

The screen dimmed. He leaned against the wall, and the numbness in his left foot crept upward along his calf, like a layer of soaked cotton wrapped around the bone. He shifted his weight, raising his right heel slightly to ease the pull on his Achilles tendon. From the far end of the corridor came the sound of cart wheels grinding over the floor tiles. An orderly was pushing the breakfast cart toward him, stainless-steel trays clinking with a clear metallic chime. Seven-thirty. It was time for the dressing change in the ward.

He pushed open the door. Wang Guiying was wiping Xiaoman’s face with warm water. She had wrung the towel nearly dry, and her movements were so gentle it was as if she feared she might break him. Xiaoman was still asleep, his breathing steady, but the dark shadows beneath his eyes had not faded. The monitor traced a regular waveform, his blood oxygen holding at 94.

Lin Chen went to the billing window, took the three thousand yuan that had just come in, added it to the four thousand two hundred already on his card, and swiped the POS machine. The receipt slid out, and he checked the amount carefully: 6,800. The remaining balance was 417.6. Factoring in the deposit he still had to reserve for Old Zhao, his cash flow was stretched taut as a wire. It could not break.

Back at his seat, he opened his laptop. The screen lit up; the Excel spreadsheet was already prepared. He created a new sheet and named it “MVP_Cash Flow.” Columns: Date, Income Item, Expense Item, Node Rental Fee, Medication Costs, Server Depreciation, Redundancy Buffer. He keyed in the numbers. Old Zhao’s quote would most likely fall somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five yuan an hour. At an average of eight hours a day, a single node would cost roughly 3,600 to 7,200 a month. If the script was optimized properly and cleansing efficiency rose to 1,200 entries an hour, then 5,000 entries would take only 4.2 hours. The costs would be manageable.

But that depended on solving the script’s concurrency and memory-leak problems. V2.0 wasn’t fault-tolerant enough. V3.0 still wasn’t fully wrapped.

He pulled up the code editor. The cursor blinked on the line class DataCleaner:. He needed to bundle the logging module, exception handling, and xlrd integration together into a Docker image that could run independently. His foot injury wouldn’t allow him to stay seated for too long. He set a Pomodoro timer: twenty-five minutes coding, five minutes standing stretch. He couldn’t put weight on his left foot, so he braced himself against the wall and did single-leg calf raises. His muscles throbbed, but the faster blood flow eased the numbness a little.

Director Li’s bet-on-performance agreement ran through his head again. If he signed, the next six months would be chained to KPIs—overtime every night until the early hours, chasing a promotion, chasing the year-end bonus. But Xiaoman’s illness would not wait. The epileptic episodes were coming more and more often. MRI scans, genetic testing, targeted medication—every last item was a money-eating beast. Working for wages moved at a linear pace. Medical expenses climbed exponentially. Trying to fight an exponential drain with linear income—sooner or later, the whole thing would collapse.

He opened his notebook of mistakes. The edges of the paper were already curled. On a fresh page he wrote:

“Path: leave salaried employment and build an independent data-cleansing pipeline. Risks: computing-cost pressure / script stability / compliance review. Countermeasures: use project-delivery bonus to cover the first month of node rental; after the MVP is proven, take outside jobs. Bottom line: no black-market work, no gambling contracts, no break in cash flow.”

His pen paused.

He knew exactly what it meant. He would be giving up the social insurance, housing fund, and stable promotion track of a major company to walk a road no one had paved. But if he stayed, he would only be spending his health and time filling in numbers on someone else’s reports while watching his brother’s life drain away bit by bit on a monitor. There was no right or wrong choice—only cost. He chose the cheaper one.

One in the afternoon. The code packaging was seventy percent complete. The logging module was running, but xlrd’s memory usage spiked when reading large files. He added chunked reading and forced garbage collection, pressing it back under the safe threshold. His left foot began to cramp. He bit his lower lip and made no sound.

Wang Guiying brought over a bowl of clear-broth noodles and set it on the table. “Eat something,” she said softly, her voice rough with the strain of a sleepless night.

“Mom, go lie down for a while.” Lin Chen didn’t look up. “I’ll watch Xiaoman.”

Wang Guiying didn’t move. She only looked at the code on his screen. She couldn’t understand the English letters and symbols, but she knew her son was wearing himself out.

“Don’t push yourself too hard,” she said. “As for money, we’ll take it one step at a time.”

“Mm.” Lin Chen answered absently. Steam from the noodles blurred the edge of the screen. He took a few quick bites, then put the chopsticks down. Time was not going to wait for him.

Three forty in the afternoon. His phone vibrated.

Not Director Li. Old Zhao.

He opened the message. It was only one line:

“You can rent the node. But you’ll have to bring your test script over and make it run. Tomorrow, three p.m., West Suburb server room. Don’t be late. Deposit two thousand first.”

Lin Chen stared at the screen.

The West Suburb server room. Forty kilometers from downtown. With his injured foot, he couldn’t walk far. But tomorrow at three p.m. was the deadline. He had to get the node running and produce usable data before ten on Monday morning; only then could he put an alternative plan on the table at the performance-bet meeting.

He stood up. The moment his left foot touched the floor, a piercing pain drove straight through him. He took a deep breath, stuffed the laptop into his backpack, and checked the USB drive, the test scripts, and the deposit transfer record. When he reached the door, he turned and looked back once at the hospital bed. Xiaoman shifted in his sleep, his breathing still even.

“Mom, I’m heading out,” he said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

The wind moved straight through the corridor. He took out his phone and hailed a ride.

Destination: West Suburb IDC Data Center.

The chime confirming the order rang out like a starter’s pistol.

The next mark on the scale had already been drawn. All that remained was to set the pen down.