Chapter 225: Anchors and Currents

The corridor of the administration building was quieter than the outpatient clinic. Where the wall paint had peeled, a faded notice about “Medical Insurance Settlement Instructions” had been pasted up, its corners already curling. Lin Chen sat on a plastic row chair with a referral form, a family-member informed consent form, and a deposit payment voucher spread across his knees. A dull pain came from his left ankle, like a rusted needle slowly stirring between the seams of the bone. He did not move. He only stared at the electronic display above the payment window. The numbers ticked: 14:32. Three hours and twenty-eight minutes until closing time. Twenty thousand yuan had to arrive before this window shut.

He called Old Zhao. The phone rang four times before it connected. In the background were the sounds of keyboards clacking and the faint murmur of voices in a conference room. “Engineer Lin.” Old Zhao’s voice carried its habitual exhaustion. “I’ve looked over the demo environment. The benchmark score is four points higher than last week, but memory usage is still on the high side. The client’s technical department is asking whether it can be pushed below eight hundred megabytes.”

Lin Chen opened his error notebook, his fingertip sliding over the “12% loss” he had written the night before. “It can. But the underlying cache pool will need to be rewritten. I’ll get you a patch before close of business today. Also, about the final payment.” His tone was steady, without a rise or fall. “Article Three of the contract states that forty percent is to be paid after acceptance of the demo environment. The environment has already been locked down. I sent the logs and performance report to your email last night. Can finance put it through today?”

The other end of the line went silent for a few seconds. Old Zhao sighed. “Lin Chen, it’s not that I’m not pushing. The client is using a corporate account, and the process is stuck at legal review. Their legal department put three question marks next to that additional clause of yours about ‘joint ownership of intellectual property.’ Could you withdraw it first? I can advance part of the final payment to you personally for emergencies.”

Lin Chen’s gaze fell on the words “special access channel” on the referral form. The paper was very thin, the creases already fuzzy. “President Zhao, that clause can’t be withdrawn. The underlying code is my livelihood. Break the rice bowl, and no one will handle follow-up maintenance. You can tell the client that intellectual property is a technical bottom line; the right of use has already been transferred. As for the final payment,” he paused, “I need fifteen thousand in my account before close of business today. The remaining five thousand can follow the original contract milestone. If the process can’t be completed today, the access key for the demo environment will automatically expire at eight tomorrow morning. It’s not a threat. It’s a system security policy.”

Old Zhao did not refute him immediately. The keyboard sounds stopped. “You little brat… Fine. I’ll speak to finance and have them expedite it. Fifteen thousand, in your account before five this afternoon. Don’t touch the key. The client wants to see the real-time topology tomorrow.”

“Received.” Lin Chen hung up. No extra words. He closed the error notebook and stood, walking toward the payment window. When his left foot touched the floor, his knee went slightly weak. He braced one hand against the edge of the counter and steadied himself. The clerk behind the window did not even raise her head as she handed out a form. “Family member’s signature and fingerprint. Deposit is twenty thousand, card or transfer. No refunds or exchanges for the special access channel. Read it clearly yourself.”

He checked each item one by one. Amount, receiving account, department, patient name. The pen tip moved over the paper with a faint scratching sound. After he pressed his fingerprint, red ink stained the pad of his thumb; he pulled out a tissue and wiped it away. When the procedure was finished, it was like completing the disassembly and reassembly of a precision instrument. There was no emotional fluctuation, only confirmation of each step.

Ten minutes to five. His phone vibrated with a bank text message: “Your account ending in 7742 has received RMB 15,000.00.” The balance instantly became 15035.3. He turned into the stairwell to avoid the disinfectant smell in the corridor. The steps were cold. He sat on the third one and opened his computer. Su Man’s USB drive went into the USB port. The test dataset loaded. A green cursor blinked in the terminal window.

He entered the command: python run_pipeline.py --mode=prod --dataset=dicom_test_v3 Enter. The fan noise abruptly rose. Logs began scrolling across the screen. [INFO] Parsing DICOM header... [WARN] Non-standard tag 0x0029,0x1001 skipped. [INFO] Memory pool allocated: 780MB.

The progress bar advanced slowly. Lin Chen stared at the memory curve. The eight-hundred-megabyte target Old Zhao mentioned—he had actually already brought it down to eight hundred and twenty the night before. But sequence reconstruction for medical imaging required temporary cache. Forcing it down to the line would cause GC to trigger frequently and slow the first-screen render. He brought up the performance profiler and found the allocation logic for the cache pool. The code was not bloated; the preloading strategy was too aggressive. He changed “full preload” to “lazy loading on demand” and added an asynchronous queue to the parser. The change was only seventeen lines. Save. Rerun.

The logs scrolled again. [INFO] Memory pool allocated: 765MB. [INFO] First render: 1.8s. [SUCCESS] Pipeline completed. He took a screenshot, packaged the logs and performance report, and sent them to Su Man. Attached note: “Cache strategy optimized. Memory 765M, first screen 1.8s. Meets demo standards. Send me the draft agreement.”

Sent. He leaned back against the stairwell wall and closed his eyes. The pain in his left foot spread from his ankle to his calf, and the muscle jerked once beyond his control. He reached down and pressed it, his fingertip feeling the tendons beneath the skin pulsing and twitching. His breathing slowed. He counted his own heartbeats, waiting for the spasm to pass. The stairwell had no windows, only the emergency exit sign giving off a ghostly green glow. The air smelled of dust and old cement. He was used to that smell. It made a person clear-headed.

At five forty-five, he returned to the administration building and paid the twenty-thousand-yuan deposit into the designated account. The POS machine spat out a receipt. He carefully checked the amount and the recipient, folded it, and placed it in his inner pocket. The referral form was stamped, and the nurses’ station registered the family information. He pushed open the ward door. Xiaoman was asleep, breathing evenly. The picture book on the bedside table lay open; on the newest page, half a star had been drawn, its lines a little shaky. Lin Chen pulled over a chair and sat down without turning on the light. The city lights seeped in through the window, cutting a boundary between brightness and shadow across the floor.

He took out his phone. Su Man’s reply had arrived: “The agreement has been sent to your email. Legal added non-compete and exclusivity clauses. Take a look. Also, the Provincial Hospital just synced their requirements. Tomorrow morning at nine, they want to run the first batch of real case data. The format is a private protocol; the parser needs to be adapted. Can you produce a patch tonight?”

Lin Chen opened the attachment. The PDF loaded slowly. He scanned the clauses one by one. Two years of non-compete, with exclusivity limited to the “medical imaging AI preprocessing track.” Reasonable, but harsh. He turned to the last page, where the signature field was blank. He picked up his pen and wrote in the error notebook: “Article 225: An agreement is a shield, and also a lock. Once signed, the cash flow during the exclusivity period must be endured. If not signed, the window closes. The choice is not in the clauses, but in delivery speed.”

He replied to Su Man: “The clauses can be signed. But the exclusivity period needs an advance payment to cover basic operations and maintenance costs. Private protocol adaptation: test version tonight. Interface documentation before eight tomorrow morning.” Su Man replied in seconds: “Advance payment will go through special approval and arrive tomorrow. I’ll send you the adaptation documentation. Lin Chen, this isn’t a demo. It’s real combat. The Provincial Hospital’s equipment is old, and the data is filthy. Don’t build fault tolerance to internet standards. Build it to the clinical bottom line.”

Lin Chen stared at the screen. Clinical bottom line. Four words, heavier than any technical document. He closed the computer and put away the USB drive. When he stood, his left foot had gone completely numb. He could only put all his weight on his right leg and slowly move out of the ward.

The vending machine at the end of the corridor shone with cold light. He bought a bottle of mineral water, twisted it open, and took a sip. The water was cold, sliding down his esophagus and pressing down the burning in his stomach. His phone vibrated again. It was not Su Man, and not Old Zhao. It was a text message from an unfamiliar number: “Engineer Lin, Provincial Hospital Information Department. The parser probe you submitted triggered our intranet firewall. The logs show an unauthorized data callback request. Please explain the situation. If there is no reply before nine tomorrow morning, special access channel privileges will be suspended.”

Lin Chen stood where he was. Water droplets fell from the mouth of the bottle, striking the tile and breaking into several pieces. He lowered his head and looked at the phone screen. The text had been sent two minutes ago.

He opened the error notebook, the tip of his pen hovering over the paper. Beside the line whose ink had not yet dried, he slowly wrote: “Article 226: A firewall is not a wall, but a boundary. Cross the boundary, and it becomes an incident. Next step: check the probe logs and locate the source of the callback request. Before nine tomorrow morning, an explanation must be given.”

He closed the notebook and turned toward the elevator. The metal doors reflected his face, dark circles under his eyes, but his pupils were very bright. He knew tonight’s sleep would be cut to pieces again.