Chapter 229: Breakdown and Payment Collection

At 8:20 in the morning, Lin Chen woke before the alarm rang.

Gray-white light slipped through the gap in the curtains and fell across the error notebook spread open on his desk. The ink of entry No. 229, written the night before, had already dried. He slowly sat up, threw back the quilt, and when the sole of his left foot touched the floor, numbness wrapped around his ankle like a thick callus and crept an inch upward. He did not rub it or sigh. He went straight to the desk.

8:35. The computer booted. He logged into the work group. Su Man's avatar was lit.

He typed: "We'll take it. Budget: thirty-five thousand. Advance payment: seventeen thousand five hundred. Delivery period: fifteen days. I'll handle model training and delivery; you handle data-annotation coordination and contract payment flow. No chasing if overdue; service stops automatically on day twenty-one. Attached is Delivery Standard V1.0, including the defect-recognition threshold and false-positive-rate ceiling. I'll start after confirmation."

Sent. Three minutes later, Su Man replied: "Contract has gone through e-signing. The advance should arrive this afternoon. The annotation team enters at three. Watch your health. Don't force it."

Lin Chen replied with a single "Okay" and closed the chat window. He knew Su Man's "don't force it" came from concern, but at this stage concern could not solve a cash-flow gap. What he needed was definite incoming money and quantifiable delivery milestones.

9:00 sharp. He called Engineer Wang. It rang four times before connecting. In the background were the sounds of keyboards clacking and a printer running.

"Engineer Wang, this is Lin Chen. I'd like to ask about the process for the fast-track ethics approval."

"Engineer Lin." Wang's voice carried fatigue. "There is a fast track, but it has to go through an additional signature from the hospital academic committee. You need to provide a complete traceability report for the desensitized data, plus a clinical-necessity statement from the attending physician. Two weeks is the fastest."

Lin Chen picked up a pen and wrote down the key terms. "I can produce the traceability report. Which doctor needs to sign the clinical statement?"

"Director Li from cardiology. But he's in outpatient clinic this week and packed solid. You'd better prepare the materials and wait outside his office in person. Don't call. He won't be able to pick up."

"Understood. Thank you."

After hanging up, he opened the computer and pulled up the desensitized data directory he had organized the night before. The traceability report needed to record the acquisition device, desensitization algorithm version, and hash checksum for every image. He wrote an automation script, ran the logs once, and generated a PDF. It took forty-seven minutes.

9:30. The annotation team created a temporary group. The data package was unzipped: three hundred high-resolution images of industrial parts, with defect coordinates in JSON format. Lin Chen wrote a quick validation script and ran it. The terminal window threw red errors: seventeen images had out-of-bounds coordinates, and nine images had annotation categories inconsistent with the drawings.

He opened the error notebook to a new page. The pen tip came down: "No. 230: The quality of outsourced industrial-vision data is below expectations. The annotation team, rushing the schedule, has missed labels and mislabeled items. Training directly on it will cause model overfitting. Next step: write a cleaning script, remove abnormal samples, and repartition the training/validation sets. Estimated time: four hours."

He brewed a cup of strong tea. Tea stems floated on the surface. The cursor began blinking on the screen. Logs rolled through the terminal window. He checked the filtering logic line by line, tightened the tolerance for out-of-bounds coordinates from ±2 pixels to ±1, and realigned the category mapping table. His left foot twitched from time to time. He stood up, held the edge of the desk, took two steps to loosen the stiff joint, then sat back down.

12:40 noon. The takeout arrived: braised chicken with rice, fifteen yuan. He shoveled down two bites; it tasted like wax. His phone vibrated. A bank text message: "Your account ending in 8842 has received a transfer of 17,500.00 yuan."

The number jumped out at him. He took a screenshot and saved it to the "Cash Flow" folder. The gap in his ledger went from 180,000 to 162,500. A drop in the bucket, but water was finally flowing in. He continued tuning parameters. The first version of the model ran at 82.4% accuracy. The false-positive rate was high; it treated oil stains as scratches. He adjusted the data-augmentation strategy, adding Gaussian noise and random contrast perturbations to simulate real factory lighting. Version two: 86.7%. Version three: 89.1%. Close to the delivery line.

At two in the afternoon, he packed up the materials, printed the traceability report, put everything into a hard-shell folder, and went out on his crutch.

The hospital corridor was still crowded. The smell of disinfectant mixed with the scent of food from the end of the hallway. He found cardiology. Director Li's office door was half open. Someone inside was being seen. Lin Chen leaned against the wall and waited. Forty minutes. The door opened and the patient came out. He walked in and handed over the materials.

"Director Li, sorry to interrupt. We're working on medical-image analysis and need fast-track testing for the ethics approval. This is the desensitized-data traceability report and the clinical-necessity statement."

Director Li flipped through it, his brow tightening slightly. "The data desensitization is well done. But the clinical-necessity section is too technical. What the hospital wants is 'patient benefit' and 'controllable risk.' You need to translate algorithm accuracy into clinical indicators, such as 'shortens image-reading time by 30%' or 'reduces missed diagnoses.' Revise it and bring it back."

Lin Chen nodded. "Understood. I'll revise it tonight and deliver it first thing tomorrow morning."

"Good. Don't delay it."

Six in the evening. Back in the rental room, his leg had already swollen by a ring, and the trouser cuff had left a clear indentation. He filled a basin with cold water and iced it for twenty minutes. When the water warmed, he dried off and continued revising the report. He changed "model F1 score 0.89" to "assisted image-reading efficiency improves by 28%, with the false-negative rate reduced to 4.2%." He changed "convolution-layer parameter optimization" to "reduces the risk of repeated-scan radiation exposure." His wording shifted from code logic into clinical language. When he finished, he printed it.

At eight that night, Su Man sent a message: "The machinery plant is pushing for progress. They asked whether they can see the first demo tomorrow. Also, Old Zhao called this afternoon and asked whether the registration-certificate schedule can be moved up to January. I said the testing institute's slot is the bottleneck. He was silent for a moment, then said, 'Find a way yourselves. Hospital procurement won't wait.'"

Lin Chen stared at the screen. Old Zhao's pressure was also a signal. Cash flow and qualifications were both tightening. He opened the terminal and ran the final round of model validation. Accuracy: 90.3%. It passed.

He replied to Su Man: "Initial version available tomorrow at 10 a.m. For Old Zhao, I'll go to the testing institute tomorrow and see whether we can cut in. Also, the machinery-plant dataset included nonstandard parts. I've added a filtering layer and will run it once more before delivery tomorrow."

Sent. He closed the computer. Night settled outside the window. A dull pain began in his left foot, and he swallowed half a painkiller. The numbers in the ledger would not flatten themselves, but every incoming payment and every line of code was filling the cracks. Tomorrow he had to go to the testing institute, revise the ethics materials, and deliver the outsourced job. Time had been sliced into fragments, but he knew how to piece them together.

Before the phone screen went dark, one final message popped up. It was from Engineer Wang in the hospital information department: "Engineer Lin, I just asked the testing institute. There is indeed an expedited channel, but your legal representative needs to go in person with all original documents. Also, next Wednesday the Municipal Health Commission has a surprise inspection. You'd better prepare your system logs in advance. Don't let anything go wrong."

Lin Chen looked at the line. Surprise inspection. Original documents from the legal representative. He picked up the pen and began writing the opening of entry No. 231 in the error notebook. The pen tip paused for a moment, then came down.

"The rules are tightening. The window is shrinking. Next step: tomorrow at 9 a.m., take all materials to the testing institute. 2 p.m., deliver the machinery-plant initial version. Evening, revise the ethics report. Every action runs by the stopwatch. Back up inspection logs tonight; Su Man verifies access permissions."

He closed the notebook. Turned off the light. In the darkness, there was only the sound of breathing and the faint traffic in the distance. Tomorrow would be another day of breaking things down.