Chapter 238: Isolated Terminals and Gray-Scale Testing

At 1:45 in the afternoon, the air-conditioning in the isolated machine room was set painfully low. Dry cold air poured from the vent and raised a fine layer of chill along the exposed skin of Lin Chen's neck. He sat in front of the terminal, the already-functional static interface glowing on the screen. With his hands resting on the keyboard, he could feel the faint wear along the edges of the keycaps with his fingertips. A dull pain throbbed in his left ankle, like a rusted hinge being forced to turn; every pulse tugged at his Achilles tendon. He didn't rub it. He only shifted half an inch of his weight onto his right foot, letting the tread of his rubber sole bite into the floor again. Su Man stood half a step behind him, holding a printed operations flowchart and a paper logbook. Neither of them spoke. The air was heavy with the scorched smell peculiar to old machines shedding heat, mixed with the disinfectant odor that lingered year-round in hospital corridors, pressing down on the lungs.

At exactly two o'clock, footsteps in leather shoes sounded outside the door, steady and restrained in that distinctly bureaucratic way. Director Chen from the Information Department pushed the door open. Behind him came the vice president and two clerks from the hospital affairs committee. The vice president was in his early fifties, hair combed with meticulous care. His gaze swept over the terminal and the shockproof case on the table. Without bothering with pleasantries, he pulled out a chair and sat down. "Begin. We only care about results, not concepts."

Lin Chen nodded and double-clicked the desktop icon. The pythonw host process started; a black box flashed and disappeared, and the main interface began to load. When the progress bar reached eighty percent, the GPU fan suddenly spun up, emitting a faint hum. He kept his eyes on the VRAM usage curve in Task Manager: 2.8G out of 3G. Right at the threshold. He switched in advance to the downgrade strategy, offloading the non-core feature extraction module from the GPU to the CPU. The VRAM curve dropped back and stabilized at 2.4G. The interface fully unfolded. On the left was the raw medical-record text input box; on the right was the structured output panel. Lin Chen imported a de-identified historical case file and clicked "Parse."

A spinning loading icon appeared in the center of the screen. Three seconds. Five seconds. Eight seconds. Lin Chen kept his breathing level. He knew that in those eight seconds, the model was performing feature alignment, entity extraction, and logical verification in an offline environment. There was no cloud compute to fall back on—everything depended on that aging GTX 1060 holding the line by itself. On the ninth second, results began appearing line by line in the panel on the right. Chief complaint, present illness history, past medical history, medication record—the fields were complete, the confidence markings clear. No garbled text, no heap of hallucinated nonsense. Su Man opened the logbook and quickly checked the key-field match rate. Ninety-two point four percent. It passed.

The vice president leaned forward, eyes fixed on the screen. "What's the latency in an offline state?"

"Average response time is 4.2 seconds, with a peak of six," Lin Chen replied. His voice wasn't loud, but each word was crisp. "Limited by local VRAM, batch processing beyond fifty records triggers a CPU fallback, and latency stretches to eight to ten seconds. But the core diagnostic logic does not degrade."

"How is the data stored?" one of the hospital affairs clerks cut in, tapping the tip of the pen against the notebook.

"In a local encrypted sandbox. Cache is automatically wiped after the demo ends. Nothing is written to disk, nothing connects to the external network. All logs can be exported as read-only PDFs." Lin Chen opened the log module and displayed the encrypted path and wipe command.

The vice president fell silent for a few seconds, lightly tapping the tabletop twice with his fingers. "The accuracy looks decent. But a hospital isn't a laboratory. How does your system integrate with our existing HIS? Who handles the interface work? Who's responsible for data cleaning? Our Information Department only has three people. We don't have the manpower to babysit secondary development for you."

"We provide a standard RESTful API and middleware scripts," Su Man answered evenly. "In the early stage, our team will be on site to do the data mapping. The cleaning rules will be customized according to the hospital's standards. The interface documentation and test cases are already packaged on the USB drive. During the on-site period, all debugging work will be handled by us and won't consume any of the hospital's manpower."

Director Chen pushed up his glasses and pulled out the configuration sheet. "Our intranet security policy is strict. This startup method of yours that bypasses signature verification may not pass compliance review. It would need a special approval process. And if a third-party audit finds an unauthorized process, who takes the blame?"

"We can cooperate on code signing," Lin Chen said. "The demo version uses temporary handling only to remain compatible with the old environment. Before formal deployment, we'll submit the full source code and a third-party security audit report. We'll cover the cost of the signing certificate. The process whitelist can be filed in advance, and we accept full monitoring from the hospital."

The vice president stood up, walked to the terminal, and looked over the output once more. He neither smiled nor frowned, only gave a small nod. "Start with a gray-scale pilot in two wards. Thirty days. The data doesn't leave the hospital, and responsibility stays with you. If there's even one serious misjudgment or one data leak during the pilot, the contract is terminated immediately and the final payment is forfeited in full. If you agree, have legal send the agreement over tomorrow."

"Agreed," Lin Chen said.

"Good." The vice president turned and headed for the door. "Director Chen, take them to sign out their visitor passes. I've got another meeting this afternoon."

The door shut. The machine room was left with nothing but the low hum of the servers. Lin Chen leaned back in the chair and let out a long breath. The tension in his neck and shoulders released all at once, and the pain in his left foot rose back up like reefs exposed by a retreating tide—sharp and undeniable. He glanced down at his shoelaces. They were tied too tight, leaving red marks across the top of his foot. Slowly, he loosened them by half a notch. Su Man tucked the paper logbook into her backpack with brisk, efficient movements. "The VRAM margin was too narrow. Next time we'll need to prune another fifteen percent off the model."

"Pruning will hurt long-text recall," Lin Chen said. "Let's get the workflow running first. During the pilot we'll tune it with real data."

He stood up and packed the shockproof case. The blue USB drive was taken back by an engineer from the Information Department and formatted in front of them. The screen returned to its default blue-gray desktop. Every trace had been erased, as if nothing had happened. But Lin Chen knew the thirty-day countdown had already begun.

When they stepped out of the administrative building, the afternoon sunlight was almost glaring. Lin Chen narrowed his eyes and limped slightly as he descended the steps. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out, and the screen lit up. It wasn't the agreement from legal. It was a text message from an unknown number:

President Lin, your company's submitted offline AI medical-record parsing solution has been copied to the Municipal Health Commission Information Center. Also, competitor "Zhiyi Cloud" won the comparable project at Municipal Second Hospital today with a bid thirty percent lower. Please take note.

Lin Chen stared at the line of text, his thumb hovering over the screen. Wind moved through the buildings, stirring the fallen leaves on the ground. He didn't reply. He only locked the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. Su Man, walking half a step ahead, looked back at him. "What is it?"

"Nothing," Lin Chen said. "Let's go back and revise the code. Thirty days is enough to run the Second Hospital's interface too."

He quickened his pace, planting his right foot firmly and touching down lightly on the left. Dust rose beneath his soles and settled again. The road ahead was long, but the direction was clear.