Chapter 244: Seventy-Two Hours

The crisp clatter of keyboard keys echoed sharply in the office at two in the morning. Lin Chen hadn’t turned on the overhead lights, leaving only the cold glow of the monitor. The cursor pulsed in the terminal as he wrote a lightweight rule-matching engine. Without access to external knowledge base interfaces, he had to localize the drug interaction data. He pulled several publicly available drug leaflets and clinical guidelines from his hard drive, using a script to parse the unstructured text into key-value pairs. [Aspirin, Warfarin] -> Increased bleeding risk, [Cephalosporins, Alcohol] -> Disulfiram-like reaction. He entered them one by one, verified, and deduplicated. The screen’s blue light washed over his face, making the dark circles beneath his eyes look even deeper in the halo.

His left leg still felt like lead, a numbness creeping up from his calf. He nudged his chair back half an inch, planted his right foot firmly on the floor, and let his left foot rest suspended on a cardboard box. The box had been left over from last week’s server parts delivery; its hardboard edges were already frayed, pressed with shallow creases. He picked up the mug from the corner of his desk and took a sip of instant coffee that had long gone cold. The bitterness slid down his throat, triggering a faint cramp in his stomach. He was used to it. From hand-copying code in the university library to this very moment, his body had long learned how to allocate energy under extreme conditions. Pain and exhaustion were automatically downgraded by his brain to background processes, leaving the foreground exclusively for logic and parameters. Every forty minutes, he would stand up, grip the edge of the desk, and slowly work his ankle to coax the blood back into circulation. The movements were slow, like a rusted machine recalibrating its gears.

The prototype of the rule engine finally ran through at four in the morning. He wrote a simple test script and imported three hundred simulated prescriptions. The match rate hit eighty-two percent, missing compound preparations and discrepancies in brand names. Lin Chen rubbed the bridge of his nose and opened another terminal window. He needed to add an alias mapping layer. “Bayaspirin,” “enteric-coated aspirin”—all had to point to the standard generic name. The logic of data cleaning was exactly the same as ten years ago, when he’d cleaned spreadsheets for Old Zhao in Qingshi Village. Only the tools had shifted from Python to Java, and the dataset had grown from eight thousand to thirty thousand records. The underlying principle hadn’t changed: dirty data always outnumbered clean data, and fault tolerance determined life or death. He opened the digital error notebook that had accompanied him for years, created a new tag: Drug Mapping - Boundary Conditions, and logged the missed entries one by one, noting the causes and drafting fixes. Break down the steps, execute, verify. There were no shortcuts. In the code comments, he typed a single line: // Fallback strategy: return empty array on rule miss, do not block main flow.

At seven in the morning, Su Man pushed the door open, carrying two convenience store rice balls. She set one on the corner of Lin Chen’s desk without a word, pulled over a folding chair, and began cross-checking the network latency logs for the demo environment. The curves on the screen looked like an electrocardiogram, punctuated by occasional sharp spikes. “The hospital’s intranet is doing traffic shaping,” she said, pointing at the logs, her voice raspy from a sleepless night. “Once concurrency exceeds fifty, response times will drop above three hundred milliseconds. Your degradation switch needs to trigger earlier.”

Lin Chen nodded, tore open the rice ball wrapper, and took a bite. The cold, hard rice slowly softened in his mouth; the seaweed had gone limp. “Adjust the threshold to one hundred fifty,” he said. “The demo machine will only connect to the intranet, no external network. The local cache is enough to sustain a ten-minute presentation.” Su Man gave a soft “mm,” her fingers gliding quickly across the trackpad as she modified the configuration parameters. No superfluous words passed between them. That was the rhythm of a startup: lay the problem on the table, break it down, execute, close the loop. Emotion was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Outside the window, the sky gradually paled, the city’s outline sharpening through the morning fog. The low-frequency hum of the air conditioner’s outdoor unit filled the empty space in the room. The wall clock ticked steadily, its second hand overlapping with the keyboard clatter to form a mechanical rhythm.

By nine in the morning, the rule engine had completed its third iteration. Lin Chen bundled the alias mapping table with the core logic, compiled it into a dynamic library, replaced the old version, and restarted the service. A green [OK] popped up in the terminal. He imported the three sets of complex medical history data the hospital had leaked in advance. First case: hypertension combined with diabetes, with traditional Chinese medicine mixed into the medication list. The engine output a warning in zero point four seconds: [Glibenclamide, Ginkgo biloba extract] -> Compounded hypoglycemia risk. Second case: atrial fibrillation patient on long-term anticoagulation. The engine flagged it: [Amiodarone, Warfarin] -> INR value fluctuation. When the third dataset was imported, the progress bar froze. Lin Chen stared at the screen, his breathing slowing. The logs showed a field parsing failure. The raw data contained a mix of half-width and full-width dose units; mg had been typed as ｍｇ.

He pulled up a regular expression and added a preprocessing layer to convert full-width characters to half-width. He ran it again. The progress bar completed, and a warning popped up: [Digoxin, Verapamil] -> Bradycardia risk. All three passed. Lin Chen leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. Sunlight had now completely spilled past the blinds, slicing across the desk, dust motes drifting slowly in the beams. He checked the time: forty-eight hours until the demo. Technology held no miracles, only parameters and redundancy. He exported the test report and sent it to Su Man for backup. The folder contained iteration logs for three versions, tracing the path from crude hardcoding to the current modular structure. Every line of modification corresponded to an error and a retry. He closed the terminal and rubbed his stiff neck.

His phone vibrated. Old Chen had sent a photo. It showed the backs of the Zhiyi Cloud team debugging equipment in a hospital ward. Below the image was a line of text: Hospital office just notified: Wednesday’s demo is changed to a double-blind test. Patient data will be encrypted and distributed on-site, decrypted, and connected directly. Your environment must support an offline decryption module. Additionally, the hospital director will be bringing experts from the Provincial Drug Administration to observe.

Lin Chen stared at the screen. Offline decryption meant the demo machine couldn’t connect to any external network; every dependency had to be localized. And with provincial regulatory experts in the room, the fault tolerance dropped straight to zero. He set the phone down and placed his fingers back on the keyboard. A sharp, needle-like pain shot through his left leg, piercing the nerve endings and racing up his Achilles tendon to his knee. He adjusted his posture, nudged the cardboard box back half an inch, pressed his right foot hard into the floor to steady his center of gravity, and watched the cursor blink on the screen once more. Seventy-two hours. Forty-six left. He created a new file and named it offline_decrypt_stub. The keyboard clatter resumed, dense and restrained, like a march with no retreat.