Chapter 245: Offline and Redundancy

The cursor blinked in the blank space beneath offline_decrypt_stub. Lin Chen didn’t start typing right away. He opened the system monitor first and looked over the demo laptop’s hardware specs: an eight-core processor, sixteen megabytes of memory, and a solid-state drive. The configuration wasn’t bad, but the hospital’s required offline decryption module had to load a full asymmetric cryptography library on top of the real-time inference engine. Memory usage would swallow more than half the machine in an instant. If data parsing and interface rendering ran at the same time, the odds of a crash were above sixty percent.

He created a new configuration file and lowered the decryption algorithm’s thread priority to the minimum while pushing data parsing to the highest priority. The demo wasn’t a stress test. He didn’t need full concurrency. He only had to get those three complex medical-history datasets through the system smoothly in front of the hospital director and the experts, and output the warnings. The rest could be left to redundancy.

Su Man was next door debugging the front end. She had not turned on the main light, leaving only a desk lamp, the room pressed down into dimness. The keyboard clicked from time to time, then fell silent. The two of them were separated by a two-meter aisle, like two conveyor belts running in parallel. Lin Chen dragged the compiled decryption library into the test environment and imported the encrypted sample data provided by the hospital. The progress bar crept forward. Ten percent, thirty, seventy. At eighty-five, the fan suddenly roared, and the screen stuttered for a second. A warning flashed in the log: Memory overflow risk, GC triggered frequently.

He stopped typing and rubbed his temples. The garbage collector was constantly cleaning up unreleased objects, dragging down the main thread. This wasn’t an algorithm problem. It was memory management. He pulled up the code and changed it so that the decrypted intermediate data would be written straight to a local temporary file instead of remaining in memory, then read back in after parsing was complete. Sacrifice a little disk I/O in exchange for memory stability. Technology choices were never about chasing the optimal solution; they were about finding the balance point where nothing crashed. He finished the change and recompiled. The progress bar moved again and this time climbed smoothly all the way to one hundred percent. The terminal flashed a green [DECRYPT OK].

Su Man turned around and handed him a cup of warm water. “I added a loading animation to the front-end page to cover the two-second delay during decryption. The hospital leadership won’t understand the code. They’ll only care whether the interface looks smooth.”

Lin Chen took the paper cup but didn’t drink. The warmth traveled through it into his palm, easing some of the stiffness in his fingers. “Two seconds is too long. Cut it to under one and a half. Drop the animation frame rate and use CSS hardware acceleration. The demo machine will only connect to the intranet, not the outside network. The local cache is enough to hold for ten minutes of presentation.”

“Got it.” Su Man turned back, her fingers moving rapidly across the trackpad.

Outside the window, the sky had gone fully dark. Neon from the city slipped through the blinds and cut several parallel bands of light across the floor. The air conditioner vent made a faint hissing sound. Lin Chen pulled his left foot out of the cardboard box. His ankle had swollen to a full ring, the skin flushed an unhealthy dark red. He pressed an ice pack against it, and the stabbing pain receded a little. The body was a consumable, but in these forty-eight hours it had to be maintained like a precision instrument. He set an alarm: every fifty minutes of work, he had to get up and walk for three. It wasn’t about wellness. It was to stop blood clots and total muscular lockup.

At one in the morning, the rule engine and the decryption module completed their joint debugging. Lin Chen imported the three complex medical-history datasets. The first—hypertension combined with diabetes—produced a warning in one point one seconds. The second, atrial fibrillation with anticoagulation, took one point three. The third had the largest volume of data, twelve kinds of Chinese and Western medicines mixed together with supplements. The progress bar reached halfway and the fan howled again. Lin Chen stared at the screen, his breathing slowing. The logs showed that the alias mapping table had triggered a circular reference while matching “Compound Licorice Tablets.” The fallback strategy kicked in and returned an empty array, but the main workflow still stalled for zero point eight seconds.

He opened the mapping table and manually cut the loop. He hard-coded “Compound Licorice Tablets” as a standalone rule. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. He ran it again. One point four seconds, and the warning appeared: [Glycyrrhizic acid, Spironolactone] -> Hyperkalemia risk. All three passed. Lin Chen leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. In his ears there was nothing but the steady sound of his own breathing. No cheering, no celebration. Just three green lines of log lying quietly in the terminal.

He opened his electronic mistake notebook and added a new record under the tag Drug Mapping - Boundary Conditions: Circular reference caused GC blocking. Fix: cut the loop with hard-coding + standalone rule. Note: prioritize stability in the demo environment; dependency tree must be refactored in production. Break the steps down, execute, verify. Ten years had passed, from Excel spreadsheets in Qingshi Village to the medical AI engine in front of him now, and the underlying logic had never changed. Dirty data would always outnumber clean data. Tolerance for error decided life and death.

His phone screen suddenly lit up. It wasn’t Old Chen, but Director Wang from the hospital IT department. The text message contained only one line: The hospital office will impose a full network lockdown at 8 a.m. tomorrow. All demo devices must be connected to the isolated intranet zone in advance and cut off from the external network. The server room air conditioning will be shut off overnight. Indoor temperature is expected to reach twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Please prepare your own cooling solution.

Lin Chen stared at the line. The network lockdown had been moved forward by ten hours. No air conditioning in the server room, twenty-eight degrees, and the laptop fan under full load would start throttling in less than half an hour. Throttling meant slower decryption, and slower decryption meant the demo would freeze to death in front of everyone. He set the phone down and walked to the window. The night air was cool, sweeping away the heat that had built up inside the room. He glanced back at the demo machine on the desk, then at Su Man.

“Bring two industrial fans tomorrow,” he said. “And a tube of phase-change thermal compound. If the machine overheats, we take the back cover off and blow straight at the motherboard.”

Su Man paused for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll go buy them. I’ll bring two bottles of ice water too, cool the machine down.”

“No need.” Lin Chen sat back down, opened the procurement app, and ordered a cooling stand and thermal pads. “Condensation from ice water will short the motherboard. Fans are enough. The demo is only ten minutes. If we hold out that long, we win.”

He placed his hands back on the keyboard. The cursor on the screen began blinking again. The earlier network cutoff meant that before eight tomorrow morning they had to pack every dependency, every test dataset, and the full offline decryption library into the demo machine and run one complete cold-start rehearsal. Time had been compressed to the limit. He opened a new terminal window and began writing an automated deployment script. The keyboard started up again, dense and restrained. The ice pack on his left foot had already melted into water, dripping down his ankle and spreading a small dark stain across the floor. He had no time to wipe it up.

At three-forty in the morning, the deployment script ran through. Lin Chen unplugged the network cable, simulated an offline environment, and hit Enter. The screen went dark for an instant, then lit up with the hospital login interface. Data import, decryption, parsing, warning. One point six seconds end to end. No errors, no lag. He let out a long breath, closed the demo machine, and packed it into its shockproof backpack.

Su Man had already fallen asleep facedown at the desk, breathing lightly. Lin Chen picked up his coat and gently draped it over her shoulders. He walked to the door, hand on the handle, and stopped for a second. Tomorrow was Wednesday. The demonstration was at ten in the morning. Zhiyi Cloud’s team had already entered the venue ahead of time. Network lockdown, server room heat, offline environment. Every variable was in place.

He pushed the door open, and the motion-sensor light in the corridor clicked on. His footsteps echoed through the empty hallway. His phone vibrated once in his pocket. He took it out. It was a text from Old Chen: Just got word through an inside channel. Zhiyi Cloud brought in a customized server. Cooling and compute are both top-tier. The director changed the rules at the last minute—after the demo, they’ll draw lots on site to decide who enters the phase-two pilot.

Lin Chen stopped walking. The glow of the screen washed over his face, expressionless. His thumb hovered over the keypad, and in the end he replied with only one word: Received.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket and kept going downstairs. The stairwell window stood open, and the night wind poured in carrying the city’s distinct smell of dust. He knew tomorrow’s demo would not be a technical showcase. It would be a head-on collision of resources and preparation. They had ten minutes. In those ten minutes there could be no errors, no stuttering, no excuses.

He reached the ground floor and pushed open the glass door. The street was empty, the streetlights stretching his shadow long behind him. He adjusted the strap of his backpack, shifting the weight onto his right leg. When his left foot touched the ground, it was still numb, but his stride remained steady. Tomorrow at ten. Server room.