Chapter 246: Hot Zones and Cold Starts

At four in the morning, the city was still asleep. Lin Chen tightened the shoulder strap of his shockproof backpack by one notch, shifting his center of gravity onto his right leg. Su Man followed behind him, carrying two industrial fans and a cooling base. The motion-sensor lights in the stairwell flickered on floor by floor, then faded out behind them. No words were exchanged, only the friction of zippers and the rhythm of footsteps. The elevator descended to the basement level. As the doors opened, a blast of cold garage air hit them, cutting through the sticky lethargy of an all-nighter. Lin Chen pulled the car door open, placed the backpack on the back seat, and rested his left foot on a piece of cardboard he had laid out in advance. The numbness had already crept down to his calf, wrapping around his nerves like a layer of soaked cotton. He closed his eyes and ran through the offline deployment flowchart in his head. Dependency package paths, decryption library signatures, log rotation strategies. Every node corresponded to an error from the previous night and the patch that fixed it. In the front passenger seat, Su Man scrolled through her phone, the screen’s glow illuminating her profile. She hadn’t slept; faint dark circles shadowed her eyes, but her fingers moved steadily across the glass. The taxi cut through empty streets, the tires thudding dully and rhythmically over speed bumps. Lin Chen didn’t look out the window. He kept his eyes fixed on the jumping mileage on the dashboard. Resources were limited. Time was limited. Fault tolerance was limited. He was accustomed to breaking down unknown variables into executable steps, just like when he used to carry water in Qingshi Village as a boy. The shoulder pole dug into his flesh, but his steps couldn’t falter. If they did, the water would spill, and he’d have to walk the whole route again.

At 7:20, they arrived at the hospital’s IT building. The security guard had just rolled up the metal shutter when Director Wang was already waiting on the steps, holding a network lockdown confirmation form. He glanced at Lin Chen’s backpack, then at the fans in Su Man’s hands, his brow furrowing almost imperceptibly. “The server room AC shut down last night for line maintenance. Since you brought your own cooling equipment, make sure it doesn’t block the fire exits or the cabinet exhaust vents.” Lin Chen nodded and handed over the equipment inventory. Director Wang scanned it, signed off, and waved them through. Pushing open the heavy fire door, a wave of heat rolled out, thick with dust and the sharp tang of ozone. Twenty-eight degrees Celsius wasn’t just a number on a screen; it was the palpable weight of waste heat from dozens of server cabinets accumulating in a sealed space. The air was stagnant, carrying a faint, burning sensation when inhaled. Lin Chen set his backpack down at the reserved workstation and unpacked. Laptop, offline hard drive, cooling base, thermal paste, two zip ties, insulated gloves. His movements were practiced, without a single wasted motion. Su Man mounted the industrial fan on the side of the cabinet, adjusting the angle so the airflow would sweep diagonally across the laptop’s intake vent. The low-frequency hum of the starting fan sounded jarring in the empty server room, but it was quickly swallowed by the ambient drone of running equipment.

The adjacent workstation was already set up. The Zhiyi Cloud team had arrived with three members. A custom tower server sat on a metal rack, equipped with dual power supplies and six silent fans. The side panel was transparent, revealing meticulously routed cables and a liquid cooling radiator inside. Their engineer was connecting intranet patch cables, moving with calm precision, occasionally exchanging a few low murmurs. Lin Chen didn’t look over. He kept his head down, unscrewed the cap of the thermal paste, and used a plastic spreader to apply an even layer across the CPU surface. Thickness controlled to exactly 0.1 millimeters. Too much would impede heat transfer; too little would cause poor contact. The laws of physics didn’t care about sentiment; they only recognized parameters. He pressed the thermal pad into place, snapped the cooling base onto it, and tightened the four mounting screws. The metal edge scraped his finger, drawing a bead of blood. He pressed a tissue against it and kept working.

At 8:00 sharp, Director Wang walked in with two hospital engineers in white coats, carrying lockdown tools. Network cables were unplugged one by one, and red seals were slapped over the switch ports. The external network indicator lights went completely dark. The server room was left with only the background hum of equipment and the whir of fans. Lin Chen pressed the power button on the demo machine. The screen lit up, booting into the local operating system. He opened a terminal and typed ./deploy_offline.sh. The script began to run. Dependency verification, signature validation, decryption module loading. The progress bar crawled forward. Beside him, Su Man cross-referenced the test data checklist, tapping checkmarks on her tablet. It was hot. Sweat slid down his temple and dripped onto the edge of the keyboard. Lin Chen didn’t wipe it away. His left foot began to ache—not numbness this time, but his nerves protesting under oxygen deprivation and high heat. He adjusted his posture, shifting his full weight onto his right leg and leaving his left foot suspended. His breathing remained steady. Lines of logs scrolled across the screen. [OK]. [OK]. [OK]. All passed. He closed the terminal and launched the demo interface. A gray-blue background, a clean input box. No flashy UI, just core functionality.

At 9:10, the fire door opened again. The hospital dean walked in with three others. The man in the middle, with graying hair and a dark jacket, was an expert from the provincial drug administration. Flanking him were the director of the hospital office and a representative from the medical affairs department. Director Wang stepped forward to report on the lockdown status. The expert nodded, his gaze sweeping over both workstations. The lead from Zhiyi Cloud immediately stood up, handed over their documentation, and began explaining their architecture and computing advantages. Lin Chen didn’t move. He simply angled the demo machine’s screen toward the main aisle. Su Man stood slightly behind him, holding the procedure checklist. At 9:40, the demo officially began. A hospital office staff member handed over an encrypted USB drive. “Double-blind test data. Decrypt on-site. The password is in the envelope.” The dean opened the envelope and read out a string of hexadecimal characters. Lin Chen took the drive, plugged it into the offline port, entered the password, and hit Enter. The screen dimmed for a split second before a decryption progress bar appeared. Ten percent. Twenty percent. The temperature in the server room was climbing. The industrial fan was already running at maximum capacity, blowing air that carried the smell of heated metal and plastic. Lin Chen kept his eyes on the progress bar. Forty-five percent. Sixty percent.

At seventy-eight percent, the progress bar froze. It wasn’t a system crash; the logs were scrolling frantically. [WARN] Decryption buffer overflow. Retrying chunk 4... Lin Chen’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He didn’t panic. He pulled up the backend monitor: memory usage at 92%, CPU temperature at 89°C. Under the intense heat, the thermal paste had likely undergone a micro-phase change, reducing its thermal conductivity and causing memory fragmentation to pile up. He glanced at Su Man. She had already handed him a Phillips-head screwdriver. Lin Chen nodded and, with one hand, quickly removed the four screws from the laptop’s back cover. His movements were fast but controlled. He lifted the cover, exposing the motherboard to the hot air. He tilted the industrial fan down by five degrees, directing the airflow straight at the heat sink fins. Simultaneously, he typed echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches into the terminal. Clearing the cache to free up memory. The progress bar moved again. Seventy-nine percent. Eighty percent. He replaced the cover, tightened the screws, and the screen brightened. Decryption complete. The data list expanded. The first row of patient information popped up. Lin Chen pressed Enter. The engine began parsing. Amid the drone of the fans, he could hear his own heartbeat. Steady. The dean cleared his throat and picked up a microphone: “Adding one rule. The slots for the Phase II pilot will be decided by an on-site lottery. However, the lottery weights will be calculated based on a composite of system response time and warning accuracy. Results will be announced in ten minutes.” Lin Chen’s finger rested on the Enter key. In the bottom-right corner of the screen, the temperature monitoring icon flickered, shifting from yellow to orange. He stared at the jumping data, saying nothing. The air in the server room seemed to grow even thicker.