Chapter 264: Electrodes and Anchors

At four in the morning, the fluorescent tubes in the corridor gave off a faint hum. Lin Chen leaned against a plastic chair beside the fire door. His left foot had gone completely numb, like a piece of wood that no longer belonged to his body. He lowered his head and looked at the dried flecks of mud on the uppers of his canvas shoes. They were from last week, when he had gone back to Qingshi Village to retrieve the old medical records. The earthen stove in the main room, the white steam rising as his mother boiled medicine, the image of Xiaoman as a child tugging at the hem of his shirt and calling him “Brother”—all of it faded quickly in the smell of disinfectant. Reality had no poetry in it. There was only the regular ticking of the monitor and the supplementary agreement waiting to be signed on his phone screen.

At seven, the nurses' station began shift handover. Lin Chen stood up, put his weight on his right leg, dragged his left foot along the floor, and moved toward the payment window. The mobile banking screen showed that the 180,000-yuan advance payment had arrived on time at 2:07 a.m. He took a screenshot, printed it out, and clipped it into the medical-record folder. The door to Dr. Shen's office was open. He handed over the payment receipt and the family consent form.

“Stereotactic electrode implantation. Minimally invasive, but it requires general anesthesia.” Dr. Shen pushed up his glasses and pointed at the anatomical diagram on the wall. “Twelve probes will enter the hippocampus and temporal lobe along the preset trajectories. After surgery, there may be brief headache and cognitive confusion. That's normal. The evaluation period will be about a week. If long-term EEG captures the origin point of the abnormal discharges, we can arrange the resection surgery.”

“What are the risks?” Lin Chen asked.

“Bleeding, infection, electrode displacement. The probability is under two percent.” Dr. Shen looked at him. “Sign it.”

The pen tip moved across the paper with a dry rustle. Lin Chen wrote slowly, pressing each stroke down hard. He knew this was not a gamble. It was an arithmetic problem. Probability was cold, but with Xiaoman lying inside, probability became a threshold he had no choice but to cross. After signing, he snapped the cap back onto the pen. The small metallic click sounded especially clear in the quiet office.

At 1:50 in the afternoon, in the family waiting area outside the operating room, the air was thick with the mixed smell of iodophor and anxiety. Lin Chen sat on the bench in the farthest corner, the old ThinkPad open across his knees. The screen brightness was turned down to its lowest setting. In the code editor, the independently deployed lightweight architecture was compiling. The commercial-licensing interface had been stripped away, and the core cleaning logic had been repackaged as a Docker image. The progress bar crept forward slowly. He needed it to run through, just as he needed Xiaoman on the operating table to wake up.

At exactly two o'clock, the red light came on. The gurney slid through the automatic doors. Xiaoman's eyes were closed, his face pale, positioning-grid marks pasted across his forehead. He seemed to sense something; his fingers curled slightly. Lin Chen stood up. Through the glass, he did not wave. He only nodded. The doors closed, cutting off every sound.

The waiting was long. Lin Chen did not scroll through his phone, and he did not close his eyes. He stared at the log output on the screen as lines of green characters rolled past. [INFO] Module loading complete. [INFO] Memory usage: 1.2GB. [INFO] Fault-tolerance fallback mechanism activated. He thought of nights in the university library copying code by hand, of the dawn in the county-town internet café when he first got a Python script to run, of Lao Zhao's text message that said “settled by the line.” Technology had never been magic. It was the dull work of breaking countless “impossible” things into “what is the next step.” Beside him, a middle-aged man kept rubbing his hands, crushing a cigarette pack out of shape; diagonally across from him, a woman leaned against her husband's shoulder, tears sliding down silently. Lin Chen drew his gaze back and kept typing. He added automatic heartbeat detection to the independent node to prevent data loss if the server went down. Code did not care about emotions. It only cared whether the logic formed a closed loop.

At six in the evening, the operating-room doors opened again. Dr. Shen removed his mask, his forehead covered in sweat. “The implantation went smoothly. Twelve electrodes, all in very good positions. We'll observe for twenty-four hours first. Long-term EEG monitoring starts tomorrow.”

The tension in Lin Chen's shoulders finally loosened a fraction. “Thank you.”

“Go handle the admission paperwork. Family can't stay tonight; there will be a caregiver.” Dr. Shen patted his shoulder. “You should rest too. You look terrible.”

Lin Chen nodded. He walked out of the building. The evening wind carried the chill of early autumn. He found a budget hotel opposite the hospital, the cheapest single room, 120 yuan a night. The room was narrow, the wallpaper yellowed, and the outdoor air-conditioning unit buzzed outside the window. He put the laptop on the bedside table and plugged it in. Only then did a delayed pain finally shoot through his left foot, like a blunt knife slowly scraping between the bones. He bit down on a towel, cold sweat soaking through his shirt. He did not make a sound. He waited for the pain to pass before slowly loosening his jaw. Two clear rows of teeth marks remained in the towel.

His phone vibrated. It was an email from HR at his former company. Lin Chen, regarding your resignation application, the department has approved it. Please submit the handover checklist by this Friday. Thank you for your past contributions.

He looked at the line of text, his fingers pausing over the keyboard for a few seconds. Then he opened his mailbox and composed a new email. Recipient: Su Man. CC: himself.

Subject: Project Launch Confirmation. Body: Funds have arrived. Independent Architecture V1.0 has compiled successfully. Full-time work begins tomorrow. Company registration materials have been submitted for preliminary review by the market-regulation bureau.

He clicked send. There was no hesitation, and no farewell. The track of working for someone else ended here. The road ahead had no KPIs and no weekly reports. It had only the line between life and death.

At eleven that night, he received Su Man's reply. Only two words: Received. Attached was a compressed archive. After he decompressed it, he found the requirements document for the early product prototype and the server deployment checklist. Lin Chen made a bowl of instant noodles, the steam blurring the screen. As he ate, he checked the list line by line. The noodles were very salty, and a layer of red oil floated on the broth. He took a sip, and his stomach finally gained a little warmth. He opened the business-registration website and filled in shareholder information, business scope, and registered capital. It was a subscribed-capital system, with no need for paid-in capital, but every line meant legal responsibility. He filled it out slowly and checked it three times before clicking submit.

At one in the morning, the progress bar reached the end. [SUCCESS] Independent node deployment complete.

Lin Chen closed the laptop. Outside the window, the city's neon was still glittering, and the sound of traffic came faintly through. He lay down and closed his eyes. His mind was no longer filled with code, contracts, or probabilities. Instead, it held the image from many years ago, under the leaking tile roof in Qingshi Village, when Xiaoman had drawn a crooked little star on the wall with chalk. Chalk dust had fallen onto his fingertips and would not wash away.

Tomorrow, EEG monitoring would begin. The day after tomorrow, the company name would be approved. The day after that, the internal product test would go online.

He turned over. His left foot was still numb, but his breathing was steady. The dust had settled. Next, it was time to lift his head and look at the road.

The phone screen lit up again in the darkness. It was an alert message from Alibaba Cloud: Your instance i-uf69xxxx has experienced a sudden spike in CPU usage. Current load: 92%. Please check service status.

Lin Chen opened his eyes. He was no longer sleepy. He sat up again, opened the laptop, and connected to the remote terminal. The command-line cursor blinked, waiting for input.