Chapter 285: Offline and Voltage

At six-thirty on Monday morning, the automatic doors of Municipal First Hospital's outpatient building had not yet fully powered on. Lin Chen had his canvas bag over one shoulder. He set his right foot on the steps first, then let his left foot touch down lightly after it. The slope of the steps tightened the muscles in his lower leg at once, and pain crawled up along the nerves like fine needles. He stopped for two seconds, waited for the sharpness to pass, and then continued upward. In the bag were two old ThinkPads, an HDMI adapter cable, three fully charged power banks, and the USB drive labeled "Offline Terminal V3.1." The canvas strap bit into his collarbone. The weight was uneven, forcing him to turn his body slightly to keep his balance.

The information technology office was on the third floor of the administration building. The corridor smelled of peracetic acid mixed with old carpet. The electronic clock on the wall read 06:58. Lin Chen knocked on the door of Room 304. Director Zhou was already there. Beside him stood two young doctors in white coats and an IT technician in gray work clothes. The technician's surname was Wu. He did not talk much; he only pointed to a long table in the corner. "Here. The backup power is connected to the wall outlet, but the voltage isn't stable. Don't plug in any high-power equipment. The network cable is unplugged. Internal and external networks are both cut off. Bring your own screen."

Lin Chen nodded and put down the canvas bag. He connected the power bank first and confirmed that the voltmeter showed a stable 12.1V before plugging in the ThinkPad. Su Man pushed the door open and came in, carrying two cups of soy milk and a printed operating checklist. She said nothing. She placed the checklist on the table and began checking the monitor ports. Lin Chen inserted the USB drive and double-clicked the startup script. A terminal window popped up. Against the black background, green initialization logs appeared. [INFO] Local environment loaded. Memory: 4.2G/8G. Network: OFF. He glanced at the time in the upper-right corner: 07:12. The review team would arrive in forty-eight minutes.

Director Zhou handed over a portable hard drive. "This is the twenty-four-hour ambulatory EEG exported last night. Three patients. It includes sleep onset, deep sleep, REM, and two suspected seizure fragments. Run it directly. We don't require real-time rendering. We only need the cleaned feature markers and confidence scores." Lin Chen took the hard drive and plugged it into the USB 3.0 port. The script began reading. The progress bar advanced slowly. For the first five minutes, everything was normal. The waveform data was segmented piece by piece; the sliding-window filtering module automatically removed power-line interference, and the baseline drift was flattened. [PASS] markers kept appearing in the log.

In the seventh minute, the waveform on the screen suddenly shook violently. It was not an algorithmic problem. A momentary delay during hard-drive reading had caused a data-block misalignment. Lin Chen's fingers hovered over the keyboard, but he did not panic. The fault-tolerance logic he had written in advance started up: the buffer detected a timestamp break, automatically triggered resampling and alignment, and marked the log with [WARN] Timestamp gap detected. Re-alignment triggered. The misalignment was corrected, and the waveform returned to smoothness. Technician Wu leaned closer to look at the screen. He said nothing, only made a note in his notebook.

In the tenth minute, the data entered the second patient's deep-sleep stage. The background noise was extremely low, but it contained faint muscle-artifact interference. The script's confidence output held steady between 0.87 and 0.91. Lin Chen watched the memory-monitoring curve. The peak stayed at 5.8G, and the fan speed was stable. He lifted the soy milk Su Man had handed him and took a sip. It had already gone cold. The cloying sweetness spread through his mouth. He swallowed and kept watching the screen. In the twelfth minute, the log printed [MARK] Sample 1402: Suspected spike-wave complex. Confidence: 0.94. Director Zhou's pen stopped. He looked up at Lin Chen, then lowered his gaze back to the screen.

The data run finished. The terminal displayed [DONE] Total processed: 86400 segments. Errors: 0. Lin Chen closed the terminal and unplugged the hard drive. Director Zhou shut his notebook and pushed the checklist back. "The offline run works, and the anti-interference logic is clear. But clinical practice is not a laboratory." He paused. "Starting next month, Neurology Ward Two will free up two beds for a controlled trial. Your people will need to be stationed on site. The data does not leave the hospital, and the model does not connect to the network. If anything goes wrong, you bear the responsibility." Lin Chen nodded. "Understood. We'll send you the on-site staffing list and the confidentiality agreements before Wednesday." Director Zhou said nothing more and turned to leave. Technician Wu followed, coiling up cables.

Su Man began packing the equipment. Lin Chen crouched down and put the power banks back into the canvas bag. When his left foot touched the floor, his knee suddenly buckled. He caught the edge of the table just in time to keep from falling. Su Man reached out to steady him. "Your foot isn't holding up. Don't force it." Lin Chen did not argue. He only straightened up slowly. He took out his phone, and the screen lit. Zhao Qiming had sent a message: "The ZhiNao people went to Municipal First Hospital's equipment department yesterday afternoon. They brought a portable EEG cap and are pushing wireless real-time upload. The review team may think your offline solution isn't 'cutting-edge' enough." Lin Chen read it and did not reply. He zipped up the canvas bag. The sound of the metal teeth locking together was clear in the quiet room. He turned to look out the window. The morning fog had not dispersed, and the glass of the inpatient building reflected a gray-white light. The on-site agreement for Wednesday had not yet been signed, but the equipment department's wireless solution was already on the table. He needed middleware that could both run offline and connect seamlessly to the hospital's old HIS system. Time had just been reduced by another day.