Chapter 287: Whitelist and Gears

The sound of leather shoes stopped at the door. Director Zhou pushed it open and came in, followed by Section Chief Liu from IT and two review specialists in white coats. The smell of peracetic acid in the air seemed even stronger now, mixed with the damp mildew of the old carpet, pressing heavily into the nose. Lin Chen's finger hovered over the Enter key for half a second, then pressed down. A line flashed across the terminal window: [ROUTE] Static mapping applied. Port 8080 forwarded to 127.0.0.1:8081. The firewall rule had been bypassed through local loopback, without triggering any external network request. IT's monitoring console would not raise an alarm. He closed the terminal and turned the screen toward the center of the long table.

The representative from Zhineng Technology had already connected their equipment. The indicator light on the wireless EEG cap blinked cold blue, with data streaming directly to the cloud through a 4G module. The 3D rendering on the screen was smooth, but the waveform edges showed a faint jaggedness, with an occasional half-second stutter. Section Chief Liu frowned and tapped a finger on the tabletop. "Wireless transmission interferes in the neurology ward. Last time, one of cardiology's monitors got crossed by your frequency band. A hospital is not a testing ground." The Zhineng representative hurried to explain that the test environment had not been properly shielded and promised to bring a 5G private-network proposal next week. Director Zhou did not respond. He only looked at Lin Chen. "How does your solution connect?"

"It doesn't connect to the external network." Lin Chen kept his voice low and pushed the portable hard drive over. "Data is pulled on a schedule from the hospital HIS export directory, cleaned locally, inferred locally, turned into reports locally, and then written back to a designated shared drive. The whole process is physically isolated. The script polls every fifteen seconds, uses no more than six gigabytes of memory, and can run on an old computer." Su Man handed over the agreement and test logs. Director Zhou flipped through a few pages, his eyes stopping on the line [WARN] Timestamp gap detected. Re-alignment triggered. "The fault-tolerance mechanism is written very rigidly," he said. Lin Chen nodded. "If one piece of clinical data is lost, the diagnosis may be off. Better slow than wrong."

The review team asked them to run a segment of historical data on site. Lin Chen plugged in the hard drive and started the script. Logs began to scroll across the terminal. The hum of the fan seemed amplified in the quiet room. A dull pain crawled upward along the nerves from his left knee, and the muscles twitched faintly out of his control. He adjusted his posture, shifting all his weight to his right foot, braced his left hand against the edge of the table, and kept typing with his right to bring up the monitoring panel. The waveform on the screen gradually took shape; the confidence curve climbed steadily. Zhineng's wireless signal suddenly dropped for a moment. The cloud rendering froze, and their representative rushed to restart the module. The screen went black for two seconds before lighting again. Section Chief Liu sighed. "Network outages are normal. Can your offline package adapt to HIS export formats from different years?"

"We built three layers of dictionary mapping." Lin Chen brought up the configuration screen, the cursor sliding across dense field-mapping tables. "The field names and code differences across the 2008, 2015, and 2020 versions are automatically recognized by the script. Anything it cannot match goes into an exception queue for manual review. It doesn't block the main process."

Director Zhou closed the logbook. "On-site deployment is possible. But IT has a hard rule: all software entering the hospital must pass Level 2 classified protection assessment. Your local script has no vendor signature and no digital certificate. If it follows the formal process, it will take forty-five days." Su Man immediately took over. "We can first file it as a 'research auxiliary tool,' outside the core business system. The data does not leave the department. We'll sign a liability clause." Section Chief Liu shook his head. "Even filing requires process. Checks are strict now. Whoever signs takes responsibility."

Lin Chen said nothing. He stared at the progress bar on the screen. Eight thousand records; it had already processed 6,200. He knew how slowly the gears of procedure turned. If they waited forty-five days, Zhineng's wireless solution would already have filled the ward. Capital did not wait, and neither did a hospital's safety red lines. He picked up the half glass of cold water on the table and took a sip. The chill pressed down his esophagus, clearing his muddled nerves for an instant.

"Section Chief Liu." Lin Chen spoke, his voice steady. "The script does not install into the system or write to the registry. It only reads from the shared drive and writes to the shared drive. You can treat it as an advanced batch-processing tool. IT only needs to add one whitelist rule to the firewall policy, allowing this laptop's MAC address to access the internal file server. All other permissions can be shut off. If you're worried, you can run the script in a sandbox, or copy the logs every day before closing to audit them." Section Chief Liu paused and looked toward Director Zhou. Director Zhou pondered for a few seconds, his knuckles tapping the table twice. "Two weeks of trial operation first. After the data is desensitized, send a copy to IT for security scanning. If there are no problems, then it goes through formal filing. But if anything happens, you bear full responsibility." Su Man quickly crossed out the original clause in the agreement and wrote a supplement by hand: "During the trial period, liability is capped at the single service fee. After formal filing, the master agreement applies." Section Chief Liu signed. The Zhineng representative did not look pleased. He silently packed away the equipment, the cable winding sounding hurried.

After the review team left, only the low drone of the machines remained in the room. Lin Chen leaned back in his chair and slowly exhaled. His left foot was already numb to the point of losing sensation. He reached down and rubbed the muscles behind his calf, fingertips finding the taut fascia beneath the skin. Su Man tucked the signed agreement into a folder and handed him a cup of warm water. "Sooner or later, we'll have to fill the classified-protection assessment pit," she said. Lin Chen took the cup but did not drink. "First, let's get two weeks of data running. Once the clinicians see the value, the process will naturally find a green light." He looked at the [DONE] flashing on the screen and thought of how his father used to repair tractors. No drawings, no parts—only listening to the sound, feeling the temperature, testing and failing until he forced a scrapped engine to ignite again. Technology landing in the real world was never about writing one perfect line of code. It was about finding the gear that could still turn inside a reality full of patches.

His phone vibrated. A message from Zhao Qiming popped up: "Zhineng just received the city health commission's pilot approval. They promised full coverage of the city's top-tier hospitals next month. If your offline solution cannot produce clinical comparison data within two weeks, the Series A valuation-adjustment clause will trigger, and I will start liquidation procedures." Lin Chen stared at the screen. Two weeks. The classified-protection whitelist had not even been approved, and the export interface of the old HIS system would be upgraded at dawn tomorrow. Su Man leaned over to look and said nothing. Lin Chen set down the phone, opened the terminal, and began writing a new data synchronization module. He needed to change the script's polling logic into event triggering, bypassing the compatibility gap caused by the interface upgrade. The sound of keystrokes rose in the empty room—dense, restrained, without pause. Outside the window, the sky had gone completely dark, and the corridor's voice-activated lights came on one after another. He knew the real hard battle had only just begun.