Chapter 30: Bang!

After lunch, Shang Lu rode Chen Yu’s beat-up bicycle along the mountain road back to the dormitory. He could have taken the tunnel, but he found it too windy and chilly; besides, there was no harsh sun today, just a gentle breeze. Whistling a tune, wearing his white cap, and with his pant legs brushing against the lush weeds and shrubs along the roadside, the old bike creaked and rattled with every revolution.

"Engineer Shang! Heading back?"

Some cadre who recognized him waved from the side of the road.

"Heading back, yeah! No shift this afternoon. No shift, no shift, no shift—la la la la la la!"

Shang Lu crested the hill, lifted his legs, and let the bike coast down the gentle slope.

"Supervisor?" Another voice called from the roadside—clearly a young woman.

"Here! Present!"

Shang Lu craned his neck to look back, his eyes widening.

"Any orders, ma'am? Within the scope of my duties, I am at your service! At your ser—oh, damn!"

*Clang!* The bicycle careened straight into a patch of weeds at the end of the downhill turn.

It was rare for life at Base 151 to be this leisurely. When Shang Lu first reported for duty, the base had been under the constant threat of the 092 Lighthouse Angel and in a state of high alert; he had essentially been thrown into the front lines as an emergency reinforcement. Now that the 092 Lighthouse Angel had been successfully eliminated and the existential threat to humanity had been removed—or, to put it simply, they had finally taken down a minor boss—it was time to rest. If the future of humanity were an RPG, then the Lighthouse Angel was merely a low-level mob encountered along the way. No one knew when the game would end, or if a final boss even existed.

Perhaps this was a struggle without end. Every time they risked their lives to destroy one enemy, more were always waiting in line behind it.

After 092 would come 093, then 094, followed by 095, 096, and 097. If humanity’s win rate against each Angel was 90%, the probability of winning ten consecutive battles was 35%, and for twenty consecutive victories, it dropped to 12%.

As long as there were enough Angels, the probability of humanity winning forever was infinitesimally close to zero.

And it only took one defeat to wipe out every previous victory.

That was how Shang Lu had always thought back at the Chengdu Institute of Automation.

But the people at 151 were mostly different from those at the Institute, which made it hard for Shang Lu, who had spent so long in the Science City, to adapt. The people here seemed to possess an unexplainable, blind optimism. In their spare time, they discussed new songs online or the pretty girls in the art troupe. The guys in the Operations Office even had the heart to rehearse their cringeworthy welcoming ceremonies. Even 1047, the most annoying person in the 110 Workshop, was a genuinely happy-go-lucky guy (Shang Lu truly believed he was a good person) who worked diligently and struggled toward the position of Chief Engineer until the day he died.

At 151, among all the people around him, the only one besides Old Man Ji who showed a profound sense of long-term anxiety was the Chief of Operations. He worried every day about what they would do once the oil reserves ran out, which was why he was throwing everything into the development of coal-fired aircraft engines.

By comparison, Science City was a place with an annual suicide rate exceeding seven per ten thousand.

Shang Lu rode his bike into the courtyard and saw a motorcycle parked there. The confidential courier from the Office of Administration was just climbing off, a locked iron box strapped to the back seat.

"Engineer Shang?" The young soldier looked surprised to see him cycling in. "Oh! You’re just in time, Engineer Shang. I’ve got a special delivery for you!"

"Only just arriving?" Shang Lu braked in front of him, planting his feet on the ground. "It’s been three days."

"Well, you know how confidential mail moves," the courier said, pulling out a form for Shang Lu to sign. "Come on, sign for it so I can go back and report."

Shang Lu took the pen and paper, bowing his head to sign his name.

The courier used a key to open the iron box, pulling out a large, earth-yellow cardboard box, tightly sealed with tape and security strips. Stamped on the strips in bright red ink were the words: *Archives Office, Chengdu Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Office of the 314 Working Committee.*

Shang Lu took the parcel and carried the heavy box into his room.

Chen Yu wasn't on shift that afternoon either, and he was leaning against his bed reading Yu Hua’s *Chronicle of a Blood Merchant*. Seeing Shang Lu lugging the heavy box inside, he set the book down and asked, "Little Chief Engineer, what did you buy on JD.com again?"

"Sexy lingerie." Shang Lu entered the room, panting as he shoved the box onto the floor.

"That much?" Chen Yu remarked. "That’s enough to last you until you’re eighty."

"Half of it is for you." Shang Lu tore off the security strips and used his key to slit the tape. He opened the box to reveal dozens of thick, blue-covered notebooks stacked neatly inside. He began to take them out one by one to count them.

Chen Yu set his book aside, crawled over, and picked one up at random. On the blue cover were the black letters "CASIA" and the emblem of the Institute of Automation—clearly, it had come from the Institute. His eyes flicked to the upper right corner, where a dark red stamp read: *TOP SECRET*.

Chen Yu’s hand shook. "You brought top-secret documents into the dorm? We don't have a secure safe here!"

"Yeah, I know," Shang Lu said nonchalantly. "Just storing it for the night; I’ll take it to the office tomorrow."

"That’s a regulation violation," Chen Yu said.

"Violation, schmiolation. Only heaven, earth, you, and I know," Shang Lu said, burying his head in the count. "You can look if you want, though in principle, someone from your Command Headquarters would need the Chief Engineer’s approval to see these."

Chen Yu flipped through the notebook in his hand; it was filled with dense, scribbled handwriting, formulas, charts, and hand-drawn diagrams.

"Who wrote this?"

"I did." Shang Lu sat down on the floor. "My experimental logs and technical documents from the past few years. I left them at the Institute, thinking I’d never need them again."

Chen Yu couldn't make heads or tails of the notebooks—they were filled with a mix of Chinese and English. He frowned for a long moment, deciding that whether or not this stuff was "top secret" didn't really matter, because there were very few people on earth who could understand it anyway.

"Explain it to me, Little Chief Engineer. What is this stuff?"

"Things I left behind when I was working at the RCBI group."

"The RCBI group?"

"Research Center for Brain-inspired Intelligence. It used to be a department under the Institute of Automation, but now it’s a technical task force. I was in that department during my master’s studies, researching bipedal walker systems controlled by BCI systems. Later, I focused on harmless implementation techniques for the BCI interface closest to the human nervous system."

Chen Yu nodded, though he only half-understood.

Whenever this happened, he felt like the Little Chief Engineer was from outer space.

They were the same age, yet he was just a regular staff officer in the Command Department, while the Little Chief Engineer was unfathomable—the only time he ever cursed was when dealing with Riemannian geometry and general relativity.

"You know that piloting giant mechs and fighting Angels now relies heavily on BCI systems," Shang Lu said. "But invasive BCI causes severe damage to a pilot’s brain. The more you use it, the worse the damage gets, often leading to uncontrollable consequences. Our goal back then was to find a new path, to abandon invasive BCI and find another way—to test a non-invasive, completely harmless BCI system: the Deep Brain Magnetoencephalography Neural Interfacing System, or MEG-BCI."

"And the result?" Chen Yu asked.

"A total failure," Shang Lu replied. "The Institute of Automation was the first to develop BCI systems, and also the first to abandon non-invasive ones because they simply didn't meet the requirements. At the time, there was a minimum standard called the 'Rabin-Shang number.' Only if a BCI system’s Rabin-Shang number was below 0.12 could it possibly be used in combat against the Angels. Everyone was working within that framework, trying to get the number below 0.12... Honestly, I never really knew what the standard represented, just that it was the bottom line. Now I finally know: it represents the precision of brainwave signal recognition and processing required for a pilot to perform General Relativity calculations."

"I tried everything, but the MEG-BCI system could never break through that 0.12 red line. The precision of non-invasive BCI is just too low. Trying to capture abstract thoughts precisely through the skull, brain tissue, and scalp is basically impossible. By the time I joined the group, no one in the entire institute was still working on non-invasive BCI. Everyone thought it was a dead end. They all accepted the default that we had to trade the pilots' lives to save humanity’s," Shang Lu continued. "I was the only one who didn't buy it. I believed that a universal model could be built, that there had to be a way to have the best of both worlds—to reach the 0.12 standard without hurting the pilot."

Shang Lu paused and sighed.

"But in this world, how can things ever be that perfect?"

"Little Chief Engineer," Chen Yu said, "you already tried your best."

"Of course I tried my best. I exhausted every option. I found countless volunteers, analyzed the magnetic signals of their brains. Building an MEG-BCI system is much more complex and difficult than an invasive one because the signals are weak, the latency is high, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low. The algorithms used have to be much more sensitive. But the brain... it’s just too difficult to grasp. Everyone is different, their thinking processes are unique. If this were an equation, it simply had no general solution." Shang Lu said, "I spent so much time chasing a non-existent solution, until the whole group lost heart."

Chen Yu didn't dare speak. He was just a weak and ignorant bystander.

Shang Lu organized all the notebooks and brushed the dust off them.

"Since you lost heart, why bring these materials here today?"

"Because all the gods and buddhas in heaven are protecting Shen Jiang," Shang Lu replied.

Chen Yu was stunned, not understanding what he meant.

"Because Jesus Christ, the Buddha, the Jade Emperor, and the Primordial Lord of Heaven are all protecting Shen Jiang, she’s lucky enough to have run into me! The only person in the world stubborn enough to keep hitting a brick wall!" Shang Lu let out a cold laugh, though it sounded a bit bitter. "This equation has no general solution; no one could ever find one. But if I push myself... I can find a specific solution that only works for her!"