Chapter 55: The Premature Jump of MEG

The next morning, the base held a plenary meeting.

With everyone in attendance, the commander spoke in a grave tone, announcing that a Level 3 contact had occurred at Base 153 last night. Based on current intelligence assessments, the entity was identified as Feathered Angel No. 032. The giant mecha *Kueihniu* and the Angel had perished together. Comrade Jian Bu, the pilot, had relinquished his chance of escape during the fierce battle to protect the base, ultimately making the ultimate sacrifice. The contact resulted in a total of 133 fatalities and 206 injuries, making it the most devastating engagement in terms of casualties over the past two years.

Everyone stood up to observe a moment of silence.

After the meeting, the Operation and Engineering Office received an internal report detailing the more comprehensive tactical assessment of the Level 3 contact at Base 153 the previous night. Feathered Angel No. 032 had descended from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, overlooking Dujiangyan City from the 4,000-meter-high Qionglai Mountains. All conventional weaponry had proven utterly useless against it. The *Kueihniu* mecha deployed its upper half, utilizing six high-altitude balloons—each six meters in radius and 2,200 meters tall—to haul itself up into the stratosphere over ten thousand meters high. Plunging downward at terminal velocity, it pierced the sky and used a chemical pesticide to puncture the Feathered Angel. The entire battle lasted only one hour and forty-seven minutes. Following the demise of the Feathered Angel, its energy dissipated in an upward and downward spiral within an extremely narrow vertical column, piercing clean through the Earth.

"It pierced the Earth?"

"Our estimation is that it pierced the Earth," Chen Yu said, sitting on the edge of the bed with a book in her hands. "Because the residual flame it shot upward was four hundred thousand kilometers high, there is no reason the downward counterpart would be any shorter. Matter in the three-dimensional universe is like air to the Angels; it effortlessly carved out a super-deep shaft unprecedented in human history."

"Would you be able to see the United States if you stood on the other end?" Shang Lu asked.

"Assuming the shaft doesn't collapse, yes," Chen Yu nodded.

Shang Lu spread out the materials on his bunk. Tucked among the dense text were blurred black-and-white photographs taken by drones during the night. True to its name, the Feathered Angel was a distant, wispy, glowing shadow. It glowed because free-moving gas molecules in the atmosphere collided with the Angel and annihilated, leaving only escaping photons. It floated on the mountain peak like a cloud, and was as delicate as a feather.

When faced with an Angel of such immense scale, humanity invariably adopted the most cautious stance, as it was likely approaching the p-yang limit. Once the p-yang limit was reached, the Angel would collapse inward into a black hole.

This was the first time Shang Lu had laid eyes on the *Kueihniu*.

The final imagery of the *Kueihniu* left in this world consisted of only its upper torso. Within the beam of the searchlight, it resembled a withered animal skeleton. To shed weight, the mecha had discarded its lower half and stripped away all armor. Suspended beneath its torso were five-kilometer-long cables and Riemann probes, making it resemble a colossal jellyfish or squid when hoisted into the air.

"What a pity," Chen Yu murmured.

"You knew him?" Shang Lu asked.

"Are you talking about Jian Bu?" Chen Yu said. "He once stood watch at Base 151. A very good man."

"What kind of person was he?"

"I'll give you an example, and you'll understand," Chen Yu covered her face with the book. "There is a large shelter in Mianzhu specifically taking in elderly people who lost their children in the Great Collapse and had nowhere else to go. Someone looks after their daily lives and handles their final rites when they pass away—because all of them have a son named Jian Bu."

Shang Lu stepped out of the dormitory, raised his head to gaze at the gloomy, low-hanging sky, and imagined that earth-shattering blow descending from the heavens.

"Damn, that's badass," he muttered softly.

***

The Operation and Engineering Office had finally made contact with that legendary wall known as the Rabin-Shang Wall. They crowded in amazement in front of the computer screen, watching that jagged curve descend all the way and then bounce around the 0.12 mark. Across more than sixty tests, the closest run had pressed right up against 0.12, but the next test result bounced right back up, as if an invisible wall truly barred the way. As it was now late November, Shen Jiang had logged well over 160 hours sitting in the MEG-BCI system, completing thousands of questions. She had memorized Wang Feng's songs to the point of reciting them backward, and progress on the MEG-BCI system had been advancing by leaps and bounds—right up until today, when it slammed hard into the southern wall with a loud "Bang!" Uncle Wang Xiangbing widened his eyes and declared it miraculous, noting that the director had actually been telling the truth.

Li Wenxuan asked if he had honestly thought the director was lying all along.

Wang Xiangbing replied that one shouldn't blindly trust authority, don't you understand? One must maintain the capacity for independent thought and view problems with a critical eye...

"The bridge!" Bai Shu shouted playfully.

Shang Lu pushed the door open and entered.

"Director, would you consider our work productive?" Wang Xiangbing gave a thumbs-up, gesturing toward the computer. "We've reached 0.12. Just one more step and we'll succeed."

Shang Lu sat down at his workstation, returning all the cluttered folders on his desk to their proper places and stacking the experimental logs neatly.

"When we were doing this back at the Chengdu Institute of the Science City, the reason we ultimately failed was because we couldn't take that final step. Do you remember what I told you about the characteristics of the MEG system? It performs evenly in temporal and spatial resolution without major shortcomings, but its precision is inherently lower than invasive iEEG systems. This is dictated by its structure—an innate limitation."

"That's why we're tailoring a single-person, single-machine setup," Bai Shu said.

"True, but that's no panacea," Shang Lu said. "I never claimed that a customized system would necessarily break through the Rabin-Shang Number Wall. Based on current test results, as experimental precision continuously improves, it has still slammed into this wall just like all previous experiments."

"What is the essence of the Rabin-Shang Value Wall?" Li Wenxuan asked.

Shang Lu thought for a moment, opting for an accessible explanation.

"I can only share my own understanding, which might not be entirely correct... We all know that the MEG system essentially guesses what the pilot's brain is thinking. Since it's guessing, it is fundamentally a probability problem. Simply put, the Rabin-Shang number is the surface manifestation of this probability."

Probability was the most ordinary yet magical thing in this world, symbolizing a certain destined uniformity. If anything could best describe it, it was undoubtedly "an invisible giant hand." During the development of the MEG system, the algorithm's recognition and differentiation of human brain activity had both hits and misses. A single test might show no trajectory or pattern, but once the number of tests multiplied, the commonalities hidden within the discrepancies would immediately come to the fore.

The RCBI team stated that Bayes' theorem was the theoretical foundation supporting all AI algorithms, while simultaneously serving as a powerful tool for deducing what went on inside this black box. If one were to describe the Rabin-Shang Number Wall in purely mathematical language, the ultimate result would likely resemble a multi-layered pastry of nested Bayes' formulas.

"We hope to cleave open both the brain and the MEG system, chopping them into minced meat, reducing them to the smallest units of neural activity and the most basic chip circuitry. Within this data space jointly constituted by the human brain and the AI, we want a one-to-one correspondence between the two. But obviously, that's impossible. To us now, the human brain is a black box, and the AI is also a black box. So why not let the AI imitate the brain, letting a black box learn from a black box? What we cannot understand, the AI may not necessarily fail to grasp. This is what I told you earlier..."

"Building an electronic second brain," Zhang Chong asked. "So what comes next? Keep doing practice questions?"

"We still have to do the questions," Shang Lu nodded. "But in the second phase, it has to learn more abstract content."

***

"Wow, you guys sound so incompetent. Like those incompetent parents who make their children do what they themselves cannot accomplish—unable to break through the Rabin-Shang Number Wall themselves, so they expect the MEG system to break through it on its own." Shen Jiang leaned leisurely back in her chair, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. "Once this AI mimics my brain to a certain extent, it will be able to guess extremely accurately what I'm thinking, and then the Rabin-Shang Number Wall will be broken, right?"

A trace of smug triumph laced Shen Jiang's face as she spoke, having clearly seen right through Shang Lu's clever scheme.

"Correct," Shang Lu sat down in the chair opposite her, placing his hands on his knees. "That's precisely it."

"Is it really that smart?"

"No," Shang Lu shook his head, admitting it quite bluntly. "Theoretically, it should mimic your brain as comprehensively as possible, but we clearly don't have that level of technology. Even the newest and most powerful Transformer models can't do it. On a practical implementation level, we hope it can capture the pre-consciousness in your brain."

"Subconsciousness?"

"No, not subconsciousness, pre-consciousness," Shang Lu explained. "You know that the Rabin-Shang number is a comprehensive metric measuring the precision of a BCI system. Take temporal precision, for instance: currently, the MEG system can achieve millisecond-level temporal precision, around 5 milliseconds or so. That means when a thought arises in your brain, it takes about 5 milliseconds for the system to perceive it. However, iEEG can shorten that time to under 1 millisecond. There's a 4-millisecond gap. You've fought Angels on the battlefield; you know 4 milliseconds is enough to reverse the tide of a battle."

"Then shorten that time! Supervisor, that's your job."

"If it were that easy to shorten, the Rabin-Shang Number Wall wouldn't be called a wall," Shang Lu said. "The MEG system is non-invasive and head-mounted, while iEEG is invasive. Separated by such thick brain tissue, skull, and scalp, the former's signal analysis speed is bound to be slower. This is determined by the system's mechanical structure, design format, and working principles; it cannot be modified."

"Then what do we do?"

"There is one fact you must understand, Leader: by the time a thought or idea has formed in your brain and the system goes to comprehend it, it is already too late."

Shen Jiang blinked in surprise: "What do you mean?"

"If you compare MEG and iEEG to two competing athletes, their starting lines are not aligned," Shang Lu explained. "Due to its innate flaws, the MEG lags twenty meters behind at the start. The moment the starter's pistol fires, its defeat is already sealed."

Shen Jiang was stunned.

"If you want the MEG system to beat iEEG—or rather, if you want to compress temporal precision to under 1 millisecond..." Shang Lu continued, "then it must jump the gun. It has to start moving *before* your starting pistol fires. In other words, it must know what you are going to think *before you do yourself!*"