Chapter 59 OPM-BCI-Proteger o Parque Nanshan(Tianrui Fala dos Presságios)

Shang Lu fell ill and could not get up. He himself could hardly have foreseen that the slight chill and exposure to the cold that night would almost completely shatter his body and mind. For over a week following that, Shang Lu always wrapped himself up in his dormitory like a Michelin man, holding a thermal flask in his hands and sipping hot water little by little. Chen Yu said he was deficient in both Qi and blood and needed nourishment, so the valiant fellows from the Operations and Engineering Office each showed off their special skills. Through unknown channels, they procured many strange things: red dates and American ginseng paired with donkey-hide gelatin, boiled with brown sugar into a huge pot that ended up giving people nosebleeds.

Chen Yu claimed his family had generations of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, so his judgment could not possibly be wrong.

Holding his nose, Shang Lu said, "Your family's centuries-old medical reputation has truly hit rock bottom with you."

When Advisor Bai went on duty, Shang Lu would pull up a small wooden stool and sit at the doorway of the dormitory to watch the snow. During working hours, there were few people in the courtyard; only the Chief of Operations wandered around sweeping the snow with a large broom woven from bamboo strips. The Chief of Operations was a legendary, monk-like figure in the base—a veteran of several decades in the navy with extremely high seniority whom no one dared or could discipline. He could lift a great tripod with one hand, and nobody dared to cross him. Usually, he didn't even take regular shifts; he just stayed in the warehouse tinkering with his coal-fired turbojet engine. Besides, the Chief of Operations was an old storyteller who always told Shang Lu bizarre anecdotes from decades ago, of dubious authenticity.

For instance, he said that one year, a veteran from Destroyer 110 was conducting a weapon inspection and cleaning the gun mounts when he accidentally triggered a rocket-assisted depth charge. The depth charge flew several nautical miles and smashed through the roof of a residential building at No. 110 Taishan Road.

Or, for another example, he said that during a military exercise one year, a newly graduated cadet tried to manually launch jamming chaff, but when he encountered a misfired sensor and leaned in to inspect the muzzle, half the top of his skull was blown off.

And once, when Destroyer 110 was dispatched on an emergency mission, the missile launchers were actually stuffed with cellophane noodles. Shang Lu burst out laughing, only to break into a coughing fit right in the middle of it.

Wearing a fur-lined hat and a military-green cotton-padded overcoat, the Chief of Operations stood like a door guardian at the main gate with his broom planted on the ground, gazing into the distance at the undulating snowy mountains. After a long while, he turned his head and said to Shang Lu, "What a heavy snowfall."

Shang Lu nodded. "Yeah, quite a heavy snow."

As soon as he finished speaking, he let out a massive sneeze.

"Did you take any medicine?" the Chief of Operations asked. "That's a severe cold."

Shang Lu sniffled and took another sip of hot water from his thermal flask. "I did. The doctor prescribed two packs of compound paracetamol and amantadine, and the fever has already broken."

"You need to take care of your health. Your body is the capital of revolution," the Chief of Operations said. "You can endure it when you're young, but once you get older, ailments crop up everywhere... That young girl from your office, when she came to see you, she rushed straight in from the front gate, all hot and flustered. I can understand her being anxious, but she needs to dress properly. She was wearing such thin clothes, with her padded jacket balled up and clutched in her hands in sub-zero temperatures. How could you not expect to get sick like that?"

Shang Lu was slightly taken aback. "You mean Bai Shu?"

The Chief of Operations nodded.

Shang Lu gazed blankly at the courtyard gate, the plume of white vapor from his breath swirling in the air, and suddenly, he smiled.

During Shang Lu's leave, the experimental progress of the MEG-BCI system continued as usual. Every night, the Operations and Engineering Office would bring the experimental logs to report on their progress. The office's exploration into Shen Jiang's brain had gradually entered deep waters, attempting to make the AI mimic and learn human emotions and feelings. This was extremely difficult, and to achieve this, the Chengdu Institute of Science City specially sent over an OPM-MEG helmet.

The Chinese name for OPMs is optically pumped magnetometers. During a video conference, the RCBI team stated that this was an extremely advanced new technology. How advanced? Extremely, extremely, extremely advanced! It was at least twenty centimeters ahead of all current BCI technology across humanity—and don't underestimate those twenty centimeters; Einstein was only ahead of Newton by one meter.

The OPM-MEG system utilizes the quantum properties of atoms themselves to perceive signals of magnetic field changes in the brain. It is also the technology truly destined to be applied in the operation of colossal mechs.

Obviously, the MEG system currently in use by the Operations and Engineering Office could never be moved into a mech's cockpit. It occupied half a room, weighed over a ton, and its scanner was filled to the brim with hundreds of liters of expensive liquid helium at minus 269 degrees Celsius. It could not be moved casually, could not suffer bumps, could not have metals nearby, and could not tolerate magnetic fields—how on earth could you move a contraption like that into the cockpit of the Red Lotus?

Compared to the original MEG system, the biggest advantage of the OPM-MEG was its size: small and portable. A single sensor module was only the size of a finger, and a single helmet could integrate more than a dozen sensors spread across the periphery of the pilot's cranium. Wearing it while piloting a mech was no different from ordinary conditions. This helmet was the ultimate crystallization of the MEG-BCI technology faction, the only one of its kind in the entire world with no duplicates.

Shang Lu hadn't seen Shen Jiang for a while, but her brain scan images were something he looked at every day. This was truly a bizarre relationship—much like the Buddhist teaching of looking past the physical skin to point directly to the true essence. The true essence witnessed by enlightened monks since ancient times probably wasn't as fundamental as what Shang Lu was looking at. Shang Lu dragged the scan images across his tablet screen: white lines against a black background, the same brain scanned tens of thousands of times, with active brain regions shifting like rain clouds in a satellite weather map.

This was the external manifestation of human brain activity. Humanity's own understanding of it was barely the size of a pinky finger, yet they were demanding that an AI interpret it.

Wang Xiangbing and the others wrote in their report that Shen Jiang's emotional center was overly stable, which could mislead the MEG system and prevent it from correctly generating her emotional variation envelope. Both the Operations and Engineering Office and the RCBI team said there had to be at least one opportunity—you, Director Shang, must create such an opportunity for the MEG system to observe, record, and analyze learning states where Shen Jiang's emotions were highly unstable, a state that frequently occurred during actual combat. To put it simply: you need to break through her psychologically and emotionally.

Damn it, did they really have to resort to such clichéd plots?

How on earth are you supposed to make someone with severe prosopagnosia fall in love with you?

Utter nonsense.

Coughing continuously, Shang Lu reviewed and approved the records. When the coughing became too violent, he had to put down the tablet. Chen Yu grew more and more worried, urging him to temporarily set work aside and prioritize rest. Nothing in the world was greater than one's own body; what work could possibly be more important than health?

Yet Shang Lu remained as stubborn as ever. He kept pushing forward with his work frantically, as if racing against time with someone. Finally, his illness suffered an unfortunate relapse. One night, Shang Lu coughed so hard he felt like he was coughing up his lungs, with blood in his sputum. His fever spiked back above 39 degrees Celsius, and he shivered while burning all over. In the dead of night at 2:00 AM, Chen Yu made six consecutive phone calls to wake up the doctor at the health clinic, threw on his clothes, hoisted Shang Lu onto his back, and—wielding a flashlight through calf-deep snow—walked over a kilometer of mountain road to deliver him to the hospital.

A blood test immediately confirmed a severe lower respiratory tract infection. The doctor ordered Shang Lu to be admitted to the ward, where he was hooked up to an IV drip for the entire night.

"You need to rest properly! Do you understand what rest means?" the doctor glared at him and admonished, "Why won't you listen, you brat? You're acting like your life means nothing."

Shang Lu's face was flushed bright red, though whether from the fever or shame was hard to tell.

"Bai."

"Hmm?" Chen Yu was curled up in a heavy cotton-padded jacket on the bench, yawning. He raised his head to glance at the high-hanging IV bottle. "There's still more than half a bottle left. We'll be at this for quite a while."

The hospital was cold, bleak, and empty, with only a duty nurse dozing off at the nurses' station. The doctor had given Shang Lu a thick, old woolen blanket and brought over a heater of unknown manufacture, a piece of junk that couldn't even warm up after half a day, leaving their hands and feet frozen.

"I'm starving," Shang Lu said.

"Starve to death then," Chen Yu curled his lip, rolled over with his back facing Shang Lu, and went to sleep. After a long silence, he rolled back over, cursing as he climbed up. "Damn your mother, you little chief engineer bastard, you only know how to torture me."

He wrapped his coat tightly around himself and headed down the corridor toward the nurses' station to find something to eat.

The rhythmic slapping of bare, freezing-red feet in wet slippers stepping against the floor echoed through the silent hallway.

Friendly Recommendation Time: Recommend a Republic-era steampunk sci-fi novel, *The Last Mecha Warlord*.