17: Sleep talking and yet another accident

The sleep Excellence sank into was no refreshing spring to wash away his exhaustion, but a viscous and anxious quagmire of consciousness, thoroughly saturated by the high-intensity mental labor and immense psychological pressure of the day. He fell into an extremely vivid dream colored by technical nightmares.

There was nothing warm or fantastical about this dream; it was a cruel extension and distorted reflection of his recent frenetic life. He seemed to be imprisoned in an infinite loop of a virtual laboratory cage of his own making. His surroundings were no longer the familiar, cluttered dormitory walls, but a cold digital barrier composed of countless flickering, rolling multi-channel raw EEG waveforms and dazzling lines of Python code marked with endless errors and warnings. The green EEG waveforms seemed to possess a malicious life of their own, transforming into writhing, thorny vines that entangled his consciousness. At times, they flapped violently up and down in a frenzy, peaking at the top; at other times, they grew so weak they nearly vanished into the pervasive, rustling background of static snow noise, as if mocking his incompetence. The code characters were more like countless autonomous black beetles, crazily swarming his entire field of vision, constantly auto-combining, compiling, running, popping up red "Error" windows, crashing, and then uncontrollably reorganizing again, over and over, without end.

He felt himself suspended in the eye of this storm made of cold data and chaotic noise, waving his hands in vain (though he might not have had a physical body in the dream), trying to capture those fleeting, weak, regular signal spikes or specific rhythmic patterns representing his "thoughts" from the violent torrent of waveforms. His lips were dry, his brow furrowed, and he muttered unconsciously and intermittently, broken words mixing with heavy, weary breaths as they struggled from his throat: "Frequency domain analysis... Fourier transform... wrong window function... spectral leakage... no... not this frequency band... alpha waves drowned out... noise floor too high... adaptive filtering... can't filter it out... damn, ubiquitous 50Hz power line interference... like a ghost... System... you piece of junk... what kind of crude rough set algorithm is this... convergence conditions too harsh... iterative divergence... gradient descent... stuck in a local minimum... need to adjust the learning rate... integral... differential... derivative... partial differential equations..." These obscure technical terms were like uncontrollable spells in a nightmare, profoundly revealing that even under the sleep protection mechanism, his overactive brain's background processes were still frantically and uncontrollably attempting to process and solve the unfinished problems that had nearly crushed him.

Just as the anxiety and struggle of this dream reached an invisible climax, the moment he felt he was about to suffocate in the data flood, an extremely subtle yet eerie event—enough to make anyone in the know break into a cold sweat—occurred silently in the dead-quiet real world.

His old model smartphone, placed by his pillow less than twenty centimeters from his head—which was still wearing the cheap brainwave cap—suddenly lit up without warning, its screen having been pitch black like a dark mirror.

This wasn't the soft, brief flicker of a typical text message or notification. Instead, as if precisely and firmly pressed by a completely transparent, invisible finger, the power button was activated and the screen stayed lit. The cold white backlight instantly illuminated a corner of the pillow, showing the time, date, and battery icon on the standby interface. This in itself was abnormal—Excellence habitually set his phone to silent and enabled accidental-touch protection before bed; under normal circumstances, it was very difficult to accidentally light it up via physical contact.

However, an even more terrifying sight, transcending common sense, followed.

The phone screen didn't stay on the standby interface. As if being remotely controlled by an invisible operator expert in the craft, the unlock pattern input grid automatically appeared on the screen. Then, a simple Z-shaped path was precisely traced by an invisible force, and the phone entered the home screen directly! The entire process was so smooth and accurate it was hair-raising; no physical contact occurred, and it was so quiet that only the sound of Excellence's breathing remained.

Immediately after, as if truly endowed with some eerie autonomous will, the phone automatically clicked open a notepad application—one he used most frequently, with a red test mark in the corner of its icon. A blank editing interface instantly occupied the screen, and a black text input cursor blinked quietly and stubbornly in the upper left corner, like a silent and weird altar waiting for the writing of a forbidden incantation.

In the silent dormitory, time seemed to freeze. There was only Excellence's fluctuating breathing, his sleep-talking mixed with technical terms, and the low hum of the computer's fan.

Then, the cursor... moved on its own.

It began to move to the right, slowly and haltingly, yet with a certain clear purpose, as if an invisible, perhaps slightly trembling and inexperienced typist was carefully and tentatively tapping on the virtual keyboard. As the cursor moved, lines of disorganized, fragmented character sequences—enough to make anyone familiar with signal processing or brain-computer interfaces feel a chill down their spine—were "input" into the blank notepad:

"filt3r_para...ms...@djust...g@in_+15%...EEG_alpha_band...#@...noise_thresh~old...err0r...recal1br@te..."

"FFT_w1ndow...s1ze...overlap...＞＜...art1fact_reject..."

"fe@ture_extract...PCA_fa1l...cov_matrix_s1ngular..."

"class1f1er...SVM_kern3l...RBF...gamma???...＞_＜...retr@1n..."

These characters were a strange mix of English words (mostly abbreviations, misspellings, or hacker-style variants of technical terms for signal processing and algorithm parameters), numbers, mathematical symbols, programming language snippets, and a large amount of meaningless garble and special characters. They were fragmented and logically chaotic, like communication snippets struggling through an environment of extreme interference and low signal-to-noise ratio, or like error-filled debug log information output by an AI system on the verge of a crash. They carried an inhuman, mechanical sense of clumsy attempts based on pattern matching. The entire input process was not smooth, with frequent long pauses, back-and-forth cursor movements (as if deleting wrong inputs), and sudden, meaningless bursts of characters, as if the invisible operator based on Excellence's brainwave signals was also engaged in a grueling struggle against immense internal and external interference.

This extremely bizarre "auto-typing" phenomenon, which transcended realistic understanding, lasted for about a dozen seconds. Then, as abruptly and incomprehensibly as it had begun, everything stopped. The phone screen dimmed and instantly went dark, falling back into a deathly silence, as if everything disturbing that had just happened was merely an extremely rare, sporadic glitch deep within the phone chip's firmware, or a brief supernatural event that could not be explained by science.

In his deep dream, Excellence seemed to subconsciously perceive some external, subtle electromagnetic interference or a slight change in intracranial pressure. He turned over uneasily, burying his face in the pillow. The muttering in his mouth became even more indistinct, turning into scattered acknowledgments and concerns regarding his real-life assistance: "...Su Mu's notes... useful... differential amplifier circuit... impedance matching... but can't let her know... too much... Uncle Liu... hand-soldered... points... really awesome... better than... rigid circuit diagrams... strong..." His voice gradually lowered and blurred, finally being swallowed once again by the waves of deep sleep.

Silence returned to the dormitory, with only the occasional light from a passing car outside casting brief, moving spots on the ceiling, and Excellence's snoring gradually becoming steadier and longer. The air was filled with the faint heat generated by electronic devices on standby and the scent of sleep.

He had no idea, and could never have imagined, what a bizarre and terrifying thing had occurred during those brief dozen seconds.

The root of it all lay in the fact that, due to extreme exhaustion and the relaxation following his euphoria, he had forgotten to disconnect the physical connection between his crude brainwave equipment and the computer. That battered acquisition cap was still firmly on his head, and several dry electrode pads were still stubbornly pressed against his scalp, which was relaxed by sleep but still bore traces of active thought. The power indicator of the signal amplifier module still emitted a faint green light in the dark, and the USB data cable was still securely connected to the computer host's port, continuously feeding pre-processed bioelectric signals from his brain to the computer.

And the brainwave activity from before he fell asleep—highly active and excited due to his breakthrough success—though gradually leveling off as he sank deeper into sleep, shifting from the beta-wave dominance of wakefulness to the alpha and theta waves of early sleep, had left deep imprints of "technical obsession" and "problem-solving" modes in his neural networks. This left behind some weak electrical signal feature patterns that could still be barely identified and correlated by the system algorithms running in the background in a low-detection-threshold mode.

More critically and fatally, the phone he had placed by his pillow was extremely close to his head, almost in the same electromagnetic environment. The phone's interior was not completely dormant; the various chips on its motherboard (CPU, baseband, touchscreen controller), wireless modules (even if Wi-Fi and mobile data were off, the underlying clock and standby communications were still running at very low power), and screen driver circuits were constantly generating extremely weak but very real, complex, and somewhat regular background electromagnetic fields.

The crude system, which was supposed to accurately identify "thought" commands while he was awake, had—in his unconscious, sleep-talking, fragmented state of technical thought—erroneously captured and correlated those residual, broken "technical obsession" signal patterns. This had extremely weakly and unstably triggered the system's command output loop. This tiny, noise-filled output signal—perhaps conducted through common ground power lines, or coupled through extremely limited near-field electromagnetic radiation in the air—had, in an unpredictable, non-reproducible, and extremely low-probability accidental way, very weakly interfered with the operation of a chip on his phone's motherboard that was in a low-power sensitive state and responsible for touchscreen signal processing or basic I/O.

This interference might have simulated a voltage change similar to a specific touch operation within an extremely coincidental clock cycle; it might have slightly disturbed the value of a register, causing it to erroneously execute the unlock and application-opening operations; or it might have generated extremely weak radio frequency radiation with specific encoding characteristics that was mistakenly received and demodulated by the phone's antenna as a wrong command. Its essence was by no means true, controllable "mind-controlled phone," but rather an extremely accidental electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) incident with incredibly harsh conditions—a negligible, even absurd, secondary interference ripple produced by the accumulation of countless errors, coincidences, equipment defects, and environmental factors. It was a rare event brewed by technology, negligence, fatigue, and coincidence.

However, this electromagnetic ripple—so tiny in the physical world it could be completely ignored and was difficult for conventional equipment to detect—produced a unique, brief, and weak electromagnetic spectrum fragment with clear "non-natural artificial encoding" characteristics. Once again, it failed to escape the capture of the "Wide-area Low-intensity Abnormal Energy Sensing Network" centered on the university town, which was as precise and sensitive as a spiderweb.

This time, the signal was countless times weaker than the previously captured micro-fusion features, optical modulation features, or even the primitive EEG biological signal features. Its energy level was almost completely annihilated beneath the vast and complex ocean of urban background electromagnetic noise, like The Whisper of a mosquito drowned out by the clamor of a bustling market.

But its instantaneous burst—that extremely brief spectrum fragment with clear "digital command" features and abnormal modulation patterns—was like a miniature strobe light using a special and extremely hard-to-crack encrypted Morse code in a pitch-black night sky. Although the light was so weak it was invisible to the naked eye, its flickering rhythm, frequency, and encoding pattern were enough to light up a glaring red alarm flag in professional-grade, round-the-clock scanning "electronic eyes"!

This insignificant, almost absurd electromagnetic ripple—born from a weary college student's technical sleep-talk and a moment of negligence—was thus, once again, clearly recorded by those ubiquitous, calm, and silent eyes representing the power and will of the state, and marked with a brand new, even more confusing and alarming label.