48: A solitary journey and distant starlight

In the days that followed, Excellence lived a life that was precisely programmed, highly efficient, yet profoundly lonely, as if he were a tiny gear embedded within a precision clock, meshing and rotating regularly under absolute control, yet utterly out of place with the grandeur and coldness of the entire machine.

Each day began not from a natural awakening or the urging of an alarm clock, but through the precise manipulation of an intelligent environmental system. At a preset time, a hidden LED array in the bedroom ceiling would simulate the spectral changes of dawn, gradually transitioning from deep indigo to soft orange-red, with the brightness increasing slowly and irresistibly. Simultaneously, a synthetic fragrance carrying the scent of dew and grass would begin to permeate the air, accompanied by extremely faint, gradually intensifying forest morning sound effects (birdsong, the sound of a stream). All of this was designed to "naturally" awaken his physiological rhythms rather than rudely disturb them. However, this overly perfect simulation instead carried an unsettling sense of artificiality, lacking the randomness of life. Every time Excellence "woke up" and opened his eyes, he saw the eternally unchanging man-made dome and breathed strictly filtered air with a constant composition; a deep sense of alienation and a suffocating feeling of being trapped in a cocoon would arrive as scheduled.

The water for washing was maintained at a constant 37.5 degrees Celsius, with the flow rate and duration optimized to avoid waste. Replacement clothes would appear punctually every day in the delivery chamber of the bedroom closet—high-quality material, comfortable to the touch, uniform in style, without any brand markings, as devoid of personality as a uniform. Meals were delivered on time through vacuum tubes by the kitchen area's intelligent system and placed on a pristine dining table. Every meal was co-designed by top nutritionists and AI algorithms, with calories, protein, vitamins, and trace elements precisely measured to the milligram. The presentation was exquisite yet cold, and the flavors were optimized through big data to ensure "universal acceptability," but after eating them for a long time, they felt as monotonous as consuming a high-grade fuel to maintain survival, lacking any of the surprises or warmth of everyday life. He had tried to suggest a small flavor preference through the internal system, but the reply was always: "Request received. It will be included as a reference for nutritional algorithm optimization." Then, everything remained the same.

Then, it was time to enter that magnificent and cold laboratory to begin the day's research. Here, the demand for resources could be met almost instantaneously and infinitely. Did he need a special metal target material with a purity as high as 99.999999%? Submit an application, and within an hour, the material, sealed in an argon-filled shockproof box, would be delivered to the designated workbench by a silent Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV). Did he need to call upon the Supercomputing Center for large-scale Chaos model simulations? Within his permissions, he could obtain powerful computing Nodes almost instantly, with data flowing unimpeded. Did he encounter an abstruse quantum tunneling effect problem? Through an encrypted academic database interface, he could access full papers from almost all the world's top journals, the latest experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider, and even unpublished preprints from certain major national laboratories. The breadth, depth, and speed of information acquisition far exceeded any university or research institution in the outside world, creating the illusion of possessing the master key to the treasury of human knowledge.

But in cruel contrast to this was the absolute isolation of communication. He saw no one. Xiao Zhang would occasionally appear like a ghost, but the process was highly formalized: usually, shortly after Excellence achieved a phased result and the data was automatically uploaded, a door in the laboratory would slide open silently, and Xiao Zhang would walk in, expressionlessly collect a hard copy of the automatically generated progress report (there seemed to be special archiving requirements), ask one or two extremely critical technical questions directed at the core, and then turn and leave decisively after getting the answers. He never engaged in small talk, never offered praise, and never showed any emotion, as if he were merely a highly intelligent humanoid data interface. Daily supplies, meal deliveries, and even laboratory cleaning and maintenance were all completed by various exquisitely designed, silent automated robotic arms and AGVs; he couldn't even see the shadow of a logistics staff member. Most of the time, the entire underground floor was terrifyingly quiet, with only the faint humming, electrical sounds, and periodic pumping of vacuum pumps produced by the precision instruments, along with the sounds of his own breathing, heartbeat, and the occasional unconscious tapping on the desk. Over time, this extreme silence would produce an eerie sense of pressure, even causing one to hallucinate.

He was as if exiled to a deserted island built with the most cutting-edge technology and piled with endless treasures; he was the island's only inhabitant and its only prisoner. He possessed the tools to touch the edge of truth, yet had no one to share the ecstasy of discovery, no one to confide in about the confusion of failure, and no one with whom to engage in those seemingly meaningless brainstorms of clashing inspiration.

He tried to throw all his energy frantically into the research of the "Composite Field," using high-intensity work to numb himself and fill that immense void. The conditions here truly liberated him from tedious and inefficient "hand-crafted" work. Utilizing the top-tier computing clusters and powerful multi-physics coupling simulation software available here, many of his wild ideas—which previously could only be verified by intuition, conjecture, and crude experiments—could now be modeled, simulated, and optimized with precision down to the atomic scale and femtosecond level. The experimental conditions had undergone a qualitative leap: he could use a Molecular Beam Epitaxy System to "grow" atomically flat ideal material interfaces layer by layer like building blocks; he could use Ultrafast Laser Pump-Probe Technology to clearly "photograph" micro-process images of energy transfer within a system; he could use a Cryogenic Strong Magnetic Field System to strip away the interference of thermal noise and peer into the intrinsic behavior of matter under extreme conditions.

Progress was significant and efficient. With the assistance of supercomputers, he successfully optimized the set of nonlinear control equations that integrated brainwave harmonics, electromagnetic resonance, and ancient metaphysical concepts, finding several more stable and efficient energy-information coupling and transmission modes. The theoretically predicted energy loss rate was reduced by several orders of magnitude. Based on the simulation results, he even designed several new core components and array layouts for generating and stabilizing the "Composite Field" that were highly feasible in theory and exquisitely structured, with performance far exceeding his previous "hand-crafted" prototypes.

But the more he surged forward on this broad highway, the more he felt an indescribable confusion and a faint sense of unease deep in his heart. He found that he seemed to have fallen into a "technical bottleneck"—he could continuously optimize, iterate, and improve performance indicators within the existing framework recognized by the system and Wang Jianguo, polishing the theoretical models to be more and more exquisite and making the experimental data look more and more beautiful, with reports that seemed impeccable. However, he found it difficult to once again capture the kind of disruptive, out-of-nothing breakthrough inspiration that had burst forth back in the dormitory, under the extreme pressure of scarce resources and the frantic combination of high-pressure system tasks and free imagination. That kind of breakthrough often came from unconventional methods, from the wild imagination born of being backed into a corner, and even from the challenging collisions with someone like Su Mu, whose thinking patterns were vastly different yet could strike precisely at the heart of the matter. The efficiency here was too high, the resources too abundant, and the path too smooth, which instead felt like a gentle trap, invisibly smoothing out the sharpest, most adventurous, and potentially most creative edges of his thinking.

He would often involuntarily stop his work and watch the dazzling, complex data streams flowing like waterfalls on the flexible screen and the brilliantly rendered multi-dimensional simulation images, but his gaze would gradually go blank, losing focus. His thoughts would drift to that distant yet vivid past: remembering that old desk lamp in the dormitory that was warm and had a small black spot he had accidentally burned onto the lampshade; remembering the "human" scent in the air that was always a mix of rosin, old books, instant noodle seasoning, and a little bit of sweat—not so pleasant, yet incredibly real; remembering the faint shadow cast by Su Mu's eyelashes on her eyelids when she frowned in thought during their late-night video calls, the rustling sound of her pen gliding across scratch paper, and the clear, sharp light that flashed in her eyes when she occasionally pointed out the key to a problem with piercing insight... Those times that seemed filled with Chaos, inefficiency, and full of uncertainty and the trivia of life were now, through the filter of memory, endowed with a warm golden glow, full of vivid, burgeoning vitality and a breath of something called "freedom," the preciousness of which he only now realized with a start.

Late one night, he completed an extremely complex simulation of multi-dimensional fields resonating synergistically under specific boundary conditions; the massive amount of data had kept the supercomputing Nodes running for several hours. The result was perfect, highly consistent with predictions, and even slightly exceeding them. But he felt an indescribable mental exhaustion and emptiness, as if all his energy had been drained, leaving only a hollow shell gradually cooling down after high-speed operation.

He subconsciously left the main work area and wandered to a relatively quiet corner of the laboratory—there, after completing all "security assessments" and "adaptive modifications," the technical team had finally returned his weathered, "hand-crafted" version Brainwave-Environment Interaction Prototype, which looked out of place and even somewhat comical in the surrounding sleek environment. It was placed on a special anti-vibration and anti-electromagnetic interference display stand, like an ancient artifact unearthed by an archaeological excavation from another era, silently telling a completely different history.

He reached out, his fingertips lightly brushing over the rough BNC interface that was even slightly crooked due to manual soldering, stroking the coarse copper coils barely fixed with crooked white hot-melt glue, and passing over the exposed, differently colored jumper wires that were tangled like nerve bundles. What his fingertips conveyed was not a cold, perfect metallic touch, but a familiar, clumsy mark of warmth that carried body heat and sweat. Compared to the cold, efficient, and perfect cutting-edge equipment around it that resembled surgical instruments, this simple, crude, and even somewhat ugly device heavily carried his initial, purest, and most reckless passion, frantic imagination, and that clumsy courage of going forward even against ten thousand people.

Suddenly, his gaze was drawn to an extremely inconspicuous, tiny gap at the base of the device, seemingly left over from assembly. In that gap, there seemed to be something small, slightly whitish, with a color completely different from the surrounding dark metal. His heart skipped a beat for no reason, and a strange premonition surged in his mind. Holding his breath, he took a pair of precision anti-static tweezers from the nearby workbench and carefully, extremely gently, probed into the gap, clamped onto that tiny foreign object, and slowly pulled it out.

It was a small piece of note paper, folded extremely small, with edges deliberately torn somewhat roughly, as if hurriedly ripped from a notebook. The paper was very thin and made of ordinary material, completely out of place in this high-tech environment.

Excellence's heart suddenly constricted, as if gripped tightly by an invisible hand, and then began to beat violently and uncontrollably! Blood seemed to rush to the top of his head instantly and then quickly recede, bringing a slight dizziness. His fingers trembling slightly, he took a deep breath and, with movements as gentle as possible, like unfolding a fragile butterfly cocoon, slowly unfolded the folded slip of paper layer by layer.

After the slip of paper was fully unfolded, it wasn't large. There was no signature, no heading, only a single line of small characters written with an ordinary HB pencil—elegant and familiar, the handwriting slightly hurried yet still maintaining a trace of composure:

"No matter where you are, don't forget the feeling when you first lit that light bulb."

It was Su Mu's handwriting! Absolutely no mistake!

With a bang, it was as if something had exploded in Excellence's mind! A huge, indescribable tide of mixed shock, warmth, sorrow, longing, and intense solace instantly breached the seemingly solid psychological dam he had built with high-intensity work over many days, completely submerging him!

How did she do it?! How could she possibly know he had been brought here?! How could she break through this fortress-like security and surveillance to precisely stuff such a small slip of paper into this device that had been strictly inspected and was almost impossible to tamper with?! What kind of insight, courage, resources, and unimaginable precision planning were required behind this?!

She... she knew his situation! She was using this extremely secretive and risky way to tell him that she remembered, she cared, and she... was still watching him! She hadn't forgotten him! That phrase "the feeling of lighting the light bulb" was like a key, instantly opening the floodgates of his memory. That night in the cluttered dormitory when he first successfully lit the wireless light bulb, that pure, unadulterated ecstasy and sense of achievement re-wrapped his cold heart like a warm tide.

This small, thin, almost weightless slip of paper in his hand now felt as heavy as a thousand catties, like a faint yet incredibly resilient and highly penetrating starlight that miraculously pierced through layers of alloy barriers, the extremely tight surveillance network, and invisible mental shackles, precisely shining into the deepest part of his lonely, cold, and almost numb heart, bringing solace, strength, and hope that could not be measured in words.

He tightly gripped that slip of paper, his knuckles turning slightly white from the force, as if he were clutching a warm ember burning fiercely in the cold night, dispelling the boundless cold silence and loneliness around him. Hot liquid finally rushed out of his eyes uncontrollably, sliding silently down his cheeks and dripping onto the cold, dust-free laboratory tabletop, leaving a small wet mark that quickly evaporated and disappeared.

He was no longer alone.

Deep within this cage cast in gold and under absolute control, an extremely fine yet incredibly resilient thread had been reconnected. On the other end of that thread was the world full of the breath of life—imperfect yet incredibly real and free—that he once possessed and desperately longed to return to.