95: Chapter 95 Backstage Time

May 3, 2022, 6:00 AM.

Before the alarm clock in the Real World could ring a second time, Jiang Lin was already standing in the wind of the Wasteland.

The entry process had already been carved into his mind and solidified.

Having completed the entire patrol process, he returned to the Outpost and focused his attention on the three folders on the workstation.

The first folder: Tile _ J

The second folder: GIANT - NW-01

The third folder: MPS

Jiang Lin mentally recited the list of manual labor items he had written down in the Real World.

Uniqueness of the synthetic skeleton.

Exclusion of semi-periodic strips.

Verification of local case tables.

Fixing of graphic coordinates.

Version control.

Proof text.

Reproducible report.

Thus, his seventh trip to the Wasteland began with a filename.

Tile _ J _ worklog_001 . txt

In the first year, he hardly left the Outpost.

Every morning, he patrolled the fields and checked the water and power sources.

The life-support system of the Wasteland allowed for no carelessness; this was the survival baseline in the physical sense.

After finishing these chores to keep the system running, he sat down in front of the stone table and began writing the proof.

First writing about the dirt road and the stones.

In reality, he used this metaphor to persuade Professor Shao Mingtang.

There was a dirt road between two villages; people could argue about whether a few stones by the roadside belonged to the left or the right, but the location of that road would not change.

In the context of topology and tiling theory, this was the relationship between boundary perturbation and macro-skeleton stability.

However, a metaphor was not a proof, nor could a metaphor be published as a paper.

The academic community did not recognize poetry; it only recognized flawless derivation.

Jiang Lin's first draft was twenty-nine pages long.

He attempted to use strict set theory language to define the stones as a point set on the boundary, and the dirt road as an isometric isomorphic skeleton at a large scale.

After finishing it, he read it through himself and deleted twelve pages.

Because he found that he had introduced an insufficiently verified lemma in the middle, causing a local rupture in the logical chain.

The second draft was eighteen pages long.

The language was more concise, but the problem remained.

He found that he kept saying that the fuzziness on the boundary would not affect the skeleton.

But those four words "would not affect" were too loose, like an untightened nut, which could trigger a structural collapse at any time when subjected to the stress test of peer review.

Under what metric space did it "not affect"?

Was it the Hausdorff distance, or some more complex homotopy equivalence?

In the second year, he stopped the grand discourse and turned to doing the most basic enumeration.

He listed all cases of boundary fuzziness into a table separately.

Which small bricks could belong to the left, and which could belong to the right.

Which ones seemed to have dual affiliation, but did not change the higher-level boundary line.

Which ones, once misclassified, would lead the next layer of skeleton astray and trigger catastrophic cascading errors.

At first, he wrote like a pile of manual ledgers, densely packed with coordinate transformation matrices and adjacency graphs.

Later, he slowly compressed it into a clearer discrete geometric language, using local patches, adjacency relations, and transformation rules to describe those boundary cases.

By the winter of the third year, the Wasteland ushered in a long sandstorm season.

Amidst the howling wind, he finally turned that metaphor of the dirt road and stones into the first truly viable lemma.

After finishing it, he made a copy of the file and named it: lemma _ skeleton _ unique _ v1.0 .

Then he continued to revise it.

In the world of mathematics, a first edition is forever only a sketch.

In the fourth year, he began to deal with that secretly repeating long corridor.

Professor Shao Mingtang had asked very sharply back then.

The fact that the entire graph did not repeat did not mean that a certain long and narrow strip within it would not repeat.

Just like how the map of a city was chaotic overall, but the shops on both sides of a certain street were identical, repeating all the way to the horizon.

If such a thing was hidden inside Tile J, its non-periodicity proof would become dirty.

A true aperiodic tiling did not allow the existence of any infinitely extending periodic substructures.

Jiang Lin recorded the notches, convex edges, short edges, and long edges on the boundary as symbols.

A, B, C, D, plus their reverse orientations.

At first, that string of symbols was as chaotic as footprints in the sandstorm, exhibiting a completely lawless pseudo-randomness.

He stared at it for half a month and saw nothing.

Symbolic dynamics seemed to fail at this moment.

Later, he changed his method.

Instead of looking at the whole string.

He only looked at which positions would have new markers added and which old markers would be pulled apart after each magnification.

This was like a string of code.

Every time it was copied, it wasn't copied out verbatim and longer, but new characters were inserted in the middle according to a certain rule.

If it truly repeated periodically, then identical segments must appear at regular intervals.

But every time this string of code was scaled up a layer, the spacing would change.

In the sixth year, he wrote the first draft of the exclusion of semi-periodic strips.

In the seventh year, he found a reading loophole.

When he read one-dimensional symbols from the two-dimensional boundary, the direction was not completely fixed.

The chirality problem on the two-dimensional manifold had been ignored by him.

If the reading method changed after flipping, the original argument would become unclean, causing the same boundary to read out two different sets of symbols after being flipped.

So he rewrote it.

In the ninth year, he overthrew it once again.

This time, it was because a short-lived repeating segment existed on a certain type of boundary.

That segment wasn't long enough to form a true periodic strip, but it was enough to make the proof look uncomfortable.

It appeared in the third iteration of the expansion rules and perished in the fifth iteration.

In rigorous academic deduction, covering up anomalies often meant planting a time bomb.

He singled out that repeating segment, numbered it, and conducted an isolation analysis of the outliers.

Then he told the reader in the proof: "A small segment does repeat here, but it will not extend infinitely."

It was merely a scar on the boundary, not a corridor leading to periodicity.

Its life cycle was closed within the algebraic system.

In the eleventh year, he revised this section until he could finally accept it.

The argument finally evolved from intuition into a chain that could be handed over to peers for line-by-line inspection.

The filename became: no _ periodic _ strip _ v3.7

Meanwhile, he returned to GIANT - NW-01.

When he saw this behemoth for the sixth time, his Wasteland age was fifty-three.

At that time, he stood outside.

He could only use a camera, magnetometer, and laser rangefinder to record it like an unsectionable metal corpse.

Now he had come again.

This time, he brought ropes, pulleys, a cutting machine, a portable high-capacity power supply, a three-axis magnetometer array, a high-precision optical measurement frame...

This was the strongest engineering formation he could muster.

He cut through that heavy hatch, welded shut by rust and unknown silicate compounds, for a full three days.

On the morning of the fourth day, the gap in the door was finally pried open into a dark opening large enough for a person to crawl through.

There were no miracles inside.

There was no intact control room.

There were no screens still flickering.

There was no complete database waiting for later generations to read.

There were only collapsed cable troughs, alloy brackets curled up by high temperature, fine sand filling half of the cabin, and rows of long-dead equipment cabinets.

The destruction here was irreversible.

But it was not that the Wasteland had left nothing behind; it was just that the answers were torn to pieces and mixed into the wreckage.

On the seventh day of this expedition, he found the first complete nameplate in a maintenance cabin on the second floor that was relatively well-protected against weathering.

The nameplate was covered with a thick layer of oxidation.

He used a soft brush and mild chemical solvent to clean it little by little, like repairing bamboo slips from a thousand years ago.

Until the handwriting was revealed.

[Seventh Canopy Station · Tidal Wave Monitoring Field NW-01]

Jiang Lin fixed the camera in place, adjusted the aperture and focal length, and took more than sixty consecutive shots to ensure that every dent and scratch was digitally recorded.

On the thirteenth day, on a blackened ceramic instruction board, he read a few broken phrases.

The high-temperature resistance of ceramic allowed this information to survive.

[Tidal wave leading edge]

[Phase difference calibration]

[Multi-loop coupled response]

[Canopy synchronization window]

[North-by-west 12° baseline]

These words did not form a complete sentence.

But it was enough.

GIANT - NW-01 was not an ordinary antenna, nor was it just an isolated monitoring tower.

It was an eye on the outer edge of the Canopy system, a basic node of a vast sensory network.

And the substation ruins codenamed RECON - VC-01 in the sixth Wasteland were not unrelated ruins either.

The annular remanence left by the large loops in the substation and the remanence fingerprinting here shared the same directionality.

At the very least, they pointed to the same physical mechanism worth tracking: large closed conductive structures had undergone collective inductive responses during a certain cataclysmic stage.

He wrote in the records of his work terminal—

[Low-confidence conclusion: RECON - VC-01 and GIANT - NW-01 may belong to the same multi-loop response chain at the tidal wave leading edge; more site samples are needed for spatial autocorrelation analysis.]

After writing it, he bolded the three words "low-confidence".

Academic restraint required him never to exaggerate inferences before having conclusive evidence.

Then, inside the Canopy Station, Jiang Lin discovered a mechanical platform.

It had fallen beside the mid-level maintenance track.

At first, he thought it was just the wreckage of some maintenance vehicle.

About five meters long and less than two meters high, it was full of a rugged heavy-industrial feel.

Two of the six contact-foot-like support structures had already broken, and the remaining four were covered by dust and rust.

The external cables were completely destroyed, the carbonized insulation layer was shattered all over the floor, and the control box was burned straight through, exposing the molten circuit board inside.

The sensor module was left with only a pitch-black empty shell.

From the perspective of modern industry, this thing had lost its brain and nerves and no longer had research value.

But when Jiang Lin squatted down and gently pushed one of the connecting rods with a high-strength alloy crowbar, two support points on the other side of the platform unexpectedly moved at the same time.

That movement was very slight.

So small that if one didn't stare right at it, they would almost miss it.

He tried again from another direction.

This time, he pressed down with his body weight.

As a connecting rod was pressed down, accompanied by an extremely faint sound of gears meshing internally, the other three support points respectively produced varying degrees of elevation and locking.

There was no electricity, no computer, no sensors.

But it could still passively distribute actions.

It looked as if the mechanical structure itself was responding to the terrain.

Jiang Lin lay flat on the floor full of fine sand, turned on his high-brightness headlamp, and observed that dusty set of connecting rods, gear plates, cams, and ratchet mechanisms.

Finally, he wrote a tentative name for this mechanical platform in his notebook: Passive Fault-Tolerant Load-Bearing Unit of the Canopy Outer Field.

This was a purely mechanical mechanism.

But the problem it solved was very rustic, resembling a safety logic core scaled up to a mechanical scale.

When the ground was uneven, which leg bore the stress?

Which leg should yield?

Which leg needed to be locked?

Once a leg broke, how could it prevent erroneous actions from being transmitted back to the main body and causing the entire system to capsize?

When a leg hadn't truly taken on the weight yet, how could the system make sure not to press its entire body onto it prematurely?

Robots in reality usually left these problems to sensors, controllers, and complex attitude calculation algorithms.

Once power was cut off or subjected to strong electromagnetic interference, many capabilities relying on active control would rapidly degrade.

But here, the connecting rods were responsible for voting (force transmission and vector synthesis), the gear plates were responsible for delay (phase misalignment), and the pawls were responsible for locking (state fixation).

The spring group was responsible for giving erroneous actions a little room for rollback (fault tolerance and buffering).

And those irregular load-bearing nodes were responsible for preventing damage from replicating all the way along neat queues.

Making it harder to be killed all at once by the same kind of error.

The pre-humans of this Wasteland World seemed to have faced extreme electromagnetic environments.

They forcefully wrote functions that had to stay alive even if the electronics died into the metal, gears, cams, and pawls.

So that when electronic systems failed, sensors distorted, and control algorithms malfunctioned, they could rely on pure mechanical contact, locking, differential, delayed release, and aperiodic node layout to complete the minimum level of attitude protection, load redistribution, and failure isolation.

This was a romance belonging to the heavy industry era, hardcore to the extreme.

From that day on, Jiang Lin's days were split in half.

In the morning, like a seasoned locksmith and mechanical engineer, he surveyed and mapped the mechanical platform.

Using a vernier caliper, micrometer, and laser scanner, he stripped away its structural diagram little by little.

In the afternoon, he returned to the Outpost and opened the mechanical materials in the workstation that he had archived countless times before.

This time, what he looked at was no longer introductory ordinary mechanical principles.

But rather papers related to mechanism synthesis, obstacle-crossing mechanisms, mechanical reliability, fail-safe design, contact mechanics, ratchet and pawl mechanisms, cam mechanisms, differential transmission, multi-body dynamics, and extreme environment robotics.

For many years in the past, these materials had simply lain in the hard drive.

He knew they were useful.

But he didn't know when they would be used.

Now, that fallen mechanical platform at the Canopy Station gave a clear question to these dry chapters.

When the book spoke of ratchet and pawl mechanisms, he would recall that blackened set of locking teeth.

When the book spoke of differential transmission, he would redraw those mutually restraining gear plates at the bottom of the Canopy platform.

When the book spoke of fail-safe, he would take a broken support foot and ask: if this leg broke, how could the remaining five legs avoid being dragged down to death by it?

When the book spoke of contact mechanics, he would think of those rusted bushings, worn pin holes, and grooves bitten out by sand and dust—which were operational wear and which were impact marks left at the instant of cataclysm.

These materials did not tell him the answer directly.

They simply gave him a language.

Enabling him to dismantle the mechanical platform before him, which looked like the remains of a monster, from something very complex, exquisite, and formidable into more concrete questions.

Which part was responsible for transmitting force.

Which part was responsible for delay.

Which part was responsible for locking.

Which part was responsible for giving erroneous actions room for rollback.

Which structure was not meant for motion, but to prevent errors from continuing to spread when a certain component failed.

Jiang Lin soon realized that he was not replicating a maintenance vehicle.

He was dismantling a set of fault-tolerant logic written in machinery.

In the past, he studied machinery in order to make things.

This time, he studied machinery to understand what the remains of a civilization were saying in metal.

But even after laying a solid foundation, he still did not attempt to replicate the mechanical platform as a whole.

It was too large and too complex, exceeding the manufacturing limits of the Outpost.

He first drew the load paths.

Which connecting rod underwent slight deformation when subjected to pressure.

Which gear plate rotated at a specific angle.

Which pawl was responsible for locking at the critical point.

Which spring was just for buffering, and which was for energy storage.

Which mechanism was truly the core differential center.

In the thirteenth year, amidst countless instances of modeling and reverse engineering, he discovered that the support points of the mechanical platform were not arranged regularly.

At first, he thought that was damage-induced displacement caused by long-term uneven stress.

After all, metal could also fatigue and creep.

Later, he measured for a full four months, inputting all data into the workstation for fitting.

Only to find out that it wasn't.

Because if it were merely damage, the deviations would gather along the direction of stress collapse, exhibiting distinct stress concentration characteristics.

Yet the offsets of these nodes did not point to the same collapse source; instead, the same few types of patterns repeatedly appeared in local adjacency relations.

That is to say, the deviations of those support points followed rules.

Not the rules of a neat matrix.

But a non-repeating set of rules.

Locally, there are only a limited number of connection and position relationships.

Globally, however, it is hard to find a simple translational period.

Jiang Lin projected these nodes onto the two-dimensional plane of the workstation, and the more he looked, the more familiar they seemed, his heartbeat beginning to accelerate.

Because although it did not look like the geometric shape of Tile J, it shared the same temperament as Tile J.

The local rules were rigid, and the global structure never repeated.

At this moment, Tile J was no longer just an abstract theory deduced by mathematicians on paper, nor was it just a paper ready for publication.

It leaped out of the ivory tower of mathematics, transforming into a surveying language and an engineering paradigm.

Jiang Lin began to number these mechanical nodes using the finite patches of Tile J.

This algebraic tool, originally used to describe polygonal tessellations, fit surprisingly well at this moment.

It helped Jiang Lin distinguish which deviations were actual physical damage and which were the initial non-periodic designs.

Which nodes were used for load dispersion, and which were meant to avoid mechanical wave resonance and the accumulation of unidirectional errors.

He typed into the records—

[Finding: The load-bearing nodes of the Seventh Canopy Station mechanical platform are of limited types and arranged non-periodically. They are likely used to disperse periodic vibrations and mechanical disturbances on a macroscopic scale, avoiding systematic collapse caused by the accumulation of unidirectional errors.]

[The finite patches of Tile J can serve as a surveying index and a scaled-down testbed, and the two exhibit a high degree of isomorphism in graph theory models.]

At this point, three seemingly parallel lines inexplicably meshed together within the gear train.

Tile J was non-repetition in mathematics.

The Seventh Canopy Station machinery was non-repetition in engineering.

MPS was tireless endurance in program logic.

They were not the same thing, yet they crossed different disciplinary barriers to ask the same question and face the same dilemma.

Could extremely rigid local rules force out a whole that would not be killed by repetition and could maintain its own structure amidst chaos?

In the fifteenth year, Jiang Lin dragged MPS out of the background sorting tasks, modified its underlying logical architecture, and fed it a brick.

In reality, MPS could initially only handle very small tasks.

Sorting five numbers, local ranking, bucketing algorithms.

Like a clumsy worker who only knew how to turn one kind of screw, mechanical and sluggish.

Now, this clumsy worker had evolved to the point where it could check the local case table of Tile J.

However, the first version of the program ran for seven hours, suffered a memory overflow, and crashed.

It was not that the computing power of the Outpost workstation was not fast enough, but that his rules were not written cleanly enough.

A certain type of flipping scenario was written by him as two different states, causing the state machine to fall into infinite recursion.

MPS treated them as two parallel paths, only to find out at the end that the results pointed to the same destination, tying the logical chain into a knot right there.

This showed that the program was beginning to help Jiang Lin discover situations that the human eye thought were different, but actually belonged to the same category topologically.

The second version of the program optimized the state pruning algorithm, ran for three days, and found a missed item.

This was completely normal in exhaustive searches involving tens of thousands of combinations.

This was like a jigsaw puzzle; you thought you were almost done, only to find that the shape of the very last piece was completely wrong.

If it were the past, Jiang Lin would have felt a bit annoyed, or even doubted his own deductive abilities.

Now, he would not.

The Wasteland had smoothed away those unnecessary emotional fluctuations.

Calmly, he added this item into the state transition matrix table, numbered: R-44.

Then he wrote in the log—

[MPS effective, state space search coverage meets the standard. It discovered local branches missed by the human eye, and the core hierarchy has not been overturned.]

In the seventeenth year, after the program finished running, no new branches popped up.

For the first time, the local case table ushered in theoretical closure.

Jiang Lin did not trust a single run.

Academic rigor does not allow for isolated evidence.

He changed the rule expression forms, the variable numbering methods, the starting states of the random number seeds, and the scanning order of depth-first and breadth-first search.

He ran it another seventeen times.

Every time the results were the same, and all branches ultimately converged on the same conclusion.

By the winter of the eighteenth year, when the Wasteland temperature dropped below freezing, MPS generated the first reproducible report.

The report was ugly, resembling a supply list printed by a dot-matrix printer in an old warehouse from the last century.

How many initial states, how many equivalence class merges, how many dead ends, which step each died at, and which graph in algebraic geometry each result corresponded to.

But prettiness wasn't important.

Being able to be peer-reviewed without any obstacles was what mattered.

In the twentieth year, he began hand-crafting a replica of the Canopy external field passive fault-tolerant load-bearing unit in the small processing workshop of the Outpost.

The first-version prototype failed thoroughly.

It was too small.

The original machine relied on a self-weight of several tons or even tens of tons to press down mechanical gaps and overcome static friction.

Yet the small prototype in his hands was only a little over ten kilograms.

The heavy pawls in the original machine that could naturally mesh via weight merely brushed against each other lightly in the small prototype and slipped open.

The scale effect in Physics dealt him a heavy blow here.

For the second version, he adjusted the tolerances, but the springs were too stiff.

During the obstacle-crossing test, one leg was propped up by the simulated terrain, and the entire platform failed to yield accordingly; the differential mechanism failed, instead pushing another fulcrum into mid-air.

For the third version, the locking mechanism intervened too early.

The prototype crawled up the gravel slope like a beetle tripped by its own legs, its various components experiencing kinematic interference and getting completely stuck halfway, the connecting rods emitting dangerous sounds of deformation.

Jiang Lin was not discouraged.

Engineering was built upon the ruins of failure to begin with.

He drew down the force analysis of every single failure.

He ran data using multibody dynamics and contact mechanics models.

Which fulcrum lost load first, which connecting rod angle exceeded the kinematic constraint boundary, which pawl meshed at too early a phase, and which bushing had too large a sliding friction coefficient.

In the Wasteland, he had time—plenty of time to try out all the clumsy methods.

In the twenty-third year, he realized that he could not test the prototype only on regular obstacles.

Regular obstacles were too easy to trick.

If every stone was placed at the same interval and height, the mechanical delay inside the prototype would quickly form a certain resonance, much like reciting answers from memory.

It was meaningless.

Therefore, using the coordinate data of the finite patches of Tile J, he built a non-periodic testbed.

He converted the vertex and boundary features of Tile J into CNC machining codes, milling obstacle bases with different heights, different intervals, and different contact angles.

This testbed looked rather awkward.

There were no neat queues, no repeating steps.

It was filled with counter-intuitive mutations.

Even Jiang Lin himself, walking on it, found it hard to predict in advance where to step next, his center of gravity constantly on the verge of losing balance.

But this was precisely its value.

It simulated the most unpredictable real Wasteland environment.

In the twenty-fifth year, the fourth-version prototype crawled across one-third of the testbed for the first time.

In the twenty-sixth year, by continuously fine-tuning the stiffness curve of the non-linear springs, it crawled across half.

In the twenty-seventh year, it completed the entire course.

It could be said to run very slowly.

A low-speed, high-torque brushless motor pushed the main spindle to rotate bit by bit, and the six supporting feet awkwardly lifted, dropped, locked, and released.

Every movement was accompanied by the friction of gears and the tick-tock of ratchets.

Yet it relied on no external sensors, nor did it relied on complex microprocessor control.

When the terrain propped up one side, the purely mechanical linkage system automatically performed force vector distribution, smoothly transferring the load to the other side.

When a certain fulcrum missed, the pawl did not lock immediately to cause the platform to capsize; instead, relying on differential delay, it waited until the next set of fulcrums caught the weight before locking the state.

Looking at it, it did not look like a qualified, cyberpunk-style engineering prototype in the modern sense, but rather like a clumsy yet extraordinarily tenacious mechanical insect stepping out of the steampunk era.

Very slow, extremely noisy, severe bushing heating, and pawl wear far exceeding industrial standard expectations.

But it proved one thing, a thing of subversively significant meaning in engineering logic.

This mechanical logic from the pre-human civilization of the Canopy Station could be scaled down.

It could be re-expressed with ordinary materials of the Real World.

Under extreme conditions completely devoid of complex electronic sensors, it could allow a mechanical platform to safely and stably hand itself over from one contact state to the next in non-repeating, harsh terrains.

As for true engineering applications—solving problems such as wear, heating, and material fatigue—that would have to wait until returning to the Real World, to be handed over to more advanced materials science, larger-scale machining centers, more professional testbeds, and the entire engineering team.

Jiang Lin squatted beside the testbed, watching it crawl bit by bit past the final irregular stone platform, tracks and mechanical feet leaving deep marks on the finish line.

He wrote on the data pad—

[Canopy external field passive fault-tolerant load-bearing unit, small-scale fourth version, all-mechanical passive control (motor is only responsible for slowly feeding power into the main spindle, not participating in judgment and control), passed the Tile J non-periodic testbed low-speed obstacle crossing. The technical path is feasible.]

In the thirtieth year, Jiang Lin stopped expanding the Tile J proofs.

Not because it was flawless.

In the rigorous mathematical world, no one dared to easily call a groundbreaking theory perfect.

But because it had reached a state.

An extremely solid ground state.

A completely unfamiliar peer, without needing to be of one mind with him or understand his metaphors, as long as they were willing to spend time, could follow the clear definitions, detailed graphics, complete tables, open-source program code, and rigorous logical deductions to step by step, irrefutably review it.

In the same year, he completed the first-version systematic compilation of the internal files of GIANT-NW-01.

In the folder were—

High-definition multi-band photos of the complete nameplate.

Corpus comparison results of the residual words on the ceramic instruction board.

3D point cloud surveying maps of the internal cabins.

Physical damage numbers of the failed storage modules.

Spectrum comparison maps of the annular residual magnetism distribution.

Spherical trigonometric review calculations pointed to by the top antenna spokes.

Complete CAD surveying maps of the Canopy external field passive fault-tolerant load-bearing unit.

Dynamics simulations and failure records of the four versions of small prototypes.

Parameter matrix records of the Tile J non-periodic testbed.

...

[Conclusion 1: The shared electromagnetic fingerprint features of GIANT-NW-01 and RECON-VC-01 support the low-confidence hypothesis that the tidal wave front once caused high-energy multi-loop responses in multiple large closed conductive structures.]

[Conclusion 2: In terms of design concept, the Seventh Canopy Station system has an engineering backup route utilizing purely mechanical passive structures with extremely low electronic dependence to cope with high-intensity electromagnetic/physical disturbance environments.]

[Conclusion 3: The Canopy external field passive fault-tolerant load-bearing unit is an extractable, dimension-reduced and reproducible local core sample of this route.]

In the spring of the thirty-seventh year.

The seasonal changes of the Wasteland seemed somewhat blurred across the long years.

Jiang Lin organized all the files and all his painstaking efforts one last time.

In the old yet still well-functioning workstation of the Outpost, he opened the final draft of Tile J.

Provisional title—

Tile J: A Non-Periodic Monotile Construction Forced by Local Boundaries

Below was the standard academic format.

Analytic geometric definitions of complete graphics.

Affine transformation rules for four types of hypergraph blocks, state transition tables for local cases, MPS full-traversal verification reports, and topological proofs of the uniqueness of the synthetic skeleton.

Dynamic analysis excluding semi-periodic bands, as well as the final main theorem corollary.

Further below was a very short appendix title.

Preliminary Application of Finite Non-Periodic Structures in Mechanical Testbeds

Reason told him that too many physical engineering applications could not be crammed into the pure mathematics main paper; that would destroy the purity of the paper at the algebraic level and confuse reviewers.

Therefore, he operated the terminal, moving this appendix to another independent space and creating a new folder for it alone.

Aperiodic_Mechanical_Testbed_v0.1

Inside were placed: the generation algorithm of the Tile J non-periodic testbed, the drawings of the small prototype of the Canopy external field passive fault-tolerant load-bearing unit, the dynamic records of low-speed obstacle crossing, and a reproducible material list based on real industrial standards.

...

Outside the Outpost.

The dark red sky, like a coagulated blood clot, weighed heavily upon the distant horizon.

A violent gale whipped up coarse sand mixed with radioactive dust, like countless tiny files sweeping across the hard edges of the Stone House, emitting sharp hisses.

In this world forgotten by time, he had spent thirty-seven years.

Day after day and year after year, he rewrote, redrew, re-memorized, and reconstructed these theories, blueprints, and mechanical structures over and over again.

His cerebral cortex had formed physical sulcal memory.

Until now, even with his eyes closed, he could draw Tile J without the slightest deviation, starting from the vector coordinates of the first boundary.

Until even without looking at the execution logs, he could accurately state during which iteration the R-44 branch survived one extra circle before hitting a wall and dying.

Until without any 3D auxiliary sketches, he could extremely clearly rotate that set of Canopy external field passive fault-tolerant load-bearing units in his mind, making every virtual connecting rod and every gear mesh at the correct position with the correct acting force.

Data synchronization complete.

Logout program initiated.

Vision began to blur, the sound of wind and sand in the Wasteland gradually fading away, replaced by a sense of weightlessness.

May 3, 2022, 06:01.

Daybreak was brilliant.

A familiar yet strange scent flooded his nasal cavity.

The cell phone screen was still lit, emitting a soft fluorescent glow.

Professor Gu Nanzhou's message sent last night remained there, revealing ease and relief between the lines.

[Do not rush, take the Gaokao first; if you can catch up over a single summer vacation, that would already be very fast.]

Jiang Lin glanced at the screen, a calmness born of vicissitudes lingering in his eyes.

He pulled out his chair, sat in front of the computer, and pressed the power button.

The system booted up, loaded data, and opened the working directory.

Tile_J_internal_draft_v0.9

Aperiodic_Mechanical_Testbed_v0.1

Two folders lay quietly on the desktop.

One belonged to mathematics.

One belonged to machinery.

The first would first startle Teacher Lu, along with the three professors and mentors: Professor Gu Nanzhou, Professor Lin Zhaoye, and Shao Mingtang.

As for the other, let us leave it pending.