The next day, around 10 a.m., Gu Beichen woke up and went to the cafeteria for lunch. At this time, the cafeteria was already preparing lunch.
Gu Beichen rubbed his slightly sore forehead. Lin Su had been working until after 3 a.m. last night before he urged her to go back to her dormitory to rest.
He only got to rest for a few hours after Platoon Leader Zhan came to relieve him.
At this time, Lin Su was unsure whether he was awake or not. He ate a few bites of food casually, then paid the fare according to Lin Su’s preferences and asked the chef to make her a tofu casserole on the spot.
This girl, no one has ever seen her eat properly, and with her staying up late last night, she definitely doesn’t have much of an appetite.
The tofu casserole had tofu, soy sauce, and a little bit of lard, which might give her a slight appetite.
Gu Beichen excitedly brought his lunchbox to the office, only to find it empty.
His heart clenched. Had Lin Su left?
However, he quickly dismissed this naive question. Lin Su really left, and Platoon Leader Zhan would definitely report to him.
What’s wrong with him? He patted his head, picked up his lunchbox, and walked out.
Upon seeing the old man guarding the gate, I went over to ask him and learned that everyone had gone to conduct a simulation experiment.
Gu Beichen walked towards the simulation test area. As a security guard, he had thoroughly explored every corner of the base as soon as he entered yesterday.
He quickly found the place for the simulation experiment. Before he even entered, through the observation window, he saw Lin Su surrounded by a group of gray-haired old experts, like a star being surrounded by the moon.
At this moment, Lin Su had a solemn face, her fingertips rapidly tapping the scrolling data stream on the screen, her voice fast and clear: “The data in the third and seventh nodes is abnormal.”
The convergence divergence during iteration is not a hardware issue, but rather a logical fallacy propagated by the parameters of the initial boundary conditions.
The experts surrounding her quickly took notes, while others nodded in sudden realization. Their eyes no longer held the scrutiny of yesterday, but only trust and humble inquiry.
Afraid of disturbing the people inside, Gu Beichen walked in very quietly, his footsteps barely touching the ground.
The room was unusually large. A DJS-130 computer, occupying half a wall and flashing countless indicator lights, was humming and running, its output devices clicking as they printed long tapes of results.
Suddenly, a piercing alarm blared, and the smooth data stream on the screen froze instantly, replaced by a string of red error codes!
“The system has crashed!” a young researcher exclaimed. “The program has gone mad! Commands are not responding!”
The person in charge, Zhao Weimin, was extremely anxious. This computer was a national treasure, and the analog data inside was priceless. If a major problem occurred, the consequences would be unimaginable.
Lin Su remained calm and pushed the two aside, saying, “Get out of the way.”
She sat down at the control room, her hands on the keyboard. Instead of trying the usual operations, she first turned off the power to restart the front-end machine, and then pressed a combination key to force her way into a monitoring program interface with black background and white text.
This is the underlying channel that bypasses the operating system and allows for direct communication with the machine.
“You can’t move this! It’ll damage the tape!” an elderly researcher surnamed Pan exclaimed in alarm, only to be pulled back by Zhao Weimin.
At this moment, Zhao Weimin had blind trust in Lin Su. He lowered his voice and said, “Don’t disturb her! She’s the only one who can save the day!”
Gu Beichen held his breath, standing on the periphery of the crowd, his gaze fixed on Lin Su. He couldn’t understand those cryptic codes, but he could understand her.
Lin Su’s hands flew across the keyboard, so fast they left afterimages. The crisp tapping sound was like a sudden rain pattering on banana leaves, carrying a unique rhythm.
She typed commands at lightning speed while simultaneously explaining them, her voice as calm as if she were reading a lab report:
“It’s not a virus. A byte was corrupted when reading the data tape, causing the instruction to skip and the core loop to a dead end. This corruption point is a bit strange, like… a deliberately left ‘backdoor’.”
“The back door?” Zhao Weimin gasped.
“Hmm.” Lin Su’s eyes sharpened, and she finally pressed the Enter key heavily. “A provocative signature. Done.”
As she finished speaking, the piercing alarm stopped abruptly, the red error codes on the screen receded like a tide, and the massive computer resumed its steady hum, with the data stream starting to flow again.
The entire control center fell into a deathly silence.
The researcher, Mr. Pan, who had exclaimed in surprise earlier, stood there with his mouth agape, unable to close it for a long time, before finally letting out a heartfelt sigh: “The younger generation is truly formidable…the younger generation is indeed formidable!”
Zhao Weimin was so excited that his face was flushed, and he looked at Lin Su as if she were a priceless treasure.
Everyone looked at the young woman who slowly stood up from her seat with an almost reverent gaze.
In just three minutes, she resolved a crisis that could have stalled the project for weeks and pinpointed the malicious nature of the problem.
At this moment, Gu Beichen’s heart was struck hard by an indescribable emotion.
He had seen her playful antics on the ridges of the fields, her gentle profile under the lamplight, and the hardened exterior that life had honed over the years.
But only now did he truly witness the dazzling brilliance that Lin Su possessed, stripped of all her identities, a radiance so intense it was almost blinding.
She is not a vine clinging to anyone; she is a tree that can reach the sky.
She stood there like an insurmountable mountain, the undisputed… queen of this realm.
Just then, Lin Su subconsciously raised her hand and rubbed her brow, which was sore from intense concentration. This subtle movement mirrored her figure under the lamp last night.
Gu Beichen had an idea. Without hesitation, he picked up the slightly cold lunchbox, walked through the silent crowd, and stood in front of her.
All eyes were on him.
He gently placed the lunchbox on a corner of the control panel, the sound not loud, but loud enough for those nearby to hear, conveying an undeniable concern:
“Now that the problem is solved, it’s time to address the human element. Comrade Lin, you haven’t eaten anything since last night, come and have some food.”
He didn’t look at anyone else, his gaze fixed solely on Lin Su’s slightly pale face. He added a sentence, as if speaking only to her, yet also as if declaring his privilege and stance to everyone:
“The tofu stew was made to your liking; it will become fishy when it cools down.”
At this moment, the “king” of the professional field was brought back to the mundane world by him in the simplest and most irresistible way.
Lin Su stared blankly at him, at the food she loved on the lunchbox, and the ice, in its silence, cracked a little more.
In an instant, the atmosphere in the control room shifted from technological shock to a subtle, human touch.
The senior experts exchanged knowing glances, their serious faces breaking into kind, slightly teasing smiles.
Zhao Weimin was the first to react. He coughed forcefully, trying to keep a straight face, but the smile lines at the corners of his eyes couldn’t be hidden: “Comrade Gu, Commander Gu is right! Eating is the most important thing, let’s go eat!”
Researcher Pan stroked his non-existent beard and chimed in with a smile, “Yes, yes, health is the foundation of everything. Go on, we old folks will keep an eye on things here, nothing will go wrong.”