Chapter 210: Markers and Milestones

Two mornings later, Lin Chen stood at the end of the county hospital’s inpatient corridor, the ache of a red-eye flight and a long transfer still lodged in his bones. The cold white light of that business center in San Francisco seemed to cling to his eyelids, but Beijing time had already pushed him back among hospital beds, payment windows, and server-room nodes. He didn’t light the cigarette. He held it between his fingers, turned the plastic lighter halfway around in his palm, then slipped it back into his pocket. The motion-sensor light in the corridor had gone out; he stamped his right foot, and it flickered back on, a harsh white glow spilling across the terrazzo floor and picking out the dust on the soles of his shoes. He lowered his head and looked at his phone screen. Old Zhao’s chat window was still resting on last night’s message: “We have compliance credentials. Billing is by node.”

His thumb hovered above the keyboard. He couldn’t just ask for a price. He had to break down the requirements into modules the other party could evaluate. He opened a memo and typed them out one by one:

1. Initial requirement: de-identification and cleansing of medical texts, average 5,000 entries per day, peak 20,000. 2. Environment requirements: Ubuntu 14.04, Docker container isolation, each node must have 16 GB VRAM, support for a CUDA 7.0 base environment. 3. Network: intranet tunneling, data must not leave the domain, localized storage. 4. Settlement: tiered pricing based on actual GPU runtime, first-month trial period settled at 70%. 5. Breach terms: if a node is down for over 2 hours, that day’s fee is waived; if our scripts cause excessive resource usage, we make up the difference at market rate.

He checked it over once. The logic was airtight, the responsibilities balanced. He copied the text and pasted it into the chat box, then added one more line at the end:

“Brother Zhao, I’ll bring my own scripts and won’t touch the underlying drivers. If this works, I’ll bring the test environment over and run it through. Would tomorrow afternoon be convenient for you? The test prepayment can go through third-party escrow after the node is confirmed.”

He hit send.

The screen dimmed. He leaned against the wall, and the numbness in his left foot crept upward along his calf, like a layer of soaked cotton wrapped around the bone. He shifted his weight, raising his right heel slightly to ease the pull on his Achilles tendon. From the far end of the corridor came the sound of cart wheels grinding over the floor tiles. An orderly was pushing the breakfast cart toward him, stainless-steel trays clinking with a clear metallic chime. Seven-thirty. It was time for the dressing change in the ward.

He pushed open the door. Wang Guiying was wiping Xiaoman’s face with warm water. She had wrung the towel nearly dry, and her movements were so gentle it was as if she feared she might break him. Xiaoman was still asleep, his breathing steady, but the dark shadows beneath his eyes had not faded. The monitor traced a regular waveform, his blood oxygen holding at 94.

Lin Chen did not go back to the billing window and pay the same charge a second time. He only photographed the imported-medication prepayment receipt from two days earlier, confirming that the hospital system had recorded the 6,800 yuan. The three thousand Old Zhou had lent him had already become a pharmacy receipt, and only 417.6 remained on his card. If Old Zhao’s side required any test prepayment, it would have to roll out of the project milestone itself; Xiaoman’s medicine money could not be moved again. His cash flow was stretched taut as a wire. It could not break.

Back at his seat, he opened his laptop. The screen lit up; the Excel spreadsheet was already prepared. He created a new sheet and named it “MVP_Cash Flow.” Columns: Date, Income Item, Expense Item, Node Rental Fee, Medication Costs, Server Depreciation, Redundancy Buffer. He keyed in the numbers. Old Zhao’s quote would most likely fall somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five yuan an hour. At an average of eight hours a day, a single node would cost roughly 3,600 to 7,200 a month. If the script was optimized properly and cleansing efficiency rose to 1,200 entries an hour, then 5,000 entries would take only 4.2 hours. The costs would be manageable.

But that depended on solving the script’s concurrency and memory-leak problems. V2.0 wasn’t fault-tolerant enough. V3.0 still wasn’t fully wrapped.

He pulled up the code editor. The cursor blinked on the line class DataCleaner:. He needed to bundle the logging module, exception handling, and xlrd integration together into a Docker image that could run independently. His foot injury wouldn’t allow him to stay seated for too long. He set a Pomodoro timer: twenty-five minutes coding, five minutes standing stretch. He couldn’t put weight on his left foot, so he braced himself against the wall and did single-leg calf raises. His muscles throbbed, but the faster blood flow eased the numbness a little.

Director Li’s bet-on-performance agreement ran through his head again. If he signed, the next six months would be chained to KPIs—overtime every night until the early hours, chasing a promotion, chasing the year-end bonus. But Xiaoman’s illness would not wait. The epileptic episodes were coming more and more often. MRI scans, genetic testing, targeted medication—every last item was a money-eating beast. Working for wages moved at a linear pace. Medical expenses climbed exponentially. Trying to fight an exponential drain with linear income—sooner or later, the whole thing would collapse.

He opened his notebook of mistakes. The edges of the paper were already curled. On a fresh page he wrote:

“Path: leave salaried employment and build an independent data-cleansing pipeline. Risks: computing-cost pressure / script stability / compliance review. Countermeasures: use project-delivery bonus to cover the first month of node rental; after the MVP is proven, take outside jobs. Bottom line: no black-market work, no gambling contracts, no break in cash flow.”

His pen paused.

He knew exactly what it meant. He would be giving up the social insurance, housing fund, and stable promotion track of a major company to walk a road no one had paved. But if he stayed, he would only be spending his health and time filling in numbers on someone else’s reports while watching his brother’s life drain away bit by bit on a monitor. There was no right or wrong choice—only cost. He chose the cheaper one.

One in the afternoon. The code packaging was seventy percent complete. The logging module was running, but xlrd’s memory usage spiked when reading large files. He added chunked reading and forced garbage collection, pressing it back under the safe threshold. His left foot began to cramp. He bit his lower lip and made no sound.

Wang Guiying brought over a bowl of clear-broth noodles and set it on the table. “Eat something,” she said softly, her voice rough with the strain of a sleepless night.

“Mom, go lie down for a while.” Lin Chen didn’t look up. “I’ll watch Xiaoman.”

Wang Guiying didn’t move. She only looked at the code on his screen. She couldn’t understand the English letters and symbols, but she knew her son was wearing himself out.

“Don’t push yourself too hard,” she said. “As for money, we’ll take it one step at a time.”

“Mm.” Lin Chen answered absently. Steam from the noodles blurred the edge of the screen. He took a few quick bites, then put the chopsticks down. Time was not going to wait for him.

Three forty in the afternoon. His phone vibrated.

Not Director Li. Old Zhao.

He opened the message. It was only one line:

“You can rent the node. But you’ll have to bring your test script over and make it run. Tomorrow, three p.m., West Suburb server room. Don’t be late. Once the test runs through, I’ll give you a two-thousand prepayment, and the balance will be settled by cleansing results.”

Lin Chen stared at the screen.

The West Suburb server room. Forty kilometers from the hospital. With his injured foot, he couldn’t walk far. But tomorrow at three p.m. was the deadline. He had to get the node running and produce usable data before ten on Monday morning; only then could he put an alternative plan on the table for the overseas video performance-bet meeting and the resignation talks that would follow.

He stood up. The moment his left foot touched the floor, a piercing pain drove straight through him. He took a deep breath, stuffed the laptop into his backpack, and checked the USB drive, the test scripts, and the deposit transfer record. When he reached the door, he turned and looked back once at the hospital bed. Xiaoman shifted in his sleep, his breathing still even.

“Mom, I’m going to the West Suburb server room tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “I’ll finish wrapping the script tonight, run it tomorrow, and come back as soon as it’s done.”

The wind moved straight through the corridor. He took out his phone, but he did not hail the ride yet. Instead, he entered the address of the West Suburb IDC Data Center, the bus transfers, and the estimated ride-hailing fare into the spreadsheet together. The order had not been placed, but the countdown had already begun, like a starter’s pistol pressed against tomorrow afternoon.

The next mark on the scale had already been drawn. All that remained was to set the pen down.