Chapter 265: Burden and Heartbeat

The command-line cursor blinked steadily against the black background. Lin Chen did not type a command right away. He switched first to the cloud monitoring panel and checked the traffic sources and process tree. It was not an external attack, but an internal scheduling conflict. The log-rotation script deployed the night before had collided with the model warm-up process, and two Python subprocesses were stuck in an endless loop in the background, fighting over memory. CPU was at 92 percent, memory at 98 percent, and disk I/O was already maxed out. His fingers settled on the keyboard. He typed top to confirm the PIDs, then entered kill -9. The redundant processes terminated, and the Docker container restarted automatically. The progress bar began moving again. The load curve dropped off a cliff, falling back to 14 percent. The cold light of the screen shone on his face; the whites of his eyes were threaded with blood. He closed the laptop and got up to go to the bathroom. Cold water splashed over his face. In the mirror, the man looking back at him had blue stubble along his jaw, the line of it drawn tight. A medicated plaster was stuck to his left ankle, its edges already curling up; the oil seeping from it had stained the adhesive tape a dark yellow. He tore it off, wiped the skin clean with an alcohol pad, and put on a fresh one. The sharp smell of mint mingled with the cheap hotel’s disinfectant and spread through the cramped space.

At seven in the morning, he checked out and returned to the hospital with his canvas bag on his back. In the corridor, early-shift nurses were already pushing treatment carts past him, the rubber wheels making a regular rasping sound on the epoxy floor. The monitor above Bed 14 was lit, its waveforms stable. Xiaoman had not woken yet; the general anesthetic needed time to metabolize. Lin Chen sat down on the folding chair beside the bed and took a thermos from his bag. Millet porridge, still warm. He unscrewed the lid and stirred it with a spoon, but did not feed Xiaoman. The care aide had not arrived, and he could not move him on his own. He only watched. The numbers on the monitor shifted: heart rate 78, blood oxygen 99, blood pressure 112/74. Another machine beside it was connected to EEG monitoring lines; the leads from twelve electrodes extended out from under the gauze and plugged into the acquisition box at the head of the bed. The data was being uploaded in real time through the local network to the department server. Lin Chen opened his laptop and connected to the hospital’s visitor Wi-Fi. There was only one bar of signal, with 140 ms of latency. He tried three times before he finally got on. In the remote terminal, the independent node was already ready. He needed first to understand the acquisition box's public field format and build a localized-cleaning prototype that did not touch any patient's raw data.

The hospital’s data interface was not open. What the nurses' station could show family members was limited to the anonymous examples and export-field format included in the acquisition box manual: several public demonstration .edf and .csv files mixed together. The field names were pinyin abbreviations, the timestamps included milliseconds but were not uniform in format, and lines of garbled text from device self-checks and blank rows were scattered in between. Lin Chen stared at the screen, his fingers sliding over the touchpad. A familiar feeling. Just like the spreadsheets Old Zhao had sent him years ago. Dirty, but cleanable. But this was not Xiaoman's raw data; it was only a format sample, enough at most to build the parser first. He created a new script file: parse_seeg.py. First he wrote a regular expression to match timestamps, then a dictionary to map the field names, and finally an exception-handling block to skip the garbled lines. He wrote the code slowly. His left foot, after so long sitting still, began to swell, and the numbness crept up his calf as though it had been filled with lead. He stood, took two steps around the ward, bearing weight on his right leg while letting his left foot barely touch the floor. The pain was dull, muffled by thick cotton. He sat back down and kept writing.

His phone vibrated. A video request from Su Man. He answered and pointed the camera at the ceiling, showing only his chin and neck. “The setting isn’t convenient,” he said. “I know.” Su Man’s voice came through the receiver with a low electrical hiss, dense keyboard clatter in the background. “The name verification with the Administration for Industry and Commerce went through. Xingchen Intelligence. I filled in the business scope according to your list. The server bill is out. Usage-based billing: we ran it for four hours yesterday, and it charged eight yuan forty. If we run monitoring data all day, it’ll be about two hundred a day.” Lin Chen looked at the fire sprinkler on the ceiling. “Two hundred. That fifteen-thousand-yuan front payment, counted only as server cost, would last seventy-five days. Now the first advance has been topped up, but medical evaluation and the first surgical payment have already locked up the bulk of it. The portion that can burn long-term on servers cannot be moved casually. Not including labor.” “Not including labor.” Su Man paused, her tone steady. “Zhao Qiming’s money wasn’t charity. What he bought was a time window. Our MVP has to go online within forty-five days and get data feedback from the first batch of seed users. Otherwise, during the next round of due diligence, he’ll push down the valuation—or directly trigger the bet-on-performance clauses.” “Understood,” Lin Chen said. “The data pipeline gets connected today. The model starts running. Forty-five days is enough.” “How are things on your end?” “Xiaoman just finished surgery. Observation period.” “Do you need me to come over?” “No. Keep a close eye on the front-end interactions and the stress tests. I’ll handle the data here.” The call ended. The screen went dark. Lin Chen turned the laptop back toward him. The script compiled. He inserted a USB drive, but what he copied was the anonymous sample data and field-mapping table attached to the manual—not the ward intranet, and not Xiaoman's original records.

Sample data import. Script running. Logs began to scroll through the terminal. [INFO] Parsing complete. Valid records: 14320. [WARN] Discarded abnormal rows: 312. [INFO] Extracting features... The progress bar advanced slowly. Lin Chen made a cup of instant coffee. The plastic cup was hot against his hand. He took a sip, and bitterness spread across the root of his tongue. He opened the window in the hospital corridor. An early-autumn wind blew in, carrying the city’s particular smell of dust and exhaust. Downstairs, the breakfast stalls had already packed up; only a few sanitation workers remained, sweeping the ground. He thought of mornings in Qingshi Village. It had been like this too: the mist not yet dispersed, his father already carrying a hoe into the fields. Time had changed the setting, but not the rhythm. It was all endurance. All waiting for a result.

At two in the afternoon, Dr. Shen came on rounds with two residents. They carried chart folders, checked the electrode positions, and inspected the gauze for seepage of blood. Dr. Shen glanced at Lin Chen. “Family member, long-term EEG monitoring has begun. We’ll export the data periodically for evaluation. Do not plug or unplug the leads at will.”

“Understood.” Lin Chen nodded.

“Also,” Dr. Shen said, his tone flat, as if stating a law of physics, “the department’s data management system is isolated on an internal network. If you want to conduct external analysis, you need to go through the ethics committee approval process. Raw data that has not been de-identified cannot be taken out of the hospital. That is the rule. Until approval comes through, all external devices are prohibited from connecting to the internal network.”

Lin Chen’s fingers stopped on the keyboard. Ethics approval. Usually it took two weeks to a month. And his model needed a continuous data stream for online learning. If the stream was cut off, the model would degrade. He watched Dr. Shen’s retreating back and did not argue. Rules were rules. He sat back down in his chair and opened the terminal. The sample log showed: [INFO] Sample inference complete. Demonstration waveform markers: 3. Confidence: 0.87. He stared at that line. The parser could run, but the real patient-data pipeline was blocked outside the wall of hospital rules. He needed a new plan: one that did not rely on the hospital’s internal network, did not cross the ethics line, and could continuously obtain compliant features after approval. He created a new document and titled it: Edge Computing Node Deployment Plan (Offline Synchronization Version). The first line read: 1. Purchase portable acquisition terminal (compliant version). 2. Localized model distillation, compressed to under 2 GB. 3. Manually synchronize encrypted data package daily. He pressed Enter. The cursor jumped to the next line. Outside the window, the sky was darkening. The hospital corridor lights came on, a ghastly white. The beeping of the monitor and the hum of the server fan overlapped in the room. Lin Chen moved his stiff neck, and a stab of pain shot through his left foot. He took a deep breath and set his fingers back on the keyboard. Code waited for no one. Neither did time. Before the next round of ward checks, he had to get the offline synchronization script running. And the first hardware budget item on the procurement list had already exceeded the cash margin he currently had left.