The quiet after Chen Yuexi's departure felt different. It wasn't the empty silence of before, but one layered with a new, settled understanding. The "distributed system" of Lin Xiaoyang's life had not only survived the unannounced visit but had seemingly upgraded its interoperability protocols. For a week, a sense of hard-won equilibrium prevailed.
Reality, however, was a relentless QA tester.
The pressure began at Nexus Analytics. The project's focus had subtly shifted. The initial goal of "ethical AI interfaces" was being incrementally nudged towards "optimizing user emotional engagement for increased platform retention." The new key performance indicator wasn't just accuracy, but something called "Affective Stickiness." Xiaoyang's manager used phrases like "leveraging latent emotional triggers" and "designing for compulsive interaction."
It made Xiaoyang's skin crawl. It felt like they were trying to build a kinder, gentler version of the very social media traps his old "EfficientHeart" had naively sought to bypass. He voiced his concerns in a stand-up meeting, couching them in technical terms about long-term user trust and ethical design frameworks.
His manager, a pragmatic man named David, listened politely. "Lin, I appreciate your principled stance. Really. But 'trust' is a lagging metric. 'Engagement' is real-time. Our investors speak the language of real-time. Your job is to make the plumbing work. Let the product and legal teams worry about the philosophy of the water."
It was a classic corporate deflection. Xiaoyang retreated to his code, a familiar sense of frustration brewing. He was no longer a student who could build whatever he wanted. He was a cog, and the machine was turning in a direction that felt… greasy.
Meanwhile, in Oxford, Shen Qinghe was facing her own form of resistance. Her doctoral thesis proposal—a bold, quantitative deconstruction of romantic sincerity across three centuries of letters—had been met with skepticism by a key member of her review committee. Professor Whittaker, a venerable scholar of the "old school," deemed her methodology "reductive" and "blind to the ineffable soul of literature."
Qinghe, of course, had prepared for this. She responded with a 20-page rebuttal, dense with statistical validation, control-group analyses, and cross-referential rigor. Professor Whittaker's counter-rebuttal consisted of a single, handwritten note in the margin of her document: "You cannot measure a heartbeat with a ruler."
For Qinghe, this was not a poetic critique; it was a logical fallacy. But it was a fallacy wielded with institutional power. Her path to data collection—access to certain private archives, approval for her textual scraping algorithms—was now blocked.
They discovered each other's mounting stress during their Wednesday evening video call, a scheduled "mid-week sync." Both were fraying at the edges, their usual crisp efficiency blunted by fatigue.
"The 'Affective Stickiness' parameter is functionally identical to the dopamine-driven feedback loops we criticized in mainstream social apps," Xiaoyang reported, rubbing his temples. "I'm being asked to polish the bars of the cage."
"My committee obstruction is irrational," Qinghe stated, her voice tighter than usual. "The objection is based on a categorical error, conflating measurement with meaning. My request to appeal is being processed with bureaucratic latency."
They were talking at each other, not to each other. Each was broadcasting their own status update into the void, hoping for a solution, but only receiving another problem in return. Their carefully built protocol assumed both parties had the bandwidth to listen. Tonight, neither did.
"Maybe you need to speak his language," Xiaoyang said, trying to be helpful. "Use a literary metaphor to explain the stats. Bridge the gap."
"His 'language' is imprecise and sentimentally biased. Accommodating it would compromise the integrity of the work," Qinghe fired back, a rare sharpness in her tone.
"Well, sometimes integrity has to be pragmatic! I can't just refuse to build the 'sticky' part of the algorithm! I have to find a way to do it that doesn't feel like… emotional manipulation." He heard the defensiveness in his own voice.
"Your compromise is at the level of implementation. Mine is at the level of foundational definition. They are not equivalent stressors." Her words were like a cold partition being drawn between their problems.
The call ended shortly after, functionally but not emotionally resolved. A scheduled data exchange had occurred, but the meta-data—the worry, the exhaustion, the need for reassurance—had been lost in transmission.
The breaking point came two nights later. It was Friday, the end of a brutal week for both. Xiaoyang had spent the day in London trying to debug an "engagement-predictor" model that felt increasingly like a psychic fishing rod. Qinghe had endured a three-hour committee meeting that circled the same irreconcilable arguments.
Their 9:00 PM call connected. Xiaoyang looked drained, hunched in his London hotel room. Qinghe's face on the screen was pale, her eyes holding a flat, over-processed look.
"Status," she prompted, her voice devoid of its usual cadence.
"Status: I hate my job today," Xiaoyang said, the words slipping out before he could filter them through their usual protocol. It was a raw, uncompiled feeling.
"Negative emotional valence towards employment confirmed," Qinghe responded automatically. "Recommendation: List specific pain points for analysis. We can model exit strategies or internal repositioning."
He didn't want a model. He didn't want an analysis. After a week of being a cog, he wanted to be a person. He wanted her to see the person, not the data stream.
"I don't need a flowchart, Qinghe," he sighed, the frustration leaking out. "I just need… I don't know. To not feel alone in hating it."
There was a pause. He saw her blink, slowly. Her system was clearly running at capacity, struggling to allocate resources to this non-standard request.
"You are not alone. I am here. However, my capacity for emotional labor is currently at 12% of nominal levels due to my own unresolved academic conflict. I cannot simulate high-bandwidth empathetic response at this time. The most efficient support I can provide is strategic."
It was the worst thing she could have said. It was brutally, honestly logical. And it felt like a door slamming shut.
"'Simulate empathetic response'?" he repeated, the words cold in his mouth. "Is that what you think I need? A simulation?"
"It is the functional requirement you have expressed," she stated, her own frustration beginning to surface, manifesting as hyper-clarity. "You require an emotional buffer. My emotional buffer subroutines are depleted. Providing a substandard simulation would be inefficient and potentially misleading. Stating this fact is the most authentic response available."
"Authentic?" A harsh laugh escaped him. "It feels like you're reading from a troubleshooting manual for a broken appliance. 'Error 404: Empathy not found.'" He ran a hand over his face. "Sometimes, Qinghe, the efficient answer is the wrong one. Sometimes you just have to… waste the energy. Say the wrong thing, but say it like you mean it."
Her image on the screen was perfectly still. "You are asking me to be intentionally inefficient. To perform an emotional gesture I cannot currently feel, in order to satisfy your non-optimal processing needs. This contradicts our entire framework."
"Maybe our framework is broken!" The words burst out, fueled by a week of corporate grease and academic stonewalls. "Maybe the 'protocol' works fine when everything is calm, but it falls apart the second we both hit a wall! What's the point of a connection that can't handle a little noise? What's in your database for that, huh? What's the algorithm for when we're both too tired to be logical?"
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the faint hum of his laptop fan. Shen Qinghe's face was unreadable, a mask of pure processing. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet, each word a precise, measured unit of data.
"The algorithm… is failure. The system enters a fault state. The connection degrades. This is a known risk of high-efficiency, low-redundancy systems under concurrent stress." She looked directly into the camera, and for a fleeting moment, he saw not anger, but something worse: a profound, analytical disappointment. "You are regressing, Lin Xiaoyang. You are demanding an energy expenditure from me that you are not yourself capable of defining, while dismissing the energy I have expended in maintaining this connection across distance and complexity. You are seeking a solution from my database that does not exist. That is… illogical."
The call disconnected.
Not with a dramatic click, but with the soft, digital fade-to-black of a video feed timing out.
Lin Xiaoyang sat in the sudden silence of his sterile hotel room, the echo of her last word—illogical—hanging in the air like a verdict. The stress test had been applied. And for the first time, their meticulously compiled system had not just thrown an error.
It had crashed.