The weeks that followed the submission to Vienna settled into a curious, suspended rhythm. Life in Oxford and London continued—deadlines were met, code was written, thesis chapters were polished—but it all felt like a sophisticated screensaver running over a primary process that was stuck in a tight, silent loop: await response.
Lin Xiaoyang found himself checking his personal email with a frequency that bordered on obsessive-compulsive, a habit his old Energy-Saving self would have scorned. He'd built a simple script to filter and flag any email from an .ac.at domain, which only made the anticipation more acute, turning each notification into a potential heart-jump.
Shen Qinghe, characteristically, managed the wait with more structured grace. She had, of course, built a probabilistic timeline model. "Based on the institute's historical decision patterns and the date of our submission," she informed him over a Wednesday video call, "the highest probability window for a response opens in 11 days and closes 23 days from now. Checking email outside this window has a diminishing marginal utility of approximately 0.02% per hour."
"So, you're not checking every five minutes?" he asked, smiling wryly.
"I have configured a single daily check at 17:00, coinciding with my post-library cognitive shift. This optimizes for information freshness while minimizing attention fragmentation." She paused, her gaze softening a fraction through the screen. "However, I have observed a 15% increase in my own non-scheduled 'status inquiry' thoughts. The variable is not fully controllable."
Her admission was comforting. Even the most optimized system experienced background noise.
Their "Veritas Core" project became a welcome distraction, a sandbox where they could still create and control outcomes. They worked on a new visualization module—a "temporal heatmap" that showed how the emotional tone of correspondence changed not just over years, but across days of the week, hours of the day. It was a rabbit hole of fascinating, meaningless detail, and they dove in together, the shared focus a buffer against the wait.
The distributed network, ever-sensing, provided its own forms of pressure and support.
Dramaturge Queen (Yuexi): STATUS REPORT: THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING ME. I've drafted two full promo trailers for your Vienna fellowship. One is a moody, intellectual arthouse piece. The other is a rom-com meet-cute in a library full of ancient manuscripts. I need to know which vibe to commit to! The people (me) demand answers!
Ning.Y: I have completed a preliminary analysis of potential Vienna-based research collaborators whose work intersects with your stated goals. Attached is a ranked list with compatibility scores and known publication biases. This data will be useful upon receipt of a positive outcome.
Stargazer Youyou: The energy around your application is… patient. It's not a yes, not a no. It's a seed in dark soil. Don't dig it up to check. Just keep the soil warm.
Xiaoyang found Tang Youyou's metaphor oddly apt. They had planted something. Now they had to trust the process, the unseen growth.
Daily life developed a surreal quality. He'd be in a London meeting about engagement metrics, nodding along, while a part of his mind vividly imagined walking through the cobbled streets of Innere Stadt with Qinghe, debating the taxonomy of Baroque architecture versus data structures. The future had bifurcated into two starkly different branches, and he was living in the liminal space where both were equally real and unreal.
The strain manifested in small, subtle ways. He was sharper with David over a minor product disagreement. Qinghe reported an uncharacteristic difficulty focusing during her morning deep-work block. They were both running their systems at a slightly higher, less efficient voltage, waiting for a signal to tell them which configuration to commit to.
During one of their weekend walks along the Cherwell, the tension finally surfaced.
"What if we don't get it?" Xiaoyang asked, the question escaping into the crisp air. He hadn't meant to voice it; it just appeared, fully formed.
Qinghe didn't answer immediately. She watched a pair of swans glide past, their movement perfectly efficient. "The 'Veritas Core' project continues," she said finally. "My doctoral defense proceeds. Your work at Nexus evolves. Our co-location percentage remains at its negotiated level. The system's core functions are unchanged."
"But the narrative changes," he pressed, using her own term for context and meaning. "The 'Vienna chapter' becomes a 'what-if.' The story of our collaboration… it stays smaller."
" 'Smaller' is a value judgment," she countered, but her voice was thoughtful, not corrective. "The fellowship is an accelerator, a unique concentration of resources and stimuli. Its absence does not invalidate the trajectory; it merely alters the slope." She stopped walking and turned to him. "My primary objective is the work. My secondary, but deeply integrated, objective is the partnership within which the work thrives. Vienna optimizes for both. Oxford-London is suboptimal but stable. The system is robust enough for either path."
He heard what she wasn't saying: she wanted it too. The optimization, the concentration, the shared adventure. But she was also pre-compiling acceptance for a negative outcome, building emotional redundancy. It was her version of a backup plan.
"We're preparing for a fault state," he realized aloud.
"We are performing a pre-failure analysis," she confirmed. "Identifying all critical dependencies and affirming they have alternate support paths. It is a standard resilience protocol."
It was profoundly unromantic. And it was the most solid, reassuring thing she could have done. She wasn't just hoping with him; she was engineering a fallback with him. The partnership wasn't contingent on the yes; it was the framework that would handle the no.
The heaviest waiting occurred in the final predicted days of the decision window. Each 17:00 check by Qinghe was preceded by a palpable, shared silence over their evening call. Each "no update" was a small, silent deflation.
Then, on a Thursday, outside the predicted window by two days, the signal arrived.
Xiaoyang was on the train back from London, the carriage a cocoon of weary commuters. He was idly reviewing a code merge on his phone when the special notification chimed. His breath caught. The sender domain. The subject line.
For a moment, he just stared at it, the noise of the train fading away. He didn't open it. He initiated the protocol.
Xiaoyang: [18:11] On train. ETA Oxford 19:05. Critical packet received. Synchronous decode requested at physical coordinates. Your status?
Her reply was almost instantaneous.
Qinghe: [18:12] At flat. Acknowledged. Tea will be ready at 19:10. Maintain stability.
The remaining hour of the journey was an eternity of controlled stillness. He didn't allow himself to speculate. He practiced the mindfulness exercises Tang Youyou had once half-jokingly recommended, focusing on the rhythmic clatter of the tracks, the passing blur of darkening fields.
When he let himself into the flat, the scene was exactly as specified. Qinghe stood by the small kitchen table, two steaming cups of tea placed precisely opposite each other. The room was quiet, lit by a single warm lamp. Her face was a mask of calm concentration.
No words. They sat. They opened their respective laptops. They clicked.
The email was there. His eyes scanned, heart pounding a dull rhythm against his ribs.
…pleased… selected… three-month residential fellowship… congratulations…
He read it to the end. Then again. No conditions. A clear, unequivocal yes.
He looked up. Qinghe was looking at him, her screen now dark. Her expression was undergoing a fascinating transformation. The rigid control was melting, not into tears or laughter, but into a dawning, brilliant clarity. It was the look of a complex equation resolving to a simple, elegant, and profoundly satisfying solution.
"Result," she said, her voice wonderfully, perfectly steady.
"Affirmative," he confirmed.
For a long moment, they just sat there, letting the data settle, the new reality compile itself in their shared space. The waiting protocol was terminated. The outcome was optimal.
Then, Qinghe did something extraordinary. She stood up, walked around the table, and sat down again, not in her chair, but on the arm of his. It was an inefficient, unplanned, wonderfully physical gesture. She put a hand on his shoulder.
"The logistics subroutine," she said, looking down at him, a real, unguarded smile finally breaking through, "will be computationally intensive."
He laughed, the sound bursting out of him, full of relief and joy. "I wouldn't have it any other way."
He reached up and covered her hand with his. The connection was electric, a high-bandwidth surge of shared triumph that no protocol could ever fully capture.
In that quiet Oxford flat, the distributed system received its most significant upgrade yet: a new, shared horizon. The perturbations were over. The next phase—the focused, intense, co-located collaboration they had dreamed of—was now a scheduled process, waiting to be executed.
All they had to do was pack.