abnormal heartbeat
After the silent standoff at the database, Shen Zhiyan completely disappeared from Jiang Mo's sight for two consecutive days.
The recording of the program proceeded as scheduled, but the person in charge of guidance was changed to a female associate researcher surnamed Zhou from his team. Researcher Zhou was professional and patient, and would even deliberately slow down her speech when explaining to ensure that Jiang Mo could keep up. Everything was impeccable, but Jiang Mo felt that the laboratory had become emptier than ever before. The low hum of the instruments and the tapping of the keyboard seemed to have lost their original rhythm.
She stopped trying to glean any information about Shen Zhiyan from Researcher Zhou and simply continued to complete her assigned tasks in silence. Occasionally, her gaze would drift over his empty workstation, over the whiteboard that had been wiped clean and free of any formula marks, and the ripples in her heart caused by discovering a secret were gradually replaced by a strange, weightless feeling of falling.
He was deliberately avoiding her. This realization was unsettlingly clear.
On the afternoon of the third day, the production team arranged for the guests to experience the center's latest "Artificial Intelligence Emotional Computing" project. In a closed room, Jiang Mo was asked to wear various sensors and watch a carefully edited series of video clips—ranging from lighthearted comedy to poignant documentaries. Cameras recorded her facial expressions, while sensors captured her heart rate, skin conductance, and brainwave activity.
"Affective computing aims to quantitatively analyze human emotional states through multimodal data," explained Researcher Zhou. "Professor Shen's research group has extensive experience in this field..."
Jiang Mo listened absentmindedly. When a documentary about left-behind children played on the screen, the children's innocent yet lonely eyes made her heart clench, and a familiar, bittersweet feeling welled up in her eyes. Subconsciously, almost instinctively from years of working in front of the camera, she controlled her facial muscles, preventing any obvious emotion from showing.
However, at that very moment, on an auxiliary display screen in the corner of the room, a curve representing her physiological data suddenly fluctuated violently without warning. The peak was steep, like a frightened heartbeat, and then it quickly dropped back down, forcibly suppressed to a stable baseline.
"Data anomaly?" the technician in charge of monitoring muttered quietly, adjusting the equipment.
Jiang Mo's heart skipped a beat. She immediately forced a smile and said to the camera with a self-deprecating laugh, "It seems my heart is more honest than my face. It seems it just sneaked out to watch a tragedy and got caught red-handed."
Researcher Zhou and the technicians were amused by her unexpected humor, which eased the slightly tense atmosphere. This was her instinct as a comedian; she was used to using jokes to defuse awkwardness and tension, wrapping her true emotional fluctuations under a relaxed facade.
After the recording ended, as she was disassembling the sensors, she casually asked Researcher Zhou, "Professor Zhou, was there anything wrong with my data just now?"
Researcher Zhou glanced at the records on the screen and smiled: "No major problem. There is a slight inconsistency between the physiological response to emotions and subjective expression, which is common in research and may just be a temporary shift in attention or other physiological interference. However, your joke just now accurately described this phenomenon."
“Inconsistent…” Jiang Mo repeated the word. So, the machine captured her genuine emotional fluctuation at that moment, even though her face and words remained perfectly calm.
She walked alone to the lounge, the abnormally volatile curve and her own impromptu quip replaying in her mind. Her comedic instincts and the genuine emotions captured on screen created another layer of "inconsistency." It was like a thorn stuck in her world, where she was accustomed to perfect pretense.
In the hallway outside the lounge, she unexpectedly ran into her assistant, Xiao Chen. He was carrying a tall stack of documents and walking hurriedly.
"Ms. Jiang!" Xiao Chen stopped when he saw her, a few beads of sweat on his forehead. "Your comment in the lab earlier, 'The heart secretly escaped,' was all over the group chat. Everyone was saying it was a stroke of genius, precise and hilarious!"
“Xiao Chen,” Jiang Mo greeted him, her gaze sweeping over the documents in his arms. On top was a bound report with the title “Iterative Verification Report of Emotional Disguise Recognition Model Based on Multimodal Physiological Signals”, signed by Shen Zhiyan.
Her gaze lingered on that name for a moment.
Following her gaze, Xiao Chen awkwardly adjusted the way he was holding the documents, trying to cover the report with his arm, and forced a smile: "Professor Shen... had a closed academic seminar a few days ago and didn't have time to tell everyone."
A closed-door seminar? Jiang Mo smiled inwardly, not calling out this obvious excuse. Looking at the sweat on Xiao Chen's forehead and the stack of documents in his arms that clearly didn't belong during a "closed-door seminar," she suddenly asked, "Xiao Chen, when you're doing research, if you encounter a data point... that can't be accurately classified by existing models, but is clearly not noise, how do you usually handle it?"
Xiao Chen paused for a moment, seemingly surprised by her question. He adjusted his glasses, thought carefully for a moment, and then answered, "Well... it depends. If it's an obvious equipment error or accidental interference, it's usually removed as an outlier. But if this 'outlier' appears repeatedly, or if its pattern has some... uniqueness, Professor Shen usually advocates marking it separately for a more in-depth case analysis." He paused, then added, "Professor Shen often says that true breakthroughs sometimes lie hidden in those 'exceptions' that don't conform to general rules."
Case analysis. Exceptions.
These two words swirled in Jiang Mo's mind. She recalled how Shen Zhiyan initially regarded her as a "sample with excessive noise," how he later admitted that she "possessed certain pattern recognition potential," and his long-forgotten past about "swallows returning to their nests" in the database.
He had been observing and analyzing her, using his rigorous data model. And she herself seemed to have been under his observation, intentionally or unintentionally revealing a complex and even contradictory side—a mesmerizing actress chanting scriptures, a comedian who speaks Spanish, and a performer whose emotional fluctuations were separated from her facial expressions.
In his iterative model, is she now an "outlier" that needs to be eliminated, or a unique exception that deserves in-depth study?
Do that unusual emotional trajectory, and the secret of the "swallow badge" she glimpsed, together constitute the complexity of her case as an "individual case"?
She politely thanked Xiao Chen and turned to leave. The corridor was empty, and her footsteps were clearly audible. She stopped guessing why Shen Zhiyan was avoiding her and began to think about what role she wanted to play in this "experiment" he was leading.
Back at the hotel, Jiang Mo didn't turn on the lights and sat quietly on the sofa in the living room for a long time. Nightlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, dividing the room into blocks of light and shadow. She took out her phone and opened the almost blank chat window, where Shen Zhiyan's message about database access still lingered.
Her fingertips hovered over the screen, the light and shadow flickering on her face.
Then, she slowly typed a line of text, without any salutation or pleasantries, and sent it directly:
"In today's affective computing experiment, my physiological signal showed an abnormal peak, inconsistent with my subjective expression. According to your model, is this noise that needs to be removed, or a case worth labeling?"
The message was sent successfully, and the screen dimmed.
Jiang Mo put her phone aside, sank into the soft sofa, and closed her eyes. She was no longer a passive sample waiting to be observed; she had proactively submitted a "data report" about the complexity of herself.
Now, it's the observer's turn to confront this "abnormal heartbeat" that he can't easily categorize, the one who has hidden himself behind the data and the "closed seminar."
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