Bayes
On the way back to the hotel, Jiang Mo remained silent. The van's windows blocked out the Beijing night, leaving only flickering light spots on her face. After she hung up for the third time, Linda's calls finally stopped, replaced by a series of voice messages on WeChat, the exclamation marks in the chat bubbles strikingly prominent.
"What does he mean?!"
"Signal? What signal?!"
"MoMo, say something! We need to stick to the same story!"
Jiang Mo didn't open any of them. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and unconsciously traced the cold edge of her phone with her fingertips. Shen Zhiyan's last sentence, like a pebble precisely thrown into a still lake, rippled wildly through her mind. "Signal"—in his data-driven language, what did that mean? Was it a noteworthy outlier, or interference that needed to be filtered out?
She recalled the way he calmly uttered "recitation," without mockery, without curiosity, only an almost cruel objectivity. This objectivity made her feel more powerless than any direct questioning or ridicule. In his presence, her carefully maintained persona, the pretense she relied on for survival, were like dust exposed to strong light, laid bare in every detail.
She parked her car in the hotel's underground garage, put on sunglasses and a mask to cover herself up, and hurried towards the elevator. Only after returning to her penthouse suite, closing the door, and completely shutting out the noise and prying eyes did she finally let out a long sigh. Her gaze involuntarily drifted to the balcony; in the night, the silhouette of "Lu Gen" was serene and peaceful.
She didn't immediately go over to light incense and chant scriptures as usual. A strange feeling, mixed with shame and rebellion, seized her. In his eyes, this was probably an irrational behavior that needed to be corrected?
The next morning, Jiang Mo was woken up by Linda's knocking. Linda had dark circles under her eyes, clearly having not slept well all night, and was carrying a tablet computer with a "crisis public relations" plan that had been worked on and revised more than a dozen times overnight.
“Listen, Momo,” Linda said seriously, “Now that Shen Zhiyan might know, we need to take the initiative. Two options: First, we can bring it up during breaks in recording in a lighthearted, self-deprecating way, like, ‘Oh dear, Teacher Shen found out. Sometimes when I'm stressed, I chant scriptures to calm myself,’ packaging it as a cute, harmless little quirk. Second, we can completely deny it, saying he misheard, or that you were practicing lines from a drama…”
Jiang Mo silently drank her warm water without saying a word. Outside the window, the sky was overcast and not yet bright.
“Personally, I prefer option one,” Linda continued, swiping her fingers across the tablet. “Self-deprecation is often the best way to clear one’s name. Besides, it aligns seamlessly with our ‘morning philosopher’ persona…”
“Linda,” Jiang Mo finally spoke, her voice hoarse from the early morning, “cancel that marketing campaign.”
"What?" Linda was stunned.
“I said, cancel the marketing plan for ‘Morning Philosopher’.” Jiang Mo put down her water glass, her gaze calm but firm. “Don’t bring up the chanting of scriptures, don’t mention it at all.”
"Why? This is a great opportunity to turn things around! And what about Shen Zhiyan..."
“Just because it’s him.” Jiang Mo interrupted her, walked to the French windows, and looked at the city gradually waking up below. “Do you think it’s useful to play these little tricks on him? He can even measure the frequency of my hand tremors.” She paused, her voice lowering. “I don’t want to be treated by him as a source of noise that needs to be decoded and analyzed.”
Linda stared at her tall, yet strangely lonely back, speechless for a moment.
In the end, Jiang Mo did not cancel the morning ritual, but she also did not light incense as usual. She simply stood quietly in front of "Lu Gen" and silently recited the two chapters of the *Tao Te Ching*. The entire process was silent, like an internal struggle.
Returning to the lab, Jiang Mo was prepared for even more incisive "observations." However, Shen Zhiyan's performance surprised her.
He arrived on time as usual, wearing a neatly pressed shirt under a lab coat, meticulous and rigorous. Upon seeing her, he merely nodded slightly as a greeting, without mentioning anything about the "recitation voice" or "Spanish." Throughout the morning's recording, he remained immersed in his work, occasionally offering necessary technical guidance to Jiang Mo, his tone calm and professional, as if the tense conversation of the previous day had never occurred.
This unusual calm only made Jiang Mo more uneasy. It was like the deathly silence before a storm, or... like an observer waiting for experimental data to surface naturally.
During a break in filming, she went to the restroom. On her way back, she passed a small conference room next to the lab; the door was ajar, and she could hear Shen Zhiyan and the program director talking inside.
"Teacher Shen, could you arrange one or two... um, more dramatic segments? For example, let Jiang Mo try operating some particularly complicated instruments, or you could teach her something step by step, and we can capture some interactive shots..." The director's voice was in a consultative tone.
“I don’t recommend it.” Shen Zhiyan’s answer was clear and calm. “There is a safety risk in operating complex instruments by non-professionals, with a probability of 8.3%. As for physical contact guidance, it does not comply with laboratory safety regulations, and from a communication perspective, such scenes are prone to unnecessary interpretations and deviate from the purpose of popular science.”
The director seemed somewhat helpless: "Well, there has to be something to watch..."
"The charm of science lies in its inherent logic and discovery process." Shen Zhiyan's voice was flat. "Forcibly adding drama is like artificially adding interference to a pure sample, which will affect the reliability of the final conclusion."
Jiang Mo stood outside the door, her steps halting. His rejection was so decisive, building an invisible wall with data and rules. She couldn't tell if she felt a sense of relief or a strange sense of loss.
The afternoon's task was to learn basic data visualization. Jiang Mo sat in front of the computer, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the numerous chart types in the software. Recalling the unexpected success she had achieved after switching to the Spanish interface yesterday, she hesitated for a moment, then switched the language back to Spanish.
The familiar interface offered a slight sense of control. She tried dragging a set of simulation data into the workspace and selected a "Gráfico de dispersión" (scatter plot). A chaotic, irregular array of dots instantly appeared on the screen.
She frowned, trying to adjust the axes and change the chart type, but the data was still like a tangled ball of yarn, impossible to unravel.
Scatter plots are useful for showing the correlation between two variables.
Shen Zhiyan's voice suddenly rang out beside her, neither too close nor too far, maintaining a perfectly appropriate social distance. Jiang Mo stiffened slightly but did not turn around.
He didn't look at her; his gaze was fixed on the chaotic dot matrix on the screen. "Your data shows clear time series characteristics. Perhaps we could try..." He reached out and gestured towards an option on the screen menu, "...Series de tiempo (time series plot)."
His pronunciation was standard and clear, with the precision of an academic report.
Jiang Mo suddenly turned her head and looked at him.
Shen Zhiyan kept his eyes fixed on the data behind his glasses, as if the fluent Spanish he had just uttered was merely a professional term that slipped out unintentionally. He continued to explain in Chinese: "Time series plots can more intuitively show the trend of data changes over time, which helps to identify periodicity, outliers, or potential patterns."
Following his instructions, Jiang Mo selected a time series graph. Sure enough, the previously chaotic dots on the screen instantly connected into a curve with a clear and regular fluctuation pattern.
She looked at the curve, then at the man beside her. He clearly noticed her Spanish ability, and might even have realized her reliance on the Spanish interface for a faint sense of security, but he didn't expose her or question her. Instead, he offered a subtle hint in an almost roundabout way.
This made her even more unsettled than his direct scrutiny.
The recording for the day ended in a subtle calm. Shen Zhiyan did not mention any topics unrelated to the experiment. His attitude was professional and aloof, yet in a certain unintentional moment, he revealed an indescribable meticulousness.
For example, after she had been staring at the screen for a long time, he would casually remind her, "The lighting in the lab is too bright. Staring at the screen for more than forty minutes will significantly increase the chance of eye strain." Then he would subtly dim the auxiliary lights above her work area.
For example, when she tried to move a box of slightly heavy printing supplies, he would pick it up first: "Based on the box's volume and your muscle distribution, the load exceeds the safe threshold. There are standardized procedures for handling this type of material."
His concern is always shrouded in a shell of data, probability, and security regulations—cold, yet effective.
When it was time to wrap up, Jiang Mo was the last to leave the lab. She glanced back and saw Shen Zhiyan still standing in front of the whiteboard, which was covered with new formulas. The afterglow of the setting sun shone through the blinds, casting interplay of light and shadow on him, making him appear even more like a solitary lighthouse operating with complex logic.
She suddenly recalled a line from the Tao Te Ching: "The highest good is like water. Water benefits all things without striving." Shen Zhiyan's actions seemed to subtly embody this quality of "benefiting all things without striving," only he used a different, scientific language.
Back at the hotel, Jiang Mo found a text message on her phone from an unknown number. It contained only a few short lines:
"Ms. Jiang, this is Chen, Shen Zhiyan's assistant. Professor Shen asked me to remind you that there will be large equipment being debugged in Lab A area from 9:00 to 10:00 AM tomorrow, and the ambient noise will be louder than usual. If you have any personal activities that require a quiet environment, we suggest you adjust the time or choose the rest room on the third floor of Lab B area, which is quieter during the same period."
Personal habitual activities...
Jiang Mo stood in the center of the room, holding her phone, motionless for a long time. The "Lu Gen" tree on the balcony swayed gently in the evening breeze.
He not only knew about it, but he also calculated the duration of the noise interference and even provided her with alternative solutions. This thoughtful reminder, which went beyond a typical working relationship, stood in stark contrast to his cold rationality during the day.
What kind of observer was he, exactly?
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