Awakening 4
He was still immersed in darkness, and for a moment, the little blind man felt that he was not dead yet. But soon, as the nutrient solution receded, he opened his eyes and could see light and strange transmission tubes and instruments around him.
He began to feel a headache, and because the experiment was so short, two short memories became entangled. He—now known as Li Rong—woke up and cooperated with the researchers with rehabilitation and drug injections.
He felt inexplicably tired, but it wasn't just a slight tiredness. However, the experimenter who was helping him walk didn't say anything, but only told him to listen to the following instructions.
Li Rong always felt that he had forgotten a lot of things, and the process should not be exactly like this - he remembered that there should be an old man standing here or there, but he couldn't remember anything more specific.
He chalked these things up to side effects of the experiment and, in his wheelchair, they pushed him back into the cabin. This time, the injection had been exceptionally brief, seemingly a split second. Li Rong opened his mouth, but forgot what he had intended to say. A vague feeling lingered in his mind; he couldn't remember whether it was a sound, a sight, or a smell that drew him in, then pulled him away, step by step.
But those things hadn't completely disappeared; they were right there, out of reach. Li Rong felt a little absurd about his idea, but the experimenter still handed him the paper.
But he seemed to remember something about the paper, and as he quickly scanned it from beginning to end, it matched his vague impression perfectly. He understood that he was participating in a secret experiment, and that the person lying in the hospital bed was his sister—a sister who had regained consciousness after the previous experiment.
However, the researcher didn't allow him to meet Li Qingyue this time. He only told him one other thing, "This is the last experiment... Director Wu said that it can be concluded after this. To ensure the highest success rate of the experiment, you can get enough sleep before entering the thermal chamber this time."
The other party brought up the monitor and fiddled with it for a moment. "So, I'm sorry, there's only video right now." Li Rong first looked at the video on the monitor. A girl lying in a hospital bed was being helped up by a nurse and fed a special hospital meal. Judging by the pixels, it should be the sound being recorded by the monitor, but no sound was being played back.
Li Rong nodded and made a small request, "Um...can you let me watch it again?" The other party was stunned for a moment before playing the video again.
He looked at the familiar yet unfamiliar face in the video and could vaguely see the smile on Li Qingyue's face. Li Rong watched the video three times and although he wanted to watch it a fourth time, the researcher next to him seemed a little anxious.
He didn't know if his feeling was right, so he just followed their instructions and lay down on the bed in a separate room. He closed his eyes and fell asleep quickly because of the inexplicable fatigue in his body.
He was plagued by bizarre dreams, in which he felt cold, then hot. Sometimes it was all black, and other times it was a tangle of emotions, so overwhelming that it seemed as if his heart would stop beating.
When he woke up, all those things that happened in the past, as if they had just happened, disappeared immediately. When Li Rong was sitting in the wheelchair, he even wondered whether he had dreamed last night.
With the researcher's help, he lay back down in his own incubator, the place he felt most familiar with so far. But the moment he lay down, Li Rong felt his body grow heavier. Before he could dwell on it, he heard a mechanically synthesized voice, inexplicably higher in pitch, making him feel particularly uncomfortable.
"All anchor point links are completed--" followed by three identical sentences.
"Please repeat the guidelines—"
"Please repeat the guidelines..."
"Please repeat the guidelines!"
The voice became more and more rapid, with the noise of electric current. He was about to say the sentence he had been reciting these days, but it seemed that it was merged with the noise of electric current. Li Rong could not tell whether these were the words he said.
"The only rule for an observer is to respect time and escape paradox." He sank back into darkness, his last glimpse of consciousness distracted for a moment. What should the only rule be?
The lights in the research center were always on. Wu Chuannan checked the data submitted by the institute today with his hands behind his back. They only had two experimental groups left that might get the data - the fourth experiment had not yet ended.
He exhaled heavily and pressed his hand between his eyebrows. He was a little worried about the progress of the experiment. In terms of consumables, he didn't know whether he could survive the next few experiments, those particularly important experiments.
He began to feel overly nervous for the first time in a long time. It was an emotion he had not experienced in more than ten years. So the moment he heard the sound, Wu Chuannan just lowered his head to check, fearing that there would be any problems with the experimental equipment. His eyes swept over the instruments that were still lit inch by inch, and he was ready to check every piece of data on the display screen that might have slight abnormalities.
Fang Luochun pushed her wheelchair into the center. Although her legs weren't yet so weak that she needed to rely on other means of transportation, she looked at her former teacher and current subordinate, her tone still brisk, "Feynman's path summation, incomplete symmetry, Teacher Wu—"
Wu Chuannan turned around and looked at the student in the wheelchair. "Are you still trying to use the so-called mathematical ideal of zero-dimensional point particles to cater to this erroneous era of emergence theory, just like you did back then?"
He heard the other party's question, which was still as sharp and merciless as before. "Dean Fang, you are too serious. This is just a set of experiments. Failure is the most common situation in experiments." His tone began to soften, as if he was back in the classroom, explaining the research methods to his most proud student one by one.
"A stable computer signal must be Newtonian. With just a few more repeated experiments, we will be able to capture the most direct evidence for superstring theory. At that time, quantum mechanics will move towards the unification of general relativity, and humanity will be getting closer and closer to the ultimate theory."
Fang Luochun took the data from him and slowly flipped through it, page by page, unfazed by the thought that her former teacher would be anxious. She tapped a few figures with her fingertips. "Teacher, are you still obsessed with that so-called microscopic 'coil'? Can repeated experiments eliminate the effects of the quantum foam's violent fluctuations?"
She raised her voice and placed the data back on the table. "Teacher, even if we run a hundred experiments on the theoretical infinite string resonance model, our current level of technology still won't be able to completely unravel those curled-up multidimensional spaces."
Wu Chuannan sighed, not knowing whether he was pointing out the pain points of the experiment to the aggressive students or simply because of the completely foreseeable failure. He only knew one thing deeply, that no matter what, this experiment would be sealed at the right time - that was a time they all knew, and it might come soon, and at most it could only last until their next experiment.
Fang Luochun pressed the wheel and walked closer, meeting Wu Chuannan's gaze from bottom to top. She lowered her voice and announced her decision in a whisper, "In that case... then allow my team to join the next experiment."
She stared at Wu Chuannan's expression, ready to revisit her somewhat crazy theory from back then. "To tear apart unstable protection and find a more correct theory, sacrifices are inevitable—just like how my teacher sacrificed me back then, and now they're treating volunteers like consumables in their experiments."
She imitated Wu Chuannan's slow pace and continued, "Since they use Plato's philosophy of existence and future to explain the conclusions of physics, why not follow this path? What does the principle say?" Her tone rose. "Respect time and escape paradox? Teacher...you're still not reconciled."
"Poincaré's theory of recurrence is only valid in isolated systems of finite size. Our world cannot return to its original state after a long period of evolution. A singularity is the end of time and space—have you figured this out yourself, teacher?" She laughed. "None of us have figured it out. Whether it's the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the Boltzmann Principle, we have to acknowledge the existence of dissipation."
"I always remember the first class I learned from my teacher, which was very beneficial to me. It was the CPT Pauli principle - C, charge conjugation, converts matter into antimatter; P, spatial inversion, converts spatial coordinates into their mirror image; T, time reversal, reverses the direction of time. In the case of incomplete symmetry, only two of the three can exist; the last one must be wrong."
She calmed down again and, with her usual infectious energy, explained her point. "Then why not reverse the paradox? We now have cell clusters that can clone freely, solving the problem of iterative nuclear decay."
She described this crazy but potentially effective method, "There's a volunteer who's having a violent reaction right now. We've never observed such a violent energy fluctuation in an experiment."
"Then let's create new spin entanglements with quantum particles from the distant past. Since living things can be cloned, let's take advantage of the unidirectionality of time and allow quantum particles to be 'cloned' as well. Students can't wait to have direct conversations with quantum particles from the past."
Fang Luochun finished his final sentence, which was also a decisive sentence, a sentence that Wu Chuannan could not refuse. "We have all waited too long. We deny the time machine, deny the parallel universe, deny the ridiculous wormhole theory and the uncertainty of superstring theory."
Wu Chuannan didn't say anything else. He just silently pushed Fang Luochun's wheelchair out. Then he heard her first instruction to him, "Reduce the potion by half. By the fifth time, those childish biological potions will no longer be necessary."
He was in agony, sending off his students and his superiors, tormented by the temptation he could not refuse, tormented by the assumptions that violated ethics and even part of science, tormented - and finally he sighed, reciting Fang Luochun's name, worthy of being his most proud student, worthy of being a person whom even he could not surpass, worthy of sitting in that position - Dean Fang.
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