The silence stretched for three days. Seventy-two hours of agonizing inefficiency, where every moment was consumed by the mental energy required to navigate the void where two vibrant social processes used to run. Lin Xiaoyang felt like a machine in a power-saving mode so deep it was indistinguishable from being powered off.
It was the fourth day when a new, unexpected system notification appeared. An email. From Professor Zhao.
The subject line was simple: "Project Consultation. My Office. 4 PM."
A cold dread, different from the anxious hum of the past few days, settled in Xiaoyang's stomach. This wasn't social fallout; this was authority. Had the gossip reached the faculty? Was the project in jeopardy?
At 3:59 PM, he stood outside Professor Zhao's office, a room that smelled of old books, tea, and a quiet, unshakeable patience. He knocked.
"Enter, Lin Xiaoyang."
Professor Zhao was sipping from a ceramic mug, his glasses perched on the end of his nose. He didn't look up from the paper he was grading. "Sit. The others will be here shortly."
Others? The dread intensified.
A minute later, the door opened. Chen Yuexi slipped in, her eyes fixed on the floor. She took a seat as far from Xiaoyang as the small office would allow, her posture rigid. Then came Tang Youyou, her usual bounce replaced by a slow, deliberate walk. She didn't even look in his direction, focusing instead on a small, worn tarot card she was nervously turning over in her hand—The Hermit.
The silence in the office was thick enough to chew on. Professor Zhao finished making a note on the paper, put his pen down, and finally looked at the three of them.
"The energy in this room," he said calmly, "is less productive than a corrupted kernel. I've heard whispers. I've also seen the commit history on your shared repository. It reads like a tragedy."
No one spoke. Yuexi studied a crack in the linoleum. Youyou gripped her tarot card tighter.
"Lin Xiaoyang," Professor Zhao continued, his gaze turning to him. "Your 'EfficientHeart' project. Its core premise is to model human connection, correct?"
Xiaoyang managed a weak nod.
"And you," he said, shifting his gaze to Yuexi and Youyou. "You agreed to lend your unique perspectives to this endeavor. To be the 'human' in this 'human-computer interaction'."
Yuexi's jaw tightened. Youyou shrunk in her seat.
"A project about human connection," Professor Zhao mused, taking a slow sip of his tea. "Has been halted because of a catastrophic failure in human connection. The irony is not lost on me." He set his mug down with a soft click. "You are all waiting for an apology. A magic script that will reset everything to a previous save state. It does not exist."
Xiaoyang flinched.
"The code is broken. The only way forward is to debug it. Line by line." He leaned forward, his eyes moving between the three of them. "So, debug. You will not leave this room until you have identified the core logical error that caused this system crash. Not the symptoms. The root cause."
The ultimatum hung in the air. The three students stared at him, then at each other, trapped.
After a full minute of suffocating silence, Chen Yuexi spoke, her voice brittle. "The error was the unauthorized access and publication of private system logs."
Xiaoyang winced. "The error was… poor file management and a lack of emotional encryption," he countered, using Yuning's terminology in a desperate attempt to sound analytical.
Tang Youyou shook her head, her voice a near-whisper. "The error was a fundamental misalignment of cosmic frequencies… a failure to see the heart's energy as a valid data type."
They were talking past each other, stating symptoms.
Professor Zhao sighed. "You are all wrong. You are describing exception handling, not the bug itself." He looked directly at Xiaoyang. "Lin Xiaoyang, why did you write those things in the notebook?"
Xiaoyang swallowed. "I… I was trying to understand. To process the data."
"To what end?"
"To… to make it more efficient. To find patterns."
"Efficient for whom?" Professor Zhao pressed, his voice gentle but relentless. "The system, or the user?"
The question struck Xiaoyang like a physical blow. He had never considered the distinction. His entire principle was self-centered: conserve his energy. The "users" in his life—Yuexi, Youyou, even Yuning—were variables to be managed for the stability of his system.
Chen Yuexi let out a small, bitter laugh. "He was optimizing his own CPU usage. We were just background processes he was trying to throttle."
"It's not like that!" Xiaoyang protested, a surge of frustration breaking through his reserve. "It's… it's messy! All of it! Your scripts, your horoscopes, Yuning's probabilities… it's all so much data! I was trying to find the signal in the noise!" He was almost shouting, the energy expenditure terrifying and liberating.
"The noise is the signal, you idiot!"
The words, sharp and clear, came from Chen Yuexi. She was looking at him now, her eyes blazing with unshed tears. "My 'scripts' are how I make sense of the world! They're my language! Youyou's 'horoscopes' are her way of caring, of trying to find order in chaos! You were so busy trying to compile our languages into your machine code that you never bothered to listen to what we were actually saying!"
Tang Youyou nodded silently, her eyes also glistening. She held up The Hermit card. "This card… it's not just about isolation. It's about inner truth. You saw our outer quirks, Xiaoyang Gege, but you never tried to see the truth inside them. You just logged them as 'eccentricities'."
The "root cause" Professor Zhao had demanded was now laid bare in the small, stuffy office. It wasn't the notebook. It wasn't carelessness. It was a fundamental failure of empathy, disguised as a quest for efficiency. He had been treating their hearts like poorly documented APIs, frustrated when they didn't return the expected, simple responses.
The silence returned, but this time it was different. The anger and hurt were out in the open, a critical error finally thrown into the debug console.
Professor Zhao nodded slowly. "Good. The stack trace is complete. The error is identified: a core assumption that human interaction is a problem to be solved, rather than a shared state to be experienced." He looked at Xiaoyang. "Your 'Energy-Saving Principle' is a flawed algorithm, Lin Xiaoyang. It creates memory leaks of regret and bottlenecks of misunderstanding. True efficiency isn't about minimizing interaction; it's about maximizing the meaningfulness of each interaction. Sometimes, the most efficient path is the one that requires the most initial processing power."
He stood up, a clear signal that the session was over. "The project continues. You will fix this not by writing better code, but by being better collaborators. Start by listening. Not to process, but to understand."
The three of them filed out of the office, the weight of the professor's words settling upon them. The hallway outside felt like a new, uncertain runtime environment.
Xiaoyang turned to the two girls, his heart pounding. The path of least resistance was to walk away. But that was the old, flawed algorithm.
"Chen Yuexi. Tang Youyou," he said, his voice rough. "I… I hear you. And I'm sorry. Not for the data leak, but for… for not listening." It was the most energy-intensive sentence he had ever uttered, and it left him feeling strangely light.
Chen Yuexi studied him for a long moment, the theatricality gone from her eyes, replaced by a raw, honest assessment. Finally, she gave a single, curt nod. "The 'Apology and Awakening' arc. A solid foundation for a redemption subplot." A tiny, tentative smile touched her lips. "But the hero has a long way to go."
Tang Youyou wiped her eyes and offered a small, shaky smile of her own. "The planetary obstruction is… clearing. Slowly." She took a deep breath. "My crystals suggest that collaborative debugging of the actual project code might be a viable method for… energetic reintegration."
It wasn't forgiveness. Not yet. But it was a handshake. A agreement to attempt a recompile.
As they walked away, Xiaoyang realized Professor Zhao was right. The energy he had just expended felt immense, but it wasn't wasted. It was an investment. For the first time, he considered that the most inefficient thing he had ever done was to try and save energy in the first place. The problem wasn't the noise.
The problem was that he had been trying to listen with a compiler, not a heart.