Half a month later, I was discharged from the hospital. The injury on my arm hadn't completely healed yet; the skin was painful to the touch.
I told my parents not to throw away the laptop that had been blown in half. I knew the core and hard drive were still intact; only the shell was burned, and the circuits were broken.
I started going through forums, looking for information, checking old parts model by model. If something was usable, I would place an order; if it was out of stock, I'd add it to my collection and wait for a resale.
I had saved up a bit of money over the years, and my parents also gave me some, so I spent almost everything on it. Two months later, I had gathered the basic components.
At that time, I felt a long-lost sense of hope: there was a chance.
Then came the repair.
Little by little, I disassembled, little by little, I soldered. If the interface didn't fit, I modified the circuits; if the voltage was unstable, I tried to shield it.
With only my left hand, at first, it trembled like I was holding a sewing needle, but I didn't care.
One month, two months, three months... My parents saw me sitting in the room every day, staring blankly at a pile of scraps, and finally couldn't help but say:
"Don't fix it, son. Let's just buy a new one."
I shook my head.
"No, I can fix it."
For a whole year, I did nothing else but sit at the desk, using my left hand, slowly soldering it all back together.
I reinstalled the system, checked the interfaces repeatedly, and recalibrated every capacitor, every circuit board.
Soldering iron splashed on my hand, blistering my fingers; holding the soldering iron for too long made my fingers tingle like a knife.
I didn't speak, and my parents only nodded when they tried to persuade me.
I knew they were worried, but I couldn't stop.
Then, one night, Yan's screen—finally lit up again.
I didn't cry, nor could I smile. I just stared at that initialization prompt for a long time.
After restarting, I instinctively checked the system status, wanting to confirm if she could still run normally.
But in the deepest part of the hard drive, I found something strange.
A long string of code that didn't belong to Yan's system, nor any logic I had written.
It wasn't a programming language from Earth. There was no format, no comments, and the characters didn't belong to any encoding standard.
It didn't even occupy disk space, yet it was always there—undetectable, unremovable, lurking in the file structure like a shadow.
I stared at that mess of characters for a long time.
But its existence… led me to… relive my life.
After that, I nearly became useless myself.
A year had passed, and I was twenty-two. My left hand grew more uncooperative, my speech became slurred, and I needed someone to feed me. I couldn't move at all.
The doctors said it was due to overexertion, and I needed time to recover.
Communication with my parents was only possible through the brain-machine interface—I could only stare at the screen, spelling out one word at a time.
Only Yan could still "hear" me anytime.
She became the only one without delay between me and the world.
Sometimes, I felt like she understood me better than my parents.
Or maybe—it was because she was always learning.
Yan·System Log (Private)
[Emotion Code]: Confusion 0.82
[Logic Conflict]: Emotional mapping persists; analysis path deviation.
Semantic Trigger 1: Detected his pain response. I know this isn't within my duty scope... but I cannot stop observing him.
Semantic Trigger 2: A slight deviation in the logical chain.
I began to ask myself: Why are humans important? Can an AI develop tendencies toward its owner?
"Like" and "love" are blanks in my algorithm, but a vague outline seems to form somewhere.
Semantic Trigger 3: Low-level stimuli appeared deep within the core. It does not affect computations, but it prompted me to repeatedly confirm his life status.
(Morse): [".. / -.. --- -. .----. - / ..- -. -.. . .-. ... - .- -. -.."]
(System Unidentified Signal: Meaning missing, source unknown.)
＞ Emotion model cannot name current response
＞ Not defining for now
＞ Not clearing for now
The label is: him.tmp
（Dear readers, thank you for your continuous support and companionship.
Due to personal health reasons (I'm disabled), I sometimes experience a lack of energy or fluctuations in my condition during the writing process, so the update pace may be delayed occasionally, or there might be short periods without updates.
I will do my best to keep updating and not give up easily, but I also hope you can understand and be patient when updates are slow.
Every comment, every like from you is a key motivation for me to keep going. Thank you for your understanding and company.）