The fluorescent lights hummed their perpetual white-noise lullaby, a sound Chen Wei had long ago stopped noticing. His eyes burned from fourteen hours staring at spectral data, the kind of exhaustion that made the world feel slightly out of focus, as if he were watching reality through warmed glass. It was 11:47 PM on a Tuesday in late October, and the Tsinghua materials science lab was his alone—exactly how he preferred it.
His workspace occupied the northeast corner of the fourth floor, tucked beside the perovskite furnace and the X-ray diffraction chamber. The lab coat he'd thrown over his clothes three hours ago now carried the faint smell of heated ceramics and indifference to personal hygiene. A half-empty bottle of mineral water sat next to his keyboard, beside a half-eaten steamed bun from the university's 24-hour canteen. Neither had been touched in ninety minutes.
"Come on," Chen Wei whispered to the data streaming across his screen. "Show me something. Anything."
The dataset represented three weeks of experiments: perovskite films doped with different concentrations of methylammonium lead iodide, each sample treated with a slightly varied annealing protocol. The superconducting transition temperature—the temperature at which the material lost all electrical resistance—had improved by 0.3 Kelvin in the best case. Marginal. Barely publishable, if the methodology was impeccable enough. His advisor, Professor Zhang, would want more data. Three weeks wasn't statistically robust when you were dealing with delicate crystal structures and measurement tolerances measured in millidegrees.
Chen Wei leaned back in his chair, the cheap mesh backing protesting with a creak. The fluorescent lights cast everything in that particular institutional pallor that made time feel suspended. Outside the tall lab windows, Beijing's October night pressed against the glass—cool, dry, full of the city's endless ambient pollution that turned the sky into a grayscale photograph.
He was twenty-one years old. A third-year physics undergraduate at China's most prestigious university, with a GPA that hovered around 3.7 out of 4.0—good enough to be taken seriously, not exceptional enough to be given free passes. His mother worked double shifts at a hospital in Chongqing. His younger sister, still in high school, had begun asking him about university entrance exams with the particular desperation of a student from a non-tier-1 city competing for elite spots. The family carried ¥3 million in accumulated debt—education loans, medical debts from his father's industrial accident a decade ago, and the simple, grinding cost of staying afloat.
This lab, this research, these microscopic improvements in transition temperature—they were his only plausible path out. Not because superconductors would make him rich (they wouldn't), but because publishing papers, winning research grants, and eventually a PhD would establish credibility. Credibility led to job offers. Job offers led to stability. And stability was the thing his family had never quite managed.
The lab door was still twenty meters away, but Chen Wei could see it in his peripheral vision through the translucent partition that separated his workspace from the main corridor. He'd become attuned to the sound of it opening—the pneumatic hiss of the electronic lock, the creak of hinges, the soft thud of closure. It hadn't opened for hours.
He should sleep. His body was sending urgent signals: the slight tremor in his hands, the pressure behind his eyes, the way the numbers on the screen seemed to drift and reorganize themselves when he blinked. Heat exhaustion, probably. The lab's air conditioning had been set to energy-saving mode since October, which meant the heating pipes along the wall were already cranking out warmth. Combined with the thermal output from the furnace and the banks of server equipment, the northeast corner of the fourth floor had become a pocket of genuine warmth, almost tropical compared to the rest of campus.
But the data. The data demanded another pass.
Chen Wei pulled up the transmission electron microscopy images, looking for grain boundary defects. If the doping was localised at the interfaces, that could explain the inconsistent results across samples. His hands moved across the keyboard with the muscle memory of someone who'd spent the last seven months in this exact corner, running the same analyses in slightly different sequences, hoping that reordering the operations would somehow reveal a pattern he'd missed.
His mother had called that evening. He'd let it go to voicemail. By the time he realised it was 11:30 PM, it seemed too late to call back.
The fluorescent light directly above his workstation flickered—just once, just enough to register—and then resumed its steady glow. An omen, his dormmate would have said. Chen Wei dismissed it as the precursor to migraine and drank the rest of the mineral water.
The temperature in the corner seemed to increase by another degree. Or perhaps he'd simply become aware of it. His collar felt too tight. He pulled it away from his neck, and the gesture released a small pocket of cooler air against his skin Temporary relief.
He should go back to the dormitory. He should sleep. He should eat something more substantial than a cold steamed bun that was now stale enough to function as a doorstop. These were all things his rational mind agreed on. But rational mind was in the back seat right now, hands bound, watching as his autonomic nervous system insisted on running one more analysis, one more iteration, one more rotation through the data.
The edges of his vision acquired a faint shimmer. Dehydration, definitely. Or the early stages of heat exhaustion. He knew the signs intellectually—he'd read papers on heat stroke, on the behavioural markers of cognitive decline under thermal stress. The irony was not lost on him that he was currently studying an academic paper on the exact condition he was inducing in himself, all in service of pursuing academic papers on perovskite superconductors.
"Okay," he said aloud to the empty lab. "One more run. Then the dormitory."
He initialled the execution command for a batch analysis—let the computer churn through the spectral data while he gathered his things. He'd check the results in the morning. His body was suggesting, with increasing insistence, that the morning would be better than midnight for cognitive tasks.
The screen flickered again. This time, it wasn't the overhead light. The pixels stuttered, resolved back into focus, then softened slightly, as if the display had been dimmed by an invisible hand.
Chen Wei blinked. Had he blinked? The air tasted strange suddenly—like ozone and copper, the way the lab smelled during electrical storms, except the sky outside was clear. Clear and dark and indifferent to his presence.
He stood up, the chair rolling backwards. The wheels caught briefly on a cable, and the jolt of resistance sent a lance of pain through his already-sensitised nervous system. Everything was too bright. The fluorescent lights had become something with texture and weight, pressing down on him like a physical force.
He took a step toward the water cooler on the far wall. The distance seemed larger than it should have been. His depth perception had become unreliable. Another step. The floor was moving slightly, or his feet were moving slightly, or there was no actual difference between those two things anymore.
The sharp corner of the desk caught his lower leg. He didn't remember walking back toward it. He also didn't remember deciding to sit down, but he was suddenly in the chair again, hands gripping the armrests, the world doing a slow tumble around an axis that ran through the bridge of his nose.
Words formed in his mind without his participation: hyperthermia, hypovolemia, cognitive impairment, core temperature approaching critical threshold...
These were medical terms he'd read in journals, floating past his consciousness like debris from a shipwreck. Were they his thoughts? Or were they appearing from somewhere else, some outer layer of reality that his subjective experience had only now begun to overlap with?
The fluorescent lights went out.
Not gradually. Not with a flicker or fade. One moment, the lab was washed in white institutional glow; the next, there was darkness so complete and immediate that it felt active, like something with intention. The windows were still visible—the faint phosphorescence of Beijing's light-polluted night sky—but the interior of the lab had become a void.
Chen Wei's hands released the armrests. He should stand. He should navigate toward the door. These were decisions his conscious mind made, but the connection between decision and execution had become tenuous. His body was very heavy, and the darkness was very deep, and somewhere in the margin between them, consciousness began to flicker like that dying overhead light.
The last coherent thought before the void took him was a simple observation: Mom's going to be upset if I miss class tomorrow.
Then: nothing.
The darkness held him for a duration that meant nothing. It could have been seconds. It could have been years. Time had become a category error, a distinction that applied to the world but not to whatever space he currently inhabited.
But then there was something. Not light—or rather, not light in the conventional sense, but an appearance of structure against the void, the way a thought appears within consciousness where before there was only blank awareness.
Words. No, not words. Something more fundamental than language, but which his mind translated into words because that was the shape his cognition took.
SYSTEMINITIALIZATIONIN PROGRESS
The message appeared in his field of vision like a notification on a phone screen, except there was no phone, no eyes to see it, no visual cortex to process it. And yet: it was there. It was unmistakably, irrefutably present. The first thing in the void. The first evidence that the void was not absolute.
VITAL SIGN ANALYSIS: CRITICAL
An image formed—a schematic of a human body in profile, overlaid with rolling numbers that updated in real time. His heart rate: 142 BPM. Core temperature: 41.2°C. Blood oxygen saturation: 87%. Every number was flagged in red. Every number suggested imminent failure.
INTERVENTION INITIATED
Something changed. Not in the physical world—or perhaps he had no physical world to perceive—but in the subtle machinery of his own biology. His heart rate began to stabilize. The temperature reading shifted, fraction by fraction: 41.1°C, 40.9°C, 40.7°C. It was as if someone had installed a thermostat inside his skull and cranked it down.
CONSCIOUSNESS PRESERVATION: ONGOING
The void acquired texture. Not sight, but something analogous to it. A sense of geometry and structure. He was in a space. His body had weight again. His breathing had returned—shallow and rapid, but present.
The fluorescent lights flickered back to life.
Chen Wei gasped. His eyes snapped open to the sight of the lab ceiling, the light fixtures casting their harsh glow across white acoustic tile. He was on the floor. When had he moved to the floor? His back was against the base of the desk, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his shirt completely soaked with sweat that was already cooling against his skin.
His hands shook as he pushed himself upright. The movement triggered a cascade of proprioceptive confusion—the lab spun gently around him, then stabilized. His vision cleared incrementally. The temperature readout on the nearby furnace display swam into focus: 21.4°C. Normal lab temperature. He was no longer dying.
But he was still in the lab. And something fundamental had changed.
The notification reappeared, this time in the centre of his visual field:
ADVANCED RESEARCH SYSTEM – ACTIVATED
CONSCIOUSNESS INTEGRATION: COMPLETE
STATUS: ONLINE
Chen Wei closed his eyes, waiting for the hallucination to fade. It didn't. When he opened them again, the message was still there, rendered in a clean sans-serif font, hovering in the air about a meter in front of his face. It was simultaneously the most unreal thing he'd ever perceived and the most vivid.
With trembling fingers, he reached out toward the message. His hand passed through it without resistance. The text didn't react to his touch, didn't disappear or change. It simply existed in a layer of reality that his body could not quite interact with.
A menu appeared below the first notification, rendered in the same clean font:
SYSTEM MENU
> Research Guide
> Computational Assistance
> Resource Optimisation
> Progress Tracking
His mind produced a name for what was happening: system, as if the word itself had weight and explanation. Not a hallucination. Not heat stroke delirium. A system—coherent, intentional, responsive. Impossible, but present.
He tried to move his lips to speak. His throat was so dry that the attempt produced only a whisper, a sound like wind across sand. "What... are you?"
The message didn't change. The menu didn't respond. Perhaps it was read-only. Perhaps it only understood particular inputs.
But then a new notification appeared, rendered in the same interface:
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: CONSCIOUSNESS RESTORATION SUCCESSFUL
YOUR CONDITION HAS CHANGED YOUR FUTURE
INITIALIZATION SEQUENCE WILL CONTINUE
STAND BY
Chen Wei tried to stand. His legs were weak and unreliable, but after a moment of trembling effort, he managed to get his back against the desk and his body into something approximating vertical posture. The world spun slowly, then settled. The hydration situation was critical—his entire mouth tasted like copper and salt.
The water bottle. Still on his desk, now empty. But there was a sink in the prep room at the far end of the lab. Water from a laboratory sink was not ideal, but it was water.
He staggered across the lab, the menu and the notification still hovering in his field of vision, visible and invisible simultaneously. They didn't obscure his view of the real world, but they occupied some parallel layer of perception, as insistent as a thought he couldn't quite dismiss.
The water from the sink was cold and tasted faintly of minerals. He cupped his hands under the flow and drank deeply, three times, until his throat felt something approaching human again.
When he looked at his reflection in the darkened window above the sink, he barely recognized himself. His face was flushed a deep red, sweat still dripping down his temples, his eyes wild and unfocused. He looked like he'd been pulled from a fire. Technically, he'd been pulled from something—though whether it was the heat of his own biology or something else entirely remained unclear.
The notification persisted: YOUR CONDITION HAS CHANGED YOUR FUTURE
It was now 12:43 AM. He'd been on the lab floor for at least forty-five minutes. At some point during his unconsciousness—if that's what it had been—the building had decided to cool itself back to normal operational temperature. Or his fever had broken. Or both.
He needed to get to the university medical centre. That was the rational next step. Heat stroke required professional evaluation, IV fluids, and monitoring for complications. The rational part of his brain was insisting quite firmly on this course of action.
But the part of his brain that had always been more interested in questions than answers, that had pulled him toward physics and mathematics and the deep mysteries of how matter actually worked, that part was still staring at the notification. Still trying to comprehend what it meant.
The system menu remained open. He considered the options:
Research Guide
What kind of guidance? Guidance toward what? The system had appeared during his heat stroke, during his collapse. Was it connected to his research? Or did it exist independent of him, and the timing was merely a coincidence?
He should go to the medical centre. He should follow the rational protocol. But the notification had used his own thought-language, had communicated in English, had appeared in response to the exact circumstances of his research situation.
With a deliberation that felt almost physical, Chen Wei raised his hand toward the "Research Guide" option and made a gesture as if to touch it.
The menu shifted. A new interface appeared:
RESEARCH GUIDE - INITIALIZATION
SELECT RESEARCH DOMAIN:
> Materials Science
> Physics
> Computational Science
> [Other Fields]
The system was offering him choices. Not dictating. Offering. This felt important somehow, though he couldn't articulate why.
He hovered his gesture over "Materials Science" and felt the interface respond, a subtle shift in emphasis and highlighting. When he made a motion as if to select, the menu expanded:
MATERIALS SCIENCE - RESEARCH GUIDANCE AVAILABLE
Current Expertise Detected:
- Perovskite Optoelectronics (Advanced)
- Superconducting Phenomena (Intermediate)
- Thin-Film Synthesis (Advanced)
- Crystallographic Analysis (Advanced)
Recommended Research Directions Available
> Expand Current Research (Superconductors)
> Adjacent Fields (Quantum Error Correction)
> Market Opportunities (Energy Storage)
His heart rate increased again, though not from fever this time. This was impossible. This was a system that had indexed his knowledge, assessed his expertise level, and was now offering him research guidance based on analysis of his capabilities and knowledge gaps.
A system that had also, implicitly, known he was about to die from heat stroke, and had intervened.
Chen Wei looked at the clock on the lab wall. 12:47 AM. In a few hours, people would start arriving for early lab work. His mother would be finishing her night shift in Chongqing. His sister would be sleeping before her high school entrance exams.
And he was standing in a materials science lab, supposedly having just recovered from a potentially fatal heat stroke, negotiating with an interface that lived in some layer of reality above or beside or underneath the normal world.
The rational choice was clear: medical centre, blood tests, observation.
Instead, he found his gesture moving toward the option:
> Adjacent Fields (Quantum Error Correction)
The menu expanded, and the system began to speak to him in the language of research, in charts and numbers and possibilities. And Chen Wei, still shaking with the aftereffects of his own collapse, found himself leaning forward, listening.
Outside, the Beijing night pressed against the windows. The furnace behind him continued its steady work, heating ceramic materials to precise temperatures. And somewhere in the space between consciousness and void, between the possible and the impossible, a system had found a host and begun its initialisation.