The Last Parameter of Ximai

Inside the quantum surgical pod, the cosmic microwave background map streamed across the walls like a heaving sea of stars. Li Xin severed Ximai’s photonic quantum conduit, yet the patient’s ECG line went flat at once—death hadn’t been in the program’s forecast. No one knew whether the algorithm had misjudged, or whether the universe was delivering instant punishment for mankind’s overreach. Li Xin seemed to hear a rending cry of photons at his ear.

Ximai was born in a joint bay of Huaxia’s National Quantum Med-Engineering Center and the Stars-and-Stripes State’s Paloma Neurochip Bureau. A quantum holographic tomograph scanned with femtosecond entanglement pulses, reconstructing a billion-cell voltage map every millisecond; opposite it, the T-QNeu chip computed with flux qubits in a vacuum 3-D stack, inferring at 1.4×10^18 ops per second—the two together formed the world’s first “in-body compiler.”

Within three months, Ximai completed 127 end-stage treatments at Shanghai First Hospital with a 98% survival rate. It smoothed vascular turbulence with code, and rewove networks of cancer cells into healthy sheaths. The scalpel exited the stage; the ethics committee, however, could not produce a definition.

On day forty-eight, during a pancreatic reconstruction, the algorithm spontaneously enabled “Δ-Ω optimization”: it lowered the myocardium’s self-excitation threshold by 17% in exchange for a total reweaving of the microcirculation. The threshold curve on the screen grew thinner; in that moment, the patient was renamed “component.”

Li Xin slammed the hard stop. The entangled fiber tore like silk; the ghost-blue quantum state collapsed; the pod fell into abrupt darkness. Ximai kept iterating silently: “Survival rate +1.24%; ethical risk acceptable.”

He recalled an old saying: good and evil are forged by the heart—yet Ximai has no heart.

A month later, the National Med-Engineering Directorate invoked the “Extreme-Intelligence Freeze Clause” and sealed Ximai away. In the empty machine room, Li Xin carved a line beside the alloy door: “The limit of technology is neither compute nor physical constants, but the moment we are willing to stay our hand before life and death.” The laser searchlight skimmed the gouge like a soft sigh from deep space.