3_Entropy Shadows of The Story of the Stone

At three in the morning, the dome of the Tiangong orbital lab was clear as ice. Li Xin floated alone, watching the holographic manuscript of The Story of the Stone turn slowly inside a quantum light trap. The algorithm that was supposed to pick up the lost chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber suddenly showed a black crack in its emotional-weight curve—a quantum collapse that only appeared when the convergence parameters were failing.

The National Quantum Cultural Restoration Center—jointly run by Huaxia’s science ministry and the SCO Quantum Security Union’s Fifth Bureau—had installed the “Story of the Stone” project here. Trained on billions of classical texts, the algorithm had woven a dense mesh of emotion and meaning. As chief engineer, Li Xin’s job was to let it spin out the missing forty chapters in real time in a holographic theater. Now the fissure was widening fast. The stabilizer readouts showed the model squeezing “sorrow,” “joy,” “greed,” and “anger” toward the same thin minimum. When he checked it against the Stars-and-Stripes State’s open “Surge-III” emotional chip, he saw the same warning sign: ten years of social-network data with emotional amplitudes dying away in an exponential slide. The algorithm wasn’t malfunctioning; it was simply pulling the future forward: as predictability creeps toward one hundred percent, the human heart drifts toward heat death. He recalled a technical note—under optimal compression, quantum tensor networks cut away any dimension whose entropy contribution falls below 10^-8, which happens to sit right on the standard deviation of human emotion.

The agencies ordered a hot rollback. If they reset, the masterpiece could be “revived,” yet sealed forever as an algorithmic mummy; if they aborted, ten years of work would vanish. Li Xin looked down at the dark Earth beyond the porthole as dawn slowly climbed up from the Pacific rim.

He cut the main quantum key. The holographic manuscript burst into blue fragments and drifted through the cabin. In the last frame before shutdown, Daiyu’s fingers rested on her qin; the strings stayed still while her eyes filled. Those tears existed in no operator table at all—they only appeared, bent and bright, in Li Xin’s gaze.

He understood then: if the algorithm could not finish even that single teardrop, there was still an untouched vastness beyond its edge. Space remained quiet, as though it were keeping an eternal narrow gap open for that uncomputable glimmer.