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 drifted alone, staring at the slowly spinning holographic manuscript of The Story of the Stone inside a quantum light trap. The algorithm meant to continue Dream of the Red Chamber’s lost chapters suddenly showed a black fissure in the emotional-weight curve—quantum collapse that appears only when convergence parameters fail.

The National Quantum Cultural Restoration Center—co-run by Huaxia’s science ministry and the SCO Quantum Security Union’s Fifth Bureau—had deployed “Story of the Stone” here. Trained on billions of classical texts, the algorithm built a dense net of emotion and meaning; as chief engineer, Li Xin was tasked with generating the missing forty chapters in real time in a holographic theater. But the fissure widened fast; the stabilizer showed the algorithm was compressing “sorrow,” “joy,” “greed,” and “anger” toward a single minimal value. He compared the Stars-and-Stripes State’s open “Surge-III” emotional chip and saw the same omen—ten years of social-network data showed emotional amplitudes decaying exponentially. The algorithm was merely unveiling a trend ahead of time: as predictability nears one hundred percent, the human heart approaches heat death. Technical note: in optimal compression, quantum tensor networks discard dimensions whose entropy contribution is below 10^-8—right at the standard deviation of human emotion.

Agencies ordered a hot rollback. If reset, the masterpiece could be “revived” yet forever entombed as an algorithmic mummy; if aborted, ten years of work would be lost. Li Xin looked down at the black Earth beyond the porthole as dawn crept up from the Pacific rim.

He severed the main quantum key. The holographic manuscript shattered into blue shards and drifted in the cabin. In the last frame before shutdown, Daiyu touched her qin; the strings did not move and her eyes brimmed—those tears weren’t in any operator table, but refracted in Li Xin’s gaze.

He understood: if the algorithm can’t complete that one teardrop, then there is still a vastness beyond its boundary. Space kept silent, as if reserving an eternal slit for that uncomputable glimmer.