"Do I wear it on my head for the test?" a Child Prodigy asked as she crouched down to pick up the helmet.
"Don't wear it, don't wear it. We'll test it like this directly!" the robot nearby said. "Please wait a moment. The helmet needs to charge and run a self-check first!"
As soon as it finished speaking, pale blue percentage readings appeared above all the helmets scattered across the floor. They slowly climbed from 1% to 2%, clearly requiring several minutes.
Quite a few Child Prodigies grew dejected. It was like a gaming enthusiast hearing that a game with even more realistic graphics had been released, only to be stopped outside the demo event and forbidden from entering.
"The performance needs to increase by at least five times, and it has to be made into a complete supercomputer server before it can be used. Right now, the performance hasn't reached five times, and the server is only a small prototype. Once you put it on, you might encounter unpredictable effects." Song He explained, "A strange dream would be one thing. What we're really worried about is it having some adverse effect on your brain and mental health!"
"We've always been worried about one kind of accident: if the Dream Control Helmet malfunctioned and made someone experience an extremely terrifying scene in a dream that had never existed in reality, it could devastate their mind." Xiang Xiaotong explained, "So at first, we always had the apes and monkeys in the Alien Zoo try them on. After things stabilized, we paid volunteers generously to wear them. We also had to simulate various failure modes and hacker attacks. It took a long time to make adjustments before we dared put them on the market."
The Child Prodigies finally understood.
"Then, Dean Xiang... Have those extremely terrifying scenes ever actually appeared?" Yang Yu asked.
"They have. During the early refinement of the first-generation helmet, there were all sorts of malfunctions, strange and bizarre." Xiang Xiaotong nodded. "Fortunately, most of them occurred during the ape experiments. When human volunteers tried them, nothing too serious went wrong."
Song He glanced at the self-check values on the helmets scattered across the floor. They had reached 30%, so there was still some time for a chat.
"The second-generation helmet isn't completely mature yet. It will definitely need further refinement before it can be sold. This is a lucrative assignment. Later, I'll select a group of students who contributed the most during the supercomputer's development and systematically teach you how to make one." Song He said, "In the meantime, I'll give you a few small examples so you can form a general impression."
"One typical failure mode is the extremely terrifying scene Dean Xiang just mentioned."
"Why? Nightmares are common dreams. Any intelligent creature that has survived to this day has evolved an ample capacity for anxiety and fear over the past few million years. Animals that couldn't feel anxiety or fear went extinct long ago."
"When a dream begins, if you fail to enter the dream constructed by the helmet and your brain starts dreaming on its own instead, you can easily run into trouble if you happen to trigger a nightmare!"
"There was an ape in the Alien Zoo named Tangerine. It was terrified of spiders. Red-haired Gorillas in the wild rarely fear insects. They've been in trees since birth, surrounded by insects every day, and may even find them cute... But Tangerine had lived in the zoo since it could remember. It stayed in a clean, tidy indoor environment, and even when it went outside to climb trees, it rarely saw large insects, because we were constantly spraying insecticide throughout the zoo. So it had developed a fear of spiders, which it had barely ever seen."
"Once, Tangerine wore the helmet for a test. Everything was normal when it first entered the dream, and it dreamed that it was lying on its own little bed."
"Then it suddenly felt that its ear was a little itchy. When it reached up to touch it, it saw a spotted spider in the dream. Terrified, it frantically flung its hand around and jumped out of bed. At that point in the dream, something went wrong with the helmet."
"At the time, the helmet's recognition ability was still very poor. When it detected that Tangerine's brain was active, it assumed the dream was correct and that the ape was enjoying itself, so it began reinforcing it according to the old signal pathway!"
Before you continue