Between the Morning Light in Beverly Hills and the Applause at the Elite University Championship
Winter came to Boston without warning.
On the second Tuesday of November, when Su Jin walked out of MIT's Stata Center, a thin layer of ice had already formed on the Charles River. When the streetlights came on, the ice reflected their orange glow like a shattered bronze mirror.
She pulled her coat tighter around her-a light camel-colored Loro Piana vicuña coat that reached the middle of her calves. It was the first piece of winter clothing she had bought in Boston, almost weightless, yet as warm as carrying a fireplace with her.
Underneath, she wore a black cashmere turtleneck from The Row and dark blue Mother jeans. A pair of black Church's Chelsea boots crunched softly against the thin snow.
The wind had tousled her hair, pressing a few loose strands against her cheeks. The cold had brought a faint flush to the tip of her nose and her cheekbones, and a tiny snowflake that had yet to melt clung to her eyelashes.
She had neither an umbrella nor a hat. She simply walked through the Boston winter wind, like a flower blooming out of season in the snow.
It was already eight in the evening when she returned to 217 Commonwealth Avenue.
She changed her shoes, hung her coat on the rack by the entrance, walked into the living room, and sat down on the sofa.
Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the old oak in the back garden had shed all its leaves. Its bare branches cast clawing shadows under the streetlights.
Little Golden Egg squeezed out of the air and floated in front of her, his round body looking especially warm in the firelight.
[Host, it's almost midnight. It's nearly time to check in.]
Su Jin leaned back on the sofa and closed her eyes.
The fire in the fireplace was burning brightly, the logs crackling now and then. Its heat reached her from two meters away, warming her face until it felt slightly hot.
[Ten, nine, eight, seven...]
She slowly opened her eyes as the countdown continued.
In the firelight, her eyes were a deep amber, her pupils as clear as a lake just washed by rain. Her eyelashes cast fan-shaped shadows beneath them.
[Three, two, one-ding!]
[Congratulations, host, on completing your seventy-third daily check-in!]
[Today's check-in reward: a 1.2-acre estate on Stradella Road in northern Beverly Hills, valued at 75 million US dollars. Transfer of ownership is complete. The property includes one main house, two guesthouses, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a private cinema, and a six-car garage. The interior design was completed by Waldo Fernandez, and all the furniture in the house was custom-made by Holly Hunt.]
[Today's check-in reward: intelligence raised to the theoretical human limit-IQ 178. Information processing speed increased by 300 percent, long-term memory capacity increased to nearly unlimited, and pattern recognition raised to the level of a top scholar.]
[Today's check-in reward: overall appearance score raised to 98. System assessment: the host's current appearance has entered the top tier.]
[Bonus "A Tale of Two Cities" Easter egg triggered: the Beverly Hills estate and the Boston Back Bay villa have formed a cross-coast asset link. The host may freely switch between living and academic settings on the East and West Coasts. The system has automatically arranged a private butler team in Los Angeles, ready to serve at any time.]
After listening, Su Jin lay on the sofa for three seconds.
The fire crackled, and a log collapsed, sending up a small cluster of sparks.
She raised a hand and touched her face. It seemed no different from yesterday-her skin was still smooth and warm, like a freshly peeled lychee.
But she knew something had changed. The change wasn't on the surface. It was deeper, in the speed of cell division, the density of collagen, the layers of pigment in her irises.
She stood up and walked to the mirror by the entrance.
The person in the mirror stood there in a black cashmere turtleneck and dark blue jeans, her hair a little windblown, the tip of her nose still faintly red from the cold.
But that face-that face seemed to have gained something compared to yesterday.
Her features hadn't changed. It was something impossible to describe, like a painting given a fresh coat of varnish: the colors were the same, but the sheen and depth were entirely different. Her lips were a little fuller in color than usual, a natural rose pink.
She looked for a long time, then turned and went back to the sofa. She sat down and picked up the laptop on the coffee table.
Two
News of the Elite University Championship had been released three days earlier.
It was an interdisciplinary competition jointly organized by the Eight Ivy League Universities and hosted in alternating years by MIT and Stanford. Held every November, it drew competitors from the twenty most prestigious universities in the United States. Each school sent four contestants to face off in turn across four fields: mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering.
This year's competition was being held at MIT. Playing on home ground, MIT was especially strict in its selection: each school within the university had only one slot, and Professor Harris was put in charge of deciding who would take the computer science school's place.
When Professor Harris announced the news in class, his gaze swept over the room before settling on Su Jin. "Su," he said, "you'll represent MIT in the computer science competition."
No one in the classroom objected.
The results of the assessment test from three weeks earlier were still posted on the computer science department's notice board. Su Jin's name was at the top, her total score nearly twenty points higher than the runner-up's.
And over those three weeks, her performance in class had completely shut everyone up: whenever Professor Harris posed a question, she was always the first to answer;
For the weekly programming assignments, her code was invariably the most concise, the most elegant, and the most efficient;
Once, during a break, a doctoral student came to her with a bug that had troubled him for three days. She looked at it for less than five minutes and pointed out the problem.
Beauty was the least valuable thing at MIT, but intelligence wasn't.
The preliminary round was at two on Wednesday afternoon, in the Stata Center's main auditorium.
Su Jin left at noon, not because she was nervous, but because she wanted to walk alone before the competition and calm herself.
Today she wore a dark gray double-breasted wool coat from Ralph Lauren, with a white Equipment silk blouse and black Acne Studios skinny jeans underneath. On her feet were brown Church's brogues, their detailing exquisite and their laces fastened meticulously.
Her hair was tied in a low ponytail with a black velvet ribbon, revealing her entire face and her pair of Buccellati Opera earrings-openwork white-gold flowers that shimmered faintly in the winter sunlight.
Walking across the MIT campus, she noticed that the students passing by looked at her differently than they had when she first arrived.
Back then, their gazes had held only admiration and curiosity. Now, the admiration remained, but the curiosity had become something more complicated-respect, recognition, the gaze one strong person gave another.
When she entered the Stata Center, the auditorium was already more than half full.
The audience included teachers and students from various schools, as well as local Boston media and recruiters from technology companies. The competition area was on the auditorium stage, with five long tables arranged in a row, each holding a laptop and a whiteboard.
MIT's contestants were seated in the very middle. Su Jin's place faced the audience, and the lights overhead shone down on her, illuminating her like an exhibit on display in a museum.
She sat down at her place, opened her laptop, and glanced around the competition area.
The contestants from the other three schools had already arrived. Stanford had sent a blond white male student and an Asian female student; Caltech had sent two brothers who looked like twins. Among Princeton's four contestants was a mixed-race young man sitting at the far end, his head lowered over his phone.
She gave the mixed-race young man another look.
He was probably twenty-three or twenty-four, at least 1.88 meters tall, with broad shoulders. He wore a dark blue hoodie, its hood resting loosely behind his head.
His hair was dark brown and slightly curly, his bangs falling over his forehead and covering half his brows and eyes. The lines of his profile were sharp-high cheekbones, a sharply angled jaw, and a straight nose. His sun-touched skin was a color between ivory and light wheat.
His head was lowered, the blue light from his phone screen falling across his face. His eyelashes were visibly long, casting small shadows beneath his eyes.
He seemed to sense something. Suddenly, he raised his head and looked in Su Jin's direction.
Their eyes met.
His eyes were light brown, their color so pale that they had an almost amber quality under the lights, unexpectedly similar to hers.
He gave her a slight nod, the corners of his mouth curving upward a little, then lowered his head and returned to his phone.
Su Jin looked away and turned her attention back to her computer screen.
Three
At precisely two in the afternoon, the host walked onto the stage and announced the start of the competition.
The preliminary round was a timed problem-solving contest: five problems in three hours, covering four areas-algorithm design, machine learning theory, computer vision, and systems architecture.
The problems grew progressively harder. The last was usually reserved for the truly top contestants; in previous years, the number of people who had solved it completely could be counted on one hand.
The first problem concerned graph algorithms: given a social network, contestants had to identify its k most influential nodes.
It was a classic problem. Su Jin completed the modeling, coding, and testing in less than twenty minutes.
When she submitted her answer, the Stanford girl beside her was still writing out her derivation.
The second problem was on machine learning theory: derive the gradient of a particular loss function and prove its convergence.
It required a solid mathematical foundation. Her answer took two fewer steps than the standard solution, using a more ingenious matrix decomposition technique. Sitting on the judging panel, Professor Harris raised an eyebrow when he saw her derivation, then took out his phone and snapped a photo.
The third problem moved into computer vision: given a set of multi-view images, reconstruct a three-dimensional point cloud of the object.
She had done a similar problem in Professor Harris's class, but the competition version added extra constraints: the image quality was extremely poor, the viewing angles were incomplete, and there was a great deal of noise and occlusion.
She stared at the problem for three minutes, then closed her eyes.
Something in her mind was working at high speed-not the linear, step-by-step kind of reasoning, but an almost intuitive, leaping form of thought.
Her IQ 178 intelligence was fully activated at that moment. What did a 300 percent increase in information processing speed mean?
It meant she could complete an initial solution design in the time it took others to read the problem, build the framework for an entire algorithm in the time it took others to write their first line of code, and complete three rounds of iterative optimization in the time it took others to run their first experiment.
She opened her eyes and began to code.
The tapping of her keyboard sounded especially crisp in the quiet competition area.
Her fingers flew over the keys at nearly twice her usual speed. Lines of code appeared one after another on the screen, their logic clear and structure elegant, with almost nothing that needed changing.
She spent forty minutes writing the code and ten minutes debugging it. The moment it ran successfully, a rotating three-dimensional model appeared on the screen.
The model had clear outlines and rich detail, with a resemblance to the real object exceeding 95 percent.
When she submitted her answer, only two people in the entire competition had completed the first three problems-her and the mixed-race young man.
He sat at the far end, a successful submission screen also displayed on the monitor before him. Leaning back in his chair, he twirled a pen in his hand and looked in her direction, seemingly waiting for her to finish too.
The fourth problem was systems architecture design: design a distributed storage system capable of supporting one billion users online simultaneously, while meeting requirements for high availability, strong consistency, and low latency.
There was no standard answer. It tested the contestants' depth of understanding of large-scale systems and their engineering intuition.
Su Jin drew an architecture diagram on the whiteboard. Her solution used a newer consensus algorithm in place of the traditional Paxos, reducing latency by 40 percent while maintaining strong consistency.
When she finished writing the last word, Professor Harris rose from the judging panel, walked over to her whiteboard, and studied it for a long time.
"This solution," he said, his voice quiet but audible to everyone in the silent competition area, "is better than most of the industry solutions I've seen."
A low murmur of discussion rose around the competition area.
The mixed-race young man turned to look at her, the curve of his mouth a little wider than before.
At the forty-fifth minute, Su Jin turned to the fifth problem.
The final problem was only three lines long: design an algorithm capable of reconstructing a highly accurate three-dimensional facial model in real time from a single RGB image, running on a mobile device at no less than thirty frames per second.
It was one of the most cutting-edge challenges in computer vision.
The best current academic methods needed several seconds on a GPU to produce a result, while the competition required it to run in real time on a phone.
Su Jin stared at the problem without moving.
The competition area was so quiet that the hum of the air conditioning could be heard.
Someone in the audience spoke in a low voice, but the person beside them quickly stopped them.
The five professors on the judging panel exchanged a glance. They had deliberately set this problem to see whether any of this year's contestants could reach the boundaries of it.
Experience from previous years showed that anyone who could meet some of the requirements was already a top contestant. At most, only one person in three years could solve it completely.
She closed her eyes and began building a model in her mind.
At this moment, her IQ 178 intelligence displayed an almost terrifying ability: she could work through several different network architectures in her head at once, compare their parameter counts, computational costs, and accuracy in parallel, and select the optimal combination.
Her brain was like a supercomputer, every neuron working at full capacity, information passing between synapses at astonishing speed.
Twelve minutes later, she opened her eyes and began to code.
She designed an extremely lightweight convolutional neural network. The entire model had fewer than two million parameters, and its measured inference time on the latest iPhone was only twenty-two milliseconds, far exceeding the thirty-frames-per-second requirement.
When she finished the final line of code, her finger paused over the enter key for one second, then pressed it lightly.
The code ran successfully.
A three-dimensional facial model appeared on the screen, generated in real time from a single RGB image.
The model's accuracy was astonishing. Even the fine creases at the corners of the eyes and mouth were clearly visible.
She submitted her answer.
The successful submission was recorded at 4:58 p.m., with two minutes left in the competition.
The entire room fell silent for a full five seconds.
Then Professor Harris stood up and began to applaud.
The applause was like a stone tossed into a still lake, ripples spreading rapidly throughout the auditorium.
People in the audience joined in, and the professors on the judging panel applauded too. Contestants from the other schools let go of their keyboards and turned to look at her. Some applauded, some shook their heads with rueful smiles, and some let out sighs of defeat.
Su Jin remained seated at her place. She didn't stand, didn't wave, didn't even smile.
She simply sat there quietly, her hands on the keyboard, looking at the three-dimensional facial model on the screen.
Light poured down from overhead, falling on her face and giving the skin the system had enhanced to the human limit an almost porcelain sheen. The screen's blue light reflected in her amber eyes, and the golden rings around her pupils stood out under the lights.
She tilted her head slightly, and a few loose strands slipped from her ponytail and fell beside her ear, setting off the exquisitely unreal profile of her face.
From the audience, she looked less like a contestant who had just completed an earth-shaking performance and more like a painting hung in the deepest part of a gallery, waiting for someone with an eye for it.
The applause continued for nearly a minute before gradually fading.
Four
After the competition, Su Jin didn't stay in the auditorium to receive congratulations. Instead, she walked alone to the rooftop terrace of the Stata Center.
It was already dark. The Boston winter night was bitterly cold, and Cambridge across the Charles River was ablaze with lights. In the distance, the red aviation warning light atop the Prudential Center's spire blinked on and off.
She stood by the terrace railing, her breath clearly visible as white vapor in the light.
Footsteps sounded behind her.
She didn't turn around.
"That problem of yours," a voice said from behind her, low and slightly creaky, with a pronunciation particular to someone of mixed heritage, somewhere between American English and a European language. "The fifth one-did you use an implicit neural representation?"
Su Jin turned around.
The mixed-race young man stood two steps behind her, wearing a dark blue hoodie with both hands in his pockets. His light brown eyes looked darker in the night.
He was almost a head taller than her, and as he stood in front of her, he blocked most of the light behind him.
"Yes," she said.
He nodded, the corner of his mouth curving upward. "I used an implicit representation too," he said, "but your encoder was much lighter than mine. I'd like to know how you handled the high-frequency details."
Su Jin looked at him and was silent for two seconds.
Then she took her phone out of her pocket, opened a notes app, and handed it to him. "See for yourself."
He took the phone and looked down at it for a few seconds, then raised his head. Something had entered his gaze-not admiration, not curiosity, but a very pure recognition from one intelligent person to another.
"My name is Ethan,"