The torrential rain washed the glass curtain wall of the Celestial Vault Building into a blurry digital matrix. Lu Ming curled up at the most secluded workstation on the 18th floor. The tapping sound of the mechanical keyboard was like some kind of dying Morse code. The smell of luosifen from the neighboring team wafted over from the air outlet of the central air conditioning, intertwining with the burnt smell emanating from the computer case, fermenting into a sticky anxiety in the stillness of 2 o'clock in the morning.
"Bang!"
Project Director Zhang Hao smashed the laser pointer onto the conference table, and the code snippet in the holographic projection burst open into a blood-red warning box. Lu Ming watched as the character AI module he had spent three weeks writing was dissected on the 4K screen—the bug that made the virtual idol suddenly squat down to tie her shoelaces during the climax of the concert was now being looped at thirty times the normal speed.
"Still using a state machine to write NPC logic in 2024?" Zhang Hao's crocodile leather shoes crushed the Type-C data cable on the ground, making a teeth-grating creaking sound. "Do you know why 'Tales of the Stardust' has gone through three lead programmers in two years of development? Because bad code can contaminate the entire project like a prion disease!"
Lu Ming's nails dug into his palms, and the lanyard of his work badge was choking his neck painfully. Lightning flashed outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the coffee stain congealed on the second button of his shirt—the caramel macchiato that Zhang Hao had "accidentally" knocked over half an hour ago. There was a snicker from the other side of the conference table. Lead Programmer Wang Zhigang was twirling a pen, and there were golden words "Official Certified Instructor of Unreal Engine" engraved on the pen shaft.
"An intern should have the awareness of an intern." Zhang Hao pulled up the Git commit records, and the bright red deletion lines annotated Lu Ming's code as "shit code" all over the screen. "You were asked to modify the collision volume, but you managed to crash the scene lighting baking. Do you know that the art team has been working overnight for three nights?"
The air conditioning outlet suddenly blew out cold air. Lu Ming watched as his trembling fingertips cast a web-like shadow on the keyboard. At the bottom of the locker, there was still the character design collection of "Tales of the Stardust". The stardust diagram sketched with a pencil by the lead artist Su Li on the title page was now burning hot in the darkness. During the acceptance last week, she had said, "Code is the orbit that carries the stars," but now it seemed like a vicious mockery.
The notification sound of the OA system rang out in the stillness, and the pop-up window of the bright red [Project Permission Change Notice] made everyone's pupils turn red. Lu Ming stared at the words "Intern Lu Ming will be removed from the 'Tales of the Stardust' project team effective immediately", and his eardrums throbbed with the roar of his blood rushing. Wang Zhigang whistled, and the melody of "Für Elise" 适时响起 from the access control system of the conference room—that was the exclusive kicking-out reminder sound set by Zhang Hao.
The sensor lights in the underground garage went out one by one following the sound of footsteps. Lu Ming stood in the rain holding a cardboard box. The potted cactus in his arms was the only personal item on his workstation. His phone vibrated in his pants pocket, and his mother's voice message mixed with the sound of the rain: "Xiaoming, remember on your birthday..."
He suddenly coughed violently, and the metallic taste in his throat mingled with the fishy smell of the rain. He looked up at the 18th floor. Inside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the holographic logo of "Tales of the Stardust" was spinning in the data torrent, a star that he could never reach.
It was almost dawn when he got back to the shared rental house. The old-fashioned elevator let out a dying groan on the 13th floor. The yellowed wallpaper was splattered with instant noodle soup stains. Lu Ming curled up on the gaming chair. There was still a prickly ash that had gotten stuck in the space bar of the mechanical keyboard when he was gnawing on duck necks last year. In the blue light of the monitor, all of his commit records on the GitLab interface were stamped with a scarlet "REJECTED".
"Ding—"
An email with a pure black background suddenly burst out of the trash folder. The sender's address was a Mobius strip composed of garbled characters, and the subject line was flashing with blood-red pixelated fonts: [Happy Birthday, Abandoned Variable]
The moment the attached.exe file automatically decompressed, the computer case let out a roar like a turbine engine. The heat wave blowing out from the cooling holes blew the instant noodle bucket away, and the twelve secondary screens simultaneously lit up with a faint blue stream of code. Lu Ming wanted to unplug the power supply, but he found that his wrist was entangled by the nano wires ejected from the bottom of the keyboard tray. The icy feeling of the needle-like interface piercing into his vein made him think of the moment when he got vaccinated as a child.
[Brain cortex remapping initiated]
[Injecting the complete knowledge base of UnrealEngine5.3]
Intense pain exploded from the occipital lobe, and a vast amount of code poured in like a galaxy. He saw his own bad code being reconstructed in the data torrent, and the blueprint nodes of the Unreal Engine automatically pieced together into a dazzling star map. When the pain reached its threshold, a semi-transparent UI appeared on his retina:
[Developer system activated]
[Novice mission: Reconstruct the underlying architecture of "Tales of the Stardust" within 72 hours]
[Reward: Official employee permissions of Celestial Vault Technology]
The computer case suddenly emitted a light as intense as a supernova. The last thing Lu Ming saw before his consciousness faded was the data stealing backdoor implanted by Zhang Hao deep in the code library—at this moment, it was twisting into a screaming skull icon under the violent cracking of the system.