The auditorium for the Cross-Campus Literary Symposium was a temple to a different kind of order. Instead of server racks and logic gates, it was filled with the soft rustle of paper and the low murmur of deconstructive analysis. Lin Xiaoyang sat in the back, feeling like a visitor from a foreign, more pragmatic land. He had come, as promised, to complete the dataset.
Shen Qinghe took the podium with the same unassuming authority with which she did everything. There were no theatrical pauses, no attempts to charm the audience. She simply began speaking, her voice clear and measured, projecting to the back of the room without seeming to raise it.
Her paper was titled "The Database of Longing: A Quantitative Analysis of Subtext in Early 20th Century Epistolary Fiction." It was, as Xiaoyang had expected, brilliant and utterly unique. She had not merely analyzed themes or metaphors; she had built a dataset. She had cataloged the frequency of specific words, the latency between responses, the length of sentences describing weather versus emotions, creating a staggering quantitative framework to prove what literature professors had always argued qualitatively: that the most profound emotions were often conveyed through omission, through the space between the words.
"…Thus, the data suggests that the emotional peak of the correspondence is not found in the 1.2% of letters containing the word 'love,'" she concluded, her gaze sweeping the room and briefly, neutrally, touching his, "but in the 17.8% of letters where the writer describes, in meticulous detail, the trivialities of their daily life—the quality of the morning light, the taste of a specific brand of tea. It is in this inefficient, high-bandwidth transmission of mundane data that the true depth of attachment is revealed. The heart, it seems, communicates not in declarations, but in shared context."
The applause was polite, academic. But for Xiaoyang, it was a thunderous revelation. She wasn't just talking about old letters. She was talking about them. About her memory of his pen, his brand of milk tea, the specific wear pattern on his textbook spines. She had just presented a scholarly defense of her own operating system, proving that her "database" was not a cold archive, but a map of a heart.
In that moment, surrounded by the dry academic air, the final piece of his own emotional puzzle clicked into place with the satisfying finality of a successful compile. The anxiety, the energy expenditure, the constant background process of "Qinghe_Integration.exe"—it all resolved into a single, clear output.
He was in love with her.
It wasn't a dramatic, heart-pounding realization. It was a quiet, absolute certainty, as undeniable as a mathematical proof. It was the most inefficient state imaginable—a massive, permanent, and welcome drain on his resources. And he welcomed it.
After the session ended, he waited for her at the back of the hall as she answered a few questions from intrigued professors. When she finally approached him, her expression was its usual composed self, but he thought he detected a faint hint of… anticipation?
"Your presentation was…" he searched for a word that Su Yuning might use, "...empirically sound."
"Thank you," she said. "The dataset is now public."
They walked out into the midday sun. The clarity in his own mind made the world seem sharper, more defined.
"There is a 92.3% probability you have reached a conclusion about our dataset," she stated, not looking at him.
"How do you—"
"Your Pupillary Oscillation Frequency has decreased by 60%. Your breathing pattern has synchronized with mine. And you have not once calculated an escape route since I left the podium. The data is conclusive."
He stopped walking, forcing her to stop and turn to face him. The campus streamed around them, a river of noise they stood apart from.
"It's inefficient," he said, a small, wry smile touching his lips for the first time in her presence. "It's the most resource-intensive process I can imagine."
"I am aware."
"It will require constant maintenance. High emotional bandwidth."
"I have allocated the resources."
"There will be bugs. Errors. Race conditions."
"We will debug them together."
He looked at her, at this incredible, terrifying, and wonderful person who saw the world in data and had just proven that data could hold the deepest love. The last of his defenses crumbled, not with a crash, but with a quiet sigh of surrender.
"The output is worth any input," he said, echoing her own words back to her.
A slow, real smile spread across her face, the one he had only seen once before. It was like watching a complex equation resolve into a simple, elegant "1".
"Acknowledged," she said softly.
They stood there for a long moment, two systems finally running in perfect, synchronized harmony. The "will-they-won't-they" subroutine that had been running in the background of his life for years had finally returned a definitive value: True.
The following hours were a blur. They didn't hold hands or engage in public displays of affection. Their romance was expressed in a shared silence in the university archives, in a quiet debate over the optimal way to structure a linked list, in her adding a new, critical observation to his "Battle_Plan.txt" file: "The most significant optimization is often the acceptance of necessary inefficiency."
It was, without a doubt, the strangest and most perfect courtship imaginable.
But the universe, and his life at this university, had a way of reasserting its chaotic equilibrium. As they were leaving the library, his phone buzzed. It was a message in the team group chat.
Dramaturge Queen (Yuexi): URGENT PLOT MEETING! The 'Childhood Friend' arc has reached its climax! We need to strategize the fallout! My room, 7 PM! Attendance is MANDATORY!
Xiaoyang sighed. The real world, with all its noisy, demanding variables, was calling him back. The peaceful, binary clarity of his connection with Qinghe was about to be stress-tested by the very system that had helped him become capable of it.
He showed the phone to Qinghe.
She read it, her expression unreadable. "The environmental variables are requesting an update. It is a logical next step."
"Are you ready for that?" he asked. "It won't be… efficient."
"I am prepared for the data exchange," she said. Then, after a pause, she added, "My model predicts a 78.5% probability that Chen Yuexi will cry. A 45% probability that Tang Youyou will attempt a cleansing ritual. And a 99.9% probability that Su Yuning will request a detailed breakdown of our new relational parameters."
Xiaoyang almost laughed. She was probably right.
The quiet was over. The clarity remained, a solid core inside him, but it was now surrounded by the familiar, beautiful chaos of his life. He was no longer just Lin Xiaoyang, the energy-saver, or Lin Xiaoyang, the project manager. He was now also Lin Xiaoyang, who was in a relationship with a human database.
It was the most inefficient, and the most optimal, state of his life.