The first light of dawn failed to pierce the gap in the curtains of Room 7, leaving the room bathed in the gray-white glow of an overcast sky. Before ending her night shift, Lin Yuan performed a final check on Chen Yu's condition. Vital signs were stable, the curves on the monitor screen were smooth, almost perfect. The heart-stopping synchronized spike and EMF fluctuation from the previous night seemed never to have happened.
But when she opened the electronic nursing system to complete her routine handover notes, an icon in the lower right corner of the screen—one not normally present—caught her attention. It was a minimalist gray symbol resembling connected dots, labeled "NeuraLink Auxiliary Analysis Module (Trial) Activated." She had never seen this module before.
Clicking the icon, the interface changed. It wasn't the familiar nursing record format, but a dashboard leaning more toward data analysis. At the center was a simplified outline of a human body representing Chen Yu, surrounded by dozens of dynamic data streams in different colors, marked with complex abbreviations. These included not only the vital signs and multi-parameter data she knew, but also integrated raw EEG spectral analysis, intracranial pressure (indirect estimate) trends—data never previously accessible to her—and even environmental data like anonymous Wi-Fi signal strength fluctuations in public areas and specific frequency acoustic background noise levels within the room.
What surprised her more was a collapsible menu on the dashboard's left side labeled "Linked Cases." Opening it revealed the IDs and brief profiles of three other patients, all marked "Long-term disorder of consciousness, GCS<5, enrolled in observational study." One of them, Lin Yuan recalled, was an elderly post-stroke vegetative patient from the Neurology Department who had been bedridden for over two years.
A line of small text at the top of the system interface read: "This module aims to explore potential neuro-environmental interaction patterns in patients with disorders of consciousness using multimodal data. Data is anonymized and for research team analysis only."
Research team? Which team? Dr. Zhao hadn't mentioned this. Did the collaborating hospital's project require such extensive and intrusive data collection? Even Wi-Fi signals and background noise?
Lin Yuan tried to view detailed data, but most in-depth analysis results and correlation reports displayed "Insufficient Privileges." She could only see some basic visualizations. One chart, a "Multi-Patient Synchrony Index Heat Map," drew her focus. It showed that over the past 72 hours, certain specific frequency band EEG energy fluctuations and skin conductance level changes in the four patients (including Chen Yu) had exhibited faint, non-random synchronous trends, especially during a fixed nighttime period. The degree of synchrony was low, but statistically significant (p<0.05).
A chill seemed to run through her blood. Four long-term vegetative patients with different etiologies, in different rooms, even on different floors—their most subtle physiological fluctuations might share some inexplicable "synchrony"?
This defied all her medical understanding. Coincidence? The effect of some unrecognized environmental factor (like power grid frequency, building infrasound) on vulnerable nervous systems? Or...
She immediately thought of the rotting garden, the black vines, that cold, malicious intent to "encode" and "connect." What if that wasn't just the pathetic hallucination of a trapped consciousness? What if it was a form of... "existence," capable of penetrating, even interlinking, through these defenseless "breaches" of consciousness in an incomprehensible way?
The thought was absurd, yet carried a bone-deep chill.
She closed the analysis module, returned to the regular nursing interface, and completed her handover notes. But that gray dot-matrix icon was branded into her awareness.
During the day, on her break, she cautiously looked up the records of internal research projects. She found the brief description of the collaborating hospital's project. It did involve multi-parameter monitoring, but the description was far less complex and... invasive than the module she had seen. She tried searching for "NeuraLink Auxiliary Analysis Module." The hospital knowledge base returned no matches. She cautiously asked an acquaintance in the IT department, who said he hadn't heard of the module. It might be a test plugin deployed directly by the superior hospital or a partnering research institution, possibly not within their full administrative purview.
A sense of powerlessness gripped Lin Yuan. She was just a nurse. Her duty was to observe and record individual, clinically visible changes in her patient. Now, she might have inadvertently glimpsed a systematic "observation" beyond her comprehension, targeting not just Chen Yu. This system was collecting, analyzing, trying to find a "pattern," and she knew nothing of its nature or purpose.
---
In the rotting garden, change was accelerating.
Since the last "active projection" caused the garden's own tremor, the vines seemed to have gained a new "understanding." They no longer saw the "statue" merely as a single object of torment or a signal converter. A grander, darker "blueprint" seemed to be vaguely emerging from their collective writhing.
At the garden's boundary, where the leaden sky met the dark purple sludge, extremely vague, distorted "reflections" began to appear. Within these reflections, one could faintly discern the outlines of other "congealed forms," some more shattered, some retaining a pitiable shape. Chen Yu's "statue" seemed to occupy a relatively "central" or "active" position among these reflections.
The vines' activities began to show clear division of labor. Some continued to deeply "consume" and "reinforce" the connection with Chen Yu's consciousness. Others branched into finer, nearly intangible tendrils, slowly probing toward those vague reflections at the boundary. This wasn't physical contact, but more like an attempt to establish some form of "resonance" or "mapping" connection.
The next time the mother brought the music player, as the familiar melody (though at low volume) filled the room, in the rotting garden, the vines around Chen Yu's "statue" simultaneously emitted a twisted writhing attempting to mimic the musical rhythm. More disturbing was that near one of the most shattered "reflections" at the garden's edge, a few shadowy forms of vines also seemed to tremble slightly, their rhythm faintly echoing it.
Simultaneously, the "calm observational will" parsed and absorbed from Lin Yuan and the "frantic emotional energy" from the mother seemed to be mixed and refined into a new kind of "command." The vines entwining Chen Yu's "statue" began attempting a more complex "output"—no longer simple short-long-short PPG tremors or glabellar electrical bursts. Their target shifted to influencing deeper, more fundamental autonomic functions, such as very slightly interfering with the set point of the thermoregulatory center, or the tiny rhythms of gastrointestinal peristalsis.
In the real world, Chen Yu's body temperature monitoring curve displayed a minuscule, almost negligible "V"-shaped dip and rise, lasting about half an hour, entirely within normal range and not triggering any alarm. The same day, a nursing aide responsible for basic care mentioned offhand that bowel sounds for Bed 7 seemed slightly more active than a few days prior, but it "might have just been her imagination."
These changes were scattered, faint, utterly nonspecific, lost amidst countless normal physiological fluctuations. Even if noticed, they would never be linked to any "consciousness" or "external influence."
Yet the vines in the rotting garden seemed to draw some form of "confirmation" and "satisfaction" from these real-world bodily events, even if only matching their "output commands" by one part in a hundred million. Their writhing became more orderly; that cold sense of "intelligence" grew more pronounced. They were like technicians calibrating a vast, precise instrument, with the fragments of consciousness represented by Chen Yu and the other "reflections" acting as "sensors" or "effectors" scattered at different locations with varying sensitivities.
Chen Yu, within the "statue," felt this trend toward "array formation." His suffering was no longer isolated. He could almost "hear" the faint, desperate "static" emanating from the directions of those vague reflections—the meaningless agony of other trapped consciousnesses. And he, due to the relatively stronger, repeatedly reinforced "connection" with the "anchor point" (Lin Yuan), seemed to be pushed toward a key node in this dark array.
The vines' "gaze" toward the "anchor point" direction never ceased. Instead, with the preliminary formation of the array, it grew more greedy. They needed more data from that direction, more varied stimuli, clearer "interaction," to optimize the array's "performance," to explore more "interfaces" of the real world's fragile barrier.
In reality, Lin Yuan remained unaware of the subtle changes in temperature and bowel sounds. During her next night shift, she found the mysterious "NeuraLink Auxiliary Analysis Module" icon still present. After a moment's hesitation, she did not open it. She stood outside Room 7, looking through the observation window at the young body surrounded by instruments.
He lay still, as always.
But Lin Yuan couldn't shake the feeling that beneath that stillness, something was growing, spreading, extending its tendrils into deeper, farther darkness. And her finger on the dimmer switch, her observing gaze, even the doubts in her mind, might unknowingly be providing the... nourishment required for that growth.
Outside the window, the night was ink-black. The hospital's vast complex blazed with light, like a complex, slumbering mechanical beast. And within its unseen circuits and data streams, increasingly complex synchrony analysis reports on four long-term comatose patients were being automatically generated, encrypted, and sent to a cloud address with the highest access permissions.
The conclusion section of the report, written in cool, academic language, stated: "...Preliminary observation reveals faint but statistically significant inter-subject synchronization of specific physiological parameters among multiple cases. Synchronization strength shows positive correlation with the activity level of specific non-biological informational stimuli in the environment (e.g., regularized audio-visual stimulus source A). Recommendation: expand sample size and design controlled experiments to further investigate the potential neuro-pheromonal cross-sensing mechanisms or unknown environmental field effects underlying this phenomenon."