At 7:42 p.m., the oscilloscope still had nothing to say.
Lin Qiao preferred instruments in that state. An almost horizontal line, thickened by thermal noise, a proper sampling rate, no orange warning in the upper right corner. The local world fit into a trace mediocre enough to be reassuring.
She placed two fingers on the correlator frame. Through the metal, the cryostat compressor transmitted a faint, steady vibration. In the Zhangjiang laboratory, that vibration mattered more than the words people spoke about the Weave. It could degrade a quality factor, shift a spectral line, turn a night’s measurements into six hours of statistical cleanup. You could look for it, measure it, reduce it. It required no metaphysics.
“Channel B at minus seventy-two point three,” Tang Rui said behind her.
Qiao looked at the secondary screen.
“Minus seventy-two point one.”
“On the raw filter.”
“Exactly.”
The doctoral student sighed with the cautious patience of someone who had learned not to sigh too loudly in front of his supervisor. He removed his glasses, wiped them on his T-shirt, and bent toward the optical rack again.
The control protocol required a seven-second stable window before each sequence. There was nothing mysterious about seven seconds: below that, the phase-fitting algorithm became too sensitive to synthesizer transients; above it, they wasted cryostat time. Qiao herself had helped make that decision three years earlier, in this continuity, if the minutes, signatures, and four colleagues who remembered it better than she did were to be believed.
She started calibration.
A white cursor moved from left to right. One second. Two. The ventilation’s hum mingled with the scrape of a cart someone was pushing down the corridor. At the fifth second, Tang Rui held his breath out of habit. At the seventh, the screen turned green.
NORMAL.
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