Xiang Ning internally struggled, wondering if he should intervene and nudge the calculations along to complete this project when an alarm sounded. He froze. The numbers on the screen had suddenly turned chaotic. There must have been some deviations in certain data sets. 

Alia quickly led him to the control room below the screen. Tens of researchers in white were furiously typing on their keyboards at almost three hundred characters per second. All he saw were afterimages of their hands. 

When they appeared in the room, the researchers stopped. Alia asked, “Old Jin, how’s everything?” 

The elderly man she called Old Jin wiped the sweat from...