Chapter 303

Zhao Jianguo stared at the newly added infection node on the screen, his fingers lightly tapping twice on the tabletop. The alarm light in B3 Laboratory had gone out, communications restored; in the monitoring screen, Jia Dongxu was bent over fiddling with the instruments, his lab coat sleeves rolled up to the elbows, revealing a section of reddish wrist—the earlier leak had triggered the automatic sprinklers, dousing him in disinfectant.

The door of the main control room slid open with a hiss, Su Qing walked in carrying an aluminum meal ticket, her steps light, as if afraid to disturb something. She set the meal ticket down beside the operation console, lifted the lid, and a puff of heat rose—it was the smell of stewed cabbage and glass noodles.

"You two aren't eating hot meal ticket, waiting till it's cold before you pick up your chopsticks." She said while stirring with a spoon, "What time is it now, isn't your stomach complaining?"

Just as her voice fell, the overhead speaker crackled with a zila sound, and then a cold mechanical female voice burst out a few words: "Attack command detected, target main terminal, initiating secondary defense response."

Zhao Jianguo jerked his head up, still processing, when a rush of Footsteps came from outside the corridor, the emergency lights shifted from yellow to red, and the metal gate began to lower slowly.

"What the hell?" he blurted, his fingers flying to pull up the system log. The audio recording was playing back—Su Qing's dialect line verbatim: "You two aren't eating hot meal ticket." The next second, the translator's output text flashed: "Activate attack program, target main terminal."

He almost laughed out loud, quickly pressed the emergency stop button on the control panel, and entered the permission code. Three seconds later, the broadcast changed: "False judgment identification has been halted, defense level returned to normal."

Dong Xu's voice came through the earpiece, tinged with disbelief: "Old Zhao, was that attack command just now… my wife saying it?"

"It's your sister-in-law." Zhao Jianguo replied, "She said you don't eat meal ticket, and your broken machine heard it as a declaration of war."

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the earpiece, then a clang—like someone had thrown a wrench onto the table. "Oh my goodness… I forgot to add the dialect pack!" Dong Xu smacked his forehead, "This translator just hooked up to the voiceprint module; its word bank is all standard Mandarin, so when our local speech comes out, it gets ripped apart and reassembled—no way the meaning stays right!"

Zhao Jianguo said nothing, his gaze falling on the Waveform Diagram. Su Qing's voice curve was smooth, her speech natural, with no aggressive emotional fluctuation. Yet the system insisted on breaking the syllables "not eating hot meal ticket" into the three keywords "activate," "attack," and "target," which happened to match the alert model's trigger conditions.

Just then, a semi-transparent interface appeared: 【Detected user's precise identification of non‑hostile Voiceprint Fluctuation, meets the "Voiceprint Recognition Specialty" activation conditions, claim?】

He clicked "Yes."

A line of small text popped up: 【Ability bound: can discern emotional micro‑changes, accent differences, disguised speech, accuracy 98.7%】. At the same time, a soft hum sounded in his ear, like a warm current sweeping through the ear canal, then vanished.

"You even rewarded yourself with an ear‑special ability on the side?" Dong Xu muttered over there, "I said you could tell at a glance it wasn't a real command."

"It's not just skill," Zhao Jianguo said, pulling the corner of his mouth, then turned to look at Su Qing.

Su Qing still stood where she was, the meal ticket lid half‑open, her face first froze, then slowly she broke into a grin and laughed: "I just said a sentence, how did it summon a riot squad? Your high‑tech is way too jumpy!"

"The tech's fine, it's just human carelessness." Zhao Jianguo looked at the monitor, "Old Jia, the translator prototype must be shut down for forty‑eight hours to add voiceprint emotional verification and local accent filtering. Otherwise next time she says 'time to wash your feet,' the system will think it's launching a missile."

"Noted." Dong Xu sighed, lowered his head to write in his notebook, "Add training sets for Southern Shandong, Central Hebei, and Southeastern Shanxi dialects, plug in a tone‑steadiness judgment module……and also have your wife record a standard test audio."

"Sure." Su Qing said cheerfully, "What do you want to hear me say? 'Be good and eat your meal ticket, don't stay up late'? Or 'If you don't come back, I'll toss your bedroll downstairs'?"

"Record them all." Dong Xu said seriously, "Perfect for testing the threat‑level boundary."

Zhao Jianguo shook his head with a smile, casually dragged the just‑mistranslated audio clip into the system folder, naming it "Typical Misjudgment Case 001," and filed it in the training library. The main control screen returned to the global monitoring interface; newly added infection points showed no change for now, and the data from Poland was still under observation.

He turned to Su Qing and said, "From now on, when you enter the Laboratory, say a greeting in Mandarin first, so the machine doesn't glitch again."

Su Qing raised her eyebrows: "Fine, then next time I come in I'll shout, 'Reporting, sir, the meal ticket delivery's here'—is that standard enough?"

"Sure." Zhao Jianguo nodded, "Better yet, give a salute so it recognizes you as logistics personnel, not a rear‑area agent."

"Roger that!" Su Qing genuinely raised her hand and performed a wobbly salute, the meal ticket lid nearly falling to the ground.

After they finished laughing, she tidied up the empty meal ticket, turned and walked out. At the doorway she paused again, glanced back at the screen where the Data Stream was still rolling, and asked, "What about that card… any leads?"

"A little." Zhao Jianguo paused, "The Virus spreads via emotion; on his birthday, sunlight hit the card, activating what was inside. We now know how to trick it, but we still don't know who planted it."

Su Qing nodded, didn't ask further, picked up the meal ticket and left. After the door closed, the main control room fell quiet again, save for the low‑frequency hum of the equipment running.

Zhao Jianguo leaned back in his Chair, fingers unconsciously rubbing his ear. The sensation of that warm current sweeping over was gone, but he clearly remembered that instant—every tiny rise and fall in Su Qing's voice had been amplified—the tail end slightly rising, she was speaking everyday words, yet her tone held a hint of complaint, a hint of concern, and the stubborn vigor that comes from years of housework. Machines couldn't read that, but he now could.

He opened the debug interface for the new Permission, selected "Play Recent Audio Analysis." The system brought up the Waveform Diagram, and automatically generated interpretive text below: "Speaker identity confirmed: Su Qing; emotional state: slight dissatisfaction accompanied by concern; true intent: urging to eat; language type: Jìzhōng dialect variant; misinterpretation risk: high."

He narrowed his eyes, thinking this gadget was more useful than he'd expected.

In the earpiece, Dong Xu kept muttering about algorithm tweaks: "I changed keyword matching to contextual coherence judgment—if a single word isn't accurate, it doesn't trigger; you also have to look at the logic of the surrounding sentences……plus I added an intimacy identifier, so if the speaker is your wife or child, it's prioritized as non‑threat……"

"Sure." Zhao Jianguo replied, "But don't make it too complicated—we want a tool, not a fortune‑teller."

"Got it." Dong Xu said, "Keep it simple, just like you said—if you won't even eat your meal ticket, what battle could you fight?"

Zhao Jianguo chuckled, was about to reply, when a prompt popped up in the lower‑right corner of the screen: 【Cross‑language translator prototype disconnected, developers are reinstalling the core module】.

He glanced at the clock—it was 1:17 a. m.

Faint shuffle of slippers came from the hallway, likely the janitor cleaning the outer area. The lights in the main control room stayed on, the glass wall reflected his seated silhouette, and behind him the blue screen of slowly rolling data.

He reached out to turn off unnecessary split‑screens, leaving only the Virus spread trend chart and the Laboratory monitor. Dong Xu was still busy, bent over the Operation Console, his shadow cast on the wall like an old clockmaker staying up late to fix a radio.

Zhao Jianguo took a sip of Cool Tea, a bitter note on his tongue. He set the cup down and suddenly felt his eyelids grow heavy.

Just then, the earpiece gave a soft "ding," and Dong Xu said, "Old Zhao, I just realized—was your earlier false‑alarm identification based solely on what you heard with your ears?"

Mm.

So, with this ability of yours… can you tell whether someone's speaking truth or lies? For instance, they might agree nicely on the surface while harboring a completely different agenda inside?

Zhao Jianguo paused: "Not a hundred percent, but close enough—about eighty or ninety percent."

"Heh." Dong Xu chuckled lightly, "Then you're worth far more than a polygraph."

Zhao Jianguo didn't respond to that. He stared at the screen, but a thought flashed in his mind: if this ability had come earlier, maybe he could have sensed the off‑notes in certain people's speech without waiting for events to unfold and then tracing them back.

But he didn't say it out loud.

Outside, the sky remained dark; far off a rooster crowed—no telling which household's early‑riser it was.