[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-technology-invades-the-modern-world":3,"chapter-technology-invades-the-modern-world-technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-3":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Technology Invades the Modern World",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2269487,4430,"Chapter 3: Seeing a Ghost","technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-3",3,"\u003Cp>Haines felt he was seeing a ghost.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>On New Year’s Eve, he came to New York hoping to meet a woman he fancied by attending a Broadway show and perhaps dating her through the final hours of 1959.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Not only did he fail to find anyone to approach, but early the next morning his pager kept buzzing, demanding he find a place to contact the Redstone Arsenal’s Rocket Development Headquarters.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>To clarify, the pager—known in Huaguo as the BB machine—had been widely used in New York’s Jewish hospitals since the 1940s, and Detroit’s police department had already implemented the first similar system back in 1921.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>All these pagers were supplied by Motorola.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As one of NASA’s core suppliers, Motorola’s wireless equipment transmitted the voice signals from the Moon back to Earth.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>So it was perfectly normal for them to provide a complete pager system to NASA employees.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Haines was already frustrated and troubled, and now his superior had asked him a question he considered utterly idiotic.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The sound of snowflakes shattering against the telephone booth’s brass frame made Haines’s voice tremble as he repeated the Atlas rocket launch window formula for the third time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He held the black receiver clamped under his left shoulder, his right index finger unconsciously tracing Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula on the fogged glass.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He had automatically written a string of orbital calibration formulas on the fogged glass to clarify his argument and subtly mock his superior’s intelligence.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Listen, von Braun’s calculation team insists the error tolerance for the third coefficient…”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Suddenly, a new focal point appeared in the blurred elliptic integral region: an Asian youth outside the glass had precisely placed his fingertip along Haines’s moving path, and the two performed a bizarre synchronized calculation across the pane.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The first variable synchronization breach occurred at the Bessel function node: before Haines could finish drawing the third term of the latitude perturbation compensation factor, the other’s damp fingertip had already completed the fourth-order differential equation for the Zulajin-7 perturbation.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The yellowed glass surface was undergoing a mathematical avalanche: ice-crystal spherical harmonic terms bloomed in sequence, and the coefficient of the fifth perturbation term materialized within condensing droplets—this was the fourth and fifth terms NASA had not yet mastered!\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Are you listening? You need to call von Braun’s team immediately and explain…” The voice in the receiver mixed with electromagnetic static as Haines watched his barely formed fourth term torn apart by analytic continuation in the complex domain.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The youth’s breath etched a more perfect solution on the outer glass—his fourth term was more precise than the Houston team’s seventeen-hour IBM 7090 computation had barely approached.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Respiratory frequency formed a terrifying positive correlation with formula expansion rate: when Haines’s pen trembled from adrenaline spikes, the youth’s finger speed on the fogged glass increased geometrically.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>A mathematical intuition beyond Cartesian coordinates spiraled upward along the warm air jet from the booth’s heater.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“No! This is impossible.” Haines heard a sound like a titanium alloy stress ring failing in his cervical spine.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>His superior’s roar through the receiver now merged with the tapping on the glass.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>First, the youth’s work made perfect sense—he had written Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula, and in contemporary New York, fewer than a handful of people could even understand it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Haines himself had derived it to the third term, and precisely because he had reached the third term, he had been granted permission to take a break.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As a GS-9 engineer, he had a certain degree of freedom.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Yet his boss on the phone claimed his calculations were wrong.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Haines had only written the second term on the fogged glass, yet the subsequent third, fourth, and fifth terms were instantly completed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>And the third term the youth filled in matched Haines’s own result exactly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>When Haines realized the Chinese youth outside had completed the formula for him, he was stunned not only that the youth had extended it to the fourth and fifth terms,\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>but also that the youth stood outside the booth, facing him directly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Logically, if the youth had merely copied the formula, it should have appeared reversed—there was no way the alignment could be this perfect.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The only explanation was that the youth had written in reverse.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Whether it was the reverse writing itself or the ability to comprehend and complete Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula, either feat alone was extraordinary; together, they were unimaginable.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Sorry, boss, I’ll call you back.” He hung up immediately, then wiped all the fog from the glass with his sleeve—this formula, if seen by the wrong person and leaked to the Soviets, would land him in serious trouble.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Arthur Rudolph, the technical director of the Redstone Rocket and head of propulsion system upgrades and the Mercury manned program, growled into the phone: “Damn it, Haines, if I were still working in Germany, you’d already be in a concentration camp!”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Rudolph couldn’t afford to be calm.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Their greatest rival, the Soviets, were leading them in space, and NASA had just suffered a major failure.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In October 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite; then, to restore America’s pride, NASA launched its own satellite, Pioneer TV3, in November of the same year.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>To boost morale, they broadcast the launch live on television—but what the American public, Washington, and the White House saw was the rocket igniting, then crashing and exploding on the ground.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>After America’s failure, the Soviets quickly launched a second satellite.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This placed enormous pressure on NASA.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>For a man like Arthur Rudolph—who had worked for the former Nazis and whose hands were stained with the blood of thousands of concentration camp laborers who built the V-2 rocket factories—of course he was desperate.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He desperately needed to prove his worth to NASA to avoid standing trial for war crimes.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Excuse me, sir, I’m Haines, Ebenezer Haines. I work for NASA. Could we talk?” Haines leaned close to Lin Ran’s ear and whispered.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>They were both intelligent men—the youth had understood the formula he wrote and calculated the third term identically.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Haines had never considered hiding his true identity.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Snow had begun falling over New York in January; before Lin Ran could answer, Haines continued: “Sir, if you’re willing to talk, come with me.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Haines turned and walked away without waiting for Lin Ran’s reply.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Lin Ran said nothing and followed immediately.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>If he had a choice, Lin Ran would have preferred to gather more information before acting cautiously, rather than revealing even a fraction of his ability to this white man who might be a NASA engineer.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But the problem was: he had no choice.\u003C\u002Fp>",1103,"2026-06-19T21:37:46.551Z",1,"Qwen3-Next 80B","7ed2d381b67214b1818c6985e4da4c1d11f949aa5ebd698adaa554e79d1829df","technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-4","technology-invades-the-modern-world-chapter-2",162,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Ftechnology-invades-the-modern-world-cover.jpg"]