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After the meal was ordered, Ryan traded thoughts with Holbrook in the canteen a while longer, and only then did the two of them part.
Back to his own dorm.
He pushed open the door, plugged the data drive in his hand into the computer, and ran one more meticulous inspection over the signal data inside. Only after that was he entirely certain.
In the experiment just conducted, the ten sensors had indeed captured, clearly and completely, all ten photoacoustic signals produced in the mouse's body.
This was the foundation for everything ahead.
Ryan let out a long breath.
To have taken this long to solve one problem. Since the day Scrapper was built, this was the first problem that had ever blocked him for such a stretch, though the New Year's particular circumstances had played their part in that.
Now that the signals could be captured, the next step was to write the algorithm and program for parsing them, in preparation for the human experiments to come, with the aim of parsing the signals on the very same day they were acquired.
There was nothing much to say about that part.
Open the system, switch over the computer's page, and set upon the keyboard.
Ryan read the algorithm and program code inside the system with one eye, and replicated it on the computer with the other.
What he chose was the simplest algorithm the system held, the blood glucose algorithm. Parse the signals through this program, and you obtained the test subject's blood glucose range.
It wasn't that he didn't want one of the algorithms that parsed out richer information. His choice was constrained by exactly one thing.
The line count of the code...
The more complex an algorithm's function, the more its lines of code multiplied accordingly...
The body-image reconstruction algorithm, for instance, had reached the point where a single glance at it made his hair want to fall out.
And code, as everyone knows, does not transcribe itself.
That boat ticket to the Mediterranean, the hairline with a bald sea at the center of its last surviving coast, was better gifted to the programmers of the AI center.
So all he could do was pick the algorithm with the fewest lines to copy out. In any case, all he needed was to confirm that signals collected from a human body were usable. What the parsed data actually was hardly mattered.
And among the materials the system had released so far, the fewest-lined of all was this blood glucose detection algorithm.
The algorithm itself wasn't complicated, but the actual program code still took him more than two hours to transcribe.
It wasn't that Ryan hadn't considered optimizing the program. But after a little study he discovered that the program the system offered was already the optimal solution, with no room for improvement left in it at all.
So he could only settle down, honest and obedient, and work one shift as a porter of code.
Not until eleven at night did he finish the entire program.
The moment it was done, he fed the mouse's signal data from the drive into the program for parsing, too impatient to wait.
[INVALID DATA]
"As expected. A mouse's parsing algorithm doesn't interoperate with a human's." Looking at the result on the screen, Ryan murmured to himself.
To read the blood information of a mouse, the parsing algorithm would need additional adaptive modification before it stood a chance.
Among the photoacoustic signals produced by different forms of life, the influencing factors all differed from humanity's. The human parsing algorithm might, so to speak, run on addition, while the mouse's would have to walk the road of multiplication.
A case like that naturally could not be parsed with the human algorithm.
This was a middling flaw of the photoacoustic scanner. Until the algorithms for other creatures matured, it simply did not apply to non-human life.
And maturing those algorithms would demand research and experiments in enormous volume. It was a massive undertaking, and one with no guidance from the system anywhere in it.
Destined to be another boat ticket to the Mediterranean.
As the holiday drained away, the relaxed air inside the base dispersed just as quickly.
Footsteps turned hurried again, and outside of rest hours it grew hard to spot a single figure loitering in the grounds.
The members of the photoacoustic laboratory filtered back into the base as well.
Ryan's three previous lab assistants returned to the laboratory too.
And when they heard that Ryan had run the signal-acquisition experiment entirely alone, and succeeded at it besides, Prosser and the other two research assistants, for a long moment, did not know what they were supposed to say.
"What we're conducting today is the experiment to acquire human photoacoustic signals."
In the laboratory, Ryan was addressing Prosser and the other two, with Holbrook standing off at one side.
Holbrook had abandoned the rest of his own team today and come over specifically to observe this experiment.
Though by his own account, of course, he had come to help.
"Is anyone willing to serve as the test subject?"
Ryan's voice had barely fallen when Prosser, without one shred of hesitation, shot his hand into the air.
The other two research assistants saw it and could only give the idea up.
Ryan produced an experiment consent form.
"Though in principle the scanner cannot possibly do the body any harm, for insurance's sake, let's sign a consent form all the same."
The form's attached terms carried every manner of guarantee for the event of an accident.
Prosser took it and signed without so much as a glance, without the least hesitation.
The mice under his own eyelids had been swept by that laser more times than he could count. He, a human being, was hardly about to worry that the photoacoustic scanner hid some safety problem.
Consent signed, he walked into the test area and sat down in the dedicated testing chair.
Another of the assistants took position outside, in charge of running the instrument.
"Ready?" the assistant asked Prosser.
Prosser answered with an OK sign.
The assistant at the controls started the scanner at once.
A soft whir.
Under the light sound of the mechanical arm, the laser emitter aimed itself at Prosser, automatically avoided every part of him that clothing covered, and swept the bare skin at speed.
Exactly as always, in the space of two seconds, the signals had already appeared on the oscilloscope, and passed through the converter into detailed data.
"Did it work?" Prosser was still calling from the test area, and by the time anyone got around to answering him, Ryan was already in front of the computer going through the data.
"Well? Did the signals come through complete?" The other two and Holbrook crowded in behind him.
Facing the mass of data, Ryan simply drew a flash drive out of his pocket and said to the assistant:
"Install the program on this drive, then import the data we just took."
"Eh? What is this?" The research assistant blinked at it.
"A signal-parsing algorithm I wrote a couple of days ago. It can parse the blood glucose value out of the signals." As Ryan said it, he also drew a household blood glucose meter out of his bag and handed it to Prosser, motioning for him to run a test.
Holbrook spoke up immediately. "Quick. Quick, try it!"
The assistant at the computer took the drive at once. "Right!"
Drive in, program installed, data imported, all in a single breath.
The moment the data went in, the computer's tower spun up into a frenzy, loud enough for everyone present to hear it, and only then did the result print onto the screen.
[7.8 mmol/L]
Every eye in the room turned to Prosser.
The blood glucose meter in his hand had only just been set down. He held its result up for the whole room to see:
[7.9 mmol/L]
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EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.