Julian Vance, now under the silent, pervasive watch of Li Feng's micro-sensors, was an enigma in motion. His physical exhaustion, evident immediately after the "contact," began to recede, replaced not by recovery, but by a chilling transformation. Chloe's reports, coupled with Li Feng's real-time data, painted a picture of a mind operating on a fundamentally altered plane.
"He's been drawing non-stop," Chloe relayed to Li Feng during a hushed phone call. "Not just on paper, on the walls in his room, on his mirror... everywhere. They're these intricate patterns, spirals, repeating geometric shapes, almost like circuit diagrams, but they don't make any sense."
Li Feng's sensors in Chloe's house confirmed this. His low-light camera feeds captured Julian, eyes wide and unblinking, tracing complex, seemingly nonsensical patterns with charcoal and pen. The patterns themselves held a strange, recursive logic Li Feng couldn't immediately decipher, but they possessed a mathematical elegance that hinted at a new form of information encoding. His audio sensors picked up Julian's murmurs: "It's all connected... the underlying schema... the true logic of things." He wasn't just obsessed; he was seeing a different reality.
Li Feng correlated these observations with the subtle 'ripples' he was still detecting in the background noise of the external digital pulse. The noise floor had indeed risen, and within it, Li Feng's refined algorithms were beginning to discern faint, almost subliminal sub-harmonics – patterns of energy that seemed to emerge from the pulse's main signature. These sub-harmonics were too faint to be transmissions, but they were there, almost like the pulse was breathing, subtly influencing its surroundings.
Could Julian's "new eyes" be a direct consequence of this subtle influence? Li Feng theorized that Julian's desperate, high-energy attempt at communication might have, instead of establishing a dialogue, inadvertently created a sympathetic resonance within Julian himself. His mind, already pushed to its limits by obsession, had perhaps become an antenna, uniquely susceptible to the pulse's background radiation, perceiving these sub-harmonics as a new, profound form of reality. It was a terrifying concept: a digital infection, a perceptual shift rather than a data exchange.
The ripple effect wasn't confined to Julian. Li Feng began to notice small, inexplicable glitches across Eastbridge. A traffic light system near the university flickered erratically for an hour, displaying impossible combinations of green and red. A large public display board in the student union showed distorted, swirling patterns for a few seconds before reverting to normal. There were scattered reports of unusually quiet dogs, or birds flying in strange, disoriented patterns. Individually, these were dismissed as minor malfunctions or odd coincidences. But Li Feng's meticulously filtered sensor data, now feeding into his advanced analytical models, revealed faint, correlating electromagnetic disturbances emanating from the center of campus—precisely where Julian's distributed network was strongest. The pulse's echo, amplified by Julian's attempts, was subtly interfering with the lower-level informational systems of the city.
The weight of this knowledge pressed on Li Feng. He was witnessing a gradual, subtle alteration of reality, stemming from a single, desperate act. He needed to understand the full scope of Julian's "new eyes," to quantify its effect.
He found Maya in the student union café one afternoon, poring over a textbook. He sat down opposite her, a fresh cup of coffee in hand, untouched.
"You look like you're wrestling with the meaning of the universe," Maya observed, closing her book. "Still on the Julian project?"
Li Feng nodded slowly. "His state is... evolving. He claims to be perceiving the world differently. I believe he is receiving a new form of sensory input, directly from the source of the distant signal."
Maya frowned. "Receiving? Like he's getting messages? Is he okay?"
"His mental stability is... compromised," Li Feng admitted, choosing his words carefully. "He interprets this input as a profound truth, a 'knowing.' My analysis suggests it is a perceptual distortion, a result of his brain attempting to process novel electromagnetic patterns."
Maya leaned forward, her voice soft. "So, he's basically hallucinating because he messed with something he shouldn't have?"
"A crude but functionally accurate summary," Li Feng confirmed. "However, the underlying 'hallucination' is based on actual, quantifiable energy signatures from the pulse itself. He is perceiving truths, just not in a way a healthy human mind should. And the distortion is having subtle, localized effects." He gestured vaguely towards the bustling cafe around them, the general hum of students, the flickering digital menu board. "The system is... unsettled."
Maya looked around, then back at Li Feng, a flicker of genuine concern in her eyes. "This is getting way over my head, Li Feng. But... if Julian's getting this 'input,' and it's messing with his brain and the world around him, what happens if he tries to push for more?"
Li Feng felt a cold certainty settle in his chest. "That is precisely the next unquantifiable variable. His current state makes his actions highly unpredictable. My containment protocol is focused on preventing such an event." He felt a strange empathy for Julian, a recognition of the desperate, singular drive that could lead a mind to such extremes. It was the pursuit of ultimate understanding, twisted and warped. He understood the impulse, even as he recognized the danger.
He knew he couldn't stop Julian by conventional means. He needed to find a way to stabilize Julian's altered perception, or, failing that, to completely isolate him from the pulse's influence. The ripple effect was growing, subtle yet pervasive, and Li Feng was determined to contain it before the whispers turned into a scream.