Cat and Rose - Cat & Rose - Chapter 22 - Lost Course (4)

Chapter 22 – Lost Course (4)

The pair of clear, almond-shaped eyes with slightly larger-than-average pupils stared at him angrily like a kitten.

Lin Si was so amused by the scene in front of him that he let out a chuckle. “Why do you say so?”

Ling Yi said, “You’re not giving me a proper answer!”

Lin Si laughed.

He seldom laughed. Even when he did, it would only be a hint of a laughter in his eyes—it was rare for him to make any sound.

It was a light, breathy noise that seemed to come from the chest—very pleasant. Ling Yi was particularly sensitive to this sound. His whole body trembled, the tips of his ears felt hot, and then he flopped on Lin Si a few times in frustrated embarrassment.

Lin Si held him down, smoothing out his fur with light touches.

Ling Yi stubbornly ignored him, refusing to yield.

The Colonel’s snake ate its own tail. He got angry, quit the game, then looked up in front. Seeing the two had rolled into a ball again, it became evident to him that he had no business there, so he pouted and started another round.

Ling Yi had a good time on the spaceship, but after returning to Area 6, he found that reality was not as such.

Lin Si sent a new document to his communicator.

“It’s time for you to learn calculus,” said Lin Si.

Ling Yi vigilantly flipped through the document. There was a lot, and it looked very complicated.

“When we left Earth, higher education had already been fully popularised, but most people’s calculus level didn’t seem too good.” Lin Si frowned as he spoke, as if he couldn’t understand these circumstances, but quickly recovered his indifferent expression. “So I decided that I won’t let you self-study anymore. Every night, I will teach you personally. The foundation of calculus is the limit, and this is the content we’re covering tonight.”

An hour had passed.

Ling Yi’s eyes were lifeless.

With a ballpoint pen in his hand, Lin Si wrote lines of beautiful, flowing prose on white paper.

The words were beautiful, while the content was the opposite—at least it appeared as such in Ling Yi’s eyes.

Lin Si finished writing a line and said, “This is infinity.”

Ling Yi looked at the Greek letter that looked like a flipped “3” with distress in his eyes.

Lin Si said, “Tell me about infinitesimals.”

“For any positive real number, which can be very, very small, there is always another positive real number. When…the distance between the independent variable and a constant is less than this positive number, the function output is less than the first positive number. And then…the output of this function where the independent variable approaches this constant is called the infinitesimal number.”

He finished speaking, then blinked in confusion.

Lin Si asked, “Do you understand?”

Ling Yi first nodded, then shook his head. “Why don’t we just say that it’s smaller than any number?”

“Because ‘smaller than any number’ is natural language, not mathematical language,” Lin Si said. “If science is to develop freely, it needs to be free from the distractions of philosophy and theology, which are metaphysical disciplines that always try to find loopholes in natural language, then use them as weapons to attack natural sciences. For example, they think that one-third and two-thirds add up to one, but adding up its decimal forms will result in the recurring decimal of 0.999, so therefore mathematics is unreliable.”

He looked at Ling Yi’s still-confused expression, then continued, “This is a very old paradox. There’s another that’s similar to it, but a little more complicated, called Zeno’s paradoxes—you can look it up on the database. Zeno’s paradoxes directly caused the second mathematical crisis of the seventeenth century, and it was not until the precise definition of infinitesimal—the paragraph you just recited—came out that the paradox was solved and the crisis was lifted. Then calculus became a discipline, and no longer bound by other things, science began to develop rapidly. That’s why, this definition cannot simply be replaced by ‘smaller than any number’. It has great meaning, and ushered in an entire new era of mathematics.

“The same can be said for the Voyager’s navigation. We want everything to be precise and strictly defined. Madam Chen never uses her own experience and speculation to decide what the spaceship should do—she only uses mathematical models to calculate probability distributions. So during the time of her leadership, we never once had a navigation accident due to a leader’s poor decision-making, whereas previous generations of leaders had all made some mistakes.”

Ling Yi furrowed his brows and read over several times the definition written in whatever the kind of language “Epsilon-Delta” was.

Lin Si finished lecturing the little one on all the knowledge he should teach—he knew that Ling Yi had a very good memory and only needed a bit more time to understand.

Ling Yi finally digested this knowledge, raised his head, but asked a question that Lin Si did not expect.

“What’s philosophy and theology?”

The teenage boy’s eyes were clear with ignorance. He truly did not know the meaning of these two terms.

For there was only science on this ship.

Lin Si was able to solve almost all strange and imaginative questions raised by boys of this age, but this time he was silent for a long time.

Finally, he said, “It’s Area 4.”

Ling Yi said, “Is it the part that we tossed away?”

“Yes.”

Area 4 was very small, nothing much compared to the other Areas. When the Voyager left Earth, it still had a place on the spaceship.

There lived philosophers, literary scholars, poets—those who dealt with the human soul. They connected remotely with Area 8 and were in charge of sorting the vast sea of information, classifying, grading, and organising them into a system, so that after landing, people would not forget the achievements of civilization and could easily pick them up again.

Later, the ship gradually became tight on resources, and the number of personnel in Area 4 was continuously reduced, becoming the area with the smallest number of people.

Even later, when they encountered an extinction crisis caused by a supernova explosion, the Voyager ejected Area 4, gained a huge recoil, and left the danger zone safely.

Now, people no longer brought up Area 4, and Ling Yi, who grew up on Voyager, only dealt with soldiers or scientists every day. To his knowledge, there were only two types of people in this world—those who studied sciences, and those who protected them.

After listening to Lin Si’s explanation of Area 4, he asked, “Then what’s its definition?”

—Lin Si’s teaching was very effective. Whenever the little thing encountered something new, he already knew to ask for a definition.

“It has no definition,” Lin Si said. “The people of Area 4 studied everything that can’t be defined, like people’s thoughts and emotions. I don’t really understand them, so you can look it up yourself.”

Ling Yi nodded.

However, all felines had strong insight and curiosity, and Ling Yi often resembled a feline.

He blinked. “But I think people’s thoughts and feelings can be defined very easily.”

“Hm?”

“For example, I like Lin Si and all the other people on the ship, and when I see Lin Si, I’ll feel happy…”

Lin Si said flatly, “That’s because you haven’t experienced other emotions. There are many instances where you can like someone and hate them at the same time, and you can admit that something is noble without denying that it is detestable.”

Ling Yi shook his head.

Lin Si chuckled lightly. “Maybe when you’re a bit older.”

Ling Yi could not quite understand such things. But he was keen.

Before, he often wondered what sort of things Lin Si had encountered before, and he had also observed Lin Si’s reactions in careful detail when facing different situations.

Lin Si was very serious when he did things for the Voyager, but he was indifferent to everything on the ship, which was slightly contradicting.

So, he opened his mouth hesitantly. “Does Lin Si both like and hate the Voyager?”

Lin Si was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I never liked it.”

He finished speaking, then added, “Now let’s return to calculus.”

Ling Yi reluctantly nodded.

“Although you rarely make mistakes in your calculations, you really don’t have much talent in mathematics, so my expectations for you are very low. As long as you can understand the concept, I’ll consider it as a pass, but you must know the process of the mathematical proof,” Lin Si said with a flat voice. “Do you have any objections?”

Ling Yi pouted. “No.”

It was not that Lin Si refused to speak properly with him because they had not met for a long time. Clearly, it was that he only ever spoke properly while teaching him.

And whenever he taught him something, he would always deliberately make things difficult for him!

Sure enough, Ling Yi had imagined him as someone too nice when they couldn’t meet each other—in reality, Lin Si was not likeable at all!

Fortunately, Lin Si was called away by a message some time after, and Ling Yi, who finally got out of the maths class, was able to stroll around Area 6.

Having not seen Beattie for a long time, he missed her a little, but never ran into her this whole time.

In the end, he saw someone who did not belong in Area 6 at the turn of the corridor.

To be precise, it was two people.

Tang Ning’s mechanical keyboard was placed aside as he sat in the corner, playing with a…little girl in a red dress?

It was a blonde girl who only stood up to his chest and wore a very elaborate red princess gown.

As he approached, Ling Yi realised that she was only a holographic projection.

Tang Ning held the little girl’s hand, while the little princess in the red dress was half-kneeling with her eyes closed. She gently touched his forehead with her own and caressed his hair with her other hand, as if she was comforting him.

When he emerged around the corner, the little girl looked up.

“Tang Ning-gege.” Ling Yi heard the girl’s sweet voice. “Your friend is here.”

Tang Ning opened his eyes. Seeing Ling Yi, he greeted him. “Xiao Ling Yi.”

He introduced the girl to Ling Yi. “Her name is Vivian. She’s an AI.”

Vivian lifted her skirt and fluttered over to Ling Yi. She pulled his hand and brought him over to Tang Ning.

Holographic images were intangible, so one could argue that she pulled Ling Yi’s hand, but in reality it was Ling Yi who actively reached out and cooperated with her movements.

Vivian sat down next to Tang Ning and pillowed on his shoulder.

“I remember telling you before that I don’t like Lucia’s image,” said Tang Ning, “so I programmed Vivian.”

“Will you be replacing Lucia with her?”

Tang Ning shook his head. “That was an image Lucia chose herself. I respect her wishes. Vivian is less autonomous than Lucia, so her image was set by me.”

Vivian sighed, “Vivian is a system of lower-level than Lucia. Vivian is unhappy.”

“I will never program something that’s lower-level than my previous work,” said Tang Ning.

“Really?” Vivian immediately recalled her disappointed expression and hugged his arm in delight.

Tang Ning nodded. “Lucia’s intelligence is very high because she uses some other things in her design, whereas you were edited entirely in code, so you’re cleaner than her.”

Vivian nodded vigorously. “Vivian is very happy.”

Tang Ning reached out to pet her actually-non-existent blonde hair. Then he put down his hand, grabbed the keyboard at his side, put it on his lap, connected the light screen, and began to code again.

Ling Yi suddenly recalled that it had been a long time since he last played with Lucia.

Only those who were lonely played with artificial intelligence.

*

The author has something to say:

I noticed all my novels so far have a girl who dresses in red—I’m a Shisi who loves red dresses! I feel someday I wouldn’t be able to control myself and write a bewitching crossdressing top who dresses in red (joke)

Thank you for reading on myeasynovel.com