novelslam Chapter 50 Psyduck
Chapter 50 Psyduck
Su Hao has a secret that no one has ever known.
It was one afternoon in second grade.
Su Hao stepped out of the school gate at precisely 15:19:58 PM.
Based on his muscle memory and stride frequency, it would take him 1 minute and 10 seconds to walk to the zebra crossing ahead.
Arrival time is 15:21:08.
Two seconds later, at 15:21:10 PM, the red light will turn off and the green light will turn on.
This was a pattern he had figured out casually a year ago.
By going to and from school at fixed times every day, his brain naturally developed this municipal-level traffic data model.
A complete cycle of the traffic lights is 120 seconds.
Green light lasts 40 seconds, red light lasts 80 seconds.
Sometimes, the timing system will be specially adjusted during the lunch break to ensure pedestrian priority.
To understand this boundary condition, he spent an entire day on his day off observing it with a stopwatch.
All his hard work paid off, allowing him to grasp the perfect time anchor point for the entire block.
At this point, as long as he takes a step, the city's traffic lights will have to give way to him according to the rules.
However, on that day, when Su Hao stepped onto the edge of the zebra crossing as if on the beat of a drum...
The traffic light did not turn green.
Su Hao was stunned.
Is it because the municipal timing scheme has introduced new variables?
Or is there a hardware malfunction in the traffic signal control system?
He looked around; several pedestrians waiting at the red light were either scrolling on their phones or staring blankly, their expressions unchanged.
He was the only one who felt that the sky had fallen.
Which step was calculated incorrectly?
Su Hao's mind went blank.
The perfect routine that had lasted for a year was forcibly broken!
His breathing became rapid, and cold sweat poured down his forehead.
He stared intently at the digital watch on his wrist, his pupils contracting, as he began frantically reviewing the events!
11 seconds.
The green light didn't come on for a full 11 seconds!
Based on 8 a.m., how many cycles have passed since then?
从8:00到15:21:21，时间差为7小时21分21秒。
Converted to seconds, that's 26481 seconds.
Dividing by the period of 120 seconds, the result is...?
Su Hao's steps involuntarily slowed down in the middle of the road.
220.675.
A decimal appeared.
The last digit is 0.675.
The fraction is 27/40.
Since they are coprime, they cannot be further reduced to fractions!
absurd!
Even if the coder was drunk, a normal urban traffic management algorithm could never produce such a disgusting score!
There's definitely something wrong!
Something must be wrong!
In a state of extreme logical confusion, his vision went black, he stumbled, and lost his balance.
"Bang--!"
At this critical moment, Su Hao's body was suddenly pulled backward by a huge external force!
Someone grabbed his backpack strap tightly from behind!
"drop--!!!"
The brutal roar of the heavy truck seemed to tear his eardrums as its massive cargo bed swept past his nose.
The strong winds it generated stung his cheeks.
A close call!
It was just a few centimeters off!
He almost became mincemeat under the wheels of a car!
Su Hao turned around stiffly, about to say thank you.
"Haohao! Are you alright?!"
What came into view was her mother Lin Wan's anxious, bloodless face.
She had clearly run over like a madwoman, her forehead covered in fine, glistening cold sweat, and she was panting heavily.
The younger sister, Su Hui, standing next to her also seemed to be stunned, looking like she was about to cry.
"……mom?"
Su Hao's feverish brain felt as if it had been doused with a bucket of ice water, instantly going out of control.
He was completely stunned; he had no idea what he had just been doing.
"Mom, what are you doing here...?"
Su Hao looked around blankly.
Upon closer inspection, every pore on my body seemed to explode.
It's a ghost!
His memory was still stuck at the zebra crossing in front of the school, but the street scene in front of him was already the main road less than 500 meters from his home.
What about the middle section of the road?
He couldn't remember a single thing!
"Huihui and I were just about to go home after buying groceries when we saw you from afar, but no matter how we called you, you wouldn't respond..."
Lin Wan's eyes were red and her voice was trembling.
She swallowed the words she was about to say and didn't dare to say them.
From a distance, she could clearly see that her son's condition was extremely horrifying:
His eyes were vacant and unfocused, and he was muttering something frantically, as if he were possessed by something terrifying!
Fearing that he had suddenly fallen ill, she dropped her things, grabbed her daughter, and rushed over desperately.
"Brother, hug me!"
Su Hui had somehow managed to break free from her mother's embrace and opened her arms to Su Hao.
Su Hao instinctively bent down and gently picked up his younger sister.
The familiar weight, along with the aroma of milk, wafts towards you.
Su Hui hugged her brother's neck tightly with her soft little hands.
In an instant, Su Hao's frantic heartbeat gradually calmed down.
The complex matrix of numbers that had been pressing down on him and making it hard to breathe began to dissipate.
The relentless, almost obsessive, logical deductions finally ceased their torment of his spirit.
"Brother, are you alright? You look so pale."
Su Hui touched Su Hao's cheek with her chubby little hand.
"Of course I'm fine, I'm just a little tired today."
To avoid worrying his family, Su Hao forced down the shock in his eyes and forced a casual smile to reassure them.
"Go home and rest. Mom will make you something nice to eat to calm your nerves."
On my way home, a cool breeze blew.
Splash!
The sound of flowing water could be heard from the scenic river next to us.
In the green belt, wildflowers are swaying gently in the wind.
"Brother, what's the name of that flower?"
"Daisies, and hydrangeas."
At my sister's age, everything is new and exciting to her.
Su Hui leaned on his shoulder and kept asking questions.
For Su Hao, who had long since memorized the encyclopedia, answering these questions required no brainpower whatsoever.
But it was this simple and warm family atmosphere, this everyday life, that gave him a long-lost sense of peace.
Only at this moment did the nerve that had been stretched to its limit finally get a chance to breathe.
......
Saturday at 10 a.m.
Su Hao sat on the bus heading to the city center.
He leaned against the car window, watching the street scenes rushing by outside, but his mind was coldly dissecting the accident that had happened a few days earlier.
A gap in memory, a moment when I almost lost my life to a car wheel.
And the trigger that caused all of this was the collapse of the traffic light cycle model.
That's no joke, he really almost died!
Su Hao dared not underestimate the seriousness of that accident.
An unknown, deep-seated vulnerability, or rather an unknown "lesion," is silently eroding his brain.
This made him feel unprecedentedly anxious.
He was not afraid of death, but he would never allow himself to cause his parents and Su Hui to fall into the immense grief of losing a loved one because of this accident!
The lesion must be identified!
Given initial conditions, analyze the anomalies, propose hypotheses, and prove them.
Su Hao decided to use the purest mathematical thinking to find out the system bug hidden in his brain!
The bus arrived at the station, and passengers filed out.
Following the optimal route he had planned in advance, Su Hao walked straight into the city's largest library.
After passing through the literature section, the novel section, and the business management section, he finally stopped at the deepest part.
The bookshelf in front of me is densely packed with a vast number of medical monographs.
Modern Psychiatry, Introduction to Clinical Psychology, Neuropsychiatry, Adolescent Mental Health...
Su Hao's gaze swept across the spines of the books one by one, and finally, he pulled one out.
Mechanisms and Clinical Intervention of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviors...
The book lists various typical clinical manifestations, but none of them completely match his bizarre symptoms.
Suddenly, his hand, which was rapidly turning the pages, froze.
Arithmetic compulsion and mathematical cognitive impairment.
The core pathological feature is a morbid obsession with numbers and calculations.
The patient will unconsciously perform mental calculations, assign special meanings to specific numbers, and develop an extreme obsession with mathematical rules.
Typical symptoms:
- Performs forced calculations based on time, distance, and number of objects.
- An excessive obsession with specific numerical values or topological patterns.
- An irresistible compulsive urge to solve mathematical conjectures.
- When logical deduction is blocked or calculations are wrong, extreme panic and anxiety will erupt.
- Compensatory decline in social functioning and daily cognitive abilities.
Holy crap, it hit the bullseye!
With each scan of a line of confirmed case indicators, Su Hao's heart sank a little lower.
I stayed up all night working out math problems in my head;
For a whole year, we deconstructed the timing algorithm of traffic lights;
Panic ensued simply because the algorithm model crashed;
Slice your daily routine down to the minute and second...
Is this something a normal person would do?
But when exactly did this absolute alienation of the underlying logic begin?
Su Hao found an empty seat in the corner and began cross-referencing pathology literature from multiple perspectives.
As he continued his research, he stumbled upon a name that seemed to be held in high esteem.
Kurt Gödel.
The greatest mathematical logician of the 20th century.
A genius who overturned the entire foundation of mathematical theory with the "incompleteness theorem".
However, in his later years, he suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoid schizophrenia.
Because he firmly believed that someone had poisoned him, he only ate the food prepared by his wife.
While his wife was hospitalized, he refused to eat and eventually starved to death!
Su Hao's eye twitched violently.
This pathological manifestation has blatantly broken through the most basic biological survival instinct!
Gödel's symptoms were clearly several orders of magnitude more severe than those of an average person. Even if he was insane, how could he suppress even his basic physiological needs?
But as his gaze swept over the next paragraph of the document, cold sweat soaked his back.
Gödel's early symptoms are extremely subtle.
When he was in his twenties, this morbid behavior was simply seen by outsiders as an extreme pursuit of mathematical logic rigor.
However, due to the failure to receive timely psychological intervention, the increasingly severe obsessive-compulsive disorder eventually...
Damn it!
This is exactly my current situation!
No, the sample environments are different.
At the very least, I had sensed something was wrong beforehand!
Su Hao began frantically reviewing the clinical records of other top mathematicians.
Cantor.
The founder of set theory.
In 1904, his theory of transfinite numbers was fiercely criticized at an academic conference, and his original obsessive-compulsive disorder rapidly deteriorated into bipolar disorder. He eventually died alone in a mental hospital.
Newton.
He was plagued by bipolar disorder for the rest of his life.
He compulsively washes his hands dozens of times a day, accompanied by severe visual and auditory hallucinations.
Euler.
A failed cataract surgery in 1771 resulted in complete blindness in both eyes.
However, his brain remained like a locked engine, compulsively performing mental calculations.
Until the very last moment of his life, he was deriving the calculus equations for Uranus's orbit.
At his funeral, his close friend, the Marquis of Condorcet, left a eulogy:
"Death finally brought Euler to an end."
The whole book is full of madmen!
On the timeline of history, most of the top mathematicians who stand at the pinnacle of human intelligence have, throughout their lives, endured varying degrees of mental distortion!
Those gods whom mortals looked up to ultimately became sacrifices to the backlash of truth.
Su Hao decisively closed the case database and immediately turned to the clinical intervention and targeted treatment section of psychiatry, beginning to absorb rescue information as quickly as a sponge.
Half an hour later, he breathed a sigh of relief.
This trip was worthwhile.
The existing clinical treatment protocols are much more mature than expected.
The cure rate is over 90%, and the earlier the diagnosis, the better the intervention effect.
In the time of Gödel and Cantor, the concept of pathology did not exist, so medical intervention was out of the question.
Times have changed!
This statistically significant high cure rate greatly reduced his psychological burden.
Long live modern medicine!
After a long period of research, Su Hao finally came to a harsh reality:
He was unable to completely eradicate the obsessive-compulsive disorder that originated deep within his genes.
Since we can't eliminate it, let's tame it and coexist with it!
Su Hao remained calm and composed, without despair.
Instead, like solving an extremely complex equation, they calmly chose a scientific path.
That was the optimal solution he extracted after reading dozens of professional psychology classics: narrative therapy.
Through "externalization," he forcibly separated that out-of-control part of himself from his soul, building a firewall in his mental world.
Don't treat your out-of-control self as an enemy; just treat it as a roommate.
He even gave that morbid soul a name: "Psyduck".
The same uncontrollable magical power within the body makes naming it after Psyduck from Pokémon perfectly fitting.
Psyduck, this little yellow duck, has an obsessive passion for perfect patterns and the beauty of absolute symmetry; it wishes it could number and line up all the atoms in the universe.
Su Hao would set aside some time every night and dedicate it entirely to "Psyduck".
Let it indulge in its madness, let it run wild as it pleases, let it pursue its morbid perfection...
At other times, if Psyduck tries to cross the line, Su Hao will ruthlessly take back control.
After many years of this back-and-forth, compromise, and adjustment...
Gradually, Psyduck ceased to be a harmful entity that caused mental exhaustion; it even became a useful tool.
Every time Su Hao tries to "outsource" massive amounts of math work to Psyduck, the duck displays unprecedented enthusiasm and efficiency...
......
In the examination hall of the Mathematical Olympiad.
Seeing that there were only ten minutes left, Su Hao made a decision in his heart.
In that deep sea of consciousness, he knocked on Psyduck's door.
There was no movement.
I guess it's because it's not allowed to participate in the entire math Olympiad, and it's throwing a tantrum.
Su Hao wasn't annoyed; he simply asked himself a question quietly in his mind:
You don't want to go back and see Su Hui's red, swollen eyes, do you?
In that instant, Su Hao clearly felt something deep in his mind stir in an extremely subtle way.
The soul lurking deep within his consciousness ultimately bowed before this pure bond.
Like Su Hao, it couldn't bear to see that girl suffer.
With time running out, Su Hao held nothing back and completely opened up the highest level of mind control to Psyduck.
"boom--"
It was as if a sealed barrier had been blasted open, and Su Hao's terrifying computing power, which had been suppressed by his mortal body, was released explosively like a dam bursting!