If Only I Could Be in Two Places at Once

When Chen Zhi opened his eyes, there was no one beside him anymore.

A faint fragrance lingered on the pillow. On the nightstand lay a sticky note with Pei Ningxue's beautiful handwriting:

"Breakfast is in the microwave, porridge and eggs. Wash the dishes after eating, I don't raise useless trash. — Your CFO"

Chen Zhi stared at those last three letters, his mouth twitching.

He rolled over and grabbed his phone. 8:40 AM.

WeChat messages lined up from top to bottom.

Lin Wanwan sent a voice message at 7:58. He tapped to listen: "Good morning, hubby! Had my first vocal class today, and the teacher praised my progress, hehe! Are you free at noon? I miss you~"

Li Zhiyi sent a text at 8:10: "Chen Zhi, I'm at the classroom. Civil Law class today. Thank you for coming to see me yesterday. Take care of yourself and don't work too hard."

Pei Ningxue tagged everyone in the Deep Space Technology all-staff group: "All departments, send your weekly reports to my email before 9:30."

Three messages, three completely different vibes.

Chen Zhi replied one by one. To Lin Wanwan: "Good girl, study hard." To Li Zhiyi: "Listen well in class too, I'll come find you tonight."

As for Pei Ningxue's message, he didn't need to reply. Replying would only get him scolded.

He dawdled out of bed and went to the kitchen to take the breakfast out of the microwave.

It was very simple: plain rice porridge, boiled eggs, and two slices of whole wheat bread.

For a wealthy heiress like Pei Ningxue, who had never touched a stove since childhood, managing to whip up a breakfast of this caliber was already an extraordinary performance.

Chen Zhi wolfed it down in a few bites and dutifully washed the dishes.

Before leaving, he glanced at the sticky note again. After a moment's thought, he folded it and tucked it into his wallet.

He called a car and headed straight for Peking University.

Back in Dorm 404, Guo Yang was still fast asleep in bed since he had no morning classes. Li Zicong sat at his desk staring blankly at his phone, while Zhang Tianyang was playing a ranked match in League of Legends.

"Yo, Boss Chen is back," Li Zicong glanced up at him. "Another night out."

"Working overtime at the company."

"What kind of crappy company do you run, working overtime every day? I bet you were out keeping the sister-in-law company."

"The sisters-in-law are all busy."

"...Sisters?"

"Sister-in-law," Chen Zhi said without changing his expression. "You misheard."

Li Zicong looked doubtful but didn't press the matter.

Chen Zhi changed into a hoodie and was just about to leave for his ten o'clock elective class when the phone in his pocket started vibrating like crazy.

Caller ID: Dai Damai.

"Hello."

"Boss! Where are you?!"

Dai Damai was extremely agitated, his voice so loud that Chen Zhi could hear an echo from the receiver.

"Dorm. What's wrong?"

"Get over here right now! Something huge happened!"

Chen Zhi frowned. "Did Moss get a bug?"

"It's not a bug! It's... I don't even know how to describe it to you!"

Dai Damai took a deep breath, speaking rapidly.

"Yesterday, didn't you ask me to pull together a small team to build the visual logic framework for autonomous driving? I took three PhD students and worked all night. We decided to hold off on the framework and first test just how far Moss's native multimodal capabilities could go."

"How did you test it?"

"I plugged Moss's multimodal interface into an open-source driving simulator. Mind you, we didn't do any driving-related training, didn't feed it any traffic rule data. It was a pure, barebones connection. I just wanted to see if Moss could survive for five minutes on a simulated road using only its own visual comprehension and logical reasoning."

Chen Zhi paused mid-motion while putting on his jacket.

"And the result?"

"The result is it survived for four hours! It ran twenty thousand kilometers of simulated road! Zero accidents! Zero violations! Fully autonomous obstacle avoidance, lane changing, and handling of emergencies the entire time!" Dai Damai's voice was trembling. "Even the extreme scenarios I set up—like pedestrians suddenly popping out from blind spots while going against traffic, people suddenly appearing in a rainstorm, the car in front slamming on its brakes, multi-car pileups—it handled them all flawlessly!"

Chen Zhi plopped down on the edge of his bed.

"Without any driving training whatsoever?"

"Not even for a single second! I swear to God!" Dai Damai caught his breath. "Boss, do you know how long it took Baidu's Apollo to run simulated road tests of the same difficulty? Three months of specialized training, plus another three months of simulated road tests. That's half a year combined. Tesla's FSD is about the same. Moss did half a year's worth of everyone else's work in four hours, and it wasn't even designed for driving in the first place!"

"It's just too smart," Dai Damai lowered his voice, carrying a sense of awe that Chen Zhi had never heard from him before.

"It saw the road footage, understood the traffic rules on its own, and learned how to make optimal decisions in complex road conditions all by itself. This isn't artificial intelligence, Boss. This is... this is true intelligence."

The dorm room fell silent for two seconds.

Nearby, Li Zicong secretly perked up his ears.

Chen Zhi stood up, walked out to the balcony, and closed the door.

"Are the test logs still there?"

"Yes."

"Was the server connected to the internet?"

"The simulator's data interface was online; the logs are backed up to the cloud."

"Wipe the cloud backups clean. Copy the local logs to an encrypted USB drive, and then format that server." Chen Zhi's tone left no room for negotiation. "The three PhD students who participated in last night's test, have each of them sign a supplementary non-disclosure agreement. Penalty for breach of contract: twenty million."

Dai Damai fell silent for a moment. "Boss, is it necessary to be this tense?"

"Damai, think about it. What would happen if this set of data leaked out?"

Dai Damai stopped talking.

What would happen?

Global annual R&D investment in autonomous driving is hundreds of billions of dollars. Giants like Tesla, Waymo, Baidu, and Huawei have thrown countless manpower and resources at it, yet to this day, none dare claim their system can achieve zero accidents.

Meanwhile, Deep Space Technology's Moss went in completely barebones and surpassed them all in just four hours.

If this were made public, Deep Space Technology would overnight become the number one target of every car manufacturer and autonomous driving team in the world.

Those who want to acquire it, those who want to steal the technology, and those who want to strangle it in the cradle—they would all come out of the woodwork.

"We can't play this card right now," Chen Zhi said, walking back into the dorm room. He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. "I'm heading over now. Wait for me."

"Alright."

Hanging up the phone, Chen Zhi had just pulled open the dorm door when Li Zicong called out from behind him.

"Chen Zhi, you're skipping class again?"

"Emergency. Help me sign in."

"Sign in again? How many times have you made me sign in for you this semester?"

"This really is the last time."

"..."

Chen Zhi ran off without looking back.

Leaving the dorm building, he was walking toward the West Gate when his phone rang again.

Lin Wanwan.

"Chen Zhi, Chen Zhi! Something huge happened!"

Chen Zhi's footsteps paused. What day was it today? Why was everyone telling him something huge had happened?

"What's wrong?"

"You know 'Singer' Season 2? The one I'm participating in!"

"I know."

"The production team just notified me that the live broadcast for the finals has been moved up! It was originally scheduled for May, but now it's been changed to mid-March! It's been moved up by two whole months!"

"Why the sudden change?"

"It seems the TV network adjusted the broadcast schedule, and Sister Su Man didn't explain the exact reason either. But that's not the most important part—" Lin Wanwan took a deep breath. "They added a new segment to the finals. Each contestant can bring a 'mystery guest' on stage for a duet. Sister Su Man said this segment will massively impact the voting. If the guest generates enough buzz, the live votes could literally double."

Chen Zhi already had a faint inkling of what she was going to say.

Sure enough.

"She asked several singers for me, but either their schedules clashed, or their status wasn't high enough. So..." Lin Wanwan's voice suddenly turned hesitant and whiny, "I want you to be my mystery guest."

"Me?"

"Yes!"

"I can't sing."

"You can! When we were little, you sang Blue and White Porcelain in our bathroom, and my dad even said your singing was very unique!"

"That was howling. Your dad's exact words were, 'Did that kid next door step on a nail?'"

"I don't care!" Lin Wanwan started acting spoiled. "Just go on stage with me this one time! It's just one song, very short! You don't have to sing well, you just have to stand there—"

"Why would just standing there be enough?"

"Because you're handsome! A handsome guy on stage is a cheat code for traffic, Sister Su Man said so herself!"

Chen Zhi gripped his phone, staying silent.

Go on a variety show? Broadcast live nationwide?

Right now, he wished he could weld his face behind the scenes. Let alone being on TV, he hadn't even shown his face at his own company's press conferences. If his identity as the founder of Deep Space Technology was recognized by a national audience, his persona as the "mysterious boss" would instantly collapse.

Worse still, the live broadcast would be screenshotted, recorded, and spread all over the internet.

Then everyone would know that the little pop diva Lin Wanwan's guest today was a handsome guy named Chen Zhi.

The paparazzi would definitely dig into his personal information like crazy. If he got photographed with Pei Ningxue or Li Zhiyi, how would he explain it to Lin Wanwan?

"Wanwan, I really need to think about this," Chen Zhi said earnestly. "Tell Sister Su Man not to rush the registration just yet. Give me two days."

"But the deadline is next week!"

"Two days is enough. I promise I'll give you an answer."

After finally calming Lin Wanwan down and hanging up the phone, Chen Zhi stood at the west gate of Peking University. Blown by the cold wind of early March, his mind cleared up quite a bit.

On one hand, there was Moss's test data, which was enough to overturn the global automotive industry.

On the other hand, there was Lin Wanwan inviting him to show his face in front of national cameras.

He sighed.

The skill he lacked the most in this life wasn't some "Extraordinary Fertility" rewarded by the system, but rather the ability to clone himself.