Unable to Be in Two Places at Once

Chen Zhi pushed open the glass doors. The two girls at the front desk hurriedly stood up to greet him. He nodded and walked straight down the corridor.

Dai Damai's CTO office door was ajar.

He pushed the door open and walked in.

Standing next to Dai Damai were three young men in plaid shirts. These three were PhD students poached from Tsinghua University just over the winter break. Right now, they all sported messy bedhead and expressions of extreme excitement.

"Boss!" Dai Damai suddenly stood up, pushing his keyboard away.

Chen Zhi walked over, his gaze falling on the thirty-four-inch curved monitor in the middle of the desk.

The screen was paused on a playback video.

"Play it," Chen Zhi said, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

Dai Damai directly hit the Enter key.

On the screen was footage from the open-source CARLA autonomous driving simulator. The environment was set to an extremely severe thunderstorm, with visibility at less than ten meters.

The test vehicle was traveling on a two-lane highway at a speed of 120 kilometers per hour.

An out-of-control heavy truck suddenly swerved out from the right blind spot, while a sedan in the front left braked urgently. Short of Ultraman showing up to save the day, this was a virtually impossible situation to salvage.

In the video, the test vehicle reacted within 0.01 seconds. The steering wheel made an infinitesimally small, full-lock turn to the left and instantly returned to center, allowing the car body to barely scrape past the edge of the heavy truck. At the same time, the brakes locked right at the absolute limit of the anti-lock braking system, bringing the vehicle to a steady stop half a meter from the sedan's rear bumper.

"This is last night's test?" Chen Zhi asked, staring at the screen.

"This is just one segment," Dai Damai said, pointing to the dense lines of code on the side of the screen.

"There are no preset scripts. Moss captured the footage through the cameras and calculated the trajectories of all objects on its own. It even predicted the truck driver's corrective actions within 0.1 seconds, thereby making an evasive decision."

The three PhD students nodded vigorously beside him. A tall boy among them swallowed hard and spoke up, "Mr. Chen, this decision-making logic is terrifying. Current autonomous driving relies on an endless library of rules to exhaustively list road conditions; it crashes when it encounters unseen special situations. But Moss is thinking. It understands the very essence of 'driving'."

Chen Zhi leaned back in his chair.

He certainly knew what this meant. Moss's capabilities were a pure dimensional strike in this era.

"Has the cloud data been wiped clean?" Chen Zhi turned to look at Dai Damai.

Dai Damai nodded repeatedly. "Right after your call, I completely shredded the cloud backups. All the local logs are in this hard drive." He pointed to a black solid-state drive on the desk.

Chen Zhi picked up the hard drive and slipped it into his hoodie pocket.

"Boss, this is an achievement that could directly disrupt the industry. Are we just going to hide it away?" The tall PhD student looked full of reluctance.

Chen Zhi lifted his eyelids to look at him. "What's your name?"

"Wang Yu."

"Wang Yu, do you know how much money Tesla invested in FSD last year?" Chen Zhi tapped his finger on the desk. "Billions of dollars. Several domestic car companies and tech giants have all thrown astronomical R&D funds into autonomous driving."

"If we take this system out now, do you think they'll just bow down and admit that their tens of billions in investments are nothing but waste paper?"

Wang Yu was stunned.

Chen Zhi stood up, his gaze sweeping over the four tech fanatics.

"They won't. They will use all their capital, PR tactics, and even administrative measures to smother Deep Space Technology in its cradle. No car company is willing to hand their soul over to us. If they find out our technology is strong enough to directly replace them, they'll immediately unite to boycott us."

The office fell completely silent.

"We are not going to be the disruptors." Chen Zhi walked over to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and drew a large pyramid on it. "We are going to be the ones selling the shovels."

"Damai, take the three of them and downgrade this logic suite of Moss."

Dai Damai's eyes widened. "Downgrade?"

"Yes. Delete its core autonomous thinking module and keep only the most basic visual recognition and response logic. We are going to package it as an assisted driving system. Its performance only needs to be thirty percent better than the current Tesla."

"Then, we'll upgrade it at a rate of twenty to thirty percent per generation."

Chen Zhi tossed the marker back into the pen holder. "Leave them some face, and leave them some hope for competition. We will license this 'Lite' version of the system to domestic car companies and let them fight it out with their rivals. We will hide in the back and collect patent and interface fees. This is the safest way to make money."

The three PhD students looked at each other, completely awed by this ruthless capitalist business logic.

Dai Damai was the first to react, pushing up his glasses. "I get it, Boss. You want to boil the frog in warm water, making them slowly develop a technological dependence on Deep Space Technology until, eventually, no one can live without us."

Chen Zhi nodded in appreciation.

The office door was pushed open.

Pei Ningxue walked in. Today she wore a beige trench coat and held three black folders in her hand.

"Mr. Chen, the non-disclosure agreements are ready." Pei Ningxue tossed the folders directly onto the desk.

Her cool gaze swept over the three PhD students, her tone entirely strictly business. "These are the highest-level commercial NDAs. The penalty for breach of contract is twenty million RMB. Sign it, and your options for this month will double. If you don't sign, you can go to the HR department right now to process your resignation."

The three young PhDs, who had just been immersed in their technical frenzy, were suppressed by Pei Ningxue's extremely domineering female CEO aura and didn't even dare to breathe loudly.

Wang Yu gritted his teeth, picked up a pen, and was the first to sign. The other two hurriedly followed suit.

"Very good," Pei Ningxue said, collecting the agreements. "Go back to your workstations and rest for the day. Tomorrow, you will start setting up the project according to Mr. Chen's requirements."

The PhD students quickly left the office.

The door closed.

Pei Ningxue turned to look at Chen Zhi. The strong businesswoman demeanor from moments ago instantly melted away. She walked up to Chen Zhi and reached out to adjust the collar of his hoodie.

"Rushing over here so early in the morning, what's the hurry? Why didn't you sleep a little longer?" she complained softly.

Dai Damai immediately looked down at his toes, pretending he didn't see anything.

Chen Zhi naturally took her hand. "I got a frantic barrage of calls from Damai. Data security is the lifeblood of the company; I had to come over and handle it personally."

Pei Ningxue pulled her hand back and rolled her eyes at him in exasperation. "Come to my office. There are a few financial statements that need your signature. The funds from Jingtou will be remitted next Tuesday, so we need to set up the overseas transfer routing in advance."

The two walked into the president's office next door.

As soon as they entered, Pei Ningxue locked the door, leaned back against it, and crossed her arms, looking at him.

"Confess. Whose call did you take in your dorm just now?"

Chen Zhi walked over to the sofa and sat down, his expression unchanging. "What call?"

"Stop playing dumb." Pei Ningxue walked over and stared down at him. "Damai said that when he called you, the line was continuously busy, and he only got through after ten minutes. So early in the morning, your business is that busy?"

Chen Zhi's heart was pounding. This woman's intuition was terrifyingly sharp.

"It was my mom," Chen Zhi lied effortlessly. "She was asking if I had registered for the new semester and nagged me for ages."

Pei Ningxue eyed him suspiciously for a couple of seconds before walking behind her desk. She sat down and flipped open a folder.

"Come here and sign this. Once you're done, get lost. Don't stand there being an eyesore."

Chen Zhi walked over, picked up a pen, and swiftly scrawled his name.

After signing, he strolled behind the executive chair, placed his hands on Pei Ningxue's shoulders, and began to gently massage them with practiced ease.

"Want to grab lunch together?" Chen Zhi asked.

Pei Ningxue closed her eyes, savoring the massage. "No time," she replied in a languid tone. "I have a mountain of work today. Go sort yourself out."

Chen Zhi secretly breathed a sigh of relief; he desperately needed the time to deal with the Lin Wanwan situation.

"Alright then. Don't work yourself too hard. I have classes this afternoon, so I'll head back to campus."

After leaving the Global Trade Center, Chen Zhi didn't return to Peking University. Instead, he found a quiet cafe downstairs.

Ordering an iced Americano, he leaned back into the sofa, his mind racing.

The finals for Lin Wanwan's variety show had been moved up, and the rules now required a mystery guest. If he didn't show his face, Lin Wanwan would inevitably be crushed, which could even ruin her performance in the competition.

He needed to come up with a flawless alternative plan, one that would not only guarantee Lin Wanwan the championship but also completely shatter the shady, under-the-table dealings of the entertainment industry.