The five minutes of shared, un-optimized silence stretched into ten, then fifteen. It wasn't awkward, but it wasn't the comfortable, data-rich quiet they were used to. It was a new, experimental space. Lin Xiaoyang felt the sharp edges of his frustration gradually soften, not because the problem was solved, but because it was no longer his alone to process. Shen Qinghe sat perfectly still, her gaze fixed on a point on the floor, as if running a background thread solely dedicated to the act of "non-solving."
Finally, she looked up. "The allotted time for unproductive acknowledgment has concluded. However, the core inefficiency remains. Your career satisfaction parameter is critically low. My standard support protocols are incompatible. We require a new subroutine."
He smiled faintly. "Proceed."
"We will co-write it," she declared, opening her laptop again, but this time with a different intent. She opened a blank document. "We will define the parameters of acceptable 'support' for your current state. User-driven customization."
It was such a bizarrely perfect approach. She couldn't give him emotional empathy off the shelf, so she was going to help him build it to spec.
"Okay," he said, pulling his chair closer. "Rule one: No immediate data dumps of new job postings following a rejection."
She typed. "Protocol 1.1: Following a negative career event, initiate a 24-hour data moratorium on new opportunities. The primary system requires time to process the exception."
"Rule two: Acknowledge the feeling first. Before logic."
"Protocol 1.2: Prime response must validate the emotional state variable. E.g., 'That situation is suboptimal and your frustration is a logical response.' Not just 'The company's decision was logical.'"
"Rule three…" He thought of Chen Yuexi's dramatic hugs and Tang Youyou's calming rituals. "Sometimes, non-verbal protocols are acceptable. Maybe… a cup of tea. Made without commenting on its optimal brewing temperature."
She paused, her fingers over the keys. "A symbolic gesture. Understood." She typed: "Protocol 1.3: In cases of high emotional load, initiate a simple, non-transactional care behavior. See appendix for approved behaviors (tea, blanket retrieval, silent proximity)."
They continued, him dictating the needs of his "Oxford Version," her translating them into actionable, almost clinical steps. It was the strangest, most intimate thing he had ever done—writing the user manual for his own heart, with the world's most meticulous technical writer.
After they finished, she saved the document as Support_Protocol_v2.1.odt. "The framework is established. Field testing is required."
The opportunity came sooner than expected. Two days later, another rejection arrived, this one a terse, automated email from a large corporation. Xiaoyang read it, felt the now-familiar sinking feeling, and texted Qinghe the news.
Her response was not immediate. Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on his door. She stood there, holding a small paper bag from a local bakery. She entered, placed the bag on the table, and said, "The situation is suboptimal. Your frustration is a logical response."
It was delivered with the cadence of someone reading a teleprompter, but she had followed Protocol 1.2.
She then put the kettle on, selected tea bags (Earl Grey for him, Oolong for her), and prepared two cups without once mentioning water temperature or steep time. Protocol 1.3 in action.
She sat with him as he slowly ate the still-warm pastry—a cinnamon swirl, his favorite, which she must have deduced from his purchases. They didn't talk about jobs or algorithms. She told him about a baffling argument in her research group over the semiotic significance of semicolons in 18th-century love letters. He told her about the bizarre, labyrinthine hierarchy of a British office kitchen he'd learned about from a failed interviewer.
It wasn't a solution. The rejection still stung. But the sting was… contained. Shared. The processing load was distributed.
This new, collaborative debugging extended beyond emotional support. Qinghe, observing his struggle with the cultural nuances of British tech interviews, proposed a novel solution.
"Your strength is not in pretending to be a conventional UK developer," she stated during one of their strategy sessions. "It is in your unique hybrid background. Your 'EfficientHeart' project is not a liability; it is a signature. We must reframe it."
"How? To them, it's just a student project."
"Not if it is presented as foundational research. I have analyzed the public work of the CTO at 'Nexus Analytics,' the firm with your pending interview. He has published papers on human-AI collaboration interfaces. Your project, with its focus on human-centric algorithm design, directly intersects with his interests."
She helped him refactor his entire application narrative. Instead of downplaying EfficientHeart, they brought it to the forefront, framing it as a case study in "applied affective computing" and "narrative-driven UX." She even helped him draft a short, white-paper-style appendix analyzing the project's successes and failures through a formal research lens.
The interview at Nexus Analytics felt different from the start. The CTO, a sharp-eyed man in his forties, leaned forward when Xiaoyang mentioned EfficientHeart. "The student project that used… what was it? Literary poetry as an encryption key for heart data?"
Xiaoyang, following the new narrative, didn't flinch. "It was an inelegant implementation," he admitted, "but the core premise was about embedding humanistic meaning into data structures. The failure was in the cryptography, not the concept."
The conversation that followed was the first truly energizing one he'd had since arriving in Oxford. They debated the ethics of emotion-tracking algorithms, the role of storytelling in technology adoption, and the challenges of quantifying "compatibility." It was a meeting of minds, not just a skills assessment.
Afterwards, walking back through the drizzle alongside the ancient stone walls of a college, Xiaoyang felt a flicker of something he hadn't felt in weeks: possibility. Not certainty, but a positive probability.
He shared this with Qinghe that evening, not as raw data, but as a feeling. "It felt… collaborative. Like talking to Su Yuning, but about market strategy."
"A high-value interaction," she agreed, a note of satisfaction in her voice. "The reframing was successful. Your unique variable is now an asset, not an outlier."
Later, as they washed up the dinner dishes—a new, domestically inefficient but pleasant shared task—Qinghe spoke without looking at him.
"The 'Shared Processing Load' subroutine… it is computationally more expensive than my previous methods."
He glanced at her, soapy water dripping from his hands. "Inefficient?"
"Very," she confirmed. "It requires real-time emotional state monitoring, protocol selection, and the suppression of my default problem-solving algorithms." She finally met his gaze, her expression unreadable. "However, the system output… the reduction in your stress biomarkers, the increase in productive collaboration… suggests a higher net utility."
She was saying the new way was better. She was saying she preferred this messy, costly, shared process.
He nodded, a lump in his throat. "Acknowledged."
He was no longer a failed variable in an unfamiliar system. He was part of a new, co-authored program. The code was still being written, the bugs were frequent, and the runtime environment was still damp and foreign. But for the first time, Lin Xiaoyang felt like he wasn't just running someone else's code. He and Qinghe were compiling their own, one imperfect, invaluable line at a time.