Qi Min woke up from her desk and reflexively reached for the water glass she usually kept under the bed.

WHEN HER HAND TOUCHED THE KEYBOARD, SHE REALIZED THAT SHE WAS NO LONGER THE LOSER SHE HAD BEEN LIVING AT A FRIEND'S HOUSE THREE DAYS AGO AND HAD A CONFUSED FUTURE.

Qi Min is 28 years old and a scientific research worker. At the top, she should be regarded as a neurobiologist, and at the bottom she is an unlucky doctor of biology who was rejected N times for an article and almost failed to graduate, and after graduation, she was rejected for N times when she found a teaching position. Luckily, she had now found a school that would accept her, but instead of a neurobiology lab, she was given a bioinformatics lab.

That's okay, compared to being forced to change the direction of research, Qi Min has experienced the most unfortunate thing that is much more excessive than this.

Five years ago, she was still studying for a PhD in the United States, and she met a lot of cool and unique guys from all over the world at school. Handsome, beautiful, gay, bisexual...... Everybody. It's a weird place. But it was in that place that Qi Min met her boyfriend who had been in a relationship for the longest time so far, Anton, an ordinary mixed-race boy who delivered food to a Chinese restaurant.

No, Anton wasn't the one who hurt her, in fact, it was even Qi Min who hurt him.

At first, Qi Min was simply attracted by Anton's delicate face like an angel, his appearance was more oriental, but he had a pair of big European-style eyes with slightly drooping corners, and his complexion was so fair and uniform that it seemed to have its own filter. However, Qi Min later learned that Anton was abducted to the United States by a human trafficking group when he was young, and was almost forced to engage in the illegal child sex industry, but fortunately escaped at that time, and was adopted by the owner of a local Chinese restaurant because of his Chinese appearance, and helped in the kitchen to learn cooking.

Later, the owner of the Chinese restaurant had to return to China due to family matters, but he transferred the restaurant to a guy from Southeast Asia. The new boss no longer cooks traditional Chinese dinner, but instead makes an improved version of Chinese fast food, the kitchen does not need so many people, half of the chefs are fired, and Anton is driven out of the street to deliver food although he does not lose his job.

But he did learn the craft in his original Chinese restaurant. What surprised Qi Min was that he, a young man who learned to cook Chinese food in the United States, was able to make shredded pork with Beijing sauce that tasted the same as the home-cooked restaurant in front of her house.

However, Kyung-chan shredded pork didn't stop the eventual breakdown of their relationship.

Three years ago, Anton crossed a bridge while delivering food and found a newborn baby girl under the bridge, most of whom were unmarried and unable to have an abortion due to doctrinal issues. Out of sympathy, Anton took the little girl home to raise her with Qi Min, and named her "Meme", and her nickname was Mimi. Although it costs more to take care of the baby, because Qi Min still has a doctoral salary, life is not too tight.

But the unfortunate thing happened a year ago, when Qi Min was busy submitting articles. Because Mimi was still too young, Anton took her with him when he delivered food. However, the restaurant owner wanted to expand the scope of food delivery on a whim at this time, and Anton suddenly had to deliver food more than ten kilometers away, so he had to put Mimi in Qi Min's laboratory first.

However, Qi Min was so busy revising her thesis that she didn't care about Mimi and walked to the balcony where the guardrail was being removed while it was being painted. As a result, Mimi fell from the balcony on the fourth floor, resulting in paralysis of her lower limbs, and she could only be accompanied by a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

This incident not only greatly affected Qi Min's mood for the article, but also caused Anton to break up with her.

At that time, Anton said that she only wanted to post articles to graduate, and then get rid of him and Mimi and return to China by herself, and she didn't think about Mimi's future at all. It was as if it had become a curse. Sure enough, after that, Qi Min's articles were rejected N times, so he had to rub other people's articles before he reluctantly graduated, and after returning to China, he also ran into walls everywhere when he found a teaching position.

When Qi Min was busy looking for a teaching job and spent all the money on her body, and was so depressed that she could only borrow a friend's house, she also thought that she was ruthless and unrighteous because she left Anton and Mimi to return to China by herself, and received the so-called "karma". But as a scientific researcher, Qi Min's life trajectory should be like this. If it weren't for Mimi's fall from the building that caused Anton to break up with her, she would have been able to bring them all back to China. One of Anton's biological parents should be Chinese, and Mimi also seems to have at least half Asian ancestry.

But unless Mimi can walk on her own like a healthy and normal child again, Anton will probably never forgive her.

Fortunately, Anton's curse did not last long. A month ago, Qi Min finally found a university that could take her in, provided that she was engaged in research in the direction of bioinformatics.

For a person who has no income for nearly half a year, it doesn't matter what direction of research he has. And this school's ranking in the country is not bad, in Qi Min's opinion, it is simply a good thing that falls from the sky.

So she became a new lab PI (Principal Investigator) in the school's biology department, and was given an empty room with only a few computers, refrigerators, and PCR machines that had been obsolete from other labs.

Fortunately, Qi Min carefully studied the topic of her article that was rejected N times, and found that if she expanded it a little more, it could still have something to do with bioinformatics.

Qi Min's original project was to study and record the typical connections of neurons in the cerebral cortex through molecular biology methods such as antibody in situ hybridization and FRET, so as to establish a real neuronal connection model. In fact, this method is not as convenient as other research groups to study brain neurons through electrophysiology, fMRI, etc., so although the data she obtained is more refined, it is not accepted by the journal editors because the amount of raw data is too small.

But if she can mathematize this model of real neuronal connections and build a connector on a computer based on it, then perhaps she can expect this connector to reflect some of the properties of the real brain. Qi Min named this "brain-like body" and wrote a project plan related to it overnight to apply for funding.

Anyone who has seen Transcendence knows that neurobiologists have long had ideas similar to simulating the human brain in a computer. However, Qi Min's "brain-like body" does not really have the mathematical topology of the brain, but is only a product of the accumulation of digitized brain neurons. The extent to which it reflects the characteristics of the real brain is a matter of course. But anyway, with this project, Qi Min will be able to apply for funds to support himself.

Now that the model of neuronal connection is available, the supercomputer group of the new school can also provide enough computing resources, so Qi Min only needs to put the data into the supercomputer group to run. As for what he can run out of in the end, Qi Min actually doesn't care very much. No matter what comes out, as long as she writes the results of this "brain-like body" into the results, she can continue to vote for her article that has been rejected N times before.

Therefore, Qi Min sat in the office last night on a pile of cardboard boxes that had not been cleaned up, and spent five hours writing the code to build the "brain-like body". She then connected to the Internet and turned on the VPN to download her data from her previous lab to the computing center of her new school.

At twelve o'clock in the middle of the night, Qi Min finally hung up her code and tried it out with the test dataset that had been temporarily divided. UNSURPRISINGLY, THERE WAS A BUG. So she began to debug hard, drinking countless cups of coffee during the process.

It wasn't until dawn, after seeing that the test set had finally passed the debugging, that she finally fell asleep on her desk and in a pile of empty coffee cups.