Chapter 99 - 41: "Soul Container

Chapter 99: Chapter 41: "Soul Container

The rain pattered softly outside the window, while the light inside was dim and warm.

The living room was quiet, filled only with the faint hum of a computer and the soft rustle of turning pages.

Two people sat opposite each other at either end of the small coffee table.

One stared at a screen, the other at a piece of paper. They were like two drowning people in a torrential downpour, each clinging to a piece of driftwood, desperately trying to swim to the opposite shore.

A Study on the Mapping and Storage Mechanism for the Vectorization of Discrete Personalities via High-Dimensional Topological Manifolds.

He had already figured out the concepts of "Discrete Personality" and "vectorization mapping."

To put it simply, a Discrete Personality referred to the conversion of a person’s traits into different, connectable building blocks.

Vectorization, then, was the process of converting these building blocks into mathematical coordinates for computation.

After reading and researching on and off for a while, he had come to a greater understanding of his parents’ paper.

His gaze fell on a bolded line of English. Beneath it, he had written his own translation:

"The integrity of information depends not on its breadth when unfolded, but on the depth of its dimensions. Like a two-dimensional manifold, it can be bent and folded, embedded into a higher-dimensional space without any loss."

Yu Xian stared at the sentence. It felt as if something was clicking into place in his mind.

It was like the blank sheet of A4 paper he was using for notes—a complete two-dimensional plane, densely covered with the formulas he’d derived.

’If we lived on the two-dimensional surface of this paper, the sheet would be our entire world. Every word, every symbol on it would be the information we left behind, our so-called "personality data."’

’As long as we don’t tear the paper, its properties remain unchanged no matter how we bend it. The information isn’t lost.’

Yu Xian considered this. What if he took that sheet of A4 paper, covered in writing, and crumpled it tightly into a ball in his fist?

’Then the sheet that could have covered half his desk would become a tight, heavily creased ball of paper.’

’If he squeezed even harder, its volume would be compressed even further, shrinking several times, or even more than ten times, until it became a "point" that could be held in his palm.’

’It got smaller.’

’It went from an object occupying a large two-dimensional plane to a tiny three-dimensional sphere.’

’But—’

’Did the words on it disappear?’

’No.’

’Was the information lost?’

’No to that, either.’

’Those formulas, words, and handwriting were still perfectly intact on the paper’s surface. They were just "bent," "folded," and "squeezed" into the complex creases inside the paper ball.’

’In this state, you can’t see the complete information—only a few broken strokes and jumbled lines.’

’But as long as you know the rules for "unfolding" it, as long as you carefully smooth it out, all the information will reappear exactly as it was, without a single "byte" lost.’

’This was a "high-dimensional topological manifold."’

’The paper, a two-dimensional manifold, was folded into three-dimensional space to become a paper ball.’

Yu Xian felt his breath catch. He remembered what Wen Xiao had told him in the coffee shop:

"Do you have any idea how complex the human brain is? We’re talking hundreds of billions of neurons, real-time dynamic bio-electrochemical reactions. To perform vectorization on all of that... even the most powerful computers today couldn’t store the complete data of a single person."

"In a computer, text can be converted into vectors because text is inherently made of discrete, finite symbols. But a person... a person is continuous, chaotic. If you were to forcibly ’vectorize’ a person, it would mean throwing away 99.99% of their information, leaving only a few bare-bones tags. If you did that, we’d be no different from NPCs in a video game."

It couldn’t be stored.

That was the death sentence Wen Xiao had delivered, based on the logic of contemporary computer science.

Because with current linear storage logic, the amount of data required to fully "digitize and vectorize" a person was astronomical—far beyond what any existing hardware could possibly handle.

But...

’But what if his parents’ approach was never "compression" to begin with?’

Yu Xian stared intently at the sentence in the paper, a chill running up his spine.

From an information theory perspective, typical data compression always involves "loss." It was just as Mr. Su had mentioned at the book club meeting: when you compress a high-definition RAW image into a JPG, information is discarded and the image quality degrades. That’s a compromise made to save space.

But the "mapping and storage" proposed in his parents’ paper might not have been based on that kind of logic at all.

’They didn’t want to throw away that 99.99% of the information.’

’What they wanted to do was a kind of... "folding."’

’Just like crumpling that sheet of A4 paper into a ball.’

’Could they have been trying, by some means, to take a person’s massive, complex, and immeasurably vast data—their memories, emotions, personality—and "crumple" it all together, folding it into a higher-dimensional mathematical model?’

’From a low-dimensional perspective—say, from our current reality or the world of computers—the processed result might just be a tiny "data packet," a simple "vector," or even just a single coordinate point.’

’Just like that paper ball, which is just a white dot when seen from a distance.’

’But in reality, folded within that tiny "point" was an entire soul... an entire lifetime.’