NOVEL ONLINE FREE Chapter 13: Chapter 13
Ten years later, in the rainy season, the glass of the convenience store was covered with steam, and the sausage roasting machine was half a circle slower than usual. I squatted beside the electric bike to debug Nuannuan's first delivery vehicle in her life. The rear seat bracket was welded by Brother Zhang before his death - it still had the small sun pattern, but there was an additional gear edge representing the "Eye of Eros". The fifteen-year-old girl tied the broken piece of the metal stick to the handlebars. The burn marks of the sausage at the broken end were deeper than the marks on her wrist.
"Dad, the new system translated my delivery notes into sausage sign language again." Nuannuan smiled while holding up her phone. On the screen, the customer drew a crooked sausage with the text "For the first little girl who ran an order alone, add a crispy sausage", "Auntie Wang Mengmeng said that this is the "hot code library" that you and your mother saved back then, which is automatically updated."
Kai Lan was cooking kelp soup behind the cash register. The silver bracelet had been passed to Nuannuan, and the small sun welded on the broken chain was shining in the steam. She suddenly pointed out the window: "Look, the new guy in blue overalls is learning your 'breakout technique for rush hour'." The draft lifted the sticky notes on the wall, and old photos from 20 years ago fell down - Li Xiaoming and Kai Lan were holding the swaddled Nuan Nuan, with the light and shadow of the first generation controller projected behind them.
When the rainstorm came at noon, Nuan Nuan received her first "special delivery". Room 302 of Sunshine Nursing Home, the note read "needs something that reminds Grandpa Chen of the heat of sausages". The metal rod fragment in the incubator suddenly trembled, resonating with the mark on her wrist - that was the frequency of the gears in Brother Chen's robotic arm, which was buried in the underlying code of the new system five years ago.
In the smell of disinfectant in the nursing home, Brother Chen sat in a wheelchair. His robotic arm had long been replaced with a wooden prosthesis, but he still wore his "03" work badge. The moment Nuan Nuan handed over the hot sausage, a glimmer flashed across his glasses - it was not the system barrage, but the "sizzle" sound of the sausage machine in the convenience store 20 years ago. "Your parents back then," he took the first bite, and the oil dripped on the yellowed sticky note, which was the little sun that Kai Lan drew when she was seven years old, "and roasted the heartbeat of the whole city into hot code."
The rainstorm cleared up in the evening, and Nuan Nuan wrote the delivery log on the sausage wrapping paper: "Today, I found that when the customer took the meal, the glimmer of the wrist would overlap with the sausage oil print, forming a new system patch." She touched the broken metal stick on the handlebar, and suddenly understood what her father always said, "The best code is in the sausage fragrance" - that is the temperature transmission between people that cannot be calculated by data.
Before the convenience store closed, Professor Kai's video call was connected on time. In the freezer of his laboratory, the newly frozen "City Memory Popsicles" are melting, revealing every "warm moment" in the past 20 years: the sparks when Brother Zhang welded the last bracket, the first time Wang Mengmeng's child called "Brother Xiaoming", and the sausage nests built by riders all over the city for stray cats last winter. "The new system should be upgraded," he pushed his reading glasses, and the node marks on his wrist had long faded into sausage oil stains, "Next, it's your generation's turn to write code in a warmer way." On the way home late at night, Nuan Nuan suddenly stopped at the old site of the frozen food warehouse. The former ice cave is now a glass greenhouse, where glowing sausage flowers are planted - the stamens are gear-shaped, and the petals have the texture of sticky notes. When the mark on her wrist lit up, all the flowers turned to the convenience store at the same time, as if paying tribute to the original heat source.
When the electric car passed the 24-hour pharmacy, Nuannuan saw a new employee in blue work clothes handing hot porridge to a homeless man. On the back of his work badge was half a piece of sausage wrapping paper, on which was written her father's handwriting twenty years ago: "Eat it while it's hot, life is worth it." The rain spread on the wrapping paper, and the core matrix of the first-generation system emerged - a code that is always warm, composed of countless "thank you" and burnt sausages.
When I got home, Kailan was sewing a new lining for the incubator, and the fabric was printed with scans of sticky notes collected over the past twenty years. Nuannuan put the broken piece of the metal stick next to her father's work badge. The reflection at the broken end overlapped with the small sun sticky note, casting a huge light and shadow on the wall - that was not the "Eye of Eros", but countless sausages and popsicles holding hands, gently shaking in the light of the rainy night.
(Many years later, when Nuan Nuan became the chief architect of the "Human Fireworks Operating System", she would always write in the code comments: "All great system patches start with the smell of sausage in the morning, the 0.3 second pause when delivering food, and the heartbeat of everyone who is willing to leave half a sausage for a stranger." And on her desk, there is always a sausage-shaped fountain pen, with three names engraved on the inside of the pen cap: Li Xiaoming, Kai Lan, and all the deliverymen with warm heartbeats.)