Engine of Silence

In 2035, China lit up the world's first commercial controllable nuclear fusion power station - codenamed "Silent Engine" - deep in the Gobi Desert in Jiuquan, Gansu. This power station ended the era of fossil energy for mankind and made China the center of the global energy order. Three years later, in 2038, Chen Ji, chief engineer of the power plant's core maintenance team, captured a set of signal waveforms that should not exist during a routine plasma diagnosis. It's not equipment noise, it's not electromagnetic interference, it has a clear internal structure - and even more disturbingly, when the operator sends control commands to the reactor, the signal "responds" in a weak but discernible way. Chen Ji named it "Echo". He tried to present this discovery at an internal meeting, but found that he was not facing a scientific discussion, but an invisible wall: Fang Cheng, the safety director of the power station, was worried that the leakage of the information would trigger a shutdown review; Zheng Jiahe, the liaison officer of the Ministry of Science and Technology, warned him that any uncontrollable disclosure of information may set back the global energy transformation process by ten years; and the external theoretical physicist Wen Yutang he invited fell into a deeper silence after preliminary analysis - because the characteristics of the echo signal were approaching a restricted area that the physics community dared not discuss openly. The traces are caught between the scientist's truth-seeking instinct and the engineer's protective responsibility. He must answer a question with no standard answer: What should you do when you discover something beyond human understanding in the machine you maintain, and making this discovery public will shake the energy foundation of the entire world?