Soul Decoding

"Passenger" is a science fiction about reality and imagination. Chen Yuan, an Asian astronomer living in Chile, studies the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the periphery of the Milky Way at a radio observatory in the Atacama Desert. In order to prove a "hydrogen spherical shell" that had never been observed, he used eight free parameters - and his wife, physicist Isabella warned him: This is not a discovery, but an invention. After a car accident, Isabella died in the basement of the research station. Chen Yuan did not bury her. He set his wife's bioelectromagnetic data as a template and let the antenna array continue to search for matches in the full-band noise. The system gives the result: 5σ. Statistically, this means "almost certain". But he didn't know whether this was the reverberation of his deceased wife or the echo created by the algorithm in his despair. When the paper came into public view, Chen Yuan was involved in a debate beyond science: If particle physics can use template matching to discover the Higgs boson, why can't the same method be used to find the soul? He is simultaneously a hero, a charlatan, a martyr and an exile - depending on who decodes him. The story attempts to ask a rather sensitive question: when the scientific method itself has become a sophisticated instrument of self-deception, and when enough parameters can carve any desired reality out of the noise, can we still distinguish between what is reality and what is imagination? In this story, I don't want to explore the metaphysical issue of whether the soul exists. I just want to explore the process of human nature solidifying an obsession.