Volume 1 Chaos Comes Chapter 3: Flock of Pigeons
I was a little dazed when I walked out of the building. At noon, my life trajectory and the fate of the entire human race completed an important fork, and completely rushed into a chaotic future.
Ai Bishui was half a meter in front of me. She looked in a good mood and was humming a song.
“Just a speck of dust within the galaxy…”
I tried hard to recall the melody, but I couldn't remember the title of the song.
On the way back to the dormitory, I had to pass the square in the center of the campus, where there were colorful pigeons. Sometimes I would feed them some broken biscuits.
I noticed that the girl in front of me quickened her pace after seeing the flock of pigeons, and took out a small piece of iron from her coat pocket while walking towards them.
It was a blues harmonica with wooden frets painted black and very finely crafted.
She brought the harmonica to her lips, held the body of the instrument with her right hand, and moved her left hand over the frets.
“Beep~beep~beep~beep~beep~”
The pigeons beside her were startled by her and flew away in all directions, like water splashed by pebbles.
Ai Bishui ignored the birds' reactions. She jumped lightly in the square, playing different scales and melodies in different positions. Her agile movements became faster and faster, causing ripples among the flock of pigeons.
Well, you shouldn’t be that happy just because you were praised by the teacher.
In an instant, all the pigeons in the square flew up together, circling in a dense formation at the height of the treetops, and mottled shadows rolled on the snow-covered ground.
Five colors form a brocade covering the ground, and thousands of bells suddenly ring in the sky.
"Beep, beep, beep, beep; beep, beep~~"
She increased the frequency of the piano music, and the pigeons' originally neat formation became increasingly chaotic. At some point, the chaotic flock of birds suddenly collapsed, scattering and floating back to the ground like fireworks exploding.
I stood there, watching all this in a daze.
The girl ran towards me with a smile on her face, breathing heavily as she spoke.
“Finally succeeded!”
Success of what? I am stupid.
"Did you know that a flock of birds is the simplest self-organizing system?" She took out a handkerchief from her harmonica case and said while wiping the harmonica.
I pretended to know and nodded.
"Large numbers of pigeons can fly together very densely because each individual only needs to pay attention to the movements of a few of their companions. The entire flock is automatically organized by this simple interaction, and complex behaviors emerge."
I remember a friend once told me that the same is true for the nervous system. Human intelligence emerges from the intersection of a large number of electric currents.
"I just input the signal at a specific space and time according to the theory written in that article."
It is said that pigeons have very sensitive hearing, and the loud sound of the harmonica is a very strong signal.
"You mean... just now you made them show a continuous change from balance to chaos..."
I don't know if this counts as a second-order phase transition.
"…Were you looking at them when I bumped into you earlier?"
"Yeah, it seems like I was thinking about how to play the harmonica at that time."
Ai Bishui and I added each other as friends at the entrance of the library and then parted ways. It was already close to afternoon, and I was going to go back to the dormitory to put down my bag and go out to eat something, while she was going to continue reading.
There are more and more students on the small path in the dormitory area, and the crowd is gathering towards the apartment. I am mixed in with them and I am very worried about meeting someone I don’t know but need to say hello to, especially when we are walking towards each other in an empty corridor.
As I entered the dormitory, I saw a dark figure packing his luggage. He had a lean and well-proportioned figure, wearing a well-fitting windbreaker and outdoor pants, and had neat short hair. He was counting his equipment while muttering to himself.
That was my roommate Xu Xia. When I went out in the morning, he must have had breakfast and was taking a nap.
Xu Xia is from Wuhan. People from Wuhan will die if they don’t eat breakfast. This is definitely a rare trait among college students.
"Do you know that skipping breakfast is chronic suicide?"
"If you say so, breathing is also chronic suicide. In fact, all oxidation reactions in the human body are chronic suicide..."
Our dormitory was not small for a triple room, but it was still very crowded: firstly because of his outdoor gear scattered everywhere, and secondly because of my various books scattered everywhere.
Another roommate of ours was Huang Jing, a native of this city, who had been living away from the dormitory since his sophomore year. But the atmosphere in the dormitory was quite harmonious. We used to call him Jingye, but he personally didn't like this name.
"The God of Learning is going to study again?"
"Yeah, lazy dog, why don't you learn from your father?"
I pushed the door open and was about to put my schoolbag on the back of the chair. When I passed by Xu Xia, I punched him on the hard chest.
"Where are you guys going this time?"
Xu Xia is a member of the Expedition Association and goes hiking or mountain climbing every holiday.
"Wugong Mountain is at the border of Jiangxi and Hunan." He said as he punched me back. Although he didn't use much force, it still made me tremble a little.
I sat down in my chair and tried to sort out what I had just discussed with the teacher, but the only image of that girl flashed through my mind.
Oh my god, what is going on?
"Let's go." Xu Xia left with a backpack half his height. I was so lost in my thoughts that I forgot to respond.
Let’s go eat first.
Ai Bishui has a very regular schedule. She wakes up at 7 am and goes to bed at 11 pm every day.
Before getting up every morning, she likes to smell her own scent in bed. It is a warm fragrance, and she thinks it will become addictive. After getting up and washing her face, she is used to putting on makeup, which is actually just applying lipstick and concealer, and at most drawing eyebrows. At the same time, she admires her face from the front camera of her mobile phone.
She knew she was beautiful from a young age. Not only because of the compliments and attention from people around her since middle school, but also because she thought she was beautiful when she saw herself in the mirror.
Like all young girls, Ai Bishui thought that this kind of beauty was eternal, just like the old saying goes: beauty lies in the bones, not in the skin.
Every time she thought back to middle school, she would recall that her homeroom teacher once announced, "Girls are naturally disadvantaged in physics." Every time she thought of this, a female scientist would , and it was not Marie Curie.
That was the inventor of frequency hopping technology and the first woman to show her body to the world: Hedy Lamarr.
If you search on the Internet, you will find that it is more often called the mother of WIFI, although the patent is in the hands of the Australian government.
If humans didn't need wireless Internet access every day like oxygen , who would care about her contribution? Nudity is definitely more attractive than brains.
In Ai Bishui's first physics class, she was surprised to find that she didn't understand the class, but she didn't need to listen. The abstract concepts and physical images the teacher talked about seemed to have been input into her mind before, and listening to the class was just to open the seal of her memory.
She absorbed all the science content in the six years of junior high and high school like drinking water. The ease with which she acquired knowledge gave her a strong motivation to explore nature, so much so that she rejected the invitation from her physics teacher to participate in competitions, after all, competitions only required constant repetition.
She also hates suggestions like junior classes or skipping grades. Since she has more than enough time to learn, why should she fill her time with knowledge in a certain direction?
Einstein didn't skip a grade in middle school., the world is so big, there is life besides physics.
Moreover, she vaguely felt that even if she didn't speed up, others would not be able to catch up.
After being admitted to her ideal university without much trouble, she absorbed all kinds of knowledge from the environment every day and thought about what she could do with them.
On an ordinary winter morning, she got up as usual, went to the library to read for a while, and then went to the cafeteria to eat a few big meat buns for breakfast and lunch. After eating, she set out for the physics building, but was attracted by a group of pigeons and then knocked down by a boy.
The boy was thin and frail, with fluffy, slightly curly hair and glasses that were one-third the size of his head. He was wearing a large black fleece work coat and a pure white hooded sweatshirt with a cat skeleton painted on it.
She looked at the boy's distorted features and found that he was also secretly looking at her.
If the facial features were stretched out, this face wouldn't be ugly, she thought, but it was useless even though it looked good.
She had been accustomed to all kinds of male gazes since she was a child, some of which were sharp and some were gentle. She didn't hate them, but the excessive attention always made her feel like she was being scrutinized or an exhibit in a window.
When she showed her talent in science, her peers' opinions of her were divided into two camps: love and jealousy. These feelings imposed on her put more pressure on her, and she could only respond politely, although those responses often caused various misunderstandings.
Thinking of this, she pulled her thoughts back to avoid falling into an annoying thought cycle. She was herself, she could do whatever she wanted, and what others thought of her was their business.
She is an independent person. She has the right to be beautiful on her own, the right to explore the world, and the right to use her smart mind to change the world. If she has the opportunity, she will do so.
She saw the boy's Adam's apple moving and he wanted to speak but couldn't, and she felt a little pitiful.
"Aren't you going to help me up?"
