At the start, I had to choose one of four options, and I immediately picked the Brahmin from the cou

But from that day on, changes at Xiao Zhou's workstation spread at a visible speed. First, a figurine of an anime girl in a black sailor uniform appeared on his desk, and then a row of colorful stickers were pasted on the side of the monitor, all of which were virtual streamers whose names Xiao Zhang couldn't recall.

Later, his phone wallpaper changed from the system default blue gradient to an illustration of a two-dimensional girl. The illustration was exquisite, and the texture of each layer of lace on the Lolita skirt on the character was clearly visible.

Dr. He first noticed this during the code review meeting on the twelfth day. Xiao Zhou had just finished reporting the test data for the graph neural network prototype verification—the F1 score was a full 0.05 points higher than the decision tree, and the convergence speed was also two days faster than expected—then he closed his laptop, and the VTuber sticker on the screen was right in Dr. He's line of sight.

Dr. He stared at the sticker for several seconds, then slowly took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with the hem of his shirt, put them back on, glanced at them again to make sure he wasn't mistaken, and then asked in a very restrained tone, "Xiao Zhou, have you been sleeping too little lately?"

"It was alright, I slept for four hours last night." Xiao Zhou said, yawning, with a few tears of sleepiness still glistening in the corners of his eyes. "And I've recently discovered that I'm particularly efficient at coding after 3 a.m.

What do you do after get off work?

"Nothing much, just watching anime, playing games, and writing some other code." Xiao Zhou paused, his tone suddenly becoming more serious. "By the way, Dr. He, do you know how to find a relatively active anime and manga technology community on GitHub? I wanted to add a dynamic lighting system to that VTuber's rendering pipeline, but I couldn't get the ambient occlusion of the hair right. I wanted to find someone to discuss it with."

Dr. He remained silent for a while, then turned to look at Chen Qiming, his eyes filled with complex emotions. Chen Qiming exchanged a glance with him, his lips moved, and he silently uttered two words.

Xiao Zhang didn't understand the lip movements, but Xiao Li did. She suppressed a laugh, buried her face behind the monitor, and her shoulders trembled.

Actually, everyone knows what's going on.

Those who have been in the computer industry for a long time have more or less heard the long-circulated joke—the real top programmers are either bald, or anime-loving, or both bald and anime-loving, and a very few exceptionally talented individuals will suddenly awaken a third form at some stage in their lives and begin to have an extraordinary interest in women's clothing.

This isn't a scientific law, but in programmer communities around the world, this phenomenon has been verified by countless real-life examples so much that it has become a tacit, humorous consensus among insiders.

Some say this is the curse of the great Turing. This founder of computer science, besides leaving behind that epoch-making paper and the machine that cracked the Enigma code, left the world with the most talked-about topic: his tragic experience of being chemically castrated at the end of his life.

A genius, rejected by society for his sexual orientation, ultimately committed suicide by biting into a poisoned apple. Programmers half-jokingly, half-seriously believe that the spirit of Turing will especially favor young people who show extraordinary talent in the world of code, and the side effect of this favor is a subtle curiosity about gender boundaries—from two-dimensional paper figures to three-dimensional women's clothing, just one step away.

As for John von Neumann, he doesn't have the same tragic legends as Turing, but this pioneer of computer architecture has a more well-known characteristic: his hair had already receded to the back of his head before he was thirty years old.

Meanwhile, his mind was simultaneously driving revolutionary breakthroughs in several completely different fields, including computer architecture, game theory, quantum mechanics, and nuclear weapons development. Many programmers in later generations inherited Feng Xiaogang's receding hairline, but none inherited his brain capable of running seven projects at once. Those who truly inherited their ancestor's talent often find themselves, as their hairlines begin to recede, suddenly developing an inexplicable passion for certain niche subcultures—like anime, mechanical keyboards, or writing poetry alone late at night in front of a command-line interface.

Dr. He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with the hem of his shirt, put them back on, glanced again at the cartoon girl on Xiao Zhou's screen that was spinning automatically, and finally sighed resignedly. He himself wasn't entirely innocent—in the locked drawer at the bottom of his desk, there was a set of limited-edition figurines he had brought back from Akihabara when he was young; the box had never been opened, and he had taken them with him when he moved three times.

He went through a similar phase when he was young, but back then the internet wasn't as developed and the anime/manga community wasn't as accessible as it is now, so his "contamination" manifested in another direction—he once spent two whole months of his spare time writing a graphical interface for his operating system in a programming language, just to put a picture of his favorite anime character at the time on the startup screen.

He had never told anyone in the team about this, but as he looked at the virtual girl in a sailor uniform on Xiao Zhou's screen, he suddenly felt a sense of disorientation, as if he had been struck by a time tunnel.

Chen Qiming walked back from the whiteboard, picked up his now-cold instant coffee, took a sip, and calmly concluded, "Whether it's anime or crossdressing, as long as it doesn't interfere with work, it doesn't matter. Last month, when he was reconstructing the graph neural network, did any of you know he was writing the VTuber rendering pipeline after get off work? You didn't, which means it didn't affect his work. Now, the NLP matching accuracy of the entire intelligent recruitment system is approaching 90%, which is almost 6 percentage points higher than our commercial competitors. He deserves at least a third of the credit for this—he was the first to propose the graph neural network solution, and he also developed the dynamic window semantic segmentation. Even if he fills his desk with figurines, plasters the walls with posters, and wears Lolita fashion to work every day, as long as he can maintain this level of output, I personally have no objections."

Xiao Zhang chimed in quietly, "To be honest, I'd love to be corrupted like that too. I've been studying graph neural networks for half a month, and I still haven't grasped the message passing mechanism. He, on the other hand, went from beginner to refactoring in two weeks, and even learned a real-time rendering pipeline—I'd be willing to be kissed by Turing for that kind of efficiency."