Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

The quantum light stream at the homeport rotates at a rate of one revolution every forty-two hours and seventeen minutes. The Starsea is parked on the inner platform of the homeport, its quantum field engine emitting a long, extremely low hum at minimum power. It's not preparing to start up, but rather unwilling to be quiet.

Zuo Cheng stood alone by the observation porthole. Before him lay the Milky Way, not the milky white band of mist seen from Earth, but a view extending outward from the core of the home port. The entire Milky Way, against the background of quantum light flow, resembled a giant, slowly rotating wheel of light, each star a visible bright spot, forming an arc of light spanning the entire field of vision.

He remembered the night he stood in front of the whiteboard in the incubator. The starry sky outside the window was the same one he saw today, only closer. Back then, he wrote, "We need to do something different," and now he was no longer standing in any building on that planet's surface.

Yu Ying projected herself onto his side from the consciousness space of her home port. She and he stood there for a while, without speaking, looking at the same Milky Way through the same porthole.

The home port rotated once. Twice.

When the third lap came to him, she said her first words:

"The Xinghai will depart tomorrow."

Zuo Cheng didn't turn around. He said, "I know. Ji Beihang said he's finished the last chapter. The driver's manual doesn't need any more revisions."

"Then what else haven't you done?"

Zuo Cheng thought for a moment. The pause was long, long enough for the light current at the home port to have circled halfway around again. He said, "Let's go downstairs and get a cup of soy milk. Not the kind Aunt Han Lu makes. It's the cheapest instant soy milk powder from the convenience store downstairs from the electronics factory. It might be discontinued. But the taste is still there. In the soil of that cactus on the rooftop."

Yu Ying did not speak.

He continued, "There was a packet of unopened soy milk powder buried in the soil of that cactus. It wasn't meant to be drunk. I bought it, put it in my pocket all day, and then placed it next to the flowerpot on the rooftop, forgetting to drink it. Then the wind blew it into the soil. I tried to dig it up the morning I left that electronics factory, but after digging for a while, I couldn't find it. So I stopped digging. Because I knew it would be absorbed by the cactus's roots, and it would live for me."

"It has lived on in your place until now."

Zuo Cheng finally turned around: "Yes. It doesn't need to be replaced now."

The bridge lights on the Starsea were off. The Quantum Heart hummed softly. Ji Beihang's pilot's manual and Shen Yiming's diary were piled on the table next to the whiteboard.

Zuo Weiyang used a consciousness jump to project from the access room in Hangzhou to the home port. Without a physical body, her consciousness field paused briefly outside the observation porthole of the Xinghai. Zuo Cheng saw her in the reflection of the porthole glass—not a figure, but a very faint golden arc. He knew it was her; not just saw it, he knew it.

Zuo Cheng said to the light, "The Starsea departs tomorrow. I remember what you said; you said I wouldn't need to push the door anymore, and I could stand by the door and give directions to the next person coming in."

The golden arc flashed slightly, not as an answer, but as if to say, "I'm still listening."

Zuo Cheng said, "Then I'll tell you a conclusion too. The person standing by the door doesn't need a spaceship to give directions. So it's not that he's stopped flying. It's that after flying for half his life, he's discovered that some roads can be traversed without a spaceship."

The golden arc didn't flash. But she didn't leave.

Zuo Cheng: "You go back first. It's almost dawn. When the soy milk arrives tomorrow, please write in the Central Diary: 'Dad said he's home.'"

The golden arc disappeared. Not vanished, but dimmed slowly on its own, like a lamp, leaving only a tiny golden dot in the end.

The last thing Zuo Cheng did on the Starsea was to go to the whiteboard on the bridge when it was late at night. The whiteboard was already full, starting with "We're going to do something different" from the incubator, to the title of Ji Beihang's last chapter, to his own "Okay". There were no blanks on the whiteboard.

He flipped it over.

The back of the whiteboard was blank.

He picked up the pen, but didn't write. He placed the pen in the whiteboard slot, without the pen touching the board. Then he stood facing the blank whiteboard for a moment.

He said to the window, "This book isn't finished yet. Because it wasn't written by one person, but by everyone who has opened the door and everyone who is now walking in. The first sower wrote the first chapter: Good. The founder wrote the second chapter: Tried it, not the answer. We've written it all. And whoever comes after, I don't know, will continue writing: The wind is still blowing."

He stood there for a long time.

Then he wrote the last sentence he had written on the whiteboard on the back. Not with a marker, but with the gold crayon that Zuo Weiyang had given him when she was three years old. The crayon was so short that only a small section remained, and it still bore the fingerprints of her little hand from when she was three. He squeezed it, fingerprint upon fingerprint, and finished writing the words.

The handwriting he used was different from the first line he wrote on the whiteboard in the incubator thirty-one years ago, but the strokes were the same:

"The light in front of the house is always on. The next person doesn't have to fumble in the dark when they open the door."

He finished writing and put the pen back in the slot. The quantum light outside the window circled once, then circled again to be directly in front of him.

At the end of this stream of light, there was a tiny golden dot, not in the fibers of the home port, but Zuo Weiyang, who used her pure consciousness pulse to light up the way home for him at the end of the quantum light stream.

He said to the light, "I'm home."

It wasn't addressed to the home port. It wasn't addressed to the Starship. It was addressed to her.

Outside the window, all the active nodes of the entire network flickered slightly at different frequencies at different distances. They weren't responding to him; they were always there, but only visible in the deep of night.

Night has passed. Dawn has not yet broken. But the soy milk is already on its way—not the one downstairs, but the one that auntie in Hangzhou just cooked, being transmitted to the port gate at a constant temperature via a zero-delay quantum entanglement channel. Keeped warm throughout the journey.

Zuo Weiyang wrote in the Central Diary: "Central operation continues. The entire network of civilizations is normal. Cross-central synchronization latency is zero. The countdown to the home port has been completely eliminated; it's not paused, but rather the candidate initiated the binding on their legal coming-of-age day. The binding was successful, and the central operation has resumed. As usual, today is not much different from yesterday. But yesterday, Dad said he was home. Today, his soy milk and mine were boiled with the same water. They taste the same. Because the water was drawn from the same well, the one under the osmanthus tree. The first sower said the water was in the well under the osmanthus tree. He wasn't wrong. I tasted it. It's sweet."

After she finished writing, she didn't shut down her central sensing. She stood by the window in the access room for a while. Outside, it was early morning in Hangzhou; the streetlights were still on, and the osmanthus branches trembled gently in the breeze. The Pioneer was passing over Hangzhou at a very low orbit, its tracklight flashing once. Twice. Once more than usual.

She raised her cup of soy milk towards the lamp.

Zuo Cheng stood by the porthole of the Starship at its home port, a cup in his hand. The temperature was just right.

The wind is still blowing.

The osmanthus flowers have just started to bloom.