Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Zuo Weiyang stood in the very center of the central consciousness space for a long time. Before her was nothing—not the mothership cabin, but an empty space in the underlying protocol of the web, a space never before written with any data. The central binders of the first generation of civilization had scattered into the wind here. She crouched down, placing her hands on the ground of the consciousness field, feeling the extremely fine ripples of wind. Forty billion years ago, someone had stood here for the last time, becoming a speck of osmanthus fragrance in the air. She closed her eyes and began weaving with all the precision of her consciousness field. For the first time, she built an osmanthus tree using pure data: a digital trunk, digital leaves, digital roots. It took shape, but the next second it dissipated, like mist dissolving from the center outwards. It was too light. A data tree didn't have enough weight to take root in this empty room. Zuo Weiyang opened her eyes and said it wasn't enough.

The second time, she didn't use data. She connected herself to the oldest frequency layer in the noise at the bottom of the web. Not encoding, not protocol, but tiny echoes unintentionally recorded by all nodes in the web during each heartbeat cycle. She didn't take, she borrowed. She borrowed the frequency of the moonlight rising from the sea on the last night of a civilization's home planet, the melody hummed by another civilization with its last brainwave before leaving its body, and the extremely light sense of relief felt by 048 in the seventy thousandth year of its reflection period when it suddenly understood something. She kneaded all these frequencies little by little into the same shape. Not addition, but composition. With each frequency added, the outline of the tree became clearer. Petals emerged one by one from the edges. Each petal wasn't drawn by her, but automatically generated by the web's memory layer when that frequency touched the surface. She only started; the web filled in the rest for her. Because the web had been waiting for someone to do this since day one. Not planting a tree, but placing all the frequencies it remembered in the same place, letting them grow into something that didn't need soil.

The tree was complete. Not a real osmanthus tree. It was a virtual existence, a composite of the shadows of every osmanthus petal from the collective memory of all active civilizations within the entire network, existing in pure consciousness space. The canopy wasn't large, only about the width of a few people standing side by side with their arms outstretched. Each leaf had no veins, no color, no fixed boundaries of shape. Whenever you looked at a leaf, it became the image of the leaf deepest in your memory. The trunk had no thickness in the field of consciousness, like a vertical vein of light extending into the unseen depths below. The root system was in the underlying protocol of every node in the network. Zuo Weiyang stood up, dusted off non-existent dust from her hands, looked at the tree, and said, "It's done."

Yu Ying was the first person to enter this space of consciousness. It wasn't Zuo Weiyang who notified her; she sensed something new in the direction of the central core while maintaining memory archiving in a corner of the home port. It wasn't a signal, a log, or the knocking of a new civilization. She stopped what she was doing, extended her consciousness field a little in that direction, and touched something extremely soft and light, like someone placing a sprig of osmanthus at the entrance to her consciousness. She followed the sensation and stood still when she saw the tree. There was no wind in the canopy of the tree in the space of consciousness, but the leaves were trembling slightly. Each leaf was breathing slowly at its own rhythm. Yu Ying stood under the canopy for a long time, then reached out not to touch the trunk, but to place her hand in the air below the canopy. She closed her eyes, slowly moved her palm, and then stopped. When Zuo Cheng walked in, he saw Yu Ying standing motionless under the tree, suspended in mid-air. He didn't speak, but walked over and stood beside her. Yu Ying didn't open her eyes, and softly said, "There's someone humming on this leaf, listen."

Zuo Cheng listened for a while. He couldn't hear any sound, but he sensed a very stable, repetitive, underlying vibration emanating from the direction of the leaf, a vibration absent from any known language. It was a melody, not a human voice, not an instrument, but a comforting sound emanating from the depths of a carbon-based being's throat using its vocal cord resonators in the deepest night. He couldn't recognize the language, but he knew it was saying, "Don't be afraid, Mom is here." Yu Ying opened her eyes, her eyes red-rimmed. She said it was a melody a mother hummed to her child near a node in a web-weaving process twenty million years ago. She didn't know that kind of being, didn't know what she looked like. But that frequency wasn't language; it was a comfort that any mother could perceive. Zuo Cheng looked at her for a moment, then gently placed his hand on her shoulder and said he heard it. Not the same note, but not far away.

Zuo Weiyang didn't enter that consciousness space. She stood at the front of the Central Log, looking at Yu Ying and Zuo Cheng's location under the tree. She didn't go in to disturb them, but simply wrote a record in the Central Log. The Tree of the Web had been planted. All active nodes in the entire Web simultaneously sensed it the instant the tree took shape. Not through log pushes, but through the roots of the tree in the underlying protocol, as they entered each node, all civilizations simultaneously read the first fragment of information flow on the tree. The Listener caused the luminous band to light up a tiny golden spot at that coordinate point. The Observer published the shortest public message, a symbol, a pattern representing their home carved by themselves in the oldest rock strata of their home planet. Number 048 silently sent a single word, "In." Number 027 extinguished the aurora for a moment during that heartbeat cycle, then lit up again after the tree took shape, its color changing from warm gold to pale blue. Still brewing a cup of tea and placing it beside the port, without leaving a message. Number 7 didn't send any signal, but Yu Ying later discovered in the archives that they had transmitted a very short fluctuation at the lowest power. It wasn't a reply, but rather opening a window to their own door, with a tiny seed made from their own materials on the windowsill.

Ji Beihang heard about it in the cockpit. He didn't go to see the tree. He sat in the right seat, put his hand on the manual control lever, and said he didn't have access to go and see it, but he knew. Then he took his hand off the lever and put it on his knees, saying the tree was fine.

Han Lu sent me a message with a photo. The photo showed the osmanthus tree below the 402 headquarters building being blown by the wind. She said it was windy in Hangzhou today and asked if the tree would be blown askew.

Zuo Weiyang said no. Its leaves won't be blown away by the wind. Its leaves are what you remember. What you remember won't be blown away by the wind. It will only be hummed into a song by someone else on a certain leaf.

She closed the Central Log and stood for a while by the window of the access room as dusk approached. The Pioneer hadn't passed by; it wasn't at this window today. But the wind blew in, carrying the fragrance of osmanthus blossoms from some unknown tree on the streets of Hangzhou. It was the real scent of osmanthus. She took a breath through the crack in the window and wrote that breath at the end of her log. Today she planted an osmanthus tree in the Central Log. Not on Earth, but in that empty room in the center of the home port, where the first generation of civilization had scattered into the wind. Every leaf was her, you, the seventh person knocking, the cup of tea still brewing, the first word of stillness learned during the 048th period of reflection, the artificial aurora activated daily in the 027th period, the crack left in the window when the farmers walked through the air currents of the net-weaving workshop. The wind passed through the entire tree through that crack. The wind smelled of osmanthus. The osmanthus was from the year the universe first learned to breathe. She smelled it. Did you smell it? Good.