Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

When Ji Beihang stood up from the right seat for the last time, all the instruments in the cockpit were lit. The Xinghai was waiting for routine self-inspection at its home port berth. Su Kuang sat in the left seat, the manual control lever in his hand but not pushing it. He didn't look back at Ji Beihang as he stood up, but simply pulled all four volumes of the pilot's manual from under the instruments and placed them next to the left seat.

Ji Beihang said, "I changed one thing. Not coordinates. I changed one coordinate to a heartbeat. A heartbeat is a direction you can find without navigation." The last page of Volume Four was open.

Su Kuang stared at the line of text without speaking. The only sound in the cockpit was the electrical hum of the Quantum Heart's deepest core. After a long while, he said, "Aren't you leaving me with the last coordinate?"

"Nothing." Ji Beihang patted the seat cushion and placed his hand on the back of the chair. "Your coordinates must be your own. What I leave in the cockpit is this: before each push of the control lever, think about the person standing in front of the door you most want to return to. You don't need to say it aloud. Just think it. After thinking it, push the lever. You'll find that what separates the spaceship and the direction isn't a quantum field, but that person."

Su Kuang took his right hand off the control lever and placed it on his knee. He said, "I'll be there. Not in your place, but because I'm here. You've completed all the hardest parts of getting things onto the track. The ones that are even harder than mine are yet to come."

Ji Beihang paused at the cockpit door as he stepped out. He didn't look back at Su Kuang, nor at the four volumes of pilot's manuals. He said, "There was a small patch of dust on the manual control panel; I wiped it off when I stood up just now. You're welcome. Every pilot cleans the area around their seat before leaving. It's the rule. I just set it up."

He walked out, the door closing behind him. Shen Yiming wrote a new entry in the new route log in the communications cabin. He wrote that Ji Beihang was retiring today. He handed all four volumes of the pilot's manual to the new captain. I watched him stand up from outside the bridge, and he stood in the exact same posture as when he manually maneuvered the Pioneer into orbit on Triton with an error of less than twenty meters that year. His legs weren't bent, his hands weren't shaking. Only there were a few more lines and whites at the corners of his eyes. The new captain later told me that when his hand was on the control stick, he felt that someone had already pushed it through every step of the previous journey.

Shen Yiming paused here for a moment. Then he continued, "I used to think retirement was a full stop. Now I realize it isn't. The full stop is that Ji Beihang no longer holds the control stick. But his hand is still there, maintaining the push-stick posture in the cockpit air. When Su Kuang grips the control stick, only the residual warmth of the area Ji Beihang wiped clean remains between his fingers. Retirement isn't a full stop, it's a fingerprint. The fingerprints on the control stick can be wiped away with a cloth. But the fingerprints on the person in the cockpit can't be wiped away."

Ji Beihang walked slowly along the home port corridor. The light stream of the home port flowed evenly on both sides, and with each step he took, the color changed from deep blue to light gold and then back to deep blue. He walked for a long time before stopping at the observation platform at the core edge.

Yu Ying walked over from the end of the corridor and stood beside him. She said, "I want you to watch the replay in your central memory space. It's a complete record of every single manual operation you've ever performed in your life. Starting from the very first time."

Ji Beihang looked at her and then said okay.

The replay starts from the very beginning. For the first time, he test-flew the first quantum field demonstrator within the atmosphere. The demonstrator was less than thirty meters long; the Quantum Heart was the initial prototype, with power only one-thousandth that of the Xinghai. When he pushed the stick, the engine feedback lag was nearly two seconds, causing the aircraft to sway before climbing. His forehead hit the corner of the instrument panel, and blood flowed down, blurring half of his eye.

The second paragraph. During Pioneer's first deep-space test, he was performing a manual yaw in lunar orbit. The instrument panel showed he was seven seconds behind schedule. He tapped his middle finger seven times with his thumb and then pushed the lever to make up for it.

The third paragraph. Pioneer entered orbit on Triton. He operated the manual control console for nearly forty minutes, with a final error of less than twenty meters. After pushing the final lever, he didn't remove his hand from the control stick, sitting quietly for a few seconds. Sweat beaded on his forehead, but he didn't wipe it away.

The last paragraph. The Starship docked at that nameless ocean planet. He lowered the rainbow ring to extremely low power and used the frequency sensed by the bioluminescence of shallow-water organisms to draw a smiley face on the water's surface. The sea surface lit up with uneven bioluminescence. A crooked, fluorescent smiley face rose from the seabed. He said, "Roger." Then he locked the control lever.

After all the replays were over, Ji Beihang stood on the observation platform for a long time. He said, "The difference between my first and last time wasn't that the instrument panel was no longer broken. It was that my last operation wasn't controlling the aircraft, but drawing a smile on the surface of the water. That wasn't an operation; it was a greeting. A pilot's last operation should be a greeting, not a goodbye."

Yu Ying said, "The greetings are written. Received."

As Ji Beihang stepped out of the observation platform, he happened to encounter someone in the corridor. Zuo Weiyang was projecting her consciousness at the end of the corridor, wearing an old-fashioned T-shirt from Zuo Cheng, with her hands in her pockets.

Ji Beihang paused for a moment. He said, "Weren't you in the access room?"

"I stood for a while next to the retirement ceremony today," Zuo Weiyang said. "I wanted to say something to you. Not goodbye. It's about that last page of Volume Four of the driver's manual, the one you mentioned has a coordinate on it."

Ji Beihang looked at her.

That coordinate is the windowsill of the access room on the top floor of a building in Hangzhou. Because every time you fly over Hangzhou, you flash in the sky, and I wave on the ground. The coordinates are simultaneously fixed by two directions. I set your sky, and you set mine ground.

Ji Beihang didn't speak immediately. He looked down at his hands. He said, "I thought no one would know that I was flashing."

"Someone knows," Zuo Weiyang smiled. "I've known since I was very young. So that coordinate isn't the windowsill, but someone who's stood on that windowsill for years. You define her earth. She defines your sky. Retirement is like stepping from the sky back to the earth. You don't need to look up from the ground."

Ji Beihang said, "I will disappear."

I know. Zuo Weiyang pulled her hand out of her pocket and waved it at him. Just like before.

Ji Beihang remained silent. He stood there, watching Zuo Weiyang's consciousness gradually fade in the light of the main port, like a wisp of golden dust dissipating into the light at the end of the corridor. He turned around and continued walking deeper into the main port.

As he passed the outer perimeter of the home port, he saw the Xinghai docked at its berth through the observation window. The quantum field conduit array on the hull was undergoing low-power pulse charging, and rainbow halos flowed gently along the conduit paths. The lights were on in the cockpit. The area of ​​the manual control console was not obstructed, and he could see a hand resting firmly on the control lever.

It's the hand on the left.

Ji Beihang watched for a while. Then he placed his palm on the observation window, feeling the vibrations of the quantum field pulses transmitted through the hull to the bulkhead. It wasn't the temperature; it was the fingerprints. Not the kind of fingerprints he left on the control lever, but the imprint of the action he made the first time he pushed the lever, already etched on the joints of each finger.

He lowered his hand and stepped out of the cabin. A beam of light converged at the end of the corridor. He walked in, and ahead lay a larger area of ​​the home port. He stopped at the fork in the road, glanced at the corridor to the right, and then turned left.

The headlights in the corridor turned on one by one. He didn't turn around.