Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

On the second day of the exchange conference, the light membrane under the Weaving Tree no longer only contained tree shadows.

When Zuo Weiyang entered the central consciousness space early in the morning, she was stunned for a moment. The light membrane was covered with things, each with a small piece of paper next to it. The handwriting was different; some were handwritten, while others were tactile imprints of consciousness directly engraved into the paper fibers.

She crouched down to look at the nearest slip of paper. The handwriting on it was crooked and shaky. It said, "This is something from the southernmost beach of our planet. It's been there for about 20,000 years, never connected to any network. Like a translucent gel, it has no temperature, no metabolism, no bioelectric signals. It stays in the sand, submerged by the tide, and continues to stay there after the tide recedes. Nobody knows what it is."

Zuo Weiyang stared at the clump of gelatinous substance for a while. It lay quietly on the light membrane, its edges shimmering with a translucent glow. It simply remained there.

The projection of the listener sat not far away. The listener said that this lump of gel had been passed down through generations in their civilization, and no one knew how it appeared on that beach. They tried to analyze its composition, but the results were different each time, as if its answer would change depending on how it was analyzed. Eventually, they gave up. Not because it wasn't important, but because they found that every time they went to the beach, they would sit next to that lump of gel. Many people throughout the civilization's history had memories of that beach that revolved around its coordinates. It wasn't a thing; it was a punctuation mark in the quietest corner of the beach.

The color representing the listener deepened slightly. Their civilization has a saying: the only place in the universe where one will never become lonely is where something does nothing but still exists.

In her central diary, Zuo Weiyang wrote: A 20,000-year-old lump of gelatinous substance had no purpose, no owner, and had never used a net. It simply stayed in a corner. For something that didn't need to know anything, simply being there was enough. She added a line in the blank space of the paper: Understood. And it has always been there.

The second item was a section of a bridge pier. Its surface was rough, the concrete pouring technique extremely primitive, and it had been corroded by salt and sand for a very long time. It was about the diameter of a person's arm, and its height was less than shoulder-high. What was truly striking was a crack on its surface. The crack was about a finger's width, and it had been repaired. The repair material was a slightly darker color, and the application was unprofessional, as if it had been done by someone who had never picked up a scraper before.

A representative of the builders stood nearby. They explained that this was their civilization's first experimental bridge pier. At that time, they didn't understand structural mechanics; they simply wanted to connect the two sides of a river. The bridge stood for many years until one day a crack was discovered in the pier. According to the engineering standards of the time, it should have been demolished and rebuilt, but one of the bridge builders said not to demolish it, but to patch it up. No one remembers that person's name. The construction log only recorded the time of the operation, without a signature. It wasn't that the record was lost; the person simply didn't leave his name. After patching it up, he tested the bridge and found it still walkable, then left. Later, the bridge was demolished and rebuilt many times, but this pier was never removed. Because after the crack was patched, the bridge was no longer the same bridge. The moment that person patched the crack, the bridge was truly completed.

Zuo Weiyang touched the surface of her consciousness projection; it felt rough and warm. She added a line to the piece of paper: The person who filled it in didn't leave their name. But Qiao remembered.

The third item was beside the thickest root of the Weaving Tree. It was a single expanse of black. Not blank, but an extremely uniform and pure black, laid flat on the light membrane. There were no textures or brushstrokes on the black.

The observers weren't standing nearby. They hovered at a tilted angle in the distance. The projections of consciousness from many civilizations were slightly turned toward that blackness. Not because it was emitting light, but because it had achieved the ultimate in not emitting light.

The observer's representative spoke after a long pause, their words extremely slow. They said they could explain today. There was a word within that blackness. In their ancient language, it roughly corresponded to "good" in human terms. Their civilization had a long tradition: after accomplishing something extremely important, the person who did it would make a mark in a private place, a mark known only to themselves. This tradition lasted an incredibly long time, so long that no one remembered the meaning of the marks anymore, only that the mark left by the deepest color was the most important. That blackness was the ultimate form of this mark. It wasn't a painting, not graffiti; it was left by an observer after completing a most important mission in an extremely distant era. It was entirely black. The word "good" was within it.

Zuo Weiyang stood silently before that black expanse. Later, she wrote in her central diary that within that black expanse was the word "good." Not for others to see. It was something the person who had completed the task knew for themselves. The complete blackness enveloped "good." Good was simply good; there were no grades, no annotations, only the completion itself. She squatted before that black expanse for a long time, adding a line of text to the corner of the paper, the strokes very light. "I saw it."

After the three civilizations were presented, the venue fell silent for a short while. It wasn't an awkward silence, but rather a silence where everyone needed time to settle those three things in the corner of their hearts. The branches of the Web-Weaving Tree swayed gently in the faint quantum light stream.

Zuo Weiyang didn't announce the end. She sat back down beside the tree roots, leaning against the trunk, looking at the things left behind on the light membrane. The clump of gel remained quietly in the shallow light, the repaired crack bulged slightly on the surface of the bridge pier, and the completely black canvas absorbed all the light passing through it at the edge of the tree shadows. The civilizations that had attended the meeting hadn't dispersed. Some went back to look at things that interested them, while a few whispered among themselves in a corner. They weren't exchanging information about technology, agreements, or cooperation; it was about the least important thing in their respective civilizations.

Zuo Weiyang wrote in the conference log: Day 1. The least important little things. A lump of glue, never having a purpose, just sitting there. A section of bridge pier with a repaired crack; the person who repaired it left no name. A single character for "good" welded into a patch of pure black. Day 2. Compared to the least important little things, what is truly important?

She didn't leave immediately after closing the journal. She sat under the tree, watching the shadows of the three objects on the light membrane. Yu Ying walked from the archives and sat down beside her. Neither of them spoke. Later, Zuo Weiyang leaned on Yu Ying's shoulder, closed her eyes, and lingered for a while in the quiet of the Weaving Tree. Yu Ying didn't speak either, just like every evening many years ago under the osmanthus tree in Hangzhou. The clump of gel on the light membrane shimmered slightly. The cracks in the bridge pier lay quietly in the shadows. The completely black canvas continued to absorb all the light that passed through it.

Zuo Weiyang added another line to the Central Diary. The universe is contained in these few words.