Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

When Yu Ying sent the audio to Zuo Weiyang, she only said one sentence.

"Not a data report. It's a voice. Every mother's first cry."

Audio is not language. It is the first words spoken by mothers from different eras across all civilizations in the universe to their offspring, extracted, pieced together, and reconstructed from the noise at the bottom of the web, in a reality independent of all technological means. After being translated, it is not translated into language, but into the frequency that is closest to "I am" in every consciousness.

Yu Ying's "Mother's Voice" archive project has been running for quite some time. Today, she completed a preliminary summary of the first batch of archives. She sent the summary report to Zuo Weiyang, along with a very brief note.

This file is not scored or ranked. Every mother's first words are equal. Not in terms of content, but in the equality of what she "wants to say."

Zuo Weiyang added a paragraph when forwarding it in the Central Daily Log.

"My mother compiled the first words mothers uttered to their children in completely independent civilizations across the universe. It took her so long. It wasn't technically difficult; it's that no sound could be sped up or skipped. Because the moment a mother utters her first word to her child, that brief pause in her heart, the time parameter is zero. There is no length. There is only occurrence."

After she forwarded it, she added a label to Yu Ying's profile homepage. It wasn't a category label. It was a gold symbol shaped like an osmanthus flower. This symbol had never been found in the core database of the home port. Zuo Weiyang had drawn and embedded it herself.

When Yu Ying saw the golden osmanthus flower in the archives, she didn't leave a message. She wrote one word in her work log: "Okay."

When Zuo Cheng saw this entry, he was organizing the previous day's visitor records on the porch. He put down his pen and adjusted a small section of quantum light in the Home Port Consciousness Space to a warm tone.

He hadn't known before what Yu Ying feared most when recording her stories every day on the Starsea. It wasn't a quantum field malfunction, nor a recording equipment error; it was that a certain story would unknowingly be repeated. She didn't want to repeat any of them. Zuo Cheng discovered this by chance during the expedition. For a while, after Yu Ying finished recording, she would add a very short note at the end of her log: "Today's entry starts differently from a certain year and month; it can be posted." He didn't ask then, and he still doesn't now.

But he saw something in the woven light stream belonging to the archives. When Yu Ying was organizing the voices of mothers throughout the universe, she discovered that the earliest actions expressed by mothers in all civilizations and the earliest actions of humanity were not in any cognate language family, but were similar neural activity patterns.

I'm here.

In her file notes, Yu Ying wrote, "This is no coincidence. It is the first form of communication that life learns before it even has language. It's not a signal; it's existence itself saying to another existence, 'I am here.'"

Han Lu sent a message from Blue Star.

She's organizing all the words of mothers throughout the universe. You told her this cup of soy milk was two degrees hotter than usual. It wasn't that Auntie's hand was shaking; I just changed it with a thermos. I helped you add the first data point to the first line of her file.

Mother's name: Yu Ying.

The starting day: the night before Zuo Weiyang was born. She wasn't in the hospital, but in the control center, adjusting an instrument that wasn't originally hers. She wasn't a technician, but she noticed a line on the screen about early theoretical testing of a future infant support mode for inertial isolation chambers. She wasn't adjusting that support mode. She was spending the entire night waiting for Zuo Weiyang to open her eyes for the first time.

Data source: Central memory. Not archives.

Yu Ying saw Han Lu's supplement in the central archives. She remained silent for a long time before adding that line of data to the document. It wasn't as her achievement, but as the first cry of every mother, which was at the very bottom of the system, not in a recording, but in the initial perturbation of the quantum field.

When Zuo Weiyang saw the data being collected in the access room, the wind outside the window paused for a moment. She picked up her hot soy milk and took a sip. The temperature was just right. She knew the temperature was just right not because her aunt had adjusted the water temperature today, but because Han Lu had been measuring it every day, for so long that the quantum entanglement channel from Hangzhou to the home port had been running stably for countless standard cycles.

She put the cup back on the table. No message was left.

In the evening, Yu Ying did something in the archives. She merged all the audio from the first batch of archives into one file. The file length was equal to the sum of the total duration of all the audio recordings. She listened to it all the way through, without skipping a single brief pause. After listening, she added her own recording at the end of the file.

Her voice was very soft. She was speaking a sentence she uttered alone in the control center to the instruments the night Zuo Weiyang was born. No recording equipment was recording that sentence. But a very faint quantum field fluctuation was detected in the underlying noise of the network today, which Yu Ying found while archiving. She translated and restored that fluctuation, adding it to the last second of the summary file.

That sentence only had two words.

Are you there.

There was no answer. Because no one heard it then. But today she heard it herself.

After forwarding Yu Ying's report in the Central Diary, Zuo Weiyang wrote a long paragraph. However, she eventually deleted most of the words, leaving only a few sentences.

The mother's file project has no projected completion date. The total number of mothers in the universe is immeasurable. Because each mother is remembered not because she's in the file, but because she's the origin of every unconscious memory in her child. That origin exists in every era before the placental vessels have fully closed. So there's no rush to file. It's not about waiting. It's about listening. Listening is the first file.

After she finished writing, she added another sentence.

Today I heard those two words my mother uttered thirty years ago in a quantum field. I responded. No channel needed. No translation needed. The two words were separated by thirty years, but the transmission time was zero.

She turned off the central log and sat by the window in the access room for a while.

There was no Pioneer outside the window. The Pioneer was on the ground. But she saw the osmanthus tree in the distance swaying gently in the wind.

That direction isn't towards that old courtyard in Hangzhou. It's in another residential area. There's a new osmanthus tree there, and it's blooming for the first time today.

Yu Ying closed the day's archiving process in the archives room. Before leaving, she glanced at the audio she had replayed at the very end of the summary file. She listened to it once, then turned off the optical flow in the archives room.

Today she filed the first batch. The total number of mothers in the entire universe is unquantifiable, but her archives already contain the data point of the first human mother.

That data point wasn't recorded by someone else. She herself had unintentionally left it in the quantum field one night thirty years ago. Today, she retrieved it herself.