Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

No ceremony was held at the home port on the day Jian Ning officially became the chief communications officer of the Starsea.

There was no conferment of ranks, no handover ceremony, no applause. Shen Yiming transferred the communications cabin administrator privileges to her in his log system, and then wrote four words in the remarks column: "Transferred." Jian Ning.

Jian Ning sat at the control panel, her hand resting on the communication panel, her fingertips tracing the cold, hard metal edge. The panel bore the fingerprints of Shen Yiming, left over decades—not visible to the naked eye, but tactile. Every button she had touched when she was his assistant had a warm, smooth feel, as if it had been pressed countless times.

Those buttons are still warm. But the person who touched them has changed.

She opened the log system; the number jumped from #00103 to #00104. The cursor blinked a few times on the blank line. She didn't rush to write. She pulled open the left drawer; inside lay half a sheet of paper, its surface showing the indentations left by an old pen. It was Shen Yiming's handwriting. Unfinished. Not crossed out.

Jian Ning looked at it for a long time.

She picked up her pen and wrote the first line on the first page of the diary. Not to finish the half-page for Shen Yiming, but to write her own first sentence.

"Teacher S. Today I'm sitting in your old seat. The spaceship has just left port. In my left drawer, there's a half-page of your old draft. I saw it; it's written with an old pen, unfinished. You didn't cross it out. I won't finish it for you. It's yours. It's the last unfinished sentence belonging to the last messenger of the previous era. I am the first messenger of the next era. I'm responsible for writing the first sentence."

After writing that line, she put down her pen, closed the drawer, and began working.

The first batch of independent operations began with log number #00104. Without hesitation, Jian Ning immediately accessed the network communication panel. Her first task was to conduct a full-spectrum test with the listener's relay optical station. She manually adjusted seven sets of frequency parameters, compressing the listener's optical station's relay delay to a negligible stable value. Data transmission was normal.

The second thing was to conduct real-time verification of the new bands for the Zhuzhe Bridge. The bridges that Zhuzhe promised to build in the second batch of route planning were nearing the preset access points. Jian Ning sent three handshake signals using the Weave Protocol, and all three were transmitted back instantly. The bridge structure was intact, and the band overlap rate was near perfect.

The third thing she did was open the communication interface and send a new weekly report to the Blue Star Hangzhou Measurement and Control Center. The format was exactly the same as what Han Lu had been sending to Xinghai every week for decades, only the direction of transmission was reversed. Before, she received it; now she sent it.

The moment Jian Ning pressed the send button, her finger paused for a second.

The signal traversed space, through the woven quantum channel, through the home port relay, and across the outer reaches of the solar system. Moments later, she received a reply. It wasn't a formatted confirmation; it was written by Han Lu herself.

"Received. You're on the same frequency as the Starship from back then. The difference is, you never left."

Jian Ning read the message but did not reply. She simply saved Han Lu's message in the attachment field of log number #00104, and then continued to retrieve the next set of communication parameters.

When Shen Yiming received Jian Ning's letter in his convalescent room at the home port, he was sitting by the window watching the quantum light stream slowly rotate outside. Ji Beihang sat opposite him, and on the small table between them sat a virtual Go board, a game they had been playing for many years without finishing. The distribution of black and white stones on the board resembled a small corner of a galaxy. Shen Yiming did not move the board. He was reading Jian Ning's letter in front of Ji Beihang.

He did not reply.

He created a new subdirectory in his log system, naming it "Second Generation Communications Officer Jian Ning." Then, he wrote the first line under the subdirectory:

"My first day on independent duty. My first words were what she taught me. My first words were 'As usual.' Her first words were also 'As usual.' It's like saying 'Good morning.' It's not about teaching, it's about passing on knowledge."

After he finished writing, he closed the folder and returned to Go. He placed a stone.

Ji Beihang didn't look at the chessboard. He watched Shen Yiming's expression—the expression of a communications officer after reading a letter from someone he had trained. It wasn't a smile, nor was it silence. It was like a welder who had finished the last weld, glanced at the completed weld, and then left. Not finished. It meant the weld was done, and he could leave.

Ji Beihang said, "The little girl you're mentoring wrote 'as usual' as her first sentence. You think she copied you."

Shen Yiming did not deny it.

Ji Beihang said, "No. From childhood to adulthood, she waved every time the Pioneer flew by. As usual. Every day. She learned communications on the rooftop. The first communication protocol she learned wasn't any technical parameters; it was when she was three years old, she saw a streak of light across the sky in the yard, and her mother said, 'That's the Pioneer; it flies by at this time every day. No need to wait, it will come as usual.'"

Shen Yiming's hand holding the chess piece did not move.

Ji Beihang continued playing chess, as if recounting a trivial matter. "From that day on, she stood on the rooftop every evening, waving. She went even in the rain. She said, 'It would fly by even if I didn't wave. But because I wave, the meaning of it flying by as usual is known by one more person.' You taught her how to write a journal, you taught her the format. She learned 'as usual' from the rooftop. Your first line was 'as usual.' Her first line was also 'as usual.' It wasn't copying. It was the same word illuminated by the same light at different heights."

Shen Yiming's piece landed. It landed in an unimportant spot on the chessboard. But he placed it very steadily.

"That's good," he said.

Jian Ning was unaware of the conversation that took place in the port corridor. She didn't even know what Shen Yiming had done after receiving her letter. All she knew was that the first independent shift after the start of the second voyage had ended. She turned off the communication panel and stood up from the console. There were no stars outside the window; the Xinghai was on a long, empty voyage, with only a bottomless darkness outside, and a rainbow halo slowly rotating around the edge of the ship in the distance.

Jian Ning didn't leave the workbench immediately. She sat back down, opened the logbook, and added a very short, informal entry at the end of the shift log. It was her personal note, not part of any standard log format.

"Tonight I passed through a deserted corner. There were no stars outside the window. The rainbow halo, as always, circled the area every so often. To the left of my workbench lay half a page of unfinished drafts left by Teacher Shen before his retirement. I didn't write anything. But I read it several times, down to the very last line."

She paused for a moment and finished writing the last few lines on the paper.

"That line of text felt the same way I did when I was a child waving under the Pioneer bullet train. The last line of his draft was also 'as usual.'"

She closed the journal and placed it back in the drawer on her left, next to the half-page of draft. The drawer wasn't closed tightly, leaving a tiny crack. She had said she wouldn't write for him. But this crack allowed the wind to pass through.

Outside the window, the rainbow halo had completed its umpteenth circle. Just as it passed directly in front of the cockpit, the edge of the halo sliced ​​through Jian Ning's line of sight. She blinked once. The duration of that blink was exactly the same as the time it took for the halo to cut across her pupil.

The halo continued to spin. She continued to sit. The drawer was left ajar. The first line of the first Independence Diary entry was already written.