Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

After retiring, Ji Beihang spent some time at his home port. Today, he did something that retired pilots always wanted to do: he applied for a single-person aircraft.

It wasn't a behemoth like the Starsea, which was 830 meters tall; it was a small operational spacecraft assigned to the quantum optical flow maintenance system inside the homeport. It could only carry one person, and its speed was extremely slow, taking about an hour to circle the core area of ​​the homeport.

The duty officer at the homeport flight control center paused for a moment when he saw his application. Not because he had applied for an aircraft, but because he had written a line in the purpose field.

"Fly one more lap."

The duty officer approved it.

When Ji Beihang reached the inner ring platform of the homeport, the small spaceship was already there. Its silvery-white hull was even smaller than the Pioneer's lifeboats. It lacked weapon systems, scientific payloads, and even its communication module was a basic model. Its sole purpose was to cruise at low speed along the outer edge of the homeport's quantum optical flow, checking for fiber breaks or attenuation.

He had never sailed such a small boat before. He laughed.

He didn't sit in the cockpit when he jumped through the hatch. There was no gravity inside the homeport, so he didn't need a seat. He went straight through the cockpit to the external observation platform at the rear of the spacecraft, stood on the edge of the platform, and held onto the railing with one hand.

The small spaceship started up at minimum power. The quantum field gave a gentle push from the bottom of the ship, and the hull rose from the inner ring platform, smoothly gliding into the interior space of the home port.

Ji Beihang didn't look at the dial. He kept his eyes closed.

He used all the muscle memory he had accumulated over decades to perceive the quantum field. The quantum light stream of the home port flowed along the hull's outer edge, billions of fibers intertwining into a flowing cocoon of light at the slow speed of light. He had never seen the home port from this angle before. In previous flights, the instrument panel was filled with data. He needed to look at those numbers to know where he was.

Not needed today.

The ship glided along the outer edge of the quantum light flow at the home port. Ji Beihang opened his eyes.

He saw the entire home port.

Billions of quantum fibers extended from beneath his feet, intertwining and entwining in space at an extremely slow pace, each fiber emitting a faint blue-white glow. The fiber bundles converged in the distance into larger streams of light, like luminous rivers meandering slowly in the darkness. At the end of these rivers of light lay the core of the mother port, within a gigantic ring-shaped structure several astronomical units in diameter. There, he saw an even denser light—not the light of stars, but the light of the Web-like Tree.

He reduced the spaceship's speed to a minimum. The ship was almost suspended in place, being gently propelled forward by the light stream.

He recalled all the flight routes he had flown in his life. During his first solo flight, he was so nervous his palms sweated, and his landing gear scraped the runway. The instructor simply said, "Be gentler next time." Triton's orbital insertion error was less than twenty meters. Proxima Centauri's orbital insertion error was zero.

Those are all missions. They are all for getting to a certain place.

Today is not about getting there.

He pressed the communication channel and sent a message to Su Kuang.

Su Kuang was aboard the Starsea. Su Kuang was now the captain of the Starsea, sitting in the left seat. When the communication was established, a faint background sound of quantum field driving could be heard from Su Kuang's end.

Ji Beihang said, "I passed by that coordinate I mentioned in the last chapter of the driver's manual today."

Su Kuang was silent for a few seconds, then asked, "Which page?"

The page number doesn't matter. What matters is that I passed through it. Not in the air, but in my mind. Not in the sky, but at a bend in a fiber optic cable outside the homeport. When you fly over here again, there will be a tiny drift value. It's not a quantum field anomaly; it's just a drop of remnant I extracted from the coolant of the old engine at node 027. It won't affect any operation. But it will occasionally show a deviation of less than one-thousandth in an insignificant section of your instrument panel.

Su Kuang asked, "What's the direction of the shift?"

Ji Beihang looked at the osmanthus tree in the center of the home port and said, "I will always point to that osmanthus tree in the center of the home port."

He said nothing more and turned off the communication channel.

The boat continued gliding forward. He saw a small berth nestled at the corner of a thick fiber. He steered the boat alongside, without stopping, but simply passed by.

He remembered what Zuo Cheng had said. Zuo Cheng had written many words on the whiteboard on the bridge, and one line he remembered very clearly: The whole book. The very beginning.

Ji Beihang shook his head. He wasn't Zuo Cheng; he couldn't write those kinds of words. He could only fly.

But after flying for half his life, he discovered for the first time today that flying is not just about getting there, but also about just seeing.

He saw the entirety of the home port. The osmanthus tree stood right in the center of the net-weaving tree, its canopy shimmering with a faint golden light. At its base lay a pale golden leaf, unlike the others.

The ship gently came to a stop on the outer platform. He shut off the propulsion system, and the quantum field slowly dissipated from the bottom of the ship. He stood on the platform without immediately disembarking.

Zuo Cheng sat on the porch, watching him walk over.

Zuo Cheng said, "Your flight record has been updated again."

Ji Beihang sat down next to Zuo Cheng and said, "Yes, it's a circle. Not any flight path, it's a circle."

Zuo Cheng asked, "Have you finished the last lap?"

Ji Beihang watched the quantum light stream slowly rotating outside the porthole. The light stream at the home port rotated quietly at a speed of one revolution every forty-two hours and seventeen minutes, never stopping.

He said, "It's over. But the engine isn't cold yet. The Quantum Heart is idling autonomously. That circle won't end; it'll keep going forever."

Zuo Cheng didn't answer, but handed him a glass of water.

Ji Beihang's hand was steady as he took the water cup. His hands had always been steady his entire life. He looked down at his palms, his fingertips calloused from decades of gripping the control lever.

He finished drinking the water, stood up, and walked towards the rest room.

He walked very slowly. Not because he was too old to walk, but because he was feeling the extremely subtle vibrations of the quantum light flow traveling from beneath the home port to the corridor floor with his feet. The floor was cool, but the vibrations were very steady. It was the same feeling he got from his fingertips when he gripped the control lever.

He ran into Shen Yiming in the corridor. Shen Yiming had just come out of the recovery room, holding a cup in his hand. The two looked at each other, neither of them speaking. Ji Beihang walked past him, and Shen Yiming watched his back.

That evening, Ji Beihang pulled out the last page of the pilot's manual. The handwritten book was old, the edges of the cover worn white. He turned to the last page. That page had been filled with many lines of writing, all of them notes he had jotted down on different routes in different years. In the blank space at the bottom right, he had only written one line.

That was the last sentence he wrote as a pilot.

For the umpteenth time, starting from the inner ring of the home port, it circled the outer edge of the quantum light flow at low speed for a complete loop. The distance is unquantifiable. Time is a pilot's final farewell. Note: The coordinates remain. The pilot's way of saying goodbye is not to stop, but to draw a circle. The circle has no end.

He closed the notebook and placed it on his bedside table.

As he turned off the light, the quantum light stream outside the window had just completed a full rotation. A new rotation had begun, in the same direction, at the same rhythm, never stopping because one person was missing. But within that rotation, there was a tiny offset, forever pointing towards the osmanthus tree in the center of the home port.

He lay down and closed his eyes.

His fingertips were still trembling slightly. It was the lingering effect of thousands of manual insertions etched into his nerve endings. He turned over and pressed his hands under the pillow.

The light from outside the window circled a second time. He fell asleep.