Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Evening. Hangzhou. Zuo Weiyang is in the reception room. Alone.

It wasn't the consciousness space of the home port, but that small room that had been converted from Mom's office into an access room. The bookshelves were still there, the quantum mechanics textbook was still there, the annotations of two generations were still there. The Pioneer no longer flew overhead; it rested on the ground square, gently covered by the museum's large protective shield. Evening light streamed through the glass windows, illuminating the old book spines and spreading a thin layer of gold. It was very quiet. So quiet that you could hear the faint whistling of the wind squeezing in through the cracks in the window. It was the same wind that had passed through the cracks in the field watchman's window, through the underlayer of the woven netting, blowing for who knows how long, until it reached here. It wasn't a farewell, but a passing by. The wind hadn't stopped; it had simply continued to blow in a different way.

She sat on the floor in front of the bookshelf, wearing the faded T-shirt, her eyes closed. It was quiet outside; no spaceships passed by. She didn't need to listen. All the nodes of the entire network operated quietly in her consciousness, like over a hundred hearts beating simultaneously; she knew everything was normal without even looking. The Listener's glowing band was green, the Builder's bridge was extending, and she had brewed another cup of tea today. 048 had written the word "in" in the log, 027 had activated the artificial aurora, and the Observer was gazing in the direction where she had said thank you. The Starship was on its course, its rainbow halo slightly off by a fraction of a degree, just right. Everything was the same as yesterday, the day before, and every day before yesterday. Not a copy, but a continuation. She quickly scanned all the records in the central log; there were no anomalies. So she shut down her central perception, leaving only herself. She opened her eyes, her gaze falling on the old book on the bookshelf.

She got up and walked to the bookshelf, pulling out the quantum mechanics textbook. Opening the title page, her mother's first line of annotation was still there: "This hypothesis is very interesting." Her father's handwriting was beside it: "Can you explain it?" Her own line was at the bottom, the handwriting still fresher: "Now it's not a hypothesis anymore, it's everyday life. Thank you, Mom." She lightly ran her fingertip across the writing. The ink was old, but not faded; her fingertip could feel the slight indentation left by the pen tip when it touched the paper. Three lines of writing, three different pressures, three generations writing on the same page, decades apart. She thought for a moment, then added another line in the blank space: "Hypotheses are not meant to be proven, but to be lived through. Every day after that is an answer."

She closed the book and walked to her desk. On it sat a thermos, the last cup of soy milk Han Lu had left behind before her retirement. She picked it up and took a sip. The temperature was just right, neither too hot nor too cold. Just like decades ago, just like every time. She put the cup down, the bottom making a very soft thud on the wooden tabletop. She looked down and saw an old mark on the floor she had never noticed before. It was a shallow dent, worn down by the heel of a chair over the years. It was left by her mother many years ago when she sat here adjusting the data for the Quantum Heart. Over time, the wood fibers had become denser, smoother than the surrounding floor, and she could feel a tiny indentation in her palm. She placed her hand on it. The floor was cool, but the dent was warm. Just like the Quantum Heart. Just like her father had said back then. She pressed her hand there for a long time, feeling the faint warmth rising from her palm. Not the warmth of memory, but real. Exactly the same warmth she felt more than a decade ago when she touched that quantum pipeline in the assembly workshop. They're all warm, they're all real, they're all still here.

She stood up and walked to the center of the room. She sat down, in the exact same posture she had when she was three years old, sitting on the assembly line floor, her knees bent at the same angle. In front of her was a piece of paper; on the back was a quantum field test report her mother had printed years ago, now obsolete, but the paper remained. She turned it over; the front was blank. Next to it was a crayon, clear, the kind from a crayon set that no one ever used. She didn't know who had put it there—maybe Han Lu, maybe her father, maybe neither—it had always been there.

She put down her crayons, stood up, and walked to the window. The Pioneer was no longer flying, but Jian Ning had just passed the outer edge of the solar system with the Starry Sea, flashing briefly in its wake. Outside the window, there was a tiny, distant golden dot of light—the Starry Sea. She stretched out her hand, palm facing the sky, not waving, but opening her palm wide. More than a decade ago, she had touched the Quantum Heart with the same hand, and the temperature she felt was warm. Today, she flashed the same hand towards the Starry Sea. Not a farewell, but a sign of her presence. She stood by the window for a long time, the wind blowing through the cracks onto her face, ruffling her hair, and stirring the edge of the paper on the table. The transparent ring on the paper faintly reflected the last rays of sunlight outside, like a door that had just been opened.

Then she went back to the paper. Next to the transparent circle, she wrote a word with her fingertip. Not with crayon, but with her fingertip. The fingertip left not a mark on the paper, but a faint trace of warmth. The trace formed a word: Good. Warm, quiet, complete, needing no further explanation. One word, just right.

It wasn't dark outside yet. A breeze blew in through the cracks in the window, warm, not cold. The soy milk on the table was still hot. The navigation lights were still flashing, and the quantum light stream of the home port was quietly rotating at a rate of one revolution every forty-two hours and seventeen minutes. The word spoken by the first sower 12 billion years ago was written on paper today by a girl with her fingertips. Not because of an echo, but because "good" is the universe's first and eternal language. There could be no more perfect ending. The wind was still blowing, the soy milk was still warm, and the navigation lights were still flashing. It wasn't over; it was good.