rpbooks Chapter 283
Chapter 283
Yu Ying stood at the entrance of the monitoring and control center, her hands placed in front of her abdomen.
Her words were brief, consisting of only four words.
"I am pregnant."
Zuo Cheng stood up so quickly that his knee hit the corner of the table. The metal corner of the control console made a dull thud, but he didn't seem to feel it. He walked over to Yu Ying, looking down at her hand resting on her abdomen. The night breeze outside hadn't completely dissipated since she pushed the door open, and her fingers were slightly bent, resting on the hem of her coat.
"How long has it been?"
Nine weeks.
Nine weeks. The final sprint of the Pioneer's final assembly began nine weeks ago. At that time, Zuo Cheng was leading the final round of orbit assembly plan review, checking the precision parameters of fifty modules, and sleeping less than four hours a day. Yu Ying shuttled between the control center and the laboratory from beginning to end, never mentioning it once. She held her daily meetings as usual, exchanged data with him in the consciousness network as usual, and helped him review every test result as usual. There was an extra heartbeat in her body, but in every conversation, she only mentioned the necessary technical parameters.
"Why didn't you say so immediately?"
Yu Ying removed her hand from her abdomen and placed it on the back of his hand. "You were reviewing the assembly plan at that time. Your decisions that day determined whether a spaceship that had taken two years and two hundred and thirty billion US dollars to build could be completed on time. I couldn't let you be distracted."
Zuo Cheng remained silent for a few seconds. The entire telemetry and control center was so quiet that the low-frequency electric thruster hummed as the Pioneer automatically adjusted its attitude on the monitoring screen.
"That's not a $23 billion spaceship. That's a test ship."
Yu Ying looked up at him.
"Your matter is more important than any other spaceship."
Yu Ying smiled. Not the kind of smile born of gratitude. It was the kind of smile she knew he would say. In all the years she'd known Zuo Cheng, he'd never hesitated on any choice; his answer to every question was always her first. "Now you know. Your spaceship didn't crash. Everyone won."
The next day, Zuo Cheng and Yu Ying informed the core team. The meeting room still had the same whiteboard, with the ten-year roadmap Zuo Cheng had drawn at the last meeting still on it. Three lines stretched from the first to the tenth year, each ending at a star. In the lower corner of the whiteboard was an old photo of Han Lu that she hadn't torn down on the day the time wall was unveiled.
Chen Hao was the first to speak. "Boy or girl?"
"I don't know yet."
"It doesn't matter." Chen Hao leaned back in his chair. "Whether you're male or female, you can always tell your classmates that my parents led all of humanity out of the solar system."
Han Lu didn't speak. The moment Zuo Cheng turned to look at her, he saw that her eyes were already brimming with tears. She wiped them with the back of her hand, a quick movement, as if wiping away something that shouldn't have been in the meeting. Fang Ze handed her a pack of tissues from the side, saying nothing, but the direction he handed it to her was perfect, placing it right next to her hand.
"It's not because you're pregnant," Han Lu said. Her voice was a shade lower than usual, but very steady. "It's because you're the first among us to choose to live a normal life amidst all this madness. I thought none of us had a normal life anymore."
The meeting room fell silent for a moment again. This silence was unlike any other before. It wasn't the silence that followed a conclusion, nor the breathing adjustment during a plan review. It was the realization, shared by everyone in the same instant over the years, that they had been running towards the same goal, running so fast that they forgot to stop and look at each other, forgot that they were once five young people who didn't even know if they would survive tomorrow, crammed into an office they had brought back from a secondhand market to write their first line of code.
Liu Wei pulled a photo from his phone and projected it onto the large screen. The photo, scanned from physical photographic paper, was slightly faded. It showed a workbench from the incubator era, with five people standing in front of a whiteboard. The whiteboard read: "Do something different."
"Ten years ago you told me we should do something different." Liu Wei zoomed in on the photo, pointing to the bottom right corner of the line of text on the whiteboard. There was also a very small annotation there, which he had written in pencil at the time: "Brother, is it big enough?"
"Now that the extraordinary thing has been accomplished, it's time to get back to normal things."
That evening, Zuo Cheng and Yu Ying were at their small home. It was the top floor of an ordinary high-rise apartment building in Hangzhou, with views of the city skyline and the orbital streaks of satellites in the sky. Yu Ying leaned back on the sofa, her head resting on his lap, slowly turning the pages of an e-book about parenting.
Her finger slowly traced names on the screen. The developmental characteristics of the fetus in the ninth week: the neural tube begins to differentiate, and the rudiments of the brain and spinal cord can already be detected by ultrasound.
Yu Ying suddenly placed the e-book against her chest and turned to look at him. The ultrasound image from the ninth week was still on the screen, glowing faintly against his chest.
"What kind of world do you think our children will live in?"
Zuo Cheng thought for a long time. He thought of many things. Four billion years ago, a seed descended upon this planet before it had even grown oceans. The first six hosts of the seven eras all failed, none surviving past the fifth branch. Chen Xinghe said in the recording in the Sahara, "You were chosen." The founder wrote that sentence on the homepage of the legacy package, hoping that you, reading this, are no longer alone.
"A world where people no longer need to be chosen can reach the stars and the sea."
Yu Ying picked up the e-book again and turned a page.
"Then go and create that world."
She fell asleep shortly after saying that. The e-reader was still lit, the screen displayed on a page showing the fetus's developmental features in the ninth week. The 3D ultrasound image highlighted the neural tube in blue, the most primitive central nervous system, not yet a fully developed brain and spinal cord, but already beginning. Several tiny nerve cells were transmitting the first electrical signals within a life that hadn't even opened its eyes yet. The caption next to the image read: "Ninth week, the fetus is about two centimeters long, the heart has divided into four chambers, and beats about 150 times per minute."
Looking at the picture, Zuo Cheng suddenly thought of the Web. Yu Ying was now the fourth member of the Web of Consciousness. At this moment of their child's nervous system formation, could their child already be the fifth name on the Web?
He suppressed the thought. Some things don't need answers now. Some things just need to be anticipated. He turned off the e-reader and gently tucked Yu Ying's hair, which had slipped onto her shoulder, behind her ear. Yu Ying stirred in her sleep, snuggling closer to him, then fell silent again. Outside the window, satellites streaked across the sky one after another, as bright as any familiar night. Pioneer orbited quietly at an altitude of four hundred kilometers, like a whale waiting for the deep sea; the countdown to its next manned maiden flight was less than a year away. The ten-branched canopy of the sun slowly rotated in the depths of his consciousness. The nine nodes of the web glowed faintly in different locations within the solar system; the methane sky of Titan and the deep-space navigation station in the Kuiper Belt were both being monitored by the web's control interface at the same second.
Everything is moving forward.
But in this room in Hangzhou, a two-centimeter-long life is proving one thing with its heartbeat of 150 beats per minute: The universe is vast, but a home can grow from one person to two, and then from two to three, no matter how far the boundaries outside are pushed.