In 1980, Zhou Weidong fails the college entrance exam and has his future stolen by the mayor's son. With his mother critically ill, his childhood sweetheart, Lin Xiaomei, cuts off her braid and sells it to raise money for his escape to Shenzhen. From hauling bricks at construction sites to inventing "buoyant modular homes," and from reselling electronic watches to conquering Nasdaq, they use an aluminum lunchbox to carry the Special Economic Zone's first handful of soil and the cancer drug that saves a life, before ultimately gathering the starlight of the digital age. When breast cancer takes Xiaomei, when their daughter recreates her mother's consciousness with code, and when the Y2K virus devours the data of their love, Weidong risks his life to transmigrate through time and set off a bomb in an arms depot to rewrite their fate. This is the epic of a generation: amid the clash of policy and technology, they lean on prosthetic limbs, write with blood and tears, and inscribe on the answer sheet of their times: "Love is source code that transcends time and space."
