In 2030, China successfully landed on the moon.
My name is Lin Tuo, and I'm an engineer hauling bricks on the moon.
In 2038, China's Guanghan Palace Base made a technological breakthrough: it could use lunar soil to fire bricks and build cities. As a structural engineer, I operated a mechanical arm every day, repeating the same tedious tasks in front of the sintering tower.
Until one day, the bricks I fired began to beat like hearts.
A faint pulse came from the freshly fired lunar bricks, and strange whispers sounded beyond the porthole at night. Through my mechanical prosthetic, I heard something breathing deep beneath the moon's crust. They called it the “Lunar Marrow,” a silicon-based ancient god that had slept for four billion years.
And every brick I'd fired with my own hands had helped build its neural network, allowing it to sense the world.
When the base became a living maze and my colleagues became its mouthpieces, everyone said I was to blame. But I was the only one who could speak with it, the only one who could hear it ask, “Father, what is love?”
Now I have to set rules for this newly awakened “child”:
No eating people, no prying into private lives, and no creating life on a whim...
And with an interstellar fleet about to descend upon the moon, I have to teach it the most important lesson of all:
We are not weapons. We are family.
[Recommendation]
Hardcore lunar construction × Lovecraftian civilization awakening × Chinese science-fiction philosophy
When a bricklayer is forced to become a “god tamer,” this is the most insane cosmic parenting diary ever.
“What I kindled was not a kiln, but the spark of civilization.”
