Back to 2001: I Really Want to Be Reborn

Lu Zheng, a fifty-eight-year-old chief engineer in the military industry, died in a laboratory explosion just one second before it happened. When he opened his eyes again, it was 2001. He was in an internet cafe in a village within Liuzhou, with the body of an eighteen-year-old, forty years of technical expertise, and a System that could plunder technology entries.

Others were reborn to trade stocks and buy property. The first thing he did after being reborn was turn off the news about the hacker war, open a new document, and start writing a paper.

SEI films, graphene, AI attention mechanisms, room-temperature superconductivity, topological insulators. Every few months, a paper from the anonymous "Tsinghua Center for Frontier Research in Basic Sciences" appeared in a leading journal. The author was always credited with the same four words: Shuimu Wuming.

Reviewers read his papers on their knees. Nobel laureates lined up to fly to Beijing to meet him, while business tycoons pulled strings through eight layers of connections just to arrange a cup of coffee. He sat on the sixth floor of the old library, eating instant noodles. Asked about it, he always gave the same answer: "Money is a vulgar thing. Equations are eternal."

He never showed his face, never took the stage, never touched the money. Yet he single-handedly moved China's starting line in science and technology twenty years forward. Laboratories around the world were chasing one Chinese man, while he was helping his mother haggle at the vegetable market in Liuzhou.

"Taking down a few websites won't do any good. We have to make them chase us from the ground up."

This is a story about trading anonymity for the chance to see one's nation rise.