The Second Future

In 2076, seventy-one-year-old Lin Qi wants only to see his long-deceased father one more time. Yet for reasons unknown, he arrives in 1998 as his father's friend: a young man who was supposed to vanish from the historical record that autumn. The future did not come back with him. No wealth, no identity, no complete AI named A-Lin. All he has are the abilities left over from decades of human-machine symbiosis and memories of more than seventy years of the future. He remembers the rise of the internet, the mobile era, artificial intelligence, and the names that would later change the world. In 1998, the future's corporate giants have yet to appear. The people he knows are still unknown young men and women. And from the day he survived, the history he remembers has begun to fail, bit by bit. He can only start over with the smallest things. A price quote, a computer rented by the hour, a payroll sheet, his first thirty yuan, the first computer that truly belongs to him, his first company... At the same time, he gets to know his father at twenty-three for the first time, along with the people who had already become part of his past in his original life. Once, he had the future. Then he changed the future with his own hands. And later, when history reached a place even he had never seen... Everyone could only keep moving forward.