“Hello, I’m from 2026.”
“...Where’s your letter of introduction?”
Lin Yanchen was at a loss for words.
Doubao had taken him aboard a time-traveling spaceship. She’d promised to send him home.
He did make it home, but got lost along the way. The year was 1980.
Without a letter of introduction or any other documentation, he had no identity. And he couldn’t even get his hands on a single sheet of official letterhead. If he couldn’t get out of the Funiu Mountains, he’d be branded a vagrant. If he was caught, he’d be suspected of being an enemy spy.
But he had Lin Doubao, an AI bionic robot sister from 500 years in the future.
She said cars could skip the boxy era and go straight to streamlined designs, communications could skip 1G and jump right to 3G, and the internet could do without America’s root servers.
She said the engineers of that era didn’t lack drive. What they lacked was direction. And she knew the way forward.
There were twenty years left until the goal of achieving the Four Modernizations by the end of the century.
In those twenty years, he would transform Huaguo’s technology from playing catch-up to taking the lead.
He’d leave the world staring at his taillights, unable to catch up.
But first, he had to get that letter of identification.
