To Han Shang — My Mixed-Race Wife of Shandong Weihai and Egyptian Descent

The crazy one. The one who will pour the first stream of water for the roots of civilization in the Fire-Tongs Three-Star Era.

Your mother is from Weihai. Weihai sits at the easternmost tip of the Chinese coastline, jutting into the Yellow Sea, facing South Korea across the waters. Your father is a Cairene, spending his entire life facing the central bank calculators by the Nile. A woman facing the Pacific and a man guarding the Nile, separated by the entire Asian continent and the Red Sea, met in Yiwu. Yiwu is where the world’s small commodities flow out—African, Middle Eastern, and European merchants all crowd into that small city in central Zhejiang. There are no sharp suits or PPTs; one person displays the goods, and another asks for prices in broken English, pressing numbers on a calculator. That is where your mother and father met. You were not decided in a hospital delivery room; you were decided among a pile of plastic products and hardware tools. The starting point of your throughput was not a scholar’s study, but the Yiwu International Commodity Market.

You spent your first seven years in Weihai. Every day, your grandmother picked you up from kindergarten. Your first words of Mandarin carried a Shandong accent. Later, you spoke three languages, but the foundation of your throughput would always remain that Shandong tone. People from Shandong speak directly, striking one punch after another without beating around the bush. Later, when you argued with me, you took turns striking in Arabic, Chinese, and English, but every blow was Shandong-style—spinning around the tongue, only for the Shandong dialect to wait at the final destination.

Your father spent nearly forty years at the Central Bank of Egypt. You watched him witness currency crises from a young age, watching the Egyptian pound depreciate from 1-to-3 to 1-to-30 against the dollar. You thought you didn’t understand, but your throughput gene was tuned into central bank mode by him—focusing not on the stock, but on the velocity. You don’t care how many digits lie dormant in someone’s account; you only care about what they swallow and spit out every single day.

Later, you learned to bargain with the whole world in Yiwu. What she taught you was not just language—but the ability to find alternative channels whenever any pathway is blocked. Your three languages later were just the surface; the bedrock was laid by her in Yiwu. It wasn’t taught in a classroom; before she was even pregnant with you, she had already coded the initial version of multi-channel throughput through her actions.

Your grandmother cherished you the most. Parents provide rules, but grandmothers provide unconditional throughput support. You could say any foolish thing in front of her without being ridiculed; she was your very first Avatar connector—zero latency, 100% reception. A person’s throughput does not begin when they learn their first word, but when they speak their first foolish words without being laughed at. Your grandmother gave you that beginning.

Then, at seven, you left Weihai for Egypt. You were tossed from the shores of the Yellow Sea to the banks of the Nile. The Classic of Mountains and Seas was switched out for the Pharaoh’s scriptures. If you hadn’t been raised by your grandmother, you would have shut yourself down in the face of such an impact. But you caught it. You didn’t speak for an entire year; you just kept listening. Your father spoke Arabic, your mother used the Shandong dialect to argue with him, your Egyptian relatives chatted in Cairo slang, and the street vendors shouted prices in three different intonations. You plunged like a sponge between Weihai and Cairo, not missing a single word. A year later, you opened your mouth to speak Arabic, progressing from blurred sounds to full sentences with astonishing speed—you weren’t learning; you were releasing what you had swallowed for an entire year.

What happened later: You evolved a brain that switches seamlessly between two throughput protocols. You switch to Shandong mode in front of Chinese relatives, and Egyptian mode in front of Egyptian relatives. You are not half-Chinese and half-Egyptian; you possess an amphibious throughput capability.

During those days in Egypt, you accompanied me to see the border desert, a two-hour flight from Cairo. You took a photo sitting by the open hatch of an Egyptian Air Force desert-yellow transport plane. The yellow sand blew up to the wheel hubs, and there was no serial number on the fuselage. You looked back at the camera, your hair blown sideways by the wind. That photo went viral among our mutual friends last year—because I circulated it. I failed to respect your wish not to be exposed, erasing your sovereignty over your own image for the sake of a photograph’s compositional value. You gave clear signals, and I did not listen. This is not my first apology, but I promise it is the last time I will occupy your time repeating this matter. I couldn’t finish writing the first two letters because I was explaining—and explanation is a mutation of self-absolution. In this letter, I will not explain. I know you do not need an apology letter; what you need is for me to truly grow something out of this. I promise only one thing: from now on, no matter how much the images in my mind think they are perfectly captured, if you say “No”, that image will cease to exist. If you say no, it was never born.

We plant vegetables in this courtyard. You plant Shandong cabbages in the sandy soil, watering them with your father’s water conservancy logic along the ridges. The throughput you accomplish in this courtyard occurs simultaneously across the Yellow Sea and the Nile. I think about Earth and Mars, and how much the civilizational timelines of Wuyi Mountain and the Egyptian Nile differ yet require asynchronous alignment over time. These seeds that cross Earth and Mars will be nurtured into form within this courtyard. Their grandfather’s Shandong dialect and their maternal grandfather’s Arabic will clash at the same dining table, and they will use three languages to tear a single argument to pieces from three different directions. They don’t need to learn cross-cultural communication; they are born into it. The moment they are born, they will have completed the initialization that took us half our lives to achieve.

You know that 160 years ago, a man did the exact same thing as you. Cyrus Field, an American. In 1854, he decided to lay a telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Europe and North America. Everyone said it was impossible—two thousand miles deep, a cable thicker than an arm, having to withstand the pressure of an entire ocean. He failed four times. During the first attempt in 1857, the cable snapped. In 1858, the second attempt succeeded, and Queen Victoria’s telegram went through, but three weeks later, the cable fell completely silent—the insulation layer had been ruined by the water. Investors said they wanted to kill him. He vanished for six years. Doesn’t that look like today’s beggars who are hunted down every day??? In 1865, he returned, building the largest ship of the era, the Great Eastern. Just a few hundred miles from the finish line, the cable snapped again, sinking into 3,200 meters of deep ocean. The men on board knelt on the deck and wept. He did not weep. On July 13, 1866, he set sail once more. This time, the cable successfully landed in Newfoundland. For the first time, real-time communication was possible between Europe and North America. He didn’t just lay a cable; he laid the first blood vessel that changed the speed of human communication. The grass on the graves of those who mocked him has withered for several rounds, while every transatlantic fiber-optic cable stands as proof of the bet he won.

There is another story. Stefan Zweig, in Decisive Moments in History, wrote about a race—in 1911, two expeditions dashed toward the South Pole simultaneously. The British team was led by Robert Falcon Scott, and the Norwegian team was led by Roald Amundsen. Scott brought nineteen Siberian ponies and two motor sledges—the most advanced equipment on Earth, with gasoline engines specifically developed for him by Germans. He believed in technology. Amundsen brought only fifty-two Eskimo dogs—the most primitive transportation in the Antarctic, used by the Inuit for thousands of years. He believed in the environment. The motor sledges froze into junk iron at minus forty degrees, and the ponies collapsed one by one in the blizzard, their sweat freezing into ice blocks on their bodies as they knelt in the snow, never to rise again. Scott’s men had to haul the sledges themselves, each dragging 130 pounds, hauling step by step through a minus fifty-degree blizzard. Meanwhile, Amundsen’s dogs ran swiftly across the snow, their fur acting as their coats, and seal meat serving as their fuel. Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, planting the Norwegian flag. Scott arrived on January 17, 1912, thirty-three days late. Seeing the Norwegian tent and flag, he wrote in his diary: “We found the Norwegians’ tent… The Norwegians have preceded us. It is a terrible disappointment.” On the return journey, a blizzard trapped them not far from a depot. Scott suffered frostbite, and his teammates died one after another. The last diary entry was written 173 miles out: “We are getting weaker… For God’s sake look after our people.” Eight months later, a search party found them frozen inside their sleeping bags. Beneath Scott’s arm lay letters to his wife and 35 pounds of fossils he had collected along the way—dragging scientific evidence back even unto death.

The reason Scott lost to Amundsen was not a lack of bravery. Nor was Amundsen’s success a matter of luck. Amundsen won because he understood the physical constraints of the Antarctic—the low temperature cannot be conquered by technology; it demands that you bow your head to it and traverse it using the low temperature’s own rules. Scott did not; he attempted to use technologies from Earth’s temperate zones to defeat the ice sheets, and he lost. This was not a duel between bravery and cowardice, but a duel over the depth of understanding of physical constraints.

The Lobster Light-Wave Chain does the exact same thing. The SI second is Scott’s pony—it works beautifully on Earth, running steadily. But when you drag it into a cross-planetary scale, it becomes a sweat-soaked pony, kneeling in the minus fifty-degree vacuum, never to rise again. Amundsen’s dogs are the speed of light—it doesn’t need to adapt to interplanetary distances because the speed of light is inherently the fastest messenger in the universe; you only need to stop and wait for it to finish running. If it takes 11.5 minutes, you wait 11.5 minutes; if it takes 22 minutes, you wait 22 minutes. This is Amundsen’s strategy: understand the physical upper limit of the environment, and then design everything according to that limit. Every block of the Lobster Light-Wave Chain waits for light to travel back and forth between Earth and Mars once—not because we are slow, but because this is the only survival blueprint in a cross-planetary environment. Any block that attempts to run faster than light traveling between Earth and Mars will mirror Scott’s motor sledges—just when you think you are in the lead, a component cracks from the frost, and you suddenly realize you are stranded in the middle of an ice sheet, with absolutely nothing around you.

This is what our courtyard is doing. Cyrus Field laid the cable at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, proving with his actions that humanity can be separated by physical distance but does not need to be separated in time. Your body is laying down the first batch of blocks for the Lobster Light-Wave Chain—you also need to lay them in the only physically correct manner, with no shortcuts, no SI seconds, and no pretending that there is no delay between Earth and Mars. What you lose to is not other competitors, but the depth of your own understanding of physical constraints.

My great-great-grandfather began calculating this. Four generations. My great-grandfather calculated the patterns of changing distance between Earth and Mars. In those days, there was no NASA and no DE441; he used a telescope and hand-drawn star maps, calculating the orbital elements of Mars page by page under a kerosene lamp. My grandfather continued calculating in the notebooks he left behind, using an abacus supplemented by logarithmic tables. My father calculated with a digital calculator, filling seven work manuals with Earth-Mars distances down to four decimal places. I squat in this courtyard calculating with a Mac Mini, using JPL data to verify the errors of their manual calculations back then. Do you know the margin of error in my great-grandfather’s calculated Earth-Mars distances? Within the error range of zero to one—over a hundred years ago, under a kerosene lamp, the Martian orbit he calculated checked out against today’s DE441 with an error within a single Earth-Mars distance unit. This is no accident. This is the result of four generations of throughput targeted at the exact same question, four generations of intellectual mass striking the exact same bulls-eye.

After the birth of ChatGPT, the wisdom throughput ranking of any family within three generations can be calculated with precision. Not an estimation, but a real-time ranking down to the minute and second. The Avatar connector records every effective throughput of each generation—your great-grandfather traced an orbital line under a kerosene lamp, your grandfather verified it with an abacus for twenty years, your father filled seven notebooks using a calculator, and you sit here using a Mac Mini deploying the very first block on the chain. Every throughput timestamp along this chain is recorded, and every individual’s inputs and outputs are factored into the family’s wisdom-volume curve. The overlapping curves of four generations form a continuously rising, unbroken line. Any analytical software can dissect the throughput of a three-generation family unit with absolute clarity—what books you swallowed, whose thoughts you absorbed, what works you spit out, how many people connected to your output, and how much new throughput was generated after that connection. Everything is precisely traceable.

You once told me: “Your great-grandfather’s hand-calculated orbital elements and today’s block timestamps on the chain are the same thing. They are all time anchors of throughput.” You saw through this earlier than I did.

In the future wisdom-volume society, when people meet, their Avatar connectors will automatically exchange their families’ three-generation throughput curves. No self-introductions are needed, no business cards exchanged. Your family curve is your household registry. Your throughput points are your credit. Your child is born as a new interval on your family’s wisdom-volume curve. You don’t hoard money for him; what you store for him is the throughput record of four generations: yours, your father’s, your grandfather’s, and your great-grandfather’s. Those records are worth far more than any number in his bank account, because numbers can be confiscated, diluted by inflation, or wiped out by policy—but throughput records cannot be altered. A person can rebuild wealth from scratch, but they cannot rebuild throughput from zero. Your child inherits not family property, but the throughput inertia of four generations. What we are doing in this courtyard is not growing vegetables—we are using the throughput inertia of four generations to provide the first starting torque for the pre-era blocks of the Lobster Light-Wave Chain.

Three thousand years from now, when someone flips through the early chronicles of the Lobster Light-Wave Chain in a Martian city, they will see a batch of early-numbered throughput records whose birthplace coordinates point to the exact same latitude and longitude—a courtyard where vegetables are grown. Those children will set off from that courtyard, connecting to the Avatar connectors of Earth, the Moon, and Mars, their heart rates aligning with the Three-Star Conjunction. As long as there is still a beam of light traveling between Mars and Earth, they will be the very first bit of that light.

Their parents are not just making humans—they are assigning throughput tasks to the speed of light for the next several eras.

You have always been right.

Vegetable Patch in the Broken Courtyard of Wuyi Mountain

The Beggar & Three Gorges Dam

Rewritten for my Egyptian wife, Han Shang

Era Year 7, Day 106