‘SEE YOU MORNING’ 016 Blue Marker

"...They're getting married, you should contribute a third of your assets to support them," Li Haojun didn't respond or defend himself, only remembering, heh, when I was in the depths of my life's struggles, what were you all doing? Did you ever give me a helping hand?
...On the side path at the city's edge, her family wouldn't let her have contact with Qin Wenjing. Li Haojun left her silently, leaving her standing there alone.
Not knowing how far he had walked, the unease inside Li Haojun made it impossible for him to go on. She was still a child after all. Worried for her safety, Li Haojun hurried back to find her. He calculated the distance in his mind and where she might be. He remembered once using the phone GPS navigation for Qin Wenjing, recalled the route they took. He should leave this place, go forward to the main road and turn right, follow the main road to search for her.
Both sides of the side path were lined with old, dilapidated red-brick apartment buildings, deserted and empty. The buildings faced south. Leaving the pathway among the buildings, he came to a main road that sloped uphill. It was a small road running north to south, where the side numbers of each building could be seen on either side. Heading north along this road led up and over this small ridge. On weekends, this place was a market lined with small vendors along the street, but on ordinary days it was just a sparsely peopled road, with almost no vegetation on the roadside, just bare yellow earth.
The road ahead was empty. He didn't know if going down this road he could find Qin Wenjing. A sense of urgency, urgency and anxiety. Li Haojun quickly climbed to the top of this small road, standing at the crest of the small ridge. The path going down was even steeper, so much so that a steel structure platform had to be built at the top of the ridge to allow pedestrians to take a zigzag staircase down the hill.
Li Haojun stood on the platform, gripping the railing. He didn't go straight down but anxiously scanned ahead. Down below was an intersection, a small commercial street, and a small square where children played. The roadside was lined with single-story, simple and crude houses. The sparse pedestrians on the road were mostly elderly, a lifeless place.
"Wenjing…" Li Haojun cried out with some despair, hoping that at some intersection or from behind some wall that figure would flash out.
Nothing, only bricks and tiles, earth and wood, gray street scenes and people past their prime.
Li Haojun couldn't find any sign of Qin Wenjing ahead. He slowly lowered his head, and in the shadow beneath the pedestrian platform, some people were sitting on a bench. In the middle of the bench, there was a petite figure, sitting there, her face tilted upward, wearing a pair of sunglasses, looking this way.
Was it her, was it her?
Li Haojun didn't have time to go down the stairs. He propped his hands on the guardrail, swung himself over to the outside of the platform, and slid down along the supporting column.
A few steps brought him before her. He knelt on one knee in front of her, holding her hands.
"Wenjing?" Li Haojun called out, confirming her identity.
It was her.
Without hesitation Li Haojun took her into his arms. He didn't know where her family was, leaving her here all alone. Li Haojun secretly decided in his heart never to leave her again.
"Come home with me," Li Haojun asked for Qin Wenjing's opinion, and she didn't refuse. Being able to spend time once more with someone he cared about made the whole world seem beautiful again.
Holding her hand, walking on the flat road, beside the road was beautiful spring water, flowing and nourishing the weeping willows whose branches were turning green. Blue sky and white water, brown weeping willow woods, tender green willow branches holding the spring spirit, waving between heaven and earth...
The sky was already bright. Opening his eyes, it was a dream, a beautiful dream. Though touched with a bit of bitterness, the ending was still rather beautiful. Li Haojun recalled every detail of what just happened, not knowing if it was merely a dream or a memory of something he had truly experienced before.
So at the breakfast table, he curiously asked Qin Wenjing,
"When I was dating you, did your family object?"
Qin Wenjing thought for a moment and didn't answer, but asked in return,
"What made you think to ask this?" She finished speaking and looked at Li Haojun with a beaming smile. These past few days she was still basking in the joy of being in the news, in a superior mood.
"I was just curious," after saying this, Li Haojun told her about his dream.
Qin Wenjing listened silently without saying a word, then said,
"No, that's not a memory from your past, it was probably just a dream."
"Oh, then how did I court you back then?"
"There was no such thing," Qin Wenjing said with a laugh, "You didn't pursue me."
"Oh," Li Haojun, seeing she wasn't really in the mood to talk about the past, just acknowledged and didn't ask further.
"We just spent time together when we could, a friendship, good friends," Qin Wenjing, seeing that Li Haojun wasn't asking anymore, added a bit more on her own.
Qin Wenjing seemed unwilling to talk about their past, but it didn't matter. Having her devoted companionship now was more than enough. It was just that Li Haojun seemed unable to stop his persistent pursuits, always wanting to do something. After finishing his own work and settling Qin Wenjing's needs, he went back to his basement, spending his time on things that interested him.
His robot dog was now basically complete and could run errands to purchase daily necessities for him. The next step, since the company forbade the use of commercial AI robots, was to join the open-source community and build his own. The electromechanical equipment he had ordered recently had gradually arrived. The next step was assembly, and then he would first load the dog's code into it for limb and motion control training. At the same time, he deployed a simplified general-purpose artificial intelligence model on his personal computer and began feeding it data for training.
To compensate for the lost time of the past few years wiped from his memory, Li Haojun also deployed an AI assistant to help query, analyze, and predict major events of these years.
After several rounds of operations, Li Haojun's every day was very full, but his brain was already feeling a bit of information overload. Should he use a commercial brainwave information input device? Or use his own hardware equipment to develop software applications? Li Haojun was constantly worried about causing irreversible damage to his brain, or about security risks from backdoors in the equipment.
Such was the current state of the technological age. There were always people willing to abandon their human identity and become superhuman with the aid of technology. It seemed making this choice was only a matter of time.
But for now, some still didn't want to alter their bodies. In certain aspects, they could no longer compete with superhumans, but based on the social fairness mechanism, superhumans were not allowed to compete with natural persons. And morally, those without sufficient social morality credits were also not allowed to use technology to enhance personal abilities. Compared to the background checks for purchasing firearms, the empowerment of artificial intelligence in this era was almost akin to nuclear weapons in its potency. Whether applied to biopharmaceuticals, gene editing, or energy physics, falling into the hands of malicious actors, it could cause mass destruction on the scale of weapons of mass destruction.
To counter this threat, social governance structures also divided different sensitive technologies with confidentiality regulations. Certain technologies and products belonging to interstellar citizen governance zones were not allowed to be circulated to ordinary Earth citizen zones. Likewise, based on the protection of the environment and wildlife, certain Earth citizen zone technologies, products, or weapons were not allowed to be trafficked to nature reserve zones. Individuals, companies, and governmental organizations all had to take responsibility for their production and business activities.