Item from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Wade's classified initiative to send a single human envoy to the Trisolaran fleet — a nuclear-pulse-accelerated lightsail probe carrying a frozen brain, on the theory that even a fragment of a human inside the fleet was a strategic asset worth any cost.
Staircase is the program that gave humanity Yun Tianming and gave Yun Tianming his strangest possible afterlife. It was opposed by most of the PDC on ethical grounds — sending a frozen brain into hostile alien custody — and pushed through anyway by Wade's personal lobbying and Cheng Xin's signed approval. Most of the launch's nuclear charges misfired and the capsule went off-course; the Trisolaran fleet recovered it anyway, decades later. The brain inside became a man again. The man became a fairy-tale author. The fairy tales became the curvature drive.
A briefing folder bound in red, classified at PDC Top Secret. Schematics of a lightsail kilometers across, a small capsule, a sequence of nuclear charges along the launch corridor. A short list of volunteer names, most of them terminally ill. A single signed authorization on the cover, in Wade's hand.