The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  But when the counter had reached just 23,500,817 seconds, the unit received that huge prime, and after it two other numbers precise to the third decimal place. A simple program in the receiver checked the two numbers; if the first was outside the 0–180 range, or the second outside 0–80, nothing would happen, and the unit would continue listening. But this time, the two numbers, while close to the boundary, were still within their respective ranges, which was enough; the program required nothing further. As dawn approached, the mountains of the southwest still slumbered and the valley was cloaked in a light mist, but the CE Mine awakened its sleeping power.

  The warmth of electric current coursed through its enormous body. The first thing it did upon waking was extract the two coordinate values from the receiver and put them into the target database, which immediately added a point to the 1:100,000 scale map of the Earth. In a flash the central computer generated flight path parameters, and, learning from the target database that the target was located on a level plain, set the warhead for airburst at an elevation of two thousand meters. Were it conscious, it would have noticed something strange, since in the countless simulated launches run after its installation to test the reliability of the system, the continent in which this target area was located was the only one it had never tested. But this didn’t matter. Everything proceeded according to the program. In its electronic mind, the world was exceedingly simple; all that mattered was the target far off on the Antarctic continent. The rest of the world was just coordinates describing the target point, a point flashing on the very top of the Earth’s transparent spherical coordinate system, luring it to the completion of its exceedingly simple mission.

  The CE Mine switched on the fuel tank heating system. Like most ICBMs, it was propelled by liquid fuel, but for the purposes of long-term storage, the propellant was a solid-liquid conversion fuel ordinarily found in a gel-like state and needed to be melted before firing.

  The layer of earth atop the silo was blasted away, exposing the CE Mine to the gaze of the dawn sky.

  *

  The deep boom of the explosion was heard by a few of the lighter sleepers in the village, who could tell it came from the direction of the valley, but they thought it was only distant thunder and ignored it.

  The next sound that came to the village was enough to keep them from going back to sleep, and it startled even more children awake. This time it was a low rumble, as if some gigantic beast was rousing itself deep within the earth, or a faraway flood was surging in their direction, threatening to swallow up the whole world. The paper of their lattice windows trembled. The sound increased in volume and shifted from a deep rumble to a high-pitched roar that shook the tile-roof houses.

  The children all ran outside in time to see a gigantic fire dragon climb slowly skyward out of the valley. The fire was too intense to look at directly, and it spread an orange aura over the surrounding hills. The children watched it ascend and increase in speed, going higher and higher and turning into a point of light as its sound grew more muffled. Eventually the light flew due south and soon dissolved into the dawn sky.

  COUNTERATTACK

  The Antarctic morning turned overcast followed by heavy snow, but Davey’s mood remained bright. The cocktail party held at the base the previous night to celebrate victory in the games had lasted late into the night, but he had slept very well. Fully refreshed, he was breakfasting with the generals and senior officials who had come to Antarctica. He valued this breakfast opportunity, since children tended to be in a good mood in the morning, rather than irritated and annoyed from the frustrations and work of the day. Many things could be talked through at breakfast.

  The army band played pleasant music in the pressurized hall for the children to listen to as they ate, and everyone was in a good mood.

  At the table, Davey said, “I predict that the Chinese children will announce their withdrawal from the games today.”

  Seven-star general Scott, who was cutting a piece of steak, grinned. “Nothing special about that. After yesterday’s strike, do they have any other choice?”

  Davey raised a glass in his direction. “Getting them off of Antarctica is a whole lot easier now.”

  Scott said, “And then knocking out the Russian kids and driving them off. And then Japan and the EU—”

  “We’ve got to be a little careful about the Russians. Who knows whether or not they’ve got any bread crumbs in their bag?”

  Everyone nodded, understanding the implication of those bread crumbs.

  “Can we be truly certain that the Chinese kids don’t have any bread crumbs?” Vaughn asked, spearing a live krill with his fork.

  Davey shook a fist at him. “They don’t have any! I told you they wouldn’t. Their bread was too small to leave behind any crumbs! Our gamble succeeded, I’m telling you!”

  “When are you going to get more optimistic?” Scott said with a sidelong glance at Vaughn. “You bring a blanket of gloom and depression wherever you go.”

  “On my deathbed, I’ll be more optimistic than any of you,” Vaughn said coldly, and swallowed the krill whole.

  Then a colonel came in carrying a portable phone, and bent down to whisper something into Davey’s ear before passing the phone to him.

  Laughing as he took the phone, Davey said gleefully, “It’s the Chinese kids. I told you, they’re definitely going to drop out of the games!” Then he spoke into the handset: “Is this Huahua? How’re you doing?”

  All of a sudden he froze, and his expression turned unnatural, his characteristic sweet smile freezing in place for a few seconds before vanishing entirely. He set down the phone and looked around for Vaughn, just as he did in every moment of crisis. When he found him, he said, “They’ve informed us that they’re still in the game, and have just launched a nuclear missile at our base carrying a four-megaton warhead that will strike its target in twenty-five minutes.”

  Vaughn asked, “Did he say anything else?”

  “No. He hung up right after that.”

  All eyes focused on Vaughn. He gently set down his knife and fork, and said calmly, “It’s real.”

  Just then another officer came running in and nervously reported that the warning center had detected an unidentified projectile heading in their direction. The warning system had first detected the object when it took off from southwestern China, but by the time the warning had navigated the multiple layers of confirmation, the object had already passed the equator.

  All of the young generals and officials stood up at once, eyes wide and faces white, as if a gang of armed assassins had burst into their plush restaurant.

  “What do we do?” Davey asked in bewilderment. “Can we hide out in the new underground hangar we just dug?”

  The seven-star general shouted, “The underground hangar? Bullshit. One blast from a four-megaton nuclear bomb will turn the whole area into a crater a hundred meters deep. And we’re smack in the center of it!” He grabbed Davey and threw his typical insults back in his face. “You moronic asshole! You’re the one who’s stuck us here. You’re gonna make us die here!”

  “The helicopters,” Vaughn said. His simple statement pulled everyone to their senses and they surged toward the exits. “Wait,” he added, and they stopped as if nailed to the ground. “Immediately notify all the planes to take off at once, and to take as much equipment and personnel as possible. But don’t explain why. We must remain calm.”

  “And the other branches? Order a total evacuation of the base!” Davey said.

  Vaughn shook his head gently. “There’s no point. In the little time we have, no vehicle will be able to escape the blast radius. It would only cause chaos, and in the end no one would escape.”

  The children scrambled for the exits. All but Vaughn, who remained behind, sitting at the table and wiping his fingers on a dinner napkin. Then he slowly got up and made his way outside, waving to the band as he passed to signal that it was nothing important.

  Out on the tarmac the c
hildren fought to board the three Blackhawk helicopters. Scott managed to scramble into the cabin of one, and when the rotors started up, he looked at his watch and said through tears, “Only eighteen minutes left. We’re not going to make it!” Then he turned to Davey. “You’re the fool who got us stuck here. You’re not gonna get away, not even in death!”

  “Keep your composure,” Vaughn, the last to climb aboard, said coldly to Scott.

  “We’re not going to make it!” Scott choked out through tears.

  “What’s so scary about dying?” A rare smile came to Vaughn’s face. “If you’re willing, General, you’ve got another seventeen minutes to become a true philosopher.” Then he turned to another officer next to Scott. “Tell the pilot not to climb, since the bomb will probably detonate at around two thousand meters. Fly with the wind, at top speed. If we can make it thirty kilometers or so, we should be outside the blast radius.”

  Three helicopters inclined their rotors and accelerated inland. As Davey looked out through the porthole at the Antarctic base spread out below them, it seemed to gradually transform into an intricate sand-table model, and he shut his eyes tight against the pain.

  The sky was foggy, and now that nothing was visible below them, it was almost as if the three helicopters were holding stationary. But Davey knew that they might already have flown beyond the base. He checked his watch. Twelve minutes had passed since they had received the warning.

  “Maybe the Chinese kids are just trying to scare us?” he said to Vaughn, who was sitting next to him.

  Vaughn shook his head. “No, it’s for real.”

  Davey pressed against the porthole and looked outside again, but there was nothing but fog.

  “The World Games are over, Davey,” Vaughn said. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back against the cabin wall, and said nothing more.

  They found out later that the three helicopters had flown for roughly ten minutes prior to the nuclear explosion, putting them around forty-five kilometers away, outside the blast radius.

  The first thing they saw was the outside world drowned in light. In the words of one young pilot, who had not been informed of the situation, “It was like flying through a neon light tube.” The glare lasted for around fifteen seconds and was accompanied by a giant roar, as if the planet below them was exploding. All at once they saw blue sky, a circular region centered on the blast that expanded rapidly outward. It was the nuclear shock wave dispersing the cloud layer out to a radius of one hundred kilometers from the hypocenter, they later learned.

  Smack in the center of the blue towered a mushroom cloud. It started off in two parts, one huge ball of white smoke and fire that took shape at two thousand meters after the initial fireball cooled, and a second on the ground where the shock wave kicked up dirt into a low pyramid whose apex extended upward into a thin spire that joined up with the huge smoke ball. The white ball instantly darkened in color as it absorbed the dust sent up by the pyramid, and flames flickered intermittently throughout the surface. Now the fog beneath the helicopter had been banished like the clouds, giving them a clear view of the land. The pilot later recalled, “The ground got fuzzy all of a sudden, like it had turned to liquid, as if an endless expanse of floodwater was surging toward us, and all of those little hills were islands and reefs. I saw cars on temporary roads flip over one after another like matchboxes. . . .”

  The three helicopters were battered about like leaves in a storm. A number of times they dropped perilously close to the ground and were pelted by flying stones and sand; then they were flung high into the air. But they didn’t crash. When they finally landed safely on snowy ground, the children jumped out of the cabin and looked back seaward at the tall mushroom cloud, even darker now. The morning sun, still below the Antarctic horizon, was high enough to just light up the top of the cloud, painting its rippling outline in gold against that slowly expanding dark blue circle of sky.

  BLIZZARD

  “Now this is Antarctica!” Huahua said, standing in the driving snow and bone-chilling wind. Visibility was poor through the endless whiteness of earth and sky, and even though they were on the coast, there was no distinguishing land from water. The young leaders of all the countries in Antarctica were closely gathered together as the blizzard swirled around them.

  “That’s not really accurate,” Specs said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the howling wind. “It rarely snowed in Antarctica before the supernova. It’s actually one of the driest places on Earth.”

  “That’s right,” Vaughn said. He was still only lightly dressed, and stood at ease in the cold wind, which had the children burrowing into their coats and shivering anyway. It was like the cold didn’t affect him at all. “Higher temperatures filled the air in Antarctica with moisture, and now the dramatic drop in temperature is turning that moisture to snow. It might be the biggest snowfall on the continent for the next hundred thousand years.”

  “Let’s go back. We’ll be frozen stiff if we stay here,” Davey said through chattering teeth, as he stomped his feet.

  And so the heads of state returned to the pressurized hall, identical to the one on the US base that had been vaporized by the atomic fireball of the CE Mine. They had gathered here with the intent of holding talks about Antarctic territory, but the long-anticipated conference was entirely meaningless now.

  *

  The CE Mine had ended the Antarctic war games. The children of every country had finally agreed to meet at the negotiating table to discuss the question of Antarctic territory. Each country had paid a heavy price during the war games, but now that the contest had unexpectedly returned to its starting point with no major power commanding a decisive advantage, negotiations seemed impossible for the foreseeable future. The children had no clear idea of whether war would break out again on the continent, or if events would follow another path. In the end, however, all of their problems were solved by a sudden change in climate.

  Signs had actually started appearing more than a month ago when autumn made its return to the northern hemisphere after a two-year absence, first with a hint of a chill, and then rains, cold weather, and fallen leaves piling up on the ground. After analyzing worldwide climate data, various countries’ meteorological agencies concluded that the impact of the supernova on global climate was only temporary, and it now was returning to a pre-supernova state.

  The ocean may have stopped rising, but it fell far more slowly than it had risen, leading many young scientists to predict that it might never return to its previous level. Still, the worldwide flood was over.

  In Antarctica, temperatures hadn’t changed as much, and the small drop was taken by most children to be a function of the long night. They expected the rising sun to dispel the cold and for Antarctica to welcome its first spring. Little did they know that the white figure of Death loomed near on the vast continent.

  In what later proved to be a wise decision, countries began withdrawing personnel from Antarctica once they reached the conclusion that the climate would recover. The war games had claimed the lives of five hundred thousand children, half in conventional games and half to nuclear explosions, but the death toll would have been four to five times worse if they had not effected an immediate withdrawal as the climate began to return to normal.

  Their bases were largely built to withstand winter temperatures no colder than around −10°C, and were incapable of sustaining the bitter −30°C temperatures that were to come. In the first month, the temperature changed only gradually, allowing the withdrawal of 2.7 million children at a speed that would have astonished the adults. However, equipment still needed to be evacuated, and countries also desired to maintain a certain presence, so nearly three hundred thousand children remained behind as the climate changed. The temperature plummeted nearly 20°C in a single week, and blizzards swept the continent, turning it into a white hellscape.

  An emergency evacuation of the remaining children left more than two hundred thousand on the shore, since the wor
sening weather had grounded virtually all aircraft, and the ports had all iced over in the space of a week, preventing ships from entering. Because most young heads of state were still gathered on the continent for the territorial negotiations, they naturally assumed the role of evacuation command. Leaders wanted to assemble their own country’s children, but the crowds on the shore were a mixture of all countries, leaving them at a loss as to how to proceed.

  In the pressurized hall, Davey said, “Now that you’ve seen how things are out there, we have to come up with a solution, and quickly. Otherwise more than two hundred thousand people will freeze to death on the seashore.”

  “In a pinch, we could retreat to the inland bases,” Green said.

  “No,” Specs said, “most base facilities were dismantled earlier in the withdrawal. And with minimal fuel remaining, all these people wouldn’t survive very long. Going back and forth would waste tons of time and miss any chance to evacuate.”

  “We can’t go back,” someone added. “Even if the bases were in perfect order, in this kind of weather we’d still freeze to death in those buildings.”