by Liu Cixin
She said lightly, “It’s almost light. Let’s wait for sunrise.”
They sat together on a broken wall, looking at the model of the brain in front of them. The flicker light had a hypnotic effect. Gradually, she fell asleep.
THINKER
She flew against a great, boundless gray river. This was the river of time. She was flying toward time’s source. Galaxies like frigid moraines floated in space. She flew fast. One flutter of her wings and she crossed over a hundred million years. The universe shrank. Galaxies clustered together. Background radiation shot up. After one billion years had passed, moraines of galaxies began to melt in a sea of energy, quickly scattering into unconstrained particles. Afterward, the particles transformed into pure energy. Space began to give off light, dark red at first. She seemed to slink in a bloodred energy sea. The light rapidly grew in intensity, changing from the dark red to orange, then again to an eye-piercing pure blue. She seemed to fly within a giant tube of neon light. Particles of matter had already melted in the energy sea. Shining through this dazzling space, she saw the borders of the universe bend into a spherical surface, like the closing of a giant palm. The universe shrank down to the size of a large parlor. She was suspended in its center waiting for a strange particle to arrive. Finally, everything fell into pitch darkness. She knew she was already within a strange particle.
After a blast of cold, she found herself standing on a broad white plain. Above her was a limitless black void. The ground was pure white, covered by a layer of smooth, transparent, sticky liquid. She walked ahead to the side of a bright red river. A transparent membrane covered the river surface. The red river water surged under the membrane. She left the ground, soaring into the sky. Not far away, the blood river branched into many tributaries, forming a complex network of waterways. She soared even higher. The blood rivers grew slender, mere traces against the white ground, which still stretched to the horizon. She flew forward. A black sea appeared. Once she flew over the sea, she realized it wasn’t black. It seemed so because it was deep and completely transparent. The mountain ranges on the vast seafloor came into view. These crystalline mountain ranges stretched radially from the center of the sea to the shore…. She pushed herself up even higher and didn’t look down again until who knows how long. Now, she saw the entire universe at once.
The universe was a giant eye calmly looking at her.
She woke suddenly. Her forehead was wet. She wasn’t sure if it was sweat or dew. He hadn’t slept, always at her side silently looking at her. Sitting on the grass in front of them, the model of the brain had exhausted its battery. The starlight that pierced it had extinguished.
Above them, those stars hovered as before.
“What are ‘they’ thinking?” she asked, breaking the silence.
“Now?”
“In these thirty-four years.”
“The twinkling the sun originated could just be a primitive neural impulse. Those happen all the time. Most of them are like mosquitoes causing tiny ripples on a pond, insubstantial. Only those impulses that spread through the whole universe can become an actual experience.”
“We used up a lifetime, and saw of ‘him’ just one twinkling impulse that ‘he’ couldn’t even feel?” she said hazily, as though still in the middle of a dream.
“Use an entire human civilization’s life span, and we still might not see one of ‘his’ actual experiences.”
“People’s lives are bitter and short.”
“Yes. People’s lives are bitter and short….”
“A truly insightful, solitary person.”
“What?” He looked at her, uncomprehending.
“Oh, I said ‘he,’ apart from completeness, is nothingness. ‘He’ is everything. Still thinking, or maybe dreaming. But dreaming about what …”
“Let’s not try to be philosophers!” He waved his hand as though he were shooing something away.
Out of the blue, something occurred to her. She got off of the broken wall. “According to the big bang theory of modern cosmology, while the universe is expanding, the light emitted from a given point can never spread widely across the universe.”
“In other words, ‘he’ can never have even one actual experience.”
Her eyes focused infinitely far away. She stayed silent for a long time, before speaking. “Do we?”
Her question sank him into his recollection of the past. Meanwhile, the woods of Mount Siyun heard its first birdcall. A ray of light appeared on the eastern horizon.
“I have,” he answered confidently.
Yes, he had. It was thirty-four years ago during a peaceful moonlit night on this mountain peak. A feather-like figure in the moonlight, a pair of eyes looking up at the stars … A twinkling in his brain quickly propagated through the entire universe of his mind. From then on, that twinkling never disappeared. That universe contained in his brain was more magnificent than the star-filled exterior universe that had already expanded for about fourteen billion years. Although the external universe was vast, the evidence ultimately showed it was finite. Thought, however, was infinite.
The eastern sky grew brighter and brighter, starting to hide its sea of stars. Mount Siyun revealed its rough contours. On its highest peak, at the vine-covered ruins of the observatory, these two nearly sixty-year-old people gazed eastward expectantly, waiting for that dazzling brain cell to rise over the horizon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CIXIN LIU is China’s #1 SF writer and author of The Three-Body Problem – the first ever translated novel to win a Hugo Award. Prior to becoming a writer, Liu worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan.
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