Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  His last sentence shocked them all, and one kid said, “You’re lying! You wanted the adults to come back just like we did.”

  “I’m not lying,” he said firmly.

  “… But it’s just you who has that weird feeling.”

  “No. I felt it too.”

  The voice, not a loud one, came from a place in the hall it took a while to locate: Off in a remote corner, Specs sat cross-legged on the floor. At some point they had all forgotten about him, since he hadn’t joined them in answering the phones. Surprisingly, next to him on the ground were three empty cardboard instant-noodle containers. In a period of unprecedented emotional upheaval, a time that later historians would call the Emotional Singularity, when the child leadership team was bending under the weight of immense pressures, who had any time to eat? They had missed two or three meals already, but there Specs was, nonchalantly munching away. He sat on the floor—to make himself comfortable he had taken a sofa cushion and was using it to lean on the leg of a computer desk, leisurely, holding a cup of instant coffee in one hand (he was one of the few children who enjoyed it).

  “Hey man, what do you think you’re doing there?” Huahua shouted at him.

  “What’s most needed: thinking.”

  “Why aren’t you answering phones?”

  “With so many of you answering them, my presence won’t make a difference. If you’re so keen on it, I’d suggest pulling a few hundred kids off the street to help. They won’t be any worse than you are.”

  His expression remained emotionless, as if the extraordinary events before his eyes didn’t actually exist. His attitude had an enormous calming effect on the other children. Slowly standing up and coming over to them, he said, “The adults may have made a mistake.”

  They stared at him in confusion.

  “The children’s world isn’t anything like what they imagined. It’s not even what we imagine.”

  Huahua said, “The situation’s urgent, and you’re here sleepwalking.”

  Without changing his tone, Specs said, “You’re the ones sleepwalking. Look at what you’re doing. At a time like this, the supreme leaders of the country are instructing fire brigades how to put out fires, urging nurses to feed babies, and even teaching a little girl how to eat. It’s shameful, don’t you think?” Then he settled back down against the computer desk and said no more.

  Huahua and Xiaomeng looked at each other, and for a few seconds no one spoke. Then Xiaomeng said, “Specs is right.”

  “Yeah. We lost our minds for a moment,” Huahua said with a sigh.

  Xiaomeng said, “Turn off the walls,” and the walls quickly returned to an opaque creamy white, instantly cutting them off from the chaos of the outside world. She pointed around them and continued, “Turn off the computers and screens, too. Let’s have three minutes of peace. No talking, and no thinking. For three minutes.”

  The screens went blank. The cream walls surrounding them seemed to form a chamber carved from a block of ice, and in this quiet space, the child leaders slowly began to recover their senses.

  SUSPENSION

  SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 2

  When the three minutes were up, a suggestion to turn the computers and screens back on was countered by Huahua: “We’re really pathetic. The situation is nothing worth panicking over. First off, I want us all to realize that the current state of the country is something we should have foreseen long ago.”

  Xiaomeng nodded in agreement. “That’s right. The stability of the dry run was the unusual thing. There’s no way children could have done that themselves.”

  Huahua said, “And as for handling the current state of emergency, we’re no better at handling the details than the agencies lower down. We need to focus on our own duties: working out the reasons—the deep, underlying reasons—why this happened.”

  The children started talking, and before long they began voicing the same question: “It’s weird. The children’s world was running so smoothly, so why did it suddenly plunge into chaos?”

  “Suspension,” said Specs, who had come out of his corner to make another cup of instant coffee.

  The word meant nothing to the children.

  He explained, “We came up with the concept when we were watching Huahua walk on train tracks eight months ago, when we were brought out to have a look at MSG and salt. We wondered how well he’d manage if the tracks were suspended in midair. Before the Epoch Clock ran out, the children’s world was running on tracks firmly grounded in the adult world, and we could ride smoothly along them. But after the clock ran out, the ground fell away, leaving the tracks suspended in midair over a bottomless pit.”

  The children murmured their agreement with Specs’s analysis.

  Huahua said, “Clearly, that last green star going out triggered the instability. When the children realized there were no adults left, their emotional support vanished all at once.”

  Specs nodded. “And we should acknowledge the frightening mass effect of that emotional imbalance. Put together, a hundred minds in that state could outstrip ten thousand in isolation.”

  Xiaomeng said, “Mom and Dad have gone and left us here. We all feel that. Here’s my analysis of the state of the country, and you can judge whether or not I’m right. All of the children in the country are looking for emotional support to fill in for the adults. Children in the provincial and metropolitan leadership are no different from the rest, so the midlevel leadership is paralyzed. That means that the wave of panic sweeping the country is crashing straight into us without any buffer.”

  “Then our next step is to restore the capabilities of the intermediate leadership,” a child said.

  Xiaomeng shook her head. “That’s impossible in the short term, since we’re already in an emergency. What we’ve got to do now is find a new emotional support for the children. That way, leadership at all levels will recover naturally.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when we were handling fires and other emergencies just now, our solutions were no better, and were sometimes worse, than what the children on the scene had. But they calmed down and got the situation under control as soon as they received our reply.”

  “How do you know?”

  Lü Gang said, “We were all answering calls, but only Xiaomeng followed up afterward. From time to time she would ask how the situation was progressing. She pays attention to details.”

  “And so,” Xiaomeng went on, “what the children need from us is a new emotional support.”

  “So we should make a speech on television!”

  She shook her head. “Video and audio of speeches like that have been playing constantly. But they’re useless. Children find emotional support in a different way from adults. What they’re looking for right now is a hug from their departed mother and father, parental love that’s directed at them alone, not spread out among all the children in the country.”

  “That’s astute,” Specs said, nodding. “Every lonely and threatened child can only find emotional support when they personally contact the central government and know that we care about them as an individual.”

  “Which means that we’ve got to go back to answering phones.”

  “How many calls can we take? We should bring in tons of kids and have them contact all the children in the country on behalf of the central government.”

  “How many? There are three hundred million kids. We’d never finish.”

  Once more they despaired of ever draining the ocean with their teacups. All they could do in the face of such an impossible task was sigh.

  Then a kid asked Specs, “Professor, since you know so much, what do you think we should do?”

  Specs swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “I can analyze problems, but I can’t find solutions.”

  Huahua said abruptly, “Have you thought about Big Quantum?”

  Everyone’s eyes brightened. They had been impressed with Big Quantum’s capabilities ever sin
ce they first arrived at NIT. It was like a giant reservoir swallowing up the muddy flood of data from Digital Domain, but what issued forth from the spillway was clear statistics and data analytics. It could use Digital Domain to monitor the entire country in enough detail to capture every work team, or even every individual. Without it, the country of children could not function at all.

  “That’s right! Let Big Quantum answer the calls for us!” Now that they had this idea, the children turned the big screen back on immediately. The flaming map popped up again, its red areas larger now, shining dull red light throughout the hall.

  Huahua asked, “Big Quantum, can you hear us?”

  “I can. I’m waiting for your instructions,” said Big Quantum’s voice from somewhere in the hall. It was a dynamic adult male voice, one that gave the children the fantasy that adults were still present somewhere, and they trusted this supercomputer implicitly.

  “You’re aware of the situation. Can you answer the calls coming in from across the country?”

  “I can. My knowledge banks give me an advantage in handling power outages, fires, and other emergencies. And I can remain on the line until I am no longer needed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that before? That wasn’t very nice!” Zhang Weidong shouted.

  “You never asked,” Big Quantum said evenly.

  Huahua said, “Then get to work. Help the children handle their emergencies, but more importantly, tell them that the country has survived. Let them know that we’re here with them, that we care for each and every one of them.”

  “Very well.”

  “Wait. I’ve got an idea,” Xiaomeng said. “Why do we have to wait for the kids to call in? We can have the computer call up everyone in the country to establish contact, and to provide necessary, individualized assistance. Can you do that, Big Quantum?”

  Big Quantum paused briefly before responding: “This will require two hundred million audio processes to run simultaneously. It may result in the loss of some mirror redundancy capabilities.”

  “In plain language.”

  “That means I need to access a capacity previously reserved for handling emergency failures. Operational reliability will take a hit.”

  Huahua said, “That doesn’t matter. The kids will at least know that we’re standing with them.”

  Specs said, “I don’t agree. Who can predict what the consequences of turning over the state to a computer might be?”

  Huahua said, “It’s easy to predict the consequences if we don’t.”

  Specs had no answer for that.

  Lin Sha asked, “What voice should we have Big Quantum use?”

  “This adult voice, of course.”

  “I disagree,” Huahua said. “We need to get the children to trust other children rather than relying on adults who will never come back.”

  And so they had Big Quantum cycle through different children’s voices and ultimately decided on a serene boy’s voice.

  Then Big Quantum awakened its slumbering power.

  SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 3

  Another huge screen appeared on another white wall displaying another national map, but this one consisted only of glowing lines on a black background sketching out administrative regions. Big Quantum informed the children that the map contained roughly 200 million pixels, each of which represented a terminal or telephone somewhere in the country, and which would light up when a connection was made.

  If the process of Big Quantum calling the entire country were represented visually, it would resemble a spectacular explosion. Digital Domain could be imagined as a gigantic network made up of countless information explosions—its servers—triggered by a complex web of fiber and microwave channels, its center dominated by the super bomb of Big Quantum (eight additional units, four of them hot backups, were distributed in other municipalities). When the calls began, the super bomb detonated, and the flood of information radiated outward, crashing into second-tier servers and detonating ten thousand of them before surging onward to trigger the even more numerous third-tier servers. The information explosion cascaded down until the final level of detonation split the wave of explosions into 200 million narrow information channels and at last to 200 million computers and telephones, covering the whole of the country in a huge digital net.

  On the map on the screen, black territory lit up like stars that multiplied and clustered, until after just a few minutes the whole country was a contiguous sheet of white light.

  At that moment, all the phones in the country started ringing.

  * * *

  In a smallish nursery in urban Beijing, Feng Jing, Yao Pingping, and the four infants under their care (including Ms. Zheng’s child) were in a large room. Ms. Zheng and their parents had gone off into the endless dark night, leaving them as orphans taking care of even smaller orphans. Many years later someone said to them, “You lost both parents overnight. It’s hard to imagine how sad you must have felt.” But in fact what weighed heaviest on the children was not sadness but loneliness and fear. Oh, and anger as well, anger at the departed adults: Had Mom and Dad really gone off without us? Humans are far more able to cope with death than with loneliness. The classroom that served as Feng Jing and Yao Pingping’s nursery seemed huge and empty now that the babies who had been crying during the day had gone silent, as if suffocated by the deathly stillness. To the two girls, the world seemed dead already, with the children in this room the only survivors left on the entire planet.

  Outside was dead calm, no person or any other sign of life, as if even the earthworms and ants underground had died off. They kept the TV on and flipped through the channels one by one, but there hadn’t been any picture since the Epoch Clock ran out (they later learned the cable station had crashed). They ached to see something, anything, and even the most annoying old commercial would have moved them to tears. But the screen showed only snow, cold and desolate, like a snapshot of the world that led to blurred vision if stared at too long. And the snow persisted as they looked back at the room and out the window.

  Later, when it was light, Feng Jing wanted to have a look around outside, and after a number of false starts, eventually found the courage to open the door. She and Yao Pingping, who was holding Ms. Zheng’s child, had been huddled close together, and when she got up and lost contact with their warm bodies, it was like leaping off a life raft into an endless icy ocean. She reached the door, and when her hand touched the lock she shivered: she heard faint footsteps outside. People didn’t scare her, but these footsteps weren’t from a person! She recoiled and returned to clasp Yao Pingping and the baby tightly. The footsteps grew louder, evidently headed in their direction. Whatever it was reached the door and stopped for a few seconds—God—and what did they hear next? Claws at the door! The two girls screamed at the same time and shook uncontrollably. But then the sound stopped and the footsteps retreated. Later they found out it was a starving dog.

  The phone rang. Feng Jing dashed to pick it up. A boy’s voice said, “Hello. This is the central government. According to the computer record of your nursery, you’re a two-person team, Feng Jing and Yao Pingping, in charge of four infants.”

  It was a heavenly sound. Tears streamed down her face, and she was too choked up to say anything. After a moment, she managed a “Yes.”

  “Your area is not currently in danger. According to the most recent records, you have sufficient food and water. Please take care of the four little boys and girls in your charge. I’ll let you know what to do next. If you have any questions or emergencies, please dial 010-8864502517. No need to write that down. Your computer is on, so I’ve put the number up onscreen. If you want someone to talk to, you can call me. Don’t be afraid. The central government is with you at all times.”

  * * *

  Data from across the vast territory converged on Big Quantum in a reverse of the massive series of explosions that had just rocked Digital Domain. More than 200 million snippets of conversation poured into Big Quantum’s me
mory at light speed, where they were abstracted into long waveforms, silhouettes of mountains whose peaks receded into the distance. These waveforms floated cloud-like over the pattern database, while higher up, the eyes of the pattern-recognition routine were fixed on their mighty procession, searching the ground of the database for analogues to each snippet, abstracting every syllable and word to pour down in a torrential rain into the buffer canyon, and join up into language code segments that were then chopped and kneaded by the teeth of the semantic analyzer to extract their real meaning.

  When Big Quantum digested all of the information it had collected, another process started, this one more complicated than can be described in words: An inference engine hurricane swept across the sea of the knowledge database, churning results up from the depths and covering the surface with wave foam. The bits of foam then underwent an inversion of the process, modulated into waveforms that surged out of Big Quantum’s memory and flooded into Digital Domain, at last resolving into the boy’s voice that issued from countless telephones and computer speakers.

  In the server room two hundred meters underground, lights on the cylindrical mainframe blinked madly, while the cooling unit in the separate cooled server room ran at maximum, pumping huge amounts of liquid helium into the interior of the enormous computer, to keep the operating temperature of the superconducting quantum circuits as close as possible to absolute zero. Inside the computer, a typhoon of high-frequency electric pulses roared through superconducting chips, tides of zeros and ones flowing, ebbing, and flowing again.