Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  On a technological level, the Supernova War was akin to the First World War, in which the land armies’ regular forces played a decisive role. In contrast to high-tech weapon disparities, there was not as great a disparity in the game war in relative damage rates between the parties’ conventional weapons.

  Tanks were this war’s most important weapons. NATO’s land-war theory held that armored ground forces were inseparable from low-altitude assault power; without fire cover and aerial reconnaissance provided by armored helicopters, tank groups were sitting ducks on the battlefield. As one American armored commander of the Common Era put it, “An Abrams without an Apache has its pants down.”

  The children’s training had been so brief that low-altitude helicopter strikes had as little impact on the Supernova War as the high-altitude air power of fighters and bombers, and helicopters crashed or were shot down in even greater numbers than other aircraft. An Apache piloted by two inexperienced, overwhelmed children flying back and forth over the battlefield proved an excellent target for shoulder-fired missiles. So on the Antarctic battleground, the attack helicopters most desired by army aviation pilots weren’t the American Apaches but the coaxial-rotor-equipped Russian Kamov Ka-50s, whose distinguishing feature was the first-ever helicopter ejection seat.

  Surviving an ejection through a helicopter’s rotors would be especially difficult, so the Ka-50’s solution was to blow off the rotors before ejecting, giving the pilot a high chance of surviving a direct hit. In an Apache, on the other hand, if the young pilots were hit while in flight, they simply had to wait it out until the end. Absent low-altitude support and cover, the tank games did not display much of a disparity in relative damage rates.

  * * *

  Time flew by, and before they knew it six months had passed. In that time, ocean levels worldwide continued to rise, swamping the coasts and turning Shanghai, New York, and Tokyo into water cities. Most children in these areas moved farther inland, and the remainder adapted themselves to the liquid life, rafting between skyscrapers and preserving some semblance of life in these formerly bustling metropolises. In Antarctica, meanwhile, the climate continued to warm up, even during the long night, bringing mild, early-winter weather and average temperatures above −10°C. The continent’s temperate weather only served to further underscore its crucial nature.

  Negotiations for dividing up Antarctica were set to begin, and the key bargaining chip for every country was its performance in the war games, a fact that motivated all children to redouble their efforts. Fresh troops were constantly arriving in Antarctica, swelling the scale of the games, and the fires of war continued their march across the continent.

  The United States, on the other hand, was mired in disappointment and dejection, despite being the instigator of the games. Because high-tech weapons were no threat in the hands of children, the country had not dominated the games in the way its children had hoped, and the multipolar shape of the games worried them ahead of the upcoming Antarctica Talks.

  One last event, the ICBM fight, was about to begin, and it was on this that the American children were pinning their final hopes.

  * * *

  “Are you kidding? It’s really heading our way?” Marshal Zavyalova asked the advisor.

  “That’s what the radar warning center says. I doubt they’re mistaken.”

  “Maybe it’ll change trajectory?” President Ilyukhin ventured.

  “Not a chance. The warhead’s in the terminal guidance phase, in an unpowered free fall. It’s coming in like a stone.”

  In the command center, everyone in Russian High Command was concentrating on the first ICBM fight with the US. The American children had fired an ICBM from their own territory, ten thousand kilometers away, directly at the Russian command center, a serious violation of the game’s rules. Both sides had set their target areas in advance, and Russia had provided a target zone more than a hundred kilometers distant. There shouldn’t have been any mistake.

  “What are you afraid of? At least it’s not a nuclear warhead,” Ilyukhin said.

  “A conventional warhead is frightening enough. It’s a Minuteman III. Those were deployed in the 1980s, I think. They can carry three tons of conventional high-explosive warheads. If it lands within two hundred meters we’ll be destroyed!” Zavyalova said.

  “And what if it lands right on our heads? We’d be dead even if it wasn’t carrying anything!” a colonel advisor said.

  Zavyalova said, “It’s not out of the question. The Minuteman is one of the most accurate ICBMs there are. Hundred-meter precision.”

  They heard a low wailing in the air, as if a keen blade were rending the sky in two. “It’s coming!” someone shouted, and everyone held their breath, skin crawling, waiting for the coming impact.

  There was a dull thud outside and a gentle tremor in the ground. They poured outside and saw a shower of dirt falling back to the ground about half a kilometer away. Ilyukhin, Zavyalova, and the others jumped into vehicles and hurried over to it. A crowd of soldiers were digging into a crater with shovels, hoes, and a backhoe.

  “The warhead apparently released a small drag chute at around ten thousand meters, so it didn’t burrow too deep,” an air force colonel said.

  Half an hour later, the bottom part of the buried ICBM’s warhead was exposed, a metal sphere 2.3 meters in diameter with three scorches on the perimeter from blasting bolts. The children inserted a drill rod into a gap they found, and were able to pry apart the metal shell. In wonder they stared at the cornucopia of boxes, all shapes and sizes, lying in a dampening cushion. Then, very carefully, they opened one. Inside were small foil-wrapped objects containing lumps of a brown substance.

  “Explosives!” warned one kid.

  Zavyalova picked up one of the “explosives” and looked it over. She gave it a sniff, then bit a piece. “Chocolate,” she said.

  They opened other boxes, which held not just chocolate but cigars as well. As the other kids were divvying up the chocolate, Ilyukhin took out a fat cigar and lit it, but he’d only taken a few puffs before it blew up in a ball of streamers, and the kids burst out laughing at him standing there stunned with a cigar butt hanging from his lips.

  He spat out the cigar butt, and said, “Three days from now, it’ll be our turn to fire on the American kids’ command center.”

  * * *

  “I’ve got a bad premonition,” Specs said during a meeting in the Chinese command center.

  “Agreed. We ought to move our command center immediately,” Lü Gang said.

  “Is that really necessary?” Huahua asked.

  “The American kids attacked the Russian command center in the ICBM game, violating the principle that bases were untouchable. Our base might be hit as a target, and that warhead might contain more than just chocolate and cigars.”

  Specs said, “My premonition goes deeper than that. I’ve got a feeling there’s going to be a sudden change in the situation.”

  Out the window of the command center, the first white of dawn had appeared on the horizon. The long Antarctic night was coming to an end.

  * * *

  From the desolate plains of northwestern Russia close to the Arctic Circle, a range-extended SS-25 Sickle whooshed into the air from a multifunction missile launcher and crossed the globe in the space of forty minutes. When it reached the sky over Antarctica, the warhead came down in a smooth parabola and hit a patch of snow inside the American base, just 280 meters from the command center. After the launch, American NMD and TMD fired six antiballistic missiles to intercept. The children watched on their screens in breathless anticipation as two glowing dots smacked almost exactly into each other. But each was a letdown, since the intercepting missiles’ suborbital trajectories through the atmosphere passed by each other separated by dozens of meters.

  After a moment of shock, the American children went about digging out the warhead, and discovered that what the Russian children had rocketed to them from twenty thousand kilometers
away was a copious amount of vodka in shock-resistant bottles, and a pretty box with a note saying it was a gift for Davey. Inside was a Russian doll, and inside that one another one, ten in all, each of them with an uncannily accurate representation of Davey’s face. The outermost was laughing, but farther in the expressions grew less happy and more worried, until the last thumb-sized one had Davey mouth open, bawling.

  Enraged, Davey threw the dolls into the snow and seized General Scott with one hand and General Harvey, who was in charge of strategic missile defense, with the other. “You are both relieved of duty! You idiots. You guaranteed that NMD and TMD would work. You—” He broke off and turned to Scott. “Didn’t you say they put us into a strongbox? And you—” He turned to Harvey and shouted, “Where the hell were your prizewinning prodigies? Are they any better than a pack of online hackers?”

  “Uh … all six tries only missed by a smidgen,” Scott said, red-faced.

  Harvey, who hadn’t slept in three days, pushed Davey aside without regard for presidential dignity and shouted, “You’re the idiot! You think those two systems are there to play around with? The TMD software alone runs to nearly two hundred million lines of code!”

  An advisor came over and handed Davey a printout. “This is from Mr. Yagüe. It’s the latest agenda for the Antarctic Talks.”

  The children from US High Command stood silently at the edge of the giant crater with a warhead from the other side of the world down at the bottom. Davey was quiet for a moment, and then said, “We have to seize the absolute advantage in the games before negotiations begin.”

  Vaughn said, “That’s impossible. The games are practically finished.”

  “You know it’s possible. You’re just unwilling to take up that line of thought,” Davey said, jerking around to fix a stare on the secretary of state.

  “Surely you don’t mean the new game?”

  “That’s right. The new game. That’s exactly it. We should have started earlier!” Scott answered for Davey.

  “There’s no way of knowing where it’ll take the Antarctic Games,” Vaughn said. He looked off in the distance, and the depths of his eyes reflected the white light of dawn on the horizon.

  “You love to complicate the simplest things in order to show off your knowledge. Even an idiot can see that the new game will give us an absolute advantage throughout the continent, in one stroke. It’ll totally clear up the direction of the games.” Davey took the printout the advisor had just delivered and waved it in Vaughn’s face. “As clear-cut as this memo. There’s nothing that’s unknown about it!”

  Vaughn reached out and took the paper from Davey’s hands. “You think this paper is cut-and-dry?”

  Davey gave him a puzzled stare, and then looked at the paper. “Of course.”

  With his withered hands, Vaughn folded the paper in half, and said, “That’s once.” Then he folded it again. “That’s twice.” Again. “Three times.… Now, Mr. President, do you find this clear-cut? Something easy and predictable?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well then, I dare you to fold it thirty-five times.” Vaughn held up the thrice-folded printout.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Answer me. Do you dare?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Davey went to take the paper from him, but Vaughn caught his hand. At the cold, clammy touch, he felt like a snake was crawling across his back.

  “Mr. President, you’re speaking as the supreme decision maker, and every one of your decisions will make history. Think it over again. Do you really dare?”

  Davey stared at him in utter confusion.

  “You have one last chance. Before you make your decision, wouldn’t you like to predict the outcome, just like you’ve predicted the outcome of the new game?”

  “The outcome? The outcome of folding a piece of paper in half thirty-five times? Don’t make me laugh,” Scott said derisively.

  “For example, how thick will that folded paper get?”

  “Around as thick as a Bible, I’d guess,” Davey said.

  Vaughn shook his head.

  “Around knee-high,” Harvey said.

  Again, Vaughn shook his head.

  “As high as the command center?”

  Vaughn shook his head.

  “You don’t mean it’d be as high as the Pentagon?” Scott said mockingly.

  “This sheet of paper is around zero point one millimeters thick. Calculating with that value, after thirty-five folds, it would be 6,871,950 meters thick, or around 6,872 kilometers. That’s roughly the radius of the Earth.”

  “What? For just thirty-five times? You’ve got to be joking!” Scott said loudly.

  “He’s right,” Davey said. He was no dummy, and had quickly made the connection to the Indian legend of the king and the chessboard.

  Vaughn tucked the folded paper into Davey’s shirt pocket. Looking around at the dumbstruck young commanders, he said slowly, “Never be too optimistic about your own judgment, particularly when it comes to the course of history.”

  Davey bowed his head and dejectedly accepted his loss. Then he said, “I admit that our minds are simpler than yours. If everyone had a mind like yours, the world would be a really scary place. Still, we can’t be certain of success, nor can we be certain of failure. Why not give it a try? We want to! There’s no way we can be stopped!”

  “Mr. President,” Vaughn said coldly. “That is your right. I’ve said all I need to.”

  In the first rays of dawn over the Antarctic wilderness, the Supernova Era advanced into the most dangerous place in its young history.

  A THOUSAND SUNS

  Before the start of their ICBM match with the American children, the Chinese children secretly moved their command center. They loaded all personnel and communications equipment into fourteen helicopters and flew forty-odd kilometers inland. Here the geography was somewhat different from the coast, and featured conical hills where the snow hadn’t entirely melted. The command center was set up in tents backed up against one hill, fronting on a broad plain in the direction of the base.

  “Second Artillery Corps Command called to ask what we should load into the warhead,” Lü Gang said to Huahua.

  “Hmmm … how about tanghulu?”

  Then the children scanned the sky near the coast through binoculars, and a young advisor wearing an earpiece provided them with a general direction, using data transmitted to him by the distant radar warning center about the approaching American ICBM.

  “Heads up. They say it’s getting close. Heading 135, inclination 42. Just over there. You should be able to see it now!”

  The early-morning Antarctic sky was a deep, dark blue, and scattered stars were still visible, but it seemed blacker than it had during the long night owing to the greatly diminished southern lights. A point of light stood out against the dark blue, moving rapidly but slower than a shooting star. It had a short fiery tail visible through binoculars, caused by air friction during reentry. Then the light disappeared, and nothing was visible in the blue heavens, whether by naked eye or through binoculars, as if it had melted into the infinite darkness. But the children knew that the missile’s warhead had entered the atmosphere and was following a precise, gravity-guided trajectory toward its target.

  “Good. It’s target is the base. Or more precisely, the command center!” called the advisor with the earpiece.

  “What’ll be in the warhead this time?”

  “Maybe Barbie dolls.”

  The Antarctic dawn was suddenly bright as midday.

  “A supernova!” exclaimed one child in fear.

  This was a familiar sight to the children, one they knew in their bones. Indeed, it closely resembled a supernova blast, and the blinding light threw the land and hillside into sudden, sharp clarity. But this time, rather than turning blue, the sky turned deep purple. The light came from the direction of the ocean, and when the children looked toward it, they saw the new sun hanging over the horizon. Unlike the supernova, thi
s sun was a ball larger than the actual sun and so fierce they could feel its heat on their faces.

  Realizing what had happened, Lü Gang shouted, “Don’t look at it. It’ll hurt your eyes!”

  They all shut their eyes, but the intensifying glare penetrated their eyelids and remained painfully bright, making them feel like they had fallen into an ocean of radiance. They clapped their hands to their eyes, but the light pierced the gaps between their fingers. They stayed in that position until the world darkened again, and then carefully removed their hands. It took their burnt-out eyes some time to readjust.

  Lü Gang asked them, “How long do you think that sun lasted just now?”

  They thought back on it, and said it seemed like at least ten seconds.

  He nodded. “I think so too. Judging from the duration of the fireball, it might have been in the megaton class.”

  Now that their vision had returned, the children looked out toward where the sun had appeared and vanished. Something white was rapidly expanding on the horizon.

  “Cover your ears!” Lü Gang shouted. “Quickly! Cover your ears!”

  They covered their ears and waited, but no explosion came. The mushroom cloud on the horizon, silvery white in the morning light, now touched the sky. The contrast it posed with the land and sky was frankly surreal, as if a gargantuan fantastic image had been superimposed upon a realistic painting. The children stared in silence, and some of them subconsciously lowered their hands from their ears.

  Lü Gang shouted again, “Cover your ears! Sound takes two seconds to reach us.”

  They covered their ears tightly, and then the ground began to rumble beneath their feet like the surface of a charged drum, throwing dirt and snow knee-high in the air, and sending the snow cover down the hill as if it had melted. The noise penetrated their flesh and bones, bored into their skulls, and they felt as if their bodies were being broken apart and scattered to the four winds, leaving their terrified souls to quiver on the ground.