To Hold Up the Sky

by Cixin Liu

  “Our universe was created in a massive explosion twenty billion years ago. Most people picture the big bang like some ball of fire bursting forth in the darkness of space, but that’s incorrect. Before the big bang, there was nothing, not even time and space. There was only a singularity, a single point of undefined size that rapidly expanded to form our universe today. Anything and everything, including us, originated from the singularity’s expansion. It is the seed from which all living things grew! The theory behind it all is really deep, and I don’t fully understand it myself, but the relevant part is this: With the advancement of physics and the appearance of ‘theories of everything’ like string theory, physicists are starting to figure out the structure of that singularity and create a mathematical model for it. This is different from the quantum-theory models they had before. If we can determine the fundamental parameters of the singularity before the big bang, we can determine everything in the universe it forms too. An uninterrupted chain of cause and effect running through the entire history of the universe…” He sighed. “Seriously, how am I supposed to explain it all?”

  Bai Bing saw Song Cheng shake his head, as if he didn’t understand, or as if he didn’t even want to keep listening.

  Bai Bing said, “Take my advice and stop thinking about the suffering you’ve gone through. Honestly, I haven’t been much luckier. Like I said, I’m just an ordinary person, but now they’re hunting me, and I may end up even worse than you, all because I know everything. You can hold on to the fact that you were martyred for your sense of duty and faith, but I’m … I just have really shitty luck. Enough shit luck for eight reincarnations. I’ve been screwed over even worse than you.”

  Song Cheng only continued to look at him, silently, as if to say: No one can be screwed over worse than me.

  FRAMED

  A week after he met with the Senior Official, Song Cheng was arrested for murder.

  To be fair, Song Cheng had already known they’d take extraordinary measures against him. The usual administrative and political methods were too risky to use on someone who knew so much and was already in the process of taking action. But he hadn’t imagined his opponent would move so quickly, or strike so viciously.

  The victim was a nightclub dancer called LuoLuo, and he’d died in Song Cheng’s car. The doors were locked from the outside. Two canisters of propane, the type used to refill cigarette lighters, had been tossed into the car, both slit open. The liquid inside had completely evaporated, and the high concentration of propane vapor in the car had fatally poisoned the victim. When the body was discovered, it was clutching a battered, broken cell phone in one hand, clearly used in an attempt to smash the car windows.

  The police produced ample evidence. They had two hours of recordings to prove that Song Cheng had been in most irregular association with LuoLuo for the last three months. The most incriminating piece of evidence was the 110 call LuoLuo had made to the police shortly before his death.

  LuoLuo

  … Hurry. Hurry! I can’t open the car doors! I can’t breathe, my head hurts …

  110

  Where are you? Can you clarify your situation?!

  LuoLuo

  … Song … Song Cheng wants to kill me …

  [End of transmission]

  Afterward, the police found a short phone-call recording on the victim’s cell, preserving an exchange between Song Cheng and the victim.

  Song Cheng

  Now that we’ve gone this far, how about you break things off with Xu Xueping?

  LuoLuo

  Why the need, Brother Song? Me and Sister Xu just have the usual man-woman relations. It won’t affect our thing. Hell, it might help.

  Song Cheng

  It makes me uncomfortable. Don’t make me take action.

  LuoLuo

  Brother Song, let me live my life.

  [End of transmission]

  This was a highly professional frame-up. Its brilliance lay in that the evidence the police held was just about 100 percent real.

  Song Cheng really had been associating with LuoLuo for a while, in secret, and it could indeed be called irregular. The two recordings weren’t faked, although the second had been distorted.

  Song Cheng met LuoLuo because of Xu Xueping, director general of Changtong Group, who held intimate financial ties to many nodes of the network of corruption and no doubt considerable knowledge of its background and inner workings. Of course, Song Cheng couldn’t get any information directly from her, but with LuoLuo he had an in.

  LuoLuo didn’t provide Song Cheng information out of any inner sense of righteousness. In his eyes, the world was already good for nothing but wiping his ass on. He was in it for revenge.

  This hinterland city shrouded in industrial smog and dust might have been ranked at the bottom of the list of similar-sized Chinese cities for average income, but it had some of the most opulent nightclubs in the nation. The young scions of Beijing’s political families had to watch their image in the capital city, unable to indulge their desires like the rich without Party affiliations. Instead, they got in their cars every weekend and zipped four or five hours along the highway to this city, spent two days and one night in hedonistic extravagance, and zipped back to Beijing on Sunday night.

  LuoLuo’s Blue Wave was the highest-end of all the nightclubs. Requesting a song cost at least three thousand yuan, and bottles of Martell and Hennessy priced at thousands each sold multiple cases every night. But Blue Wave’s real claim to fame was that it catered exclusively to female guests.

  Unlike his fellow dancers, LuoLuo didn’t care about how much his clients paid, but how much that money meant to them. A white-collar foreign worker making just two or three hundred thousand yuan a year (rare paupers in Blue Wave) could give him a few hundred and he’d accept. But Sister Xu wasn’t one. Her fortune of billions had made waves south of the Yangtze the last few years, and likewise she was smashing the opposition in her expansion northward. But after several months spent together, she’d sent LuoLuo off with a mere four hundred thousand.

  It had taken a lot to catch Sister Xu’s eye; after she had broken it off, any other dancer would have, in LuoLuo’s words, swigged enough champagne to make his liver hurt. But not LuoLuo, who was now filled with hatred for Xu Xueping. The arrival of a high-ranking Discipline Inspection official gave him hope of revenge, and he used his talents to entangle himself with Sister Xu once more. Normally, Xu Xueping was closemouthed even with LuoLuo, but once they had too many drinks or snorted too many lines, it was a different story. LuoLuo knew how to take the initiative, too; in the darkest hours before dawn, while Sister Xu slept soundly beside him, he’d silently climb out of bed and search her briefcase and drawers, snapping pictures of documents that he and Song Cheng needed.

  Most of the video recordings the police used to prove Song Cheng’s association with LuoLuo had been taken in the main dance hall in Blue Wave. The camera liked to start with the pretty young boys dancing enthusiastically on the stage, before shifting to the expensively dressed female guests gathered in the dim areas, pointing at the stage, now and then smiling confidentially. The final shot always captured Song Cheng and LuoLuo, often sitting in some corner in the back, seeming very intimate as they conversed quietly with heads bent close. As the only male guest in the club, Song Cheng was instantly recognizable.…

  Song Cheng didn’t have anything to say to that. Most of the time, he could only find LuoLuo at Blue Wave. The lighting in the dance hall was always dim, but these recordings were high resolution and clear. They could only have been taken with a high-end low-light camera, not the sort of equipment normal people would have. That meant they’d noticed him from the very beginning, showing Song Cheng how very amateur he had been compared to his opponent.

  That day, LuoLuo wanted to report his latest findings. When Song Cheng met him at the nightclub, LuoLuo uncharacteristically asked to talk in the car. Once they were done, he’d told Song that he felt unwell. If he went back to th
e club now, his boss would make him get on stage for sure. He wanted to rest for a while in Song Cheng’s car.

  Song Cheng had thought that LuoLuo’s addiction might have been acting up again, but he didn’t have a choice. He could only drive back to his office to take care of the work he hadn’t finished during the day, parking in front of the department building with LuoLuo waiting in the car. Forty minutes later, when he came back out, someone had already found LuoLuo dead in a car full of propane fumes. Song Cheng had to open the car door from the outside.

  Later, a close friend in the police force who’d participated in the investigation told Song that the lock on his car door didn’t show any signs of sabotage, and the evidence elsewhere really was enough to rule out the possibility of another killer. Logically enough, everyone assumed that Song Cheng had killed LuoLuo. But Song Cheng knew the only possible explanation: LuoLuo had brought the two propane canisters into the car himself.

  This was too much for Song Cheng to fight against. He gave up his attempts to clear his name: if someone had used his own life and death as a weapon to frame him, he didn’t have a chance of escape.

  Really, LuoLuo committing suicide didn’t surprise Song Cheng; his HIV test had returned positive. But someone else must have prompted him to use his death to frame Song Cheng. What would have been in it for him? What would money be worth to him now? Was the money for someone else? Or maybe his recompense wasn’t money. But what was it, then? Was there some temptation or fear even stronger than his hatred of Xu Xueping? Song Cheng would never know now, but here he could see even more clearly his opponent’s capabilities, and his own naïveté.

  This was his life as the world knew it: a high-ranked Discipline Inspection cadre living a secret life of corruption and affairs, arrested for murdering his paramour in a lover’s spat. The temperance he’d previously displayed in his heterosexual relationship only became further proof in the public mind. Like a trampled stinkbug, everything he had possessed disappeared without a trace.

  Now Song Cheng realized that he’d been so prepared to sacrifice everything for faith and duty only because he hadn’t even understood what sacrificing everything entailed. He’d of course imagined that death would be the bottom line. Only later did he realize that sacrifice could be far, far crueler. The police took him home one time when they searched his house. His wife and daughter were both there. He reached toward his daughter, but the child shrieked in disgust and buried her face in her mother’s arms, shrinking into a corner. He’d seen the look they gave him only once before, one morning when he’d found a mouse in the trap under the wardrobe, and showed it to them.…

  “Okay, let’s set aside the big bang and the singularity and all the abstract stuff for now.” Bai Bing broke off Song Cheng’s painful reminiscences and hauled the large briefcase onto the table. “Take a look at this.”

  SUPERSTRING COMPUTER, ULTIMATE CAPACITY, DIGITAL MIRROR

  “This is a superstring computer,” Bai Bing said, patting the briefcase. “I brought it over, or, if you prefer, stole it from the Center for Meteorological Modeling. I’ll depend on it to escape pursuit.”

  Song Cheng shifted his gaze to the briefcase, clearly confused.

  “These are expensive. There are only two in the province as of now. According to superstring theory, the fundamental particles of matter aren’t point-like objects, but an infinitely thin one-dimensional string vibrating in eleven dimensions. Nowadays, we can manipulate this string to store and process information along the dimension of its length. That’s the theory behind a superstring computer.

  “A CPU or piece of internal storage in a traditional electronic computer is just an atom in a superstring computer! The circuits are formed by the particles’ eleven-dimensional microscale structure. This higher-dimensional subatomic array has given humanity practically infinite storage and operational capacity. Comparing the supercomputers of the past to superstring computers is like comparing our ten fingers to those supercomputers. A superstring computer has ultimate capacity, that is to say, it has the capacity to store the current status of every fundamental particle existing in the known universe and perform operations with them. In other words, if we only look at three dimensions of space and one of time, a superstring computer can model the entire universe on the atomic level.…”

  Song Cheng alternately looked at the briefcase and Bai Bing. Unlike before, he seemed to be listening to Bai Bing’s words with full attention. In truth, he was desperately seeking any kind of relief, letting this mysterious visitor’s rambling extricate him from his painful memories.

  “Sorry for going on and on like this—big bang this and superstring that. It must seem completely unrelated to the reality we’re facing, but to give a proper explanation I can’t sidestep it. Let’s talk about my career next. I’m a software engineer specializing in simulation software. That is, you create a mathematical model and run it in a computer to simulate some object or process in the real world. I studied mathematics, so I do both the model-creating and the programming. In the past I’ve simulated sandstorms, soil erosion on the Loess Plateau, energy generation and economic development trends in the Northeast, so on. Now I’m working on large-scale weather models. I love my work. Watching a piece of the real world running and evolving inside a computer is honestly fascinating.”

  Bai Bing looked at Song Cheng, who was staring at him unblinkingly. He seemed to be listening attentively, so Bai Bing continued.

  “You know, the field of physics has had huge breakthroughs one after another in recent years, a lot like at the beginning of the last century. Now, if you give us the boundary conditions, we can lift the fog of quantum effects to accurately predict the behavior of fundamental particles, either singly or in a group.

  “Notice I mentioned groups. A group of enough particles means a macroscopic body. In other words, we can now create a mathematical model of a macroscopic object on the atomic level. This sort of simulation is called a digital mirror. I’ll give an example. If we used digital mirroring to create a mathematical model of an egg—as in, we input the status of every atom in the egg into the model’s database—and run it in the computer, given suitable boundary conditions, the virtual egg in memory will hatch into a chick. And the virtual chick in memory would be perfectly identical to the chick hatched from the egg in real life, down to the tips of every feather! And think further, what if the object being modeled were bigger than an egg? As big as a tree, a person, many people. As big as a city, a country, or even all of Earth?” Bai Bing was getting worked up, gesturing wildly as he spoke.

  “I like to think this way, pushing every idea to its limit. This led me to wonder, what if the object being digitally mirrored were the entire universe?” Bai Bing could no longer control his passion. “Imagine, the entire universe! My god, an entire universe running in RAM! From creation to destruction—”

  Bai Bing broke off his enthusiastic account and stood up, suddenly on guard. The door swung open soundlessly. Two grim-faced men entered. The slightly older one turned to Bai Bing and raised his hands to show that he should do the same. Bai Bing and Song Cheng saw the leather handgun holster under his open jacket; Bai Bing obediently put his hands up. The younger man patted Bai Bing down carefully, then shook his head at the older man. He picked up the large briefcase as well, setting it down farther from Bai Bing.

  The older man walked to the door and made a welcoming gesture outward. Three more people entered. The first was the city’s chief of police, Chen Xufeng. The second was the province’s secretary of discipline inspection, his old classmate, Lu Wenming. Last came the Senior Official.

  The younger cop took out a pair of handcuffs, but Lu Wenming shook his head at him. Chen Xufeng turned his head minutely toward the door, and the two plainclothes police left. One of them removed a small object from the table leg as he left, clearly a listening device.

  INITIAL STATE

  Bai Bing’s face didn’t show any sign of surprise. He smiled placidly. “You’
ve finally caught me.”

  “More accurately, you flew into our net on purpose. I have to admit, if you really wanted to escape, we would’ve had a hard time catching you,” said Chen Xufeng.

  Lu Wenming glanced at Song Cheng, his expression complicated. He seemed to want to say something, but stopped himself.

  The Senior Official slowly shook his head. He intoned solemnly, “Oh, Song Cheng, how did you fall so low…” He stood silent for a long time, hands resting on the table’s edge, his eyes a little damp. No onlooker could have doubted that his grief was real.

  “Senior Official, I don’t think you need to playact here,” Bai Bing said, coldly watching the proceedings.

  The Senior Official didn’t move.

  “You were the one who arranged to frame him.”

  “Proof?” the Senior Official asked indulgently, still unmoving.

  “After that meeting, you only said one thing about Song Cheng, to him.” Bai Bing pointed at Chen Xufeng. “Xufeng, you know what that whole business with Song Cheng means, of course. Let’s put a little effort into it.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “It won’t count for anything in court, of course. With your cleverness and experience, you didn’t let anything slip, even in a secret conversation. But he,” Bai Bing pointed again at Chen Xufeng, “got the message loud and clear. He’s always understood you perfectly. He ordered one of the two people earlier to carry out the framing. His name is Chenbing, and he’s his most competent subordinate. The whole process was one formidable engineering project. I don’t think I need to go into detail here.”

  The Senior Official slowly turned around and sat down in a chair by the office table. He looked at the ground as he said, “Young man, I have to admit, your sudden appearance has been astonishing in many ways. To use Chief Chen’s words, it’s like seeing a ghost.” He was silent for a while, and then his voice rang out with sincerity. “How about you tell us your real identity? If you really were sent by the central officials, please trust that we’ll assist you however we can.”