by Cixin Liu
“Look here, sir,” Bai Bing said, pointing to a menu bar below the image. “These buttons let you zoom and change angles. This is the time slider bar. The digital mirror program will continue to move forward in time following you as the search object. If you want to find a particular time or event, it’s not that different from how you’d use the scrollbar to look up things in a large document in a word processor. First find the approximate location with large steps through time, then make smaller adjustments, moving the slider left or right based on scenes you recognize. You should be able to find it. It’s also similar to the fast-forward and rewind functions on a DVD player, although, of course, this disk playing at normal speed would take—”
“I believe nearly five hundred thousand hours,” said the Senior Official, doing the mental math for Bai Bing. He accepted the mouse and zoomed out, revealing the young mother on the maternity bed, and the rest of the hospital room. There were a bedside table and lamp in the plain style of that era, and a window with a wooden frame. What caught his attention was a spot of red-orange light on the wall. “I was born in the evening, about the same time as now. Perhaps this is the last ray of the setting sun.”
The Senior Official shifted the time slider, and the image again began to jump rapidly. Time flew past. When he stopped, the screen showed a small circular table lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. At the table, his plainly dressed, bespectacled mother was tutoring four children. An even younger child of three or four, clearly the Senior Official himself, was clumsily feeding himself from a small wooden bowl. “My mother was an elementary school teacher. She liked to bring the students having trouble with schoolwork back home for tutoring. That way, she could pick me up from nursery school on time.” The Senior Official watched for a while. His child self accidentally spilled the bowl of porridge all over himself. His mother hurriedly got up, reaching for a towel. Only then did the Senior Official move the time slider.
Time skipped forward a few years. The screen suddenly lit up in a blaze of red, apparently the mouth of a blast furnace. Several workers in dirty asbestos work suits were moving, their silhouettes flickering in and out of the furnace flames. The Senior Official pointed to one of the figures. “That’s my father, a furnace worker.”
“You can change the angle to the front,” said Bai Bing. He tried to take the mouse from the Senior Official, who refused him politely.
“Oh, no. This year, the factory worked everyone overtime to increase production. The workers had to be brought meals by family members, and I went. This was the first time I saw my father at work, from this exact angle. His silhouette against the furnace fire impressed itself into my mind very deeply.”
Once more, years passed in the wake of the time slider, stopping on a clear, sunny day. The bright red flag of the Young Pioneers of China waved against the azure sky. A boy in a white shirt and blue trousers gazed up at it as other hands fastened a red scarf around his neck. The boy’s right hand flew above his head in a salute, passionately announcing to the world that he would always be prepared to struggle for the cause of Communism. His eyes were as clear as the cloudless blue sky.
“I joined the Young Pioneers in second grade of elementary school.”
Time jumped forward, and a different flag appeared: that of the Communist Youth League, against the backdrop of a memorial to the fallen. A small group of older children were swearing their oaths to the flag. He stood in the back row, his eyes as bright as before, but tinged with new fervor and longing.
“I joined the Youth League first year of secondary school.”
The slider moved. The third red flag of his life appeared, the flag of the Communist Party this time, in what appeared to be an enormous lecture hall. The Senior Official zoomed in on one of the six teenagers taking their oaths, letting his face fill the screen.
“I joined the Party sophomore year of college.” The Senior Official pointed at the screen. “Look at my eyes. What do you see in them?”
In that pair of young eyes could still be seen the spark of childhood, the fervor and longing of youth, but there was a new and yet immature wisdom, too.
“I feel you were … sincere,” Bai Bing said, looking at those eyes.
“You’d be right. Until then, I still meant every word of the oath.” The Senior Official wiped at his eye, the motion minute enough that Bai Bing didn’t notice it.
The slider moved forward another few years. This time it sped too far, but after a few small adjustments, a tree-shaded path appeared on the screen. He stood there, looking at a young woman turning to leave. She turned her head to look at him one last time, her eyes bright with tears. She gave a powerful impression, solemn but resolute. Then she left, disappearing into the distance between the two rows of tall poplars. Tactfully, Bai Bing got up and prepared to leave some space, but the Senior Official stopped him.
“Don’t worry, this is the last time I saw her.” He put down the mouse, his gaze leaving the screen. “Very well, thank you. You may turn off the computer.”
“Don’t you want to keep watching?”
“That’s all I have worth reminiscing.”
“We can find where she is right now, no problem!”
“That won’t be necessary. It’s getting late; you should leave. Thank you, truly.”
* * *
Once Bai Bing left, the Senior Official telephoned the security station, requesting that the building guard come up to his office for a moment. Soon after, the armed police guard entered and saluted.
“You’re … Yang, yes?”
“You have an excellent memory, sir.”
“I didn’t call you up here for anything important. I just wanted to tell you that today is my birthday.”
Taken by surprise, the guard was momentarily lost for words.
The Senior Official smiled indulgently. “Send my regards to the ranks. You may go.” The guard saluted, but just as he turned to leave, the Senior Official seemed to think of something. “Oh, leave the gun behind.”
The guard hesitated, but pulled out his handgun. He walked over and carefully set it on one end of the broad office desk, before saluting again and leaving.
The Senior Official picked up the gun, detached the magazine, and took out the bullets, one by one, until there was only the last. Then he pushed the magazine back in. The next person to handle this gun could be his secretary, or the janitor who came in at night. An empty gun was always safer.
He put down the gun, then stood the removed bullets on the table in a circle, like the candles on a birthday cake. After that he strode to the window, looking across the city to the sun on the verge of setting. Behind the outer city’s industrial air pollution, it appeared as a deep red disk. He thought it looked like a mirror.
The last thing he did was to take the small “Serve the People” pin from his lapel and set it on the flag stand on the desk, beneath the miniature flags of China and the CCP.
Then he sat at his desk, calmly awaiting the last ray of the setting sun.
THE FUTURE
That night, Song Cheng entered the main computer room of the Center for Meteorological Modeling. He found Bai Bing alone, looking quietly at the screen of the booting superstring computer.
Song Cheng came over and patted his shoulder. “Hey, Bai, I’ve already notified your manager. A special car will arrive shortly to take you to Beijing. You’ll give the superstring computer to a central official. Some other experts in the field might listen to your report too. With such an extraordinary technology, it won’t be easy to get people to understand and believe it all. You’ll have to be patient when you explain and give the demonstrations … Bai Bing, what’s wrong?”
Bai Bing remained quiet, not turning from his seat. In the mirrored universe on the screen, the Earth floated suspended in space. The ice caps had altered in shape, and the ocean was a grayer shade of blue, but the changes weren’t obvious. Song Cheng didn’t notice them.
“He was right,” Bai Bing said.
>
“What?”
“The Senior Official was right.” Bai Bing turned slowly toward Song Cheng. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Did you spend an entire day and night coming up with that conclusion?”
“No, I got the future-time recursion to work.”
“You mean … the digital mirror can simulate the future now?”
Bai Bing nodded listlessly. “Just the very distant future. I thought of a completely new algorithm last night. It avoids the relatively near future, which allows it to sidestep the disruption in the causal chain resulting from knowledge of the future changing the present. I jumped the mirror directly into the far future.”
“How far?”
“Thirty-five thousand years later.”
“What’s society like, then?” Song Cheng asked cautiously. “Is the mirror having its effect?”
Bai Bing shook his head. “The digital mirror won’t exist by that time. Society won’t either. Human civilization already disappeared.”
Song Cheng was speechless.
On the screen, the viewing angle descended rapidly, coming to a stop above a city surrounded by desert.
“This is our city. It’s empty, already dead for two thousand years.”
The first impression the dead city gave was of a world of squares. All the buildings were perfect cubes, arrayed in neat columns and rows to form a perfectly square city. Only the clouds of sandy dust that rose at times in the square grid streets prevented one from mistaking the city for an abstract geometrical figure in a textbook.
Bai Bing maneuvered the viewing angle to enter a room in one of the cube-shaped edifices. Everything in it had been buried by countless years of sand and dust. On the side with the window, the accumulated sand rose in a slope, already high enough to touch the windowsill. The surface of the sand bulged in places, perhaps indicating buried appliances and furniture. A few structures like dead branches extended from one corner; that was a metal coatrack, now mostly rust. Bai Bing copied part of the view and pasted it into another program, where he processed away the thick layer of sand on top, revealing a television and refrigerator rusted down to the bare frames, as well as a writing desk. A picture frame, long fallen over, lay on the desk. Bai Bing adjusted the viewing angle and zoomed in so that the small photo in the frame filled the screen.
It was a family portrait of three, but the three people in the photo were practically identical in appearance and dress. One could guess their gender only by the length of hair, and age only by height. They wore matching outfits similar to Mao suits, orderly and stiff, buttoned to the collar. When Song Cheng looked closer, he found that their features still displayed some variation. The effect of indistinguishability had come from their identical expressions, a sort of wooden serenity, a sort of dead graveness.
“Everyone in the photos and video fragments I could find had the same expression on their face. I haven’t seen any other emotion, certainly not tears or laughter.”
“How did it end up like this?” Song Cheng asked, horrified. “Can you look through the historical records they left?”
“I did. The course of history after us goes something like this: The age of the mirror will start in five years. During the first twenty years, digital mirrors will only be used by law enforcement, but they’ll already be substantially affecting human society and causing structural changes. After that, digital mirrors will seep into every corner of life and society. History calls it the beginning of the Mirror Era. For the first five centuries of the new era, human society still gradually develops. The signs of total stagnation first appear in the mid-sixth century ME. Culture stagnates first, because human nature is now as pure as water, and there is nothing left to depict and express. Literature disappears, then all of the humanities. Science and technology will grind to a standstill after them. The stagnation of progress lasts thirty thousand years. History calls that protracted period the Middle Age of Light.”
“What happens after?”
“The rest is straightforward. Earth runs out of resources, and all the arable land is lost to desertification. Meanwhile, humanity still doesn’t have the technology to colonize space, or the power to excavate new resources. In those five thousand years, everything slowly winds down.… In the era I showed you, there are still people living on all the continents, but there’s really not much to see.”
“Ah…” The sound Song Cheng made resembled the Senior Official’s slow sigh. A long time passed before his shaking voice could ask, “Then … what do we do? Do we destroy the digital mirror right now?”
Bai Bing took out two cigarettes, handing one to Song Cheng. He lit his own and drew deeply, blowing the smoke at the three dead faces on the screen. “I’m definitely destroying the digital mirror. I only kept it around until now so you can see. But nothing we do now matters. That’s one bit of consolation: everything that happens afterward has nothing to do with us.”
“Someone else created a digital mirror too?”
“The theory and technology for it are both out there, and according to superstring theory, the number of viable initialization parameter sets is enormous, but still finite. If you keep going down the list, you’ll eventually run into that one set.… More than thirty thousand years from now, till the last days of civilization, humanity will still be thanking and worshiping a guy named Nick Kristoff.”
“Who is he?”
“According to the historical records: a devout Christian, physicist, and inventor of the digital mirror software.”
MIRROR ERA
FIVE MONTHS LATER, AT THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY CENTER OF EXPERIMENTAL COSMOLOGY
When the radiant sea of stars appeared on one of the fifty display screens, all of the scientists and engineers present erupted into cheers. Five superstring computers stood here, each simulating ten virtual machines, for a total of fifty sets of big bang simulations running day and night. This newly created virtual universe was the 32,961st.
Only one middle-aged man remained unmoved. He was heavy-browed and alert-eyed, imposing in appearance, the silver cross at his breast all the more striking against his black sweater. He made the sign of the cross, and asked:
“Gravitational constant?”
“6.67 times 10–11!”
“Speed of light in a vacuum?”
“2.998 times 105 kilometers per second!”
“Planck’s constant?”
“6.626 times 10–34!”
“Charge of electron?”
“1.602 times 10–19 coulombs!”
“One plus one?” He gravely kissed the cross at his chest.
“Equals two! This is our universe, Professor Kristoff!”
ODE TO JOY
An alternate history of the sophon
TRANSLATED BY JOEL MARTINSEN
THE CONCERT
The concert held to close the final session of the United Nations was a depressing one.
A utilitarian attitude toward the body, dating back to bad precedents set at the start of the century, had been on the rise; countries assumed the UN was a tool to achieve their interests, and interpreted its charter to their own benefit. Smaller nations challenged the authority of the permanent members, while each permanent member believed it deserved more authority within the organization, which lost all authority of its own as a result. A decade on, all efforts at a rescue had failed, and everyone agreed that the UN and the idealism it represented no longer applied to the real world. It was time to be rid of it.
All heads of state assembled for the final session, to observe a solemn funeral for the UN. The concert, held on the lawn outside the General Assembly building, was the final item on the program.
It was well after sunset. This was the most bewitching time of day, the handover from day to night when the cares of reality were masked by the growing dusk. The world was still visible under the last light from the setting sun, and on the lawn, the air was thick with the scent of budding flowers.
The secretary general was the
last to arrive. On the lawn, she ran across Richard Clayderman,* one of the evening’s featured performers, and struck up a cheerful conversation.
“Your playing fascinates me,” she told the prince of pianists with a smile.
Clayderman, dressed in his favorite snow-white suit, looked uncomfortable. “If that’s genuine, then I’m overjoyed. But I’ve heard there have been complaints about my appearance at a concert like this.”
Not merely complaints. The head of UNESCO, a noted art theorist, had publicly criticized Clayderman’s playing as “busker-level,” and his performances as “blasphemy against piano artistry.”
The secretary general lifted a hand to stop him. “The UN can have none of classical music’s arrogance. You’ve erected a bridge from classical music to the masses, and so must we bring humanity’s highest ideals directly to the common people. That’s why you were invited here tonight. Believe me, when I first heard your music under the sweltering sun in Africa, I had the feeling of standing in a ditch looking up at the stars. It was intoxicating.”
Clayderman gestured toward the leaders on the lawn. “It feels more like a family gathering than a UN event.”
The secretary general looked over the crowd. “On this lawn, for tonight at least, we have realized a utopia.”
She crossed the lawn and reached the front row. It was a glorious evening. She had planned on switching off her political sixth sense and just relaxing for once, taking her place as an ordinary member of the audience, but this proved impossible. That sense had picked up a situation: The president of China, engaged in conversation with the president of the United States, looked up at the sky for a moment. The act itself was utterly unremarkable, but the secretary general noticed that it was a little on the long side, perhaps just an extra second or two, but she’d noticed it. When the secretary general sat down after shaking hands with the other world leaders in the front row, the Chinese president looked up at the sky again, confirming his perception. Where national leaders are concerned, apparently random actions are in fact highly precise, and under normal circumstances, this act would not have been repeated. The US president also noticed it.
