by Cixin Liu
Some leading cadre of the provincial AI-Security Bureau had taken it upon himself to compile the code of the latest version of the Curse virus, the Curse 5.0.
In this version, the target parameters for “Taiyuan City”, “ Shanxi Province”, and “China” had been replaced with “*”, “*”, “*”
The Micro-Age
CHAPTER
1
Return
The Forerunner now knew that he was the only person left in the universe. He knew that when he crossed the orbit of Pluto. From here the Sun was but a dim star, no different from when he had left the Solar System 30 years ago.
The divergence analysis the computer had just performed, however, told him that Pluto's orbit had significantly shifted outward. Using this data, he could calculate that the Sun had lost 4.74 percent of its mass since he had left. And that left only one conclusion, sending shivers straight through his heart, chilling his soul.
It had already happened.
In fact, humanity had long known that it would happen when he had embarked on his journey. They had learned that after thousands upon thousands of probes had been shot into the Sun. The probes' findings allowed astrophysicists to determine that a short-lived energy flash would erupt from the star, reducing its mass by about five percent.
If the Sun could think and could remember, it would have almost certainly been untroubled. In the billion-long years of its life, it had already undergone much greater upheavals than this. When it was born from the turbulence of a spiraling stellar nebula, greater changes had been measured in milliseconds. In those brilliant and glorious moments, its gravitational collapse ignited the fires of nuclear fusion, illuminating the grim, dark chaos of stellar dust.
It knew that its life was a process, and even though it was currently in the most stable phase of this process, occasional minor, yet sudden, changes were inevitable. The Sun was much like the calm surface of water; perfectly still for the most part, but every so often broken by the bursting of a rising bubble. The loss of energy and mass meant very little to it. The Sun would remain the Sun, a medium-sized star with an apparent visual magnitude of -26.8.
The flash would not even have that great of an effect on the rest of the Solar System. Mercury would probably dissolve, while the dense atmosphere of Venus would likely be stripped to nothing. The effect on the more distant planets would be even less severe. It could be expected that the surface of Mars would melt, likely scorching its color from red to black. As for Earth, its surface would only be heated to 7,000 degrees, probably for no longer than 100 hours or so. The planet's oceans would certainly evaporate. On dry land, strata of continental rock would liquefy, but that would be that.
The Sun would then quickly revert to its erstwhile state, albeit with reduced mass. This reduction would cause the orbits of all the planets to shift outward, but that would hardly be consequential. Earth, for example, would only experience a slight drop of temperature, on average falling to about -80 degrees. In fact, the cold would advance the re-solidification of the melted surface and it would ensure that some of Earth's water and atmosphere would be preserved.
There was a joke that became popular in those days. It was a conversation with God and it went like this:
“Oh, God, for you thousands of years are just a brief moment!”
God answered, “Indeed, they are just a second to me.”
“Oh, God, for you hundreds of millions are just small change!”
God answered, “Just a nickel.”
“Oh, God, please spare me a nickel!”
Upon which God then answered, “Certainly. Just give me a second. ”
Now, it was the Sun that was asking humanity for “just a second”. It had been calculated that the energy flash would at the earliest occur in 18,000 years.
For the Sun, this certainly was no more than a second, but in humanity – faced with an entire 'second' of waiting – it engendered an attitude of apathy. “Apathism” was even elevated to a kind of philosophy. It was all not without its repercussions; with every passing day humanity grew more cynical.
Then again, there were at least four- or five-hundred generations in which humankind could leisurely find a way out.
After two centuries, humanity took the first step: A spaceship was launched into interstellar space, taxed with the mission of finding a habitable planet within 100 light-years to which humanity could migrate. This spaceship was called the UNS Ark and its crew became known as the Forerunners.
The Ark swept past 60 stars, and so past 60 infernos. Only one was accompanied by a satellite. This satellite was a 5,000-mile-wide drop of incandescent, molten metal, its liquid form in constant flux as it orbited.
It was the Ark's only achievement; further proof of humanity's loneliness.
The UNS Ark sailed for 23 years. However, as she traveled close to light-speed, this “Ark Time” equated to 25,000 years on Earth. Had it followed its mission plan, the UNS Ark should have long returned to Earth.
Flying close to the speed of light made communication with Earth impossible. Only by reducing its velocity to less than half the speed of light could the Ark be contacted by Earth. This maneuver, however, cost significant amounts of time and energy, and therefore the Ark would usually only perform it once a month to receive a dispatch from Earth. When it slowed down, the Ark would pick up Earth's newest message, sent more than 100 years after the last. The relative time between the Ark and Earth made communication much like targeting a high-powered scope; if the scope was budged by even the slightest degree, its aim would jump a vast distance off-target.
The UNS Ark had received its last message from Earth 13 “Ark years” after it was first set out. On Earth, 17,000 years had passed since its departure. One month after that message, the Ark had again slowed, but it had received only silence. The predictions made many millennia ago could certainly have been off. One month on the Ark was more than a 100 years on Earth. In that time it must have happened.
UNS Ark had truly become an actual ark – an ark with a lone Noah. Of the other seven Forerunners, four had been killed by radiation when a star exploded in a nova four light-years from the Ark. Two others had succumbed to illness; one man had, in the silence of that fateful slow-down, shot himself.
The last Forerunner had kept the Ark at communication-speed for a long stretch. Finally, he had accelerated the Ark back to near light-speed, but a tiny flame of hope burning within him had soon tempted him to again reduce the ship's speed. Again he had listened anxiously, but all he heard was silence; and so it went on. His frequent cycles of acceleration and deceleration prolonged the return journey multi-fold.
And through it all, the silence remained.
The Ark returned to the solar system 25,000 years after its departure from Earth, 9,000 years later than had at first been planned.
CHAPTER
2
The Monument
Passing the orbit of Pluto, the Ark continued its flight deep into the Solar System. For an interstellar vessel such as the UNS Ark, traveling in the solar system was like sailing in the calm of a harbor. Soon the Sun grew brighter. As its light began to bathe the Ark, the Forerunner caught his first glimpse of Jupiter. Through his telescope he could see that the huge planet had changed almost beyond recognition. Its red spot was nowhere to be seen and its tempestuous bands appeared more chaotic than ever. He paid no heed to the other planets and continued the tranquil flight at the end of his journey, straight on to Earth.
The Forerunner's hand trembled as he pushed the button. The massive metal shield covering the porthole slowly crept open.
“Oh, my blue sphere, blue eye of the universe, my blue angel,” the Forerunner prayed, his eyelids closed firmly.
A long time later, he finally forced his eyes open.
The planet he saw was black and white.
The black was rock, melted and re-hardened; tombstone black. The white was seawater, vaporized and refrozen; corpse shroud white.
&nb
sp; As the Ark entered low Earth orbit, slowly passing over the black land and white oceans, the Forerunner spotted no vestiges of humanity; all had been melted to nothing. Civilization was gone, lost in a wisp of smoke.
But at least there should have been some kind of monument, some memorial capable of withstanding the 7,000 degrees that had destroyed all else.
Just as these thoughts crossed the Forerunner's mind, the monument appeared. It was a video signal, originating from the surface and being sent to his spaceship. The computer streamed the signal's contents onto his screen. It was a video, millennia old. Obviously shot by extremely heat-resistant cameras, it revealed the catastrophe that had befallen Earth. The moment the energy flash hit was very different from what he had imagined so many times in the past years. The Sun did not suddenly grow brighter; most of the cataclysmic radiation it blasted forth remained well outside the visible spectrum. What he could see, however, was the end of the blue sky. It suddenly turned inferno-red, only to change again to a nightmarish purple.
He saw the cities of that era, the so familiar forms of skyscrapers, oozing with thick black smoke as the temperature surged by thousands of degrees. Soon they began to glow in the dim red of kindled charcoal; but they could not last, finally melting like countless sticks of wax.
Scorching red magma streamed from the mountain tops, forming countless cascading waterfalls of molten rock. These incandescent rapids converged to form a massive crimson river of lava that buried the earth below under its pyroclastic floods. And where there had been ocean waters, now stood only giant mushroom clouds of steam. The belly of these ferociously billowing mountains shone with the red glow of the molten world beneath. Their crests were permeated with the sky's cruel purple. The endless ranges of steam clouds expanded with relentless speed and abandon. Soon they swallowed all of the Earth…
Years passed before this haze finally dispersed, revealing that there still was a planet beneath. The burned and melted world below had begun to cool, leaving all of it covered in rippling, black rock. In some parts, magma still flowed, forming intricate webs of fire that spanned the Earth. All traces of humanity had disappeared. Civilization had vanished, forgotten like a dream from which the Earth had awoken.
A few years later, the Earth's water, having been dissociated to oxyhydrogen under the incredible heat, began to recombine. It fell as great torrents, again covering the burning world in steam. It was as if the Earth had been trapped in a titanic steamer; dark, moist and stiflingly hot. The deluge lasted for dozens of years as the Earth continued to cool. Slowly, the oceans began to fill again.
Centuries passed. The dark clouds of evaporated seawater had finally fully dispersed and the sky was returned to blue. In the heavens the Sun reappeared. Earth's new, more distant orbit forced a sharp decline in temperatures, freezing the oceans. Now the sky was without clouds and the long-dead world below froze in complete silence.
Again the picture changed, this time revealing a city: First a forest of tall and slender buildings came into view. As the camera slowly descended from some unseen place above their highest tops, a plaza began to come into view. Its spacious extents were filled with a sea of people. The camera descended further, allowing the Forerunner to discern that all of the faces in the forum were turned up, appearing to look right at him. The camera finally stopped, hovering above a platform in the middle of the plaza.
A beautiful girl, probably in her teens, stood on this platform. Through the screen she waved right at the Forerunner, and as she waved, she shouted, “Hey, we can see you! You came to us like a streaking star!” Her voice was delicate and fair. “Are you the UNS Ark One?”
In the final years of his journey the Forerunner had spent most of his time playing a virtual reality game. To run this game, the computer directly interfaced with the player's brain signals, using his thoughts to generate three-dimensional images. The people and objects in these images were obviously restricted in many ways, bound by the limits of the player's imagination. In his loneliness, the Forerunner had created one virtual world after another, everything from single households to entire realms.
Having spent so much time in unreal realities, he almost immediately recognized the city on his screen for what it was: just another virtual world. It was of inferior quality, at that, most likely the product of a flighty mind. Virtual images such as this one, having been born from the imagination, were always prone to errors. The pictures he saw now, however, seemed to get more wrong than right.
First and worst, when the camera passed those skyscrapers the Forerunner had seen many people leave the buildings through windows on the top floors. These people had jumped straight out, leaping hundreds of feet down to the ground below. After falling from such dizzying heights they would land without a scratch, apparently completely unharmed. Furthermore, he could see people leap off the ground only to rise, as if they were being pulled by invisible wires. These strange jumps could carry them several stories up a skyscraper's side. They could ascend even higher, pushing off foot-holds that ran up the side of all buildings, almost as if they had been put there for just the purpose. In this manner they could reach the top of any building or enter it through any of the many windows. It seemed as if these skyscrapers had neither elevators nor doors. At least, the Forerunner never saw them use anything except a window to enter or leave a building.
When the virtual camera moved above that plaza, the Forerunner could see another error: Amongst the sea of people hung crystal balls suspended by strings. These balls were about three feet in diameter. Occasionally people would reach into these balls, pulling out a part of the crystal substance with great ease. As they removed a piece, the ball would immediately recover its spherical shape. The extracted part would do the same; but even as the small piece rounded itself again, the person who had extracted it would put it into his mouth and swallow it...
In addition to these obvious mistakes, the confusion and derangement of the image's creator could best be captured by something else entirely. Bizarre objects were floating through the city's sky and air. Some were large ones, ranging from five to ten feet, while others were smaller, only a foot or so long. Some looked like pieces of broken sponge, others like the crooked branches of some giant tree, all slowly floating through the air.
The Forerunner saw one large branch drifting toward the girl on the platform. She simply gave it a light push, sending it spiraling into the distance. The Forerunner understood then. In a world on the brink of destruction, it must have been impossible to remain of sound mind and thought.
The image was most likely being sent out by an automated installation. It had probably been buried deep beneath the surface before the catastrophe struck. Shielded from the radiation and heat, it must have lain hidden and waited, automatically rising to the surface once it was safe. This installation then probably kept an unending vigil, monitoring space, projecting these images to any of the scattered remnants of humanity returning to Earth. Chances were that these comical and jumbled images had been created with goodwill, intended to comfort the survivors.
“Did you say that other Arks were launched?” the Forerunner asked, hoping to get something from this bizarre display.
“Of course. There were twelve others!” the girl answered with enthusiasm. The absurdity of the other parts of the image notwithstanding, this girl was not half-bad at all. Her beautiful face combined the best features typical of East and West peoples. She beamed with utmost naivety. To her the entire cosmos seemed a great, big playground. Her large, round eyes seemed to sing with every flutter, while her long hair floated and unfurled in the air, appearing completely weightless. She reminded the Forerunner of a mermaid swimming in an unseen ocean.
“So, is anyone still alive?” the Forerunner asked, his final hope flaring like a wildfire.
“Aren't you?” the girl innocently returned the question.
“Of course. I am a real human. Not like you, a computer-generated virtual person,” the Forerunner replied,
slightly exasperated.
“The last Ark arrived seven-hundred-thirty years ago. You are the last Ark to return, but please tell us, do you have any women aboard?” the girl queried with great interest.
“It is only me,” the Forerunner replied, his head drooping with the memories.
“So you say that there are no women with you?” the girl asked again, her eyes widening in genuine shock.
“As I said, I am the only one. Are there no other spaceships out there that have yet to return?” the Forerunner inquired in return, desperate to keep the fire of hope alive.
The girl wrung her delicate, elfin hands before her chest. “There are none! It's so sad, so very terribly sad! You are the last of them, if…oh…” She could barely contain her sobs. “If not by cloning…” The girl was now crying uncontrollably. “Oh,” she finished, her beautiful face now covered in tears. Around her the people in the plaza were a sea of tears.
While he did not cry, the Forerunner, too, felt his breaking heart sink into new depths. Humanity's destruction had become fact beyond denial.
“Why do you not ask me who I am?” the girl asked, raising her face again. She had reclaimed her innocent demeanor, her recent sorrow, merely seconds past, apparently forgotten.
“I could not care less,” the Forerunner answered flatly.
With tears in her eyes again, the girl shouted, “But I am Earth's Leader!”
“Yes! She is the High Counselor of Earth's Unity Government!” the people in the plaza shouted in unison, darting from sorrow to excitement. They truly were a deficient product.
