by Cixin Liu
“We have a problem,” she said. “One round of calculations for this model will need to run for five hundred thousand hours on a single computer.”
I was shocked. “That’s... more than fifty years?”
“Yes. From past experience, every model requires several rounds of debugging before it’s operational—more in this case, since it’s such a complex model. We can only allow ten days to complete a simulation.”
I mentally estimated: “We’d need two thousand computers working simultaneously.”
Instead, we started a search for a mainframe, but it wasn’t easy. Neither Lightning Institute nor New Concepts had one; their biggest machine was an AlphaServer. The military’s mainframes were busy and had tight restrictions, and since ours wasn’t a registered military project, Lin Yun could not win us their use despite repeated attempts. So we had to place our hopes on civilian-sector mainframes, where Lin Yun and I had no connections at all. We turned to Gao Bo for ideas.
His situation wasn’t good. When he took up his position, he had converted all of the institutional departments into business units that were completely reliant on the market. He had conducted competitive rehiring and laid off a huge number of staff. His HR conduct was more impulsive than careful, and combined with his poor understanding of national conditions and human sentiment, his relationships were tense throughout the hierarchy.
His business failures were even worse. The first thing he did in office was to focus the Institute’s main strength on new surge arrestors and eliminators vastly different from conventional anti-lightning systems, including semiconductor eliminators, optimized lightning rods, laser lightning attractors, rocket lightning attractors, and water column lightning attractors. However, right around that time, new surge arrestors and eliminators were under discussion at a conference of the Chinese Society for Electrical Engineering’s High Voltage Committee, Overvoltage and Insulation Coordination Subcommittee. Minutes from the meeting showed a decision that, as there had been no theoretical or practical demonstration that these nonstandard products had any superior functionality to ordinary anti-lightning devices, and seeing as many R&D problems still remained, nonstandard anti-lightning products therefore could not be adopted in engineering projects. Due to the group’s authority and influence, the conference’s viewpoint was destined to be adopted by state-designated lightning projects, meaning that any such technology currently under development would be completely shut out of the market, wasting enormous investment. When I went to Gao Bo to talk about the mainframe, he was looking for me, to ask me to put ball lightning research on hold and concentrate my energy on developing a new lightning location system for power supply systems. He also wanted me to complete the design of an anti-lightning project for the Beijing Capital Theater. Hence the mainframe was a no-go. I had to do ball lightning research in my spare time.
Lin Yun and I tried some other leads, but it turned out that in the era of commoditized computers, mainframes were scarce.
“We’re pretty fortunate, really,” she said. “Our calculations are nothing next to the world’s supercomputing projects. I recently saw the data for a US DOE nuclear test simulation, which their current twelve teraFLOPS is far from satisfying. They’re setting up a cluster incorporating twelve thousand individual Alpha processors that can achieve speeds on the order of one hundred teraFLOPS. Our calculations rate as conventional compared to that, so we should be able to find a solution.”
She acted like a warrior at all times. No matter the difficulty, she pushed forward, minimizing my stress by understating the difficulties involved. It was something I ought to have been doing for her.
I said, “There are similarities between the digital models of ball lightning and nuclear tests. They’re both simulating an energy release process, and in some respects, the former is more complicated. So at some point we’ll need the kind of computational power they’re using. But even right now, I don’t see any way out for us.”
For the next few days, I concentrated on the lightning location system Gao Bo had passed down to me, and I didn’t have any contact with Lin Yun. One day I received a phone call from her, telling me to look at a website. She sounded very excited.
I opened up the website and saw a black outer space background topped by purple radio waves floating over the Earth. The page title was SETI@home, short for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home.”
I’d heard of it before: a huge experiment that harnessed the idle power of tens of thousands of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI@home program was a special screen saver that analyzed data from the world’s largest radio telescopes to help in the hunt. When you have a fire hose of data coming at your ears and you need to sift through it to find the information you need, a giant supercomputer is a necessity that comes at a huge cost. Scientists with tight budgets found an expedient solution: rather than use one large machine, they shared the workload among many smaller computers. Every day, data received by Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was recorded onto high-density tapes and sent back to the research base in California, where it was divided into chunks of roughly 0.25 megabytes and distributed by the main SETI@home server to different personal computers. All Internet users around the world had to do was visit the website and download and install the screen saver. Then, when they took a break from work, the screen saver would start running, and a computer that appeared to be at rest would join the ranks of those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, receiving and analyzing chunks of data from SETI@home, automatically returning the results to base when complete, and then fetching another chunk.
I downloaded the screen saver and started it running. It also had a black background, and in the lower half, the signal received by radio telescope was displayed in three-dimensional coordinates, like a bird’s-eye view of a megacity composed of countless skyscrapers, a magnificent sight. The upper left displayed a dynamic waveform—the portion of the signal under analysis—as well as a completion percentage, which, after five minutes, displayed just 0.01 percent.
“Wonderful!” I exclaimed, drawing startled looks from my officemates. At the realization of how those wealthier scientists had, on encountering the same problem as us, come up with such a creative and frugal solution, I felt a sense of embarrassment. I went to New Concepts immediately, where Lin Yun was seated at a computer and, as I had expected, working on a web page.
“I’m almost done, and we’ve located a server. The key thing is, under what pretense?”
“Modeling ball lightning, of course!”
“Absolutely not! How many people are interested in that? I say we look for aliens, too.”
“We can’t trick people.”
“It’s not tricking them. Ball lightning’s behavior is difficult to explain using purely physical laws, but most of the problems are easily resolved if you think of it as a life-form.”
“That’s going a bit woo-woo.”
“I’ve thought about this before. A world composed of atoms and molecules has evolved life, so if the Big Bang theory is correct, then in the long evolutionary history of the universe, the invisible electromagnetic world would have been in existence far longer than the world of atoms and molecules. Why wouldn’t it have evolved an electromagnetic structure akin to life?”
“That settles it. Let’s look for aliens!”
“We’ve got an advantage over SETI. They’re looking for aliens tens of thousands of light-years away, but we’re looking in the atmosphere,” she said as she showed me the home page, with SETI@home’s background replaced with blue sky, and the title changed to “SML@home”—“Search for Magnetic Life at home.” The screen saver displayed a faint blue fireball that drifted slowly across the screen, dragging a purple tail of light and emitting a deep hum.
The next thing to do was to divide the model we needed to calculate into two thousand chunks in parallel. That was a lot of work that took us half a month—the programmin
g was more complicated than SETI@home’s since the chunks had to transmit data to each other. Then we hooked the chunks up to the screen saver and put it on the web page. Finally, we put up the web page and hopefully awaited the results.
Three days later, we realized we’d been a bit too optimistic. The website had received fewer than fifty hits, and only four people had downloaded the screen saver. Two comments were left on our guestbook warning us not to engage in pseudoscience.
“There’s only one option left,” Lin Yun said. “Subterfuge. We’ll upload our data to the SETI@home servers. It’s no hassle to hack them. Then, all of those computers that have downloaded their screen saver will do our work, and the program will send the results back to us.”
I didn’t object. I had discovered how weak moral constraints seemed when you crave something. But I rationalized: “They’ve got more than a hundred thousand computers working for them. We only need two thousand, and we’ll leave when we’re done. It won’t affect them much.”
Lin Yun’s conscience didn’t need soothing. She hooked up the broadband and quickly got to work. She worked so adeptly I had a hard time imagining how she’d learned that. Two days later, she had successfully put our data and programs onto the SETI@home server (at UC Berkeley, we found out later).
Lin Yun, I was learning, had far fewer moral constraints than I did, in that she dared to act recklessly to achieve her goals.
Just two days later, all of the two thousand screen savers had been downloaded from the SETI@home server, and the calculation results began streaming into our server. For several days, Lin Yun and I sat for hours watching the data build up, imagining in exhilaration the two thousand computers scattered across the globe working for us.
But on the eighth day, I turned on my computer and logged on to the New Concept server to discover that the updates had stopped. The last transmission was a text file, which read:
We are devoting our meager funds to the service of humanity’s greatest endeavor, but find ourselves subjected to such a brazen intrusion. You should be ashamed of yourselves!
Norton Parker
Director, SETI@home
I felt a chill in my heart like I’d plunged into an ice pit, and was too disheartened even to call Lin Yun.
She called instead. “I know. But that’s not why I called,” she said, and added, “Look at the guestbook on our old web page.”
I opened up SML@home and saw another message in English in the guestbook:
I know what you are calculating. BL. Don’t waste your life. Come and find me!
24th Street, Bldg 106, #561
Nekrasovsky Naukograd, Novosibirsk, Russia
BL. Short for ball lightning.
Siberia
“Ah, the sigh of wind in the pines!” Lin Yun said excitedly. My mind wasn’t on aesthetics, but on tightening my coat around me. Through the swirling snow and fog, the distant peaks were vague shadows.
The plane from Moscow took four hours to reach Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, adding an additional layer of strangeness atop the one I felt upon landing in Moscow the week before, except with a modicum of comfort at the thought that this place was closer to China.
After receiving the message, we instinctively felt that there had to be something behind it, but I never dreamed I would ever get the chance to go to Siberia. A week before, Lin Yun informed me that she and I would travel to Russia with a technical advisory group. China and Russia, she said, had basically completed negotiations for in-China assembly of Sukhoi Su-30 fighters, and the advisory group was accompanying low-level representatives to Russia to work out the details. I would be the group’s sole lightning expert. Finding this an odd coincidence, I asked her how she’d found this opportunity, and she said mysteriously, “I exercised a certain privilege, one I didn’t use when looking for the mainframe. This time there was no other way.”
I didn’t know what privilege she was talking about, but I didn’t ask further.
After reaching Moscow, I found I had absolutely nothing to do in the delegation’s activities, nor did Lin Yun. We visited the Sukhoi Design Bureau and a few military-industrial assembly plants.
One evening in Moscow, Lin Yun asked for leave from the group leader and went out, only returning to the hotel late at night. I visited her in her room, where she was sitting woodenly, eyes red and face stained with tears, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought of her as the type to cry. She said nothing and I asked nothing, but for the next three days in Moscow she was depressed. This episode informed me that her life was far more complicated than I imagined.
When the delegation boarded the plane to fly home, we boarded a different plane headed in basically the same direction, but for a much closer destination. Novosibirsk wasn’t all that much closer to Moscow than to Beijing.
We found a taxi to Nekrasovsky Naukograd, which the driver told us was a sixty-kilometer drive. On either side of the snow-covered roadway was an endless swirl of snow and dark forests. Lin Yun could speak halting Russian and seemed to have struck up a rapport with the driver. He twisted his neck to peer at me, shivering with cold in the back seat, and, as if sympathizing with me being left out of the conversation, suddenly switched into fluent English and carried on talking to Lin Yun.
The driver told us Noksbek Naukograd was a Science City. “...Science Cities were a romantic idea of the 1950s, brimming with the purity and innocence of that era, and with idealism for creating a new world. But they weren’t, in fact, as successful as you may have heard. Far from metropolitan areas, transportation difficulties limited the radiant effects of science and technology. Insufficient population meant that metropolitan culture was unable to take shape, violating the human inclination toward urbanism, and, in a futile struggle with larger cities, they could only watch as scientists migrated toward more attractive locations.”
“You don’t sound like a taxi driver,” I remarked.
Lin Yun said, “He’s a researcher at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is... what did you say your specialty was?”
“I’m engaged in studying comprehensive resource planning of undeveloped areas in the far-east economic region, a project of use to no one in an age of quick bucks.”
“Were you laid off?”
“Not yet. Today’s Sunday. I make more driving this cab on the weekend than I get in salary for the week.”
*
When the car entered the Science City, buildings from the 1950s and ’60s swept past on either side of us in the snow, and I’m certain I even saw a statue of Lenin. It was a city with a sense of nostalgia, something you didn’t get from ancient cities and their thousand-odd years of history. They were too old, old enough to have no connection to you, old enough that you lost all feeling. But young cities like these made you think about the era that had just passed away, the childhood and youth you spent there, your own antiquity, your own prehistory.
The car stopped at a five-story building in what could have been a residential area, part of a row of identical-looking buildings. Before the driver drove off, he left us with a memorable line through the window: “This is the cheapest neighborhood in the city, but the people who live here aren’t cheap.”
We went through the door into a dark interior of a residential building with ’50s-era high ceilings and several election stickers for various local political parties stuck to the lobby walls. Farther in, we had to feel our way forward. We used a cigarette lighter to check the door numbers up on the fifth floor. As we skirted the stairwell entrance in search of number 561, my fingers now getting scorched, I heard a man’s deep voice shout in English, “Is that you? For BL? Third door on the left.”
We pushed open the door and entered a room that gave two contradictory feelings: at first it was very dark, but then the ceiling lights glared. The room was filled with the stench of alcohol. Books were everywhere, and it looked chaotic, but not to the point of being out of control. A computer screen flashed for an instant before
going dark, and the large man sitting at it stood up. He had a long beard, a somewhat pale face, and seemed to be in his sixties.
“When you’ve lived here for so long, it’s easy to tell who’s coming up the stairs from the sound. The only strangers paying a visit would have to be you two. I knew you’d come.” He took stock of us. “So young—like I was at the start of my tragic life. You’re Chinese?”
We nodded.
“My father went to China in the fifties as a hydroelectric engineer, to help you build the Sanmenxia Hydropower Station. I heard it only made things worse.”*
Lin Yun thought a moment before replying. “It seems you all didn’t account for the silt in the Yellow River, so the dam caused flooding upstream. Even now the reservoir can’t be filled to design levels.”
“Ah, another failure. The memories left to us from that romantic age are nothing but failure. Alexander Gemow,” he said by way of introduction. We introduced ourselves in turn. He took stock of us again, this time with a more meaningful look, and then said to himself, “So young. You’re still worth saving.”
Lin Yun and I glanced at each other in surprise, and then tried to guess the meaning behind his words. Gemow put a liquor bottle and a glass onto the table, and then began rummaging around for something. We took this opportunity to take a look at the room. I noticed a forest of empties flanking his computer, and realized the source of the peculiar paradox I’d felt upon entering: the walls were papered in black, so it was practically a darkroom, but age and water seepage had faded the color, bringing out white lines and blotches on the black walls.
“Found them. No one ever comes here, damn it.” He put two large glasses on the table, then filled them with alcohol, a home-brewed vodka, cloudy white. I declared I couldn’t drink that much.
“Then let the lady drink for you,” he said coldly, draining his glass and refilling it. Lin Yun did not protest, but drained her glass as I clicked my tongue, then reached over and drank half of mine.
