Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  When the first ball lightning exploded, a strong EM pulse cut off the camera image. When it returned several seconds later, the place was empty, except for a few remaining excited lightning balls that drifted until they gradually went out. As their energy levels dropped, their sound grew less terrifying and more mournful, requiem-like.

  On the roof of the guesthouse, I heard the explosions from the reactor. The sound rattled all of the glass in the building, but we heard it not through our ears, but in our very organs. It was so nauseating that it must have had infrasonic elements.

  *

  I felt like I wouldn’t be able to hold myself together if I entered the reactor room, but I still went in alongside Lin Yun, my psyche so weak that my legs shook and I could scarcely stand still. More than a decade after seeing my parents turned to ash, I stood among the ashes of children. Apart from a very few charred remains, the majority of the deceased had been burned up entirely, but their clothing was basically unharmed. Ball lightning had incinerated them in an instant, with an internal temperature of more than ten thousand degrees and a matter wave resonance that caused its energy to release evenly into every cell.

  Several police officers ringed the teacher’s ashes, searching for something in her pockets. The other seven terrorists had also been tidily taken care of, including the two who were preparing to detonate the red pills.

  I stepped gingerly among the children’s ashes. Those blooms of life were now white piles beneath as many sets of children’s clothing. Many of them retained the shape of children fallen on the ground, heads and limbs clearly distinguishable. The control room floor had become a huge painting, a work of art describing life and death executed by ball lightning. For a moment I even sensed something transcendent and ethereal.

  Lin Yun and I stopped before a small pile of ash which, judging by the undamaged clothing, must have been a girl. Her final position was preserved excellently in ash, and it looked as if she had leaped into a different world with a dance of joy. Unlike the other ash piles, part of her body had escaped destruction: a hand. Her hand was small and white, the wrinkles on each finger unmistakable, as if it still belonged to a living body. Lin Yun squatted down and gently lifted the hand, then held it in both palms. I stood beside her, and we remained motionless; time had stopped for us. I genuinely wished I could become an unfeeling statue and remain with the ashes of the children forever.

  After a while, I realized that there was someone else beside us, the operational commander. Lin Yun noticed him too, and gently set down the hand before standing up. “Sir, let me visit the children’s parents. I was the one who conducted the weapon attack.”

  The commander slowly shook his head. “The decision was mine. The consequences are not your responsibility. They aren’t the responsibility of any comrade who took part in the action. You did well. I will request commendation for Dawnlight. Thank you all. Thank you.” After saying this, he took steady footsteps toward the door. We knew that no matter what assessment this operation received from various quarters, his political career was over.

  After a few steps, he stopped, and without turning around, uttered a sentence that Lin Yun was sure to remember for the rest of her life: “Also, Major, thank you for your counsel about the situation.”

  *

  I handed in my resignation as soon as we returned to base. Everyone tried to make me stay, but my mind was made up.

  Ding Yi said, “Chen, man, you’ve got to think about this rationally. Without ball lightning weapons, those kids would have died anyway. And they’d have died far more horribly, taking tens of thousands of other people with them. Deaths from radiation sickness and leukemia. And the next generation would have deformities....”

  “That’s enough, Professor Ding. I don’t have your pure scientific rationality. Or Lin Yun’s military cool. I don’t have anything. So I’ve got to leave.”

  “If it’s because of something I did...,” Lin Yun said slowly.

  “No, no. You did nothing wrong. It’s me. Like Professor Ding says, I’m too sensitive. Maybe it’s because of what I experienced as a child. I just don’t have the courage to see anyone else get burned to ash by ball lightning. No matter who they are. I don’t have the emotional strength that’s needed for weapons research.”

  “But we’re still collecting chip-burning macro-electrons. Those weapons will end up reducing personnel casualties on the battlefield.”

  “They’re the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. At this point I don’t ever want to see ball lightning again.”

  I was in the records room, returning all of the confidential material I had used in the course of my work. I had to sign my name onto each document, the last bit of paperwork I had to complete before leaving the base. With each name I signed, I took another step away from this world unknown to the outside where I had spent the most unforgettable period of my waning youth. I knew that when I left this time, I would never return.

  When I left, Lin Yun accompanied me for quite a ways. When we parted, she said, “Research on civilian uses of ball lightning may start quite soon. We may have another opportunity to work together then.”

  “It will be nice when that day comes,” I said. It was indeed a comforting thought. But a different feeling prompted me not to wait for that possible future reunion, and instead say the words I had long wanted to tell her.

  “Lin Yun, the first time I met you on Mount Tai, I felt something I’d never felt before....” I looked off at the distant mountains separating us from Beijing.

  “I know... but we’re too different.” She followed my gaze. We remained like that for a while, not looking at each other, but watching the same spot in the distance.

  “Yes. Too different... Take care.”

  With the clouds of war growing thick and foreboding, she surely understood what I meant by the last two words.

  “You too,” she said lightly.

  The car had driven a fair distance when I looked back and saw her standing there still. The autumn wind had blown a carpet of leaves at her feet, so it seemed like she was standing in the middle of a golden river. This was the last impression that Major Lin Yun left me with.

  After that, I never saw her again.

  Strange Phenomena IV

  When I returned to the Lightning Institute, I fell into a deep malaise. I spent my days in a stupor, passing the time getting drunk in my apartment. One day Gao Bo visited. He said, “You’re an idiot. That’s the only way to describe you.”

  “What for?” I asked lazily.

  “Are you under the impression that you’re a saint simply because you left weapons research? Any civilian technology can be put to military use. Likewise, any military technology can benefit the public. As a matter of fact, practically all of the major scientific advances of the past century, in aerospace, nuclear energy, computers, and on and on, were the product of cooperation between scientists and soldiers following different paths. Is even this simple truth too hard for you to understand?”

  “I have unique experiences and wounds that others don’t. Besides, I don’t believe you. I’ll be able to find a research project that saves and benefits lives and has absolutely no use as a weapon.”

  “Impossible, I’d say. The scalpel can kill, too. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you found something to do.”

  *

  It was already late when Gao Bo left. I turned off the light and lay down on my bed. Like every night recently, I entered a state of non-sleep, more exhausting than being awake, since the nightmares came one after another. They rarely repeated, but all of them shared the same background noise, the wailing of ball lightning in flight, like a lonely xun flute blowing endlessly in the wilderness.

  A sound woke me. Deet. Just one brief note, but it stood out from the noise of my dream, and I was clearly aware that it came from non-dream reality. I opened my eyes and looked at the strange blue light enveloping the room. The light was dim and flickered occasionally, and rendere
d the ceiling cold and dark, like the roof of a tomb.

  I sat up halfway and noticed that the light was coming from the LCD screen of my laptop, which was sitting on the table. That afternoon, as I was unpacking a travel bag I had been too lazy to open up for the many days I’d been back from the base, I found my old laptop and connected it to a network cable so I could go online. But when I pressed the switch, the screen remained black but for a few lines displaying an error message from the ROM self-check. Then I remembered that it was the machine I’d taken to the ball lightning weapons test exercise, and that its processor and memory had been torched by the ball lightning discharge, the CPU and two RAM sticks turned to ash. And so I just left it there and focused on other things.

  But now the computer was running! A computer sans CPU and memory had started up! The Windows startup logo appeared on the screen. Then, with a soft clicking of the hard drive, the desktop popped up, the blue sky so empty and the meadow such a brilliant green that they seemed to belong to a strange other world, as if the LCD screen was a window onto it.

  I forced myself out of bed and went to turn on the light, the violent shaking of my hands making it hard to reach the switch. The brief moment from when I flipped the switch until the light came flooding in felt like a suffocating eternity. The light snuffed out the weird blue, but did nothing to lessen the fear that gripped my whole body. I remembered the words Ding Yi had left me with when we parted: “If you come across anything, give me a call,” he had said, meaningfully, looking at me with that peculiar expression of his.

  So I picked up the phone and dialed Ding Yi’s cell phone in a fluster. He was evidently not asleep, since the phone only rang once before he answered.

  “Come to my place at once! The faster the better! It... it’s turned on. It’s running. I mean, the... the notebook computer is running....” I found it hard to be coherent, given the circumstances.

  “Is this Chen? I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything until I get there,” Ding Yi said in a voice that sounded perfectly calm.

  After I set down the telephone, I looked back at the laptop. As before, it was quietly displaying the desktop, as if waiting for something. The desktop’s blue-green odd-eyed stare left me unable to remain in the room, so without even getting dressed, I went outside. The hall of the bachelors’ apartments was quiet enough to hear the snoring of my neighbor, and I felt much better and breathed more easily. I stood in the doorway and waited for Ding Yi to get there.

  He arrived quickly. Ball lightning theoretical research was to be transferred to the Institute of Physics, so he had been in the city for the past few days in connection with that.

  “Shall we go in?” he said, after a glance at the tightly closed door behind me.

  “I... I won’t. You go in,” I said, turning aside to let him pass.

  “It might be something incredibly simple.”

  “Maybe for you. But me... I can’t take it anymore,” I said, pulling at my hair.

  “I don’t know whether or not supernatural phenomena exist, but what you’ve seen is certainly not that.”

  His words calmed me down a bit, like an adult’s hand grabbed by a child in the terrifying dark, or the firm ground beneath a drowning man’s feet. But this feeling immediately made me depressed. Before Ding Yi, my mind was weak; before Lin Yun, my actions were weak. I was such a fucking weakling—no wonder I placed after Ding Yi and Jiang Xingchen in Lin Yun’s heart. Ball lightning had molded me into this form; from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined. I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.

  Biting the bullet, I followed Ding Yi into my room. Past his thin shoulder I saw that the computer on the table had entered screen saver mode, the star field. Then the screen went dark. Ding Yi moved the mouse and the desktop came up again. I had to avert my eyes from the strange grass.

  Ding Yi picked up the computer and, after inspecting it, passed it to me. “Take it apart.”

  “No.” I pushed it aside. When I made contact with its warm case, my hand jerked back as if shocked. Something about it felt alive.

  “Fine. I’ll take it apart. You look at the screen. And find a Phillips screwdriver.”

  “You don’t need one. I didn’t put the screws back after the last time.”

  And so he began feeling around the laptop. They were ordinarily hard to dismantle, but mine was a late-model modular Dell, so he was easily able to open the bottom of the case. As he worked, he said, “Do you remember the first time we used the high-speed camera to record the ball lightning’s energy discharge? We played it back frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the incinerated wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the image. Do you remember what Lin Yun said then?”

  “She shouted: ‘It’s like a cubic bubble!’ ”

  “That’s right.... Pay attention to the screen as I look inside,” he said, then bent at the waist and peered into the interior of the open computer.

  At that moment, the screen went black, except for two lines displaying a self-check error message, indicating that no CPU or memory had been found.

  Ding Yi flipped over the computer to show me the motherboard, where the CPU and RAM slots were empty.

  “The moment I observed this, the quantum wave function collapsed.” He set the computer carefully down on the table. Its screen remained black.

  “Do you mean that the incinerated CPU and memory sticks exist in a quantum state, just like the macro-electrons?”

  “Yes. In other words, when the chips experience matter-wave resonance with the macro-electron, they turn into a macro-particle in a quantum state. Ball lightning’s energy release is essentially the full or partial superposition of the probability clouds of it and its target. The chips’ state is indeterminate—they exist between two states, destroyed and undestroyed. Just now, when the computer started up, they were in the latter state, the CPU and memory completely unharmed and plugged into their slots in the motherboard. But when I observed them, their quantum states collapsed back into a destroyed state.”

  “In the absence of the observer, when will the chips exist in an undestroyed state?”

  “That’s undetermined. They only exist as the probability of an event. You can consider the chips in this computer to be within the probability cloud.”

  “Then the animals that were burned up—are they in a quantum state, too?” I asked nervously, with the premonition that I was nearing an unbelievable truth.

  Ding Yi nodded.

  I didn’t have the courage to ask my next question, but Ding Yi looked calmly at me, and clearly knew what I was thinking.

  “Yes, the people too. All the people who have been killed by ball lightning exist in a quantum state. Strictly speaking, they haven’t really died. They’re like Schrödinger’s cat, and exist indeterminately in two states, living and dead.” Ding Yi stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the deep night. “To them, to be or not to be is indeed a question.”

  “Can we see them?”

  Ding Yi waved a hand at the window, as if resolutely dismissing the idea from my brain. “Impossible. We’ll never be able to see them, since their collapsed state is death. They exist alive for a certain probability of the quantum state, but when we appear as observers, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state, to their urns or graves.”

  “Do you mean they’re alive in some parallel universe?”

  “No, no. You’ve misunderstood. They live in our own world. Their probability cloud might cover quite a large area. Perhaps they’re even standing in this room, right behind you.”

  The skin crawled on my back.

  Ding Yi turned around and pointed behind me. “But when you turn around to take a look, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state. Trust me: neither you nor any other person will ever be able to see them. That includes cameras and other observers. Detection of their presence is impossible.”

  �
��Can they leave traces behind in the real world that are not in a quantum state?”

  “They can. I suspect you’ve already seen such traces.”

  “Then why don’t they write me a letter!” I shouted, losing control. By “they,” I meant only two people.

  “Compared to an object like a computer chip, a conscious being in a quantum state, particularly a human, behaves in a far more complicated manner. How they interact with us in the non-quantum-state world is an unanswered mystery, one that contains many logical and even philosophical traps. For example: maybe they have written, but how large is the probability that those letters would have a non-quantum state for you to read them? Also, is the real world in a quantum state for them? If it is, then they will have a very hard time finding this state of you in your probability cloud. For them, the road home is long and uncertain.... But that’s enough. These are things that can’t be figured out in a short amount of time. Get stuck down a blind alley and you’ll burn out. Take your time to think things over later.”

  I said nothing. How could I stop thinking?

  Ding Yi picked up a more than half-filled bottle of Red Star erguotou from the table, and poured us each a glass. “Come on. This might push those thoughts from your mind.”

  With the fiery spirit burning in my blood, the chaos in my brain did clear out a little. I tried to think of other things instead.

  “How’s Lin Yun doing? What’s she up to?” I asked.

  “Still collecting chip-attacking macro-electrons. I’m not too sure about the details. Some unfortunate incidents came between us.”

  “What happened?”

  “I secretly installed a miniature video camera in her apartment.”