Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  “While it was true that the Soviet leadership was giving them the brush-off, she personally believed that no one had been cheated. Although the Vietnamese didn’t realize the attack bees’ power at first, they did put them into action, deploying a special forces division from the General Department for Military Intelligence to handle it.

  “Before they did, the Russian woman took the division through a weeklong training and then went with them to the front lines. Trembling, but still clinging to a pitiful thread of hope, I asked her, ‘Which front lines? Cambodia?’ She said, ‘Not Cambodia. The Vietnamese army had the absolute advantage on that front. It was the northern front. Against you.’ I looked at her in terror, and said, ‘You... you went to the Vietnam-China border?!’ She said she had—not to the farthest front lines, of course, but to Lang Son, and she had watched every time the five-man teams of wiry young guys applied an identification agent to their collars and ran off to the front carrying two thousand attack bees...

  “Finally noticing the state I was in, she asked, ‘What’s wrong? The whole time, all we conducted were experimental attacks. We’d hardly gotten any of your people by the time the war ended.’ She said it so casually, like talking about a ball game.

  “If we were only chatting between two soldiers, then I was out of line, since I ought to have been able to remain relaxed even when discussing the Zhenbao Island Incident.* But I didn’t want to tell her the cause of Mom’s death, so I ran out, leaving her staring in shock. She chased me and caught up to me and begged me to tell her what she’d done wrong, but I struggled free and ran aimlessly through the frozen streets.

  “It snowed that night, and for a moment I felt the grim face of the world. Later, a police patrol van rounding up drunks took me back to the hotel....

  “When I got home, I received an e-mail from the Russian woman that read, ‘Yun, I don’t know how it is I’ve hurt you. After you left, I spent many sleepless nights, but couldn’t think of anything. I am certain, though, that it’s connected to my bee weapons. If you were just an ordinary young woman, I wouldn’t have let the slightest hint of it slip out, but you and I are alike. Both of us are soldiers researching new-concept weapons, and we have common aims, which was why I told you everything. When you left in tears that night, it was like a knife in my heart. Back at my residence, I opened the lid of that container and watched the liquid nitrogen evaporate into white fog and disperse into the air. During the chaos of the Institute’s dissolution, more than a million attack-bee embryos died due to poor management, and the container you saw held the last remaining ones.

  “ ‘I wanted to sit there all night until the liquid evaporated entirely; even in the bitter cold of the Russian winter, the cells would die quickly. I was destroying two decades of hard work, destroying the dreams of my youth, all because a Chinese woman dearer to me than even my own daughter hated them. As the nitrogen fog dissipated, my cold home turned even colder. The cold clarified my thinking, and all of a sudden I understood that the material inside the container did not belong to me as an individual. It had been developed at the cost of billions of rubles eked out by the hard labor of the Soviet people. At this thought, I replaced the lid and closed it tightly. Then I protected it with my life, and at last gave it to the appropriate people.

  “ ‘Yun, for the sake of our ideals and our faith, for the sake of our homeland, we two women have trodden a lonely road no woman ought to follow. I have been on it longer than you, so I know a little more of its dangers. All the forces of the natural world, including those that people believe are the most gentle and harmless, can be turned into weapons to destroy life. The horror and cruelty of some of these weapons is beyond imagination, unless you have seen them yourself. But I, a woman you believe resembles your mother, can tell you that we are not on the wrong road. Fearsome things may fell your countrymen and your family, or strike the tender flesh of the child in your arms, but the best way to prevent this from happening is to create them yourselves, before the enemy or potential enemy has that chance! So I have no regret for the life I’ve lived, and I hope that you won’t either, when you reach my age.

  “ ‘Child, I’ve moved to a place you don’t know, and I won’t contact you anymore from now on. Before I say goodbye, I won’t offer any vacant blessings, which are useless for a soldier. I’ll just leave you with a warning: beware the attack bees! Instinct tells me that they will appear on the battlefield again, and the next time it won’t be just one swarm of a thousand or two, but a mega-swarm of tens or hundreds of millions, blotting out the sky and covering the sun like a storm cloud, enough to annihilate an entire field army. May you never meet them in battle. This is the only blessing I can give you, child.’ ”

  Now that Lin Yun had opened up about the psychological world she had long kept deeply hidden, she appeared to feel some sort of release, even as her listeners remained in shocked silence. The sun was setting. Another dusk had come to the Gobi. The glow reflected in the mirror plated everyone standing near it with a layer of gold.

  “What’s happened has happened, child. All we can do about it is to accept our own responsibility,” the general said slowly. “Now take off your badge and epaulets. You’re a criminal now, not a soldier.”

  The sun dipped beneath the horizon and the mirror darkened, like Lin Yun’s eyes. Her sorrow and despair were no doubt as boundless as the Gobi at night.

  As Ding Yi looked at her, he heard the words she had said at Zhang Bin’s gravesite: I grew up in the army. I don’t know if I could entirely belong anywhere else. Or to anyone else.

  Lin Yun raised her right hand and reached over to the major’s epaulet on her left shoulder—not to take it off, but to rub it.

  Ding Yi noticed that her finger dragged an afterimage behind it.

  When Lin Yun’s hand touched the epaulet, it was as if time stopped. This was the final image she left in the world. Her body began to turn transparent, swiftly turning into a crystalline shadow, and then the quantum-state Lin Yun vanished.

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both...

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  * Zhenbao Island, also known as Damanskii Island, was the site of a border clash in March 1969 during the seven-month undeclared conflict that marked the height of the Sino-Soviet Split.

  Victory

  It was bright outside when Ding Yi finished his tale. The war-ravaged city had welcomed another morning.

  “You tell a good story. If the purpose was to comfort me, then you succeeded,” I said.

  “Do you think I’d be able to invent all that you just heard?”

  “How did she remain in a quantum state for so long without collapsing with all of you observing her?”

  “There’s one thing I’ve been pondering ever since I first posited the existence of the macro-quantum state: a sentient quantum individual is different from an ordinary non-sentient quantum particle in one important way, and we overlooked an important parameter for the wave function describing the former. Specifically, we overlooked an observer.”

  “An observer? Who?”

  “The individual itself. Unlike ordinary non-sentient quantum particles, sentient quantum individuals can engage in self-observation.”

  “Okay. But what does self-observation imply?”

  “You’ve seen it. It can counteract other observers, and maintain the quantum state uncollapsed.”

  “And how is that self-observation conducted?”

  “No doubt by some highly complicated emotional process that we’re unable to even imagine.”

  “So will she return again like that?” I asked, full of hope for the answer to this critical question.

  “Probably not. Objects that experience resonance with macro-fusion energy will, for a period of time after the resonance is complete, have an existence-state probability higher than their destroyed state. That’s why we were able to see all of
those probability clouds of chips as the fusion was going on. But the quantum state will decay as time moves onward, and eventually the destroyed state will be more probable than the existence state.”

  “Oh—” I exclaimed, the sound coming from deep within my heart.

  “But the existence-state probability, no matter how small, is still there.”

  “Like hope,” I said, doing my best to throw off my fragile emotional state.

  “Yes. Like hope,” Ding Yi said.

  As if to answer him, we heard a commotion out on the street. I went to the window and looked down to see lots of people outside. More were streaming out of the buildings, gathering excitedly in threes and fives. What surprised me most were their expressions: everyone was beaming like the sun had risen early. This was the first time I had seen this sort of smile since the start of the war, and now it was on so many faces.

  “Let’s go down,” Ding Yi said, picking up the half-finished bottle of Red Star from the table.

  “What’s the booze for?”

  “We might need it when we get down there. Of course, in the unlikely event I’m wrong, don’t laugh at me.”

  We had just exited the building when someone from the crowd ran over to us. It was Gao Bo. I asked him what was up.

  “The war is over!” he shouted.

  “We surrendered?”

  “We won! The enemy alliance dissolved, and they’ve declared unilateral ceasefires. One by one, they’ve begun to pull back. Victory!”

  “You’re dreaming.” I turned from Gao Bo to Ding Yi, who didn’t seem surprised at all.

  “You’re the one who’s dreaming. Everyone’s been focused on the progress of the talks the whole night. Where have you been? Zonked out?” Gao Bo said, then ran off joyfully to join an even bigger crowd.

  “Did you anticipate this?” I asked Ding Yi.

  “I don’t have that foresight. But Lin Yun’s father predicted it. After Lin Yun disappeared, he told us that macro-fusion would probably end the war.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s simple, really. When the truth about the chip burn-out catastrophe got out, the whole world was frightened.”

  I smiled, but shook my head. “How? Not even our thermonuclear weapons frighten anyone that much.”

  “There’s a difference between this and thermonuclear weapons—a possibility you may not have realized.”

  I looked at him, baffled.

  “Think about it. If we detonated all of our nuclear bombs on our own soil, what would happen?”

  “Only an idiot would do that.”

  “But supposing that we have lots of macro-nuclei that can fry chips, a hundred or more, and we keep conducting macro-fusion on our own territory. Is that still idiotic?”

  At Ding Yi’s prompting, I soon understood his point. If a second, identical macro-fusion took place on the same spot, the fact that the first had fried all the chips in the vicinity would mean the energy of the second would not be drained. It would pass through the region cleared by the first and destroy chips in a larger region beyond that until it, too, was drained by the chips it encountered. Proceeding in that manner with multiple macro-fusions on the same spot, fusion energy could propagate throughout the world. The Earth would be transparent to it. Perhaps fewer than a hundred strings of that type would be enough to temporarily return the entire world to an agricultural age.

  There was one other important point: indiscriminate use of conventional nuclear weapons would take humanity out with them, so under no circumstances would politicians with even a shred of reason make such a decision. And even if some crazed strategist gave an order, it was unlikely to be executed. But macro-fusion was different. It could achieve strategic objectives without killing a single person. Hence the decision to use it was a relatively easy one, compared to conventional nukes, and when a country was backed into a corner, it was very likely to do so.

  Chip-frying macro-fusion would reformat the world’s enormous hard drive, and the more advanced the country was, the harder it would be hit. The road to recovery back to the Information Age would lead to an undetermined new world order.

  Now that I understood this, I knew I wasn’t dreaming. The war really was over. As if a string on my body had been plucked out, my legs crumpled beneath me and I sat on the ground watching the sky dumbly until the sun rose. In the deceptive warmth of the first ray of sunlight on that day, I covered my face and wept.

  Around me, the sounds of celebration rolled on in waves. Still crying, I stood up. Ding Yi had disappeared into the reveling crowd, but someone immediately hugged me, and then I went and hugged someone else. I lost count of the people I hugged on that grand morning. As the dizzy joy ebbed somewhat, I found myself hugging a woman. When we let go, we happened to look each other over for a moment, and I froze.

  We knew each other. She was the pretty student who had said I had a strong sense of purpose on that late night in the university library so many years ago. It took me a while, but I remembered her name: Dai Lin.

  The Quantum Rose

  Two months later, Dai Lin and I got married.

  After the war, people’s lives turned far more traditional. Single people got married, and childless families had children. The war had made people cherish things they used to take for granted.

  During the slow economic recovery, times were hard, but they were warm. I never told Dai Lin of my experiences after graduation, and she never spoke of hers. Clearly all of us had a past in those lost times that it was hard to look back on. The war told us what was truly valuable: the present and the future.

  Half a year later, we had a child.

  *

  During that time, the only interruption to this plain but busy life was a visit from an American. He introduced himself as Norton Parker, an astronomer, and said I ought to recognize him. When he mentioned the SETI@home project, it came to me at once: he had been in charge of the project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence whose distributed processing server Lin Yun and I had invaded to swap in the mathematical model for ball lightning. That experience seemed a world away. Now that the early research on ball lightning was known to the world, it would not have been hard for him to find me.

  “There was also a woman involved, I believe.”

  “She’s no longer on this earth.”

  “Dead in the war?”

  “...You could say that.”

  “Damn the war.... I came to tell you about an applied ball lightning project I’m heading up.”

  With the secret of ball lightning now unlocked, collecting macro-electrons and exciting them into ball lightning had become an industrialized operation, and research on civil applications was making swift progress. It had many unbelievable uses, including burning away cancer cells in sick patients without harming other organs. But Parker said his project was more surreal.

  “We’re searching for and observing a particular phenomenon of ball lightning: sometimes it maintains a collapsed state, not a quantum state, even without an observer.”

  I was unimpressed. “We encountered that a number of times, but ultimately we were able to find one or several undetected observers. The one I remember most clearly was on a target range. We later learned that the observer was a reconnaissance satellite in space that had caused the ball lightning to collapse.”

  Parker said, “And that’s why we chose to conduct tests in places where all observers could absolutely be screened out. Places like abandoned deep mines. We removed all personnel and observation equipment, so there shouldn’t have been any observers inside. We set the accelerators to automatic, conducted target tests, and then used the hit rate to ascertain whether or not the ball lightning was in a collapsed state.”

  “And the results showed...?”

  “We have performed tests in thirty-five mines. The outcome of the majority of them was normal. But on two occasions, the ball lightning reached a collapsed state in the mine without any observer.”

  “So do you t
hink that the outcome raises doubts about quantum mechanics?”

  Parker laughed. “No, quantum mechanics isn’t wrong. But you’ve forgotten my specialty. We’re using ball lightning to search for aliens.”

  “What?”

  “In the mine tests, there were no human observers, and no man-made observation equipment, but the ball lightning remained collapsed. This can only mean that there was another, nonhuman, observer.”

  This immediately piqued my interest. “It would have to be a very powerful observer to see through the earth’s crust!”

  “That’s the only reasonable explanation.”

  “Can those two tests be repeated?”

  “Not anymore. But the collapsed-state outcome of the tests remained for three full days before the tests started producing quantum-state outcomes again.”

  “There’s an explanation for that, too: the super-observer must have detected that you had detected it.”

  “Perhaps. So we’re planning even larger-scale tests now, to find more of this phenomenon for study.”

  “That’s significant research indeed, Dr. Parker. If you are really able to prove that a super-observer is watching our world, then human activity becomes very indiscreet.... You could say human society is in a quantum state, and a super-observer will force it to collapse to a state of reason again.”

  “If we’d found that super-observer a little earlier, maybe war could have been averted.”

  *

  Parker’s research prompted me to pay a visit to Ding Yi. To my surprise, he was living with a lover, a dancer who had lost her job in the war. She was clearly a simpleminded type, and I couldn’t say how they ended up together. Evidently Ding Yi had learned how to enjoy life apart from physics. A person like him wouldn’t bother with marriage, of course, but fortunately the woman wasn’t looking for that, either.