Ball Lightning Sneak Peek

by Liu Cixin

  “Was Jiang Xingchen captaining Zhufeng?”

  “Yes. Did you know him?”

  I didn’t speak. I was thinking more of Lin Yun now.

  “We asked you here firstly because you are the most successful tornado researcher in the country, and secondly because the attack on Zhufeng was carried out by a meteorological weapon system code-named Aeolus. Our intelligence indicates it is related to your research results.”

  I nodded heavily. “That’s true. I’m willing to accept responsibility.”

  “No, you’ve misunderstood. We didn’t ask you here to assign blame. And you don’t have any responsibility. The Lightning Institute’s publication and transfer of the project’s results passed through multiple levels of review by the relevant departments and was entirely legal. Of course someone must be held responsible, but it isn’t you. We’re not as sensitive about the use of advanced technology as the enemy.”

  I said, “The weapon can be defended against. All you need to do is link up the fleet’s missile defense system with our atmospheric optical detection system. I’ve seen how a missile shooting an oil firebomb can wipe out a tornado, but there’s an even faster and more effective method: use high-energy microwaves or lasers to heat up the descending cold air mass.”

  “Yes, we’re putting all our energies into developing that kind of defensive system. And we’d like your full assistance.” The senior colonel sighed gently. “But, honestly speaking, it will probably have to wait until the next war to be used.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The loss of the Zhufeng carrier battle group was a huge blow to our sea power. For the rest of this war, we no longer have the ability to engage the enemy in a large-scale sea battle. We have to rely on shore-based firepower for coastal defense.”

  * * *

  After I left the Naval Warfare Center, shrill anti-aircraft sirens sounded in the air above the city. The streets were empty, and I walked through the emptiness with no particular destination in mind. A civil defense warden ran at me shouting something, but I pretended not to hear him. The wardens came over to grab me, but I shook them off unfeelingly and continued to sleepwalk along, and they left me on my own like the lunatic they imagined I was.

  Now all of my hopes were dashed, and I ached for a bomb to bring my tormented life to an end. But the explosions remained distant. Nearby, the silence only grew.

  After I’d walked for I don’t know how long, the sirens seemed to have stopped, and people gradually returned to the streets. In total exhaustion I sat down on the steps of a city garden, and realized that my empty brain was now occupied by a feeling, the feeling of understanding someone at last.

  I understood Lin Yun.

  I took out my mobile and dialed the number of the base, but no one answered. So I got up and looked for a cab. They were rare in wartime, and it took half an hour before I found one, then we drove off to the base at once.

  It was around three hours later that we arrived at the base, only to discover that I had wasted my time. It was completely empty, personnel and equipment removed. I stood on my own for a long while in the center of the excitation lab, a shaft of weak light from the setting sun piercing the broken window to illuminate me, gradually fading until night descended. Only then did I leave.

  After returning to the city, I made inquiries into the fate of the ball lightning project team and Dawnlight, but no one could tell me anything. They seemed to have evaporated from the world. I even dialed the number that General Lin had left, but there was no answer there, either.

  There was nothing I could do but go back to the Lightning Institute and start researching the use of high-powered microwaves to dispel tornadoes.

  CHIP DESTRUCTION

  The war dragged on, and another autumn arrived. People gradually grew accustomed to life during wartime, and air-raid sirens and food rationing, like concerts and cafés before them, became a normal part of life.

  For my part, I threw myself entirely into developing a tornado defense system, a project overseen by Gao Bo’s Lightning Institute. Work went at a feverish pace, so for a while I forgot everything else. But one day, what seemed like an endless stalemate in the war was finally broken.

  That afternoon at roughly 3:30, I was discussing technical details of shipboard high-energy microwave emitters with a few engineers from the Institute and the military. The device could emit a highly focused microwave beam of around one billion watts of power at frequencies from ten to one hundred hertz, frequencies at which the power could be absorbed by water molecules. Several of these beams added together could produce a regional power density of one watt per square centimeter, comparable to a microwave oven, that would raise the temperature of the falling mass of cold air in the egg and eliminate it in an embryonic state. When the device was paired with the atmospheric optical detection system, they would form an effective defense against tornado weapons.

  Just then there was a sudden, strange noise outside, a little like the drumming of a squall of hail on the ground. Starting off in the distance, the sound grew closer, until it finally reached the room we were in. Then there were snapping sounds all around us, as close as the left side of my chest! As this was going on, something strange was happening to the computers: lots of objects flew out of the towers, but left their cases untouched. On closer inspection, they turned out to be complete CPUs, memory chips, and other chips. For a moment, the floating chips grew incredibly dense in the air. I waved a hand and brushed against several of them with the back of my hand, so I knew they weren’t an illusion, but eventually they all disappeared without a trace, leaving the air empty again. Then the computer screens changed, showing blue screens, or simply going dark.

  I felt an intense heat on the left side of my chest and felt for the source. My mobile, in my shirt pocket, was burning up, so I plucked it out. My companions were doing the same thing. Our phones emitted white smoke, and when I took mine apart, a small quantity of white ash dispersed. The chips inside had been incinerated. We opened up the computers and found that nearly a third of the chips on the motherboards had been burned up. White ash and a peculiar stench filled the office for a while.

  Then the rest of the computer screens and the lights went dark. The power had gone out.

  My first thought was that we had been attacked by ball lightning that released its energy into computer chips, but something wasn’t right: all of the nearby buildings were research units where chips were plentiful. This would weaken the ball lightning energy discharge enough to reduce its effective radius to no more than one hundred meters. At that distance, we’d definitely have heard the unmistakable explosion it made when discharging, but we had heard nothing apart from the popping of burning chips, so I was nearly certain that no ball lightning had been present nearby.

  The first thing we had to do was to determine the scope of the attack. I picked up my phone from the table, but it was dead, so we went downstairs together to check things out. We soon learned that chips had been attacked in two of the Institute’s office buildings and one lightning lab, and about a third of them had been destroyed. Separately, we visited the neighboring Institute of Atmospheric Physics and the Meteorological Modeling Center, and found that the chips in those two units had suffered an attack identical to ours. It would have taken dozens of ball lightning strikes to do the damage we were now aware of, but I hadn’t seen the slightest trace of it.

  Immediately after that, Gao Bo sent a few younger people off on bicycles to check out the situation, while the rest of us waited anxiously in the office. He and I were the only ones at the Lightning Institute who knew about ball lightning weapons, and we exchanged glances from time to time, with a panic somewhat worse than other people’s. Half an hour later, the bicyclists came back, terror on their faces, like they’d seen a ghost. They had all ridden for three to five kilometers. Everywhere they went, all electronic chips, without exception, had been attacked by some mysterious force, and had been destroyed in the same ratio, arou
nd one-third. They panicked and didn’t dare ride any farther, reporting back to the Institute instead. We were a little unaccustomed to being without mobile phones and landlines.

  “There’s no hope for us if the enemy really has such a devilish weapon!” someone said.

  Gao Bo and I exchanged another glance. My mind was a jumble. “How about we take four of the Institute’s cars and drive off in four directions so we can check out things in a wider area?”

  I drove a car through the city to the east. All of the buildings I saw along the way were dark, with people clustered in small groups outside talking nervously. Many of them still held their clearly useless mobile phones. I knew what the situation was in these places without even having to get out of the car, but I still got out a few times, mostly to ask people whether they had seen signs of ball lightning. But no one had seen or heard anything.

  Outside of the urban area, I continued to drive, all the way to a distant county seat in the far suburbs. Here, even though the power was out, there were far fewer signs of panic than downtown. I felt a surge of hope in my heart, a hope that I was approaching the edge of the ring of destruction, or at least that I would see fewer signs of damage. I parked the car outside a web café and rushed inside. It was dusk, and the café was very dark without power, but I smelled that familiar burnt odor at once. I grabbed a machine, took it outside, and carefully inspected the motherboard. In the light of the setting sun I saw that the CPU and several other chips were missing. The computer dropped out of my hands and smashed onto my foot, but I didn’t feel the pain. I only shivered heavily in the cold late autumn breeze, and then jumped in the car and went back.

  Not long after I got back to the Institute, the other three cars also returned. The one that went the farthest had taken the expressway for over a hundred kilometers. Everywhere they went, things were the same as here.

  We urgently searched for information of the outside, but we had no TV or Internet, and no phone. Only the radio worked. But all of the deluxe digitally tuned radios were driven by integrated circuits, and all of them were now junk. It wasn’t easy, but we eventually found a usable vintage transistor radio that an old mail clerk kept in the reception office, which received three fuzzy southern provincial stations, as well as three in English and one in Japanese.

  It was only late that night that these stations began to have reports on this bizarre disaster, and from those fragmentary broadcasts, we learned the following: the chip damage zone was centered somewhere in the northwest of China. It covered a circular area with a radius of 1,300 kilometers, or around one-third of the land in the country, an astonishingly large area, but the chip damage rate gradually tapered off the farther you got from the center. Our city was located near the edge of the region.

  * * *

  For the next week, we lived in a pre-electricity agricultural society. It was a difficult time. Water had to be trucked in and rationed out in amounts that were barely sufficient to drink. At night we relied on candles for illumination.

  During this period, rumors about the disaster flew thick as cow hair. In the public chatter as well as in the media (which for us was limited to radio), the most popular explanation had to do with aliens. But in all of the rumors, there was no mention of ball lightning.

  Out of the mess of information, we could conclude one thing: the attack was unlikely to have come from the enemy. It was obvious that they were as confused as we were, which let us breathe a little easier.

  I came up with a hundred different possibilities during that time, but none of them was convincing. I was convinced that this was connected to ball lightning, but I was also certain that ball lightning wasn’t that powerful. So what was?

  The enemy’s behavior was also mystifying. Our territory had been dealt such a blow that our defensive capability was basically gone, yet they halted their attack. Even the routine daily airstrikes disappeared. The world media had a fairly convincing explanation: in the face of such a strong, unknown force that could easily destroy the entire civilized world, no one wanted to act rashly before figuring out what it was.

  In any event, it gave us the most peaceful period since the start of the war, albeit an ominous and chilly one. Without computers or electricity, we had nothing to do, and no way to dispel the terror in our hearts.

  One evening, as an icy autumn rain began to fall outside, I sat by myself in my chilly apartment listening to the raindrops. It felt as if the outside world had been swallowed up by an infinite darkness, and the lonely flickering candle in front of me was the only light in the entire universe. An infinite loneliness crushed me, and my all-too-brief life played back like a movie rewinding in my mind: the abstract painting made up of children’s ashes in the nuclear plant, Ding Yi putting the Go board behind the bubble, long electric arcs in the night sky, Siberia in the blizzard, Lin Yun’s piano playing and the sword at her neck, the thunderstorm and starry sky on Mount Tai, my university days on campus, and finally back to that stormy birthday night.… I felt like my life had gone in a huge circle, bringing me back to my point of origin, only now there was no sound of thunder in the rain, and there was only one candle left in front of me.

  Then there was a knock at the door. Before I could get up to answer it, someone pushed it open and came in. He took off a wet raincoat, his thin body shivering from the cold, and when I made out his face in the candlelight, I cried out for joy.

  It was Ding Yi.

  “Do you have anything to drink? Preferably something hot,” he said, through chattering teeth.

  I passed him half a bottle of Red Star erguotou. He held it over the candle flame to warm it, but he soon grew impatient and tossed back a few mouthfuls. Wiping his mouth, he said, “No beating around the bush. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  AMBUSH AT SEA

  This is the account that Ding Yi gave me of what happened at the ball lightning research base after I left:

  Because the nuclear plant operation was such a big success (from the military’s point of view, at least), the sidelined ball lightning weapons project began to receive renewed interest, followed by substantial investment. This investment was mostly put toward collecting chip-striking macro-electrons, as highly selective strikes on integrated circuits were believed to be the area of ball lightning weapons with the greatest potential. After a large amount of work, there were finally more than five thousand of these rare macro-electrons in storage, enough to constitute a combat-capable weapons system.

  When war broke out, the base entered a state of nervous excitement. Practically everyone there believed that ball lightning would be to this war what the tank was to the First World War and the atom bomb to the Second, a history-making weapon. Overflowing with enthusiasm, they prepared to make history, but their instructions from the higher-ups were just two words: await orders. And thus Dawnlight was the idlest of all the units in the war. At first, people imagined that High Command might want to use the weapon in the most critical position at the most critical moment, but Lin Yun learned through her channels that they were thinking too highly of themselves; High Command had a fairly low opinion of the weapon. They believed that the nuclear plant operation had been a special case and did not prove the weapon system’s battlefield potential. None of the branches had much of an interest in putting the weapon to use. Hence, investment in the project dried up again.

  After the destruction of the Zhufeng carrier battle group, the base was fraught with anxiety. The staff were baffled that the demonstration of the enormous power of a different new-concept weapon had done nothing to shake up old attitudes toward ball lightning. They felt that their weapon was the only hope left for turning the tide of the war.

  Lin Yun repeatedly asked her father to give Dawnlight a battle assignment, but each time she was refused. On one occasion, General Lin told his daughter, “Xiao Yun, don’t let your fascination with weapons develop into superstition. Your thinking about war needs to be deeper, more holistic. The notion that the entire war
can be won by relying on one or two new-concept weapons is, frankly, naïve.”

  * * *

  Here Ding Yi said, “As a believer in science, my faith in the weapons was even stronger than Lin Yun’s. I firmly believed that ball lightning could determine the outcome of the war. At the time, I ascribed High Command’s attitude toward ball lightning weapons to rigid thinking that was impervious to reason, and I was far more annoyed than most of the people at the base. But the way things developed ultimately demonstrated our naïveté.”

  * * *

  At last there was a turning point. The base and Dawnlight received orders to carry out an exploratory attack on an enemy carrier group in coastal waters.

  The headquarters of the South Sea Fleet convened a war meeting. Personnel in attendance were not of high rank, so clearly the higher-ups did not place much value on this combat operation. Two senior colonels chaired the meeting: one the director of the fleet’s Operations Division, the other from the army, the second commander of the Southern Military Region’s coastal defense system. The other twenty-odd officers mostly hailed from submarine units and the coastal force of the South Sea Fleet.

  The defense commander started off by describing the battlefield situation: “You are all aware of recent events that have seriously weakened our blue-water sea power. The enemy’s naval forces are encroaching on our coastal waters. The enemy fleet has on several occasions come within range of our shore-based anti-ship missiles, but our strikes have failed. Their missile defense systems have successfully intercepted the vast majority of our anti-ship missiles. If we can destroy or partially destroy the systems’ early warning capability, then our land-based missiles will be able to effectively attack the enemy. The primary mission of the present operation is this: the electronics in the enemy fleet’s missile defense system will be destroyed using ‘Maple Leaf,’ partially or totally crippling the system to give our land-based defenses an opportunity to attack.”