by Liu Cixin
“The missile is in transit. It will arrive in three minutes,” he said.
“Sir, maybe we should pull back a little,” an officer said to General Du.
“No.” General Du waved a hand tiredly and did not raise his bowed head.
Very soon they were able to see the missile. Its white tail traced it in the southern sky like an airplane’s contrail, but far faster.
Lin Yun’s voice sounded through the megaphone from the tent, still calm, as if everything that was happening was nothing more than a fluid piece of music she was playing. Now she was declaring that it had come to an end.
“You’re too late, Dad.”
Macro-fusion is quiet. In fact, the majority of eyewitnesses said that it was quieter than usual at the time of fusion, as if all other sounds in nature had been screened out so that the whole process could be conducted in an incomprehensible silence. As one eyewitness put it, the process of macro-fusion looked like “the rising and setting of a blue sun.” At first, the tent emitted blue light. Then people could see the ball of light, still small, as the tent turned transparent like a sheet of cellophane hanging over the tent poles. But soon it collapsed, as if melting. The collapse strangely drew every part of the tent into the fusion’s center, where it was absorbed into the ball of light as if being sucked into a whirlpool, leaving behind no remains or traces of any kind. After the tent disappeared, the ball continued to grow, and soon emerged in the Gobi Desert like a blue sun. By the time it stopped expanding, its radius had grown to around two hundred meters, the distance at which Ding Yi had predicted that ball lightning’s target selectivity would start. Within that distance, the extreme density of the energy meant that everything was destroyed.
The blue sun remained at its largest state for around half a minute. It was stable during that time, but an eerie stillness enveloped the world, so that the brief period felt like an eternity, as if nothing had changed since the birth of the world. The blue sun outshone the real sun, which was half below the western horizon. It drowned the entire Gobi in its blue light and rendered the world weird and unfamiliar. It was a cold sun, and even close by, no one could feel any heat from it.
Then came the strangest marvel of all: from its ghostly depths, the blue sphere radiated a multitude of glittering small stars that turned immediately into objects of various sizes when they reached its surface. The onlookers were shocked when they realized what the objects were: tents, in a state of quantum superposition! They appeared entirely corporeal, not illusory. The largest was bigger than the original tent and hovered in the air like an enormous black shadow. The smallest was pebble-sized, but was complete and whole, like an exquisite model. The tents soon collapsed under the gaze of the observers into a destroyed state, trailing a series of superimposed images before vanishing into the air. But more quantum tents kept flying out from the center in a tent probability cloud that permeated the nearby space. The blue sun was enveloped within the cloud, its expansion arrested by the presence of observers.
At last a sound broke the stillness: a faint snap from a computer on the desk, and then from everyone’s mobile phone. The sound of electronic chips frying. At the same time, a multitude of small objects passed through the unharmed outer case of the computer and radiated outward—objects that, on closer inspection, turned out to be complete CPUs, memory sticks, and other chips, each in a quantum superposition, existing simultaneously in an unknown number of positions. The flying chips were so numerous that the office building was momentarily choked in a thick chip probability cloud. Then, like an invisible broom, observation returned these chips to a destroyed state and they vanished, dragging tails behind them, collapsing to ash inside the computer case. Soon the air was empty again.
There was a louder noise, a thunder that carried through the air. It was the incoming missile, chips fried, spiraling downward in a huge fireball.
Peace was restored. The blue sun shrank rapidly down to a single point near the ground, then disappeared into the spot where, just one minute before, two macro-nuclei had collided off their bridges at five hundred meters per second and two strings of singularities twisted together in the blink of an eye. Now, in the unimaginable macro-universe, two atoms were gone, but a new one had been born, an incident unnoticed by any observer in that world. As in our world, only when billions and billions of nuclei were tangled together would they produce an effect that could be called an incident.
The setting sun quietly shone its light on the Gobi Desert and the base. A few birdcalls sounded from the tamarisks, as if nothing at all had happened.
Base personnel gathered at the fusion point, where the tent and everything within it had vanished without a trace. Before them was a smooth mirror roughly two hundred meters in radius lying flat on the sands, formed when the silicon of the ground instantly liquefied and then solidified. Like other objects melted by ball lightning, the ground had not emitted an appreciable amount of heat when it melted, but had been transformed while in a wave state in some other space. It was now cool to the touch. Its surface was astonishingly smooth, and reflected their faces with great clarity. Try as he might, Ding Yi found nothing to indicate how the ground had solidified, or by what mechanism this part of the Gobi had been made so flat and smooth after melting. The people stood around the huge mirror in silence, looking at the beautiful reflection of the sunset in the western sky, then the stars that came out one by one in the reflection of the heavens.
Meanwhile, the macro-fusion wave of energy was propagating outward. It passed all three target circles, turning all eighty thousand tons of chips in the hundred-kilometer radius to ash, then kept going. It expanded to more than a thousand kilometers before the volume of chips it passed along the way was enough to weaken it, thereby dragging one-third of the country back to an agricultural age.
LIN YUN II
The rain had stopped at some point, and outside the window, the first light of dawn was coming.
As on that birthday night in my youth, I was no longer the person I was the day before. I had lost too much—although, for the moment, I wasn’t sure of what I had lost, only that I had been reduced to a weak, hollow shell.
“Do you want to keep listening?” Ding Yi, his eyes bloodshot, said drunkenly.
“Hmm? No, I don’t want to listen anymore.”
“It’s about Lin Yun.”
“Lin Yun? What more is there to say about her? Go on.”
* * *
On the third day after macro-fusion, Lin Yun’s father arrived at the fusion point.
By this point, most of the more than three hundred captured macro-nuclei had been released into the air. When the electromagnets that attracted them cut out, the strings danced away fairly quickly, and soon disappeared without a trace. The thirty-odd strings kept for research use were transferred to a safer storage point. Base personnel had mostly dispersed, and stillness returned to this part of the Gobi Desert that had witnessed two massive energy discharges in two separate centuries.
Only Colonel Xu and Ding Yi accompanied General Lin to the fusion point. The general looked more haggard and far older than he had at the meeting in Beijing not long before, but he maintained an indomitable spirit that made him appear unbroken.
They reached the edge of the huge mirror created by macro-fusion. The mirror’s surface was covered in a thin layer of sand, but it was still smooth and bright and reflected the clouds that swirled overhead, like a patch of sky fallen into the Gobi, or a window into another world. As General Lin and the other two stood there in silence, time in their world seemed to have stopped. In the world of the mirror, it raced breakneck forward.
“This is a unique monument,” Ding Yi said.
“Let the sand slowly bury it,” General Lin said. A few wisps of white hair that had appeared on his head wafted in the wind.
And then Lin Yun appeared.
The clunk of a security officer pulling back a rifle bolt alerted them. When they looked up, they saw Lin Yun standing on the other
side of the mirror—four hundred meters away, but even at that distance, they all recognized her. She strode across the mirror toward them. General Lin and the others quickly realized it was the real Lin Yun, not an illusion, since they could hear the light crunch of her feet on the surface like the tick of a second hand, and they could see the footprints she left in the thin layer of sand. The clouds continued their tumble across the mirror as she walked atop them, at times raising a hand to brush away her short hair where the Gobi wind had blown it onto her forehead. When she had nearly reached them, they could see her uniform was trim, like new, and although her face was a little pale, her expression was clear and calm. Finally, she stood in front of her father.
“Dad,” she said softly.
“Xiao Yun, what have you done?” General Lin said. His voice wasn’t loud, and it was tinged with a deep sorrow and despair.
“Dad, you look tired. Why don’t you sit down.”
A security officer carried over a wooden crate that had once held experimental equipment, and General Lin sat down on it slowly. He did seem exhausted. Perhaps for the first time in his long military career, he let his exhaustion show.
Lin Yun nodded at Colonel Xu and Ding Yi in greeting, and gave a familiar smile. Then she said to the guard, “I’m unarmed.”
General Lin waved at the guard, who lowered the assault rifle, but kept a finger next to the trigger.
“I really didn’t imagine that macro-fusion would have so much force, Dad,” Lin Yun said.
“You’ve rendered a third of the country defenseless.”
“Yes, Dad,” she said, lowering her head.
“Xiao Yun, I don’t want to criticize you. It’s too late for that. This is the end of everything. The only thought in my mind the past two days has been: Why did you take this step?”
Lin Yun looked at her father, and said, “Dad, we came here together.”
General Lin nodded heavily. “Yes, child. We came here together, and what a long road it’s been. Perhaps it began with your mother’s sacrifice.” The general squinted at the blue sky and clouds in the mirror, as if staring at past time.
“Yes, I remember that night. It was the Mid-Autumn Festival. A Saturday. I was the only one left behind out of all the kids in the military kindergarten. I sat on a stool in the compound, clutching a mooncake an auntie had given me, but instead of looking up at the moon, I was staring at the gate. She said, ‘Poor Yunyun, your dad’s with the troops and can’t come back to pick you up. You’ll sleep at the kindergarten tonight.’ I said, ‘My dad never comes to pick me up. My mom does.’ She said, ‘Your mom’s not here. She gave her life in the south. She won’t be coming to pick you up anymore, Yunyun.’ I knew that already, but now the dream I had tended for a month was completely dead. The big kindergarten gate often appeared before me in my waking hours and my dreams. The difference was that, in my dreams, Mom always came through the gate, but when I was awake, it remained empty.… That Mid-Autumn Festival night was a turning point in my life. My lonely melancholy turned all at once to hatred, hatred for the people who had taken Mom’s life, making her leave me alone in the kindergarten even on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival.”
General Lin said, “I came to get you a week later. You were always holding a little matchbox with two bees inside. The women were afraid you’d get stung, and wanted to take the matchbox from you, but you cried and howled and wouldn’t give it to them. Your ferocity frightened them.”
Lin Yun said, “I told you that I wanted to train those bees so they’d sting the enemy, like they’d stung Mom. I proudly described to you all my ideas for killing the enemy … like how I knew that pigs liked to eat, so we should put lots and lots of pigs where the enemy was living and let the pigs eat all of their provisions so the men would starve to death. I thought a small speaker placed outside the enemy’s homes could produce an eerie sound at night to frighten them to death.… I constantly came up with ideas like these. It became a fascinating thought exercise for me that amused me to no end.”
“I was alarmed to see that in my daughter.”
“Yes, Dad. After I finished telling you my ideas, you looked at me in silence for a while, then took out two photos from a briefcase. Two identical photos, except that the corner of one was singed, and the other had brown marks on it that I later learned were blood. They were photos of a family of three. Both parents were military officers, but their uniforms were different from yours, Dad, and they wore epaulets that you and the others didn’t have back then. The girl was around my age and pretty, her pale skin a little pink, like fine porcelain. Growing up in the north, I had never seen skin like that. Her hair was so black and so long, down to her waist. So cute. Her mother was pretty, too, and her father was so handsome that I envied the entire family. But you told me that they were enemy officers who had been killed by our artillery fire, and the photos had been recovered from their bodies when the battlefield had been swept. Now the pretty kid in the photographs didn’t have a mom or dad anymore.”
General Lin said, “I also told you that the people who killed your mom weren’t bad. They did it because they were soldiers and had to carry out their duty to the fullest. Like your father the soldier, who also had to carry out his duty to kill the enemy on the battlefield.”
“I remember that, Dad. Of course I remember. You need to understand that it was the 1980s. The way you educated me was pretty alternative and unrecognized back then. If it had gotten out, it would have spelled the end of your political career. You wanted to dig out the seed of my hatred to keep it from germinating. That showed me how much you loved me, and I’m still grateful for that.”
“But it didn’t help,” General Lin said, with a sigh.
“Right. Back then I was curious about a thing called duty, which made it possible for soldiers to kill but not hate each other. But not for me. I still hated them. I still wanted to have them stung by bees.”
“It pained me to listen to you. Hatred born out of the lonely melancholy of a child who lost her mother doesn’t go away easily. The only thing capable of wiping out that hatred is a mother’s love.”
“You understood that. For a while there was a woman who came over often and was kind to me. We got on well. But for some reason she didn’t end up as my new mother.”
The general sighed again. “Xiao Yun, I should have paid more attention to you.”
“Later, I slowly got used to life without Mom, and the naïve hatred in my heart faded with time. I never stopped the fascinating thought exercises, though, and I grew up with all kinds of fantasy weapons. But it wasn’t until that summer holiday that weapons became a real part of my life. It was the summer of second grade. You had to go to the south to work on building up the PLA Marine Corps, and when you saw how disappointed I was that you were going, you took me along. It was a fairly remote unit, and with no other kids around. My playmates were your colleagues and subordinates, all of them officers in the field army, most of whom didn’t have children. Bullet casings were what they usually gave me to play with. All kinds of casings. I used them as whistles. One time I saw a man eject a bullet from a magazine and I started fussing for it. He said, ‘That’s not for children to play with. Children can only play with headless ones.’ I said, ‘Take off the head and give it to me!’ He said, ‘Then it’ll be just like the casings I gave you before. I’ll give you some more of those.’ I said, ‘No, I want that one with the head taken off!’”
“That’s just how you were, Xiao Yun. Once you got something in your sights, you didn’t care about anything else.”
“I gave him such a hard time that he said, ‘Fine, but this one’s hard to take off. I’ll shoot it for you instead.’ He shoved it back into the magazine, carried the rifle outside, and fired once at the sky. Then he pointed at the casing that bounced onto the ground and said, ‘Take it.’ Rather than picking it up, I asked with wide eyes, ‘Where did the head go?’ He said, ‘It flew away, way up high.’ And I said, ‘Was the sound right after
the crack the sound of it flying?’ He said, ‘You’re really clever, Yunyun.’ Then he aimed at the sky and fired again, and again I heard the sound of a bullet whistling in flight. He said it flew fast enough to puncture thin steel plates. I rubbed the rifle’s warm barrel, and all the weapons I had fantasized about in my thought exercises instantly seemed weak and impotent. The real weapon in front of me held an irresistible attraction.”
General Lin said, “The rough army guys thought it was adorable that a little girl loved guns, so they continued to amuse you with them. Ammunition was far less strictly supervised back then, and lots of ex-soldiers took dozens of rounds away with them, so they had plenty for you to play with. Eventually it got to the point where they let you fire, at first helping you hold the gun, and eventually letting you do it on your own. By the time the summer holiday ended, you could drop to the ground with an assault rifle and fire bursts all by yourself.”
“I held the gun and felt the vibrations of it firing the way other girls cradled singing dolls. Later on, I watched light machine guns firing on the practice range. To me it was a song of delight, not a painful sound.… When summer was over, I no longer covered my ears for hand grenade explosions or recoilless rifles.”
“I took you to the front-line troops for subsequent holidays, mostly with the thought that I’d be able to spend more time with you, but also because I felt that, even though the army wasn’t a place for a kid, it was at least a fairly innocent place that wouldn’t do you much harm. But I was wrong.”
“I had more contact with weapons during those holidays, since the enlisted officers and troops liked to let me play with them. They were proud of their weapons. In their childhood memories, guns were always their favorite toys. Teaching me to shoot was a pleasure for them, so long as they kept things safe. Other kids only had toy guns to mess around with, but I was lucky enough to play with the real thing.”
