Ball Lightning Sneak Peek

by Liu Cixin

  “‘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.

  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 nu
clear 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 think 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.

  When I arrived, Ding Yi wasn’t at home, just the woman. His three-bedroom apartment wasn’t as spare as it was before: to his calculation papers, she had added lots of cute decorations.

  The moment the woman heard I was Ding Yi’s friend, she asked me whether he had any other lovers.

  “Physics counts as one, I guess. No one can hold the top place in his heart so long as physics is there,” I said frankly.

  “I don’t care about physics. I mean, does he have any other women?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s got so much stuff in his head I don’t think he could make room for two people.”

  “But I heard that during the war, he and a young major were close.”

  “Oh, they were just colleagues and friends. Besides, that major isn’t here anymore.”

  “I know that. But you know what? He looks at that major’s photograph every day, and rubs it.”

  I had been distracted, but this surprised me. “A photo of Lin Yun?”

  “Oh, so she’s called Lin Yun. She looks like a teacher, or something. Are there teachers in the army?”

  This shocked me even further, and I insisted on seeing the photo. She led me to the study, opened up a drawer in a bookshelf, and took out an exquisite silver-inlaid picture frame. Then, she said, “It’s this one. Every night before he goes to sleep he steals a look at it and dusts it off. Once I told him, ‘Put it on the writing desk, I don’t mind,’ but he still doesn’t leave it out. He just gives it a stealthy look and dusts it off.”

  I took the frame and held it facedown in my hand. With eyes half-closed, I steadied my
heart—the woman must have been looking at me in amazement—and then I jerked the photo around and stared at it.

  At once I understood why the woman had thought Lin Yun was a teacher: she was with a group of students.

  She was standing in their midst, more beautiful than ever, still wearing that trim major’s uniform, with a beaming smile on her face. Looking at the children around her, I immediately recognized them as the group that had been incinerated by ball lightning at the nuclear power plant. They, too, were smiling sweetly, and were obviously very happy. I noticed in particular a little girl that Lin Yun was holding tightly, an adorable child smiling so hard her eyes were slits.

  But what caught my attention was the girl’s left hand.

  It was missing.

  Lin Yun and the children were standing on a well-manicured lawn where there were a few small white animals. Behind them, I could see a familiar structure: the macro-electron excitation lab, where we had heard the bleat of a quantum goat. But in the photograph, the warehouse’s long exterior wall was painted in colorful cartoon animals, flowers, and balloons. The brilliant colors made the building look like an enormous toy.

  From the photograph, Lin Yun looked at me with her touching smile, and in her limpid eyes I read things I had not seen while she was alive: a happy belonging and a peace from somewhere deep within. It reminded me of a distant, long-forgotten still harbor in which a small boat was moored.

  I gently returned the photo to the drawer and walked out to the balcony, unwilling to let Ding Yi’s lover see the tears in my eyes.

  Ding Yi never spoke of the photo. He never even mentioned Lin Yun, and I never asked. It was a secret deep in his heart.