The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  Xiaomeng said, “There’s no other way. Think about the MSG and salt. The price of that is hard work.” That vital lesson from the end of the Common Era had made “MSG” and “salt” bywords for economic fundamentals.

  Huahua said, “Hard work doesn’t mean painful work, or work without hope or delight. Kids ought to work in their own fashion. Specs had it right. We haven’t uncovered the rules for the children’s world.”

  They turned back toward Specs. He had spoken little throughout the entire inspection tour but had watched in silence. He never made public speeches, and when a major company had pressed him to speak during a visit, he had said simply, without expression, “I’m responsible for thinking, not speaking,” which became a popular quotation thereafter. Now he was his typical self, holding a cup of coffee, staring blankly at the clouds and land out the window, perhaps enjoying the scene or perhaps lost in thought.

  Huahua called to him, “Hey, professor. You’ve got to give us some opinions.”

  “This isn’t the real children’s world,” he said.

  Huahua and Xiaomeng stared at him, baffled.

  He said, “Think about how big a transformation the supernova brought to humanity? Overnight, only children were left in the world. And that brought about other huge changes. A random example: There are no families in today’s society. In the past, just that one fact would have completely altered the very fabric of society. The Suspension proved that there are so many aspects of the children’s world we’ve never even imagined. But now? It’s like nothing has fundamentally changed from the time of the adults. Society is running along the same track. Don’t you find that odd?”

  Xiaomeng said, “So what do you think it ought to be like?”

  Specs shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I’m just sure that it shouldn’t be this way. What we see now might really be only the product of inertia from the adults’ society. Deep down, things have got to be accumulating; they just haven’t made themselves known yet. The real children’s world may not have even started.”

  Huahua asked, “Do you mean we’re headed for another Suspension?”

  Specs shook his head again. “I don’t know.”

  Huahua stood up. “We’ve done enough thinking the past few days. Let’s do something different. How about we go to the cockpit and watch them fly the plane?”

  “You can’t just keep bothering folks!” Xiaomeng said.

  But Huahua insisted. He often went up front during the course of their inspections and had grown friendly with the child pilots. At first he only asked a few questions, but then he began pestering them to let him fly the plane. The pilots staunchly refused, saying he had no license, but this time he made such a fuss that the captain let him have a go. No sooner had he taken the yoke than the Y-20 began careening like a roller coaster, and he had to return the yoke to the captain.

  Huahua said, “Why can’t we just switch jobs?”

  The captain smiled but shook his head. “I’m not switching. Piloting a country is far harder than flying a plane. You’re in big trouble right now.”

  *

  But in fact, at that very moment, on the ground twenty thousand meters below them, Specs’s accumulation had come to an end and was about to demonstrate its power.

  THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

  Historians believe that the child leaders’ use of Digital Domain and the quantum computer to put an end to the six-hour Suspension at the start of the Supernova Era was a stroke of genius, and the reams of subsequent research, including mathematical modeling, proved that if the situation had not swiftly been brought under control, the country quite likely would have experienced an irreversible collapse.

  But as time moved on, that decision acquired a more profound level of significance. This was the first time humanity had used computers and the internet to unite all of society into a single group. In a way, at that moment, all of the children in the country were sitting in the same classroom. It was not solely the technological foundation provided by quantum computing and Digital Domain that made this possible, but more importantly, the comparatively simple structure of the children’s society. In the more complicated adult era, it would have been hard to gather all of society online.

  Their experience of Suspension meant that the children were deeply impressed by Digital Domain and the quantum computer that had rescued them from their fear and loneliness, and their dependence on the network remained.

  In the toil of the Inertia period, the network became a refuge for the children, a place to escape reality, and they spent their all-toob-rief stretches of free time online. Since the country operated atop the foundation of Digital Domain, most of the children’s work and schooling also involved the network, and thus it gradually became a second reality for them, a virtual reality where they were far happier than in the real world.

  A large number of virtual communities had been set up in Digital Domain, and practically every child old enough to go online was a member of one or more of them. Deep wounds left by the Epoch Clock running out and the Suspension gave the children an instinctive fear of being alone, and they relied on groups to shake off their loneliness at being so abruptly abandoned by the adults. It was the same online. The larger the group, the more easily it attracted new members, and this led to the massive expansion of a few of them through mergers and absorptions of other, smaller-scale communities. One community, “New World,” grew the fastest. By the time the three young leaders began their inspection tour, it claimed a membership of more than fifty million.

  The child leaders had not paid much attention to the growth of online society. Huahua devoted his scant free time to online gaming, so he was most familiar with New World’s massively multiplayer games. One popular war game set in the Three Kingdoms period had more than ten million players on each of two opposing teams, and in the giant battles, cavalry buried the ground in a brown deluge. A naval war game had fleets of hundreds of thousands of ships, and in one air-combat game, every engagement involved millions of fighter planes that choked the air like a dust cloud.

  Upon their return from the inspection tour, the shape of Digital Domain had fundamentally changed. New World, which had now grown to an astonishing size, around 200 million members, was the only community left. That is, practically every child in the country old enough to go online was a member.

  Specs took this development very seriously. “This means we have a virtual country overlaid on top of the real one. It’s extraordinary. We should set up a committee specifically to track the online country and begin to engage it.”

  But things developed far faster than they anticipated, and by the third day after their return, Big Quantum said to them, “New World’s membership want a dialogue with the country’s three top leaders.”

  Huahua asked, “Which members?”

  “All of them.”

  “Aren’t there nearly two hundred million of them? What kind of dialogue? Chat room? BBS? Email?”

  “Those primitive methods are unworkable when you’re talking about so many people, but an entirely new form of dialogue, the assembly, has been developed in Digital Domain.”

  “An assembly? Sure, I can make a speech to two hundred million people, but how can they talk to me? Through representatives?”

  “No. The assembly will allow all two hundred million people to speak to you.”

  Huahua burst out laughing. “That’s going to be noisy.”

  Specs said, “It’s probably not that straightforward.” Then he asked Big Quantum, “Is there one of these assembly conversations every day?”

  “That’s right. Today, the members are discussing having a conversation with you. The assembly begins at twenty-three thirty.”

  “Why so late?”

  “Most children don’t get off work or school till then, so that’s when they have time to go online.”

  “Let’s take a look first as ordinary guests,” Specs suggested to Huahua and Xiaomeng. They agreed, and called over the
engineer in charge of Digital Domain, a boy named Pan Yu who had won gold at the Information Olympics back in the adult era and now was the leading domestic authority on computers. They explained their goal, and he sent someone to fetch four virtual reality helmets.

  Specs lowered his eyebrows. “I’ll get dizzy as soon as I put it on.”

  Pan Yu said, “New World has two modes: image and VR. It only looks real in VR mode.”

  In the hall at the top of the NIT, the leadership was working late, some of them reviewing documents, some making phone calls, and some speaking with ministry heads who had come to make work reports, but they would all get off at 2300. By 2320, only the top three and Pan Yu were left. They put on their VR helmets, which were already plugged in.

  At once the four children felt like they were suspended above a blue plaza, the Windows desktop, as it turned out, only three-dimensional, with its icons standing upright like statues. The mouse pointer flew across the plaza and clicked something, and then a window containing a crowd of animated little cartoon people arranged in orderly ranks rose up.

  They heard Pan Yu’s voice: “You can design your own appearance in the community, but that’s a hassle so we’ll just use premade ones.”

  And so they each selected a cartoon-character avatar, and were amused to see their three companions’ avatars floating beside them.

  Pan Yu said, “The assembly is about to begin. We’ll go right there rather than try out anything else in the community.”

  In the blink of an eye, they were in New World’s assembly space. Their first impression was that it was enormous and empty. Above them was a pure blue sky extending farther than they could see, and below them was flat, endless desert. The line NEW WORLD ASSEMBLY was written in the sky in glowing letters that shone down on the vast desert like a row of suns. There was nothing else in the world.

  “Where is everyone? Why is it empty?” Huahua asked. Indeed, apart from his three companions floating next to him, there was only sand and sky.

  Pan Yu’s cartoon avatar opened its big eyes even wider in surprise. “What, you can’t see anyone?”

  The three leaders looked about them, but could see no one.

  Pan Yu seemed to realize something, and said, “Let’s go down.” He moved the mouse, and the four of them began descending toward the desert. Before long, the sand below them resolved into intricate structures, and then the three of them realized that every grain was a cartoon character. It impressed upon them the sheer scale of the number: the vast desert consisted of 200 million cartoon characters.

  Most of the country’s children were here.

  They continued to descend to the ocean of people and soon were in their midst, surrounded on all sides by cartoons. There seemed to be something in the air, black dots that had just appeared in the sky and were falling to earth. Two landed in their vicinity, two more cartoons, and they realized that children were still entering the area.

  “Why are you still guests?” asked a cartoon next to them. He had no feet, but was supported by a flashing wheel. When he extended his long, thin arms, a head appeared on each palm, the same as the head on his neck. He juggled the three heads, replacing the one on his neck again and again. “Hurry up and log in as registered members. The national leaders are coming to talk to us, and as guests your words won’t be tabulated.” How he distinguished between guests and members they weren’t able to tell.

  “That’s right,” said another nearby cartoon with a sniff. “Who’d have thought there would still be unregistered guests.”

  “And too lazy to make a proper avatar. Selecting a ready-made—it’s indecent,” said another.

  But they weren’t much more decent themselves. One of them may have been too lazy to make a proper body, and had connected two long legs directly to a head. It had no arms, and a pair of wings sprouted from its ears. The other was nothing but a head, a big egg floating half a meter above the ground, with a tiny, fast-spinning rotor poking out of its forehead.

  Then another line of glowing red text appeared in the sky: ATTENDANCE HAS REACHED 194,783,453. THE ASSEMBLY IS ABOUT TO BEGIN.

  The rightmost digits of the 190 million number continued to turn over.

  Then a voice sounded in the air, the familiar voice of Big Quantum. “I’ve conveyed your request to the national leadership.”

  Pan Yu said to the three leaders, “Notice how Big Quantum refers to a single request?”

  “When will they be here?” said a child’s voice. Boy or girl it was hard to tell, but it was loud and carried a long echo. At the same time, a line of red text appeared in the air: VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: 98.276%.

  “Who’s that speaking?” Huahua asked Pan Yu.

  “That’s Virtual Citizen 1.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s not a ‘who.’ It’s a person made up of nearly two hundred million children.”

  “I noticed just now that everyone around us was moving their lips as if they were speaking, but I couldn’t hear anything.”

  “That’s right. They were all speaking, but only Big Quantum heard the nearly two hundred million messages. It summarized them into the one statement you just heard.”

  “That’s what you mean by the assembly format?”

  “Right. This format allows an individual to carry on a simultaneous conversation with more than a hundred million conversation partners. Right now, two hundred million children have turned into just one, so Big Quantum referred to ‘your request’ and not ‘your requests.’ It’s a highly complicated process that requires advanced intelligence and fast processing speed. The short, simple statement you just heard would, if printed out, fill enough paper to circle the globe. Only a quantum computer can handle it.”

  Then Big Quantum answered Virtual Citizen 1: “They said they need to think it over before making a decision.”

  Specs cut in, “Just one problem. What if the two hundred million children have a difference of opinion that can’t be summarized into one statement?”

  Pan Yu put a finger to his lips. “Shhh. You’ll see what happens very soon.”

  Another voice sounded, pitched differently from the previous one so it sounded like someone else was speaking. “They’ll definitely come.” And the text in midair read, VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: 68.115%.

  Pan Yu whispered an explanation: “The percentage indicates the proportion of people who hold that opinion.”

  A voice at a different pitch said, “That’s not certain. They may not come.” The text in midair read, VIRTUAL CITIZEN 3: 24.437%.

  “Can they not? They’ve got to come! They’re the leaders of the country, and they’ve got to talk to the country’s children.” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 4: 11.536%)

  “What do we do if they don’t?” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 3: 23.771%)

  “We do it on our own.” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 5: 83.579%)

  “I told you, they’re definitely going to come.” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: 70.014%)

  Pan Yu said, “You see, if there’s disagreement, the virtual citizen will split into two or more parts. How many is determined by the chosen level of precision. At the most precise, all messages will be listed out. That’s impossible, of course. What’s important is that each virtual citizen is usually more or less a defined group with its own particular character traits. They’ll continue to appear, just like an individual. VC 2 and VC 3, for example, returned just now.”

  After watching for a while, Huahua said to Pan Yu, “Let’s leave.”

  “Press the exit button on your clothes.” The button was on the cartoon’s torso, and pressing it returned them instantly to the Windows space.

  *

  “That was amazing!” Huahua exclaimed after removing his helmet.

  Xiaomeng said, “They don’t need any leaders at all in that network country. They accomplish everything through discussions among two hundred million kids.”

  Specs said thoughtfully, “This will have a profound effect on the real world, too. We paid attention too late.”
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  Xiaomeng asked, “Then should we speak with them?”

  Specs said, “We’ve really got to be careful. This is like nothing else in history. No one knows what might happen. We should think about it longer and more carefully before acting.”

  “There’s no time. It’s like I said: If we don’t go, then something’s definitely going to happen,” Huahua said.

  With Specs and Xiaomeng in agreement, they spent the night in a conference studying the issue, and discovered that quite a few members of the leadership team had been to the New World Assembly and were familiar with the situation. They mostly felt that it was a positive thing. One kid said, “We’re all doing things that are beyond our own abilities. If the country really can be run like this, it’ll free us up.”

  Everyone agreed that the central government, as represented by the three top leaders, would attend the New World Assembly and talk to the 200 million children.

  *

  They entered the New World Assembly area a second time, this time using their real-world appearances for avatars. Big Quantum erected a tall podium for them in the center of the space. They came early to prepare, and to get used to the environment, and as the country’s 200 million children logged in and entered, the dense crowd of cartoon characters began to blot out the sky like a layer of clouds. They watched as the avatars fell from the sky like a storm. When the endless sea of people finally calmed, 200 million pairs of eyes were fixed on the platform.

  “I feel like I’m going to melt,” Xiaomeng whispered.

  Huahua, on the other hand, drank it in. “It’s different for me. For the first time I’ve found what leading a country feels like! How about you, professor?”

  Specs said without emotion, “Don’t bug me. I’m thinking.”

  When the assembly began, Virtual Citizen 1 led off. According to the figures showing in the sky, he represented a 97.458 percent share.

  “We’re extremely disappointed in this new world. The adults left, leaving us kids behind, so it should be a fun world. But it’s not fun at all. It’s not even as fun as the world was when the adults were around.”