The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  Xiaomeng said, “The adults used to give us food and clothing, so of course we had time to play and take it easy. But not now. We’ve got to work, or else we’ll starve to death. We can’t forget the MSG and salt.”

  Virtual Citizen 2 (63.442%): “Xiaomeng, don’t let that trainload of MSG and ten trainloads of salt scare you. That was for one-point-three billion people in the adults’ time. We don’t eat that much.”

  Virtual Citizen 3 (43.117%): “Why does Xiaomeng sound so much like an adult? Boring!”

  Virtual Citizen 1 (92.571%): “Regardless, we don’t like this world now.”

  Huahua asked, “So what kind of world do you want?”

  Later historians studying the virtual citizens’ answers to this question looked through the raw records of individual member responses kept by the quantum computer; although only a small proportion were retained, it still amounted to forty gigabytes, or around twenty billion Chinese characters. If printed out as a trade-paperback-size volume, it would be eight hundred meters thick. Below are some representative responses:

  I want the sort of country where kids can go to school if they want, but don’t have to if they don’t want to. They can play if they want, and if they don’t, they don’t have to play at all. If they want to eat, they can, and if they don’t, they don’t have to. They can go wherever they want, and if they don’t want to go anywhere, they don’t have to. . . .

  I used to hate having adults look after us. Now they’re not around, and the country belongs to the kids. We should really be having lots of fun. . . .

  In our country, you can play soccer in the middle of the street. . . .

  A country that gives me as much chocolate as I want. And gives Flower (perhaps the speaker’s cat.—Ed.) as many cans of fish as it wants. . . .

  A country that celebrates Spring Festival every day. Every day, each person is issued ten packs of whippersnappers, twenty double-bangs, and thirty flash-bangs, as well as a hundred kuai in yasui money, all of them crisp new notes. . . .

  In my country, when you eat dumplings you can just eat the filling. . . .

  It used to be that only kids could play, but adults couldn’t because they had to go to work. We’ll grow up too, but we don’t want to go to work, we just want to keep playing. . . .

  Dad said I don’t work hard at school, so when I grow up I’ll be a street sweeper. If I don’t work hard, my country won’t make me be a street sweeper. . . .

  Will the country let us all live in the city?

  I’ll only take three classes in school: music, art, and sports. . . .

  No proctor for school exams. Kids can give themselves their own marks. . . .

  The country should give every class in every school fifty gaming consoles, one for everyone. You play all through class, and whoever can’t get a hundred and twenty thousand points in Battle for the Galaxy gets kicked out! Deet-deet-deet, dong-dong-dong. It’ll be awesome. . . .

  Build a huge playground at my house, like the one in Miyun in Beijing, but ten times bigger. . . .

  The country should issue us dolls on a set schedule, a different one each time. . . .

  Shoot a cool animated series, ten thousand episodes, that never goes off the air. . . .

  Puppies are my favorite. Why doesn’t the country give every puppy a pretty little doghouse?

  Big Quantum distilled these 200 million messages into one sentence that was uttered by Virtual Citizen 1, representing 96.314 percent of the members in attendance:

  “We want a world of fun!”

  Xiaomeng said, “The adults have drawn up a detailed five-year plan for the country, and we have to follow it.”

  Virtual Citizen 1: “We think the adults’ five-year plan is boring. We’ve drawn up our own five-year plan.”

  Huahua asked, “Can you give us a look?”

  Virtual Citizen 1: “That’s the point of this assembly. We’ve built a virtual country to show off our five-year plan. Have Big Quantum give you a tour. You’re sure to love it!”

  Huahua said to the sky, “Great. Big Quantum, show us around!”

  A COUNTRY OF FUN

  No sooner had he uttered those words than the blue sky and the crowd vanished before their eyes, leaving the three children hanging in an endless black void. When their eyes adjusted, they saw stars appear in the remote distance, and then a blue orb take shape in space. It hung like a glowing crystal ball in the dark ocean of the infinite cosmos, and spread across its surface a swirl of snow-white clouds. It looked so fragile, liable to shatter at the slightest touch and spill out its blue blood into the cold isolation of space. As the blue crystal ball drew closer, they realized how huge it was, and eventually the gigantic blue planet filled all the sky, and the children could see clearly the borders between oceans and continents. Now all of Asia was visible at once, and a twisting red line appeared on the brown land, a closed loop demarcating the borders and coastline of that ancient country in the east. Its territory drew nearer, and they could begin to make out the ripples of mountain ranges and veinlike rivers. Then Big Quantum spoke: “We’re now in orbit at a height of more than twenty thousand kilometers.”

  Earth slowly rotated beneath their feet, and they seemed to be flying toward something. Xiaomeng suddenly shouted, “Look! It’s like there’s a thread up ahead.”

  The thread ran from space to the land below, its top half clearly visible against the blackness behind it, almost like a long strand of spider silk joining the Earth to a point in space. Its lower half merged in with the colors of the land and was hard to make out, but with effort they could see that it terminated in the vicinity of Beijing. The children were flying toward the spider silk, and as they got closer they could see that it was as shiny as a silken thread. Sections of it reflected the bright sunlight at times, and its far end flickered like a lamp. It gained width as they drew nearer, and then they could make out details of its structure. Now they knew what the long spider silk actually was: it wasn’t hanging down from space, but was rising from the surface. They could hardly believe their eyes.

  “Wow!” Huahua exclaimed. “It’s a building!”

  Indeed it was a skyscraper, clad in fully reflective mirrors, towering into space.

  The voice of Virtual Citizen 1 sounded in the children’s ears: “All children in the country call this home. This building is twenty-five thousand kilometers high and has three million floors. Each floor is home to an average of one hundred children.”

  “You mean every child in the country lives in this one building?” Huahua asked in surprise. But when they landed on the roof, they realized it was not at all impossible. Their impression of the spider silk as narrow was due to their distance and its ratio of height to width, but the rooftop might have been large enough to hold the Workers’ Stadium twice over. The giant flashing signal light in the center, as tall as an ordinary twenty-story building, rotated and shone so brightly they couldn’t look at it head-on; perhaps it was a warning light for passing spacecraft.

  They crossed to the other side of the roof, where there was an entrance to the top floor—floor 3 million—of the supertower. This floor, they noticed at once, was one big grassy lawn, with a fountain smack in the center reflecting a warm artificial light. Scattered about the lawn were a few dozen finely wrought cabins of the sort only found in fairy tales, the dwellings of this floor’s hundred children. Inside one of them they saw a typical kid’s room, toys of all kinds strewn about the bed and table. In another, also clearly a kid’s room, the decoration was entirely different, and they found that every room they went into was unique and personalized.

  The floor below was another grassy meadow, but in place of the fountain there was a clear brook, with the children’s homes distributed along its banks. They went into a few of them, and as before each one was different.

  The scene changed dramatically on the next floor, a serene snowscape that shone faintly blue in the eternal twilight, and snowflakes drifted downward in an uninterrupted stream,
landing in thick white blankets on the roofs of the children’s houses. There were snowmen in front of some of them. Evidently the children on this floor loved the winter.

  One floor down was a forest with houses built in clearings. A thin morning fog was pierced by shafts of light from the sun rising beyond the trees. Birdcalls rang out at times from within the forest.

  They descended more than twenty floors, each of them its own unique world. In one, it never stopped raining; another was a desert of golden sand; one was even a miniature ocean, with children living in boats drifting about on the surface.

  “How did you manage to make all these?” Specs asked.

  Big Quantum replied, “This was produced using one of the virtual country’s gaming programs, an old city simulator. The virtual country uses plug-ins provided by a component library to build the virtual world, and it can create virtual images on its own.”

  They looked carefully about them, at every blade of grass and every pebble, all of them true to life. “An immense amount of work went into this building,” Huahua exclaimed.

  Virtual Citizen 1 replied, “Of course. More than eighty million children had a hand in its construction, and more than a hundred million designed their own homes.”

  Led by Big Quantum, the children entered a streamlined, transparent elevator that protruded from the side of the building. From within they could see the glittering stars and the Earth below.

  Xiaomeng said, “You’re not really planning on building a building like this in the real world, are you?”

  Virtual Citizen 1 said loudly, “Of course we are. Why else would we have drafted these plans? Everything you see down there on the ground we want built for real!”

  Huahua said, “Sucks if you have to go to the roof, and have to take a twenty-five-thousand-kilometer elevator ride.”

  “That’s no problem. All the elevators in this building are little rockets, and are faster than the satellite boosters of the adults’ era. Take a look!”

  Just then an elevator car spurting flames rocketed past them at astonishing speed, and just as it was about to reach the roof, the flames at the bottom of the streamlined car vanished, and reappeared out of the top to slow it down. Virtual Citizen 1 explained, “These elevators can reach speeds of sixty thousand kph, making the journey up from the ground in a little over twenty minutes.”

  Specs snorted. “Judging from the deceleration we just saw, I’m afraid the passengers were smashed to a pulp.”

  Virtual Citizen 1 made no reply, evidently caring not a whit for such a minor problem. Then the top of their car spurted flame and they began descending with terrifying speed. They felt the speed for the first few seconds, but then as the wall of the building blurred into one smooth continuous track, they seemed almost motionless, apart from the floor indicator that ticked backward rapidly in the thousands place. There was no sense of downward acceleration; rather, they stood firmly on the floor of the elevator, as if the VR program had overlooked this particular level of reality. But one thing it did get right: Despite being in space, they were not weightless, since weightlessness in orbiting objects is due to their motion rather than their height; even at this height, Earth’s gravitational attraction remained strong.

  Huahua said, “Set aside the building’s feasibility for the moment. What’s the point of it? Why do all kids in the country have to live in one building?”

  Virtual Citizen 1 said, “To leave all the other places for playing in!”

  Many years later, historians found profound significance in the notion of the supertower, tracing it to the loneliness common to every child’s heart when the Epoch Clock ran out.

  “The country is enormous. That’s not enough for you to play in?” Xiaomeng asked.

  “As you’ll find out shortly, it’s not!”

  “Still, the building’s actually pretty cool,” Huahua said with feeling.

  “It’s even cooler than this down there!”

  The rocket elevator continued to plummet. Eventually the arc of the Earth’s edge wasn’t so pronounced, and the ground below them became more detailed.

  Xiaomeng looked from the top of the building to the bottom, both ends too far to see, and exclaimed, “The height of the building is twice the diameter of the Earth!”

  Specs nodded. “It’s like a long strand of Earth hair.”

  Huahua said, “And think about how it’ll pass from the dark side to the sunward side, and how the sun will light up its enormous height. What a magnificent sight!”

  The elevator’s rockets switched from top to bottom, and they began to decelerate. Soon they could make out the separations between building floors, and just a few seconds later the elevator came to a halt, the VR program once again ignoring the fact that the force of such a quick deceleration would crush the elevator’s passengers into meat paste. The children could see that the elevator was still in space, but Virtual Citizen 1 said, “Our present position is on the two hundred and forty thousandth floor of the building, at a height of two thousand kilometers. We won’t take the elevator the rest of the way but will use a different method of descent. Look down, what do you see?”

  They looked out from the elevator and saw a long line rising from the Earth, its terminus nearly invisible because it was so thin. As it rose, it traced two large loops and a range of curves and bends, as if some naughty child had scribbled across a photograph of the Earth. The line extended toward the building and joined it just below their elevator. Close up they could see it was a narrow train track.

  Virtual Citizen 1 asked, “Can you guess what that is?”

  Huahua said, “It looks like a giant picked up one end of the railroad from Beijing to Shanghai and attached it here.”

  Virtual Citizen 1 laughed. “What a description! You must be a writer. But this track is much longer than that. It’s more than four thousand kilometers long. It’s a roller coaster we’re planning to build.”

  A roller coaster? The children looked in amazement at the long track and its two huge loops glittering attractively in the sunlight.

  “You mean it goes all the way to the ground?”

  “That’s right. We’re going to take it down.”

  As he spoke, a small boat-shaped vehicle with five two-person seats like the roller coasters they had seen in amusement parks emerged on rails from the building and stopped under the elevator. A hatch opened in the elevator floor right over the car (at this point the VR program ignored the vacuum of space).

  As soon as the three of them were in the car, it started sliding smoothly along the rails. It moved slowly at first, but once it was out of the building’s shadow and into the bright sunlight, it reached the first big drop and catapulted them forward. Since their VR helmets only provided visual sensations and they weren’t able to actually feel the acceleration, they missed out on experiencing the first feeling of weightless during their time in space. Supergravity replaced no gravity as the roller coaster entered the first loop, and they saw the stars and the Earth revolve around them. When they leveled out again, Xiaomeng looked back from the rear seat. The loop was well behind them already, and the supertower was now just a thin thread of spider silk that seemed to be dangling from the glittering galaxy itself. The second loop was even bigger than the first one but took the same amount of time to complete; clearly, they were still speeding up. Then came a long descent, not monotonic, of course, since the roller coaster traced a series of troughs and crests, some of them quite lofty. The coaster twisted into a spiral at the end of that stretch, and when the children entered it, they felt like they were at the center of the universe with the Earth and stars spinning endless circles around them.

  Starting off level, the spiral eased downward until it was almost perpendicular, making the Earth into a huge record spinning round and round in front of them. Out the spiral’s other end, the tracks stayed vertical, dropping them straight at the Earth and creating another situation where they ought to feel weightless. Ahead of them the tracks twis
ted into a tangle perhaps a hundred kilometers in diameter, and it felt like they were threading that labyrinth forever, nearing the exit multiple times only to be dragged back on a path toward the entrance again. They weren’t at the center of the universe now; their cosmos was a box in the hands of a fidgety child who turned it over and over in random directions.

  The roller coaster escaped the maze at last and entered a straight-line descent, picking up speed again. This stretch lasted a long while; up ahead the tracks blurred into a smooth belt which made it hard to judge their speed. The color above them had turned from black to a light purple that gradually became deep blue; the stars had grown fuzzy, and there was little curvature to the horizon.

  Sitting in front, Huahua saw a flame at the tip of their streamlined car that quickly blossomed until it enveloped the entire car; the program clearly had not ignored atmospheric friction. After the flames disappeared, the children found they were above a sea of clouds. The sky above them was a clear blue, shining with sunlight that, in contrast to the stark black-and-white illumination of outer space, seemed to permeate every last wrinkle in their clothes. On the tracks up ahead was another series of loops, climbs, and dips, and the presence of clear reference objects meant that their ride was far more heart-stoppingly crazy than back in space.

  During the moments when the roller coaster slid smoothly, the children could see gigantic frames towering up from the ground in the distance, all of them at least ten thousand meters tall, piercing the clouds. Some of them formed right triangles with the ground, while others were shaped like giant doors, as if they were enormous upright compasses and set squares. Huahua asked what they were, and Virtual Citizen 1 replied, “Slides and swings. For little kids to play on.”

  Huahua couldn’t imagine what kind of little kid could slide down a ten-thousand-meter slide, much less how they could get such a gigantic swing swinging.