The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  The roller coaster’s final segment was an easy slope that descended toward what the children thought was a grassy plain covered in colorful flowers, but when they finally landed, they realized the plain was actually formed from a huge number of multicolored rubber balls, blown-up versions of the kind you’d find in a ball pit, only here, stretching as far as the eye could see, it had to be called a ball ocean. They slid quite a long ways through this ball ocean before stopping, kicking up balls around them that then clattered back down again in a kaleidoscope of rain. They couldn’t think of who would dive into such a weird ocean, or how they’d get out afterward; they knew from previous experiences of “swimming” in ball pits as younger kids that movement wasn’t easy. Then two giant wheels popped out of the roller coaster, one on each side, churning the balls into motion with a strange gurgling sound. The virtual citizen informed them that the ocean of balls covered nearly a thousand square kilometers.

  “It’ll use up all of the rubber in the country. How will we make car tires after that?” Xiaomeng asked, but the virtual citizen didn’t answer, clearly uninterested.

  After the roller coaster emerged from the ball ocean, the children were able to observe the giant slide from up close. It was a water slide. Water came rushing down the wide slide from a top that was farther than they could see, as if a river were pouring down from the sky. Imagining himself sliding down that river for ten thousand meters, Huahua felt his entire body tremble with anticipation, and he asked if he could have a ride.

  “You’re only out for fun, Huahua. We’ve got serious things to do,” Xiaomeng said as she held him back.

  The virtual citizen added, “That’s right. It’s another forty kilometers from here to the lift, and we shouldn’t waste that time. Besides, what’s the point of doing it in a virtual, computer-hosted form? Wait until we’ve built the real thing—that’ll be a thrill!”

  Leaving the super water slide, the children saw a huge wide platform, big enough to hold several hundred people, hanging from thick steel cables dropped from above. At first they thought it was an athletic field, but it was only when the virtual citizen informed them that it was the seat of the gigantic swing that they noticed the poles towering skyward a thousand meters away on either side. And then they discovered how the swing would be set in motion: the platform had rocket engines attached to its underside.

  Next they visited the bumper car arena. Each car was the size of one of the dump trucks from the adults’ time, each wheel more than two meters tall. The inflatable bumpers on all sides turned them into huge monsters. Thousands upon thousands of them colliding and chasing after each other on a vast plain would kick up enough dust to blot out the sky. It would certainly take guts and a sacrificial spirit to play that game.

  The virtual citizen explained, “This is the first development zone for the New Five-Year Plan, and focuses on the construction of huge carnival rides. You still haven’t seen the giant Ferris wheel and Challenger UFO; they’re more than a hundred kilometers away, but on a good day you could see them. Now let’s go to Zone Two, the gaming zone.”

  No sooner had he spoken than their environment changed, and they found themselves in a huge city built of tall, oddly shaped buildings, some of them like enormous castles, others wrapped in tangles of pipes or covered in holes like Swiss cheese.

  “These are all video game arcades?” Huahua asked.

  “No. Each of them is a gaming console.”

  “They’re enormous! Then . . . ​where are the screens?”

  “The idea behind these consoles is new. To play, you’ve got to go inside, where the setting is all holographic or made of actual devices. Each game begins from the console’s bottom floor, and you work your way up until the conclusion at the top floor. You don’t play with a mouse or joystick like you used to, but you’re actually part of the game world and are running around and fighting all the time. Like that castle console: it’s a royal palace, and you’ve got to defeat tons of enemies before you become king. The one with all the holes is a monsters’ den, and you use your laser sword to kill monsters like poison dragons and rescue the princess. Of course, these games are for the little kids. Since they’re so small, they can only run small-scale games.”

  “What? These are only small-scale games? How big are the big ones?”

  “Large-scale machines don’t have a fixed form. Most of them take up an entire zone.”

  The environment changed again, and they found themselves on a broad plain where in the distance formations of ancient foot soldiers were advancing, helmets glittering in the sunlight, their raised spears like a densely planted wheat field. “You see? This is a game of ancient warfare. The players command a robot army ten thousand strong and pit it against another one. There’s also a Western game where you ride a horse into the wilderness armed with your revolver and have all sorts of adventures.”

  “How much land does Zone Two cover?”

  “A million square kilometers, more or less, would be enough to build all the consoles. Now I’ll show you Zone Three: the zoo.”

  Their environment switched to the boundary between a forest and a plain. Hordes of animals cavorted on the plain and ran in and out of the forest. “These megazoos are true animal kingdoms. They have no cages, and all the animals can move freely through the natural environment. When you go into these zoos, you’re entering the mountains and wilderness where you may come across all sorts of animals. You’ll wear powered protective clothing, so no wild beast will be able to hurt you. You’ll travel through the forest atop an elephant, or take a photo with a Bengal tiger. The biggest zoo is nearly three hundred thousand square kilometers in area, even bigger than the UK. That one doesn’t have any roads; helicopters are the only form of transportation available, and when you go in, you’ll feel like you’re entering a primeval world right at the dawn of humanity. We’ll also build three animal cities with streets and buildings just like human ones, but they’ll be filled with cute puppies and kittens and other animals kids can be friends with. You can go in and play with them, and you can take the ones you like back with you. . . . ​This zone covers an area of nearly one million square kilometers.”

  “Does it need to be that big?”

  “What kind of a question is that? Animals need freedom of migration. Birds need to fly freely. Can they do that without enough space? Next I’ll show you Zone Four, the adventure zone.”

  Their environment changed rapidly, from the foot of a steep snow-covered mountain to an endless savannah to a deep mountain gorge to the banks of a raging river . . .

  When they stopped at last beneath a huge waterfall, Huahua remarked, “There doesn’t seem to be anything built in these places.”

  “That’s right. All of the old cities will be torn down, and the zone will be restored to its pristine state.”

  “What for?”

  “Adventuring!”

  “Can’t you adventure in some of the Zone Two games?”

  “That’s totally different! In games, the program is preset. Everything is predictable. It’s totally different here. You don’t know what you’ll find. That’s what makes it exciting. Besides, this is far bigger than any game in Zone Two.”

  “How large is Zone Four?”

  “The entire northwest!”

  “That’s excessive.”

  “The hell it is. It’s got to be big. Where’s the adventure if the edge is just a few steps away?”

  “Well, if you do it that way, our country doesn’t have nearly enough territory.”

  “And that’s why Zone Five only contains one small project.”

  “There’s a Zone Five?”

  “Right. Candytown.”

  The city they now found themselves in was an exquisite miniature in comparison to the gigantic scale of the previous zones. The buildings were short, and its most striking characteristic was that it was colored in vibrant monochromes, as if it were built from big wooden blocks. “This is Candytown. All the buildings are b
uilt from candy. The brown stadium you’re looking at is made entirely of chocolate. That translucent building over there is made of rock sugar.”

  “Can you eat it?”

  “Of course!”

  Huahua went up to the stadium and clicked on a brown pillar beside the door; a chunk came right off. Xiaomeng went over to a small, dainty building and lightly touched a window; the glass shattered, and she picked up a fragment imagining how sweet the thin bit of sugar crystal would taste on her tongue.

  Specs broke his long silence to snort, “This is a violation not only of the laws of economics but of science as well. Is candy strong enough to build with?”

  The virtual citizen replied, “That’s the reason there are no tall buildings in Candytown. And they’ve got steel skeletons for strength.”

  “Won’t they melt in the heat?”

  “Excellent point.” Their environment changed again, but not by much. Now they were on the outskirts of Candytown, at one of the small hills that ringed it. The brilliant colors and soft lines of the hills made them seem plucked from a watercolor painting.

  The virtual citizen said, “It’s a shame you can’t smell them, but they’re delicious. These are the Ice Cream Hills.”

  When they looked closer, they saw rivulets of cream running all over the hills, some of them tumbling in creamy waterfalls. The streams joined into a river flowing down the valley, an undulating flow of milk-colored soft ripples and waves that passed without sound. “Climate conditions were somewhat ignored, so the ice cream is melting. Candytown might have to be constructed someplace colder.”

  Later Supernova Era historians devoted considerable research to the Candytown concept, first of all to the puzzle of why, when children of the Common Era didn’t care much for candy, were they so captivated by it in the new world of their imagination? Maybe candy was for children a representation of something adults could never understand, a symbol of beauty.

  From their analysis of Big Quantum’s original records, historians learned that the architects of the New Five-Year Plan and the virtual country were mainly children between the ages of five and eleven, bolstered by younger children, and by sheer force of numbers they held an unbeatable advantage under the statistical and inductive principles of the New World Assembly. Disappointment with the real world led a significant proportion of older children to join them, and in the frenzy that gradually developed, only a minority of children maintained any sense of rationality.

  DEBATE

  Their environment changed a final time, returning the three young leaders to the platform in the New World Assembly at the center of a sea of people. Looking down, they saw not just a sea of eyes but a sea of mouths, two hundred million mouths constantly in motion speaking words that only Big Quantum could hear and remember.

  Virtual Citizen 1 (91.417%) asked, “What do you think of the New Five-Year Plan? Can you guide us to make it real?”

  Huahua said, “Are you the only one here? There’s no Virtual Citizen 2?”

  Virtual Citizen 1 said, “VC 2 has been around a few times, but is really annoying. I told them to piss off. Hey, VC 2, come out and speak if you’ve got any guts!”

  And so the country launched into a huge debate, the biggest ever seen in human history, in which direct participants numbered more than 200 million. Across the vast territory of the country, children could be found on the phone or at their computers shouting or typing away, each of them vying to contribute their 1/200,000,000th part toward the world of their dreams. The smaller of the two competing groups of children had a larger average age, but tragically, Big Quantum’s summarized statements did not (or could not) take age into account, and so the larger group held an absolute advantage. And thus, with a huge number of younger children taking part in the debate to determine the fate of the country, the least rational and most capricious formed a highly dangerous social force.

  The timid voice of Virtual Citizen 2 (8.792%) ventured, “Don’t listen to them, Huahua, Specs, and Xiaomeng. That’s just the jeering of a group of ignorant babies who only care about playing. I recommend that the assembly’s rules for tabulation and summarization should be altered to incorporate an age-based weighting.”

  A commotion shook the sea of people down below. The cartoon avatars shouted and whirled about, as if a stiff wind had churned up waves on the ocean.

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “We’re babies? How old are you? Thirteen at the oldest. Just a few days ago you’d have been spanked by your dad, but now you’re pretending to be adults? Shame shame shame shame shame! Listen, the adults are gone. It’s only us kids that are left. No one gets to tell anyone what to do anymore!”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: “The problem is that your five-year plan is impossible.”

  virtual citizen 1: “How do you know that if you don’t do it? A hundred years ago, would you have thought all two hundred million kids in the country could be in one place for a meeting? You’re a coward.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: “If it was possible, then why didn’t the adults do it?”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “The adults? Hmph! They didn’t know how to have fun. Of course they weren’t going to build a fun world. The world the adults built was awful. Everything about it was so boring. They didn’t play; they just spent their days pouting and going silently to work. Total snoozefest. And they insisted on telling us what to do, can’t do this, can’t do that, can’t play here, can’t play there, so for us it was just school school school and test test test, behave and be a good kid. Ugh ugh ugh ugh! But now it’s just us left, and we want to build a fun world.”

  Xiaomeng said, “And how does this fun world of yours produce food? Without food, we’ll all starve to death.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “The adults left us with tons of stuff. That’ll last us for ages.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: “Wrong. It’ll run out eventually.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “No it won’t no it won’t! It never ran out for the adults, did it?”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: “That’s because they were constantly producing more stuff to eat.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “Production production. Gag. Shut up shut up shut up.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: “But what happens when we’ve eaten everything?”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “We deal with it then. First we want to build the fun world. Then we’ll tackle food. There were so many people in the adults’ time, but they managed to eat enough without too much work, right?”

  Xiaomeng shouted. “My friends, the adults put a lot of work into getting enough to eat.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “We never saw that. Did any of you? Did you, Xiaomeng? Hah!”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: “That you never saw it doesn’t mean they weren’t working hard, you little idiots.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “You’re the idiot! Wannabe adult. Lame!”

  Huahua said, “Let’s take a giant step back. Even if we tackle your five-year plan, can you all handle such a strenuous task?”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “Of course we can.”

  Huahua said, “You might have to work twenty-hour days.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “We can work twenty-four-hour days.”

  Huahua said, “If half of you were Ph.D.s, it might have a chance of working.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “We’ll study hard. We’ll each read ten thousand books. We’ll become Ph.D.s!”

  Huahua said, “Nuts. You’re tired enough as it is.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “That’s because the work’s so boring. It’s no fun at all. When it’s fun, you don’t get tired. We can work twenty-four hours a day. We’ll all become Ph.D.s. Then we’ll build that fun world. We will we will we will!”

  Human group effects are powerful, as can be seen from a crowd of soccer spectators numbering in the tens of thousands; when two hundred million people (and children at that) were all in one place, the effect was more powerful than sociologists and psychologists of the past could have imagined. Individual minds ceased to exist, subsumed into the fl
ood of the group. Years later, many of the participants at that New World Assembly recalled how they abandoned all control of themselves; logic and reason lost all meaning for millions of young children. Now they didn’t want to listen, they didn’t want to act, they just wanted, and wanted, and wanted, wanted that dreamworld, that country of fun.

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “Will the national leaders please answer us? Do you or do you not accept our five-year plan?”

  The three leaders exchanged glances. Xiaomeng said, “My friends, you’ve lost your senses. Go home and think it over again.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “We’ve lost our senses?! That’s silly! The two hundred million of us have less sense than the three of you? Silly silly silly silly silly!”

  Then new virtual citizens began splitting off.

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 3 (41.328%): “Looks like the country won’t accept our five-year plan. We’ll do it ourselves!”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 4 (67.933%): “By yourselves? Easy to say. You think it’s like making a virtual world on a computer? You need national leaders and the government to do it in the real world. Otherwise you won’t get anywhere.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 3: “Sheesh . . .”

  The tumult in the ocean settled down, and then turned into a listless desert.

  Xiaomeng said, “My friends, it’s late. Let’s all go to sleep. There’s still work tomorrow.”

  VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: “Yuck. Work work work, study study study. Total lamefest. And tiring. Lame lame lame lame lame. Tiring tiring tiring tiring tiring . . .”

  The already feeble voice gradually trailed off, and the children began to ascend out of the ocean and exit the session in a reversal of the rain of cartoon avatars they had seen at the start, as if a puddle were evaporating in the sun. Soon it was gone entirely, and the ground popped up a line of text: NEW WORLD ASSEMBLY #214 CONCLUDED.

  *

  After taking off their helmets, the three young leaders remained silent for a long while.

  This brought the Supernova Era to the end of its second period, a three-month stretch, longer than the Suspension, that again took its name from Specs’s casual description. “Inertia” was what later historians later dubbed it.