The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  After three months coasting on the inertia of the adults’ time, the children’s world at last showed its true face.

  7

  CANDYTOWN

  DREAMTIME

  Life seemed to proceed along the same old tracks after the New World Assembly, despite a few unusual signs, the most conspicuous of which was that some children no longer studied mornings and evenings but either went to bed or went online after they finished work. The leadership didn’t pay much attention to the phenomenon, since they felt it was a normal manifestation of work fatigue rather than an omen of some kind. But the practice spread swiftly, and soon work-aged children were skipping not only class but work as well, and younger children began to abandon their studies entirely. At this point the leadership realized something else was present beneath the surface, but it was too late. The development of the situation accelerated before they had time to adopt countermeasures, and as a result the children’s world experienced a second social vacuum.

  Unlike the first, this vacuum did not take the form of a catastrophe, but of a joyous holiday. It was a Sunday morning, normally the time when the city was at its quietest, since the children would still be sound asleep from the exhausting, extended six-day work week. But this day was different. The children in the NIT found that the city had awakened from the slumber it had been in since the adults’ departure.

  Children were everywhere outside, as if all of them had taken to the streets. It reminded them of the hustle and bustle of the adults’ era, long ago. They moved in small groups, holding hands, laughing, singing, and filling the city with delight. For the entire morning, the children strolled through the city, taking a look here, inspecting something there, as if this was their first visit to the city, or to the world, and every fiber of their being was twinging with the same sensation: This world belongs to us!

  The Candytown period was divided into two phases: Dreamtime and Slumbertime. Now the first had begun.

  *

  That afternoon, the children returned to their schools, where they thought about how carefree they had been during the adults’ time, and reminisced about childhood. They were delighted to be reunited with classmates and friends from the Common Era, and hugged and congratulated each other for surviving the disaster. They set aside worries about what the next day would bring; they had worried enough, and were tired of it. Planning for tomorrow wasn’t a task for kids anyway.

  That night the revelry reached a crescendo. All the lights in the city were turned on, and the air shook with fireworks that drowned out the Rose Nebula.

  In the NIT, the leaders looked out over the sea of gleaming lights and brilliant pyrotechnics in silence. Watching the crowds of exuberant children on the street, Specs said, “This is the true beginning of the children’s world.”

  Xiaomeng sighed softly. “What happens next?”

  Specs seemed not at all concerned. “Relax. History is a river that flows where it wills, and no one can stop it.”

  “Then what should we do?” Huahua asked.

  “We’re part of history, a few drops in that river. Go with it.”

  Now Huahua sighed. “I’ve just come to that realization, too. I feel ridiculous thinking back on the feeling I had of us helming of the ship of state.”

  *

  The next day, children in critical systems like power, transportation, and telecommunications remained in their posts, but the vast majority of children didn’t go to work. For a second time, the children’s country fell into paralysis.

  Unlike the Suspension, this time there weren’t many warning reports. In the NIT office, the child leaders held an emergency meeting, but no one knew what to say or do. After a long silence, Huahua pulled a pair of sunglasses from out of a drawer and said, “I’ll go have a look.” Then he walked out.

  When he left the building, he found a bicycle and took it down the avenue. There were as many kids out today as the day before, and they looked even more excited. He parked his bike outside a shopping center. The door was open, and children were going in and out, so Huahua joined them. Lots of children were inside, most of them at the shelves, all of them picking out things they liked.

  An electric toy car came squealing along and disappeared under a shelf. Looking back in the direction it came, he saw another shelf of toys, a dense crowd of kids, and toys strewn all over: cars, tanks, and robots careered about and knocked down teetering piles of dolls, to cries of delight. They had come to find toys they liked, but on realizing there were more wonderful things than they could carry off, decided to play with them here. The children were younger than Huahua, and as he passed among them and saw them messing with high-end toys, he was reminded of the world described in the New Five-Year Plan the previous day. He was over the age of being fascinated with toys, but he could appreciate these kids’ enthusiasm.

  The children seemed to have separated themselves into two groups, each doing their own thing. One group had assembled fairly large armies out of electric toys: hundreds of tanks and other battle vehicles, a hundred-odd fighter jets, a huge crowd of robots, and tons of weird, nameless weapons, all laid out before them on the terrazzo floor in a flashing, clattering mess.

  In front of Huahua the tiny army made a majestic charge. The two lines met four or five meters away from him, clanging and smashing to the delight of the children. It was like they’d walloped a hornets’ nest; half the vehicles toppled and groaned in place, while the others were sent spinning off in all directions. The terrazzo battlefield was now littered with overturned electric cars and detached robot limbs.

  Their first battle ended, the children’s enthusiasm was running high, but there wasn’t enough left on the shelves to stage a second engagement. Just then a boy raced in to tell them that he’d found the storeroom, and they all ran off after him. A short, hurried round of hauling later, a dozen crates of war machines and robots had arrived, and the shelves had been pushed aside for more room to fight. A new, larger battle commenced just a few minutes after that, one that carried on with fresh troops continually being added.

  Another group was ensconced in a menagerie of stuffed animals and dolls, and had set them up into families sitting next to little houses built out of wooden blocks. The houses went up so fast that they had to push aside the shelves so they could start erecting a city on the floor, to be populated by fashion dolls.

  As they looked in satisfaction over the world they had created, the war-hungry first group dispatched a dense phalanx of a hundred remote-controlled tanks that rolled into the charming kingdom without any resistance and flattened it.

  Huahua went over to the food department, where a group of young gourmands were digging in. They were hard at work selecting choice delicacies, but they took just one bite of each so as to leave room in their stomachs for more. Littered about the counter and floor were fine chocolates with bites taken out of them, drinks uncapped but tossed aside after just one sip, piles of canned goods with just a spoonful missing from each. Huahua saw a group of girls standing beside a pile of rainbow-colored candies taking a peculiar approach to eating: they unwrapped each piece, gave it a quick lick, and then dropped it before finding another unopened one in the pile. Many of the children were already full but refused to give up, as if they were tied to some sort of torturous work.

  He went out the door and ran smack into a four- or five-year-old girl, who dropped a huge armload of dolls, nearly twenty of them. She took the brand-new travel bag she had slung over a shoulder and threw it on the ground, and then sat there beating her legs and bawling. The bag, Huahua noticed, was overflowing with dolls large and small; he couldn’t imagine what she would do with them all. There were more children outside than there had been when he arrived, all of them in high spirits, and a majority of them carrying things that had caught their eye in the shops.

  The return journey on his bike was slow, since the streets were full of children at play, as if the city street had been turned into a playground. Some kicked balls around, o
thers played cards. He found children who had gotten cars started and were zigzagging down the road like they were drunk. Three boys sat atop one luxury sedan as others on the roadway dove for cover. The car didn’t get far before crashing into a van parked on the roadside, and the boys tumbled to the ground. The kids inside came out and burst out laughing at their companions struggling to crawl to their feet.

  *

  Back in the NIT, Huahua told Specs and Xiaomeng what he had seen outside, and learned from them that conditions were similar in other regions.

  Xiaomeng said, “As we understand it, kids out there are taking anything they want as easily as drinking water or breathing air. Work stoppage means that state assets are unprotected, but oddly enough, no one is asserting property rights over assets that do not belong to the state, so no conflicts have arisen when children take things at will.”

  Specs said, “That’s not hard to explain. Any losses to private property can easily be recouped elsewhere. That means an end to private property.”

  Huahua was shocked. “So economic rules, and the whole form of ownership from the adults’ time, collapsed overnight?”

  Specs said, “It’s an extraordinary situation. We’re living in a time of unprecedented plenty, on the one hand due to the drastic decline in population, and on the other, because of the adult society’s tremendous overproduction in the year since the supernova in order to leave behind as much as possible for the children. For today’s society, it’s like per capita material wealth went up by a factor of five or ten overnight! Economic structures and notions of personal ownership will undergo astonishing transformations in light of such fantastic wealth. All of a sudden we’re in a state of primitive communism.”

  Xiaomeng said, “So we’re in the future, ahead of schedule?”

  Specs shook his head. “This is just a temporary illusion, without a corresponding productive foundation. No matter how much the adults left behind, it’ll get used up eventually, and at that point, economic rules and personal ownership will return to normal, or even go backward. That process might even exact a price in blood.”

  Huahua smacked his hand on the table. “We should have the army take immediate action to protect state assets!”

  Xiaomeng shook her head. “We’ve deliberated this with the General Staff Department, and the unanimous feeling is that we have to pull the army out of the major cities first.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an emergency right now, but the army is made up of kids, too. They’ll naturally be unprepared. To guarantee success, full preparations must be made to put the army into the best possible state. That takes time, but there’s no other way.”

  “Very well. But do it quickly. This is more dangerous than when the Epoch Clock ran out. The country’s going to be picked clean!”

  *

  The children remained astonished for the next three days: The adults had left behind so much stuff, so many tasty things to eat and to play with. The next feeling was one of confusion: If the ideal world was so close, why had they never made it there before? The children forgot everything; even the older ones who had retained a modicum of sense during the New World Assembly had their anxieties about the future whisked away by the revels. This was the most carefree time in all of human history, and the entire country turned into a pleasure garden of juvenile overindulgence.

  *

  In the Candytown period, three students from Zheng Chen’s class, the letter carrier Li Zhiping, barber Chang Huidong, and cook Zhang Xiaole spent their time together now that they didn’t have to go to work. The postal service was practically shut down, so Li Zhiping had no mail to deliver; no one went to Chang Huidong’s shop to get a haircut, because children didn’t care as much for appearances as adults might have wished; Zhang Xiaole the cafeteria chef had even less cause for staying in the kitchen, since the children had far better places to forage. For three days of Dreamtime, every cell in their body had been in a state of excitement and they slept little. They woke every morning just after dawn, as if a voice were calling out to them, “Come, look, another wonderful day has begun.”

  Every morning when they stepped out into the fresh air, the three boys felt the joy of birds liberated from the cage. Complete freedom was theirs. With no restrictions and no work to finish, they could go anywhere they pleased, and play whatever they wished.

  The past few mornings, children like themselves had played physically strenuous games; younger children who played war games or hide-and-seek could hide so well you’d never find them, since anywhere in the city was fair game. The bigger kids could play cars (real cars!), soccer, and street hockey in the middle of the road. They played hard, since apart from the play itself they had another goal in mind: preparing for the midday feast. They had eaten well the past few days, but they were nowhere near satiated. Every morning, the children did their utmost to play themselves to exhaustion, hoping above all else that when it came time for lunch, they would be able to exuberantly tell themselves, “I’m hungry!”

  The games stopped at eleven thirty, and at noon the feast began. With so many possibilities throughout the city, the three boys realized it was unwise to eat at the same spot every time, since each location sourced from the same warehouse every day, so meals lost their novelty.

  But the feast at the stadium was different. It was the largest feast in the city, serving more than ten thousand children a day. And the food options were even more plentiful. Walking into the stadium was like entering a labyrinth whose walls were built out of cans and cakes. You had to keep your wits about you or you’d stumble over the piles of choice candies underfoot. One day, Li Zhiping gazed down from a high-up stadium seat at the grubby children swarming over the mountains of food on the playing field like ants on a frosted cake. The mountain was a little lower after each feast, but it was replenished by children making afternoon deliveries.

  After a few visits, they gained a bit of experience about eating: if they found something tasty, they could only eat a little of it at a time before it turned unpleasant. Zhang Xiaole learned an illustrative lesson from luncheon meat. The first time he ate eighteen varieties, twenty-four tins all told—he didn’t finish them, of course, but just had a few bites of each—but the stuff had tasted like sawdust in his mouth ever since. They also discovered that beer and hawthorn jelly were useful in this regard, and for the next few days they used them as appetizers.

  Although the stadium feast was spectacular, the three boys were even more impressed by the feast they saw at the Asia Pacific Building, which had once housed the city’s fanciest hotel. The tables were piled high with gourmet products they had only seen before in foreign films, but the only diners were kittens and puppies. Drunk on French wine and Scottish whisky, the little animals swayed on unsteady feet to the uproarious amusement of their little masters in the audience.

  The midday feast meant that afternoons were devoted to more sedentary pursuits, such as cards, video games, and billiards, or even just watching television. Only one activity was essential: drinking beer. Everyone drank two or three bottles every afternoon to aid digestion. After dark, the three boys joined the citywide revelry of singing and dancing that lasted till midnight, by which point they’d worked up enough of an appetite for dinner.

  *

  It wasn’t long before the children were tired of playing. They learned that nothing in the world was fun forever, nothing was eternally delicious, and when everything was easily attainable, it quickly lost all flavor. The children were tired, and gradually, the games and feasts turned into a type of work. And they didn’t want to work.

  Three days later, the child army entered the city with the task of protecting state assets. Food and other life necessities had to be divvied up according to actual needs, and a stop was put to profligate indulgence. The situation was brought under control more easily than anticipated, without erupting into large-scale bloodshed.

  But subsequent events did not improve in the way that the young lea
ders had hoped. Every development in the children’s world revealed a new, strange face entirely beyond the imagining of the adults in the Common Era.

  The Candytown period entered its second phase: Slumbertime.

  SLUMBERTIME

  For the next several days, apart from fetching food from the distribution points, Li Zhiping and his companions did little but sleep. They slept long, eighteen or twenty hours a day. They ate, but with no one to push them to wake up, they simply lay there sleeping. Sleep came easier with practice. The mind grew sluggish and they felt perpetually drowsy. There was no point to doing anything; it was all tiring, even eating.

  Now they realized that total idleness was exhausting, and it was a more frightening exhaustion than they had ever known. When they got tired working or studying, they could rest, but now rest itself was tiring, leaving sleep the only recourse, but the more they slept the sleepier they became.

  When they lay awake they had no desire to rise, since their very bones felt soft and rubbery. They simply lay there looking up at the ceiling, their minds absent of thoughts, and none likely to come. It was hard to believe that lying in bed with an empty mind could be so tiring. They’d lie for a while, and then fall asleep, and eventually they couldn’t tell day from night.

  Humans were a sleeping creature, they decided, and waking was the abnormal state. During those days they became denizens of slumberland, spending the bulk of their day living in dreams. Dreams were better than being awake, since they could return over and over to the country depicted in the New Five-Year Plan, go inside that megatower, ride the huge roller coaster, visit Candytown and taste a piece of windowpane.

  The only time the boys communicated now was when they woke up and told each other about their dreams; when they finished, they pulled up the covers again and went back in search of the wonderful world they had just visited. But they never found it, and were taken instead to a different place. Little by little the dreamworlds faded and grew more and more like the real world, until eventually they found it very difficult to distinguish the two.