The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  COUNTRY A: Hey, B.

  COUNTRY B: Hello.

  COUNTRY A: Let’s set out the next tank game. How are we going to play tomorrow?

  COUNTRY B: How about another head-on charge?

  COUNTRY A: Good. How many are you mobilizing?

  COUNTRY B: Oh, 150.

  COUNTRY A: That’s too many. Some of our tanks are in a tank vs. infantry game tomorrow. Let’s say 120.

  COUNTRY B: Fine. How does Arena 4 sound?

  COUNTRY A: Arena 4? Not the greatest. It’s hosted five head-on charges and three ultra-close wall-toppling games, so there are wrecked tanks all over the place.

  COUNTRY B: Wrecks can act as cover for both sides. It’ll add variables to the game and make it more fun to play.

  COUNTRY A: That’s true. Arena 4 it is. But the rules need to change a bit.

  COUNTRY B: The jury can handle that. Set the time?

  COUNTRY A: Let’s start at 10 a.m. tomorrow. That way we’ll both have enough time to assemble.

  COUNTRY B: Great. See you tomorrow.

  COUNTRY A: See you tomorrow!

  Careful thought reveals that this form of warfare is not entirely inexplicable. Rules and agreements suggest the establishment of a system, and a system gains inertia once established; a violation by one side implies the system’s collapse, with unforeseeable consequences. The key point is that this warfare system could only have been established in a children’s world where game thinking was determinative, and could never be reproduced in an adult world.

  If anyone from the Common Era had witnessed the game war, what they would have found most surprising would not have been the sports-like form, since such wars could be found, if not quite so glaringly, back in the old days of cold-weapons warfare; no, they would doubtlessly have been shocked, mystified even, by the nature of the roles played by the participating countries. Enemies were established according to the order of play. People later referred to the “athlete role” of the belligerents who competed in battles set up in a manner never before seen in human history.

  One other key characteristic of the game war was the specialization of the fighting. Every battle was a single contest of weapons. Integration of forces and cooperative operations were basically nonexistent.

  Not long after the Olympics started, the land-based Supernova War transformed into a huge tank battle. Tanks were the children’s favorite weapons; nothing better embodied their fantasies about fighting. During the adults’ era, a remote-controlled tank was guaranteed to be a welcome gift. Once war broke out, their fascination transferred to real tanks and they sent them out onto the battlefield with abandon. All together, the countries brought nearly ten thousand tanks to Antarctica to engage in unbridled tank combat on an immense scale, with hundreds to upward of a thousand tanks pitted against each other in each fight.

  On the open plain of Antarctica, these groups of iron monsters raced, fired, and burned. Everywhere you looked were fragments of destroyed tanks, some of them on fire for two or three days and, when the wind let up, releasing long, thin columns of weird black smoke from clusters of wrecks all over the plain. From a distance the land looked like it had a wild head of hair.

  Compared with the grandeur and brutality of the tank battles, air combat was a much chillier pursuit. Dogfights ought to have been the most competitive fights of all, but the child pilots had trained for less than a year and had put in less than a hundred hours in high-speed fighters, meaning they had mastered only normal takeoff, landing, and level flight, at best.

  The superior skill set and physical fitness required for air combat was simply unattainable for the vast majority of them. Hence, combat between opposing fighter formations could barely even get started; far more planes were lost owing to accidents than were shot down by the enemy. During dogfights, most of a pilot’s concentration was devoted to not crashing, with little energy left for attacking. Moreover, the acceleration produced by a modern fighter in air combat could be over six gees, to as much as nine when evading a radar lock or a tracking missile, more than the children’s fragile cerebral blood vessels could take. There were, of course, a few prodigies, like the American flying ace Carlos (the F-15 pilot who twice evaded missile tracking), but they were in the minority, and avoidable if not provoked.

  It was even chillier on the water. Due to the Antarctic’s particular geographic location, ocean supply lines were the lifeline for the armies of every country. A cut supply line was the worst of all possible disasters, and would be like abandoning the children on another Earth.

  So as to guarantee transport, no country dared to risk any of its sea power, and hence during naval battles, the opposing sides’ ships stayed far away from each other, usually beyond the line of sight. Attacks at that distance required technical sophistication, but giant missile attack systems had a very low hit rate in the children’s hands. Few strikes actually hit the target, and only a few transport ships were sunk during the games.

  It was the same below the surface. Piloting structurally complicated submarines through the inky depths, relying only on sonar in a cat-and-mouse game with the enemy, was a game that required rich experience and top skills the children could not possibly have attained in such a short time.

  As in air combat, submarine battles didn’t work. Not a single torpedo struck its target during the whole games. Moreover, since Antarctica had no submarine base, and constructing one was far more complicated than setting up a bare-bones port for surface ships, all countries were forced to use logistics bases in Argentina or Oceania. Conventional subs were ill-equipped for lengthy activities in the Southern Ocean, and few countries had nuclear attack subs. In the course of the underwater games, just one conventional sub was sunk, and that owed to its own malfunction.

  During the Olympic Games period of the Supernova War, most of the fighting was concentrated on land, which saw quite a number of peculiar forms of combat brand new to the history of warfare.

  *

  Most terrifying of all were the infantry games. Although all games of this type used light weapons, they saw casualties in far greater numbers.

  The biggest infantry games were firearm duels, and were played in the fortifications and assault categories.

  Fortification infantry games involved opposing sides firing at each other from fortifications across a separation, and they could last as long as several days. But as the children discovered, firing from fortified positions meant there was very little exposure, which minimized the lethality of ordinary firearms. They would rain bullets at each other in volleys so dense they would collide in midair, and the spent casings piled up to calf height in the firing positions, but in the final analysis, apart from chipping away the outside layer of the enemy’s fortifications, they achieved very little.

  And so they switched to scope-equipped precision sniper rifles, which cut ammo expenditure to a thousandth of what it was and boosted combat successes by a factor of ten. Now the game saw the young gunners spending most of their time lying low observing the opposite position, scanning inch by inch for the slightest discrepancy in the stones and patches of snow, and sending over a bullet at any potential firing gaps.

  Ahead of the line was empty ground, with no creature stirring across the broad plain as the children hid in their bunkers. The characteristic snap of a sniper rifle and then the zip of a bullet through the air, pop—zip pop—zip, only intensified the chilly quiet of the battlefield, as if somewhere out under the southern lights a lonely ghost were randomly plucking a zither. The children chose a striking name for this game: “Rifle Fishing.”

  The most thrilling and savage of the infantry games were the grenade events, which were also subdivided into fortifications and assault categories. In the former, fortifications were constructed before the game began, with the two sides separated by just twenty meters, the distance a child could throw a grenade. Once the game started, the children popped up from their defense works, made their throws, and then ducked back down again to avoi
d the incoming ones.

  Wooden stick grenades were used most often, since they were relatively powerful and could be thrown relatively far; egg-shaped grenades were far less common. The game required high levels of strength and courage, and a particularly strong nerve.

  After the start command, grenades flew like hailstones, and even within the fortifications the rapid pace of the violent explosions could spook your soul out of your body, to say nothing of keeping you from jumping up to counterattack. The integrity of the fortification was the decisive factor. If an enemy grenade managed to pierce or tear away part of the roof, then it was all over. The game had one of the highest casualty rates, and the kids dubbed it “Grenade Volleyball.”

  The assault subcategory of grenade games had no fortified positions. Opposing sides faced each other across open ground, when they closed to within throwing distance, commenced throwing. Then they threw themselves to the ground or beat a retreat out of the fragmentation area to protect themselves. This game mostly used egg-shaped grenades, since it was easier to carry more of them. Attacking and evading, the two sides invariably intermingled, and everyone then just chucked their grenades at crowded areas. It was nothing short of a nightmarish scene of madness: dense smoke and fire of explosions on the open ground, crowds of kids running and diving and occasionally pulling a grenade from a bag and tossing it up, smoking grenades tumbling about on the ground. . . . ​The children called this game “Grenade Football.”

  Artillery games acquired fanciful nicknames as well. The five-kilometer howitzer subcategory, in which parties towed their units into position and finished aiming before receiving the start command, whereupon they commenced firing immediately, was known as “Cannon Boxing.” Artillery games with self-propelled mobile batteries had far more variables and were known as “Cannon Basketball.” Mortars, in which opposing sides were only separated by one or two thousand meters, within line of sight, was a thrilling, physically demanding game the children dubbed “Mortar Soccer.”

  *

  Contrary to their enticing names, the games saw some of the most brutal forms of combat in history. During the battles, weapons exchanged fire more directly than they ever had before, and the casualties they caused topped the ranks of their particular category of combat. For example, in the tank battles, even the winning side saw at least half its tanks destroyed. Blood flowed in rivers by the end of every game in the War Olympics. As for the little soldiers, they prepared for eternity with every sortie.

  This led to the later identification of the fundamental misperception the people of the Common Era had where children were concerned. The Supernova War taught people that children placed less value on life than adults, and thus had a much stronger tolerance for death. If necessary, they could be meaner, colder, and crueler than adults. Later historians and psychologists agreed that were this cruel, crazy form of war set in the Common Era, the unimaginable psychological pressures produced would have pushed all participants into a collective mental breakdown.

  True, no small number of children fled on the brink of battle, but mental breakdowns were rare. Later generations were in awe of the grit they displayed on the battlefield, particularly in the baffling heroics of heroes who emerged during battle. During the grenade games, for example, there were children known as “pitchbacks,” who never used their own grenades but picked up the ones thrown by the enemy and tossed them back. Although few managed to survive the games, it still was an honor to be a pitchback. They were described in a popular fighting song:

  Oh what a joy to be a pitchback, one as great as me!

  I’ve got a craze for hand grenades, and I pick up all I see.

  As quick as a lick I snatch them up when they’re smoking in the muck,

  Like Ali Baba in the treasure cave,

  But I’m . . . ​not . . . ​gonna . . . ​get . . . ​stuck!

  Out of all the games of the War Olympics, cold-weapons events had to be counted among the most barbaric and terrifying. In these games, the opposing sides battled each other with bayonets and other bladed weapons, returning warfare to its most primitive form. Below is an account of one young soldier who took part in an event:

  I found a nearby rock and honed my rifle’s bayonet one last time. The squad leader saw me sharpening it yesterday and I got an earful. He said bayonets were not to be sharpened, since it would damage their rustproofing. I didn’t care, and kept on grinding. This rifle never seems to have a sharp enough bayonet. And I wasn’t expecting to survive the game anyway, so why the hell did I need rustproofing?

  The kids on the jury inspected our guns one by one to make sure they weren’t loaded. And they took away the bolt, and they body-searched me for pistols or other hot weapons. All five hundred Chinese kids were searched, but the judges didn’t find anything, since each of us had buried a grenade in the snow at our feet before they came to inspect. Once they left, we dug them up and tucked them into our clothing. We weren’t trying to break the rules; it’s just that the previous night a Japanese captain came to us in secret and told us that he belonged to an antiwar group, and that the Japanese kids were planning to use a scary weapon in the cold-weapons games. We asked him what it was, but he wouldn’t say. He only said it was a weapon that we’d never guess. An extremely terrifying one. He told us to be on guard.

  When the game began, infantry formations on both sides started advancing toward each other. A thousand bayonets glinted like ice under the shifting southern lights, and I can clearly remember the howl of the wind that drove over the unmelted snow, like it was singing some desolate war song.

  I was in the back of our formation, but since I was at the edge I had a pretty good view of up front, and I saw the Japanese kids gradually getting closer. They weren’t wearing steel helmets, but had tied on white cloth headbands, and they sang as they walked. I saw the bayonet-fixed rifles in their hands, but didn’t see the fearsome weapon the Japanese captain had mentioned the previous night. Suddenly, the enemy formation changed shape, thinning out into columns spaced around two paces apart, creating parallel passageways through their formation. Then I saw clouds of snow and dust rising behind them, and coming through the clouds a horde of black objects surging through the formation like a flood. I heard deep whines, and when I got a better look, my blood curdled.

  It was a huge pack of army dogs.

  The dogs charged past the enemy formation and in the blink of an eye had reached our own. Up ahead the front half of our formation was in disarray, and I heard pitiful screams. I couldn’t tell the dogs’ breed, but they were huge, standing a head taller than me, and mean as hell. The tussle between kids and dogs up front stained the ground with fresh blood. I saw one dog leap up with a torn-off arm in its jaws. . . . ​The Japanese kids were closing in and fell out of formation and swarmed toward us, bayonets leveled, joining the dogs in their attack on the Chinese kids. Most of my comrades up front were already beaten to a pulp by the teeth and blades.

  “Grenades away!” the regiment commander shouted, and without a second thought we pulled the pin and slung the grenades into the mess of people and dogs, and rapid explosions sent blood and flesh flying.

  Those of us remaining charged across the blast zone, trampling on the corpses of our comrades, the enemy, and the dogs to reach the Japanese army, and then turned ourselves into killing machines fighting with bayonets, rifle butts, and teeth. I fought a Japanese second lieutenant first, and he came screaming at me with his bayonet aimed for my heart, but I parried with my gun and it got me in the left shoulder. I was shaking with the pain of it and I dropped my rifle on the ground. Instinctively I grabbed his rifle with both hands right at the bayonet socket. I could feel my own hot blood trickling down the barrel. He gave the gun a few yanks back and forth, and somehow the bayonet detached. With my right hand, which could still move, I yanked the bayonet out of my left shoulder, and then held it shakily and moved toward him. The little punk stared at me, and then ran off carrying his bayonetless rifle. I didn’t have
any energy for a chase, so I looked around and saw a Japanese kid holding one of my comrades on the ground, strangling her with both hands. So I crossed the few steps toward them and stabbed the bayonet into the guy’s back. I didn’t even have the strength to pull it out. My vision went dark as I saw the ground coming to meet me, brown and muddy, and I fell smack into it, getting a faceful of that mix of our blood and the enemy’s and the Antarctic snow and earth.

  I woke up in the first-aid station three days later and learned that we had lost the game. In the jury’s reasoning, even though both sides had broken the rules, our violation was more serious, since the grenades we had used were most definitely hot weapons. The dogs used by the Japanese kids were warm weapons at best.

  From Zheng Jianbing, Blood Mud: The Chinese Army

  in the Supernova War. Kunlun Publishing House, SE 8.

  As the Olympics progressed, the outcome that gradually took shape was well afield of anything the advocates of this form of warfare had anticipated.

  From a purely military perspective, the game war was nothing like traditional warfare. The more or less fixed position and arrangements predetermined by the two sides meant their forces’ geographic positions were for the first time relatively unimportant. The aim of the battle was not to occupy a city or a strategically important position, but purely to exhaust the enemy’s strength on the battlefield. Ever since the start of the games, the children’s attention had focused on one key point, and now, from high command all the way down to the front-line trenches, the one thing in everyone’s mind and on everyone’s lips was relative damage rate.

  In the adults’ era, the relative damage rate for particular weapons received some attention as a factor in war policy, but it rarely was the most important factor. High command could still elect to achieve a particular strategic or tactical objective no matter the cost. But in the children’s war, the relative damage rate took on an entirely different significance, primarily because in their world, heavy weapons were a nonrenewable resource; there was no way for them to manufacture such complicated war machines in such a short time.