The Supernova Era

by Cixin Liu

  Lü Gang shouted, “Get behind the hill for cover. The shock wave will be here any moment!”

  “A shock wave?” Huahua cocked an eye at him.

  “That’s right. It might die down into a stiff wind by the time it reaches us.”

  As the children retreated to the back of the hill, a sudden squall picked up around them, ripping the tents from their stakes and sending the equipment inside flying. Half the helicopters on the hillside were knocked over before flying snow whited out the entire scene, but they heard the sound of flying stones pelting airframes. The gale lasted for about a minute before rapidly slackening and finally dying away altogether, letting the snow and dust return gently to the ground. As the curtain fell, it revealed a hazy firelight on the horizon. The mushroom cloud was less distinct now but far larger, and now took up half the sky. The wind had blown its top portion to one side, giving it the look of a gigantic monster with a wild head of hair.

  “The base is destroyed,” Lü Gang said soberly.

  All communications from the base had been severed, and when they looked toward it through the dust that had yet to settle, all they could see was the dim fire on the horizon.

  *

  An advisor came over to tell Huahua that the American president was calling him. Huahua asked, “Will replying give away our position?”

  “No. The transmitter is in a different location.”

  Davey’s voice came through the wireless receiver. “Hey, Huahua, looks like that atom bomb didn’t have your name on it. You really are clever fellows to think of moving your command center. I’m glad you’re still alive. I’d like to let you all know that we’re starting the new game! Nuclear bombs!” He laughed. “It’s the greatest! Wasn’t that new sun pretty?”

  Huahua said angrily, “You shameless pack of pissants. You’ve trampled over every rule of the games! You’ve wrecked their very foundation!”

  Davey laughed. “What rules? Fun is the only rule!”

  “Your adults were a bunch of scoundrels to leave you with strategic nuclear weapons.”

  “Hey now, they only left a few behind carelessly. Our stockpiles were huge. You eat a big piece of bread and you’re bound to drop some crumbs. Besides, don’t you wonder if there might be any crumbs remaining from the Russians’ big hunk of bread?”

  “That’s the crucial thing,” Lü Gang whispered into Huahua’s ear. “They won’t dare try a nuclear strike against Russia since they’re afraid of retaliation. With us, they don’t have that worry.”

  “Don’t sweat the small stuff if you don’t have to,” Davey said over the radio.

  “We’re not sweating it,” Specs said coldly. “In this insane world, there’s no point to getting mad on moral grounds. It’s too tiring.”

  “Right, right. Listen to him, Huahua. He has the right attitude. That’s how to keep it fun.” Then Davey cut off the connection.

  *

  The Chinese children immediately contacted other Antarctic Games participants to set up an alliance to punish the American children for breaking the rules, but the outcome was a disappointment.

  Huahua and Specs called Russia first. Ilyukhin said perfunctorily, “We have learned of what has befallen your country and express our deepest sympathies.”

  Huahua said, “This abominable violation deserves to be punished. If this vile precedent is allowed to stand, they will move on to drop atom bombs on other countries’ bases, or even on land outside of Antarctica! Your country ought to stage a nuclear counterattack on the violator’s base. You may be the only one left with that capability.”

  “Of course such conduct deserves punishment,” Ilyukhin replied. “I expect that all countries are hoping you will stage a nuclear counterattack to preserve the integrity of the rules. My country also desires to punish the wrongdoer, but Russia has no nuclear weapons. Our venerable fathers and mothers fired all the nuclear bombs into the sun.”

  The talk with the EU was even more depressing. The incumbent rotating president, Prime Minister Green of Britain, asked innocently, “Why would your country believe that we have retained nuclear weapons? This is shameless libel of a united Europe. Inform us of your current position and we will deliver a memo of protest.”

  Huahua set down the phone. “Those little punks just want to play it safe on the mountaintop and watch the tigers fight it out.”

  “Very wise,” Specs said, nodding.

  *

  Communications were provisionally restored between the command center and the Chinese base, and an unbroken stream of frightening news began coming over the radio. G Group Army, stationed at the base, suffered a devastating blow; total casualties were still unknown, but it had likely lost all combat effectiveness. The majority of base installations had been destroyed. Fortunately, as the geographic scale of the games had grown, the other two group armies formerly stationed on base had moved over a hundred kilometers away, preserving two-thirds of the Chinese children’s Antarctic forces. However, the port they had spent two months building had been seriously damaged in the nuclear strike, posing a major supply problem for these forces.

  *

  An emergency meeting of high command convened in a hastily raised tent at the foot of the hill. Just before it began, Huahua said he had to step out for a moment.

  “This is urgent!” Lü Gang reminded him.

  “I’ll only be five minutes,” Huahua said. Then he went outside.

  About half a minute later, Specs left the tent, too, and seeing Huahua lying motionless on a patch of snow staring straight up at the heavens, he went over and sat down beside him. The dust had settled and a warm, gentle breeze blew through the air, bringing with it the moisture of melting snow and the scent of damp earth. In the sky over the ocean, the expanding mushroom cloud had lost its shape, but had grown even larger, and it was hard to tell where it ended and the clouds began. The other half of the sky was painted by the rays of dawn over the opposite horizon.

  “I really can’t keep it up anymore,” Huahua said.

  “No one’s doing any better,” Specs said lightly.

  “It’s not the same. This is impossible!”

  “Think of yourself as a computer. You’re just cold hardware, and reality is just data. Accept your input and perform your calculations. That’s how you keep it up.”

  “Is that the strategy you’ve used since the supernova?”

  “I did that before the supernova. It’s not a strategy. It’s my nature.”

  “But I don’t have that nature.”

  “Getting out is easy. Just run out in any direction without taking anything with you. Keep going and you’ll get lost pretty quick, and before long you’ll freeze or starve to death in the Antarctic wilderness.”

  “Not a bad idea. I just don’t want to be a deserter, is all.”

  “Then be a computer.”

  Huahua propped himself up and looked at Specs. “Do you really think that everything can be accomplished purely through cold deduction and calculation?”

  “Yes. Hiding behind what you imagine to be intuition is actually a complicated set of calculations and deductions. So complicated as to be imperceptible. We need only two things right now: calm, and more calm.”

  Huahua got up and patted the snow off his back. “Let’s go back.”

  Specs caught him. “Think carefully about what you’re going to say.”

  Huahua gave Specs a thin smile under the morning light. “I’ve thought about it. For a computer, our current situation is really nothing more than a simple arithmetic problem.”

  *

  The children were silent for a long time at the start of the meeting, still dazed by the nosedive their already grim situation had taken.

  The commander of D Group Army broke the silence by pounding on the table and shouting, “Were our adults really that honest? Why didn’t they leave us any?”

  The other children echoed similar sentiments:

  “That’s right. Why not even a few?”

&nb
sp; “They left us empty-handed!”

  “If we had just one, the situation would be completely different!”

  “Right! Even one would be good.”

  “That’s enough,” Lü Gang said. “Stop it with the useless talk.” Then he turned to Huahua. “What are we going to do?”

  Huahua stood up and said, “The two group armies in the interior need to evacuate immediately to save their strength in the event of a further nuclear strike by the enemy.”

  Lü Gang stood up and began to pace briskly. “You ought to know what that means. If all of our assembled and combat-ready land forces stand down and evacuate, it will take a long time to reassemble them. We’ll lose all combat capacity on Antarctica!”

  Specs said, “It’s like reformatting our hard drive.”

  Lü Gang nodded. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “But I agree with Huahua. Evacuate immediately,” Specs said firmly.

  Bowing his head, Huahua said, “There’s no other way. If the group armies remain in a dense, combat-ready form, the enemy’s next large-scale nuclear strike could wipe out the entire army.”

  Lü Gang said, “But if they divide up into a large number of small forces distributed across a wide area, it will be hard to guarantee supplies. They may not survive very long.”

  B Group Army commander said, “We’ll take things as they come. Now is not the time for overthinking. The danger grows with every second we stay here. Give the order!”

  D Group Army commander said, “Over our heads a sword is dangling by a thin strand of hair. It could drop at any moment.”

  Most of the children supported a swift evacuation.

  Huahua looked at Specs and Lü Gang, who both nodded. Then he crossed to the front of the conference table and stood there. “Good. Give the evacuation order to the two group armies. There’s no time to plan out the details, so let the forces disperse themselves into battalions. Speed is paramount. Also please be crystal clear about the consequences of this decision, and prepare yourself mentally. The Antarctic mission is going to be very difficult for us from now on.”

  The children stood up. An advisor read over the draft of the order, but no one proposed any changes. All they wanted was speed, as much as possible. The advisor took the order to the radio, but all of a sudden a solemn voice broke in, “One moment, please.”

  The children turned to look at the speaker, Senior Colonel Hu Bing, the liaison officer for the five special observers. Saluting Huahua, Specs, and Lü Gang, she said, “Sirs, the Special Observer Team will now carry out its final duty!”

  The mysterious body organized by the adults before they left consisted of five senior colonels, three from the army and two from the air force. In the event of war, they had the authority to know all confidential information and to listen in on all of the high command’s deliberations. However, the adults had guaranteed that the team would never interfere. That was how it had been throughout the games, where during every military meeting of the high command, those five children had sat silently to one side, listening. They didn’t even take any notes. They just listened. They never spoke, and even after the meetings adjourned they had little interaction with anyone. Gradually the other children in the high command forgot they were there.

  Once, when Huahua asked them who was team leader, Hu Bing had answered, “Sir, the five of us have equal power. There is no team leader, but when it is necessary I will serve as liaison.”

  That only deepened the mystery of their mission.

  Now the five officers gathered in an odd formation, an inward-facing circle, and stood solemnly at attention, as if a flag were being raised in the center. Hu Bing said, “We have a Situation A. Vote.”

  Each of the five raised a hand.

  Hu Bing turned toward the ammo boxes serving as a conference table and pulled a white envelope from her uniform. Holding it in both hands, she lowered it decorously to the center of the table, and said, “This letter was sent from the last president of our country in the Common Era and is addressed to the country’s current leadership.”

  Huahua picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a letter handwritten in fountain pen. He read it aloud:

  Children,

  When you read this letter, our worst fears have come to pass.

  In the last days of the Common Era, we can only make predictions about the future according to our own way of thinking, and on the basis of these predictions, do the work we are able to as well as possible.

  But still those fears kept pricking at our hearts. The minds and actions of children are entirely different from adults. The world of children might follow an entirely different track from our predictions. That world might be one unimaginable to us, and we’re powerless to do much for you.

  We can only leave you with one thing.

  It is the last thing we wanted to leave behind for our children. When we left it, it felt like taking the safety off of a handgun and placing it on the pillow next to a sleeping infant.

  We have been as careful as possible, and have appointed a Special Observer Team made up of five of the most dispassionate children, who will vote, based on the situational danger level, whether or not to hand over this legacy to you. If, after ten years, it has not been handed over, it will self-destruct.

  We had hoped they would never need to carry out this vote, but now you have opened the envelope.

  We write this letter at the final assembly point. We have reached the end of our lives, but our minds are still clear. A child keeping watch at the assembly point delivered this letter to the SOT. We had thought that we had said all we needed to, but in the course of writing this letter, so many things come to mind.

  But now you have opened it.

  Opening the letter means that your world is entirely beyond our imagining. Everything we want to say no longer has any meaning, apart from one thing:

  Take care, children.

  On the last day of the Common Era,

  at the Final Assembly Point #1, China

  The letter closed with the former president’s signature.

  The child leaders focused their attention on Hu Bing, who gave a formal salute, and said, “The SOT will now conduct the handover. One Dongfeng 101 ICBM, with a maximum range of twenty-five thousand kilometers, carrying one thermonuclear warhead with a yield of four megatons.”

  Lü Gang stared at them. “Where is it?” he asked.

  “We don’t know. And we don’t need to,” she said. Then another senior colonel on the SOT set a laptop on the table and opened it. It was already running, and the screen displayed a world map. “Any location on this map can be enlarged for more detail, to a maximum 1:100,000 scale. Double-click on the strike target and the wireless modem will transmit a signal through via a satellite link to the destination, and the missile will fire automatically.”

  The children crowded round to stroke the computer, many of them with tears in their eyes, as if they were touching the adults’ warm hands reaching out to them from the beyond.

  THE CE MINE

  The supernova did not bring massive changes to every part of the world. In a small village in the mountains of southwestern China, for example, life hardly changed at all. Sure, the adults were gone, but there weren’t all that many in the Common Era anyway, since they were all working far from home. The farm work the children did now wasn’t all that much heavier than what they were used to. Their day-to-day lives were the same as before, going to work at sunrise and resting at sunset, although they were even more unaware about the outside world now than they had been in the adults’ time.

  But for a period before the adults died, it seemed as if great changes were coming to their lives. A highway was put in past the village into the mountains leading to a valley sealed behind barbed wire. Every day, large trucks in great numbers would go in fully loaded and return empty. Their contents were covered in green canvas tarps, or packed into big boxes, containing who knows what, and if
all of it was piled together it would probably have been as high as the hill behind the village.

  Day and night the unbroken stream of trucks traveled the highway, going in full and coming back empty. There was also the occasional plane with blades like electric fans that flew into the valley dangling objects beneath it that weren’t there when it flew out again. This went on for about half a year before things went quiet again. Bulldozers tore up the highway, and the village children and the critically ill adults had to wonder: Why didn’t they just leave the highway alone rather than expending so much effort to destroy it? It wasn’t long before the grass grew over the plowed-under right-of-way and it was more or less reabsorbed by the surrounding hillsides. The barbed wire around the valley was torn down, too, and the children were once again able to hunt and cut firewood. When they reached the valley they found that nothing had changed. The forest was the same old forest, and the grass was the same old grass. They had no idea why a thousand outsiders, in military uniforms and plain clothes, had spent the last half year messing around here, much less where all the cargo on the endless river of vehicles had gone. It all seemed like a dream now, and gradually it was forgotten.

  They had no way of knowing that beneath the mountain valley was buried a sleeping sun.

  *

  Historians called it the Common Era Mine. The ICBM was referred to in this way for two reasons. First, because it occupied the world’s deepest missile silo. The 150-meter shaft was covered over by a further twenty meters of earth, making it undiscoverable even during substantial excavations in the mountain valley. Before launch, directional blasting would blow apart the earthen cover and expose the shaft’s mouth. Second, because it waited unattended for the trigger signal, like a mega-landmine buried inside the country awaiting its target’s approach. The CE Mine stood ninety meters tall, and if set outside would have risen like a metallic spire. Now it was in a deep sleep in the silo, with just a clock and a receiving unit operating. Listening silently on its locked-in frequency, the unit no doubt received all kinds of noise from the outside world, but it was waiting for a long string of digits, a prime so large that it would take the fastest computer in the world until the end of time to match it by brute force. And there was only one other copy of this number in existence, saved on the five observers’ laptop computer. When the timer ticked up to 315,360,000 seconds, that is, ten years after it was started, the CE Mine would wake up to the end of its life, switch on its systems, and fly out of the silo through the atmosphere to an orbit five thousand kilometers above the Earth, where it would self-destruct, leaving a gleaming star visible even in daylight for ten seconds or more.