by Liu Cixin
“And the mutual destruction rates are obtained how?”
“From the World Weapons Test Organization. Like in your time there was a … World Trade Organization.”
“War is as regular and ordered as economics?”
“War is economics.”
The ambassador looked through the car window at the black world. “But the world doesn’t look like war is only a calculation.”
The head of state looked at the ambassador with heavy eyes. “We did the calculations but didn’t believe the results.”
“So we started one of your wars. With bloodshed. A ‘real’ war,” the general said.
The head changed the subject again. “We’re going to the capital now to study the issues involved with immigrant unfreezing.”
“Take us back,” the ambassador said.
“What?”
“Go back. You can’t take on any additional burdens, and this isn’t a suitable age for immigrants. We’ll go on a little further.”
The hovercar returned to Freezer No. 1. Before leaving, the head handed the ambassador a hardbound book. “A chronicle of the past hundred and twenty years,” he said.
Then an official led over a 123-year-old man, the only known individual who had lived alongside the immigrants, and who had insisted on seeing the ambassador. “So many things happened after you left. So many things!” The old man brought out two bowls from the ambassador’s time and filled them to the brim with alcohol. “My parents were migrants. They left me this when I was three to drink with them when they were thawed out. But now I won’t see them. And I’m the last person from your time you’ll see.”
After they had drunk, the ambassador looked into the man’s dry eyes, and just as she was wondering why the people of this era seemed not to cry, the old man began to shed tears. He knelt down and clasped the ambassador’s hands.
“Take care, ma’am. ‘West of Yang Pass, there are no more old friends!’”2
Before the ambassador felt the supercooled freezing of the liquid helium, her husband suddenly appeared in her fragmented consciousness. Hua stood on a fallen leaf in autumn, and then the leaf turned black, and then a tombstone appeared. Was it his?
THE TREK
Outside of perception, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and time slipped past in the outside world.
… 120 years … 130 years … 150 years … 180 years … 200 years … 250 years … 300 years … 350 years … 400 years … 500 years … 620 years.
STOP 2: THE LOBBY AGE
“Why did you wait so long to wake me up?” the ambassador asked, looking in surprise at the atomic clock.
“The advance team has mobilized five times at century intervals and even spent a decade awake in one age, but we didn’t wake you because immigration was never possible. You yourself set that rule,” the advance-team captain said. He was noticeably older than at their last meeting, the ambassador realized.
“More war?”
“No. War is over forever. And although the environment continued to deteriorate over the first three centuries, it began to rebound two hundred years ago. The last two ages refused immigrants, but this one has agreed to accept them. The ultimate decision is up to you and the commission.”
There was no one in the freezer lobby. When the giant door rumbled open, the captain whispered to the ambassador, “The changes are far greater than you imagine. Prepare yourself.”
When the ambassador took her first step into the new age, a note sounded, haunting, like some ancient wind chime. Deep within the crystalline ground beneath her feet she saw the play of light and shadows. The crystal looked rigid, but it was as soft as carpet underfoot, and every step produced that wind-chime tone and sent concentric halos of color expanding from the point of contact, like ripples on still water. The ground was a crystalline plane as far as the eye could see.
“All the land on Earth is covered in this material. The whole world looks artificial,” the captain said, and laughed at the ambassador’s flabbergasted expression, as if to say, This surprise is only the beginning! The ambassador also saw her own shadow in the crystal—or rather, shadows—spreading out from her in all directions. She looked up …
Six suns.
“It’s the middle of the night, but night was gotten rid of two hundred years ago. What you see are six mirrors, each several hundred square kilometers in area, in synchronous orbit to reflect sunlight onto the dark side of the Earth.”
“And the mountains?” The ambassador realized that the line of mountains on the horizon was nowhere to be seen. The separation between ground and sky was ruler-straight.
“There aren’t any. They’ve been leveled. All the continents are flat plains now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
To the ambassador, the six suns were like six welcoming lamps in a bright hotel lobby. A lobby! The idea glimmered in her mind. This was, she realized, a peculiarly clean age. No dust anywhere, not even a speck. It beggared belief. The ground was as bare as an enormous table. And the sky was similarly clean, shining with a pure blue, although the presence of the six suns detracted from its former breadth and depth, so that it more resembled the dome of a lobby. A lobby! Her vague idea crystallized: The entire world had been turned into a lobby. One carpeted in tinkling crystal and lit by six hanging lamps. This was an immaculate, exquisite age, contrasting starkly with the previous darkness. In the time immigrants’ chronicles, it would be known as the Lobby Age.
“They didn’t come to greet us?” the ambassador asked, gazing upon the broad plain.
“We have to visit them in person in the capital. Despite its refined appearance, this is an inconsiderate age, lacking even in basic curiosity.”
“What’s their stance on immigration?”
“They agree to accept migrants, but they can only live in reservations separated from society. Whether these reservations are to be located on Earth or on other planets, or if we should build a space city, is up to us.”
“This is absolutely unacceptable!” the ambassador said angrily. “All migrants must be integrated into society and into modern life. Migrants cannot be second-class citizens. This is the fundamental tenet of time migration!”
“Impossible,” the captain said.
“That’s their position?”
“Mine as well. But let me finish. You’ve just been thawed out, but I’ve been living in this age for more than half a year. Please believe me, life is far stranger than you think. Even in your wildest imagination you’d never dream up even a tenth of life in this age. Primitive Stone Age humans would have an easier time understanding the era we are from!”
“This issue was taken into consideration before immigration began, which is why migrants were capped at age twenty-five. We’ll do our best to study and to adapt to everything!”
“Study?” The captain shook his head with a smile. “Got a book?” He pointed at the ambassador’s luggage. “Any will do.” Baffled, the ambassador took out a copy of Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov’s Frigate Pallada, which she had gotten halfway through before migration. The captain glanced at the title and said, “Open at random and tell me the page number.” The ambassador complied, and opened to page 239. Without looking, the captain rattled off what the navigator saw in Africa, accurate to the letter.
“Do you see? There’s no need for learning whatsoever. They import knowledge directly into the brain, like how we used to copy data onto hard drives. Human memory has been brought to its apex. And if that’s not enough, take a look at this—” He took an object the size of a hearing aid from behind his ear. “This quantum memory unit can store all of the books in human history—down to every last scrap of notepaper, if you’d like. The brain can retrieve information like a computer, and it’s far faster than the brain’s own memory. Don’t you see? I’m a vessel for all human knowledge. If you so desire, in under an hour you can have it too. To them, learning is a mysterious, incomprehensible ancient
ritual.”
“So their children gain all knowledge the moment they’re born?”
“Children?” The captain laughed again. “They don’t have any children.”
“So where are the kids?”
“Did I mention that families vanished long ago?”
“You mean, they’re the last generation?”
“‘Generation’ doesn’t exist as a concept anymore.”
The ambassador’s amazement turned to befuddlement, but she strove to understand. And she did, a little. “You mean they live forever?”
“When a bodily organ fails, it’s replaced with a new one. When the brain fails, its information is copied out and into a transplant. After several centuries of these replacements, memory is all that’s left of an individual. Who’s to say whether they’re young or elderly? Maybe they think of themselves as old, and that’s why they haven’t come to meet us. Of course, they can have children if they desire, by cloning or in the old-fashioned way. But few do. This generation’s survived for more than three hundred years and will continue to do so. Can you imagine how this determines the form of their society? The knowledge, beauty, and longevity we dreamed of is easily attainable in this age.”
“It sounds like the ideal society. What else do they desire but can’t attain?”
“Nothing. But precisely because they have it all they have lost everything. It’s hard for us to understand, but to them it’s a real concern. This is far from an ideal society.”
The ambassador’s confusion turned to contemplation. The six suns were heading west and soon dipped below the horizon. When only two remained, Venus rose, and then rays of the true sun’s dawn spread from the east. Its gentle light gave the ambassador a smidgen of comfort; some things, at least, were unchanging in the universe.
“Five hundred years isn’t all that long. Why have things changed so much?” she asked, as much to the whole world as to the captain.
“The acceleration of human progress. Compare our fifty years of progress to the previous five centuries. It’s been another five centuries, which might as well be fifty millennia. Do you still think migrants can adapt?”
“And what’s the end point of this acceleration?” the ambassador asked, eyes narrowed.
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no answer to that question in the sum total of human knowledge you possess?”
“The strongest feeling I’ve gotten from my time in this age is that we’re beyond the time when knowledge can explain everything.”
“We’ll continue onward!” the ambassador decided. “Take that chip with you, as well as their device for importing knowledge into the brain.”
The ambassador saw Hua again before entering the haze of supersleep, only a glance after 620 years, a captivating, heartbreaking glance, but it anchored her to home within the lonely flow of time. She dreamed of a cloud of dust drifting over the crystal ground—was this the form his bones now took?
THE TREK
Outside of perception, the sun swept through the sky like a shooting star, and time slipped past in the outside world.
… 620 years … 650 years … 700 years … 750 years … 800 years … 850 years … 900 years … 950 years … 1,000 years.
STOP 3: THE INVISIBLE AGE
The sealed door to the freezer rumbled open and for a third time the ambassador approached the threshold of an unknown age. This time she had mentally prepared herself for a brand-new era, but she discovered that the changes weren’t as great as she had imagined.
The crystal carpet that blanketed the ground was still present and six suns still shone in the sky. But the impression given by this world was entirely different from the Lobby Age. First of all, the crystal carpet seemed dead; although there was still light in the depths, it was far dimmer, and footsteps no longer tinkled on its surface, nor did gorgeous patterns appear. Four of the six suns had gone dim, the dull red they emitted serving only to mark their position but doing nothing to light the world below. The most conspicuous change was the dust. A thin layer covered all the crystal. The sky wasn’t spotless, but held gray clouds, and the horizon was no longer a ruled line. It all contributed to a feeling that the previous age’s lobby had gone vacant, and the natural world outside had begun to invade.
“Both worlds refuse to take migrants,” the advance-team captain said.
“Both worlds?”
“The visible and invisible worlds. The visible world is the one we know, different though it may be. People like us, even if most of them are no longer primarily formed of organic material.”
“There’s no one to be seen on the plain, just like last time,” the ambassador said, straining to look.
“People haven’t needed to walk on the ground for several hundred years. See—” The captain pointed at a place in the air, where, through the dust and clouds, the ambassador saw indistinct flying objects, little more than a cluster of black dots at this distance. “—those could be planes or people. Any machine might be someone’s body. A ship in the ocean, for instance, could be a body, and the computer memory directing it might be a copy of a human brain. People generally have several bodies, one of which is like ours. And that one, although it’s the most fragile, is the most important, perhaps due to a sort of nostalgia.”
“Are we dreaming?” the ambassador murmured.
“Compared to this visible world, the invisible world is the real dream.”
“I’ve got an idea of what that might be. People don’t even use machines for bodies.”
“Right. The invisible world is stored in a supercomputer, and each individual is a program.”
The captain pointed ahead to a peak, glittering metallic blue in the sunlight, that stood alone on the horizon. “That’s a continent in the invisible world. Do you remember those little quantum memory chips from last time? It’s an entire mountain of them. You can imagine, or maybe you can’t, the capacity of that computer.”
“What sort of life is it on the inside, when people are nothing more than a collection of quantum impulses?”
“That’s why you can do whatever you please, and create whatever you desire. You can build an empire of a hundred billion people and reign as king, or you could experience a thousand different romances, or fight in ten thousand wars and die a hundred thousand times. Everyone is master of their personal world, and more powerful than a god. You could even create your own universe with billions of galaxies containing billions of planets, each that can be whatever different world you desire, or that you dare not desire. Don’t worry about not having the time to experience it all. At the computer’s speed, centuries pass every second. On the inside, the only limit is your imagination. In the invisible world, imagination and reality are the same thing. When something appears in your imagination, it becomes reality. Of course, as you said, reality in quantum memory is a collection of impulses. The people of this age are gradually transitioning to the invisible world, and more of them now live there than in the visible world. Even though a copy of the brain can be in both worlds, the invisible world is like a drug. No one wants to come back once they’ve experienced life there. Our world with its cares is like hell for them. The invisible world has the upper hand and is gradually assuming control of the whole world.”
As if sleepwalking across a millennium, they stared at the quantum memory mountain and forgot about time, and only when the true sun lit up the east as it had for billions of years did they return to reality.
“What’s going to come next?” the ambassador asked.
“As a program in the invisible world, it’s simple to make lots of copies of yourself, and whatever parts of your personality you dislike—being too tormented by emotions and responsibility, for example—you can get rid of, or off-load for use the next time you need them. And you can split yourself into multiple parts representing various aspects of your personality. And then you can join with someone else to form a new self out of two minds and memories. And then you can join with seve
ral or dozens or hundreds of people…. I’ll stop before I drive you mad. Anything can happen at any time in the invisible world.”
“And then?”
“Only conjecture. The clearest signs point to the disappearance of the individual; everyone in the invisible world will combine into a single program.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. This is a philosophical question, but after so many times thawing out I’m afraid of philosophy.”
“I’m the opposite. I’ve become a philosopher now. You’re right that it’s a philosophical question and needs to be studied from that standpoint. We really should have done that thinking long ago, but it’s not yet too late. Philosophy is a layer of gauze, but at least for me, it’s been punctured, and in an instant, or practically an instant, I know what lies on the road ahead.”
“We need to terminate our migration in this age,” the captain said. “If we continue onward, migrants will have an even harder time adapting to the target environment. We can rise up and fight for our own rights.”
“That’s impossible. And unnecessary.”
“Do we have any other choice?”
“Of course we do. And it’s a choice as clear and bright as the sun rising in front of us. Call out the engineer.”
The engineer had been thawed out together with the ambassador and was now inspecting and repairing the equipment. His frequent thaws had turned him from a young man to an old one. When the confused captain called him out, the ambassador asked, “How long can the freezer last?”
“The insulation is in excellent condition, and the fusion reactor is operating normally. In the Lobby Age, we replaced the entire refrigeration equipment with their technology and topped up the fusion fuel. Without any equipment replacement or other maintenance, all two hundred freezer rooms will last twelve thousand years.”