Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  Come on! Come on! I cried silently. Don’t give up!

  The screen of the phone showed four faces squeezed together. A soft click. The picture froze.

  “Thank you.” I took back the phone. “Would you leave me your contact info? I’ll send a copy to you.”

  After another few seconds of silence, the hippo slowly typed an address on my phone.

  “Nocko and Lindy, would you like to give Hippo a hug?”

  The two little ones opened their arms and each hugged one of the hippo’s arms. The hippo looked down to the left and then to the right, and then slowly squeezed its arms to hug them back tight.

  Yes, I know you crave to be hugged by this world, too.

  *

  It was late by the time we got back to the hotel. After showering, I lay on the bed, exhausted. Both my heels were rubbed raw by the new shoes, and the pain was excruciating. Tomorrow I still had a long way to go.

  The laughter of the children and the image of the blue hippo lingered in my mind.

  I searched on the hotel room’s iWall until I found the web address I wanted and clicked on it. Accompanied by a mournful tune played by a violin, white lines of text slowly appeared against a black background:

  This morning I thought about the first time I had been to Disney. Such bright sunlight, music, colors, and the smiling faces of children. I had stood in the crowd then and cried. I told myself that if one day I should lose the courage to continue to live, I would come to Disney one last time and plunge myself into that joyful, festive spirit. Perhaps the heat of the crowd would allow me to hold on for a few days longer. But I’m too exhausted now. I can’t get out of the door; even getting out of the bed is a struggle. I know perfectly well that if only I could find the courage to take a step forward, I would find another ray of hope. But all my strength must be used to struggle with the irresistible weight that pulls me down, down. I’m like a broken wind-up machine that has been stranded, with hope ever receding. I’m tired. I want it all to end.

  Goodbye. I’m sorry, everyone. I hope heaven looks like Disney.

  The date stamp on the post was three years ago. Even now, new comments are being posted, mourning the loss of another young life, confessing their own anxiety, despair, and struggle. The woman who had written this note would never be back to see that her final message to the world had garnered more than a million replies.

  That note was the reason Disney added the blue hippos to its parks. Anyone around the world could, just by launching an app on their phone, connect to a blue hippo, and, through its cameras and microphones, see and hear everything the hippo could see and hear.

  Behind every blue hippo was a person in a dark room, unable to leave.

  I sent the picture from today to the address left me by the hippo, along with the contact information for a suicide-prevention organization staffed by therapists. I hoped that this would help. I hoped that everything would be better.

  *

  Late night. Everything was so quiet.

  I found the first-aid kit and bandaged my feet. I crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over me, and turned off the light. Moonlight washed over the room, filling every inch.

  One time, as a little girl, I was playing outside when I stepped on a piece of broken glass. The bleeding would not stop, and there was no one around to help me. Terrified, I felt abandoned by the whole world. I lay down in the grass, thinking I would die after all the blood had drained out of me. But after a while, I found the bleeding stanched. So I picked up my sandals and hopped back home on one foot.

  In the morning, Lindy would leave me. The therapist said that I no longer needed her—at least not for a long while.

  I hoped she would never be back.

  But maybe I would miss her, from time to time.

  Goodnight, Nocko. Goodnight, Lindy.

  Goodnight, melancholy.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Most of the incidents and quotes from Alan Turing’s life are based on Andrew Hodges’s biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). Besides the papers cited in the text, I also consulted the following sources on artificial intelligence:

  Gary Marcus. “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The New Yorker, August 14, 2013 (accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-cant-my-computer-understand-me).

  Matthias Englert, Sandra Siebert, and Martin Ziegler. “Logical limitations to machine ethics with consequences to lethal autonomous weapons.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2842 (2014) (accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2842).

  Some details about depression are based on the following articles:

  «抑郁时代，抑郁病人» http://www.360doc.cn/article/2369606_459361744.html

  «午安忧郁» http://www.douban.com/group/topic/12541503/#!/i

  In the preface to his Turing biography, Andrew Hodges wrote: “[T]he remaining secrets behind his last days are probably stranger than any science fiction writer could concoct.” This was the inspiration for this story. The conversation program “Christopher” is entirely fictional, but some of the details in the conversations with Turing are real. I’m afraid it’s up to the careful reader to screen out the fiction and nonfiction woven together in this tale.

  As I drafted this story, I sent the sections on Turing’s life to friends without telling them that these came from a piece of fiction. Many friends believed the stories, including some science fiction authors and programmers. After taking delight in the fact that I had successfully won the imitation game, I asked myself what were the criteria for telling truth and lies apart? Where was the boundary between reality and fiction? Perhaps the decision process had nothing to do with logic and rationality. Perhaps my friends simply chose to believe me, as Alan chose to believe Christopher.

  I hereby sincerely apologize to friends who were deceived. To those who weren’t, I’m very curious how you discovered the lies.

  I believe that cognition relies on quantum effects, like tossing dice. I believe that before machines have learned to write poetry, each word written by an author is still meaningful. I believe that above the abyss, we can hold tightly onto each other and stride from the long winter into bright summer.

  1 Author’s Note: Science fiction writer Liu Cixin once created a software poet and submitted a sack filled with the poet’s work to a publisher. The editor wrote back, “You have written too much. I cannot read it all.”

  2 Levesque, Hector J. “On our best behaviour.” Artificial Intelligence 212 (2014): 27–35.

  3 This example comes from Marcus, Gary. “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The New Yorker, August 14, 2013 (accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-cant-my-computer-understand-me).

  4 See, e.g., Levesque, H. J.; Davis, E.; and Morgenstern, L. 2012. The Winograd Schema Challenge. In Proceedings of KR 2012. Levesque, H. J. 2011. The Winograd Schema Challenge. In Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium, TR SS-11-06.

  5 The example is drawn from Terry Winograd, Understanding Natural Language (1972).

  LIU CIXIN

  Liu Cixin is widely recognized as the leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He won the Yinhe Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006, and again in 2010. He received the Xingyun Award in both 2010 and 2011.

  An engineer by profession—until 2014, he worked for the China Power Investment Corporation at a power plant in Niangziguan, Shanxi Province—Liu began writing science fiction short stories as a hobby. However, his popularity soared with the publication of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series of novels (the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006 and then published as a standalone book in 2008). An epic story of alien invasion and humanity’s journey to the stars, the series begins with a secret, Mao-era military effort at establishing communications with extraterrestrial intelligence, and ends (literally) with the end of the universe. Tor Books published the English edition of the series from 2014 to 2016 (The Three-Body
Problem, translated by Ken Liu; The Dark Forest, translated by Joel Martinsen; Death’s End, translated by Ken Liu). The Three-Body Problem was the first translated book to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and President Barack Obama praised it as “wildly imaginative, really interesting.”

  Liu works in the “hard SF” tradition of writers like Arthur C. Clarke. Some have called him a “classical” writer for that reason, as his stories foreground the romance and grandeur of science and humankind’s effort to discover nature’s secrets.

  “Moonlight” showcases Liu Cixin doing what he does best: presenting idea after idea in a dizzying fusillade. This is the story’s first appearance in English.

  MOONLIGHT

  For the first time that he could remember, he saw moonlight in the city.

  He hadn’t noticed it on other nights because the bright electric glow of millions of lamps had overwhelmed it. But today was the Mid-Autumn Festival, and a web petition had proposed that the city turn off most landscape lighting and some of the streetlights so that residents could enjoy the full moon.

  Looking out from the balcony of his single-occupancy unit, he discovered that the petitioners had been wrong about the effect. The moonlit city was nothing like the charming, idyllic scene they had imagined; rather, it resembled an abandoned ruin. Still, he appreciated the view. The apocalyptic spirit gave off a beauty of its own, suggesting the passing of all and the discharge of all burdens. He had only to lie down in the embrace of Fate to enjoy the tranquility at the end. That was what he needed.

  His phone buzzed. The caller was a man. After ascertaining who had picked up, the voice said, “I’m sorry to disturb you on the worst day of your life. I still remember it after all these years.”

  The voice sounded odd. Clear, but distant and hollow. An image came to his mind: chill winds rushing between the strings of a harp abandoned in the wilderness.

  The caller continued. “Today was Wen’s wedding, wasn’t it? She invited you, but you didn’t go.”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’ve thought about it so many times over the years. You should have gone, and you would be feeling better now. But you … well, you did go, except you hid in the lobby and watched Wen in her wedding dress heading into the reception holding his hand. You were torturing yourself.”

  “Who are you?” Despite his astonishment, he still noticed the caller’s odd phrasing. The caller said “after all these years,” but the wedding had only taken place this morning. And since Wen’s wedding date had been decided on only a week ago, it was impossible for anyone to know about it long before then.

  The distant voice went on. “You have a habit. Whenever you’re upset, you curl your left big toe and dig the nail into the bottom of your shoe. When you got home earlier, you found that your toenail had snapped but you didn’t even notice the pain. Your toenails are getting long though. They’ve worn holes into your socks. You haven’t been taking care of yourself.”

  “Who in the world is this?” He was now frightened.

  “I’m you. I’m calling from the year 2123. It’s not easy connecting to your mobile network from this time. The signal degradation through the time-space interface is severe. If you can’t hear me, let me know and I’ll try again.”

  He knew it wasn’t a joke. He had known from the first moment that the voice didn’t belong to this world. He clutched the phone tightly and stared at the buildings washed by the cold, pure moonlight, as though the whole city had frozen to listen to their conversation. Yet he could think of nothing to say as the caller waited patiently. Faint background noises filled his ear.

  “How … could I live to be so old?” he asked, just to break the silence.

  “Twenty years from your time, genetic therapies will be invented to extend human lifespan to around two centuries. I’m still technically middle-aged, though I feel ancient.”

  “Can you explain the process in more detail?”

  “No. I can’t even give you a simple overview. I have to ensure that you receive as little information about the future as possible, to prevent you from inappropriate behaviors that would change the course of history.”

  “Then why did you get in touch with me in the first place?”

  “For the mission that we have to accomplish together. Having lived for so long, I can tell you a secret about life: once you realize how insignificant the individual is in the vastness of space-time, you can face anything. I didn’t call you to talk about your personal life, so I need you to let go of the pain and face the mission. Listen! What do you hear?”

  He strained to catch the background noises through the receiver. The faint sounds resolved into splashes and plops, and he tried to reconstruct an image from them. Strange flowers bloomed in the darkness; a giant glacier cracked in a desolate sea, and zigzagging seams extended into the depths of the crystalline mass like lightning bolts …

  “You’re hearing waves crashing against buildings. I’m on the eighth floor of Jin Mao Tower. The surface of the sea is right under the window.”

  “Shanghai has been flooded?”

  “That’s right. She was the last of the coastal cities to fall. The dikes were high and durable, but the sea ultimately inundated the interior and flooded back in…. Can you imagine what I’m seeing? No, it’s nothing like Venice. The undulating water between the buildings is covered with garbage and flotsam, as if all the refuse accumulated in this city over two centuries had become afloat. The moon is full tonight, just like where and when you are. There are no lights in the city, but my moon is not nearly as bright as yours—the atmosphere is far too polluted. The sea mirrors the moonlight onto the skeletons of the skyscrapers. The great sphere at the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower flickers with silvery streaks reflected from the waves, as if everything is about to collapse.”

  “How much has the sea risen?”

  “The polar ice caps are gone. In the span of half a century, the sea rose by about twenty meters. Three hundred million coastal inhabitants had to move inland. Only desolation is left here, while the inland regions are gripped by political and social chaos. The economy is nearing total collapse…. Our mission is to prevent all of this.”

  “Do you think we can play God?”

  “Mere mortals doing what needed to be done a hundred years earlier would have the same effect as divine intervention now. If, in your time, the whole world had stopped using all fossil fuels—including coal, petroleum, and natural gas—global warming would have stopped, and this disaster could have been prevented.”

  “That seems impossible.” After he said this, his self from more than a hundred years in the future remained silent for a long time. So he added, “To stop the use of fossil fuels, you need to contact people from even earlier.”

  He sensed a smile through the phone. “Do you imagine I can stop the Industrial Revolution in its tracks?”

  “But what you’re asking of us now is even more impossible. The world will fall apart if you eliminate all coal, gas, and oil for a single week.”

  “Actually, our models show that it wouldn’t even take that long. But there are other ways. Remember that I’m speaking to you from the future. Think. We’re smart people.”

  He thought of one possibility. “Give us an advanced energy technology. Something environmentally friendly that won’t contribute to climate change. The technology has to be able to satisfy existing energy needs while also being much cheaper than fossil fuels. If you give us that, it won’t be ten years before the market will force all fossil fuels out of contention.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  Encouraged, he went on. “Then teach us how to achieve controlled nuclear fusion.”

  “You vastly underestimate the difficulties. We still haven’t achieved any breakthroughs in that field. There are fusion reactor power plants, but they aren’t even as competitive in the market as fission plants in your time. Also, fusion reactors require the extraction of fuel from seawater, a process
that may lead to more environmental damage. We can’t give you controlled fusion, but we can give you solar power.”

  “Solar power? What do you mean exactly?”

  “Collecting the sun’s power from the surface of the Earth.”

  “With what?”

  “Monocrystalline silicon, the same material you use in your time.”

  “Oh, come on! You literally just made me facepalm. I thought you had something real for a minute there…. Actually, do you still say ‘facepalm’?”

  “Sure we do. Old-timers like me have kept lots of expressions like that alive. Anyway, our monocrystalline silicon solar cells have far higher conversion efficiency.”

  “Even if you achieved one hundred percent efficiency it would be irrelevant. How much solar power reaches each square meter on the Earth’s surface? There’s no way that a few solar panels can satisfy the energy needs of contemporary society. Have you been hallucinating that your youth was spent in some preindustrial farmers’ paradise?”

  He heard his future self laugh. “Now that you mention it, the technology really does evoke shades of agrarian nostalgia.”

  “‘Evoke shades of agrarian nostalgia’? When did I start to talk like a coffee shop writer?”

  “Heh, the technology really is called the silicon plow.”

  “What?”

  “The silicon plow. Silicon is the most abundant element on Earth, and you can find it everywhere in sand or soil. A silicon plow cuts furrows in the earth just like a regular plow, but it extracts the silicon out of the soil and refines it into monocrystalline silicon. The land it processes turns into solar cells.”

  “What … what does a silicon plow look like?”

  “Like a combine harvester. To start it, you need an external energy source, but then it relies on the power provided by the solar cells it leaves behind. With this technology, you can turn the whole Taklamakan Desert into a solar power plant.”