by Cixin Liu
“Is this an official warning?” Cheng Xin asked calmly.
“I don’t think so. But it’s in all the media. I’m sure it’s real! Let’s get to the spaceport and run for our lives!” The secretary disappeared from the window.
Cheng Xin and AA passed through the dense congeries of information windows and arrived at the transparent wall of the conference room. They saw that panic had already seized the city below them. A massive increase in the number of flying cars outside resulted in chaos, and every vehicle tried to force itself through the jam at high speed. One of the cars struck a giant tree building and erupted into a fireball. Soon, fire and columns of smoke appeared in two other locations in the city....
AA picked out a few information windows and perused them carefully. Cheng Xin, on the other hand, tried to get in touch with the members of the IDC. Most of their phones were busy, and Cheng Xin managed to talk to only two committee members. One of them, like AA and Cheng Xin, knew nothing. The other, a PDC official, told Cheng Xin that he could confirm that Observation Unit #1 in the Solar System advance warning system had noticed some significant anomaly, but he didn’t know the specifics. He also confirmed that Fleet International and the UN had not issued a formal dark forest strike alarm, but he wasn’t optimistic.
“There are two possibilities for why no alarm has been issued: One, nothing has happened. Two, the photoid is too close and an alarm would be useless.”
AA was only able to obtain one piece of specific information from her reading: The photoid was coming along the ecliptic plane. There were conflicting reports concerning its exact direction and distance from the Sun, and estimates of when the photoid would strike the sun diverged wildly: Some claimed that the world had another month; others said only a few hours.
“We should go to Halo,” AA said.
“Is there enough time?”
Halo was a corporate spaceship that belonged to the Halo Group. Right now, it was parked at the company’s geosynchronous base. If the alarm was real, their only hope now was to ride the ship to Jupiter and hide out behind the gas giant before the photoid struck. As Jupiter was in opposition, and therefore as close to the Earth as it could be, it would take twenty-five to thirty days for the ship to fly from the Earth to Jupiter, which was just under the upper end of the range of estimates for when the photoid would strike. But this estimate seemed highly unreliable: The advance warning system was still being constructed, and couldn’t have given such an early alert.
“We have to do something instead of waiting here to die!” AA said. She dragged Cheng Xin out of the conference room and onto the parking lot at the top of the tree. They ducked into a flying car, but AA seemed to remember something and got out again. A few minutes later, she returned with an oblong object that resembled a violin case. She opened the case, took out what was inside, and carried it with her into the car, leaving the case behind.
Cheng Xin looked at what was in AA’s hand and recognized the implement: a rifle, though adapted to shoot laser bolts instead of bullets.
“Why are you bringing this?” Cheng Xin asked.
“The spaceport is sure to be filled with people—who knows what’s going to happen?” AA tossed the rifle onto the backseat and started the flying car.
Every city had a spaceport to service various small space vessels—rather like ancient airports.
The flying car merged into a mighty aerial stream of traffic. All the countless cars in the stream, like a swarm of locusts, were headed for the spaceport. They cast a flowing shadow along the ground, as though the city’s blood was seeping out.
Ahead, a dozen or so white lines rose into the blue sky, trails left by spaceships. They rose straight up and then turned east and disappeared in the depths of the firmament. New white lines continuously shot up from the ground and extended into air, each line headed by a fireball that was brighter even than the sun: the flame from the fusion drives of the ships.
On an information window inside the car, Cheng Xin saw a live video feed taken from near-Earth orbit. Countless rising white lines appeared against the tan background of the continent and extended upward. They grew more numerous, denser, as though the Earth was growing white hair. The fireballs at the ends of the white lines were like fireflies drifting into space. This was the greatest collective escape into space in human history.
Their car arrived above the spaceport. About a hundred spacecraft were arrayed below, and more were being moved out of the giant hangar in the distance. Space planes had long since fallen out of use, and modern shuttles all took off vertically. Unlike the oddly shaped spacecraft Cheng Xin had seen at the port in the space elevator terminal station, these shuttles all had streamlined profiles, with three or four tail fins. They were now erected helter-skelter in the parking lot of the spaceport, like a forest of steel.
AA had called ahead to the hangar to move one of the Halo Group’s shuttles onto the lot. She quickly picked out the shuttle from the air and landed their car next to it.
Cheng Xin looked at the shuttles around her. They were of different sizes: The smaller ones were only about a few meters tall, looking like giant versions of artillery shells. It was hard to imagine that such tiny crafts could escape the Earth’s gravity well. There were also larger vessels, some as big as ancient airliners. The Halo Group’s shuttle was medium-small in size, about ten meters tall, covered with a reflective metallic surface reminiscent of the droplets. The shuttle was parked on a wheeled launch frame so that it could be dragged to the launch point at a moment’s notice. They would ride this shuttle to reach Halo in orbit.
A loud rumbling came from the launch area, strangely reminding Cheng Xin of the noise made by the Moskstraumen. The ground quaked and her legs felt numb. A great bright glow appeared in the launch area, and a shuttle rose into the air on a ball of flame, adding yet another column of smoke to the sky. A great billowing cloud of white fog flowed toward them, bringing with it a strange burning smell. The fog wasn’t generated by the engine of the shuttle, but by the boiled water from the coolant pool below the launch pad. As the launch area and the ships disappeared in the sweltering, muggy steam, people became even more agitated and anxious.
AA and Cheng Xin climbed up a slender set of stairs to board the shuttle. As the fog dissipated, Cheng Xin saw a crowd of children gathered not too far away. They appeared to be elementary school students under the age of ten, dressed in their school uniforms. A young teacher stood with them. Her long hair was buffeted by gusts of wind and she looked around helplessly.
“Can we wait a bit?” Cheng Xin asked.
AA looked over at the children and understood what Cheng Xin wanted. “All right. Go. We have to wait for our turn to get to the launch pad. It will be a while.”
In principle, shuttles could take off from any flat part of the ground. However, to prevent ground damage from the ultrahigh-temperature plasma generated by the fusion drive, the shuttles used a launch pad. The launch pad was equipped with a coolant pool and diversion channels to safely redirect the plasma.
The teacher saw Cheng Xin walking over, and came up and grabbed her. “This shuttle is yours, isn’t it? Please, please save the children.” Her bangs stuck to her forehead, and tears and condensed fog wetted her face. She stared at Cheng Xin intently, as if hoping to seize her with her gaze. The children came over as well, and looked expectantly at Cheng Xin. “They’re here for space camp, and they were scheduled to go up in orbit. But after the alert was issued, they refused to take us and sent others up in our place.”
“Where’s your ship?” AA asked as she walked over.
“It’s gone. Please, please!”
“Let’s bring them,” Cheng Xin said to AA.
AA looked at Cheng Xin for a few seconds. There are billions of people on the Earth. Do you think you can save them all?
Cheng Xin’s gaze did not waver.
AA shook her head. “We can only bring three more.”
“But our shuttle’s capacity is ei
ghteen!”
“Halo can only seat five under maximum acceleration because it’s equipped with only five deep-sea-state capsules. Anyone not in a deep-sea state is going to be crushed into a meat pie.”
The answer surprised Cheng Xin. The deep-sea acceleration fluid was only necessary for stellar spaceships. But she had always thought Halo was a planetary ship and wasn’t capable of voyaging beyond the Solar System.
“All right. Then bring three!” The teacher let go of Cheng Xin and grabbed on to AA, terrified of losing this one chance.
“You pick three, then,” said AA.
The teacher let go of AA and stared at her, even more terrified than before. “How am I supposed to pick? How...” She looked around, not daring to meet the eyes of the children. She looked to be in utter pain, as if the gazes of the children burned her.
“Fine. I’ll pick,” AA said. She turned to the children and smiled. “Everyone, listen up. I’m going to ask three questions. Whoever gives the right answers first gets to come with us.” She ignored the stunned looks from the teacher and Cheng Xin, and held up a finger. “First question: Say we have a light which is off. After one minute, it blinks. Half a minute later, it blinks again. Fifteen seconds later, it blinks a third time. It keeps on going like this, blinking at intervals that are half of the immediately preceding interval. I want to know how many times it will have blinked by the two-minute mark.”
“A hundred!” one of the children blurted out.
AA shook her head. “Wrong.”
“A thousand!”
“No. Think carefully.”
After a long pause, a timid voice spoke up. The speaker was a gentle and quiet little girl and it was hard to hear her with all the noise. “An infinite number of times.”
“Come here,” AA said, pointing at the little girl. When she walked over, AA guided her to stand behind herself. “Second question: Say we have a rope whose thickness is uneven. To burn it from one end to the other takes an hour. How do you use this rope to track the passage of fifteen minutes? Remember, the thickness is uneven!”
This time, no child spoke up in a hurry, and they all fell into deep thought. Soon, a boy raised his hand. “Fold the rope end to end, and then burn it from both ends at the same time.”
AA nodded. “Come over.” She pulled the boy behind her to stand with the girl. “Third question: eighty-two, fifty, twenty-six. What’s the next number?”
“Ten!” a girl shouted.
AA gave her a thumb up. “Well done. Come over.” Then she nodded at Cheng Xin, took the three children, and headed for the shuttle.
Cheng Xin followed them to the stairs for boarding the shuttle. She looked back. The remaining children and their teacher looked at her as if at a sun that would never rise again. Tears blurred the scene in front of her, and as she climbed up, she could still feel the gazes of despair behind her, like ten thousand arrows piercing her heart. She had felt like this before, during the last moments of her brief career as the Swordholder, and also in Australia when Sophon had announced the plan for exterminating the human race. It was a pain worse than death.
The cabin inside the shuttle was spacious; eighteen seats were arranged in two columns. Since the cabin was vertical, like a well, everyone had to climb a ladder to get to the seats. Cheng Xin experienced the same feeling she had when inside the spherical spacecraft she took to meet Tianming—the shuttle seemed to be a shell only, and she couldn’t see where there was space for the engine and the control systems. She thought back to the chemical rockets of the Common Era, each as big as a skyscraper, but the effective payload was only a tiny capsule near the top.
She couldn’t see any control surfaces inside the shuttle, and only a few information windows drifted by. The shuttle’s AI seemed to recognize AA. As soon as she entered, the windows gathered around her. They moved with her while she went around securing the children’s and Cheng Xin’s seat belts.
“Don’t look at me like that. I gave them a chance. Competition is necessary for survival,” AA whispered to Cheng Xin.
“Auntie, are they going to die on the surface?” the boy asked.
“Everyone is going to die. It’s just a matter of when.” AA sat down next to Cheng Xin. She didn’t buckle her seat belt, but continued to examine the information windows. “Damn it. There are still twenty-nine launches ahead of us.”
The spaceport had a total of eight launch pads. After each launch, the pad had to cool for ten minutes before the next use because the coolant pools needed to be replenished with fresh water.
The wait shouldn’t have mattered much to their survival. The flight to Jupiter would take a month. If the dark forest strike happened before they arrived, it really made no difference if they were on the ground or in space. However, the problem now was that any delay might cause them to not be able to take off at all.
Society had already descended into pandemonium. Driven by the instinct for survival, the more than ten million inhabitants of the city swarmed toward the spaceport. The shuttles, like passenger aircraft during ancient times, could only carry away a small number of people in a short period of time. Possessing a private space vessel was like owning a private airplane, an unattainable dream for most of the population. Even with the space elevator, no more than one percent of the population could reach near-Earth orbit within a week. Those who could finally make the voyage to Jupiter would be one-tenth of that one percent.
There were no portholes on the shuttle, but a few information windows showed the scene outside. They saw dark masses flooding into the parking area. Crowds surrounded every vessel, screaming with their fists raised, hoping to squeeze onto one of them. At the same time, outside the spaceport, some flying cars that had landed took off again. The cars were all empty, and their owners piloted them by remote control in an attempt to stop any more space launches. More and more flying cars gathered in the air, forming a dark, hovering barrier above the launch pads. Very soon, no one would be able to leave.
Cheng Xin minimized the information window and turned around to comfort the three children seated behind her. AA screamed. Cheng Xin turned around and saw a window that had been maximized to fill the entire cabin. In the window, a blinding fireball had appeared in the forest of shuttles.
Someone had begun to launch while surrounded by people in the parking lot!
The plasma emitted by the nuclear fusion drive was tens of times hotter than the emissions of ancient chemical rockets. When launched from a flat surface, the plasma would melt the crust instantaneously and spill out in every direction. No one could survive within a thirty-meter radius. The video feed in the window showed many black dots scattering from the fireball. One of the dots struck a nearby shuttle and left a black mark: a burnt-up body. Several other shuttles around the one that took off toppled, probably because their launch frames had been melted.
The crowd quieted. They looked up and saw the shuttle that had probably killed dozens of people lifting off from the parking lot, rumbling, dragging its white trail until it was high in the air, then turning east. They seemed unable to believe their eyes. A few seconds later, yet another shuttle took off from the parking lot, even closer to them. The rumbling, flames, and waves of superheated air threw the stunned crowd into complete panic. Then a third, a fourth... the shuttles in the parking lot took off one after another. Amidst the fiery balls of flame, burnt remains of bodies flew through the air, turning the parking lot into a crematorium.
AA watched the horrifying scene and bit her bottom lip. Then she waved the window away and began to type on another small window.
“What are you doing?” Cheng Xin asked.
“We’re taking off.”
“No.”
“Look.” AA tossed another small window at Cheng Xin, which showed the few shuttles around them. A cooling loop was located just above the tail nozzle of each vehicle. The loops were used to dissipate the heat from the fusion reactors. Cheng Xin saw that the loops of all the surrounding shuttles ha
d begun to glow with a dim red light, indicating that their reactors had been turned on in preparation for liftoff.
“We’d better launch before they do,” said AA. If any of these shuttles took off, the plasma would probably melt the launch frames of the rest of the shuttles, causing them to topple onto the molten ground.
“No. Stop.” Cheng Xin’s voice was calm, but unwavering. She had experienced even worse catastrophes, and she would face this one with serenity.
“Why?” AA’s voice was equally calm.
“Because there are people around.”
AA stopped typing and turned to face Cheng Xin. “Soon, you, me, the crowd, and the Earth itself will all turn into tiny fragments. Can you tell which ones are honorable and which ones despicable in that mess?”
“Our values still hold, at least for now. I’m the president of the Halo Group. This shuttle belongs to the Halo Group, and you’re the company’s employee. I have the authority to make this decision.”
AA stared at Cheng Xin for a few moments, then she nodded and closed the control window. She also turned off all the other information windows, thus isolating the cabin from the mad, noisy world outside.
“Thank you,” said Cheng Xin.
AA said nothing. But then she jumped up, as if suddenly remembering something. She picked up the laser rifle from one of the empty seats and climbed down the ladder. “Keep your seat belts on. The shuttle might fall over any moment.”
“What are you going to do?” Cheng Xin asked.
“If we can’t leave, they can’t leave either. Fuck them.”
AA opened the cabin door, went out, and immediately closed the door and locked it to prevent anyone from trying to force their way in. Then she climbed down the stairs and began to shoot at the tail fin of the nearest shuttle. Smoke rose up from the tail fin, leaving behind a tiny hole about the size of a finger. That was enough. The self-monitoring system within the shuttle would discover the damage to the tail fin and the AI would refuse to initiate the launch sequence. This was a safety measure that couldn’t be overridden by those inside. The cooling ring around the shuttle began to fade, indicating a reactor shutdown. AA turned around in a circle and shot a hole through the tail fins of each of the eight shuttles around them. As the crowd was in total panic, no one noticed what she was doing amidst the waves of heat and smoke and dust.