The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin

by Cixin Liu

  “Marshal!” the Minister of State grabbed hold of Loragar just as he was about to leave. “It is critical that we coordinate this action with the Laurasians.”

  “Yes!” the Emperor nodded again. “Let us act in unison with them, lest Dadurmy play the good guy and draw the Ant Coalition to his side.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Last War

  “After three of our cities have been destroyed, and to avoid further loss of life, the Ant Coalition has suspended its strike action and resumed its work in the dinosaur world,” Kachica, the High Archoness of the Ant Coalition, addressed the delegates of the parliament from the speaker's podium. “The choice we now face is absolutely clear: Either the ants destroy the dinosaurs or all of Earth's civilizations will be destroyed!”

  “I agree with the Archoness' motion,” Senator Belapi said, waving her feelers from her seat. “Current trends show that Earth's biosphere is heading for one of two fates: Either it will be turned into a cesspool of pollution by the dinosaur's intensive industry or a nuclear war between the Gondwanans and Laurasians will destroy all of Earth!”

  Their words drew a massive uproar of pheromones from the gathered parliament. “Yes! Now is the time for a final decision!”, “Destroy the dinosaurs, save civilization!”, “Let's go!”, and “Act now!” rang out.

  “Please, everyone, let us keep our calm!” The Chief Scientist of the Ant Coalition, Professor Joyah, waved her feelers to quell the uproar. “Recall that the symbiotic relationship of ants and dinosaurs has lasted for more than two millennia. In all those years, the alliance of dinosaurs and ants has been the backbone of our world's civilizations; it is what supports our own civilization. If this alliance should fall and dinosaurs are destroyed, ask yourselves if our society could really continue to exist on its own. You know it is very easy to see the concrete benefits that the ants bring to the ant dinosaur alliance. What the dinosaurs bring to the table beyond basic material goods, however, is far more immaterial; it is their ideas and scientific knowledge – and that is the core of the issue for us ants. We may make remarkable engineers, but we will never be scientists! The raw physiology of our brains ensures that we will never possess two of the dinosaurs' traits: Curiosity and imagination.”

  Senator Belapi shook her head in disagreement. “Creativity and imagination? Humbug, Professor. Do you really consider those traits to be good things? It is precisely because of them that the dinosaurs are such neurotic beings and it’s what makes their moods so volatile and unpredictable. They end up wasting their lives daydreaming as they indulge their silly fantasies.”

  “But, Senator, it is that unpredictability and those fantasies that inspire them and makes their creativity possible. It’s what allows them to consider theories that explore the most profound laws of the universe, and that is the basis of all scientific progress,” Professor Joyah interjected.

  “Right, right,” Kachica impatiently interrupted the Chief Scientist. “Now is not the time for academic discussions. Professor, the ant world is facing one dilemma and one dilemma only: To destroy the dinosaurs or to suffer destruction alongside them?”

  Joyah did not reply.

  Kachica turned to Rulley, nodding her head.

  Marshal Rulley approached the speaker's podium. “I would like to show everyone something, something that did not rely on our dinosaur teachers and required almost no scientific innovation.”

  At the Marshal's signal, two ants brought in two thin, white flakes that looked much like two simple scraps of paper. Rulley explained what the delegates were seeing. “These are some of ant-kinds most ancient weapons – thunder grains – but they are a new model. Our military engineers manufactured these thunder grain-flakes precisely for their use in this final war.” With the wave of an antenna, another four ants approached carrying two small electric wires, the kind of wire commonly used in the dinosaurs' machines. One wire was red, the other green. The ants spanned the two wires into a frame, and then took the small, white flakes and attached them to the middle of each wire. They firmly wound them around the wire until they looked just like a piece of white adhesive tape. Then something miraculous happened: Those two white pieces of tape changed color, taking the hue of the wire they were attached to, one turning red and the other green. Soon, the once-white flakes seemed to have completely merged with their wire, making them all but invisible.

  As this happened, Kachica announced, “This is the Coalition's newest weapon: Stealth Thunder Grains. Once they have been brought into position, the dinosaurs will have no way of detecting them!”

  Two minutes later, the thunder grains exploded with two crisp cracks, neatly severing the two wires.

  As they exploded, Kachica began detailing the plan. “When the time comes, the Coalition will have an army of one-hundred-million ants at the ready. One part of this army will be composed of ants currently working in the dinosaur world, right under their noses. The other part is infiltrating the dinosaur world as we speak. This great army will affix two-hundred-million Stealth Thunder Grains to the wiring of the dinosaurs' machines! We have called this campaign 'Operation Linebreaker'.”

  “Wow, what a magnificent plan!” Senator Bilubu shouted in approval, eliciting an echo of sincere pheromone praise from the gathered delegates.

  Kachica again took the stage and intoned, “Even as Operation Linebreaker is under way, another equally magnificent operation will be put into action! The Coalition will dispatch another army of twenty million ants that will penetrate into the skulls of five million dinosaurs and attach thunder grains to the major blood vessels of their brains. These five million dinosaurs have been selected from the elite of the billions of dinosaurs living on Earth. They include their top leadership and scientists, as well as key technical personnel and operators. Eliminating these dinosaurs will decapitate the dinosaur world. We named this campaign 'Operation Mindbreaker'.

  “The most beautiful thing about this plan is the simultaneous blows against the dinosaur world!” Kachica continued her presentation. “The two-hundred-million thunder grains we will have deployed in the machines of the dinosaur world and the five million we will have attached to the brains of the dinosaurs will all explode at exactly the same time! There will be less than a second separating any explosion from the next! This will prevent any sector of the dinosaur world coming to the rescue and squash the possibility of the dinosaurs successfully substituting key positions. All of the dinosaur world will be like a huge vessel whose bottom is torn to shreds in the middle of the ocean. It will sink very swiftly indeed! Then, we will be the Earth's true rulers.”

  “High Archoness, Madam Kachica, will you tell us when this great moment will be?” Belapi asked, desperately struggling to contain her excitement.

  “All thunder grains will explode at midnight one month from today,” Kachica answered.

  All the gathered ants erupted in cheers.

  Only Professor Joyah shook her feelers in desperation, attempting to quiet the ruckus of ants. When the cheers did not subside, she shouted at the top of her pheromones. Only then did they calm down and turn to face her.

  “Enough! Have you all gone mad?” she yelled. “The dinosaur world is an extremely complex and incredibly vast system. If this system should suddenly be toppled by our fell blow, it will lead to consequences we can scarcely imagine.”

  “Professor, other than the destruction of the dinosaur world and the final victory of the Ant Coalition, can you tell us what other consequences you envision?” Kachica asked with more than a hint of derision.

  “I told you, we can scarcely imagine what will happen!” Joyah shouted in frustration.

  “There you go again, Joyah the alarmist. Madam, I am afraid we are all tired of your games,” Belapi said as the other delegates expressed their disapproval of the Chief Scientist's complaints.

  Rulley walked over to Joyah and with a front claw gave her a pat on the thorax. The Marshal was a very sober ant and one of the very few who h
ad not erupted into cheers. “Professor, I understand your worries. In fact, we shared them as we planned the operations. I was most concerned about the dinosaurs' nuclear weapons going out of control. But there is no reason to worry; it is true that all nuclear weapon systems of the dinosaur world are controlled by dinosaurs and even though they normally only permit a few ants to perform maintenance work under close scrutiny, infiltrating them will still be a breeze for our special forces. We will deploy more than twice the usual amount of thunder grains in the nuclear weapon systems. When it is all done, the nuclear weapons will be paralyzed, just like all other systems. There is no chance of a catastrophe.”

  Joyah sighed as she replied. “Marshal, the situation is much more complex than that. The key question is this: Do we really understand the dinosaur world?”

  For a moment, this question gave all ants pause.

  Finally, Kachica turned to Joyah. “Professor, ants pervade every corner of the dinosaur world and it has been that way for thousands of years! How can you possibly ask such a ridiculous question?”

  Joyah slowly shook her feelers. “When all is said and done, ants and dinosaurs remain two very different species that live in two completely separate worlds. Intuition tells me that there are great secrets of the dinosaur world that we ants cannot even guess at.”

  “If there is nothing you can actually point to, you might as well just let it rest,” Belapi chided.

  Joyah would not be silenced. “It is for this reason that I ask that you establish a surveillance system. My specific plan is as follows: Whenever you attach a firecracker to a dinosaur’s brain, you should also install a listening device on their cochlea. I will lead a department that will monitor and analyze the information these devices gather. With a little luck, we may soon learn about some things that we had no idea even existed.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Thunder Grains

  The Communication Tower was the heart of Boulder City's information network. Its mission was to process and pass on all the information flowing between the capital and the rest of the nation. There were over a hundred such network centers scattered throughout Gondwana, forming the trunk of the Empire's massive information network.

  A small detachment of ants had already made their way into one of the servers of the information center. The squad was made up of more than a hundred ants, and five hours ago it had infiltrated the Communication Tower by means of a water pipe. From there they had made their way into the server room through a small crack in the floor. Finally they had used a fan grill to gain access to the inside of the server itself. The massive architecture and the size of the machines offered the ants unimpeded access without fail.

  Hearing dinosaurs approach, the ants quickly hid under the motherboard. The field of micro-circuitry that could have been a football field in one of their cities seemed to offer easy shelter. Then they heard the hatch to the server rack open. From a small hole in the motherboard, they could see that a giant magnifying glass had come to cover the entire world above them. Through the glass' curvature they could see the giant eye of a dinosaur engineer, enlarged to even more terrifying proportions. The ants clung where they hung, terror-stricken.

  In the end, however, it appeared that the dinosaur had failed to spot them. Once they felt safe again, the ants immediately went about deploying dozens of thunder grains. These small and thin flakes quickly and seamlessly took on the color of the wires they were attached to, making them all but impossible to spot. In this manner, about a dozen thin thunder grains were attached to wires of varying thickness and a wide range of colors. Some flakes were also attached to the circuit boards themselves. The Stealth Thunder Grains used for this purpose possessed an even more advanced ability, allowing them to take on different colors on different parts of their surface; soon, they perfectly matched the circuit board below them. Their mimicry was flawless, making them even harder to recognize than those attached to the wires. In fact, when the time came, these specialized thunder grains would not explode. Instead, they would drip a few splashes of acids, burning into the circuit board and melting it to the point of complete failure.

  Once the hatch was closed again, the entire world of the server had been plunged back into black, leaving a sole green power indicator to light the darkness. It was like a soft emerald moon, hanging in the sky. The quiet hum of the cooling fan and the light clicking of the hard disk were the only sounds in the eerie tranquility of this strange world.

  Soon, squads of ants had installed thunder grains in every server of the network center. In the vast world beyond the center, on all of Earth's lands, there were hundreds of millions of ants doing the same deed in countless machines.

  That night, Baltzara, the Emperor of the Gondwanan Empire, suffered a nightmare. In his nightmare he saw a dense black mass of ants crawl toward his nose, clambering into his body. Then they came back out his mouth, forming an endless, horrible black column. And as they emerged, each ant clasped something in its pincers. It was his intestines, cut to tiny pieces. Each ant casually discarded its piece of his innards, only to once again push into his nose; they had become a ceaseless circle ….

  There was a grain of truth in the Emperor's nightmare. As he dreamed, there really was a pair of ants climbing into his nose. During the day, these two soldier ants had infiltrated the Emperor's sleeping chambers and hidden under his pillow, biding their time.

  Now in his nose, they faced a gale whistling in and out of his nostrils as he slept. Holding only to the nostril hairs that grew like a chaotic jungle, the experienced ants proceeded forward, cleverly avoiding triggering a sneeze. They soon made it into the Emperor's nasal cavity and from there, as they had done so many times before in the countless surgeries they had participated in, they entered into the space behind the eyeball.

  The ants followed the path of the translucent optical nerve, straight into the brain. At times a thin membrane would come between them and their progress, but the two ants would simply bite a small hole into these obstacles. The holes were tiny, far too small for the great dinosaur to feel. Doing this, the two reached the cerebrum suspended quietly in the brain fluid's darkness. It appeared like a strange life form all of its own. The ants studied it carefully, quickly finding the large blood vessels of the brain; these were the main conduits for the blood that pumped to the Emperor's cerebrum. One of the ants flicked on a microscopic lamp, illuminating the vessels. The other ant retrieved a few yellow thunder grains and attached them to the blood vessels' transparent walls. The two ants then quickly withdrew from the brain, making their way along a dark, moist, and winding passage. Climbing down a slanting slope they soon reached the ear. Climbing in the weak light filtering through the translucent eardrum, they came upon the cochlea. Here the two ants began to install the listening device.

  Emperor Baltzara’s nightmare continued. In his dreams, his intestines had been completely dissected and extracted, leaving him an empty husk. Ever more ants were pushing into him, his body abused as their ant hill …

  When the Emperor woke, covered in cold sweat, those two ants had long completed their work and silently climbed out of his nose. They had scaled down his bed and withdrawn through the floor of the sleeping chamber. Emperor Baltzara heavily rolled himself over and back into his nightmare-plagued sleep.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Leviathan and Luna

  In the High Command of the Ant Coalition, High Archoness Kachica and the Coalition's Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Rulley, were in the midst of orchestrating the downfall of the dinosaur world. Behind them stood two large screens displaying the progress of Operation Linebreaker and Operation Mindbreaker.

  “It appears that everything is going according to plan,” Rulley said, turning to Kachica.

  Kachica was about to respond when Joyah entered the command center. The High Archoness now instead turned to the Coalition's Chief Scientist, greeting her. “Ah, Professor Joyah, I did not see you all of last week! I assum
e you have been busy analyzing the information gathered by our listening devices. But what with the grim look? Is there some terrible secret you have come to share with us?”

  Joyah nodded a feeler. “Indeed. I must immediately speak with both of you.”

  “As you can see, we are very busy; please make it short,” Kachica noted tersely.

  Producing a recorder, Joyah said, “I would like both of you to listen to a recording. It was made at the bilateral summit between the Gondwanan Empire and the Laurasian Republic that convened yesterday. We were listening in on a meeting between Baltzara and Dadurmy.”

  Clearly impatient, Kachica interrupted. “What secrets could that summit possibly hold? We all know that the nuclear arms reduction talks between the two countries collapsed. Nuclear war between Gondwana and Laurasia is imminent. All any of this does is prove that the course we have chosen is the right one; we must destroy the dinosaur world before they start a nuclear war.”

  Joyah was unimpressed. “You just summarized the press release, but I want you to hear the particulars of a secret meeting that took place at the summit. In it, they reveal something we have previously not heard about.”

  The recording began to play, and after a short silence, they heard:

  Dadurmy: “Your Highness Baltzara, do you know the real reason why the ants yielded so readily? It is almost certain that their return to work in the dinosaur world is nothing more than a delaying tactic. They are almost certainly putting a plot against the dinosaur world into action as we speak.”

  Baltzara: “President Dadurmy, do you really think me stupid enough to not realize the obvious? Compared to Laurasia going over to an anti-timer for 'Luna', the threat posed by the ants – even the threat posed by your nuclear weapons – is hardly worth my time.”