The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin

by Cixin Liu

  “My father's water saved the home's life-support system and so I lived on. In the following five years I grew and matured. Then, one autumn day, I gazed out my window, watching dusk fall, when I suddenly saw someone run along the river's edge. I could not believe my eyes. How could anyone afford such a luxury? Who could afford to breathe so much outside? I looked more closely, and by all the Gods, it was the Last Entrepreneur! I saw him slow his run and seat himself on a stone at the river's bank. He even let his bare feet dangle into the clear waters of the river. He looked like a healthy, well-muscled and proportionate, middle-aged man, but I knew that he was actually over two-hundred-years-old. His age was kept in check by genetic engineering to the point of immortality. But when I saw him then, he looked to be nothing more than an ordinary man.

  “Another two years passed before the state of my home's life-support system deteriorated again. It was a small-scale system with a limited life-span and finally it collapsed completely. The oxygen content of my air began to drop relentlessly. In the end, I was left with no option but to swallow an air-vendor and go outside before I collapsed from asphyxiation inside my home. I went outside and, like everyone else whose life-support system had given up the ghost, I calmly awaited my fate: I would breathe until the pitiful funds in my account had run dry, and then I would be suffocated by the strangling pincers of an Enforcer.

  “As I left my home, I noticed a large group of people outside. Apparently, the large-scale collapse of life-support systems had begun. A gigantic Enforcer came to hover in the air over all of us. It broadcast a final warning: 'Citizens, you have broken into someone's home. You are trespassing into a private residence. Please, leave immediately! Otherwise …' We shouted back, 'Leave? Where to? We can't breathe in our homes.'

  “Together with the others, I began to run through the emerald green grass at the river’s bank, freed of all worries. In our crazed celebration of life, we let the fresh, sweet spring wind blow past our pale faces.

  “I don't know how long we ran,” the alien said, “but at some point we realized that our accounts had long since been fully breathed-up. But for some reason, the Enforcers did not come to take us. As we stood in amazement, we heard the voice of the Last Entrepreneur echo from the gigantic Enforcer floating in the sky:

  “‘Greetings, I welcome all of you to my humble abode! I am very pleased to entertain so many guests and I hope you enjoyed your stay in my yard, but unfortunately, I must ask you all to consider my situation; there are just too many of you. As of this moment, nearly a billion people have left their homes and come into mine as their life-support systems collapsed. Moreover, more than a billion additional visitors will soon come and they, too, as all of you have, will break into my home, violating my right to property rights and privacy. It would be an entirely reasonable remedy to the situation for the Machine to end your lives, and if I had not advised it to desist, you would all have long been vaporized by its lasers. But I was privileged to extensive super-education and therefore I will extend my courtesy to all guests in my home, even those who break into it. That notwithstanding, I ask you to put yourselves in my stead. You must surely see that two billion guests in one's home is a bit much, especially as I am a person who enjoys his peace and quiet. Therefore, I must ask you to please leave my humble abode. I am, of course, aware that you have nowhere to go on this Earth, but I have taken it upon myself to prepare twenty-thousand large-scale spacecrafts for you. They offer enough capacity for all two billion of you. Each one of these vessels is the size of a city and each can travel at one percent of light-speed. Although they are not equipped with full life-support systems, these ships are sufficiently equipped to keep you in cryo-stasis for up to fifty-thousand years. Our Solar System has but one Earth, so your only recourse will be to find a new home planet in interstellar space, but I am certain that you will find such a place. Considering how vast the universe is, why ever would you wish to squeeze into the tight bounds of my tiny shack? There is no cause for you to bear me ill will; I obtained my home by entirely legitimate means. I had my beginnings as the manager of a small company for feminine hygiene products and the entire path of my career, right to the level you witness today, was predicated on nothing but business acumen. Never did I rely on illegal means or methods and so the Machine protected me and will continue to protect me. As I am a law-abiding citizen, it will also protect my private property, but it will not tolerate your illegal actions. In conclusion, I must ask you all to embark at your first convenience. For the sake of our common evolutionary origin I will certainly remember you and I hope that you will remember me. Farewell and please, take care.’

  “That is how we came to the Fourth Earth,” the alien said. “Our voyage here was a thirty-thousand-year-long, wandering journey through the depths of space. On the way we lost nearly half of our ships. Some disappeared in the interstellar dust; others were swallowed by black holes.” He paused as pain crossed his face, but soon he finished. “But, finally, ten-thousand ships and their one billion passengers arrived at this world. Well, that was the story of the First Earth. The story of two billion poor and one rich man.”

  “If you had not come to interfere, would our world have repeated this story?” Mr. Smoothbore asked both himself and the no-longer stranger as the tale finished.

  “I do not know,” the still-alien replied. “Perhaps; perhaps not. The progress of civilization is like the life of an individual, subject to the vagaries of fate…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I should go. I am no more than an ordinary social surveyor and I have work to do if I am to make a living.”

  "So do I,” Mr. Smoothbore replied.

  “Take care, dear Child,” the alien said with a wave.

  “Take care, dear Elder,” Mr. Smoothbore echoed as he took his leave.

  In the light of the star ring, the two men from two worlds parted ways.

  As Mr. Smoothbore entered the Grand Presidential Hall, the 13 standing members of the Committee for the Liquidation of Wealth turned to face him.

  Mr. Zhu addressed him first. “We have verified the completion of your contract. You did very well. The other half of your payment has been transferred to your account, even if money will soon be meaningless.” Genuine remorse crossed the magnate's face. “There is something more you certainly already know: Our Elders' surveyors have already arrived on Earth. Our, and your, efforts have become meaningless. We have no further work to give you.”

  “But I still have a job that needs doing,” Mr. Smoothbore replied, drawing his revolver. As he readied his gun, he thrust his left fist forward.

  Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang – Seven glinting bullets fell to the table. Together with the six shots in his snub-nose there were 13 in all.

  Thirteen faces, shaped by the weight of their immense wealth, twisted in unison as shock and horror flashed across their refined features. Then a calm settled. Maybe they felt relief.

  Outside, a cluster of titanic comets streaked across the sky, their brilliant light bursting through the thick windows, overwhelming the light of the crystal chandeliers. The ground below shook violently as the ships of the First Earth entered the atmosphere.

  “Have you eaten?” Ms. Xu asked Mr. Smoothbore, pointing to a bowl of instant noodles on the table. “Let us eat first.”

  They placed a silver basin formerly used for wine and ice on three crystal ashtrays. They poured water into the basin, then lit a fire underneath it. They fed the flames with hundred yuan notes, each in turn offering notes to the fire. Spellbound, they watched the yellow and green flames leap like some cheerful, vivacious creature.

  The 1.35 million brought the water to a boil.

  Curse 5.0

  The Curse 1.0 was born on the December 8, 2009.

  It was the second year of the global financial crisis and common wisdom on the street still held that things would soon turn around. It never occurred to most that the real crisis had only just begun. Everything seemed to be wrapped in an air of a
nxiety and everywhere people were looking for any opportunity to let off steam. Perhaps it was these circumstances that gave birth to the Curse 1.0.

  The Curse's creator was a young woman, somewhere between 18 and 28, and that was pretty much all IT-Archaeologists learned about her. The cursed was a young man, 20-years-old. Unlike the creator, there was little about him that remained undocumented. His name was Sa Bi, a name that could hardly avoid raising unfortunate associations with “idiot” in Chinese, and when it happened he was a senior at Taiyuan Polytechnic. What happened between the two was in no way remarkable, no different from what happened between boys and girls everywhere, every single day. There were thousands of versions of the supposed events and perhaps the real one was in there among them, but no one except those two themselves knew exactly which particular version transpired between them. In any case, when the drama had run its course, the girl hated the boy with a burning passion and so she coded the Curse 1.0.

  The girl was an expert coder, although it isn’t known where and how she learned her craft. Despite the ever-growing abundance of IT specialists at the time, the number of programmers actually proficient in deep-level coding had not increased. There were just too many easy and convenient tools out there. With their help, there was no need to code close to the hardware. Laboriously writing line by meticulous line of code seemed superfluous when merely running the right tool could produce the desired results. This was even true for viruses like the one the girl was about to write. An endless variety of hacker tools allowed coders to produce viruses by quickly combining a few pre-coded modules or, even simpler still, by using a single module and only slightly modifying it. The last virus to become a pandemic in pre-Curse China, the so-called Panda Burning Incense –or Fujacks Virus – was created in just this way.

  This girl, however, chose to start from square one, without the use of any tools whatsoever. She coded it line upon line, like a peasant weaving cloth from a hand loom. One could just imagine her, crouched in front of her monitor, hammering away at the keys, grinding her teeth. She must have been the spitting image of Heinrich Heine's description of The Silesian Weavers: “Germany, your shroud's on our loom; and in it we weave the threefold doom...We weave; we weave.”

  No computer virus in history spread as quickly as the Curse 1.0. There were two reasons for its success: First, the Curse did not actually damage the infected system. In fact, most viruses had no intention of causing direct harm. What damage they did was usually the result of poorly executed propagation methods and programming. The Curse, for its part, was as good as perfect when it came to avoiding propagation-related side-effects. Its behavior was remarkably restrained as well: In most infected systems it never manifested at all; only if specific system parameters compounded in a certain way – probably in about one out of ten infected systems – did it enact, and even then it only ever showed up once. What it did was simple: It displayed a pop-up message reading:Die and go to hell, Sa Bi!!!!!!!!

  If one clicked the pop-up, the virus would display further information about Sa Bi, informing the user that the accursed was a student at Taiyuan Polytechnic, in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China, enrolled in Department XXX , majoring in XXX, in class XXX, residing in dorm XXX, room XXX. If the pop-up was not clicked, the message would disappear after three seconds, never to reappear on that computer. The virus went so far as to remember the hardware information of systems it had displayed the pop-up on. Furthermore, on those machines it would then remain forever dormant, even if the operating system was reinstalled.

  The second reason for the success of the Curse 1.0 was its ability to mimic system processes. This was by no means the girl's invention, but she had expertly and truly mastered its use. System mimicry is achieved by making large parts of a virus' code identical to the code of the operating system, thereby ensuring that its behavior is similar to that of processes run by the operating system. When anti-virus software removes such a virus, it very likely will cause significant damage to the operating system as well, making extreme caution the only real option when dealing with this kind of virus. Both Rising AntiVirus and Norton targeted the Curse 1.0, but dealing with it turned out to be much more troublesome than they had expected. In fact, things ended up looking even worse than when Norton AntiVirus mistakenly deleted system files of the Chinese language version of Windows XP in 2007. This, together with the fact that the Curse 1.0 caused no real harm and that it drained only a tiny, completely unnoticeable amount of system resources, lead all manufacturers to eventually remove the Curse 1.0 from their virus definition databases.

  On the very day that the Curse was born, science fiction author Liu Cixin was on business in Taiyuan, the capital of the northern Shanxi province, for the 264th time. Even though it was his least favorite city by a margin, Cixin always went shopping in the old, ever-bustling market street when he was in town. From a small corner store, he bought a bottle of lighter fluid for his positively ancient Zippo lighter. It was one of the few items that even today could not just be bought off of the Taobao.com Marketplace or eBay.

  Two days ago, snow had fallen on the city. Like always, it had compacted to ice, covering the streets. And so, as he made his way to the train station, Cixin had slipped and fallen, landing painfully on his behind. Preoccupied with his hurting backside, he had totally forgotten that he had taken the lighter fluid out of his traveling bag and put it into his pocket. It had not gone well when security had checked him. They had forced him to surrender the lighter and on top of that fined him 200 yuan.

  Now, he liked Taiyuan even less.

  The Curse 1.0 lived on. Five years and then 10 years passed and still its quiet proliferation continued across the web as it multiplied and prospered.

  By then, the financial crisis had finally ended and the boom times had returned. In the wake of peak oil, the use of coal had increased all across the world and this black gold had left Shanxi rolling in revenue. It had made the province the Arabia of Asia. Its capital, Taiyuan, had naturally become a new Dubai. It was a city shaped by its coal tycoons. Once poverty-stricken, it had always bourn grand ambition, even in the bad days at the beginning of the century. Back then, wonderfully luxurious music halls and bathhouses had been erected on streets overflowing with the unemployed. Now, having become genuinely newly rich, the entire city lived in luxury, laughing all the way to the bank. The city's immense buildings now made Shanghai pale in comparison and its massive main street, one of the broadest in China, had become a deep canyon; so deep, in fact, that it rarely allowed even a glimpse of the Sun. Rich and poor, full of dreams and desires, crowded into the city. And the city would swallow them in the vortex of its bustling, noisy maelstrom, churning 24/7 each and every day of the year. Almost instantly they would forget themselves and why they had come.

  That day, Liu Cixin again came to Taiyuan. It was the 397th time, and again he went to buy lighter fluid. On his way, he noticed an elegant and handsome young man on the street, a particularly conspicuous strand of white gleaming in his long hair. Cixin, of course, immediately recognized his fellow author, Pan Haitian. Haitian had started out writing science fiction, had then turned his attention to the genre fantasy, only to return to science fiction. Drawn in by Taiyuan's boom, he had recently abandoned his Shanghai home and moved there. Haitian and Cixin stood at opposite ends of the science fiction spectrum – the former to the soft end, the latter on the hard edge. Nonetheless, they were now very happy to have run in to each other and they decided to have lunch together.

  They opted for one of the regional specialties, tounao. Enjoying the nutritious lamb soup and a fair helping of spirits that traditionally accompanied it, they got to talking shop – writing. It did not take long for the more than mildly intoxicated Cixin to exuberantly extol his next grand project: He was planning to write a 10-volume, three million character science fiction epic describing 200 civilizations who would suffer 2,000 cycles of destruction in a universe repeatedly reformatted by vacuum decay events and ending wit
h the entire known universe being flushed down a super massive black hole. The idea and his enthusiasm were infectious and so Haitian quickly suggested that the two of them should collaborate. Using the same epic framework, Cixin would write a version that embodied the hardest of hard science fiction. This edition would be aimed at the male demographic. Haitian, on the other hand, would get to work on a version that was the softest of soft fantasy literature. It would be aimed at the female reader. The idea clicked and the two writers threw themselves at the project without hesitation or reserve.

  It was the 10th birthday of the Curse 1.0 and its doomsday was night. After Vista, Microsoft had found it increasingly difficult to justify the upgrade treadmill of its operating system, indirectly extending the longevity of the Curse 1.0. But operating systems are like the wives of the newly rich: Eventual upgrades are inevitable. So, with every passing year, the Curse 1.0 found its code ever less compatible with the computers it encountered. Soon, it sunk to the bottom of the vast ocean that is the web, doomed to die and disappear. Just as its fate seemed sealed, a new academic discipline was born: IT-Archaeology. With less than half-a-century of history behind it, it would be easy to say that the web had no ancient things to study, but the idea, buoyed by the up-swell of nostalgia, found many firm friends. The main focus of IT-Archaeology was uncovering forgotten life in the nooks and crannies of the web. They looked for web pages that had not been clicked in 10 years, BBS still registerable but un-patronized for two decades and similar buried treasures. Amongst these virtual artifacts, the viruses of “remote antiquity” were the most sought-after; finding a virus still alive after roaming the wilds of the web for more than a decade was no less exciting than finding a dinosaur in a mountain lake.