by Cixin Liu
The Forerunner felt himself growing tired of this senseless game and he rose to turn away.
“How can you not care? All the capital has gathered here to welcome you, forefather! Do not ignore us!” the girl cried, raising a tearful wail.
Remembering his original, still unresolved question, the Forerunner turned and inquired, “What has humanity left behind?”
“Follow our landing beacon; then you can learn for yourself!” came the happy reply.
CHAPTER
3
The Capital
The Forerunner climbed into his landing module. Leaving the UNS Ark to orbit, he began his descent to Earth, following the landing beacon's directions. He wore a pair of video specs, their lenses displaying the images being broadcast from the planet below.
“Forefather, you must immediately come to Earth's capital. Even though it is not the planet's biggest city, it is certainly the most beautiful,” the girl calling herself Earth's Leader prattled on. “You will like it! Mind, though, that the landing coordinates we have given you will lead you to a spot a good distance from the city, as we wish to avoid possible damage ...”
The Forerunner changed the image of his specs to show the area directly below his lander. Now, at only 30,000 feet in the air, he could still see nothing but black wasteland below.
As he descended, the virtual image grew even more confusing. Perhaps its creator, thousands of years ago, had been in the grips of an unimaginable depression; or, perhaps the computer projecting it, left to its own devices thousands upon thousands of years, was showing the signs of its age. In any case, for some unfathomable reason, the virtual girl had begun to sing:
“Oh, you dear angel! From the macro-age you return!
Oh, glorious macro-age,
Magnificent macro-age,
Oh, beautiful macro-age,
Oh, vanished vision! In the fires the dream did burn.”
As this beautiful singer began her hymn, she leapt into the air. She lifted off the platform, jumping a good 30 feet into the air. After falling back to the platform she sprang back up, this time clearing the plaza in a single bound. She landed on top of a building and from there she jumped again, this time across the entire width of the plaza. Landing at its other side, she looked like a charming little flea.
She leapt once more and in mid-jump she caught hold of one of the strange objects that floated through the air. The several-feet-long thing looked like the trunk of a weird tree and it carried her spiraling through the air, above the sea of people. Even as she rose, her svelte body continued to rhythmically writhe.
The sea of people below began to agitate with raw excitement. Soon it boiled over into song. “Oh, macro-age! Oh, macro-age!” As the song rose, they all began to jump. The crowd now looked like sand on a drum, rising in waves with every invisible beat.
The Forerunner simply refused to take any more of this and he killed both image and sound. He was certain now that it was even worse than he had first thought. Before the catastrophe had struck, the people of Earth must have felt venomous envy toward the survivors who had slipped through time and space and so skipped their appointed destruction. Fueled by such emotions, they had created this gross perversion to torment those that returned.
As his descent continued, the annoyance the images had caused slowly began to ebb, but by the time he felt the shock of the landing, that annoyance had almost completely left him. For a moment he succumbed to fancy: Maybe he had truly landed near a city. Perhaps it was not visible from up high?
All illusion faded to nothing as he stepped out of the lander. Beyond laid only boundless, black desolation. Despair chilled his entire body.
The Forerunner carefully slid open his visor. Immediately he felt a surge of cold air against his face. The air was very thin, but it was enough for him to breathe. The temperature was somewhere around 40 degrees below freezing. The sky was a dark blue, as it had been at dawn and dusk in the age before the catastrophe. It was neither now, as the Sun hanging overhead clearly evidenced.
The Forerunner removed his gloves, but he could not feel the Sun’s warmth. In the thin air the sunlight was scattered and weak. In the sky above he could see some stars twinkle brightly.
The ground beneath his feet had solidified about 2,000 years ago. All around he could see the ripples of hardened magma. Even though the first signs of weathering were visible, it remained hard and jagged. No matter how closely he looked, he could only make out the barest traces of soil. Before him the rippling land stretched to the horizon, punctuated only by small hills. Behind him lay the frozen ocean, gleaming white against the sky line.
Scanning his surrounding the Forerunner searched for the source of the transmission. What he finally spotted was a transparent shield dome, embedded in the rocky ground. This hemisphere was about three feet in diameter and it covered what appeared to be an array of highly complex structures.
The Forerunner soon was able to make out several similar domes scattered in the distance. They were spaced at distances of 50 to 100 feet. From where he stood they looked somewhat like bubbles, frozen as they burst through the Earth's surface, now glinting under the Sun.
Reactivating the left lens of his video specs, the Forerunner again opened a virtual window into that strange imaginary world. That shameless impostor was still floating through the air, riding her bizarre branch, deliriously singing and writhing. As she flew, she blew kisses toward the camera. The masses below, even to the last man, cheered:
“...Oh, great macro-age!
Oh, romantic macro-era!
Oh, melancholic macro-age!
Oh, frail macro-age...!”
Numbed, the Forerunner stopped cold. Standing beneath the deep blue firmament in the light of the shining Sun under the sparkling stars, he felt the entire universe revolving around him – him. The last human.
He was engulfed by an avalanche of dank loneliness. Covering his face, he sank to his knees and he began to sob.
As he descended into despair, the singing ceased. Everyone in the virtual image stared straight toward him, their countless eyes filled with deep felt concern. The girl, still riding her branch through mid-air, beamed an almost infatuating smile right up at him.
“Do you have so little faith in humanity?” she asked, her eyes twinkling.
She continued speaking, and as she did, something that the Forerunner could not place sent a shiver across the Forerunner's body, setting all his senses on edge. Disturbed, he slowly began to rise back to his feet. As he stood, he suddenly saw it: a shadow was falling over the city in his left lens. It was as if a dark cloud had appeared out of the blue, blackening the entire sky from one second to the next. He took a step to the side. Light was immediately restored to the city.
He slowly approached the dome, intrigued. Standing before it, he bent forward, carefully studying it. Inside he could indistinctly make out a dense array of tiny, yet incredibly detailed, structures. As he looked he immediately noticed that something magnificently strange had completely dominated the sky in his video specs:
That something was his face.
“We can see you! Can you see us? Use a magnifier!” the girl shouted as loud as she could as the sea of people below once more boiled over with exhilaration.
Now the Forerunner finally and truly understood it all: He pictured the people jumping out of tall buildings; that made sense because gravity could cause them no harm in their microscopic environment. And it explained their jumps, too. In such an environment, people would easily be able to leap up a thousand-foot-tall – or should that be thousand-microns-tall? – building. The large crystal balls must, in fact, be drops of water. In this tiny environment their form would be completely at the mercy of the water's surface tension. And when these microscopic people wanted a drink, they could simply pull out an even smaller droplet. Finally, the strange, several-foot-long things that floated through the urban landscape – and that the girl was riding – these, too, made sense. They were nothing other than t
iny particles of dust.
This city was not at all merely virtual. It was a city just as real as any city 25,000 years ago had been, only that it was covered by a three-foot, transparent dome.
Humanity still was. Civilization still was.
In this microscopic city floated a girl on a branch of dust – the High Counselor of Earth's Unity Government – confidently stretching her open hand toward the man who, at the moment, filled almost her entire cosmos: The Forerunner.
“Forefather, the micro-age welcomes you!”
CHAPTER
4
Micro-Humanity
“In the seventeen-thousand years before the Catastrophe,” the girl told the Forerunner, “humanity left no rock unturned in its search for some way out. The easiest way out would have been migrating to another star. But no Ark, including yours, was able to locate even a single star with a habitable planet. And it did not truly matter; a mere century before the catastrophe, our spaceship technology was still not developed enough to migrate even a thousandth of humanity.
“Another plan,” she continued, “was to have humanity migrate deep underground, well-hidden from the Sun's energy flash and ready to emerge once its effects subsided. That plan, however, would have done little else than drag out their inevitable death. After the Catastrophe, Earth's ecosystem was completely destroyed. Humanity could not have survived.
“There was a time when humanity fell into almost total despair. It was in that darkest night that the spark of an idea flashed to life in the mind of a certain genetic engineer: What if humanity's size could be reduced by nine orders of magnitude?” A pensive look crossed her face. “Everything about human society could also be scaled to that size, creating a microscopic ecosystem; and, such an ecosystem would only consume microscopic amounts of natural resources. It did not take long before all of humanity came to agree that this plan was the only way in which our species could be saved.”
The Forerunner listened intently, thoroughly considering this plan.
She continued. “The plan relied on two types of technology: The first was genetic engineering. By modifying the human genome, humans would be reduced to the height of about ten microns, no larger than a single body cell. Human anatomy, however, would remain completely unchanged. This was a completely plausible goal. In essence, there is very little difference between the genome of a bacterium and that of a human. The other piece of the puzzle was nanotechnology. This technology had been developed as far back as the twentieth century and even in those days people were able to assemble simple generators the size of bacteria. Based on these humble beginnings, humanity soon learned to build everything from nano-rockets to nano-microwave ovens; but the nano-engineers of ages past could have never imagined where their technologies would ultimately be put to use.
“Fostering the first batch of micro-humans was very similar to cloning: The complete genome was extracted from a human cell and then cultivated to form a micro-human that resembled the original in all ways except size. Later generations were born just like macro-humans. That, by the way,” she added, “is what we call you. And, you may have already guessed that we call your era the 'macro-age'.
“The first group of micro-humans took to the world-stage in a rather dramatic fashion,” she told him. “One day, about 12,500 years after the departure of your Ark, a classroom was shown on all of Earth's TV screens. Thirty students sat in this classroom. Everything seemed perfectly normal. The children were normal children and the classroom was a normal classroom. There was nothing at all that would have seemed out of the ordinary. But then, the camera drew back and humanity could see that this classroom in fact stood on the stage of a microscope.” The High Counselor would have continued her account had she not been interrupted by the Forerunner’s curiosity.
“I would like to ask,” he interjected, “if micro-humans, with their microscopic brains, can achieve the intelligence levels of macro-humans?”
The girl shook her head, more bemused than angry. “Do you take me for some kind of fool? Whales are no smarter than you are! Intelligence is not a matter of brain size. In regards to the number of atoms and quantum states in our brains, well, let us just say that our ability to process information is easily enough to match that of a macro-human brain.” She paused, then continued, curiosity ringing in her voice. “Ah, could you please show us to your spacecraft?”
“Of course, very gladly.” It was the Forerunner's turn to pause. “How exactly will you go?”
“Please wait just a moment!” the girl exuberantly shouted.
After saying this, the High Counselor leapt into the air and onto a truly bizarre flying machine. The machine resembled a large, propeller-powered feather. Soon everyone on the plaza below was leaping into the air, competing for a spot on this “feather”. It was apparent that this society obviously had neither a sense nor notion of rank or status. The people indiscriminately jumping onto this strange vehicle were certainly ordinary citizens, both young and old. Regardless of their age, they all wore the childish demeanor that seemed so out of place with the High Counselor; the result was a noisy, excited, chaotic ruckus.
The “feather” was almost instantly jam-packed with people, but a continuous stream of new “feathers” was already coming into view. No sooner than one appeared, it would already be filled with excited micro-humans. In the end, the city's sky was filled with several hundred feathers, each filled to capacity, or beyond, with people. They were all lead by the feather-flier of the High Counselor. The girl led this formidable flying armada to somewhere in the city.
The Forerunner again bent over the dome, carefully observing the microscopic city within. This time he was able to make out the skyscrapers. To him they looked like a dense forest of matchsticks. He strained his eyes and finally was able to spot the feather-like vehicles. They looked like tiny white grains of powder, floating on water. If it had not been for the hundreds of them, it would have been impossible to see them with the naked eye.
The picture in the left lens of the Forerunner's video specs remained crisp as ever. The micro-camera-person and his unimaginably small camera had obviously also boarded a feather and from there continued to stream a live-feed. Through this feed, the Forerunner was able to catch a glimpse of traffic in the micro-city.
He was in for an immediate shock; it appeared that collisions were an almost constant occurrence. The fast flying feathers were continuously knocking into each other and into the dust particles floating through the air. They even regularly hit the sides of the towering skyscrapers! But the flying machines and their passengers were no worse for wear and no one seemed to pay any heed to these collisions.
Actually, this was a phenomenon that any junior high physics student could have explained: The smaller the scale of an object, the stronger its structural integrity: There is a vast difference between two bicycles colliding and two 10,000-ton ships ramming into each other. And, if two dust particles collide, they will suffer no harm whatsoever. Because of this, the people of the micro-world seemed to have bodies of steel and could live lives free from fear of injury.
As the feathers flew, people would occasionally jump out of the skyscraper windows, trying to board one of the machines in mid-air. They were, however, not always successful and so some would fall from what seemed like hundreds of meters. The sheer height left the watching Forerunner with a feeling of vertigo. The falling micro-humans on the other hand plummeted with perfect grace and composure, even taking the time to greet acquaintances through skyscraper windows as they rushed toward the ground!
“Oh, your eyes are black as the ocean, so very, very deep,” the High Counselor noted of the Forerunner. “So deep with melancholy! Your melancholy shrouds our city. You should make them a museum! Oh, oh, oh ...” She began to cry, clearly aggrieved.
The others, too, began to cry and their feather-fliers began bouncing between the skyscrapers, smashing into buildings left, right, front, and center.
The Forerunner could se
e his own huge eyes in the image on his left video spec. Their melancholy, magnified a million-fold, shocked even him. “Why a museum?” he asked, perplexed.
“Because melancholy is only for museums. The micro-age is an age without worries!” Earth's Leader loudly acclaimed. Even though tears still clung to her tender face, there was no longer any trace of sorrow to be found behind them.
“We live in an age without worries!” the others excitedly joined, shouting in unison.
It seemed to the Forerunner that in the micro-age moods shifted hundreds of times faster than they had ever done in the macro-age. These shifts seemed particularly pronounced when it came to negative emotions, such as sadness and melancholy. They could bounce back from such feelings in the blink of an eye.
However, there was another aspect of this discovery that was even harder for the Forerunner to truly fathom. Apparently, all negative emotions were incredibly rare in this era; so rare, in fact, that they were like fascinating artifacts to the people of the micro-age. When they saw them, they grasped at the opportunity to experience them.
“Don't be depressed like a child! You will quickly see that there is nothing to worry about in the micro-age!” the High Counselor shouted, now full of joy.
Hearing her words, the Forerunner could not help but do a double-take. He had previously observed that the general mental state of the micro-humans seemed much like that of macro-age children, but he had just assumed that their children would simply be even more, well, childish. “Are you saying,” he asked in astonishment, “that in this era, as people age, they grow…?” He almost couldn't believe what he was asking. “Grow more childish?”
“We grow happier with age!” the High Counselor giggled.
“Yes! In the micro-age we grow happier with age!” the crowd echoed loudly.
“But melancholy can be very beautiful,” the girl continued. “Like the moon's reflection on a lake; it reflects the romanticism of the macro-age. Oh, oh, oh …” The Earth's Leader fell into plaintive cries at the imagery.