Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  The next stage of research at the base followed two forks: a search for a way to breach the magnetic field defense, and a reorientation of ball lightning’s target from personnel to weapons equipment, particularly high-tech weapons.

  The first idea was to collect macro-electrons that would melt wiring. This would be an effective way to disable the enemy’s high-tech weapons. But a serious problem was discovered during experiments: ball lightning that would melt wiring would also discharge into large metal objects, and since melting large metal objects required immense amounts of power, most of the energy in this form of ball lightning was discharged into the metal object, with little released into the wire. Efficiency was poor, and potential damage to the weaponry was very limited.

  Our very next thought, naturally, was that electronic chips might make an excellent target for ball lightning weapons. First of all, unlike wires, chips were made of a unique material for which nothing similar yet nonessential existed to split the ball lightning’s energy. Additionally, chips were small, so a relatively minor discharge could destroy a large number of them. Chip destruction was absolutely fatal to modern high-tech weaponry. But macro-electrons that discharged into chips (we called them chip-eating macro-electrons) were very rare, like pearls in the imperial crown of ball lightning. To collect a sufficient quantity of them required capturing a huge number of macro-electrons to subject to spectral recognition, for which substantial funds were needed. But the higher-ups had stopped further investment in the project.

  To gain their attention, and to win research funding, Colonel Xu decided to conduct an attack exercise using the chip-eaters we had already collected.

  *

  The exercise was conducted at the MBT 2005 test base, where Lin Yun and I had gone to learn about the feeler defense system. Now all was quiet here. Weeds grew in the vehicle tracks. All we could see were two MBT 2005s that had been brought here the day before for use as test targets.

  Initially, only General Armaments Department personnel were supposed to watch the tests, but a notice sent two hours beforehand doubled the number of observers. Most of them were from the General Staff Department, and included a major general and a lieutenant general.

  We first took them on a tour of the target area. Apart from the two tanks, the targets to be fired upon included several armored vehicles equipped with military electronic equipment. One vehicle held a frequency-hopping radio, another held a radar assembly, and a third held several hardened military-use computers. The computers were switched on, their screens displaying various images on screen saver mode. One additional target was an obsolete surface-to-air missile. The vehicles and equipment were set up in a line.

  After showing them the target equipment, we specifically opened the electronic control portion to show them the unharmed chips on the circuit boards.

  “Young man, are you telling us that your new weapon will completely destroy these ICs?” the lieutenant general asked.

  “Yes, General. But the other parts will remain unharmed,” I answered.

  “The ICs will be fried by lightning-produced induction, is that correct?” the major general asked. He was quite young, and evidently a technical officer.

  I shook my head. “No. EM induction from ordinary lightning would be drastically weakened by the Faraday cage effect of the tank’s metallic exterior. Ball lightning will penetrate the armor and turn the chips to ash.”

  The two generals glanced at each other and smiled, then shook their heads, clearly unconvinced.

  Then Lin Yun and Colonel Xu brought us all to the firing site five hundred meters away and showed them the thunderball gun. It was installed on a truck that had once been used for transporting rockets.

  The lieutenant general said, “I have a sixth sense about weapons. An immensely powerful weapon, regardless of what it looks like, will have an invisible edge to it. But I can’t see any edge to this thing.”

  Colonel Xu said, “Sir, the first atomic bomb looked like a big iron barrel. You wouldn’t have seen any edge on it, either. Your sixth sense is only applicable to conventional weapons.”

  The general said, “I hope so.”

  Out of safety concerns, we erected a simple cover for the observers out of sandbags. When firing was about to commence, the visitors all filed behind it.

  Ten minutes later, firing began. The thunderball gun was operated much like a conventional machine gun, with a trigger-like firing device and sight that were nearly identical to a machine gun’s. In the initial design, firing was carried out via computer, using a mouse to drag the crosshairs across the screen to lock on a target; the thunderball gun would automatically train the launcher on the target. But this required a complicated electro-mechanical system, and the thunderball weapon didn’t need to be aimed particularly precisely—that is, even with a certain amount of deviation, the ball lightning would still incinerate the target. So we decided to use a more primitive means of controlling this advanced weapon, partly because of tight time constraints, but also to make the weapon as streamlined and reliable as possible. Now it was operated by a sergeant, a distinguished marksman from the force.

  First we heard a series of deafening crackles, a sound produced by the artificial lightning used for excitation at the head of the launcher, closely followed by the emergence of three lightning balls, glowing orange red. They flew off in the direction of a tank with a shrill whistle, spaced roughly five meters apart, and disappeared when they struck the target, as if melting into the tank. Then, from the tank, came the sound of three explosions, clear and sharp, as if the detonations had not been inside it but right next to our ears. Then the other targets were fired upon, two to five shots of ball lightning apiece. The crackle of the excitation arc, the whistle of the ball lightning, and then the explosion when they struck the target sounded in turn. In the target area five hundred meters away, two balls that had missed their targets or passed through without exploding drifted about....

  When the last thunderball struck the surface-to-air missile, calm descended. The two misses floated above the target area for a while before disappearing silently in succession. One armored car was smoking, but the other targets sat there calmly, as if nothing at all had happened.

  “What did those signal flares of yours do?” a colonel asked Lin Yun.

  “You’ll find out!” she said, full of confidence.

  Everyone exited the shelter and walked the five hundred meters to the target area. Although confident about the results we were about to witness, I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous at being surrounded by all of the senior officers who would decide the fate of the project. Ahead of us, the armored car was no longer smoking, but there was a crisp odor in the air that grew stronger the closer we got. One general asked what it was.

  Lin Yun said, “Ozone, emitted in the ball lightning discharge explosion. It might replace the smell of gun smoke on the battlefield of the future, sir.”

  Lin Yun and I brought them to the armored car first. The observers circled it, peering at it closely, evidently thinking they would find burn traces, but there was nothing to be found. The vehicle body was unchanged. When we opened the door, a few of them stuck their heads in for a look, but apart from a stronger smell of ozone, there was no trace of damage. The four military computers were still lined up inside the vehicle, but it would not have escaped notice that one thing was different: all of the screens were dark. We pulled one of the computers out onto the ground, and Lin Yun quickly opened up its dark green case. I held it up at an angle, and dumped out a white ash intermingled with a few black fragments from the interior. I held the case up high to let them all see the interior, and I heard gasps from the crowd.

  On the motherboard, two-thirds of the chips were gone.

  The gasps continued. In the MBT 2005, the observers saw that the communications equipment and the radar had more than half of their chips burned to ash. When we finally opened up the nose of the surface-to-air missile, the gasps reached a crescendo, si
nce the missile’s guidance module had been turned into a reliquary for cremated chips. The two soldiers from the missile corps in charge of removing the warhead looked up at Lin Yun and me with fear in their eyes, then looked through the gaps in the crowd to the distant thunderball weapon, looking like they’d seen a ghost.

  The lieutenant general declared, “It can take out the main strength of an entire army!”

  The observers applauded enthusiastically. If ball lightning weapons were to have an advertising slogan, there was nothing more appropriate.

  *

  After returning to base, I noticed a loss of my own: the notebook computer I had taken with me to the exercise wouldn’t turn on. I took it apart, and discovered its insides were covered in a fine white ash. I blew on it, and it took flight and sent me coughing. Taking another look at the motherboard, I saw that the CPU and two 256 MB sticks of ram were missing, turned into the dust now drifting about me. During the firing demonstration, I was in a position half the distance from the ball lightning ignition point that the others were so as to observe and record, but I was still much farther than the customary fifty-meter safe distance.

  It should have occurred to me before, really. The chips were so small in size that each could absorb only a small amount of the energy discharged by the ball lightning, leaving the remainder to act at a much larger distance. For tiny targets such as chips, ball lightning’s threat radius was greatly expanded.

  Strange Phenomena III

  One night under a brilliant moon, Lin Yun, Ding Yi, and I strolled easily along a path on base discussing how the ball lightning weapon could defeat the magnetic defense problem.

  “Now we can be certain that, so long as we use charged macro-electrons, the problem is unsolvable,” Lin Yun said.

  “That’s my opinion, too,” Ding Yi said. “Recently I’ve been trying to use the motion state of macro-electrons to locate the nucleus of the atom they belong to, but the theory is extremely knotty, and there are certain obstacles that are practically impossible to overcome. It’s a long road, and I fear that humanity won’t make any breakthroughs this century.”

  I looked up at the stars, thinned out now due to the full moon, and tried to imagine what an atom five hundred to a thousand kilometers in diameter would be like.

  Ding Yi went on, “But on second thought, if we can find a macro-nucleus, that would mean we can obtain chargeless macro-neutrons, which would be able to penetrate EM barriers.”

  “Macro-neutrons can’t be excited like macro-electrons, and don’t have energy release. How would they be weaponized?” Lin Yun asked the question I was about to.

  Ding Yi was about to answer, but then Lin Yun put a finger to her lips. “Shh—listen!”

  We were walking next to the ball lightning excitation lab. Before the advent of spectral recognition, it was here that large numbers of animal tests were performed with select weapons-grade macro-electrons, turning hundreds of test animals to ash. It was the same building that Lin Yun had taken me to on my first visit to the base to demonstrate the lightning weapon. Under the moonlight it looked like an enormous shadow, without definition. Lin Yun motioned for us to stop, and when our footsteps ceased, I heard a sound coming from the lab.

  It was the bleat of a goat.

  There were no goats in the lab. Animal tests had stopped two months ago, and during that time, the lab had been sealed.

  I heard the sound again, unmistakably a goat’s bleat: faint, and a little bleak. Oddly, the sound reminded me of ball lightning explosions, since the two shared the same quality: even though a listener could determine the direction of the sound’s source, it nevertheless seemed to fill all space, and sometimes seemed to be coming from inside your body.

  Lin Yun headed toward the lab entrance, Ding Yi following close behind, but my feet were like lead and I stood rooted in place. It was the same old sensation, a whole body chill, as if I were in the grip of an icy hand. I knew they wouldn’t find any goat.

  Lin Yun pushed open the lab door, and the heavy iron rumbled loudly as it rolled back on its track, drowning out the faint bleats. When the door sound had subsided, the goat’s bleats were gone as well. Lin Yun turned on the light, and through the doorway, I could see part of the building’s vast interior. A square pen formed from two-meter-high iron fencing had once held the targets for excitation experiments. Several hundred test animals had been incinerated by ball lightning there. Now, the space was completely empty. Lin Yun looked inside the huge lab for a while, but as I had predicted, she found nothing. Ding Yi stood at the entrance, the light casting a long, thin shadow behind him on the ground.

  “I clearly heard a goat!” Lin Yun called, her voice echoing in the cavernous interior.

  Ding Yi didn’t respond, but turned and walked toward me. When he reached me, he said softly, “Have you come across anything in all these years?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, striving to keep my voice from trembling.

  “Some... things it would be impossible for you to encounter.”

  “I don’t understand.” I forced a laugh, which must have sounded ridiculous.

  “Forget it.” Ding Yi clapped me on the shoulder. He had never done that before. The action gave me a smidgen of comfort. “In the natural world, the unusual is just another manifestation of the normal.” As I was considering this, he shouted toward Lin Yun in the lab, “Stop looking and come out!”

  Lin Yun turned off the light before she came out, and just as the door was closing, I saw a shaft of moonlight from a high window light up the now-dark lab, casting a trapezoid of light on the floor, right in the center of the pen of death. The building felt cold and sinister, like a long-forgotten tomb.

  The Nuclear Power Plant

  Actual use of ball lightning weapons took place much earlier than we anticipated.

  It was around midday that Dawnlight received an emergency order for immediate departure, fully equipped for combat. The order added that this was not a drill. One platoon carrying two thunderball guns left by helicopter, and Colonel Xu, Lin Yun, and I went along. After a short flight of not much more than ten minutes, we landed. It wouldn’t have taken much longer to go by car on a convenient highway, so this was clearly an emergency situation.

  We disembarked and realized immediately where we were. In front of us was a white complex gleaming in the sun, one that had appeared countless times on television. An enormous columnar structure stood conspicuously in the center of the complex. This was a large-scale nuclear reactor, newly built as the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

  From our vantage point, the plant appeared exceedingly calm and devoid of people. But our surroundings were bustling. Groups of heavily equipped People’s Armed Police leaped out of the military vehicles that had just pulled up. Three officers next to a military jeep peered in the direction of the plant through binoculars for quite a long while. Beside a police car a group of police officers were putting on bulletproof vests, their submachine guns lying in disarray on the ground. I followed Lin Yun’s gaze to several snipers on a roof behind us, rifles trained on the reactor.

  The helicopters had landed in the yard of the plant’s guesthouse. Without saying a word, a PAP colonel led us to a conference room inside that evidently served as the temporary command center. Several PAP commanders and police officers were clustered round a black-suited official looking at a large paper chart that appeared to be an internal blueprint of the plant. Our officer guide informed us that the official was the operational commander. I recognized him from his frequent television appearances. That such a high-ranking official was here indicated the gravity of the situation.

  “What are regular troops doing here? Things are getting overcomplicated!” a police officer said.

  “Oh, I asked GSD to bring them in. They’ve got new equipment that might be useful,” the operational commander said. This was the first time he had raised his head since we came in. I noticed in his expression none of the tension and anxiety of th
e military and police officers around him, but rather the faint fatigue of routine that, in this situation, was an expression of inner strength. “Which of you is in charge? Ah, hello, Colonel,” he said to Xu Wencheng. “I have two questions. First, can your equipment destroy a live target without damaging any of the facilities inside the structure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Second... hmm, why don’t you take a look at the site conditions first and then I’ll ask you. Let’s continue,” he said, and he and the group around him turned their attention back to the large chart.

  The colonel who had led us in motioned for us to follow him, and we went from the conference room to the door of an adjacent room. It was ajar, and a large number of temporary cables were running through it. The colonel gestured for us to remain in place.

  “There’s little time, so I’ll give you only a brief rundown of the situation. At nine o’clock this morning, eight armed terrorists took over the power plant’s nuclear reactor. They entered by hijacking a bus taking elementary school students on a plant tour, and in the course of occupying the reactor, they killed six plant security guards. Now they have thirty-five hostages: twenty-seven students and teachers from the bus, and eight plant engineers and operating personnel.”

  “Where are they from?” Lin Yun asked.

  “The terrorists? The Garden of Eden.”

  I knew about that international terrorist organization. Even an utterly benign idea could be dangerous if taken to an extreme, and the Garden of Eden was a classic example. It had originated as a group of technological escapists who had established an experimental micro-society on an island in the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to break free from modern technology and return to nature. Like many similar organizations throughout the world, it was closed off in the beginning, a community with no aggressive tendencies at all. But as time passed in seclusion, the mentality of these isolationists turned radical, and their flight from technology turned into a hatred of it, their removal from science into an opposition to it. Some extreme diehards left the island they called the Garden of Eden and, with a mission to obliterate all of the world’s modern technology and bring it back to nature, began engaging in terrorist activities. Unlike other stripes of terrorists, the Garden of Eden attacked targets that were bewildering to the public: they blew up the European Synchrotron, burned down the two largest genetics labs in North America, destroyed a large neutrino detection tank deep within a mine in Canada, and even assassinated three Nobel Physics laureates. The group found repeated success at research facilities where scientists were minimally defended, but this was its first attack on a nuclear reactor.