Ball Lightning Sneak Peek

by Liu Cixin

  My research made swift progress. Since the precision required for detecting atmospheric disturbances was far less than what was necessary to detect bubbles, the optical detection system could be used in its present state, and its detection range correspondingly increased by an order of magnitude. What I needed to do was to use an appropriate mathematical model to analyze existing images of atmospheric disturbances, and recognize which ones might give rise to tornadoes. (Later, specialists in the field would call such disturbances “eggs.”) In my early days doing ball lightning research, I had put an enormous amount of energy into mathematical modeling. It was a road I had no desire to look back upon, but at least it seemed like it wasn’t a total waste of time. I had the skills to construct models in fluid and gas dynamics, skills that were immensely useful in my present research, allowing the software portion of the tornado detection system to be completed quite quickly.

  We tested the system in Guangdong Province, a frequent site for tornadoes, and successfully predicted several of them, one of which grazed a corner of urban Guangzhou. The system gave ten- to fifteen-minute advance warnings—enough time to safely evacuate personnel before the tornado’s arrival, but not long enough to avert other losses. But in atmospherics circles, this was already a remarkable achievement. Besides, according to the principles of chaos theory, long-term prediction of tornadoes was basically impossible anyway.

  Time moved quickly while I was immersed in my work, and, in the blink of an eye, a year had passed. In that year, I attended the World Meteorological Congress, held once every four years, and was nominated for the International Meteorological Organization Prize, known as the Nobel in Meteorology. In part because of my academic background, I ultimately didn’t win, but I still attracted the attention of the meteorological world.

  To demonstrate the achievements of tornado research, a conference sponsored by the organization—the International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones—specifically selected Oklahoma to host. The region, known as “Tornado Alley,” was the setting for the movie Twister, which depicted tornado researchers.

  The main motivation for the trip was to see the world’s first practical tornado forecasting system. Our car drove along the flat plains, Oklahoma’s three most common sights alternating outside the window: livestock farms, oil fields, and vast wheat fields. When we had almost reached our destination, my travel companion, Dr. Ross ordered the windows covered.

  “I have to apologize. We’re entering a military base,” he said.

  I felt crushed. Was I really unable to escape from the military and army bases? I got out of the car and noticed that most of the buildings around us were temporary structures, along with several radar antennas in large radomes. I could also see a vehicle carrying a device that resembled a telescope, but was no doubt actually a high-powered laser transmitter, probably for atmospheric optical observation. In the control room was a familiar sight: a row of dark-green military computers and operators wearing fatigues. The only thing a little unfamiliar was the large, high-resolution plasma display, usually unaffordable back home, where projection screens were used instead.

  The big screen displayed images of atmospheric disturbances captured by the optical observation system, a technology transfer that had netted Gao Bo’s Lightning Institute a nice sum. What appeared as ordinary disturbance images on the small screen were quite impressive when blown up to this size, chaotic turbulence like a group of crystalline pythons dancing wildly, tangling into balls, and then flinging out again in all directions, disorienting and frightening at the same time.

  “You look at the air and it seems so empty, not a crazy world like this,” someone exclaimed.

  There’s even wilder stuff you haven’t seen yet, I said to myself, and then looked closely at the chaotic turbulence on the screen, trying to get a glimpse of a macro-electron bubble. I couldn’t, of course, but there was definitely more than one of them hiding in such a large area, only recognizable by the still-classified pattern-recognition software.

  “Will we be seeing any eggs today?” I asked.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Ross replied. “Tornadoes have been common in Oklahoma and Kansas lately. Just last week, 124 tornadoes occurred in Oklahoma in the space of a single day. A new record.”

  So as not to waste time, our hosts had set up a conference room on the base so the symposium could take place while we waited for the eggs to appear. Before the attendees had even taken their seats, an alarm sounded. The system had found an egg! We rushed back to the control center, but the screen still rolled with the same translucent chaos, little different from how it was before. The egg had no fixed shape; it was only discernible through the model recognition software, which then marked it on the image with a red circle.

  “It’s 130 kilometers away, at the border of Oklahoma City. It’s very dangerous,” Ross said.

  “How long until it produces a tornado?” someone asked nervously.

  “Around seven minutes.”

  “It will be difficult to evacuate all personnel,” I said.

  “No, Dr. Chen. We’re not doing any evacuation!” Ross said loudly. “This is the surprise we want to give you today!”

  A small square region on the big screen displayed a missile roaring off the launcher and into the sky. The camera tracked it, showing its thin white tail painting a giant parabola across the sky. Roughly one minute later, the missile crossed the peak of the parabola and began to descend, and after one more minute, at an elevation of roughly five hundred meters, it exploded in a blistering fireball that looked like a blooming rose against the sky. In the section of the screen showing the atmospheric disturbance, a rapidly expanding crystal ball appeared at the spot marked by the red circle egg. Then the transparent sphere transformed and disappeared, its position filled in by the chaos of the disturbance. The red circle vanished, and the alarm ceased. Dr. Ross declared that the egg had been annihilated. This was the ninth egg wiped out by the “Tornado Hunter” system that day.

  Dr. Ross explained: “You all know that tornadoes are usually born out of strong thunderstorms. When the hot, wet air of a thunderstorm rises and crosses the upper layer of cold air, it gradually cools. Water vapor condenses into raindrops or hailstones, which are borne downward when the cooled air begins to sink, only to be pushed back up again by factors like the warm lower layer and the rotation of the Earth. Ultimately, these layers form a tornado. The process of tornado formation is unstable, but the sinking of the cold air represents a critical energy flow. This mass of sinking cold air is the heart of the egg. The Tornado Hunter system fires a missile carrying an oil firebomb that detonates in a precision strike on the sinking cool air, instantly releasing an immense amount of heat energy that increases the temperature of the mass of air and breaks the tornado’s formation. It strangles it in the cradle.

  “As we’re all aware, the technology for missile strikes and oil firebombs is not new. This isn’t really a precision strike, either, since the precision we require is a level less than is used for military uses. That lessens the cost. What we’re using are all obsolete, decommissioned missiles. The key technology in the Tornado Hunter system is Dr. Chen’s atmospheric optical detection system. That’s the innovation that allows us to determine the advance positioning of the egg. It’s what makes the artificial destruction of tornadoes possible. Let us pay him our deep respect!”

  * * *

  The next day, Oklahoma City, the state capital, made me an honorary citizen of the city. When I accepted the citation from the governor, a young blonde woman presented me with the Oklahoma state flower, mistletoe, which I had never seen before. She told me that a tornado had taken her parents the previous year. It had been a terrifying night. An F3 tornado had ripped off the roof of her house and flung everything inside more than a hundred meters into the air. She had only survived because she had landed in a pond. Her account reminded me of the night I lost my parents, and gave me a sense of pride in my work. It was this kind of work tha
t finally rid me of the shadow of ball lightning, and let me start on a new life in the sun.

  After the ceremony, I congratulated Dr. Ross. Even though I had been the one to make the breakthrough in forecasting tornadoes, they had been the ones who ultimately conquered them.

  “It was TMD that finally conquered tornadoes,” he said absently.

  “Theater missile defense?”

  “That’s right. It was adopted practically without modification. It was only a matter of replacing the system’s incoming missile identification module with your egg positioning system. TMD seems purpose-built to destroy tornadoes.”

  I realized then that the two were indeed similar: they both automatically identified targets, and then used guided missiles for precise interception.

  “My original field of study had nothing to do with meteorology. I was in charge of TMD and NMD software systems for many years. When I realized that the weapons systems I’d developed could be used to benefit society, I felt a joy I’d never had before. Dr. Chen, you have my special thanks for that.”

  “I feel the same way,” I said sincerely.

  “Swords can be made into plowshares,” Ross said. But then in a much lower voice, he added, “But some plowshares can be cast back into swords. Weapons researchers like us sometimes have to accept blame and loss for this in the course of carrying out our duties.… Can you understand that, too, Dr. Chen?”

  I had heard similar words from Gao Bo, and so I nodded silently, but my mind grew wary. When he said “us,” did he include me? Did they really know about the work I used to do?

  “Thank you. You have my sincere gratitude,” Ross said. He was looking at me with a peculiar expression, which betrayed a glimpse of sorrow. Later I realized I was thinking too much, and that his words had nothing to do with me. I only learned later what his expression really meant.

  I was among the final group of visiting scholars to go abroad. Ten days after I returned home, war broke out.

  ZHUFENG

  Life grew tense. Apart from daily attention to the war, work also took on a new level of meaning, since the joys and cares that had previously occupied a primary position in my life no longer seemed so important.

  One day I received a telephone call from the military instructing me to attend a meeting. A naval ensign would come to pick me up by car.

  As the war escalated, I sometimes thought about the ball lightning weapons project. These were unusual times, and if the research base needed me to go back, I would abandon all of my personal feelings and do my utmost to fulfill my duty, but I never heard from them. The war news I read never had anything related to ball lightning weapons. This should have been the best opportunity for them to come out, but it was as if they had never even existed. I tried calling the base, but found that all their numbers were disconnected. Ding Yi was similarly nowhere to be found. All that I had been through was like a dream, and it had left no traces behind.

  It was only after I arrived at the military meeting and discovered that most of the people there, none of whom I recognized, were from the navy that I realized that this had nothing to do with ball lightning weapons. Everyone looked grim, and the atmosphere of the meeting was depressive.

  “Dr. Chen, first off we’d like to explain to you something that happened in naval combat yesterday,” a senior colonel in the navy said, getting down to business without any opening remarks. “You don’t need to know the specific location and circumstances of the battle, so I’ll only tell you the pertinent information. At around three p.m. yesterday, the Zhufeng carrier battle group was attacked by a large number of cruise missiles—”

  My heart jumped when I heard the name.

  “—Forty of them. The group immediately switched on defensive systems, but they soon discovered the method of attack was peculiar: under ordinary circumstances, cruise missiles attacking a sea target will fly close to the surface of the ocean to break through anti-missile defenses, but these flew at an altitude of one thousand meters, as if they didn’t care about being shot down. And sure enough, the missiles didn’t directly attack targets in the group. Instead, all of them exploded outside our defensive perimeter at altitudes of five hundred to one thousand meters. The force of each explosion was small, just enough to disperse a large quantity of white powder. Please have a look at the recording.”

  Empty sky appeared on the projection screen. There were lots of clouds, and it looked about to rain. Then lots of small white dots appeared and gradually expanded, as if dripping dozens of drops of milk onto the water.

  “Those are the cruise missiles’ explosion points,” the senior colonel said, pointing at the expanding dots on the screen. “What’s strange is that we really didn’t know what the enemy was doing. That white material—”

  “Were there any other unusual signs at that location?” I interrupted, a foreboding fear rising in my heart.

  “What do you mean? There was nothing that seemed relevant.”

  “Unrelated, then. Can you take a look?” I asked urgently.

  The colonel and several other officers exchanged glances, and a bespectacled lieutenant colonel said, “An enemy early warning aircraft flew through that airspace. That doesn’t seem unusual.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Hmm … the enemy emitted a high-energy laser at that region of the ocean from a low-orbit satellite, perhaps to coordinate submarine detection with the plane.… Is that related to the missile attack under discussion? Dr. Chen, are you okay?”

  I hope to God it’s submarine detection. May the lord make it submarine detection. My heart prayed in a panic as I said, “Not really.… That white powder, do you have a rough idea of what it was?”

  “I was about to tell you,” the senior colonel said as he flipped the scene on the screen. Now it was an image formed from a small number of brilliant colors, like a well-used painter’s palette. “This is a false-color infrared image of that region of space. See, the explosion points are rapidly turning into low-temperature zones.” He pointed at a patch of brilliant blue, and said, “So we guess that the white powder might be a highly efficient refrigerant.”

  I felt like I had been struck by lightning, and the world had turned upside down. I had to grip the table to bring myself to earth. “Hurry! Get the fleet out of there!” I said to the senior colonel, while pointing at the screen.

  “Dr. Chen, this is a recording. The event took place yesterday.”

  Dazed by the facts, I was struck dumb for a while before I realized what he meant.

  “This was recorded on Zhufeng. Have a look.”

  Sea and sky appeared on screen. A small escort destroyer flickered in and out at one corner. A thin funnel took shape in the sky, its tail extending down toward the ocean as a long thin thread. Upon contact with the surface, the thread turned white as it began sucking up water. At first this thread connecting sea and sky was narrow, and it rocked and swayed gently, and seemed almost to snap in half at its thinnest point. But it soon grew thicker, turning from thin gossamer hanging from the sky into a towering column standing on the water, holding up the heavens. It turned black, with only the swirling seawater on its surface still reflecting the sun.

  I had thought of this before, in fact, but didn’t believe anyone would do it.

  The disturbances capable of giving birth to a tornado—the eggs—were very numerous in the atmosphere. The sinking cold air at the heart of the egg could be warmed to stop its descent, thereby wiping out the egg that would evolve into a tornado, like I had seen in Oklahoma. Similarly, if a coolant were used to further chill that mass of air, “incubating” an egg that would otherwise have disappeared, it could be spurred to form a tornado. Since the eggs were so plentiful, under appropriate climatic conditions, tornadoes could be manufactured at will. The technological key was in finding potential eggs, and my tornado forecasting system made that possible. Even worse, the system could be used to find opportunities for two eggs nearby, or even superimposed. If multiple eggs were in
cubated at once, it could focus atmospheric energy into the generation of super-tornadoes that had never existed in nature.

  Now before me was one of those tornadoes, more than two kilometers in diameter, twice as large as any naturally occurring tornado. The largest tornadoes in nature were F5s, and their size had won them the name “the hand of God.” But this artificially incubated tornado was at least an F7.

  On screen, the tornado crept toward the right. Zhufeng was clearly executing an emergency turn in an attempt to avoid it. Tornadoes usually advance in a straight line at a speed of around sixty kilometers per hour, or roughly the same as the carrier’s top speed. If Zhufeng could accelerate and turn quickly enough, it had a chance of missing it.

  But just then, in the air on either side of the huge black column, two more white threads dropped down and then swiftly thickened and evolved into another two huge black columns.

  The three super-tornadoes were separated by less than their diameter, not even a thousand meters. Together they formed a nearly eight-kilometer-wide, slowly approaching earth-to-sky fence of death. Zhufeng’s fate was sealed.

  The tornado columns now filled the entire screen. Mist from the roiling waves surged ahead of them like an approaching waterfall, the columns themselves the dark abyss behind. The picture jostled violently, and then cut out.

  As the senior colonel explained, a tornado had crossed Zhufeng’s front half, and, just like the lieutenant colonel had predicted on that small island, its deck snapped. Half an hour later it sank, carrying more than two thousand officers and sailors, including their captain, to a watery grave. As the tornadoes neared, the captain had issued a decisive order to fully seal off the two pressurized water reactors to reduce any nuclear leak to the minimum possible, but this left Zhufeng dead in the water. Two escort destroyers and one supply ship were also sunk. When the super-tornadoes had swept the ships, one of them continued onward for two hundred kilometers before expiring, twice as far as any tornado had traveled in recorded history. During its journey, it retained enough power to scour an island fishing village and kill more than one hundred people, including women and children.