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Have we encountered them before? Think about the Earth: It’s been careening through space for several billion years. Is it not possible that it had entered a four-dimensional fragment in the past?”
“Why are there bubbles at all? Why are there so many four-dimensional fragments in three-dimensional space?” “It’s a great mystery.” “Captain, I think it’s likely a dark secret.”
Their early exit was probably due to one of two reasons: one, the fragment had sped up in a direction opposite to the ships’ current heading. Two, the fragment was shrinking. The crews believed reason number two was more likely. Other than the data, they also remembered the answer from the Ring: When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also drying, and all the fish are going to disappear.
Guan and the science officers concluded that the lines were created by four-dimensional matter entering three-dimensional space. As the fragment shrank, four-dimensional matter dropped into three-dimensional space and decayed instantly.
By their calculations, a few tens of grams of four-dimensional matter could form a line stretching almost ten thousand kilometers in three dimensions.
A higher dimension existing in macro form decayed toward lower dimensions as inevitably as water fell over a cliff. The decay of four-dimensional space into three dimensions was the root cause of the fragment’s shrinking. But the lost dimension wasn’t truly lost: It simply curled up from the macroscopic to the microscopic and became one of the seven dimensions folded up within the quantum realm.
A month later, the hibernation ark and the two ships both embarked on their new voyages. The hibernation ark headed for the Solar System, while Blue Space and Gravity planned to divert around the four-dimensional fragment and then aim for a new target star system.
The two seeds of human civilization continued to drift into the depths of the starry sea. Whatever fate held in store for them, at least they were starting again.
During the Great Resettlement, many nations revived capital punishment, and this persisted even after the return from Australia. During these five years, many former ESF members were executed, even though many among the cheering crowd had also submitted applications to the ESF.
“Child, don’t be afraid. What will happen, will happen.” A lovely dream had ended: Dark forest theory had received its final confirmation with the annihilation of Trisolaris.
Trisolaris was shattered three years and ten months after the start of the Broadcast Era. No one had expected the attack to come so soon after the gravitational wave broadcast.
The attack on the Trisolaran system was identical to the attack on Luo Ji’s 187J3X1: A small object traveling near the speed of light struck one of the three stars in the system and destroyed it through its relativistically amplified mass.
While the locations of stars were relatively well known, humans had no information at all concerning spacecraft made by other intelligences—save for the Trisolaran Fleet. How many extraterrestrial spaceships were there? How densely were they deployed in space? How fast did they fly? What were their headings? There were no answers to these questions.
For the first time, humanity witnessed the extinction of a civilization, and realized such a fate might befall Earth at any moment. The threat of Trisolaris, a crisis that had lasted close to three centuries, dissipated overnight, yet what took its place was an even crueler universe.
Luo Ji had spent the Great Resettlement with the Resistance. Although he did not directly participate or lead any operations, he remained the spiritual center of the resistance fighters. The Earth Security Force and the droplets had made every effort to seek him out and kill him, but somehow, he had managed to evade them. Not even the sophons could locate him.
Sophon had known of the destruction of Trisolaris four years ago. Three days earlier, after the light from the explosion had reached the Earth, she had given a brief speech to the public. She recounted the death of Trisolaris in simple words, and made no denunciation or judgment of the cause—the gravitational wave broadcast initiated by two human ships.
At the time of the catastrophe, Trisolaris was in a stable era, orbiting around one of the three stars in the system at a distance of about 0.6 AU. The photoid struck the star and tore a hole through the photosphere and the convection zone. The hole was about fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, wide enough for four Earths laid side by side.
The fire tree acted like a claw extended from the sun, pulling Trisolaris down with each revolution. After about ten more revolutions, Trisolaris would fall into the sun itself, and the cosmic football game played between three suns would come to its end. But this sun wouldn’t survive long enough to see itself emerge as the victor.
The diminished fusion meant that the core radiation no longer exerted sufficient pressure against the weight of the solar shell, and the sun began to collapse. The dim shell fell into the core, triggering a final explosion. This was the sight witnessed by humankind three days ago on Earth.
Only a few extremely fortunate ships that happened to be behind the two other suns, which acted as shields, were safe. Thereafter, the remaining two suns formed a stable double-star system, but no life would witness the regular sunrises and sunsets. The cinders of the exploded star and the incinerated Trisolaris formed two vast accretion discs around the two suns, like two gray graveyards.
“Trisolaris was in a different situation from the Solar System. First, the broadcast only included the coordinates of Trisolaris. To discover the existence of Earth based on this requires examining the record of communications between the two worlds from three centuries ago. That will definitely happen, but it will take time. More important, from a distance, the Trisolaran system appears far more dangerous than the Solar System.”
“Dark forest attacks all share two qualities: one, they’re casual; two, they’re economical.”
“These attacks are not part of some interstellar war, but a matter of conveniently eliminating possible threats. By ‘casual,’ what I mean is that the only basis for the attack is the exposure of the target’s location. There will be no reconnaissance or exploration conducted against the target beforehand. For a supercivilization, such exploration is more expensive than a blind strike. By ‘economical,’ what I mean is that the attack will employ the least expensive method: using a small, worthless projectile to trigger the destructive potential already present in the target star system.”
Sophon smiled and shook her head. She spoke patiently, as though to a naïve child. “The whole universe is in darkness, but we remain lit. We’re a tiny bird tied to a branch in the dark forest, with a spotlight trained on us. The attack could come from any direction, at any time.”
“I’ve considered it. Here’s my question: If Trisolaris showed certain signs of being dangerous when observed from a distance, does there exist some sign that can be shown to the universe to indicate that a civilization is harmless and will not threaten anyone else, thus avoiding a dark forest strike? Can Earth civilization broadcast such a ‘safety notice,’ if you will, to the universe?”
Sophon looked up at Luo Ji with clear eyes—before then, she had never even dared to meet his gaze directly—and answered without any doubt: “
The Conversation of the Way of Tea gave the tiniest bit of hope for the expectant mass of humanity: It was possible to broadcast a safety notice to the cosmos to avoid dark forest strikes.
the bodies of modern humans had changed considerably from the past. They were more flexible and agile compared to past generations, but were no longer adapted to boring, repetitious physical labor. And opening up wastelands, even in agrarian times, was an extremely physically demanding task.
Faced with the omnipresent threat of death and the lure of a different state of existence, religion once again took center stage in social life.
Historically, the discovery of the dark forest state of the universe was a giant blow to most major religions, especially Christianity. In fact, the damage to religion was evident even early on during the Crisis Era. When Trisolaran civilization was discovered, Christians had to wrestle with the fact that the aliens were not in the Garden of Eden, and God never mentioned them in Genesis.
The two miracles, the creation of dark forest deterrence and the initiation of the universal gravitational wave broadcast, shared many characteristics:
And so the Earth turned into a giant church, a planet of prayer. Everyone prayed with unprecedented faith for another act of salvation.
Gradually, as humans begged and begged in a cultural environment of waxing religiosity, the image of the Trisolarans transformed again. Since they possessed the secret of broadcasting the safety notice, they were angels of salvation sent by God. The only reason that humanity had not yet received such salvation was due to insufficient expression of their faith. And so the pleas directed at Sophon turned into prayers, and the Trisolarans once again became gods.
“Even if salvation were to arrive now, it would be meaningless,” said Bi Yunfeng. “We have no shred of dignity left.” He had once been one of the candidates for the Swordholder position, as well as the commander of the Earth Resistance Movement’s branch in Asia.
Like a moody child, human society’s attitude toward Blue Space, which had already vanished in the depths of space, transformed again. From an angel of salvation, this ship again turned into a ship of darkness, a ship of devils. It had hijacked Gravity and cast a sinful spell of destruction on two worlds. Its crimes were unforgivable.
The baby that was human civilization had been abandoned in a sinister, terrifying dark forest; it cried, hoping for a mother’s touch. Cheng Xin was the perfect target for this yearning, mother’s love incarnate.
No one could have predicted that nearly three centuries later, the Staircase Project would bring a ray of hope to an Earth mired in despair. It would probably forever remain a mystery how the Trisolarans managed to intercept and capture the probe carrying Yun Tianming’s brain.
Yun Tianming had appeared at the exact moment when Earth civilization seemed to be bereft of hope. When the news became public, people’s first reaction was that their prayers had been answered: The angel of salvation had finally arrived.
Cheng Xin noticed the guardrails crisscrossing the hall, installed to help people move around in weightlessness. The guardrails were mainly made of stainless steel, though some were made from copper. Observing their surfaces, bearing the marks of countless hands through more than two centuries of service, Cheng Xin was reminded of the deep ruts left in front of ancient city doors.
“These were from the beginning of the Great Ravine,” one of the PDC officials traveling with her said. That had been a brief, despotic age, when the whole world had been militarized before everything, from faith to life, collapsed.… But why had these posters been kept until now? To remember, or to forget?
Cheng Xin felt as though she was passing through strata of history. Each ring used different construction material from the rings before it, and looked newer. Each ring’s method of construction and decorative style formed a time capsule of an age: the repressive militaristic uniformity of the Great Ravine; the optimism and romanticism of the latter half of the Crisis Era; the hedonistic freedom and indolence of the Deterrence Era.
they would orbit the Sun in synchrony with the planets, staying within their shadows. The plan called for a total of fifty space cities, each of which was capable of housing about fifteen million individuals. Specifically, twenty cities would be shielded by Jupiter, twenty by Saturn, six by Uranus, and four by Neptune.
Since the space cities would not be satellites of the gas giants, but would have to stay in close proximity of the planets, they would fall toward the planets, unless propulsion systems were installed to counteract gravity and maintain their distance from them.
The Bunker Project was to be engineered entirely with resources from the Solar System outside the Earth, mainly from the satellites of the four Jovian planets and the rings of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. There should be no drain on Earth resources or its economy.
Cheng Xin said, “Curvature—” She finished her sentence with her eyes: propulsion? AA nodded. Her eyes said, Yes, curvature propulsion!
Later, there was a more moderate and localized proposal for taking advantage of curved space for navigation. Supposing a spaceship could somehow iron flat the space behind it and decrease its curvature, the more curved space in front of it would pull it forward. This was the idea of curvature propulsion.
“Snow-wave paper,” she whispered. AA’s eyes lit up again. The flame of excitement burned even brighter than before. “There’s really nothing else that will flatten this?” “No. Only the obsidian from He’ershingenmosiken will do the job. I was hoping to get the obsidian slab back from Needle-Eye.”
A scroll was a rolled-up sheet of paper with curvature; a section was pulled out and ironed flat, decreasing the curvature. This was clearly a hint for the difference in space in front of and behind a ship driven by curvature propulsion. It couldn’t mean anything else.
Yun Tianming was telling the Earth that the Trisolaran ships used space curvature drives. This was an extremely important piece of strategic intelligence. Out of all the possible paths for researching lightspeed spaceflight, curvature propulsion was confirmed to be feasible. Like a beacon in dark night, this indicated the right direction for further development of human spaceflight technology.
She was thinking of Tianming, of the man who struggled alone in the long night of outer space and an eerie, sinister alien society. To convey his important message to the human race, he must have racked his brain until he had devised such a metaphorical system, and then spent ages in his lonely existence to create over a hundred fairy tales and carefully disguise the intelligence report in three of those stories.
