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Every set of broadcast coordinates would eventually be cleansed; it was just a matter of sooner versus later. One low-entropy entity might think this set of coordinates insincere, but on the millions upon millions of low-entropy worlds there were billions upon billions tasked with cleansing—someone would think it sincere. All low-entropy entities possessed the cleansing gene, and cleansing was an instinct. Also, cleansing was a very simple thing.
The next task was to put this now-useless set of coordinates into the data bank called the tomb.
Medium membrane was the least efficient communication membrane, also called primitive membrane. Most communications preferred long membrane, though it was said that even short membrane could be used to convey messages. If true, that would make the communicators akin to gods.
Singer had indeed heard of low-entropy worlds that possessed neither the hiding gene nor the hiding instinct, but this was the first time he had seen one.
This was how the Star-Pluckers’ coordinates were revealed. Nine time grains after the first three communications, another record appeared: The Star-Pluckers plucked their star again to send out another broadcast … a set of coordinates! The main core was certain that it was a set of coordinates. Singer looked for the star indicated by the coordinates and saw that it had also been cleansed, about thirty-five time grains ago.
Interesting. Very interesting. Why did whoever cleansed the dead three-star world not also cleanse the world of the Star-Pluckers?
But given the millions upon millions of worlds out there, someone would have noticed—Singer was just one who did. Even without Singer, some other low-entropy entity would have noticed them; it was just a matter of time. Or perhaps they had noticed them, but decided that a low-entropy group that didn’t possess the hiding gene wasn’t much of a threat, and cleansing them was more trouble than it was worth.
The chain of events painted an uneasy picture, a picture that indicated danger. The cleansing against the dead three-star world had happened twelve time grains ago, so the Star-Pluckers must have realized that their own position had been revealed. Their only choice was to shroud themselves in slow fog so that they would appear perfectly safe and no one would bother them. But they hadn’t. Maybe they didn’t have the ability?
Perhaps they didn’t want to shroud themselves. If that was so, that made the Star-Pluckers very dangerous; far more dangerous than the dead world. Hide yourself well; cleanse well.
Singer took a mass dot out of the magazine again, then realized that he couldn’t use a mass dot to cleanse the Star-Pluckers. Their planetary system had a different structure than the dead world’s system: it possessed blind corners. Using a mass dot might leave something behind, thereby wasting effort. He needed to use a dual-vector foil.
“Why did you give it to me without so much as asking a question?” “It’s not like this is very costly.” “But if we make too much use of this—” “It’s being used everywhere in the cosmos.” “Yes, that is true. But in the past, we’ve always been restrained.
The Elder began to riffle through Singer’s thoughts, and Singer shuddered. Very quickly, the Elder found the rumor in Singer’s mind.
But the home world couldn’t coexist with the fringe world. The fringe world had to be destroyed, lest the home world be destroyed by it. If the war couldn’t be won, then … “Has the home world decided to transform into two dimensions?” Singer asked. Of course, the Elder already knew the question.
The Elder did not answer, which was also an answer. If the rumor was true, then it was a great sorrow. Singer couldn’t imagine such a life. On the tower of values, survival ranked above all. When survival was threatened, all low-entropy entities could only pick the lesser of two evils.
As he continued to sing, Singer picked up the dual-vector foil with a force field feeler and carelessly tossed it at the Star-Pluckers.
“If nothing can affect it, then we have no way to bring it to the ship for further analysis.” 白 Ice laughed. “That’s a simple problem to solve. Have you forgotten the story told by Francis Bacon? ‘If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.’”
“Just as four-dimensional space collapses into three dimensions, three-dimensional space can collapse into two dimensions, with one dimension folding and curling into the quantum realm. The area of that slice of two-dimensional space—it only has area—will rapidly expand, causing more space to collapse.… We’re now in space that is falling toward two dimensions, and ultimately, the entire Solar System will follow. In other words, the Solar System will turn into a painting with no thickness.”
“Everyone, don’t be sad. No one will be able to escape from the Solar System, not even a bacteria or virus. All of us will become a part of this grand picture.” 白 Ice now looked calm and stoic.
“You know what I’m thinking of? Needle-Eye’s pictures from Yun Tianming’s fairy tales,” 白 Ice said.
The inability to decipher this key piece of information led humanity to place all their hopes in the Bunker Project.
For a sufficiently advanced civilization, a quick glance was sufficient. If humans could figure out the plan to use the gas giants as barriers, couldn’t observers from such advanced civilizations do so, as well? Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.
It was possible to distinguish every individual on Revelation: They were laid out side by side, holding hands, every single cell in their body exposed to space in two dimensions. They were the first to be painted into this grand painting of annihilation.
“The entire Solar System within the Kuiper Belt will collapse into two dimensions in eight to ten days.”
All of these design features meant that if Halo could find another Earthlike planet in outer space, it could act as a habitable base for the crew on the surface of the planet for a considerable amount of time. Maybe it was these characteristics of Halo that led to it being chosen for the artifact-rescuing mission to Pluto.
a dark forest strike has been initiated against our world. The attack takes the form of a dimensional strike, which will collapse the space around the Solar System from three dimensions to two dimensions. The result will be the complete destruction of all life.
At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.
A museum was built for visitors; a tombstone was built for the builders.
Everything in the three-dimensional world died after collapsing into two dimensions. Nothing survived in a painting with no thickness. Perhaps a two-dimensional universe could possess its own sun, planets, and life, but they would have to be created and operate under completely different principles.
Because the starry night was two-dimensional. How could Van Gogh have painted such a thing in 1889? Did he, having suffered a second breakdown, truly leap across five centuries and see the sight before them using only his spirit and delirious consciousness? Or, maybe it was the opposite: He had seen the future, and the sight of this Last Judgment had caused his breakdown and eventual suicide.
Engine Number One entered lightspeed about one hundred and fifty astronomical units from the Sun, and returned here after flying at lightspeed for a while. For the engine itself, the experiment lasted only ten minutes or so, but for us, it was three years before the engine returned.
“Engine Number One, which has already been tested, is installed in Halo.”
the plane was not completely flat, but undulating! A long wave slowly rolled across the plane. It was a similar wave in three-dimensional space that had allowed Blue Space and Gravity to find warp points to enter four-dimensional space. Even in places where there were no two-dimensional objects in the plane, the rippling wave was apparent. The waves were a visualization of two-dimensional space in three dimensions that occurred only when the two-dimensional space was large enough.
“That’s due to the fact that light slows down inside the trail left by Halo,” Luo Ji said. His image was growing distorted, but his voice still came through clearly. “Pluto is still moving. One of the Plutos you are seeing is the result of slow light. Once Pluto has moved outside of Halo’s trail, light traveling at standard speed provides you with a second image. That’s why you’re seeing double.”
In other words, the speed of light through vacuum is lowered within the trail of lightspeed ships.” “How much lower?” “Theoretically, it could be reduced to zero, but that’s not achievable in reality. But if you adjust the curvature ratio of Halo’s engine to the maximum, you can lower the speed of light in its trail down to exactly what we’ve been looking for: sixteen point seven kilometers per second.” “Then you’d have…” AA said, staring at Luo Ji. The black domain, Cheng Xin thought.
We calculated that it would take more than a thousand curvature propulsion ships to accomplish such a thing. If all these ships started near the Sun and spread out in every direction at lightspeed, the trails they produced would expand and connect to each other, forming a sphere that contained the entire Solar System. The speed of light within this sphere would be sixteen point seven kilometers per second—a reduced-lightspeed black hole, or a black domain.”
In the cosmos, the trail of a curvature propulsion drive could be a sign of danger, as well as a safety announcement. A trail far away from a world was the former; a trail that shrouded a world the latter. It was like a noose, indicating danger and aggression when held in the hand, but safety when wrapped around the holder’s own neck.
Cheng Xin now understood that of the three paths of survival presented to humanity—the Bunker Project, the Black Domain Plan, and lightspeed ships—only lightspeed ships were the right choice. Yun Tianming had pointed this out, but she had blocked it. If she hadn’t stopped Wade, Halo City might have achieved independence.
Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love. This time, no one could fix her mistake for her.
Early cosmology had presented a paradox: If the universe was infinite, then every spot in the universe would feel the cumulative effects of the infinite gravity exerted by an infinity of celestial bodies. Cheng Xin really did feel an infinite gravity now.
Cheng Xin’s only thought was to find Yun Tianming and tell him everything. In her mind, a journey of 287 light-years would take a long time, but the ship’s AI informed her that the trip would only take fifty-two hours in the ship’s frame of reference.
Halo had taken only fifty-two hours (by the ship’s frame of reference) to traverse the 286 light-years between the Solar System and the planetary system around DX3906, but it took eight full days to cross the sixty AU between the rim of the planetary system and Planet Blue at sub-light speeds.
Guan Yifan gently deposited AA on the ground and laughed. “A word of advice: In the future, no matter who you meet—human or otherwise—don’t ask for the location of their worlds. That’s a basic bit of manners in the cosmos—like how it’s impolite to ask a lady’s age.…
“So why haven’t people settled here?” “It’s too dangerous. Outsiders come here often.” “Outsiders? Extraterrestrials?” AA asked. “Yes. This is close to the center of the Orion Arm. Two busy shipping lanes flow through here.”
Yifan pointed at a spot in the sky where the stars were slightly less dense. “A few days ago we could see the Sun in that direction, much more clearly than you could see this star from the Earth. Of course, what we saw was the Sun of two hundred eighty-seven years ago. The Sun went out on the day the expedition left me here.”
That part of space is empty. The two-dimensional Sun and planets you saw were actually just the result of the release of energy when three-dimensional material collapsed into two dimensions. What you saw wasn’t two-dimensional material, only the refraction of electromagnetic radiation at the interface between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.
But two-dimensional space has no thickness, so light from three-dimensional space passes through it without hindrance. The two-dimensional world is completely transparent and cannot be seen.”
“There’s only one way to detect the presence of the two-dimensional Solar System from three-dimensional space: gravity. The gravity of the Solar System still has an effect, so, in that empty space ought to be detectable as an invisible source of gravity.” Cheng Xin and AA looked at each other thoughtfully. “Sounds like dark matter, doesn’t it?” Yifan laughed.
The First and Second Trisolaran Fleets never joined together. More than sixty years ago, there was a large-scale space battle near Taurus. It was brutal, and the resulting wreckage formed a new interstellar dust cloud. We know that one of the sides in the battle was the Second Trisolaran Fleet, but we don’t know who they were fighting against. We also don’t know how the battle ended.”
Hunter was not equipped with an ecological cycling system, and for long voyages passengers had to enter hibernation. Although Hunter was only a few percent of Halo’s volume, it was also a lightspeed ship equipped with a curvature engine.
Guan Yifan was filled with admiration for Halo’s design. He said that for Galactic humans, people who had made their home in the Milky Way, there was one quality about Solar System humans that they did not inherit and could not learn: enjoyment of life.
