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In the moment they locked gazes, Cheng Xin understood that time had not defeated this man. What was at his core had not been worn away by the passing years, but had only become more prominent—like a rock revealed after the snow and ice had melted away.
“As I said, the cartridges are basically of ancient design, but the bullets are new. So new, in fact, that they might as well come from the future. The bullet is a superconducting container and the interior is a pure vacuum. A magnetic field suspends a small ball in the middle to prevent it from contacting the bullet’s body. The ball is made of antimatter.”
It was as the Elder said: In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.
It would be naïve to think of this connection as unidirectional. Recall the great law of reversible discovery: If you could see a low-entropy world, then that low-entropy world could also see you—it was only a matter of time. Thus, waiting for others to complete cleansing was dangerous.
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.
The dual-vector foil drifted in front of Singer. It was sealed in its package, crystal clear. Although it was an ordinary object, Singer liked it a lot. He didn’t like the expensive tools too much; they were too violent. He liked the unyielding tenderness displayed by the dual-vector foil, a kind of aesthetic that could turn death into a song.
“How far is the photoid from the Sun?” Cheng Xin asked. “There’s no photoid.” “Then what have you found?” Cao Bin gave a wretched laugh. “A slip of paper.”
The two ships resembled helium-filled airships of the Common Era: They looked immense, but the effective payload was just the small gondola hanging below the gasbags.
Finally, the drone stopped five meters from the target. The clear holographic video it transmitted allowed the crew of both ships to see this extraterrestrial object that had been shot at the Sun. A slip of paper.
If the world could not affect the slip in any way, the only solution was to let the world surround the slip and move about it.
Thus, an odd sight came to be: The slip was located in the center of Revelation, but the ship had no dynamical connection to the slip. The two simply happened to occupy the same space as both moved toward the Solar System at the same velocity.
“Answer a question first, please.” Ding Yi ignored Bai Aisi’s question and pointed at the desert lit by the westering sun. “Forget about the uncertainty principle for a minute and suppose everything is determinable. If you know the initial conditions, you can calculate and derive the conditions at any later point in time. Suppose an extraterrestrial scientist were given all data about the Earth several billion years ago. Do you think it could predict the existence of this desert solely through calculation?” Bai Aisi pondered this. “No. This desert wasn’t the result of the Earth’s natural
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The body of the dead crewman was also diffused into the plane, showing up as a gigantic, man-shaped glow. His body had been transformed into a slice on the plane without thickness. Though large in area, it had no volume.
“General, you once said, ‘I don’t think it’s anything. There’s nothing inside.’ You were right. That slip really wasn’t anything, and contained nothing. It’s only space, just like the space around us, which isn’t anything and contains nothing. But there’s a difference: It’s two-dimensional. It’s not a block, but a slice. A slice without thickness.”
“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.”
“You know what I’m thinking of? Needle-Eye’s pictures from Yun Tianming’s fairy tales,” 白 Ice said. Only a few people aboard Revelation knew about Yun Tianming’s secret message. Now, in a flash, they all understood the meaning of this detail in the stories. It was a simple metaphor, and there were no bearing coordinates because it was so direct. Yun must have thought he was taking a great risk to put such an obvious metaphor into his stories, yet he had to try because the message was so important.
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.
“The Earth Civilization Museum is on Pluto. A large portion of humanity’s precious artifacts are stored there. The museum is buried under the surface, however, and we are concerned that during the process of falling into the plane, these artifacts would be mixed together with the strata of the crust and their structures would be damaged. We’d like to ask you to carry some of the artifacts away from Pluto on Halo and scatter them in space so that they can fall into two dimensions separately. This way, their structures would be preserved without harm in two dimensions. I guess this counts as a
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Five hours ago, the advance warning system confirmed that 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. The process is estimated to take eight to ten days. At this moment, the collapse is ongoing and the rate and extent of collapse are rapidly growing. We have confirmed that the escape velocity for the collapsing region is the speed of light. An hour ago, the Federation Government
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Above the wheel was a diagram formed from white lines against the black surface of the monolith. Two curved arrows indicated the directions in which the wheel could be turned. Next to one of the arrows was a drawing of a half-open door, while the other bore a drawing of a shut door. Cheng Xin turned to survey the arrows on the ground pointing to the monolith. All the simple, clear, wordless instructions gave her a strange feeling, which AA voiced. “These things … I don’t think they’re intended for humans.”
Four centuries ago, while she had worked for the PIA, Cheng Xin had met Say, the UN secretary general, a few times at various meetings. The last time was at a PIA briefing. Wade was there, too. On a big screen, Cheng Xin had given Say a PowerPoint presentation about the Staircase Project. Say had sat there quietly and listened to the whole thing without asking any questions. Afterwards, Say walked next to Cheng Xin, leaned in, and whispered, “We need more people to think like you.”
“She was the one who thought of this first. She wanted to do something so that humanity would leave behind a legacy that could be preserved for a long time after our civilization was gone. She planned an unmanned ship filled with cultural artifacts and information about us, but it was deemed a form of Escapism, and the project halted with her death. Three centuries later, after the Bunker Project began, people remembered it. That was a time when people worried that the world was going to end any moment. The new Federation Government decided to build a tombstone at the same time that the Bunker
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I promised them that there was nothing that could be more bizarre and outrageous than what I’d gone through, and I would not laugh at them.
So they told me that, according to the most advanced theories and techniques in every field, based on extensive theoretical research and experimentation, through analysis and comparison of multiple proposals, they did find a way to preserve information for about one hundred million years. And they emphasized that this was the only method known to be practicable. Which is—” Luo Ji lifted the cane over his head, and as his white hair and beard danced in the air, he resembled Moses parting the Red Sea. Solemnly, he intoned, “—carving words into stone.”
What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. 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.
As the plane continued to rise, the people-cloud began to spread out in the opposite direction, like a curtain being lifted by an invisible hand. The scene reminded Cheng Xin of a massive flock of millions of birds that she had seen once. The flock had seemed like a unified organism changing shape in the dusk sky.
Four centuries ago, Ye Wenjie had stood on the peak of Red Coast Base and watched such a sunset during the last moments of her life. Her heart had struggled to beat like a zither string about to break, and a black fog had begun to cloud her eyes. On the western horizon, the Sun that was falling into the sea of clouds seemed to melt, and the Sun’s blood seeped into the clouds and the sky, creating a large crimson swath. She had called it humanity’s sunset. And now, the Sun really was melting, its blood seeping into the deadly plane. This was the last sunset.
The AI said that all official communications from the government had terminated when the Earth was flattened. The Federation Government couldn’t fulfill the promise to carry out its duties until the end of the Solar System after all.
Cheng Xin now recalled the strange feeling she had experienced each time she had looked at Van Gogh’s painting. Everything else in the painting—the trees that seemed to be on fire, and the village and mountains at night—showed perspective and depth, but the starry sky above had no three-dimensionality at all, like a painting hanging in space. Because the starry night was two-dimensional.
“Anywhere you like. You can go to any place in the Milky Way. In your lifetimes, you could probably get to the Andromeda Galaxy. Halo is capable of lightspeed flight. It is equipped with the world’s only curvature propulsion drive.”
“You don’t need any kind of preparation. This propulsion method relies on manipulating space, so there’s no hypergravity. Curvature propulsion drive online. System is operating within normal parameters. Local space curvature: twenty-three point eight. Forward curvature ratio: three point forty-one to one. Halo will enter lightspeed in sixty-four minutes, eighteen seconds.”
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.
In the end, she had committed another grave error. 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.
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.
Fate was such an odd thing: Four centuries ago, when she had gazed at this distant world through the telescope, she could never have imagined that she’d come here one day.
“Where are all these worlds?” 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.…
“True. I personally got to see three-dimensional space from four-dimensional space, but it’s not possible to see the two-dimensional world from three dimensions. This is because three-dimensional space has thickness, meaning that there is a dimension that could stop and scatter the light from four-dimensional space, making it visible from four dimensions. 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.”
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.
“A light tomb?” “It’s a reduced-lightspeed black hole produced by the trails of lightspeed ships. Something happened on World III that caused them to think that their coordinates had been exposed. They had no choice but to turn their world into such a black hole.” “We call such a place a black domain.” “Ah, good name. As a matter of fact, the people of World III initially called it a light curtain, but outsiders referred to it as a light tomb.”
“Lightspeed spaceflight was a tremendous milestone for humankind. It was like another Enlightenment, another Renaissance. Lightspeed flight fundamentally transformed human thinking and changed civilization and culture.”
“Has anyone in the new world thought of going to the end of the universe?” “Of course. Five ultimate spaceships have already been launched.” “Ultimate spaceships?” “Some call them doomsday ships. These lightspeed ships have no destination at all. They turn their curvature engines to maximum and accelerate like crazy, infinitely approaching the speed of light. Their goal is to leap across time using relativity until they reach the heat death of the universe. By their calculations, ten years within their frame of reference would equal fifty billion years in ours. As a matter of fact, you don’t
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“For us, the dark forest state is all-important, but it’s just a detail of the cosmos. If you think of the cosmos as a great battlefield, dark forest strikes are nothing more than snipers shooting at the careless—messengers, mess men, etc. In the grand scheme of the battle, they are nothing. You have not seen what a true interstellar war is like.”
The universal laws of physics are the most terrifying weapons, and also the most effective defenses.
“I know you can’t. Because you’re too kind. It’s very simple. The attacker must first transform themselves into life forms that can survive in a low-dimensional universe. For instance, a four-dimensional species can transform itself into three-dimensional creatures, or a three-dimensional species can transform itself into two-dimensional life. After the entire civilization has entered a lower dimension, they can initiate a dimensional strike against the enemy without concern for the consequences.”
The fish that dried out the sea went onto land before they did this. They moved from one dark forest to another dark forest.
“Dimensional strikes will eventually cause more and more of the universe to become two-dimensional, until one day the entire universe is two-dimensional. Similarly, the construction of fortifications will eventually cause all the reduced-lightspeed areas to connect, until the different lowered lightspeeds all average out: This new average will be the new c for the universe.
Death lines are usually the products of Zero-Homers.” “Zero-Homers?” “They’re also called Resetters. Maybe they’re a group of intelligent individuals, or a civilization, or a group of civilizations. We don’t know exactly who they are, but we’ve confirmed their existence. The Zero-Homers want to reset the universe and return it to the Garden of Eden.”
Later, Yifan would explain to her that she had experienced a “time vacuum.” The length of that moment could not be measured in time because, during that moment, time did not exist.
“I know you’re not afraid. I just want to tell you something in case we don’t … I know about your experience as the Swordholder. I want to let you know that you didn’t do anything wrong. Humanity chose you, which meant they chose to treat life and everything else with love, even if they had to pay a great price. You fulfilled the wish of the world, carried out their values, and executed their choice. You really didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I don’t know what happened to you after that, but you still didn’t do anything wrong. Love isn’t wrong. A single individual cannot destroy a world. If that world was doomed, then it was the result of the efforts of everyone, including those living and those who had already died.”
