Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3)

by Liu Cixin

Cheng Xin gazed up at the giant black columns reaching into space. They lifted up the domed sky and seemed to turn the universe into a Palace of Death. Is this the ultimate end for everything? In the sky, Cheng Xin could see the end of the columns. She pointed in that direction. “So the ships entered lightspeed at the end?” “That’s right. These are only about a hundred kilometers high. We’ve seen columns even shorter than these, presumably left by ships that entered lightspeed almost instantaneously.” “Are these the most advanced lightspeed ships?” “Maybe. But this is a rarely seen technique. 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.” “How?” “By moving the hour hand of the clock past twelve. Take spatial dimensions as an example. It’s practically impossible to drag a universe in lower dimensions back into higher dimensions, so maybe it’s better to work forward in the other direction. If the universe can be lowered into zero dimensions and then beyond, the clock might be reset and everything returned to the beginning. The universe might possess ten macroscopic dimensions again.”