Ball Lightning

by Liu Cixin

Electric blue bursts froze the rain into solid drops for an instant, forming dense strands of glittering crystal beads suspended between heaven and earth.

“Actually, son, it’s not hard to live a wonderful life. Listen to me. Choose a tough, world-class problem, one that requires only a sheet of paper and a pencil, like Goldbach’s Conjecture or Fermat’s Last Theorem, or a question in pure natural philosophy that doesn’t need pencil and paper at all, like the origin of the universe, and then throw yourself entirely into research. Think only of planting, not reaping, and as you concentrate, an entire lifetime will pass before you know it.

this is what life is, fragile and uncertain, unable to endure a puff of wind.”

I reached out a trembling hand to touch my father’s body. As I made contact with the gray-and-white surface of his shoulder, it felt like I was pushing through an extremely thin and extremely brittle shell. I heard a soft cracking, like a glass crackling when it is filled with boiling water in the winter. The two statues collapsed right before my eyes in a miniature avalanche.

I could not reveal my deepest secret to this unfeeling person before me. Society was plagued by stoicism in the face of the profound mysteries of the natural world: its existence was the bane of science. If science had less of that sort of person, who knows, maybe humanity would have reached Alpha Centauri by now!

“He’s the sort of person who, if he drops his keys, won’t look for them in the place the sound came from. Instead, he’ll get a piece of chalk and divide the room into a grid and then search section by section.…”

On the table before me, in the light of the guttering candles, the world’s sharpest sword lay quietly.

An astronomer once made an interesting observation: “Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.”

me understand that competition was meaningless. He didn’t posture or put on aggressive displays of power, but strove at all times to conceal his strength, as a sort of kindness, or a fear that his strength would hurt someone like me. He seemed always to be saying, “I’m really very sorry to make you feel inferior before her. It’s not intentional. Let’s work to change the situation together.”

Lin Yun, I was learning, had far fewer moral constraints than I did, in that she dared to act recklessly to achieve her goals.

He had not appeared so agile before, but the alcohol was evidently like lubricant for this Siberian.

It was like having a corpse buried deep in your backyard: though you think you’re free of it, you always know it’s there,

The direction of a man or woman’s life might be determined by the era they found themselves in. It’s impossible for someone to distance themselves very far from the times they live in.

Sometimes what we find hardest to tolerate in others is our own reflection.

On the roof of the guesthouse, I heard the explosions from the reactor. The sound rattled all of the glass in the building, but we heard it not through our ears, but in our very organs. It was so nauseating that it must have had infrasonic elements.

More than a decade after seeing my parents turned to ash, I stood among the ashes of children.

The control room floor had become a huge painting, a work of art describing life and death executed by ball lightning.

I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.

Soon the carriers were in front of them, partially obscured by the destroyers: three nuclear-powered floating cities, three death-bringing iron mountains whose outlines seemed beyond the work of human hands.

For the troops on the fishing boats, this massive fleet was a surreal sight, as if they had suddenly landed on a strange planet whose surface was covered in enormous iron castles.

Lin Yun seemed to have shrunk down. The old unshakable, goal-oriented major was now a fragile, helpless little girl. Was that who she really was?”

I’ll give you an example: a twenty megaton release of energy without selectivity would turn the region within a fifty kilometer radius to cinders, but if that energy only acted upon hair, it would be enough to turn everyone in the world bald.”

Under the moonlight across the vast sand of the Gobi, in a carpet of white temporary warehouses, three hundred strings spun their silent, endless dance.

Macro-fusion is quiet. In fact, the majority of eyewitnesses said that it was quieter than usual at the time of fusion, as if all other sounds in nature had been screened out so that the whole process could be conducted in an incomprehensible silence.

It was a cold sun, and even close by, no one could feel any heat from it.

from its ghostly depths, the blue sphere radiated a multitude of glittering small stars that turned immediately into objects of various sizes when they reached its surface. The onlookers were shocked when they realized what the objects were: tents, in a state of quantum superposition! They appeared entirely corporeal, not illusory. The largest was bigger than the original tent and hovered in the air like an enormous black shadow. The smallest was pebble-sized, but was complete and whole, like an exquisite model.

As on that birthday night in my youth, I was no longer the person I was the day before. I had lost too much—

Hatred born out of the lonely melancholy of a child who lost her mother doesn’t go away easily.

Ding Yi said that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, death is the process of transitioning from a strong observer to a weak observer, and then to a non-observer.

When I come to death’s door and open my eyes for the final time, all of my intellect and memories will be lost into the abyss of the past, and I will return to the pure feeling and fantasies of childhood. At that moment, I’m sure the quantum rose will smile at me.

It’s the seemingly unlikeliest of possibilities in science fiction stories that tend to become reality, so in the end, who knows?