The Supernova Era

by Liu Cixin

The girl ignored Xiaomeng completely and continued to munch noisily. Huahua went to switch to another location, but when he looked up at the map, he stopped in surprise. A dozen new lines had appeared, and more were being added, most of them from major cities. Some cities had two lines, and all of them pointed toward Beijing. The screen showed that more than fifty ports were calling (not all of them displayed on the map), and the number was ticking upward. The children stared in shock, and by the time they recovered enough to patch in another city, the map had more lines than it was possible to count. More than thirteen hundred ports calling, according to the display. And this was just one of the NIT’s ten web addresses, so what they had received was only the tip of the iceberg. All of the country’s children were calling Beijing.

So the supernova era finally begins.