Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“Take that with you,” Chen Xufeng said, waving a hand.

“We would never bring anything too fancy, Chief Chen. We know how you’d hate it. This is just some fruit as a token of our gratitude. I suppose you haven’t seen the way Chief Wen tears up whenever he mentions you. He calls you our loving parents reborn, you know.”

Once the visitor left, Chen Xufeng shut the door and returned to the coffee table. He tipped all the fruit out of the basket, picked up the check at the bottom, and slid it in his pocket.

The Senior Official and Lu Wenming eyed Chen Xufeng coldly. Clearly they hadn’t known any of this. Wen Xiong was the director general of Licheng Group, an enormous corporation spanning dining, long-distance travel, and many other services. Its start-up money had come from drug profits from Wen Xiong’s crime syndicate, which had made this city into a crucial hub in the Yunnan-Russia drug-trafficking route. With Wen Xiong’s successful expansion into aboveboard commerce, his underground business, drawing nourishment from the former, grew even more rapidly. The result in the hinterland city was the proliferation of drugs and the decline of public safety. And Chen Xufeng, the backstage supporter, was a powerful safeguard for its continued survival.

“You took payment in dollars? It must have gone to your son,” Bai Bing said cheerfully. “The money that’s paying for his American college education all came from Wen Xiong, after all…. Speaking of which, don’t you want to see what he’s doing right now, on the other side of the planet? That’s easy enough. It’s midnight in Boston right now, but the last two times I saw him, he wasn’t sleeping yet.” Bai Bing sent the point of view up into space, twirled the Earth 180 degrees, then zoomed in on North America. He found the city splendid with lights on the Atlantic coast, then located the apartment building so quickly it was clear he must have searched it before. The point of view entered an apartment bedroom, exposing an awkward scene: the boy in his room with two prostitutes, one white and one black.

“See how your son’s spending your money, Chief Chen?”

Furious, Chen Xufeng tipped the monitor screen-side down onto the briefcase.

The deeply stunned group once again sank into a long silence. At last Lu Wenming asked, “Why did you spend all this time just running away? Didn’t you consider using more… conventional means to free yourself from this predicament?”

“You mean, report to Discipline Inspection? Excellent idea, yes. I had the same idea at first, so I used the digital mirror to run a search on the Discipline Inspection leadership.” Bai Bing raised his head to look at Lu Wenming. “You can guess what I saw. I didn’t want to end up like your old college buddy here. In that case, could I go to the public prosecutors or the Anti-Corruption Bureau? I’m sure Director Guo and Chief Chang process the vast majority of serious accusations strictly by the law, and very carefully tiptoe around a small portion. For what I’d report, they’d join you in hunting me down the moment I told them. Where else could I go? Could I get the press to run an exposé? I think you’re all familiar with those certain key figures in the provincial news media groups. After all, weren’t they the ones who came up with the Senior Official’s shining résumé? The only difference between those reporters and prostitutes is that they sell a different body part. It’s all tied together in one big web, not a strand safe to touch. I didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“You could go to the Central Commission,” the Senior Official said neutrally, closely observing Bai Bing for a reaction.

Bai Bing nodded. “It’s the only choice left. But I’m a nobody. I don’t know anyone. I came to see Song Cheng first to find reliable connections, pursuit or no.” Bai Bing paused, then continued, “But this decision wasn’t an easy one. You’re all smart people. You know the ultimate consequences of doing this.”

“It means that this technology will be revealed to the world.”

“That’s right. Every bit of the fog that covers history and reality will be swept away. Anything and everything, in light and darkness, past and present, will be stripped naked and paraded before the light of day. At that time, light and dark will be forced into a deciding battle for supremacy unlike anything in history. The world’s going to descend into chaos—”

“But the end result will be the victory of the light,” said Song Cheng, who’d been silent until then. He walked in front of Bai Bing and looked straight at him. “Do you know how shadows derive their power? It comes from their very nature of secrecy. Once they’re exposed to the light, their power is gone. You see that with most cases of corruption. And your digital mirror is the burning brand that will tear the darkness open.”

The Senior Official exchanged looks with Chen and Lu.

Silence fell. On the superstring computer screen, the atomic-level digital mirror of Earth hovered placidly in space.

The Senior Official put a hand on Bai Bing’s shoulder. “Why don’t you move the time slider in the simulation farther forward?”

Bai Bing, Chen Xufeng, and Lu Wenming looked uncomprehendingly at the Senior Official.

“If we can accurately predict the future, we can change the present and control the course the future will take. We’d control everything—young man, don’t you think this is possible? Perhaps, together, we can shoulder the great duty of shaping the history to come.”

Bai Bing realized what he was saying and gave a pained smile, shaking his head. He stood and walked over to the computer. He clicked and dragged the time slider bar, extending its length beyond Now into the future. Then he said to the Senior Official, “Try it for yourself.”

INFINITE RECURSION

The Senior Official leapt toward the computer, quicker than anyone had ever seen him move, bringing to mind the dark image of a hungry eagle spotting a baby chick on the ground. He moved the mouse with practiced motions, sliding the time past the Now. In the instant that the slider entered the future, an error window popped up.

Stack Overflow

Bai Bing took the mouse from the Senior Official’s hand. “Let’s run a debugging program and trace that step by step.”

The simulation software returned to the state it had been in before the error and began to run line by line. When the real Bai Bing moved the slider past the present, the simulation Bai Bing in the digital mirror did the same. The debugging program immediately zoomed in on the digital mirror’s superstring computer display, allowing them to see that, on the simulated screen, the simulated simulated Bai Bing two layers down was also moving the slider past the present. Then the debugging program zoomed in on the superstring computer display in the third layer…. In this way the debugger progressed layer after layer deeper, each layer’s Bai Bing in the process of moving the slider past the present time, an infinite Droste image.

“This is recursion, a programming approach where a piece of code calls itself. Under normal circumstances, it finds its answer a finite number of layers down, after which the answer follows the chain of calls back to the surface. But here we see a function calling itself without end, forever unable to find an answer, in infinite recursion. Because it needs to store resources used by the previous layer on the stack at every call, it created the stack overflow we saw earlier. With infinite recursion, even a superstring computer’s ultimate capacity can be used up.”

“Ah.” The Senior Official nodded.

“As a result, even though the course of the universe was decided at the big bang, we still can’t know the future. For people who hate the determinist idea that everything comes from a chain of cause and effect, this probably provides some consolation.”