Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

“You mean… the digital mirror can simulate the future now?”

Bai Bing nodded listlessly. “Just the very distant future. I thought of a completely new algorithm last night. It avoids the relatively near future, which allows it to sidestep the disruption in the causal chain resulting from knowledge of the future changing the present. I jumped the mirror directly into the far future.”

“How far?”

“Thirty-five thousand years later.”

“What’s society like, then?” Song Cheng asked cautiously. “Is the mirror having its effect?”

Bai Bing shook his head. “The digital mirror won’t exist by that time. Society won’t either. Human civilization already disappeared.”

Song Cheng was speechless.

On the screen, the viewing angle descended rapidly, coming to a stop above a city surrounded by desert.

“This is our city. It’s empty, already dead for two thousand years.”

The first impression the dead city gave was of a world of squares. All the buildings were perfect cubes, arrayed in neat columns and rows to form a perfectly square city. Only the clouds of sandy dust that rose at times in the square grid streets prevented one from mistaking the city for an abstract geometrical figure in a textbook.

Bai Bing maneuvered the viewing angle to enter a room in one of the cube-shaped edifices. Everything in it had been buried by countless years of sand and dust. On the side with the window, the accumulated sand rose in a slope, already high enough to touch the windowsill. The surface of the sand bulged in places, perhaps indicating buried appliances and furniture. A few structures like dead branches extended from one corner; that was a metal coatrack, now mostly rust. Bai Bing copied part of the view and pasted it into another program, where he processed away the thick layer of sand on top, revealing a television and refrigerator rusted down to the bare frames, as well as a writing desk. A picture frame, long fallen over, lay on the desk. Bai Bing adjusted the viewing angle and zoomed in so that the small photo in the frame filled the screen.

It was a family portrait of three, but the three people in the photo were practically identical in appearance and dress. One could guess their gender only by the length of hair, and age only by height. They wore matching outfits similar to Mao suits, orderly and stiff, buttoned to the collar. When Song Cheng looked closer, he found that their features still displayed some variation. The effect of indistinguishability had come from their identical expressions, a sort of wooden serenity, a sort of dead graveness.

“Everyone in the photos and video fragments I could find had the same expression on their face. I haven’t seen any other emotion, certainly not tears or laughter.”

“How did it end up like this?” Song Cheng asked, horrified. “Can you look through the historical records they left?”

“I did. The course of history after us goes something like this: The age of the mirror will start in five years. During the first twenty years, digital mirrors will only be used by law enforcement, but they’ll already be substantially affecting human society and causing structural changes. After that, digital mirrors will seep into every corner of life and society. History calls it the beginning of the Mirror Era. For the first five centuries of the new era, human society still gradually develops. The signs of total stagnation first appear in the mid-sixth century ME. Culture stagnates first, because human nature is now as pure as water, and there is nothing left to depict and express. Literature disappears, then all of the humanities. Science and technology will grind to a standstill after them. The stagnation of progress lasts thirty thousand years. History calls that protracted period the Middle Age of Light.”

“What happens after?”

“The rest is straightforward. Earth runs out of resources, and all the arable land is lost to desertification. Meanwhile, humanity still doesn’t have the technology to colonize space, or the power to excavate new resources. In those five thousand years, everything slowly winds down…. In the era I showed you, there are still people living on all the continents, but there’s really not much to see.”

“Ah…” The sound Song Cheng made resembled the Senior Official’s slow sigh. A long time passed before his shaking voice could ask, “Then… what do we do? Do we destroy the digital mirror right now?”

Bai Bing took out two cigarettes, handing one to Song Cheng. He lit his own and drew deeply, blowing the smoke at the three dead faces on the screen. “I’m definitely destroying the digital mirror. I only kept it around until now so you can see. But nothing we do now matters. That’s one bit of consolation: everything that happens afterward has nothing to do with us.”

“Someone else created a digital mirror too?”

“The theory and technology for it are both out there, and according to superstring theory, the number of viable initialization parameter sets is enormous, but still finite. If you keep going down the list, you’ll eventually run into that one set…. More than thirty thousand years from now, till the last days of civilization, humanity will still be thanking and worshiping a guy named Nick Kristoff.”

“Who is he?”

“According to the historical records: a devout Christian, physicist, and inventor of the digital mirror software.”

MIRROR ERA

FIVE MONTHS LATER, AT THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

CENTER OF EXPERIMENTAL COSMOLOGY

When the radiant sea of stars appeared on one of the fifty display screens, all of the scientists and engineers present erupted into cheers. Five superstring computers stood here, each simulating ten virtual machines, for a total of fifty sets of big bang simulations running day and night. This newly created virtual universe was the 32,961st.

Only one middle-aged man remained unmoved. He was heavy-browed and alert-eyed, imposing in appearance, the silver cross at his breast all the more striking against his black sweater. He made the sign of the cross, and asked:

“Gravitational constant?”

“6.67 times 10–11!”

“Speed of light in a vacuum?”

“2.998 times 105 kilometers per second!”

“Planck’s constant?”

“6.626 times 10–34!”

“Charge of electron?”

“1.602 times 10–19 coulombs!”

“One plus one?” He gravely kissed the cross at his chest.

“Equals two! This is our universe, Professor Kristoff!”

THE CONCERT

The concert held to close the final session of the United Nations was a depressing one.

A utilitarian attitude toward the body, dating back to bad precedents set at the start of the century, had been on the rise; countries assumed the UN was a tool to achieve their interests, and interpreted its charter to their own benefit. Smaller nations challenged the authority of the permanent members, while each permanent member believed it deserved more authority within the organization, which lost all authority of its own as a result. A decade on, all efforts at a rescue had failed, and everyone agreed that the UN and the idealism it represented no longer applied to the real world. It was time to be rid of it.

All heads of state assembled for the final session, to observe a solemn funeral for the UN. The concert, held on the lawn outside the General Assembly building, was the final item on the program.

It was well after sunset. This was the most bewitching time of day, the handover from day to night when the cares of reality were masked by the growing dusk. The world was still visible under the last light from the setting sun, and on the lawn, the air was thick with the scent of budding flowers.