Лю Цысинь - Hold Up the Sky

Li Bai exchanged looks with Bigtooth. Both burst into laughter. “Esteemed god, I told you from the start, these are tricky bug-bugs,” said Bigtooth. “A moment of carelessness and you’ll fall into one of their traps.”

“Hahahaha, tricky indeed, but entertaining as well,” Li Bai said to Bigtooth, before turning toward Yi Yi with cold amusement. “Did you really think I came here to admit defeat?”

“You could not surpass the pinnacle of human poetry. That’s a fact.”

Abruptly, Li Bai raised a finger and pointed to the river. “How many ways are there to walk to the riverbank?”

Yi Yi looked uncomprehendingly at Li Bai for a few seconds. “It seems… there’s only one.”

“No, there’s two. I can also walk in this direction,” Li Bai indicated the direction opposite from the river, “and keep going, all the way around the Devouring Empire, crossing the river from the other side to reach this bank. I can even make a full circuit around the Milky Way and return here. With our technology, it’s just as easy. Technology can surpass anything! I am now forced to take the second path!”

Yi Yi pondered this for a long time before shaking his head in bewilderment. “Even if you have the technology of a god, I can’t think of a second path to surpassing Li Bai.”

Li Bai stood. “It’s simple. There are two ways to surpass Li Bai. The first is to write poems that surpass his. The other is to write every poem!”

Yi Yi looked even more confused, but Bigtooth beside him seemed to have had an epiphany.

“I will write every five-character-line and seven-character-line poem possible. They were Li Bai’s specialty. In addition, I’m going to write down every possible lyrical poem for the common line formats! How do you not understand? I’m going to try every possible permutation of Chinese characters that fits the format rules!”

“Ah, magnificent! What a magnificent undertaking!” Bigtooth crowed, forgetting all dignity.

“Is this hard?” Yi Yi asked ignorantly.

“Of course, incredibly so! The largest computer in the Devouring Empire might not be able to finish the calculations before the death of the universe!”

“Surely not,” Yi Yi said, skeptical.

“Of course yes!” Li Bai nodded with satisfaction. “But by using quantum computing, which you’re still a long way from mastering, we can complete the calculations in an acceptable length of time. Then I’ll have written every single poem, including everything that’s been written in the past, and, much more importantly, everything that may be written someday in the future! This will naturally include poems that surpass Li Bai’s best works. In fact, I’ve ended the art of poetry. Every poet from now on to the destruction of the universe, no matter how great, will be no more than a plagiarist. Their works will turn up in a search of my enormous storage device.”

Bigtooth suddenly gave a guttural cry, his gaze on Li Bai changing from excitement to shock. “An enormous… storage device? Esteemed god, do you mean to say, you’re going to… save all the poems the quantum computer writes?”

“What’s the fun in deleting everything right after I write it? Of course I’m going to save them! It will be a monument to the artistic contributions my race has made to this universe!”

Bigtooth’s expression changed from shock to horror. He extended his bulky claws and bent his legs, as if trying to kneel to Li Bai. “You mustn’t, esteemed god,” he cried. “You mustn’t!”

“What’s got you so scared?” Yi Yi regarded Bigtooth with astonishment.

“You idiot! Don’t you know that atomic bombs are made of atoms? The storage device will be made of atoms too, and its storage precision can’t possibly exceed the atomic level! Do you know what atomic-level storage is? It means that all of humanity’s books can be stored in an area the size of the point of a needle! Not the couple of books you have left, but all the books that existed before we ate Earth!”

“Ah, that sounds plausible. I’ve heard that a glass of water contains more atoms than the Earth’s oceans contained cups of water. Then, he can just write down those poems and take the needle with him,” Yi Yi said, pointing at Li Bai.

Bigtooth nearly burst with outrage. He had to rapidly pace a few steps to summon a little more patience. “Okay, okay, tell me, if the god writes all those five-character- and seven-character-line poems, and the common lyrical poetry formats, one time each, how many characters would that be?”

“Not many, no more than two or three thousand, right? Classical poetry is the most concise art form there is.”

“Fine, you idiot bug-bug, let me show you how concise it really is!” Bigtooth strode to the table and pointed at the game board with one claw. “What is it you call this stupid game… ah yes, weiqi. How many grid intersections are on the board?”

“There are nineteen lines in both the vertical and horizontal directions, for a total of three hundred and sixty-one points.”

“Very good, each intersection can be occupied by a black piece, a white piece, or no piece, a total of three states in all. So you can think of each game state as using three characters to write a poem of nineteen lines and three hundred and sixty-one characters.”

“That’s a clever comparison.”

“Now, if we exhaust all the possible permutations of these three characters in this poem format, how many poems can we write? Let me tell you: 3 361, or, let me think, 10 172!”

“Is… is that a lot?”

“Idiot!” Bigtooth spat the word at him for the third time. “In all the universe, there are only… grargh!” He was too infuriated to speak.

“How many?” Yi Yi still wore a befuddled expression.

“10 80atoms! You idiot bug-bug—”

Only now did Yi Yi show any sign of astonishment. “You mean to say, if we could save one poem in every atom, we might use up every atom in the universe and still not be able to fit all of his quantum computer’s poems?”

“Far from it! Off by a factor of 10 92! Besides, how can one atom store a whole poem? The memory devices of human bug-bugs would have needed more atoms to store one poem than your population. As for us, ai, technology to store one bit per atom is still in the laboratory stage….”

“Here you display your shortsightedness and lack of imagination, Emissary, one of the reasons behind the laggardly advancement of Devouring Empire technology,” Li Bai said, laughing. “Using quantum storage devices based on the quantum superposition principle, the poems can be stored in very little matter. Of course, quantum storage is none too stable. To preserve the poems forever, it needs to be used in tandem with more traditional storage techniques. Nonetheless, the amount of matter required is minuscule.”

“How much?” Bigtooth asked, looking as if his heart were in his throat.

“Approximately 10 57atoms, a pittance really.”

“That’s… that’s exactly the amount of matter in the solar system!”

“Correct, including all the planets orbiting the sun, and of course including the Devouring Empire.”

Li Bai said this last sentence easily and naturally, but it struck Yi Yi like a bolt out of the blue. Bigtooth, on the other hand, seemed to have calmed down. After the long torment of sensing disaster on the horizon, the actual onslaught only left a sense of relief.

“Can’t you convert pure energy into matter?” asked Bigtooth.

“You should know how much energy it would take to create such an enormous amount of matter. The prospect is unimaginable even to us. We’ll go with ready-made.”

“His Majesty’s concerns weren’t unjustified,” Bigtooth murmured to himself.