Лю Цысинь - Supernova Era

D Group Army commander said, “Over our heads a sword is dangling by a thin strand of hair. It could drop at any moment.”

Most of the children supported a swift evacuation.

Huahua looked at Specs and Lü Gang, who both nodded. Then he crossed to the front of the conference table and stood there. “Good. Give the evacuation order to the two group armies. There’s no time to plan out the details, so let the forces disperse themselves into battalions. Speed is paramount. Also please be crystal clear about the consequences of this decision, and prepare yourself mentally. The Antarctic mission is going to be very difficult for us from now on.”

The children stood up. An advisor read over the draft of the order, but no one proposed any changes. All they wanted was speed, as much as possible. The advisor took the order to the radio, but all of a sudden a solemn voice broke in, “One moment, please.”

The children turned to look at the speaker, Senior Colonel Hu Bing, the liaison officer for the five special observers. Saluting Huahua, Specs, and Lü Gang, she said, “Sirs, the Special Observer Team will now carry out its final duty!”

The mysterious body organized by the adults before they left consisted of five senior colonels, three from the army and two from the air force. In the event of war, they had the authority to know all confidential information and to listen in on all of the high command’s deliberations. However, the adults had guaranteed that the team would never interfere. That was how it had been throughout the games, where during every military meeting of the high command, those five children had sat silently to one side, listening. They didn’t even take any notes. They just listened. They never spoke, and even after the meetings adjourned they had little interaction with anyone. Gradually the other children in the high command forgot they were there.

Once, when Huahua asked them who was team leader, Hu Bing had answered, “Sir, the five of us have equal power. There is no team leader, but when it is necessary I will serve as liaison.”

That only deepened the mystery of their mission.

Now the five officers gathered in an odd formation, an inward-facing circle, and stood solemnly at attention, as if a flag were being raised in the center. Hu Bing said, “We have a Situation A. Vote.”

Each of the five raised a hand.

Hu Bing turned toward the ammo boxes serving as a conference table and pulled a white envelope from her uniform. Holding it in both hands, she lowered it decorously to the center of the table, and said, “This letter was sent from the last president of our country in the Common Era and is addressed to the country’s current leadership.”

Huahua picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a letter handwritten in fountain pen. He read it aloud:

Children,

When you read this letter, our worst fears have come to pass.

In the last days of the Common Era, we can only make predictions about the future according to our own way of thinking, and on the basis of these predictions, do the work we are able to as well as possible.

But still those fears kept pricking at our hearts. The minds and actions of children are entirely different from adults. The world of children might follow an entirely different track from our predictions. That world might be one unimaginable to us, and we’re powerless to do much for you.

We can only leave you with one thing.

It is the last thing we wanted to leave behind for our children. When we left it, it felt like taking the safety off of a handgun and placing it on the pillow next to a sleeping infant.

We have been as careful as possible, and have appointed a Special Observer Team made up of five of the most dispassionate children, who will vote, based on the situational danger level, whether or not to hand over this legacy to you. If, after ten years, it has not been handed over, it will self-destruct.

We had hoped they would never need to carry out this vote, but now you have opened the envelope.

We write this letter at the final assembly point. We have reached the end of our lives, but our minds are still clear. A child keeping watch at the assembly point delivered this letter to the SOT. We had thought that we had said all we needed to, but in the course of writing this letter, so many things come to mind.

But now you have opened it.

Opening the letter means that your world is entirely beyond our imagining. Everything we want to say no longer has any meaning, apart from one thing:

The letter closed with the former president’s signature.

The child leaders focused their attention on Hu Bing, who gave a formal salute, and said, “The SOT will now conduct the handover. One Dongfeng 101 ICBM, with a maximum range of twenty-five thousand kilometers, carrying one thermonuclear warhead with a yield of four megatons.”

Lü Gang stared at them. “Where is it?” he asked.

“We don’t know. And we don’t need to,” she said. Then another senior colonel on the SOT set a laptop on the table and opened it. It was already running, and the screen displayed a world map. “Any location on this map can be enlarged for more detail, to a maximum 1:100,000 scale. Double-click on the strike target and the wireless modem will transmit a signal through via a satellite link to the destination, and the missile will fire automatically.”

The children crowded round to stroke the computer, many of them with tears in their eyes, as if they were touching the adults’ warm hands reaching out to them from the beyond.

The supernova did not bring massive changes to every part of the world. In a small village in the mountains of southwestern China, for example, life hardly changed at all. Sure, the adults were gone, but there weren’t all that many in the Common Era anyway, since they were all working far from home. The farm work the children did now wasn’t all that much heavier than what they were used to. Their day-to-day lives were the same as before, going to work at sunrise and resting at sunset, although they were even more unaware about the outside world now than they had been in the adults’ time.

But for a period before the adults died, it seemed as if great changes were coming to their lives. A highway was put in past the village into the mountains leading to a valley sealed behind barbed wire. Every day, large trucks in great numbers would go in fully loaded and return empty. Their contents were covered in green canvas tarps, or packed into big boxes, containing who knows what, and if all of it was piled together it would probably have been as high as the hill behind the village.

Day and night the unbroken stream of trucks traveled the highway, going in full and coming back empty. There was also the occasional plane with blades like electric fans that flew into the valley dangling objects beneath it that weren’t there when it flew out again. This went on for about half a year before things went quiet again. Bulldozers tore up the highway, and the village children and the critically ill adults had to wonder: Why didn’t they just leave the highway alone rather than expending so much effort to destroy it? It wasn’t long before the grass grew over the plowed-under right-of-way and it was more or less reabsorbed by the surrounding hillsides. The barbed wire around the valley was torn down, too, and the children were once again able to hunt and cut firewood. When they reached the valley they found that nothing had changed. The forest was the same old forest, and the grass was the same old grass. They had no idea why a thousand outsiders, in military uniforms and plain clothes, had spent the last half year messing around here, much less where all the cargo on the endless river of vehicles had gone. It all seemed like a dream now, and gradually it was forgotten.