Ken Liu - Broken Stars

Goodbye. I’m sorry, everyone. I hope heaven looks like Disney.

The date stamp on the post was three years ago. Even now, new comments are being posted, mourning the loss of another young life, confessing their own anxiety, despair, and struggle. The woman who had written this note would never be back to see that her final message to the world had garnered more than a million replies.

That note was the reason Disney added the blue hippos to its parks. Anyone around the world could, just by launching an app on their phone, connect to a blue hippo, and, through its cameras and microphones, see and hear everything the hippo could see and hear.

Behind every blue hippo was a person in a dark room, unable to leave.

I sent the picture from today to the address left me by the hippo, along with the contact information for a suicide-prevention organization staffed by therapists. I hoped that this would help. I hoped that everything would be better.

Late night. Everything was so quiet.

I found the first-aid kit and bandaged my feet. I crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over me, and turned off the light. Moonlight washed over the room, filling every inch.

One time, as a little girl, I was playing outside when I stepped on a piece of broken glass. The bleeding would not stop, and there was no one around to help me. Terrified, I felt abandoned by the whole world. I lay down in the grass, thinking I would die after all the blood had drained out of me. But after a while, I found the bleeding stanched. So I picked up my sandals and hopped back home on one foot.

In the morning, Lindy would leave me. The therapist said that I no longer needed her—at least not for a long while.

I hoped she would never be back.

But maybe I would miss her, from time to time.

Goodnight, Nocko. Goodnight, Lindy.

Goodnight, melancholy.

Most of the incidents and quotes from Alan Turing’s life are based on Andrew Hodges’s biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). Besides the papers cited in the text, I also consulted the following sources on artificial intelligence:

Gary Marcus. “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The New Yorker , August 14, 2013 (accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-cant-my-computer-understand-me).

Matthias Englert, Sandra Siebert, and Martin Ziegler. “Logical limitations to machine ethics with consequences to lethal autonomous weapons.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2842 (2014) (accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2842).

Some details about depression are based on the following articles:

«抑郁时代，抑郁病人» http://www.360doc.cn/article/2369606_459361744.html

«午安忧郁» http://www.douban.com/group/topic/12541503/#!/i

In the preface to his Turing biography, Andrew Hodges wrote: “[T]he remaining secrets behind his last days are probably stranger than any science fiction writer could concoct.” This was the inspiration for this story. The conversation program “Christopher” is entirely fictional, but some of the details in the conversations with Turing are real. I’m afraid it’s up to the careful reader to screen out the fiction and nonfiction woven together in this tale.

As I drafted this story, I sent the sections on Turing’s life to friends without telling them that these came from a piece of fiction. Many friends believed the stories, including some science fiction authors and programmers. After taking delight in the fact that I had successfully won the imitation game, I asked myself what were the criteria for telling truth and lies apart? Where was the boundary between reality and fiction? Perhaps the decision process had nothing to do with logic and rationality. Perhaps my friends simply chose to believe me, as Alan chose to believe Christopher.

I hereby sincerely apologize to friends who were deceived. To those who weren’t, I’m very curious how you discovered the lies.

I believe that cognition relies on quantum effects, like tossing dice. I believe that before machines have learned to write poetry, each word written by an author is still meaningful. I believe that above the abyss, we can hold tightly onto each other and stride from the long winter into bright summer.

Liu Cixin is widely recognized as the leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He won the Yinhe Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006, and again in 2010. He received the Xingyun Award in both 2010 and 2011.

An engineer by profession—until 2014, he worked for the China Power Investment Corporation at a power plant in Niangziguan, Shanxi Province—Liu began writing science fiction short stories as a hobby. However, his popularity soared with the publication of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series of novels (the first volume, The Three-Body Problem , was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006 and then published as a standalone book in 2008). An epic story of alien invasion and humanity’s journey to the stars, the series begins with a secret, Mao-era military effort at establishing communications with extraterrestrial intelligence, and ends (literally) with the end of the universe. Tor Books published the English edition of the series from 2014 to 2016 ( The Three-Body Problem , translated by Ken Liu; The Dark Forest , translated by Joel Martinsen; Death’s End , translated by Ken Liu). The Three-Body Problem was the first translated book to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and President Barack Obama praised it as “wildly imaginative, really interesting.”

Liu works in the “hard SF” tradition of writers like Arthur C. Clarke. Some have called him a “classical” writer for that reason, as his stories foreground the romance and grandeur of science and humankind’s effort to discover nature’s secrets.

“Moonlight” showcases Liu Cixin doing what he does best: presenting idea after idea in a dizzying fusillade. This is the story’s first appearance in English.

For the first time that he could remember, he saw moonlight in the city.

He hadn’t noticed it on other nights because the bright electric glow of millions of lamps had overwhelmed it. But today was the Mid-Autumn Festival, and a web petition had proposed that the city turn off most landscape lighting and some of the streetlights so that residents could enjoy the full moon.

Looking out from the balcony of his single-occupancy unit, he discovered that the petitioners had been wrong about the effect. The moonlit city was nothing like the charming, idyllic scene they had imagined; rather, it resembled an abandoned ruin. Still, he appreciated the view. The apocalyptic spirit gave off a beauty of its own, suggesting the passing of all and the discharge of all burdens. He had only to lie down in the embrace of Fate to enjoy the tranquility at the end. That was what he needed.

His phone buzzed. The caller was a man. After ascertaining who had picked up, the voice said, “I’m sorry to disturb you on the worst day of your life. I still remember it after all these years.”

The voice sounded odd. Clear, but distant and hollow. An image came to his mind: chill winds rushing between the strings of a harp abandoned in the wilderness.

The caller continued. “Today was Wen’s wedding, wasn’t it? She invited you, but you didn’t go.”

“Who is this?”

“I’ve thought about it so many times over the years. You should have gone, and you would be feeling better now. But you… well, you did go, except you hid in the lobby and watched Wen in her wedding dress heading into the reception holding his hand. You were torturing yourself.”