Ken Liu - Broken Stars

“Are you telling me that all the plowed land will become black, shiny cells?”

“No. The plowed land will just look darker, but the conversion efficiency will be phenomenal. After the land has been plowed, you just attach wires to the two ends of the furrow to get a photovoltaic current.”

As the holder of a doctorate degree in Energy Planning, he was entranced by the promise of this technology. His breathing sped up.

“I just sent you an email with all the technical details. At your technology level, you shouldn’t have any trouble mass-producing it—that’s also one of the reasons I chose to contact your era instead of an earlier time. Starting tomorrow, you must dedicate yourself to spreading this technology. I know you have the necessary resources and the skills. How to popularize the technology is up to you. Maybe you can take advantage of the report you’re drafting right now. But you have to remember one thing: under no circumstances can you reveal that the technology comes from the future.”

“Why did you choose me? You should have picked someone more senior.”

“I have to take care to reduce the potential negative side effects from my interference. You and I are the same person. Can you think of a better choice?”

“Tell me, just how high have you climbed on the career ladder?”

“I can’t reveal that. It took a lot of convincing for the Embodied International to decide to interfere in history at all.”

“Embodied International?”

“The world is divided between the Embodied International and the Virtual International—never mind, I’ve said too much. Don’t ask me about anything like that again.”

“But… if I do as you’ve asked, how will you see the world change? Are you going to wake up the next day and find everything different?”

“It’ll be even faster than that. The minute you open my email and decide on your course of action, my world will likely change instantly. But we two are the only people—the only person—who will know this. For everyone else in my era, history is history, and in the new timeline, which is also their only timeline, the period of fossil fuel use between your time and my time never happened.”

“Will you call me again?”

“I don’t know. Every contact with the past is a major undertaking. International conferences have to be held. Goodbye.”

He returned to his bedroom and turned on the computer. The inbox showed the email from the future. The body was blank, but there were more than a dozen attachments, totaling more than a gigabyte. He browsed through them quickly and found detailed technical drawings and documents. Although he couldn’t make sense of everything yet, he saw that the technical language was accessible to someone of his era.

One particular photograph caught his attention. It was a wide-angle shot of an open space. A silicon plow, which really did resemble a combine harvester, sat in the middle of the field, and the soil behind it was slightly darker. The perspective of the shot made the plow look like a small brush painting the earth dark stroke by long stroke. About a third of the land in the frame had already been plowed, but the part of the photo that most attracted his attention was the sky of the future. It was a dusty gray, but not overcast. Maybe it was taken at dawn or dusk, since the plow cast a long shadow. This was an age without blue skies.

He began to think through his next steps. As a staff member of the Planning Office of the Ministry of Energy, he was responsible for, among other things, gathering information on the progress of new energy development projects across the country. The report he was drafting would be passed on to the minister, who would then deliver it to the State Council at their upcoming meeting. Part of China’s four-trillion-yuan stimulus package in response to the economic crisis was set aside for developing new energy technologies, and the State Council meeting would decide where to invest the funds. His future self apparently wanted him to take advantage of this opportunity. But before he could put this technology into his report, he had to first find a research lab or company to pick it up as a development project. He would have to be very strategic in this choice, but he was certain that if the technical documents were real, he would find a good company to undertake the work. Even in the worst case, whoever decided to move forward with this research wouldn’t lose much…

He shuddered, as if waking from a dream. Have I already decided to go down this path? Yes, I have . There could only be two outcomes from his decision: success or failure. If his effort would eventually succeed, the future should have already been altered.

Mere mortals doing what needed to be done a hundred years earlier would have the same effect as divine intervention .

He stared at the email on the screen, and suddenly had the urge to respond to it. He wrote only two words in the reply: Got it. Immediately, a response came back informing him that the address was undeliverable. He picked up his phone and looked at the caller ID, an ordinary number from China Mobile. He pressed the “call” button, and a recorded voice informed him that the number was not in service.

Returning to the balcony, he luxuriated in the watery moonlight. The neighborhood was completely quiet this late at night, and the moon bathed the buildings and the ground in a milky, unreal, tender glow. He had the sensation of waking from a dream, or perhaps he was still dreaming.

The phone rang again. The screen showed another unfamiliar number, but as soon as he picked up, he recognized the voice of his future self. It was still distant and hollow, but the background noises were different.

“You succeeded,” his future self said.

“When are you calling from?” he asked.

“The year 2119.”

“So four years earlier than the last time you called.”

“For me, this is the first time I’ve ever called you… or calling me, I guess. But I do remember receiving that phone call you mentioned more than a hundred years ago.”

“That was just twenty minutes ago, for me. How is everything? Has the seawater receded?”

“There’s no seawater. The climate never warmed drastically, and sea levels didn’t rise. The history you heard about twenty minutes earlier never happened. In our history books, solar energy made a breakthrough in the early twenty-first century and culminated in the silicon plow, which made large-scale solar energy collection possible. In the 2020s, solar energy came to dominate world energy markets, and fossil fuels quickly vanished. The first half of your—our—life has been a brilliant rising arc tied to the silicon plow, and in three years from your time, the technology will begin to spread across the globe. However, just like the history of the coal and oil industries, the history of solar energy hasn’t generated any lasting celebrities, not even you.”

“I don’t care about being famous. It’s wonderful to have had a role in saving the world.”

“Of course we don’t care about fame. In fact, it’s good that we are not well known, otherwise we’d be treated as history’s greatest criminal. The world has changed, but not for the better. The good thing is that only one person, you and me, knows this. Even those who had devised and implemented the plan to interfere with history the last time have no memories of fossil fuel use in the rest of the twenty-first century since that timeline never came to be. I don’t remember calling you, but I do remember getting the call from the future. That phone call is, in fact, the only clue I have to that nonexistent history. Listen! What do you hear?”

Through the receiver, he detected faint cries that reminded him of clouds of swarming birds above the woods at dusk. Gusts of wind swept through the trees from time to time, overwhelming the cries with susurrations.