Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

Dumb as wooden chickens, we took a few seconds to recover and think of replaying the video. We now went through it frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the video.

“It’s like a cubic bubble!” Lin Yun said, pointing at the outline.

As we continued the playback, only the dimming thunderball and the empty white paper beneath it were visible on screen. We advanced the frames, staring at each of them for ages, but there really was nothing on the paper. Advancing further, the outlines returned, now surrounding a cube of ash….

A cloud of smoke covered the screen. Ding Yi had lit his pipe at some point, and was exhaling at the screen.

“You have just witnessed the dual nature of matter!” he said loudly, pointing at the screen. “In that brief moment, the bubble and the wooden cube both exhibited a wave nature. They experienced resonance, and in that resonance the two became one. The wooden cube received the energy released by the macro-electron, and then they both regained their particle nature, the burnt wooden cube coalescing into matter at its original position. This is the puzzle that has vexed you all, and the explanation for the target selectivity of the thunderball’s energy release. When the target is struck by the energy, it exhibits a wave state and is not at its original position at all. Thus the energy will naturally have no effect on the object’s surroundings.”

“Why is it only the target object, the wooden cube here, that exhibits a wave nature, and not the paper beneath it?”

“This is determined by the object’s boundary conditions, through a mechanism similar to how image processing software can automatically pick out a face from an image.”

“There’s another puzzle that now has an explanation: ball lightning’s penetrative power!” Lin Yun said excitedly. “When macro-electrons exhibit wave nature, they can naturally penetrate matter. And if they encounter slits roughly their size, they will be diffracted.”

“When ball lightning exhibits a wave state, it can cover a large range. So when a thunderball discharges, it can affect objects at a distance,” Colonel Xu said, as realization dawned.

And so the cloud of mystery surrounding ball lightning gradually dissipated. But these theory-based accomplishments did not have much direct application to the development of ball lightning weapons. As far as weapons development was concerned, a large quantity of lethal macro-electrons needed to be collected first, and theory was useless for that purpose. However, the base had captured and stored more than ten thousand macro-electrons already, and that number was swiftly growing, which gave us the liberty to use crude techniques that did not rely on any theory. We already knew that the target selected for energy discharge was determined by the nature of the macro-electron, and unrelated to the lightning that excited it. This was the basis upon which we chose our experiment.

We began conducting a large number of animal tests. The procedure was simple: take animals similar to human targets, such as rabbits, pigs, and goats, place them into the target area, and then release and excite ball lightning. If the ball lightning blast killed an animal target, then that macro-electron was selected for the weapons stockpile.

It was impossible for your spirit not to be affected by watching ball lightning turn group after group of test animals to ash every day, but Lin Yun reminded me that dying from ball lightning was far less painful for the animals than dying in a slaughterhouse. She had a point, and my heart was steadier after that. But as the tests went on, I realized that things weren’t quite so simple: the target selectivity of the ball lightning’s energy release was so precise that oftentimes a macro-electron discharge would incinerate an animal’s bones, or vaporize its blood, but not harm its muscles or organs. Animals suffering those attacks died in a horrible fashion. Fortunately, Ding Yi made a discovery that put an end to that nightmarish experiment.

Ding Yi had been studying ways of exciting ball lightning through means other than lightning. His first thought was lasers, but that was unsuccessful. Then he thought of using high-powered microwaves, to no success. But during the course of a subsequent experiment, he discovered that microwaves were modulated into a complex spectrum after passing through a macro-electron, different spectra for different macro-electrons, like a fingerprint. Macro-electrons that discharged into like targets had like spectra. And hence, recording the spectra of a small number of macro-electrons with a suitable target selectivity made it possible to find many more similar macro-electrons using spectral recognition, without excitation experiments. And so animal testing became unnecessary.

Work on a ball lightning emitter for use in combat was proceeding at the same time. In fact, using previous work as a foundation, the technological fundamentals were basically in place. The thunderball gun consisted of several parts: a superconducting battery to store the bubbles; a magnetic field accelerator rail, which was a three-meter-long metal cylinder with EM coils set at regular intervals that could invert the instant the bubble passed, using the magnetic field created to push and pull it along the series of coils and accelerate it to speed; an excitation electrode, a row of discharge electrodes that would produce lightning to excite the thunderball as it passed; and subsidiary mechanisms, including a superconducting battery to power the system, and a machine gun targeting system. Since it used existing test equipment, the first thunderball gun required only two weeks to assemble.

Once the spectral recognition technology was in place, the search for weapons-grade macro-electrons proceeded much more quickly, and soon we had more than a thousand of them. In an excited state, their energy only discharged into organic life. This quantity of macro-electrons was enough to kill all of the defenders of a small city, without the need to break so much as a dish in a cabinet.

“Doesn’t your conscience bother you even a little?” I asked Ding Yi. We were standing in front of the first ball lightning weapon, which looked not so much like an attack weapon as a radar or communications device, since the acceleration rail and excitation electrode looked like a sort of antenna. Atop it were two superconducting batteries, meter-high metal cylinders in which those thousand-odd weapons-grade macro-electrons were stored.

“Why don’t you go ask Lin Yun?”

“She’s a soldier. You?”

“I don’t care. What I study is on a scale of less than a femtometer, or more than ten million light-years. At those scales, the Earth and human life are insignificant.”

“Life is insignificant?”

“From a physics perspective, the form of matter movement known as life has no more meaning than any other movement of matter. You can’t find any new physical laws in life, so from my standpoint, the death of a person and the melting of an ice cube are essentially the same thing. Dr. Chen, you tend to overthink things. You should learn to look at life from the perspective of the ultimate law of the universe. You’ll feel much better if you do.”

But the only thing that made me feel better was that the ball lightning weapon didn’t seem as fearsome as it did at first. It was possible to defend against it. Macro-electrons could interact with magnetic fields, and if they could be accelerated by fields, they could also be deflected. It was quite possible that the weapon’s power would be exhibited only briefly after its introduction in combat, so the military worked hard on the project’s secrecy.

Not long after the birth of the ball lightning weapon, Zhang Bin came to the base. He was in much weaker health, but he still stayed the entire day. In a trance, he watched the macro-electrons confined by the magnetic field, and watched as each was excited into ball lightning. He was thrilled, as if an entire lifespan was concentrated in that one day.