Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“If it’s because of something I did…,” Lin Yun said slowly.

“No, no. You did nothing wrong. It’s me. Like Professor Ding says, I’m too sensitive. Maybe it’s because of what I experienced as a child. I just don’t have the courage to see anyone else get burned to ash by ball lightning. No matter who they are. I don’t have the emotional strength that’s needed for weapons research.”

“But we’re still collecting chip-burning macro-electrons. Those weapons will end up reducing personnel casualties on the battlefield.”

“They’re the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. At this point I don’t ever want to see ball lightning again.”

I was in the records room, returning all of the confidential material I had used in the course of my work. I had to sign my name onto each document, the last bit of paperwork I had to complete before leaving the base. With each name I signed, I took another step away from this world unknown to the outside where I had spent the most unforgettable period of my waning youth. I knew that when I left this time, I would never return.

When I left, Lin Yun accompanied me for quite a ways. When we parted, she said, “Research on civilian uses of ball lightning may start quite soon. We may have another opportunity to work together then.”

“It will be nice when that day comes,” I said. It was indeed a comforting thought. But a different feeling prompted me not to wait for that possible future reunion, and instead say the words I had long wanted to tell her.

“Lin Yun, the first time I met you on Mount Tai, I felt something I’d never felt before….” I looked off at the distant mountains separating us from Beijing.

“I know… but we’re too different.” She followed my gaze. We remained like that for a while, not looking at each other, but watching the same spot in the distance.

“Yes. Too different… Take care.”

With the clouds of war growing thick and foreboding, she surely understood what I meant by the last two words.

“You too,” she said lightly.

The car had driven a fair distance when I looked back and saw her standing there still. The autumn wind had blown a carpet of leaves at her feet, so it seemed like she was standing in the middle of a golden river. This was the last impression that Major Lin Yun left me with.

After that, I never saw her again.

When I returned to the Lightning Institute, I fell into a deep malaise. I spent my days in a stupor, passing the time getting drunk in my apartment. One day Gao Bo visited. He said, “You’re an idiot. That’s the only way to describe you.”

“What for?” I asked lazily.

“Are you under the impression that you’re a saint simply because you left weapons research? Any civilian technology can be put to military use. Likewise, any military technology can benefit the public. As a matter of fact, practically all of the major scientific advances of the past century, in aerospace, nuclear energy, computers, and on and on, were the product of cooperation between scientists and soldiers following different paths. Is even this simple truth too hard for you to understand?”

“I have unique experiences and wounds that others don’t. Besides, I don’t believe you. I’ll be able to find a research project that saves and benefits lives and has absolutely no use as a weapon.”

“Impossible, I’d say. The scalpel can kill, too. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you found something to do.”

It was already late when Gao Bo left. I turned off the light and lay down on my bed. Like every night recently, I entered a state of non-sleep, more exhausting than being awake, since the nightmares came one after another. They rarely repeated, but all of them shared the same background noise, the wailing of ball lightning in flight, like a lonely xun flute blowing endlessly in the wilderness.

A sound woke me. Deet . Just one brief note, but it stood out from the noise of my dream, and I was clearly aware that it came from non-dream reality. I opened my eyes and looked at the strange blue light enveloping the room. The light was dim and flickered occasionally, and rendered the ceiling cold and dark, like the roof of a tomb.

I sat up halfway and noticed that the light was coming from the LCD screen of my laptop, which was sitting on the table. That afternoon, as I was unpacking a travel bag I had been too lazy to open up for the many days I’d been back from the base, I found my old laptop and connected it to a network cable so I could go online. But when I pressed the switch, the screen remained black but for a few lines displaying an error message from the ROM self-check. Then I remembered that it was the machine I’d taken to the ball lightning weapons test exercise, and that its processor and memory had been torched by the ball lightning discharge, the CPU and two RAM sticks turned to ash. And so I just left it there and focused on other things.

But now the computer was running! A computer sans CPU and memory had started up! The Windows startup logo appeared on the screen. Then, with a soft clicking of the hard drive, the desktop popped up, the blue sky so empty and the meadow such a brilliant green that they seemed to belong to a strange other world, as if the LCD screen was a window onto it.

I forced myself out of bed and went to turn on the light, the violent shaking of my hands making it hard to reach the switch. The brief moment from when I flipped the switch until the light came flooding in felt like a suffocating eternity. The light snuffed out the weird blue, but did nothing to lessen the fear that gripped my whole body. I remembered the words Ding Yi had left me with when we parted: “If you come across anything, give me a call,” he had said, meaningfully, looking at me with that peculiar expression of his.

So I picked up the phone and dialed Ding Yi’s cell phone in a fluster. He was evidently not asleep, since the phone only rang once before he answered.

“Come to my place at once! The faster the better! It… it’s turned on. It’s running. I mean, the… the notebook computer is running….” I found it hard to be coherent, given the circumstances.

“Is this Chen? I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything until I get there,” Ding Yi said in a voice that sounded perfectly calm.

After I set down the telephone, I looked back at the laptop. As before, it was quietly displaying the desktop, as if waiting for something. The desktop’s blue-green odd-eyed stare left me unable to remain in the room, so without even getting dressed, I went outside. The hall of the bachelors’ apartments was quiet enough to hear the snoring of my neighbor, and I felt much better and breathed more easily. I stood in the doorway and waited for Ding Yi to get there.

He arrived quickly. Ball lightning theoretical research was to be transferred to the Institute of Physics, so he had been in the city for the past few days in connection with that.

“Shall we go in?” he said, after a glance at the tightly closed door behind me.

“I… I won’t. You go in,” I said, turning aside to let him pass.

“It might be something incredibly simple.”

“Maybe for you. But me… I can’t take it anymore,” I said, pulling at my hair.

“I don’t know whether or not supernatural phenomena exist, but what you’ve seen is certainly not that.”

His words calmed me down a bit, like an adult’s hand grabbed by a child in the terrifying dark, or the firm ground beneath a drowning man’s feet. But this feeling immediately made me depressed. Before Ding Yi, my mind was weak; before Lin Yun, my actions were weak. I was such a fucking weakling—no wonder I placed after Ding Yi and Jiang Xingchen in Lin Yun’s heart. Ball lightning had molded me into this form; from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined. I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.