Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“Finally noticing the state I was in, she asked, ‘What’s wrong? The whole time, all we conducted were experimental attacks. We’d hardly gotten any of your people by the time the war ended.’ She said it so casually, like talking about a ball game.

“If we were only chatting between two soldiers, then I was out of line, since I ought to have been able to remain relaxed even when discussing the Zhenbao Island Incident. [11] Zhenbao Island, also known as Damanskii Island, was the site of a border clash in March 1969 during the seven-month undeclared conflict that marked the height of the Sino-Soviet Split. But I didn’t want to tell her the cause of Mom’s death, so I ran out, leaving her staring in shock. She chased me and caught up to me and begged me to tell her what she’d done wrong, but I struggled free and ran aimlessly through the frozen streets.

“It snowed that night, and for a moment I felt the grim face of the world. Later, a police patrol van rounding up drunks took me back to the hotel….

“When I got home, I received an e-mail from the Russian woman that read, ‘Yun, I don’t know how it is I’ve hurt you. After you left, I spent many sleepless nights, but couldn’t think of anything. I am certain, though, that it’s connected to my bee weapons. If you were just an ordinary young woman, I wouldn’t have let the slightest hint of it slip out, but you and I are alike. Both of us are soldiers researching new-concept weapons, and we have common aims, which was why I told you everything. When you left in tears that night, it was like a knife in my heart. Back at my residence, I opened the lid of that container and watched the liquid nitrogen evaporate into white fog and disperse into the air. During the chaos of the Institute’s dissolution, more than a million attack-bee embryos died due to poor management, and the container you saw held the last remaining ones.

“ ‘I wanted to sit there all night until the liquid evaporated entirely; even in the bitter cold of the Russian winter, the cells would die quickly. I was destroying two decades of hard work, destroying the dreams of my youth, all because a Chinese woman dearer to me than even my own daughter hated them. As the nitrogen fog dissipated, my cold home turned even colder. The cold clarified my thinking, and all of a sudden I understood that the material inside the container did not belong to me as an individual. It had been developed at the cost of billions of rubles eked out by the hard labor of the Soviet people. At this thought, I replaced the lid and closed it tightly. Then I protected it with my life, and at last gave it to the appropriate people.

“ ‘Yun, for the sake of our ideals and our faith, for the sake of our homeland, we two women have trodden a lonely road no woman ought to follow. I have been on it longer than you, so I know a little more of its dangers. All the forces of the natural world, including those that people believe are the most gentle and harmless, can be turned into weapons to destroy life. The horror and cruelty of some of these weapons is beyond imagination, unless you have seen them yourself. But I, a woman you believe resembles your mother, can tell you that we are not on the wrong road. Fearsome things may fell your countrymen and your family, or strike the tender flesh of the child in your arms, but the best way to prevent this from happening is to create them yourselves, before the enemy or potential enemy has that chance! So I have no regret for the life I’ve lived, and I hope that you won’t either, when you reach my age.

“ ‘Child, I’ve moved to a place you don’t know, and I won’t contact you anymore from now on. Before I say goodbye, I won’t offer any vacant blessings, which are useless for a soldier. I’ll just leave you with a warning: beware the attack bees! Instinct tells me that they will appear on the battlefield again, and the next time it won’t be just one swarm of a thousand or two, but a mega-swarm of tens or hundreds of millions, blotting out the sky and covering the sun like a storm cloud, enough to annihilate an entire field army. May you never meet them in battle. This is the only blessing I can give you, child.’ ”

Now that Lin Yun had opened up about the psychological world she had long kept deeply hidden, she appeared to feel some sort of release, even as her listeners remained in shocked silence. The sun was setting. Another dusk had come to the Gobi. The glow reflected in the mirror plated everyone standing near it with a layer of gold.

“What’s happened has happened, child. All we can do about it is to accept our own responsibility,” the general said slowly. “Now take off your badge and epaulets. You’re a criminal now, not a soldier.”

The sun dipped beneath the horizon and the mirror darkened, like Lin Yun’s eyes. Her sorrow and despair were no doubt as boundless as the Gobi at night.

As Ding Yi looked at her, he heard the words she had said at Zhang Bin’s gravesite: I grew up in the army. I don’t know if I could entirely belong anywhere else. Or to anyone else.

Lin Yun raised her right hand and reached over to the major’s epaulet on her left shoulder—not to take it off, but to rub it.

Ding Yi noticed that her finger dragged an afterimage behind it.

When Lin Yun’s hand touched the epaulet, it was as if time stopped. This was the final image she left in the world. Her body began to turn transparent, swiftly turning into a crystalline shadow, and then the quantum-state Lin Yun vanished.

It was bright outside when Ding Yi finished his tale. The war-ravaged city had welcomed another morning.

“You tell a good story. If the purpose was to comfort me, then you succeeded,” I said.

“Do you think I’d be able to invent all that you just heard?”

“How did she remain in a quantum state for so long without collapsing with all of you observing her?”

“There’s one thing I’ve been pondering ever since I first posited the existence of the macro-quantum state: a sentient quantum individual is different from an ordinary non-sentient quantum particle in one important way, and we overlooked an important parameter for the wave function describing the former. Specifically, we overlooked an observer.”

“An observer? Who?”

“The individual itself. Unlike ordinary non-sentient quantum particles, sentient quantum individuals can engage in self-observation.”

“Okay. But what does self-observation imply?”

“You’ve seen it. It can counteract other observers, and maintain the quantum state uncollapsed.”

“And how is that self-observation conducted?”

“No doubt by some highly complicated emotional process that we’re unable to even imagine.”

“So will she return again like that?” I asked, full of hope for the answer to this critical question.

“Probably not. Objects that experience resonance with macro-fusion energy will, for a period of time after the resonance is complete, have an existence-state probability higher than their destroyed state. That’s why we were able to see all of those probability clouds of chips as the fusion was going on. But the quantum state will decay as time moves onward, and eventually the destroyed state will be more probable than the existence state.”

“Oh—” I exclaimed, the sound coming from deep within my heart.

“But the existence-state probability, no matter how small, is still there.”

“Like hope,” I said, doing my best to throw off my fragile emotional state.

“Yes. Like hope,” Ding Yi said.