Cixin Liu - Death's End

Of course, the pinnace and the crewmen no longer possessed any thickness.

It was unclear how large the plane had spread by now; only those two images indicated its presence.

Revelation slid faster toward the plane, toward that abyss whose thickness was zero.

“Everyone, don’t be sad. No one will be able to escape from the Solar System, not even a bacteria or virus. All of us will become a part of this grand picture.” 白 Ice now looked calm and stoic.

“Stop accelerating,” said Vasilenko. “What difference does a few minutes make? Let’s at least breathe easier at the end.”

Revelation ’s engine shut off. The plasma column at the stern of the ship disappeared, and the ship drifted, powerless, in space. In reality, the ship was still accelerating toward the two-dimensional patch of space, but since the ship moved along with the surrounding space, those inside could not feel any gravity from acceleration. They enjoyed the weightlessness and took deep breaths.

“You know what I’m thinking of? Needle-Eye’s pictures from Yun Tianming’s fairy tales,” 白 Ice said.

Only a few people aboard Revelation knew about Yun Tianming’s secret message. Now, in a flash, they all understood the meaning of this detail in the stories. It was a simple metaphor, and there were no bearing coordinates because it was so direct. Yun must have thought he was taking a great risk to put such an obvious metaphor into his stories, yet he had to try because the message was so important.

He probably thought that with the knowledge of Blue Space and Gravity ’s discoveries, humanity would understand the metaphor. Unfortunately, he had overestimated their ability to comprehend.

The inability to decipher this key piece of information led humanity to place all their hopes in the Bunker Project.

It was true that both dark forest strikes humans had witnessed involved photoids, but they ignored a salient fact: Those two target planetary systems were structured differently from the Solar System. The star known as 187J3X1 had three giant Jupiter-like planets, but they all orbited extremely close to their sun. Their average distance from the sun was but 3 percent of the distance from Jupiter to the Sun, even closer than Mercury’s orbit. Since they almost brushed up against their sun, the solar explosion destroyed them completely, and they could not have been used as barriers. The Trisolaran system, on the other hand, had only one planet, Trisolaris.

The structure of the planetary system around a star was a characteristic observable from a distance. For a sufficiently advanced civilization, a quick glance was sufficient.

If humans could figure out the plan to use the gas giants as barriers, couldn’t observers from such advanced civilizations do so, as well?

Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.

Revelation was now no more than a thousand kilometers from the plane; it fell faster and faster.

“Thank you, everyone, for doing your duty. Although we haven’t been together long, we worked together well,” Vasilenko said.

“I also thank every member of the human race,” said 白 Ice. “Once, we lived together in the Solar System.”

Revelation fell into the two-dimensional space. In a few seconds, it was flattened. Light akin to fireworks once again lit up the darkness of space. This was a vast two-dimensional image that could be clearly seen from Alaska, a hundred thousand kilometers away. It was possible to distinguish every individual on Revelation : They were laid out side by side, holding hands, every single cell in their body exposed to space in two dimensions.

They were the first to be painted into this grand painting of annihilation.

“Let’s head back to the Earth,” Cheng Xin said softly. This was the first idea that floated up through the chaos and darkness of her jumbled thoughts.

“The Earth is not a bad place to wait for the end. A falling leaf seeks to return to the root. But we hope Halo will go to Pluto,” Cao Bin said.

“Pluto?”

“Pluto is at its apogee, rather far from the two-dimensional space. The Federation Government is about to issue a formal attack alert to the world, and many ships will be headed there. Although the final result will be the same, at least there will be more time left.”

“How much longer?”

“The entire Solar System within the Kuiper Belt will collapse into two dimensions in eight to ten days.”

“That’s not long enough to be worth worrying about. Let’s go back to Earth,” said AA.

“The Federation Government would like to ask you to do something.”

“What can we possibly do now?”

“Not anything important. There’s nothing important now. But someone came up with the idea that theoretically, there might exist image-processing software that could process a two-dimensionalized image of a three-dimensional object and re-create the three-dimensional object. We hope that in the distant future, some intelligent civilization might re-create a three-dimensional representation of our world from its two-dimensionalized image. Though it would be nothing more than a dead representation, at least human civilization would not be forgotten.

“The Earth Civilization Museum is on Pluto. A large portion of humanity’s precious artifacts are stored there. The museum is buried under the surface, however, and we are concerned that during the process of falling into the plane, these artifacts would be mixed together with the strata of the crust and their structures would be damaged. We’d like to ask you to carry some of the artifacts away from Pluto on Halo and scatter them in space so that they can fall into two dimensions separately. This way, their structures would be preserved without harm in two dimensions. I guess this counts as a kind of rescue mission…. Of course, I admit that the idea is nearly science fiction, but doing something now is better than doing nothing.

“Also, Luo Ji is on Pluto. He wants to see you.”

“Luo Ji? He’s alive?!” AA cried out.

“Yes. He’s almost two hundred.”

“All right. Let’s go to Pluto,” Cheng Xin said. In the past, this would have been an extraordinary journey. But now, nothing mattered.

A pleasant male voice spoke up. “Do you wish to go to Pluto?”

“Who are you?” asked AA.

“I’m Halo, or Halo ’s AI. Do you wish to go to Pluto?”

“Yes. What do we do?”

“You just have to confirm the request. There’s no need to do anything. I will complete the voyage for you.”

“Yes, we want to go to Pluto.”

“Authorization confirmed. Processing. Halo will accelerate at 1G in three minutes. Please pay attention to the direction of gravity.”

Cao Bin said, “Good. Better leave early. After the attack alert is issued, there might be total mayhem. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk again.” He closed the window link before AA and Cheng Xin could say good-bye. At this moment, AA, Cheng Xin, and Halo were not his top priorities.

Outside the porthole, they could see a few blue reflections appearing on the shell of the combined city—reflections of Halo ’s nozzle lights. Cheng Xin and AA fell to one side of the spherical hall and felt their bodies grow heavier. The acceleration soon reached 1G. After the two of them—still weak from hibernation—struggled up and looked outside the porthole again, they saw the entirety of Jupiter. It was still immense, and shrinking at too slow a rate to be perceived.

The ship’s AI led AA and Cheng Xin on a tour of the ship to familiarize them with it. Like its predecessor, this new Halo was still a small stellar yacht with a maximum capacity of four. Most of the space on the ship was taken up by the ecological cycling system. By conventional measures, the ecological cycling system was extremely redundant—a volume of space that would have supported forty was used to provide for only four. The system was divided into four identical subsystems, linked together and acting as each other’s backups. If any of the four failed accidentally, the other three could bring it back to life. Halo ’s other distinguishing characteristic was the ability to land directly on a medium-sized solid planet. This was a rare design choice among stellar ships—similar ships typically used shuttles to carry landing parties onto planets. Directly descending into a planet’s deep gravity well required the ship to have a very strong hull, which greatly increased the cost. Moreover, the need for atmospheric flight required a streamlined profile, which was also very rare among stellar ships. All of these design features meant that if Halo could find another Earthlike planet in outer space, it could act as a habitable base for the crew on the surface of the planet for a considerable amount of time. Maybe it was these characteristics of Halo that led to it being chosen for the artifact-rescuing mission to Pluto.