Cixin Liu - Death's End

There were numerous other unusual features on the yacht. For instance, it had six small courtyards, each about twenty to thirty square meters in size. Each courtyard automatically adjusted to the direction of gravity under acceleration, and, during coasting, spun independently within the ship to generate artificial gravity. Each courtyard displayed a different natural scene: a green lawn with a babbling brook running through the grass; a small copse with a spring in the middle; a beach with waves of clear water throwing up surf…. These scenes were small but exquisite, like a string of pearls made of the best parts of the Earth. On a small stellar spaceship, such a design was extremely luxurious.

Cheng Xin felt both distressed and sorry for Halo . Such a perfect little world was soon going to be turned into a slice without thickness. She tried to avoid thinking about those other grander things facing imminent destruction—annihilation covered the sky of her thoughts like a giant pair of black wings, and she dared not look directly up at it.

Two hours after departure, Halo received the formal dark forest attack alert issued by the Solar System Federation Government. The president, a beautiful woman who looked very young, made the announcement. She stood in front of the blue flag of the Federation and spoke without expression. Cheng Xin noticed that the blue flag resembled the ancient UN flag, though a diagram of the Sun replaced the diagram of the Earth. This most important document, marking the end of human history, was very short:

Five hours ago, the advance warning system confirmed that a dark forest strike has been initiated against our world.

The attack takes the form of a dimensional strike, which will collapse the space around the Solar System from three dimensions to two dimensions. The result will be the complete destruction of all life.

The process is estimated to take eight to ten days. At this moment, the collapse is ongoing and the rate and extent of collapse are rapidly growing.

We have confirmed that the escape velocity for the collapsing region is the speed of light.

An hour ago, the Federation Government and Parliament have passed a new resolution that repeals all laws regarding Escapism. However, the government wishes to remind all citizens that the escape velocity far exceeds the maximum velocity of all human space vehicles. The probability of a successful escape is zero.

The Federation Government, Parliament, the Supreme Court, and Federation Fleet will carry out their duties until the end.

AA and Cheng Xin didn’t bother to watch more news. It was possible that, just like Cao Bin said, the Bunker World had approached paradise. They wanted to see what paradise looked like, but they didn’t dare look. If everything was heading toward ruination, the more beautiful it all was, the more pain they would suffer. In any event, it was a paradise that was collapsing in the terror of death.

Halo stopped accelerating. Behind it, Jupiter became a small yellow dot. The next few days of the voyage were spent in the uninterrupted slumber produced by the sleep-aid machine. In this lonely voyage through the night before the end, just the unstoppable mad imaginings were enough to make anyone fall apart.

Halo ’s AI awakened AA and Cheng Xin from their dreamless sleep as the ship reached Pluto.

Out of the porthole and on the monitor they could see the entirety of Pluto. Their initial impression of the dwarf planet was one of darkness, like an eye that remained perpetually shut. This far from the Sun, the light was extremely dim. Only when Halo entered low orbit could they see the colors on the surface of the planet: Pluto’s crust appeared to be made of patches of blue and black. The black was rocks—not necessarily black in color, but the light was too dim to tell otherwise. The blue was solidified nitrogen and methane. Two centuries ago, when Pluto had been near its perigee and inside Neptune’s orbit, the surface would have looked completely different. The ice cover would have partially melted and produced a thin atmosphere. From the distance, it would have appeared a deep yellow.

Halo continued to descend. On Earth, this would have involved a soul-stirring atmospheric reentry, but Halo continued to fly through the silent vacuum, decelerating by the power of its own thrusters. On the blue-black ground below, an attention-grabbing line of white text appeared:

EARTH CIVILIZATION

The text was written in the modern script that mixed Latin and Chinese elements. After it, there were a few more lines of smaller text repeating the same thing in different scripts. Cheng Xin noticed that none of them said “museum.” The yacht was still about one hundred kilometers above the surface, which meant that the text was gigantic. Cheng Xin couldn’t make an exact estimate of the size of the characters, but she was certain that these were the largest written characters ever produced by humankind, each big enough to contain a city. By the time Halo was only about ten thousand meters above the surface, one of the large characters took up the entire field of view. Finally, Halo touched down on the broad landing field, which was the topmost dot in the Chinese character qiu (球), a part of the word Earth .

With the guidance of the ship’s AI, Cheng Xin and AA put on light space suits and exited Halo onto the surface of Pluto. Given the frigid surroundings, the heating systems in their space suits were operating at maximum power. The landing field was empty, white, and seemed to phosphoresce in the starlight. The numerous burn marks left on the ground indicated that many spacecraft had once landed and taken off here, but Halo was the only ship here now.

During the Bunker Era, Pluto was akin to Antarctica on ancient Earth. No one lived here permanently, and few came to visit.

In the sky, a black sphere moved rapidly among the stars. It was large, but the surface was shrouded in darkness: Charon, Pluto’s moon. Its mass was a tenth of Pluto’s, and the two almost formed a double-planet system, revolving around a common center of mass.

Halo turned on its searchlights. Due to the lack of atmosphere, there wasn’t a visible beam of light. It cast a circle of light on a distant rectangular object. This black monolith was the only protrusion above the white ground. It gave off an eerie sense of simplicity, as though it was an abstraction of the real world.

“That looks a bit familiar,” Cheng Xin said.

“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t have a good feeling about it.”

Cheng Xin and AA headed for the monolith. Pluto’s gravity was only one-tenth of the Earth’s, and so they proceeded by leaping. Along the way, they noticed a row of arrows pointing toward the monolith on the ground. Only when they reached the monolith did its immensity impress itself on their minds. When they looked up, it was as though a chunk had been taken out of the starry sky. They looked around and saw that there were rows of arrows coming from other directions, all pointing toward the monolith. At the foot of the monolith was another prominent protuberance: a metal wheel about a meter in diameter. To their surprise, they found the wheel to be hand-operated. Above the wheel was a diagram formed from white lines against the black surface of the monolith. Two curved arrows indicated the directions in which the wheel could be turned. Next to one of the arrows was a drawing of a half-open door, while the other bore a drawing of a shut door. Cheng Xin turned to survey the arrows on the ground pointing to the monolith. All the simple, clear, wordless instructions gave her a strange feeling, which AA voiced.