Cixin Liu - Death's End

The wider belt took up half the space on one side. Its two ends were not connected to the blue and red star clusters; instead, the belt ended in two round tips. Cheng Xin could tell that this “belt” was actually an extremely flattened oval—or perhaps a circle that had been stretched out. Colored patches of various sizes flitted across the wide belt: blue, white, and light yellow. Instinctively, Cheng Xin understood that she was looking at Planet Blue.

The light belt on the other side of the ship was thinner but brighter, and its surface showed no details. Unlike Planet Blue, this belt’s length cycled rapidly between a bright line that connected the red and blue clusters, and a bright circle. The belt’s periodic circular state told Cheng Xin that she was looking at the star DX3906.

“We’re orbiting Planet Blue at lightspeed,” said Guan Yifan. “Except the speed of light is now very slow.”

The shuttle had been moving far faster, but as the speed of light was an absolute speed limit, the shuttle’s velocity had been cut down to that.

“The death lines ruptured?”

“Yes. They spread out to cover the entire solar system. We’re trapped here.”

“Was it due to the disturbance from Tianming’s ship?”

“Perhaps. He didn’t know the death lines were here.”

Cheng Xin didn’t want to ask what their next step was, knowing that nothing more could be done. No computer could operate when the speed of light was below twenty kilometers per second. The shuttle’s AI and control systems were all dead. Under such conditions, not even a light inside the spacecraft could be turned on—it was just a metal can with no electricity or power. Hunter was the same, also dead. Before falling into reduced lightspeed, the shuttle had not yet began decelerating, and so the small spaceship should be nearby—but it might as well be on the other side of the planet. Without the control systems, neither the shuttle nor Hunter could open their doors.

Cheng Xin thought about Yun Tianming and 艾 AA. They were both on the ground, and should be safe. But now there was no way for the two sides to communicate. She never even got to say hello to him.

Something light gently struck the visor of her helmet: the metal bottle. Cheng Xin looked at the ancient pressure gauge on it again, and touched her own space suit. Hope, once extinguished, lit up again like a firefly.

“You’ve been preparing for situations like this?” she asked.

“Yes.” Yifan’s voice sounded distorted in Cheng Xin’s earpiece due to the use of ancient analog signals. “Not for ruptured death lines, of course, but we were prepared for accidentally drifting into the trails of lightspeed ships. The situations are similar: The reduced lightspeed stops everything…. Next, we need to start the neurons.”

“What?”

“Neural computers. Computers that can operate under reduced lightspeed. The shuttle and Hunter both have two control systems, one of which is based on neural computers.”

Cheng Xin was amazed that such machines existed.

“The key isn’t the speed of light, but the system design. The transmission of chemical signals in the brain is even slower, only two or three meters per second—not much faster than us walking. Neural computers can still work because they imitate the highly parallel processing found in the brains of higher animals. All the chips are designed specifically to function under reduced-lightspeed conditions.”

Yifan opened a metal bulkhead decorated with many dots connected in a complex web like the tentacles of an octopus. Inside was a small control panel with a flat display, as well as several switches and indicator lights. The whole assembly was built from components deemed obsolete by the end of the Crisis Era. He toggled a red switch and the screen lit up: text scrolling by. Cheng Xin could tell it was the boot sequence of some operating system.

“The parallel neural mode hasn’t been started yet, so we have to load the operating system serially. You’ll probably have a hard time believing how slow serial data transmission is under reduced lightspeed: look, the data rate is a few hundred bytes per second. Not even a kilobyte.”

“Then the boot sequence will take a long time.”

“That’s right. But as the parallel mode gradually builds up, the loading will speed up. Still, it really will take a long time to complete the sequence.” Yifan pointed to the progress indicator, a line of text on the bottom of the screen.

Remaining load time for boot module: 68 hours 43 minutes [flickering] seconds. Total remaining system load time: 297 hours 52 minutes [flickering] seconds.

“Twelve days!” Cheng Xin exclaimed. “What about Hunter ?”

“Its systems will detect the reduced-lightspeed condition and automatically boot the neural computer. But it will take about as long to complete.”

Twelve days. They could only get to the survival resources in the shuttle and on Hunter after twelve days. Until then, they had to rely on their primitive space suits. If the space suits were powered by nuclear batteries, the electricity should last long enough, but they didn’t have enough oxygen.

“We have to hibernate,” said Yifan.

“Do we have the equipment for hibernation on the shuttle?” As soon as she asked the question, Cheng Xin realized her error. Even if the shuttle had such equipment, it would be controlled by the computer, which was out of commission right now.

Yifan opened the storage unit from which he had taken the oxygen bottle earlier and took out a small box. He opened it to show Cheng Xin a few capsules. “These are drugs for short-term hibernation. Unlike regular hibernation, you won’t need an external life-support system. Once you are in hibernation, your respiration will slow down to the point where you consume very little oxygen. One capsule is enough for fifteen days of hibernation.”

Cheng Xin opened her visor and swallowed one of the pills. She watched as Yifan also took one. Then she looked outside the portholes.

Patches of color now moved so fast over Planet Blue—the broad belt that connected the blue and red ends of the lightspeed universe on one side of the ship—that they turned into a blur.

“Can you see the patterns on the belt repeating periodically?” Yifan wasn’t looking outside at all. His eyes were half-closed as he strapped himself into the hypergravity seat.

“They’re moving too fast.”

“Try to follow the motion with your eyes.”

Cheng Xin tried to match her moving gaze with the patterns flowing across the belt. For a moment, she could see the blue, white, and yellow patches, but they blurred almost immediately. “I can’t,” she said.

“That’s all right. They’re moving too fast. The pattern could be repeating several hundred times per second.” Yifan sighed. Cheng Xin noticed his sorrow, despite his effort to hide it. And she knew why.

She understood that every time the pattern repeated on the broad belt, it meant that the shuttle had completed another orbit around Planet Blue at lightspeed. Even at reduced lightspeed, the demonic rules of the theory of special relativity still held. In the planet’s frame of reference, time was passing tens of millions of times faster than in here, like blood seeping out of her heart.

A moment here; eons there.

Cheng Xin turned away from the porthole and strapped herself into the seat as well. Light flickered through the porthole on the other side. Outside, the sun of this world was alternately a bright line that connected the two ends of the universe, and a ball of light. It was dancing the mad dance of death.

“Cheng Xin.” Yifan called for her softly. “It’s possible that when we wake up, we’ll find the screen telling us that an error has occurred.”