Cixin Liu - Death's End

They’d missed each other.

After they knew not how long, Yifan asked her softly, “What should we do?”

“I want to look more. There must be some sign.”

“There really won’t be anything. Eighteen million years will erase everything: Time is the cruelest force of all.”

“Carving words into stone.”

Yifan looked at Cheng Xin, confused.

“艾 AA would know to carve words into stone,” Cheng Xin muttered.

“I don’t understand….”

Cheng Xin didn’t explain; instead, she grabbed Yifan by the shoulders: “Can you have Hunter do a deep scan of this area and see if there’s anything under the surface?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Words. I want to see if there are words.”

Yifan shook his head. “I understand your desire, but—”

“To better last through the eons, the words ought to be large.”

Yifan nodded, but obviously only to appease her. They returned to the shuttle. Although this was a walk of only a few steps, they leaned against each other as if afraid time would divide them if they were physically separated. Yifan contacted Hunter and directed it to do a deep scan of the area within a circle centered on this coordinate with a radius of three kilometers. The depth of the scan was set to be between five and ten meters, focusing on human writing or other significant markings.

Hunter passed overhead fifteen minutes later and sent back the results about ten minutes after that: nothing.

Guan Yifan ordered the ship to do another scan at a depth range between ten and twenty meters. This took another hour, the bulk of which was spent waiting for the ship to pass overhead. Still nothing. At that depth there was no more soil, only bedrock.

Guan Yifan adjusted the scanning range to between twenty and thirty meters. “This is the last time,” he said to Cheng Xin. “The sensors can’t go deeper than that.”

They waited for the ship to orbit Planet Blue another time. The sun was setting and the sky was full of lovely, fiery clouds, while the purple woods were limned with a golden glow.

This time, the shuttle’s screen showed the images transmitted back by the ship. After processing by enhancement software, they could see a few fragments of white words embedded in the dark rock: “e,” “liv,” “a,” “life,” “you,” “little,” “side,” “Go.” The white color was to indicate that the words were carved into the bedrock; each character was about a meter square, and they were arranged into four rows. The words were twenty-three to twenty-eight meters below them, carved into a forty-degree incline.

Hunter ’s AI invoked the geological expert system to interpret the results. They found out that the giant characters had initially been carved into the surface of a large sedimentary rock formation on the side of a mountain. The original surface was about 130 square meters. Over the eons, the mountain on which the rock had been located sank, and that was how the carved rock ended up below them. More than four lines of text had been carved into it, but the lower portion of the rock had been broken up during the geological transformations and all the text there lost. The surviving text was incomplete as well—the last three lines all had missing characters at the end.

Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan embraced again. They cried tears of joy at the news concerning 艾 AA and Yun Tianming, and shared the happiness that they had enjoyed more than one hundred eighty thousand centuries ago. Their despairing hearts grew peaceful.

“I wonder what their life here was like?” Cheng Xin asked, tears glistening in her eyes.

“Anything was possible,” said Yifan.

“Did they have children?”

“Anything was possible. They could have even founded a civilization here.”

Cheng Xin knew that was indeed possible. But even if that civilization had lasted ten million years, the eight million-plus years that had come after would have erased all traces of it.

Time really was the cruelest force of all.

Something strange interrupted their meditation: a rectangle limned by faint lines of light, about a man’s height, hovered over the clearing like the dashed selection lines marked out by dragging a mouse. It moved through the air, but did not go far before returning to its original position. It was possible that it had been there all along, but the outline was so faint and thin that it was invisible during daytime. Whether it was made by a force field or actual substance, there was no doubt it was the creation of intelligence. The lines making up the rectangle seemed to evoke the line-shaped stars in the sky.

“Do you think this is the… gift they left for us?” Cheng Xin asked.

“Seems hard to believe. How could it have survived more than eighteen million years?”

But he was wrong. The object had indeed survived eighteen million years. And, if necessary, it could survive until the end of the universe, because it existed outside of time.

The door remembered that, initially, it had been placed next to the rock carved with text, and it had a real metal frame. But the metal had eroded away after only five hundred thousand years, though the object had always remained brand new. It had no fear of time because its own time had not yet started. It had been thirty meters underground, next to the carved rock, but it had detected the presence of humans and risen to the surface. During the process, it did not interact with the crust, moving like a ghost. It now confirmed that these two were indeed the ones it had been expecting.

“I think it looks like a door,” Cheng Xin said.

Yifan picked up a small branch and tossed it at the rectangle. The branch passed through it and landed on the other side. They saw a luminescent flock of little balloon creatures drift over. A few passed through the rectangle and one even crossed the glowing outline.

Yifan reached out and touched the frame. The light and his finger passed through each other, and he felt nothing. Without even thinking, he extended his hand into the space outlined by the rectangle. Cheng Xin screamed. Yifan pulled his hand back, and everything looked unharmed.

“Your hand…. It didn’t go through.” Cheng Xin pointed to the other side of the rectangle.

Yifan tried again. His hand and forearm disappeared as they entered the plane of the rectangle and did not go through. From the other side, Cheng Xin saw the cross section of his forearm, like the surface of a window. All his bones, muscles, and blood vessels were clearly visible. He pulled his hand back and tried again with a branch. It went through the frame without problems. Right after, two insects with spinning rotors passed through the rectangle as well.

“It really is a door—a smart door that recognizes what’s going through it,” Yifan said.

“It allowed you in.”

“Probably you, as well.”

Cheng Xin gingerly tried, and her arm also disappeared in the “door.” Yifan observed the cross section of her arm from the other side, and had a moment of déjà vu.

“Wait for me here,” Yifan said. “I’ll go investigate.”

“We should go together,” Cheng Xin said resolutely.

“No, you wait here.”

Cheng Xin grabbed him by both shoulders and turned him to face her. She looked into his eyes. “Do you really want us to also be separated by eighteen million years?”

Yifan stared back into her eyes for a long moment, and finally nodded. “Perhaps we should bring some things with us.”

Ten minutes later, they passed through the door, hand in hand.