Cixin Liu: Death's End

Primordial darkness.

Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan were once again immersed in a time vacuum. The sensation was similar to when they had entered reduced lightspeed back in the shuttle. Time did not flow here, or maybe it was more accurate to say that time did not exist. They lost all sense of time, and experienced again that feeling of stepping across time, but existing outside of it.

Darkness disappeared; time began.

There is no appropriate expression in human language to express the moment at the start of time. To say that time began after they entered the door would be wrong because “after” required time. There was no time here, and thus no before or after. The time “after” they entered could have been shorter than a billion-billionth of a second, or longer than a billion billion years.

The sun brightened. It did so very gradually: At first it was just a disk, and then the light began to unveil the world. It was like a song that began as barely audible notes, then grew and grew into a mighty chorus. A circle of blue appeared around the sun, expanded, and turned into a blue sky. Under the blue sky, a pastoral scene slowly took shape. There was an unplanted field with black soil; next to it was an exquisite white house. There were also a few trees that brought a hint of the exotic with their broad, strangely shaped leaves. As the sun continued to brighten, the peaceful scene appeared like a welcoming embrace.

“There are people here!” Guan Yifan pointed at the distance.

They could see the backs of two figures standing on the horizon: a man and a woman. The man had just put down his uplifted arm.

“That’s us,” said Cheng Xin.

In front of those two figures, they could see a distant white house and trees, exact duplicates of the ones nearby. They couldn’t see what was at the feet of those figures due to the distance, but they could guess that it was another black field. At the end of the world was a duplicate of it, or maybe a projection.

Duplicates or projections of the world existed all around them. They looked to their sides and saw the same scene repeated. The two of them also existed in those worlds, but all they could see were the backs of those figures, who turned their heads away as Cheng Xin and Yifan turned to look at them. They looked behind them and saw the same thing—except now they were looking at the world from the other direction.

The entrance to the world had disappeared.

They followed a path of stepping-stones, and around them, the copies of themselves in the copies of their world walked along with them. The path was broken by a brook with no bridge over it, but the brook was so small that they could step over it. Only now did they realize that gravity was a standard 1G. They passed the copse of trees and came to the white house. The door was shut and the windows covered by blue curtains. Everything looked brand new, dustless—as a matter of fact, they were brand new, also, as time had just begun to flow.

In front of the house was a pile of simple, primitive farming tools: shovels, rakes, baskets, water pails, and so on. Although some of them were shaped a bit oddly, it was easy to tell their function by appearance. What most drew their attention, though, was a row of metal columns erected next to the farming tools. They were about the height of a person, and the smooth surfaces glinted in the sunlight. Each column had four metal attachments that seemed to be folded limbs. The columns were probably robots in a resting state.

They decided to familiarize themselves with the environment before entering the house, and so they continued to walk past it. After a bit less than a kilometer, they reached the edge of the small world and faced the duplicate world before them. At first, they thought it was just a reflected image of their own world, though it was not mirrored. But after they were halfway there they decided that it couldn’t be a reflection: Everything looked so real. They took a step forward and entered the duplicate world without any resistance. Looking around, Cheng Xin was struck with a hint of terror.

Everything looked the same as when they had first entered the world. They were in the same pastoral scene, with duplicates of the scene before them and to the sides, and in those copies, copies of them also existed. They turned around to look back, and they saw copies of themselves at the far end of the world they had just left, looking behind them.

Yifan let out a long sigh. “I don’t think we need to go any farther. We’ll never reach the end.” He pointed up and then down. “I bet that without these barriers, we’d see the same scene above and below us as well.”

“Do you know what this is?”

“Are you familiar with the work of Charles Misner?”

“Who was he?”

“A physicist of the Common Era. He was the one who first came up with this concept. The world we’re in is actually very simple. It’s a regular cube about a kilometer on each side. You can imagine it as a room with four walls and a ceiling as well as a floor. But the room is constructed such that the ceiling is also the floor, and each wall is the same as the opposite wall. In reality, it has only two walls. If you walk through one of the walls, you’ll immediately reappear at the opposite wall, and the same is true of the floor and ceiling. Thus, this is a completely enclosed world in which the end is also the beginning. The images we see all around us are the result of light returning to the starting point after crossing the world. We’re still in the same world we started from, because this is the only world that exists. Every copy we see around us is just an image of this world.”

“So this is…”

“Yes!” Yifan swept his arm around to indicate everything. “Yun Tianming once gave you a star, and now he’s given you a universe. Cheng Xin, this is an entire universe. It might be small, but it’s a complete universe.”

Cheng Xin looked around, at a loss for words. Yifan sat down quietly on a ridge in the field and picked up a fistful of black earth, letting the soil slip from between his fingers. He sounded depressed. “He’s quite a man to be able to give the woman he loved a star and a universe. But I can’t give you anything.”

Cheng Xin sat down as well and leaned on his shoulder. She laughed as she said, “You’re the only man in this universe. I don’t think you need to give me anything.”

The feeling of being alone in the universe was soon shattered by the sound of a door opening. A figure in white came out of the house and walked toward them. The world was so small that it was possible to clearly see anyone at any distance. They saw that the newcomer was a woman dressed in a kimono. The kimono, decorated with tiny red flowers, was like a walking flower bush that brought the feeling of spring to the universe.

“Sophon!” Cheng Xin cried out.

“I know her,” Yifan said. “She’s the robot controlled by sophons.”

They walked over to meet the woman under one of the trees. Cheng Xin saw that it really was Sophon: That unparalleled beauty remained unchanged.

Sophon bowed deeply to Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan. When she straightened, she smiled at Cheng Xin. “I said that the universe is grand, but life is grander. Fate has indeed directed us to meet again.”

“I couldn’t have imagined,” Cheng Xin said. “I’m really glad to see you. Really.” Sophon brought her to the past—more than eighteen million years ago. But that wasn’t really accurate, because they were now in another time stream altogether.

Sophon bowed again. “Welcome to Universe 647. I am its manager.”

“The manager of the universe?” Yifan looked at Sophon, astounded. “What a grand title! For a cosmologist like me, that sounds like—”