Cixin Liu - Death's End

“Doctor, I’m a survivor of the Doomsday Battle. After my ship exploded, I was curled up in a life pod the size of your desk, drifting in the vicinity of Neptune’s orbit. By the time I was rescued, I was close to death, but my mind was still sound, and I never suffered any delusions…. I believe what I saw.” Devon got up and walked away. He turned around at the cabin door. “If I meet that bastard again—doesn’t matter where—I’m going to kill him.”

Some time after that, an accident happened in Ecological Area #3—a nutrient tube ruptured. The tube was made of carbon fiber, and as it wasn’t subject to pressure, the probability of a malfunction was very low. Ecological Engineer Ivantsov passed through the aeroponically grown plants, as dense as a rainforest, and saw that others had already shut off the valve leading to the ruptured tube and were cleaning up the yellow nutrient broth.

Ivantsov stopped dead when he saw the ruptured tube.

“This… is caused by a micrometeoroid!”

Someone laughed. Ivantsov was an experienced and prudent engineer, and that made his outburst even funnier. All the ecological areas were buried in the center of the ship. Ecological Area #3 was tens of meters away from the nearest section of the exterior hull.

“I worked more than a decade in external maintenance and I know what a micrometeoroid strike looks like! Look, you can see the typical signs of high-temperature ablation around the edges of the rupture.”

Ivantsov closely examined the inside of the tube; then he asked a technician to cut off a ring of material around the rupture and magnify it. The chatter died down as everyone stared at the 1000x image. There were tiny black particles, a few microns in diameter, embedded in the wall of the tube. The particles twinkled like unfriendly eyes in the magnified image. They all knew what they were looking at. The meteoroid must have been about one hundred microns in diameter. It had shattered as it went through the tube, its broken pieces winding up embedded in the wall opposite the breach.

As one, they looked up.

The ceiling above the ruptured tube looked smooth and undamaged. Furthermore, above the ceiling, tens, maybe hundreds more bulkheads of various thicknesses separated this place from space. An impact-breach in any of these bulkheads would have triggered a high-level alert.

But the micrometeoroid had to have come from space. Based on the condition of the rupture, the micrometeoroid had struck the tube at a relative velocity of thirty thousand meters per second. It would have been impossible to accelerate the projectile to such speed from within the ship, much less from within the ecological area.

“It’s like a ghost,” a sublieutenant named Ike muttered, and left. His choice of words was meaningful: About ten hours earlier, he had seen another, bigger ghost.

Ike had been trying to fall asleep in his cabin when he saw a round opening appear in the wall opposite his bed. It was about a meter across, and occupied the space where a Hawaiian landscape had hung. It was true that many of the bulkheads on the ship could shift and transform so that doors could appear anywhere, but a circular opening like this was impossible. Moreover, the cabin walls of mid-level officers were made of metal and could not deform this way. A closer examination by Ike revealed that the edge of the opening was perfectly smooth and reflective, like a mirror.

Although the hole was strange, Ike was rather pleased by it. Sublieutenant Vera lived next door.

Verenskaya was the AI system engineer aboard Gravity . Ike had been trying to get the Russian beauty to go out with him, but she hadn’t shown any interest. Ike still remembered his latest attempt two days ago.

He and Verenskaya had just gotten off duty. As usual, they walked back to the officers’ quarters together, and as they reached Verenskaya’s cabin, Ike tried to invite himself in. Verenskaya blocked her door.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Ike said. “Let me in for a visit. It’s not very neighborly to never invite me over. They’ll think I’m not a real man.”

Verenskaya looked askance at Ike. “Any real men on this ship would be too worried about our mission to think about getting into the pants of every woman around them.”

“What’s there to worry? After we catch those murderers, there will be no more danger. Happy times will be here!”

“They’re not murderers! Without deterrence, Blue Space would be humankind’s only hope. Yet we’re now hunting them down, allied with the enemies of the human race. Don’t you feel ashamed?”

“Um… baby, if you feel this way… how did you…”

“How did I get to join this mission? Is that what you want to say? Why don’t you go to the psychiatrist and the captain to report me? They’ll put me in forced hibernation and kick me out of the fleet after we return. That’s just my wish!” Verenskaya slammed the door in his face.

However, now Ike had a perfect excuse to enter Verenskaya’s cabin. He unbuckled his weightlessness belt and sat up in his bed, but stopped when he saw that the bottom half of the round opening made the top of the cabinet against the wall disappear as well. The edge of what remained of the cabinet was also perfectly smooth and reflective, like the edge of the opening itself. It was as if some invisible knife had cut through the cabinet and everything inside, including the stacks of folded clothes. The mirrorlike surface of the cross-section ran up against the edge of the round opening, and the whole reflective surface looked like a portion of the inside of a sphere.

Ike pushed against the bed and lifted off in the weightlessness. Looking through the opening, he almost screamed in fright. This must be a nightmare!

Through the hole, he could see that a part of Verenskaya’s bed, pushed up against the cabin wall, had also disappeared. Verenskaya’s lower legs had been cut off. Although the cross section of the bed and the legs were also smooth and reflective, as though covered by a layer of mercury, he could see Verenskaya’s muscles and bones through it. But Verenskaya seemed all right. She was still in deep sleep, and her firm breasts slowly moved up and down as she breathed. Normally, Ike would have admired such a sight, but right now he only felt a supernatural fright. When he calmed down and looked closer, he saw that the cross-section of Verenskaya’s legs and bed also formed a spherical surface that matched the round opening.

He was looking at a bubble-shaped space about a meter in diameter, which erased everything within its path.

Ike picked up a violin bow from the nightstand, and, with a trembling hand, poked it into the bubble. The part of the bow extended inside the bubble disappeared, but the bow hair remained taut. He pulled the bow back and saw that it was undamaged. But he was still glad that he hadn’t tried to go through the hole—who knew if he would emerge from the other side unharmed?

Ike forced himself to be calm and tried to think of the most rational explanation for the eerie sight. Then he made what he thought was a wise decision: He put on his sleep cap and lay back down on the bed. He buckled his weightlessness belt back on and set the sleep cap for half an hour.

He woke up after half an hour, and the bubble was still there.

So he set the sleep cap for an hour. When he woke up this time, the bubble and the hole in the wall were gone. The Hawaiian landscape was back on the wall and everything was as it was before the incident.

But Ike was worried about Verenskaya. He dashed out of his cabin and stopped in front of Verenskaya’s door. Instead of ringing the doorbell, he pounded on the door. His mind was filled with the terrifying vision of Verenskaya, close to death, lying on the bed with her legs cut off.