Cixin Liu: Death's End

In the moments that preceded the great battle, noises from both inside and outside the city stopped. The Eastern Roman Empire welcomed its last dawn on this Earth, at the intersection of Europe and Asia, of land and sea.

On the second story of the minaret, the woman magician died, pinned to the wall. She was perhaps the only real magician in the entire history of the human race. Unfortunately, ten hours earlier, the age of magic, brief as it was, had also come to an end.

The age of magic began at four o’clock on the afternoon of May 3, 1453, when the high-dimensional fragment first intersected with the Earth. It ended at nine o’clock on the evening of May 28, 1453, when the fragment left the Earth behind. After twenty-five days and five hours, the world returned to its normal orbit.

On the evening of May 29, Constantinople fell.

As the bloody slaughter of the day was coming to its inevitable end, Constantine, faced with the swarming Ottoman masses, shouted, “The city is fallen and I am still alive.” Then he tore off his imperial robe and unsheathed his sword to meet the oncoming hordes. His silvery armor glinted for a moment like a piece of metallic foil tossed into a tub of dark red sulfuric acid, and then vanished.

The historical significance of the fall of Constantinople would not be apparent for many years. For most, the obvious association was that it marked the final gasp of the Roman Empire. Byzantium was a thousand-year rut behind the wheels of Ancient Rome, and though it enjoyed splendor for a time, it finally evaporated like a water stain under the bright sun. Once, ancient Romans had whistled in their grand, magnificent baths, thinking that their empire, like the granite that made up the walls of the pools in which they floated, would last forever.

No banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything.

Yang Dong wanted to save herself, but she knew there was little hope.

She stood on the balcony of the control center’s top floor, surveying the stopped particle accelerator. From her perch, she could take in the entire twenty-kilometer circumference of the collider. Contrary to usual practice, the ring for the collider wasn’t an underground tunnel, but enclosed within an aboveground concrete tube. The facility looked like a giant full stop mark in the setting sun. [1] Translator’s Note: The Chinese full stop punctuation mark looks like this: 。

What sentence does it end? Hopefully only the end of physics.

Once, Yang Dong had held a basic belief: Life and the world were perhaps ugly, but at the limits of the micro and macro scales, everything was harmonious and beautiful. The world of our everyday life was only froth floating on the perfect ocean of deep reality. But now, it appeared that the everyday world was a beautiful shell: The micro realities it enclosed and the macro realities that enclosed it were far more ugly and chaotic than the shell itself.

Too frightening.

It would have been better if she could just stop thinking about such things. She could choose a career that had nothing to do with physics, get married, have children, and live a peaceful, contented life like countless others. Of course, for her, such a life would be only half a life.

Something else also bothered Yang Dong: her mother, Ye Wenjie. By accident, she’d discovered on her mother’s computer some heavily encrypted messages that she had received. This aroused an intense curiosity in Yang.

Like many elderly people, Yang’s mother wasn’t familiar with the details of the web and her own computer, so she had only deleted the decrypted documents instead of digitally shredding them. She didn’t realize that even if she had reformatted the hard drive, the data would still have been easily recoverable.

For the first time in her life, Yang Dong kept a secret from her mother, and recovered the information in the deleted documents. It took her several days to read through the recovered information, during which she learned a shocking amount about the world of Trisolaris and the secret shared by the extraterrestrials and her mother.

Yang Dong was utterly stunned. The mother she had depended on for most of her life turned out to be someone she didn’t know at all, someone she couldn’t even have believed existed in this world. She didn’t dare to confront her mother, never would, because the moment she asked about it, her mother’s transformation in her mind would be complete, irrevocable. It was better to pretend that her mother was still the person she had always known and continue life as before. Of course, for Yang, such a life would be only half a life.

Was it really so bad to live only half a life? As far as she could see, a considerable number of the people around her lived only half lives. As long as one was good at forgetting and adjusting, half a life could be lived in contentment, even happiness.

But between the end of physics and her mother’s secret, Yang had lost two such half lives, which added up to a whole life. What did she have left?

Yang Dong leaned against the banister and stared at the abyss beneath her, terrified as well as enticed. She felt the banister shake as it bore more of her weight, and she stepped back as though shocked by electricity. She dared not stay here any longer. She turned to walk back into the terminal room.

This was where the center kept the terminals for the supercomputer used to analyze the data generated by the collider. A few days ago, all of the terminals had been shut down, but now a few were lit. This gave Yang Dong a bit of comfort, but she knew that they no longer had anything to do with the particle accelerator—other projects had taken over the supercomputer.

There was only one young man in the room, who stood up as Yang Dong came in. He wore glasses with thick, bright green frames, a distinct look. Yang explained that she was here only to retrieve a few personal items, but after Green Glasses heard her name, he became enthusiastic and explained the program running on the terminals to her.

It was a mathematical model of the Earth. Unlike similar projects in the past, this model combined factors from biology, geology, astronomy, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and other fields of study to simulate the evolution of the Earth’s surface from past to future.

Green Glasses directed her attention to a few large-screen displays. These did not show scrolling columns of numbers or crawling curves on a chart; instead, they showed bright, colorful pictures, as though one were viewing the continents and oceans from high above. Green Glasses manipulated the mouse and zoomed in on a few places to show close-up views of a river or a copse of trees.

Yang Dong felt the breath of nature seeping into this place that had once been dominated by abstract numbers and theories. She felt as if she were being released from confinement.

After the explanation from Green Glasses, Yang Dong retrieved her things, politely said good-bye, and turned to leave. She could feel Green Glasses staring at her back, but she was used to men behaving this way, so instead of being annoyed, she felt comforted, as if by sunlight in winter. She was seized by a sudden desire to communicate with others.

She turned to face Green Glasses. “Do you believe in God?”

Yang Dong was shocked by her own question. But considering the model displayed on the terminals, the question wasn’t entirely out of place.

Green Glasses was similarly stunned. After a while, he managed to close his mouth and ask, carefully, “What kind of ‘God’ do you mean?”

“Just God.” That overwhelming sensation of exhaustion had returned. She had no patience to explain more.

“I don’t.”