Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest

“I can imagine their reaction.”

“The PDC’s rotating chair and all the permanent member representatives looked at me with that Wallfacer smile on their face, and the chair declared the meeting adjourned. Those bastards!”

“I know the feeling.”

“I had a total breakdown. I fled out of the hall and into the square outside, shouting, ‘I am Wallfacer Frederick Tyler! My Wallbreaker exposed my strategy! He was right! I’m going to attack the Earth fleet with the mosquito swarm! I’m anti-human! I’m a devil! Punish me and kill me!’”

“That was a meaningless act, Mr. Tyler.”

“What I hate the most is the expression people have when they look at me. A crowd of people surrounded me in the square, their eyes revealing the fantasies of children, the reverence of the middle-aged, and the concern of the elderly. All of their eyes said, ‘Look, he’s a Wallfacer. He’s at work, but he’s the only one in the world who knows what he’s doing. See what a great job he’s doing? He’s pretending so well. How will the enemy know what his real strategy is? That great, great, great strategy that only he knows and that will be the salvation of the world…’ Complete and utter crap! Those idiots!”

At last Luo Ji decided to remain silent, and merely smiled wordlessly at Tyler.

As Tyler stared at him, a thin smile wavered on his pale face and then developed into full-blown hysterical laughter. “Ha! You’re smiling the Wallfacer smile! A smile from one Wallfacer to another! You think I’m at work. You believe I’m acting the part, and you think I’ll save the world!” He cackled again. “How did we end up in such a hilarious situation?”

“This is a vicious cycle we’ll never be free of, Mr. Tyler,” Luo Ji said, and sighed softly.

Tyler’s laughter stopped abruptly. “Never be free? No, Dr. Luo, there’s a way out. There really is a way, and I’m here today to tell it to you.”

“You need a break. Rest here for a few days,” Luo Ji said.

Tyler nodded slowly. “Yeah, I need a break. We’re the only ones who understand each other’s pain, Doctor. That’s why I’ve come.” He looked up. The sun had set a while ago, and the Garden of Eden had grown indistinct in the twilight. “This is paradise. Can I go for a walk alone by the lake?”

“You may do whatever you like here. Take it easy, and I’ll call you to dinner in a while.”

Tyler walked down to the lake, leaving Luo Ji to sit down, sunken in heavy thoughts.

For five years, he had bathed in an ocean of happiness. The birth of his Xia Xia in particular had made him forget everything about the outside world. The love of his wife and child blended together and intoxicated his soul, and, in this gentle home isolated from the rest of the world, he had fallen deeper and deeper into an illusion: Perhaps the outside world really was something akin to a quantum state, and did not exist unless he observed it.

But it was a state that could no longer endure now that the abominable outside world had burst into his Garden of Eden to confuse and frighten him. His thoughts shifted to Tyler, whose last words still resounded in his ears. Was it really possible for Wallfacers to break free of the vicious cycle, to shatter the iron shackles of logic… ?

He jerked to his senses and ran toward the lake. He wanted to shout, but was afraid of scaring Zhuang Yan and Xia Xia, so he just ran as fast as he could through the quiet twilight, the swish of his feet against the grass on the hillside the only sound. But into this rhythm a soft crack inserted itself.

The sound of a gunshot from the lake.

Luo Ji returned home late that evening after the child was sound asleep. Zhuang Yan asked softly, “Did Mr. Tyler leave?”

“Yes. He’s gone,” he said wearily.

“He seemed worse off than you.”

“Yes. That’s because he didn’t take an easy path…. Yan, have you watched TV recently?”

“No. I…” She paused, and Luo Ji knew what she was thinking. With the outside world growing more serious by the day, and the gap widening between life here and life outside, the difference made her uneasy. “Is our life really part of the Wallfacer plan?” she asked, looking at him with that same innocent face.

“Of course. What is there to doubt?”

“But can we truly be happy when all humanity is unhappy?”

“My love, your responsibility when all of humanity is unhappy is to make yourself happy. With Xia Xia, your happiness gains a point, and the Wallfacer plan gains a point toward its success.”

Zhuang Yan stared silently at him. The language of facial expressions she had envisioned in front of the Mona Lisa five years ago seemed to have been partially realized between her and Luo Ji. More and more, he could read her mind through her eyes, and what he read now was, How can I believe that?

Luo Ji pondered this for a long time, and finally said, “Yan, everything has an ending. The sun and the universe will die one day, so why should humanity believe that it ought to be immortal? Listen, this world is paranoid. Fighting a hopeless war is a fool’s errand, so look at the Trisolar Crisis from a different perspective and leave your cares behind. Not just the ones involving the crisis, but everything else from before that. Use the time that’s left to enjoy life. Four hundred years! Or, if we refuse the Doomsday Battle, then nearly five hundred. That’s a fair amount of time. Humanity used the same period to go from the Renaissance to the information age, and in the same space could create a carefree, comfortable life. Five idyllic centuries without needing to worry about the distant future, where the sole responsibility is to enjoy life. How wonderful….”

He realized that he had spoken unwisely. Claiming that the happiness of her and the child were part of the plan added another layer of protection to her life by making her happiness into a responsibility. This was the only way to ensure that she maintained a balanced mind in the face of the cruel world. He could never resist her eternally innocent eyes, so he didn’t dare look at her when she questioned him. But now, because of the Tyler factor, he had involuntarily told the truth.

“When you say that, are you being a Wallfacer?” she asked.

“Yes, of course I am,” he said, to fix the situation.

But her eyes said, You really did seem to believe that!

At the start of the hearing, the rotating chair spoke to strongly urge that Luo Ji be required to attend the next hearing, arguing that refusal to participate was not part of the Wallfacer plan because the PDC’s supervisory authority over the Wallfacers trumped the Wallfacers’ own strategic plans. The proposal was unanimously adopted by all permanent member representatives, and with the emergence of the first Wallbreaker and the suicide of Wallfacer Tyler in mind, the other two Wallfacers attending the meeting heard the unspoken implications of the chairman’s words.

Hines spoke first. His neuroscience-based plan was still in its infancy, but he described the equipment he was envisioning as a basis for further research. He called it the Resolving Imager. Based on computed tomography and nuclear magnetic resonance, it operated by scanning in all cross sections of the brain at once, which required cross sectional accuracy on the scale of the internal structure of brain cells and neurons. This would bring the number of simultaneous CT scans to several million, to be synthesized by computer into a digital model of the brain. Other technical requirements were even greater: The scan needed to be conducted at a rate of twenty-four frames per second to produce a dynamic synthetic model that could capture all brain activity at a neuron-level resolution, making it possible to precisely observe thought activity in the brain, or even replay all neural activity throughout the thinking process.