Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem

His dreams were chaotic, but there was one constant: the ghostly countdown, suspended in midair. Even before he fell asleep, he had known he would dream of it. In his dreams, he attacked the countdown. Crazed, he tore at it, bit it, but every attempt failed to leave a mark. It continued to hang in the middle of his dream, steadily ticking away. Finally, just as the frustration became almost intolerable, he woke up.

Opening his eyes, he saw the ceiling, indistinct above him. The city lights outside the window cast a dim glow against it through the curtains. But one thing did follow him from dream into reality: the countdown. It was still hovering before his eyes. The numbers were thin, but very bright with a burning, white glow.

1180:05:00, 1180:04:59, 1180:04:58, 1180:04:57 …

Wang looked around, taking in the blurry shadows around the bedroom. He was now certain that he was awake, but the countdown did not disappear. He shut his eyes, and the countdown remained in the darkness of his vision, looking like mercury flowing against a black swan’s feathers. He opened his eyes, rubbed them, and still the countdown did not go away. No matter how he moved his gaze, the numbers stayed at the center of it.

A nameless terror made Wang sit up. The countdown clung to him. He jumped off the bed, tore the curtains apart, and pushed the window open. The city, deep in sleep, was still brightly lit. The countdown hovered before this grand background like subtitles on a movie screen.

Wang felt he was suffocating. He let out a stifled scream. His wife, frightened awake, questioned him anxiously. He tried to force himself to be calm and comforted her, telling her that it was nothing. He lay back on the bed, closed his eyes, and spent the rest of his difficult night under the constant glow of the countdown.

In the morning, he tried to act normal in front of his family, but he could not fool his wife. She asked him whether his eyes were all right, whether he could see clearly.

After breakfast, Wang called the Research Center and asked for the day off. He drove to the hospital. Along the way, the countdown mercilessly hovered in front of the real world. It was able to adjust its brightness so that, no matter what the background, it showed up distinctly. Wang even tried to temporarily overwhelm the display by staring into the rising sun. But it was useless. The infernal numbers turned black and showed up against the orb of the sun like projected shadows, which made them even more frightening.

Tongren Hospital was very busy, but Wang was able to see a famous ophthalmologist who had gone to school with his wife. He asked the doctor to test him, without describing the symptoms. After careful examination of both eyes, the doctor told him they were functioning normally with no signs of any disease.

“There’s something stuck in my vision. No matter where I look, it’s always there.” As Wang said this, the numbers hovered in front of the doctor’s face.

1175:11:34, 1175:11:33, 1175:11:32, 1175:11:31 …

“Oh, you’re talking about floaters.” The doctor took out a prescription pad and began to write. “They’re common at our age, the result of clouding in the lens. They’re not easy to cure, but they’re also not a big deal. I’ll give you some iodine drops and vitamin D—it’s possible that they’ll go away, but don’t get your hopes up too much. Really, they’re nothing to worry about, as they don’t affect your vision. You just have to get used to ignoring them.”

“Floaters… Can you tell me what they look like?”

“There’s no real pattern. It differs by person. For some, they appear as tiny black dots; for others, like tadpoles.”

“What if someone sees a series of numbers?”

The doctor’s pen stopped. “You see numbers?”

“Yes, right in the middle of the visual field.”

The doctor pushed his pen and paper away, and looked at him sympathetically. “As soon as you came in, I could tell you’d been working too much. At the last class reunion, Li Yao told me you were under a lot of pressure at work. We have to be careful at our age. Our health is no longer what it used to be.”

“You are saying this is due to psychological factors?”

The doctor nodded. “If it was anyone else, I’d suggest you go see a psychiatrist. But it’s nothing serious, just exhaustion. Why don’t you rest for a few days? Take a vacation. Go be with Yao and your kid—what’s his name… Dou Dou, right? No worries. They’ll go away soon.”

1175:10:02, 1175:10:01, 1175:10:00, 1175:09:59 …

“Let me tell you what I see. It’s a countdown! One second after another, it keeps on ticking precisely. Are you saying this is all in my head?”

The doctor gave him a tolerant smile. “You know how much the mind can affect vision? Last month we had a patient—a girl, maybe fifteen, sixteen. She was in class when she suddenly lost the ability to see, went completely blind. But all the tests showed that there was nothing wrong with her eyes physiologically. Finally, someone from the Department of Psychiatry treated her with psychotherapy for a month. All of a sudden, her vision returned.”

Wang knew that he was wasting his time here. He got up. “All right, let’s not talk about my eyes anymore. I have one last question: Do you know of any physical phenomenon that can operate from a distance and make people see visions?”

The doctor gave this some thought. “Yes, I do. A while ago I was part of the medical team for the Shenzhou 19 spacecraft. Some taikonauts engaged in extravehicular activities reported seeing flashes that didn’t exist. The astronauts on the International Space Station reported similar experiences. It was because during periods of intense solar activity, high-energy particles struck against the retina, causing them to see flashes. But you’re talking about numbers—a countdown, even. Solar activity can’t possibly cause that.”

Wang walked out of the hospital in a daze. The countdown continued to hover in his eyes, and he seemed to be following the numbers, following a ghost that would not leave him. He bought a pair of sunglasses and put them on so that others would not see his eyes wandering around as though he were sleepwalking.

Before entering the main lab at the Nanotechnology Research Center, Wang took off his sunglasses. Even so, his colleagues noticed his apparent mental state and gave him concerned looks.

Wang saw that the main reaction chamber in the middle of the lab was still in operation. The main compartment of the gigantic apparatus was a sphere with many pipes connected to it.

They had made small quantities of a new, ultrastrong nanomaterial that they’d given the code name “Flying Blade.” But the samples so far were all made with molecular construction techniques—that is, using a nanoscale molecular probe to stack the molecules one by one, like laying out bricks for a wall. This method was very resource-intensive, and the results might as well have been the world’s most precious jewels. It was impractical to produce large quantities this way.

At the moment, the lab was attempting to develop a catalytic reaction as a substitute for molecular construction so that large numbers of molecules would stack themselves into the right arrangement. The main reaction chamber could rapidly run through a large number of reactions using different molecular combinations. There were so many combinations that normal manual testing methods would have taken more than a hundred years. In addition, the apparatus augmented actual reactions with mathematical simulations. When the reaction reached a certain stage, the computer would build a mathematical model of it based on intermediate products and finish the remainder of the reaction via simulation. This greatly boosted the experimental efficiency.