Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem

A thick column of smoke poured out of the hole. Judgment Day, which had been sailing along the right shore, now began to turn, dragging this smoky tail. Soon it crossed over the canal and smashed into the left shore. As Wang looked, the giant prow deformed as it collided into the slope, slicing open the hill like water, causing waves of earth to spill in all directions. At the same time, Judgment Day began to separate into more than forty slices, each slice half a meter thick. The slices near the top moved faster than the slices near the bottom, and the ship spread open like a deck of cards. As the forty-some metal slices moved past each other, the piercing noise was like countless giant fingernails scratching against glass.

By the time the intolerable noise ended, Judgment Day was spilled on the shore like a stack of plates carried by a stumbling waiter, the plates near the top having traveled the farthest. The slices looked as soft as cloth, and rapidly deformed into complicated shapes impossible to imagine as having once belonged to a ship.

Soldiers rushed toward the shore from the slope. Wang was surprised to find so many men hidden nearby. A fleet of helicopters arrived along the canal with their engines roaring; crossed the canal surface, which was now covered by an iridescent oil slick; hovered over the wreckage of Judgment Day ; and began to drop large quantities of fire suppression foam and powder. Shortly, the fire in the wreckage was under control, and three other helicopters began to drop searchers into the wreckage with cables.

Colonel Stanton had already left. Wang picked up the binoculars he’d left on top of his hat. Overcoming his trembling hands, he observed Judgment Day . By this time, the wreckage was mostly covered by fire-extinguishing foam and powder, but the edges of some of the slices were left exposed. Wang saw the cut surfaces, smooth as mirrors. They reflected the fiery red light of dusk perfectly. He also saw a deep red spot on the mirror surface. He wasn’t sure if it was blood.

INTERROGATOR: Do you understand Trisolaran civilization?

YE WENJIE: No. We received only very limited information. No one has real, detailed knowledge of Trisolaran civilization except Mike Evans and other core members of the Adventists who intercepted their messages.

INTERROGATOR: Then why do you have such hope for it, thinking that it can reform and perfect human society?

YE: If they can cross the distance between the stars to come to our world, their science must have developed to a very advanced stage. A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards.

INTERROGATOR: Do you think this conclusion you drew is scientific?

YE: …

INTERROGATOR: Let me presume to guess: Your father was deeply influenced by your grandfather’s belief that only science could save China. And you were deeply influenced by your father.

YE: (sighing quietly) I don’t know.

INTERROGATOR: We have already obtained all the Trisolaran messages intercepted by the Adventists.

YE: Oh… what happened to Evans?

INTERROGATOR: He died during the operation to capture Judgment Day . But the posture of his body pointed us to the computers holding copies of the Trisolaran messages. Thankfully, they were all encoded with the same self-interpreting code used by Red Coast.

YE: Was there a lot of data?

INTERROGATOR: Yes, about twenty-eight gigabytes.

YE: That’s impossible. Interstellar communication is very inefficient. How can so much data have been transmitted?

INTERROGATOR: We thought so at first, too. But things were not at all as we had imagined—not even in our boldest, most fantastic imaginations. How about this? Please read this section of the preliminary analysis of the captured data, and you can see the reality of the Trisolaran civilization, compared with your beautiful fantasies.

The Trisolaran data contained no descriptions of the biological appearance of Trisolarans. Since humans would not lay eyes on actual Trisolarans until more than four hundred years later, Ye could only envision the Trisolarans as humanoid as she read the messages. She filled in the blanks between the lines with her imagination.

Listening Post 1379 had already been in existence for more than a thousand years. There were several thousand posts like it on Trisolaris, all of them dedicating their efforts to detecting possible signs of intelligent life in the universe.

Initially, each listening post had several hundred listeners, but as technology advanced, there was only one person on duty. Being a listener was a humble career. Though they lived in listening posts that were kept at a constant temperature, with support systems that guaranteed their survival without requiring them to dehydrate during Chaotic Eras, they also had to live their lives within the narrow confines of these tiny spaces. The amount of joy they got from Stable Eras was far less than others got.

The listener at Post 1379 looked through the tiny window at the world of Trisolaris outside. This was a Chaotic Era night. The giant moon had not yet risen, and most people remained in dehydrated hibernation. Even plants had instinctively dehydrated and turned into lifeless bundles of dry fiber lying against the ground. Under the starlight, the ground looked like a giant sheet of cold metal.

This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What the listener of Post 1379 disliked the most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise the listening post picked up from space. He felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row: lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

On this day, however, the listener saw something odd when he glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But the listener was so familiar with the noise of the universe that he could tell that the wave that now moved in front of his eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. He was certain that the radio signal before him had been modulated by intelligence.

He rushed in front of another terminal and checked the computer’s rating of the signal’s recognizability: a Red 10. Before this, no radio signal received by the listening post had ever garnered a recognizability rating above a Blue 2. A Red rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of Red 10 meant the received transmission contained a self-interpreting coding system! The deciphering computer worked at full power.

Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, the listener stared at the waveform display. Information continued to stream from the universe into the antenna. Because of the self-interpreting code, the computer was able to perform real-time translation, and the message began to show up immediately.

The listener opened the resulting document, and, for the first time, a Trisolaran read a message from another world.

With the best of intentions, we look forward to establishing contact with other civilized societies in the universe. We look forward to working together with you to build a better life in this vast universe.