Death's End

The sun has set.
Mountain, tree, rock, river—
All the grand buildings are buried in shadows.
People light their lamps with great interest,
Delighting in all they can see,
Hoping to find what they wish.{Translator’s Note:

The poem is by Xu Yunuo (1894–1958), a modern Chinese poet most prominently associated with the May Fourth Movement.}

Bunker Era, Year 11 Lightspeed II

The final destination of Cheng Xin and Cao Bin was Halo City, a medium space city. Medium cities were space cities whose interior areas were below two hundred square kilometers but above fifty square kilometers. Typically, these cities were mixed within formations of large cities, but two of the medium cities, Halo City and Lightspeed II, were situated far from the Jovian city cluster, almost outside the protection of Jupiter’s shadow.

Before arriving at Halo City, the dinghy passed by Lightspeed II. Cao Bin told Cheng Xin that Lightspeed II used to be a science city and was one of the two research centers studying how to lower the speed of light to achieve the black domain state, but it had been abandoned. Cheng Xin was very interested and wanted to stop for a visit. Reluctantly, Cao Bin turned the dinghy in that direction.

“Why don’t we just take a look from the outside?” Cao Bin said. “It’s best not to go in.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“But we went inside Pacific I, which was also dangerous.”

“It’s not the same. There’s no one inside Lightspeed II. It’s a… ghost city. At least, that’s what everyone says.”

As the dinghy approached, Cheng Xin realized that the city really was in ruins. It didn’t spin, and the exterior appeared broken and cracked. In some places, the skin of the city had been ripped open, revealing the structural frame underneath. As she surveyed the giant ruin illuminated by the searchlights of the dinghy, Cheng Xin felt awe as well as terror. She thought of the ruin as a beached whale. It had lain there for eons, until all that was left was cracked skin and bones, and life had long ago drained away. She seemed to be looking at something even older than the Acropolis of Athens, with even more secrets.

They slowly approached a large crack, several times as wide as the body of their dinghy. The beams in the structural frame were also bent and twisted, opening up a way to the interior. The beam of the searchlight shone in so that Cheng Xin could see the distant “ground,” which was completely bare. After the dinghy descended a short distance into the interior of the space city, it stopped and swept the searchlight about them. Cheng Xin saw that the “ground” was bare in every direction. Not only were there no buildings, there wasn’t anything at all to indicate that people had once lived here. The crisscrossing beams forming the frame for the city were visible on the “ground.”

“Is it just an empty shell?” Cheng Xin asked.

“No.”

Cao Bin looked at Cheng Xin for a few seconds, as if assessing her courage. Then he reached out and shut off the searchlights.

At first, all Cheng Xin could see was darkness. Starlight spilled in from the crack in front, as though she was gazing up at the sky through a broken roof. Eventually, her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she realized that the interior of the ruined space city wasn’t entirely dark, but was illuminated with a faint, flickering blue light. Cheng Xin shivered. She forced herself to calm down and looked for the source. The blue glow came from the center of the interior of the space city.

The light source blinked without pattern, like a twitching eye. The empty ground was filled with strange shadows, like a desolate wasteland illuminated by flashes of lightning on the horizon at night.

“The light is caused by space dust falling into the black hole,” Cao Bin said, pointing in the direction of the light source. He was trying to relieve some of Cheng Xin’s terror.

“There’s a black hole over there?”

“Yes. It’s about… no more than five kilometers from here. A microscopic black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of twenty nanometers and a mass equivalent to Leda, the Jovian moon.”

In this phosphorescent blue glow, Cao Bin told Cheng Xin the story of Lightspeed II and 高 Way.{Translator’s Note: Like “艾 AA,” “高 Way” is a mixed Chinese-English name (“高” is the surname and pronounced “Gao”).}

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