Death's End

Soon, the plane had swallowed one-third of the city, and it continued to flicker frantically as it rose irresistibly toward the axis. Some people had begun to fall into the plane by now. They either fell behind due to malfunctions in their space suit thrusters or they had given up on running. Like drops of colorful ink, they spread open on the plane in an instant, and each appeared as a unique figure in two dimensions. On one of the zoomed-in images shown by the AI, they saw a pair of lovers leaping into the plane while in an embrace. Even after the two had been flattened, it was possible to see the figures in an embrace lying side by side—their postures appeared odd, as though drawn by a clumsy child who did not understand the principles of perspective. Nearby there was a mother who lifted her baby overhead as she fell into the plane, all so that the baby would survive for an extra tenth of a second. The mother and child were also vividly portrayed in this giant painting. As the plane kept on rising, the rain of people falling on it became denser. Two-dimensional human figures flooded forth on the plane, most moving outside the boundary of the space city.

By the time the two-dimensional space approached the axis, most of the surviving population had landed against the city’s far side. Half of the city was now gone, and as people looked “up” they could no longer see the familiar city on the other side, but only a chaotic, two-dimensional sky pressing down on the parts of Europe VI that remained in three dimensions. It was now no longer possible to escape from the main gateway at the north pole, so people congregated around the equator, where there were three emergency exits. The weightless crowd piled into mountains around the exits.

The two-dimensional space passed through the axis and swallowed up the three suns, but the light emitted by the two-dimensionalizing process made the world even brighter.

A low whistling sound began: The city was losing its air to space. The three emergency exits along the equator were wide open, each as large as a football field; outside them was the still-three-dimensional space.

The ship’s AI pushed another information window to the front. This was a feed from space looking down at Europe VI. The two-dimensionalized portion of the space city spread across the invisible plane, making the rapidly sinking, still-three-dimensional portion look minuscule by comparison, like the back of a whale peering out of the vast ocean. Three clumps of black smoke rose out of the city and dissipated in space; the “smoke” was formed from the people blown out by the fierce winds of the decompressing space city. The lonely, three-dimensional island continued to sink and melt into the two-dimensional sea. In less than ten minutes, all of Europe VI had turned into a painting.

The painting of Europe VI was so vast that it was hard to estimate its exact area. It was a dead city, but perhaps it was more accurate to call it a 1:1 drawing of the city. The drawing reflected every detail of the city, down to every screw, every fiber, every mite, and even every bacterium. The precision of the drawing was at the level of the individual atom. Every atom in the original three-dimensional space was projected onto its corresponding place in two-dimensional space according to ironclad laws. The basic principles governing this drawing were that there could be no overlap and no hidden parts, and every single detail had to be laid out on the plane. Here, complexity was a substitute for grandeur. The drawing wasn’t easy to interpret—it was possible to see the overall plan of the city and recognize some big structures, such as the giant trees, which still looked like trees even in two dimensions. But buildings looked very different after being flattened: it was almost impossible to deduce the original three-dimensional structure from the two-dimensional drawing by imagination alone. However, it was certain that image-processing software equipped with the right mathematical model would be able to.

In the information window, it was also possible to see two other flattened space cities in the distance. The cities appeared as perfectly flat continents drifting in dark space, gazing at each other across the plane. But the camera—perhaps located on a drone—was also falling toward the plane, and soon the two-dimensional Europe VI filled the screen.

Close to a million people had escaped Europe VI via the emergency exits; now, caught by the three-dimensional space around them collapsing into two dimensions, they fell toward the plane like a swarm of ants caught in a waterfall. A majestic rain of people fell onto the plane, and the two-dimensional human figures in the city multiplied. Flattened persons took up a lot of area—though still minuscule compared to the vast two-dimensional buildings—and resembled tiny, barely man-shaped marks in the immense picture.