Death's End

The three carried the boxes of artifacts onto Halo. Luo Ji seemed familiar with the ship’s layout, heading for the ship’s hold without instruction from Cheng Xin or AA. The ship’s AI also recognized him, and accepted his orders. After they secured the artifacts, the three returned to the yacht’s living quarters. Luo Ji asked the AI for a cup of hot tea, and soon, a little robot that Cheng Xin and AA had never seen before brought it to him. Clearly, Luo Ji had some history with this ship that the two women did not know about. They were curious about the story, though more urgent matters had to be taken care of first.

Cheng Xin asked the AI to play some news from the Earth, but the AI said that it had received only a few transmissions from the planet, and the visual and audio content was essentially impossible to make sense of. They looked at the few open information windows and saw only blurred images taken by unmanned cameras. The AI added that it could provide the video taken by the spacecraft monitoring system near the Earth. A new, large window popped up and the flatted Earth filled the screen.

The three immediately thought the image looked unreal, even suspecting that the AI had synthesized the image to fool them.

“What in the world is this?” AA cried out.

“It’s the Earth about seven hours ago. The camera is fifty astronomical units away, and angular magnification is four hundred and fifty times.”

They looked more closely at the holographic video taken by the telescopic lens. The body of the flattened Earth appeared very clearly, and the “tree rings” were even denser than when observed with the naked eye. The collapse had probably already been completed, and the two-dimensional Earth was dimming. But what really shocked them was the frozen two-dimensional ocean—the white ring around the rim of the Earth. They could clearly make out the grains forming the ring: snowflakes! These were unimaginably large snowflakes, hexagonal in plan, but each with unique crystal branches—exquisite, lovely beyond words. To see snowflakes from fifty AU away was already extremely surreal, and these immense snowflakes were arranged side by side on the plane with no overlap, which further enhanced the feeling of unreality. They seemed to be purely artistic portrayals of snowflakes, powerfully decorative, turning the frozen two-dimensional sea into a piece of stage art.

“How big are the snowflakes?” AA asked.

“Most have diameters between four thousand and five thousand kilometers.” The ship’s AI, incapable of wonder, continued to speak in a serene tone.

“Bigger than the moon!” Cheng Xin said.

The AI opened a few other windows, and each showed a zoomed-in snowflake. In these images, the sense of scale was lost, and they seemed to be tiny spirits under a magnifying lens, each snowflake ready to turn into a tiny droplet as soon as it touched down on a palm.

“Oh—” Luo Ji stroked his beard again, and this time, succeeded.

“How are they formed?” AA asked.

“I don’t know,” the AI said. “I can’t find any information about the crystallization of water at astronomical scales.”

In three-dimensional space, snowflakes formed in accordance with the laws of ice-crystal growth. Theoretically, these laws did not restrict the size of snowflakes. The largest snowflake previously on record was thirty-eight centimeters in diameter.

No one knew the laws of ice crystal growth in two-dimensional space. Whatever they were, they permitted ice crystals in two dimensions to grow to five thousand kilometers.

“There’s water on Neptune and Saturn, and ammonia can also form crystals. Why didn’t we see large snowflakes there?” Cheng Xin asked.

The AI said it didn’t know.

Luo Ji squinted his eyes and enjoyed the two-dimensional version of the Earth. “The ocean looks rather nice this way, don’t you think? Only the Earth is worthy of such a lovely wreath.”

“I really want to know what the forests look like, what the grasslands look like, what the ancient cities look like,” Cheng Xin said slowly.

Grief finally struck them, and AA began to sob. Cheng Xin turned her eyes away from the snowflake ocean and made no sound as her eyes filled with tears. Luo Ji shook his head, sighed, and continued to sip his tea. Their grief was moderated to some extent by the thought that the two-dimensional space would also be their home in the end.

They would attain their eternal rest alongside Mother Earth on that plane.

—————

The three decided to begin their third cargo trip. They exited Halo, gazed up at the sky, and saw the three two-dimensional planets. Neptune, Saturn, and the Earth had grown even larger, and the asteroid belt was wider. This was no hallucination. They asked the AI about it.