Death's End

Cheng Xin sobbed her heart out over Yifan’s shoulder. In her memories, she had cried like this only once before, when Tianming’s brain had been taken out of his body. That was… 18,903,729 years plus six centuries ago, and those six centuries were but a rounding error at such geologic timescales. This time, she cried not only for Tianming. She cried out of a sense of surrender. She finally understood how she was but a mote of dust in a grand wind, a small leaf drifting over a broad river. She surrendered completely and allowed the wind to pass through her, allowed the sunlight to pierce her soul.

Letting the past go, she allowed her growing esteem for Guan Yifan to take over her heart.

They sat on the yielding humus and continued to hold each other, letting time flow by. The dappled sunlight gently shifted around them as the planet continued to rotate. Sometimes Cheng Xin asked herself, Has another ten million years passed by? A small, rational part of her mind strangely whispered to her that such a thing was possible: There really were worlds where one could step through a thousand years at will. Consider the death lines: If they ruptured and expanded just a bit, the speed of light within would rise from zero to an extremely small number, like the rate at which continents drifted over the ocean: a centimeter for every ten thousand years. In such a world, if you got up from your lover and walked a few steps away, you would be separated from him by ten million years.

They’d missed each other.

After they knew not how long, Yifan asked her softly, “What should we do?”

“I want to look more. There must be some sign.”

“There really won’t be anything. Eighteen million years will erase everything: Time is the cruelest force of all.”

“Carving words into stone.”

Yifan looked at Cheng Xin, confused.

“艾 AA would know to carve words into stone,” Cheng Xin muttered.

“I don’t understand….”

Cheng Xin didn’t explain; instead, she grabbed Yifan by the shoulders: “Can you have Hunter do a deep scan of this area and see if there’s anything under the surface?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Words. I want to see if there are words.”

Yifan shook his head. “I understand your desire, but—”

“To better last through the eons, the words ought to be large.”

Yifan nodded, but obviously only to appease her. They returned to the shuttle. Although this was a walk of only a few steps, they leaned against each other as if afraid time would divide them if they were physically separated. Yifan contacted Hunter and directed it to do a deep scan of the area within a circle centered on this coordinate with a radius of three kilometers. The depth of the scan was set to be between five and ten meters, focusing on human writing or other significant markings.

Hunter passed overhead fifteen minutes later and sent back the results about ten minutes after that: nothing.

Guan Yifan ordered the ship to do another scan at a depth range between ten and twenty meters. This took another hour, the bulk of which was spent waiting for the ship to pass overhead. Still nothing. At that depth there was no more soil, only bedrock.

Guan Yifan adjusted the scanning range to between twenty and thirty meters. “This is the last time,” he said to Cheng Xin. “The sensors can’t go deeper than that.”

They waited for the ship to orbit Planet Blue another time. The sun was setting and the sky was full of lovely, fiery clouds, while the purple woods were limned with a golden glow.

This time, the shuttle’s screen showed the images transmitted back by the ship. After processing by enhancement software, they could see a few fragments of white words embedded in the dark rock: “e,” “liv,” “a,” “life,” “you,” “little,” “side,” “Go.” The white color was to indicate that the words were carved into the bedrock; each character was about a meter square, and they were arranged into four rows. The words were twenty-three to twenty-eight meters below them, carved into a forty-degree incline.

WE LIVED A HAPPY LIFE TOGETHER

WE GIVE YOU A LITTLE

SURVIVE THE COLLAPSE INSIDE

GO TO THE NEW

Hunter’s AI invoked the geological expert system to interpret the results. They found out that the giant characters had initially been carved into the surface of a large sedimentary rock formation on the side of a mountain. The original surface was about 130 square meters. Over the eons, the mountain on which the rock had been located sank, and that was how the carved rock ended up below them. More than four lines of text had been carved into it, but the lower portion of the rock had been broken up during the geological transformations and all the text there lost. The surviving text was incomplete as well—the last three lines all had missing characters at the end.