Death's End полностью

“I thought you weren’t going to agree,” Cheng Xin said. “This requires heavy investment in basic research.”

“You think I’m just a capitalist? Well, you’re not wrong. I am, and so are the members of the board of directors. We want to maximize profits. But that doesn’t conflict with lightspeed spaceships. Politically, the government will devote the most resources into the Bunker Project and the black domain, but lightspeed ships will be left to entrepreneurs…. We should put our efforts into the Bunker Project, and then use some of the profits to research lightspeed ships.”

“Here’s my thinking, AA: Curvature propulsion and the black domain probably share some fundamental theories. We can wait for the government and the World Academy of Sciences to complete that part of the research, then develop it toward curvature propulsion.”

“All right. We should start a Halo Group Academy of Sciences, too, and recruit scientists. Many of them have dreamed about lightspeed spaceflight, but they can’t find such opportunities in national or international projects—”

AA was interrupted by a sudden surge of new information windows. Windows of all sizes appeared in every direction like a colorful avalanche, quickly burying the few original information windows showing feeds from the Halo Group’s projects. A “window avalanche” like this usually indicated the sudden occurrence of some important event, but the flood of information often caused people to be overwhelmed, unable to find out what actually happened. Such was the case with AA and Cheng Xin. They saw that most of the windows were filled with complex text and animated figures, and only those windows that showed pure images could be taken in at a glance. In one of the windows, Cheng Xin saw a few faces looking upwards, then the lens zoomed in until a frightened pair of eyes filled the frame, accompanied by a cacophony of screams….

A new window came to the forefront showing AA’s secretary. She stared at AA and Cheng Xin, her face full of terror and shock.

“A warning! An attack!” she shouted.

“Any specifics?” AA asked.

“They activated the first observation unit in the Solar System advance warning system and found a photoid right away!”

“In what direction? How far?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. All I know—”

“Is this an official warning?” Cheng Xin asked calmly.

“I don’t think so. But it’s in all the media. I’m sure it’s real! Let’s get to the spaceport and run for our lives!” The secretary disappeared from the window.

Cheng Xin and AA passed through the dense congeries of information windows and arrived at the transparent wall of the conference room. They saw that panic had already seized the city below them. A massive increase in the number of flying cars outside resulted in chaos, and every vehicle tried to force itself through the jam at high speed. One of the cars struck a giant tree building and erupted into a fireball. Soon, fire and columns of smoke appeared in two other locations in the city….

AA picked out a few information windows and perused them carefully. Cheng Xin, on the other hand, tried to get in touch with the members of the IDC. Most of their phones were busy, and Cheng Xin managed to talk to only two committee members. One of them, like AA and Cheng Xin, knew nothing. The other, a PDC official, told Cheng Xin that he could confirm that Observation Unit #1 in the Solar System advance warning system had noticed some significant anomaly, but he didn’t know the specifics. He also confirmed that Fleet International and the UN had not issued a formal dark forest strike alarm, but he wasn’t optimistic.

“There are two possibilities for why no alarm has been issued: One, nothing has happened. Two, the photoid is too close and an alarm would be useless.”

AA was only able to obtain one piece of specific information from her reading: The photoid was coming along the ecliptic plane. There were conflicting reports concerning its exact direction and distance from the Sun, and estimates of when the photoid would strike the sun diverged wildly: Some claimed that the world had another month; others said only a few hours.

“We should go to Halo,” AA said.

“Is there enough time?”

Halo was a corporate spaceship that belonged to the Halo Group. Right now, it was parked at the company’s geosynchronous base. If the alarm was real, their only hope now was to ride the ship to Jupiter and hide out behind the gas giant before the photoid struck. As Jupiter was in opposition, and therefore as close to the Earth as it could be, it would take twenty-five to thirty days for the ship to fly from the Earth to Jupiter, which was just under the upper end of the range of estimates for when the photoid would strike. But this estimate seemed highly unreliable: The advance warning system was still being constructed, and couldn’t have given such an early alert.