Ball Lightning(105)

As Ding Yi looked at her, he heard the words she had said at Zhang Bin’s gravesite: I grew up in the army. I don’t know if I could entirely belong anywhere else. Or to anyone else.

Lin Yun raised her right hand and reached over to the major’s epaulet on her left shoulder—not to take it off, but to rub it.

Ding Yi noticed that her finger dragged an afterimage behind it.

When Lin Yun’s hand touched the epaulet, it was as if time stopped. This was the final image she left in the world. Her body began to turn transparent, swiftly turning into a crystalline shadow, and then the quantum-state Lin Yun vanished.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both...

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.



* Zhenbao Island, also known as Damanskii Island, was the site of a border clash in March 1969 during the seven-month undeclared conflict that marked the height of the Sino-Soviet Split.





Victory


It was bright outside when Ding Yi finished his tale. The war-ravaged city had welcomed another morning.

“You tell a good story. If the purpose was to comfort me, then you succeeded,” I said.

“Do you think I’d be able to invent all that you just heard?”

“How did she remain in a quantum state for so long without collapsing with all of you observing her?”

“There’s one thing I’ve been pondering ever since I first posited the existence of the macro-quantum state: a sentient quantum individual is different from an ordinary non-sentient quantum particle in one important way, and we overlooked an important parameter for the wave function describing the former. Specifically, we overlooked an observer.”

“An observer? Who?”

“The individual itself. Unlike ordinary non-sentient quantum particles, sentient quantum individuals can engage in self-observation.”

“Okay. But what does self-observation imply?”

“You’ve seen it. It can counteract other observers, and maintain the quantum state uncollapsed.”

“And how is that self-observation conducted?”

“No doubt by some highly complicated emotional process that we’re unable to even imagine.”

“So will she return again like that?” I asked, full of hope for the answer to this critical question.

“Probably not. Objects that experience resonance with macro-fusion energy will, for a period of time after the resonance is complete, have an existence-state probability higher than their destroyed state. That’s why we were able to see all of those probability clouds of chips as the fusion was going on. But the quantum state will decay as time moves onward, and eventually the destroyed state will be more probable than the existence state.”

“Oh—” I exclaimed, the sound coming from deep within my heart.

“But the existence-state probability, no matter how small, is still there.”

“Like hope,” I said, doing my best to throw off my fragile emotional state.

“Yes. Like hope,” Ding Yi said.

As if to answer him, we heard a commotion out on the street. I went to the window and looked down to see lots of people outside. More were streaming out of the buildings, gathering excitedly in threes and fives. What surprised me most were their expressions: everyone was beaming like the sun had risen early. This was the first time I had seen this sort of smile since the start of the war, and now it was on so many faces.

“Let’s go down,” Ding Yi said, picking up the half-finished bottle of Red Star from the table.

“What’s the booze for?”

“We might need it when we get down there. Of course, in the unlikely event I’m wrong, don’t laugh at me.”

We had just exited the building when someone from the crowd ran over to us. It was Gao Bo. I asked him what was up.

“The war is over!” he shouted.

“We surrendered?”

“We won! The enemy alliance dissolved, and they’ve declared unilateral ceasefires. One by one, they’ve begun to pull back. Victory!”

“You’re dreaming.” I turned from Gao Bo to Ding Yi, who didn’t seem surprised at all.

“You’re the one who’s dreaming. Everyone’s been focused on the progress of the talks the whole night. Where have you been? Zonked out?” Gao Bo said, then ran off joyfully to join an even bigger crowd.

“Did you anticipate this?” I asked Ding Yi.

“I don’t have that foresight. But Lin Yun’s father predicted it. After Lin Yun disappeared, he told us that macro-fusion would probably end the war.”

“Why?”

“It’s simple, really. When the truth about the chip burn-out catastrophe got out, the whole world was frightened.”

I smiled, but shook my head. “How? Not even our thermonuclear weapons frighten anyone that much.”

“There’s a difference between this and thermonuclear weapons—a possibility you may not have realized.”

I looked at him, baffled.

“Think about it. If we detonated all of our nuclear bombs on our own soil, what would happen?”

“Only an idiot would do that.”

“But supposing that we have lots of macro-nuclei that can fry chips, a hundred or more, and we keep conducting macro-fusion on our own territory. Is that still idiotic?”