Ball Lightning(106)
At Ding Yi’s prompting, I soon understood his point. If a second, identical macro-fusion took place on the same spot, the fact that the first had fried all the chips in the vicinity would mean the energy of the second would not be drained. It would pass through the region cleared by the first and destroy chips in a larger region beyond that until it, too, was drained by the chips it encountered. Proceeding in that manner with multiple macro-fusions on the same spot, fusion energy could propagate throughout the world. The Earth would be transparent to it. Perhaps fewer than a hundred strings of that type would be enough to temporarily return the entire world to an agricultural age.
There was one other important point: indiscriminate use of conventional nuclear weapons would take humanity out with them, so under no circumstances would politicians with even a shred of reason make such a decision. And even if some crazed strategist gave an order, it was unlikely to be executed. But macro-fusion was different. It could achieve strategic objectives without killing a single person. Hence the decision to use it was a relatively easy one, compared to conventional nukes, and when a country was backed into a corner, it was very likely to do so.
Chip-frying macro-fusion would reformat the world’s enormous hard drive, and the more advanced the country was, the harder it would be hit. The road to recovery back to the Information Age would lead to an undetermined new world order.
Now that I understood this, I knew I wasn’t dreaming. The war really was over. As if a string on my body had been plucked out, my legs crumpled beneath me and I sat on the ground watching the sky dumbly until the sun rose. In the deceptive warmth of the first ray of sunlight on that day, I covered my face and wept.
Around me, the sounds of celebration rolled on in waves. Still crying, I stood up. Ding Yi had disappeared into the reveling crowd, but someone immediately hugged me, and then I went and hugged someone else. I lost count of the people I hugged on that grand morning. As the dizzy joy ebbed somewhat, I found myself hugging a woman. When we let go, we happened to look each other over for a moment, and I froze.
We knew each other. She was the pretty student who had said I had a strong sense of purpose on that late night in the university library so many years ago. It took me a while, but I remembered her name: Dai Lin.
The Quantum Rose
Two months later, Dai Lin and I got married.
After the war, people’s lives turned far more traditional. Single people got married, and childless families had children. The war had made people cherish things they used to take for granted.
During the slow economic recovery, times were hard, but they were warm. I never told Dai Lin of my experiences after graduation, and she never spoke of hers. Clearly all of us had a past in those lost times that it was hard to look back on. The war told us what was truly valuable: the present and the future.
Half a year later, we had a child.
*
During that time, the only interruption to this plain but busy life was a visit from an American. He introduced himself as Norton Parker, an astronomer, and said I ought to recognize him. When he mentioned the SETI@home project, it came to me at once: he had been in charge of the project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence whose distributed processing server Lin Yun and I had invaded to swap in the mathematical model for ball lightning. That experience seemed a world away. Now that the early research on ball lightning was known to the world, it would not have been hard for him to find me.
“There was also a woman involved, I believe.”
“She’s no longer on this earth.”
“Dead in the war?”
“...You could say that.”
“Damn the war....?I came to tell you about an applied ball lightning project I’m heading up.”
With the secret of ball lightning now unlocked, collecting macro-electrons and exciting them into ball lightning had become an industrialized operation, and research on civil applications was making swift progress. It had many unbelievable uses, including burning away cancer cells in sick patients without harming other organs. But Parker said his project was more surreal.
“We’re searching for and observing a particular phenomenon of ball lightning: sometimes it maintains a collapsed state, not a quantum state, even without an observer.”
I was unimpressed. “We encountered that a number of times, but ultimately we were able to find one or several undetected observers. The one I remember most clearly was on a target range. We later learned that the observer was a reconnaissance satellite in space that had caused the ball lightning to collapse.”
Parker said, “And that’s why we chose to conduct tests in places where all observers could absolutely be screened out. Places like abandoned deep mines. We removed all personnel and observation equipment, so there shouldn’t have been any observers inside. We set the accelerators to automatic, conducted target tests, and then used the hit rate to ascertain whether or not the ball lightning was in a collapsed state.”
“And the results showed...?”
“We have performed tests in thirty-five mines. The outcome of the majority of them was normal. But on two occasions, the ball lightning reached a collapsed state in the mine without any observer.”
“So do you think that the outcome raises doubts about quantum mechanics?”
Parker laughed. “No, quantum mechanics isn’t wrong. But you’ve forgotten my specialty. We’re using ball lightning to search for aliens.”