Ball Lightning(80)

I felt an intense heat on the left side of my chest and felt for the source. My mobile, in my shirt pocket, was burning up, so I plucked it out. My companions were doing the same thing. Our phones emitted white smoke, and when I took mine apart, a small quantity of white ash dispersed. The chips inside had been incinerated. We opened up the computers and found that nearly a third of the chips on the motherboards had been burned up. White ash and a peculiar stench filled the office for a while.

Then the rest of the computer screens and the lights went dark. The power had gone out.

My first thought was that we had been attacked by ball lightning that released its energy into computer chips, but something wasn’t right: all of the nearby buildings were research units where chips were plentiful. This would weaken the ball lightning energy discharge enough to reduce its effective radius to no more than one hundred meters. At that distance, we’d definitely have heard the unmistakable explosion it made when discharging, but we had heard nothing apart from the popping of burning chips, so I was nearly certain that no ball lightning had been present nearby.

The first thing we had to do was to determine the scope of the attack. I picked up my phone from the table, but it was dead, so we went downstairs together to check things out. We soon learned that chips had been attacked in two of the Institute’s office buildings and one lightning lab, and about a third of them had been destroyed. Separately, we visited the neighboring Institute of Atmospheric Physics and the Meteorological Modeling Center, and found that the chips in those two units had suffered an attack identical to ours. It would have taken dozens of ball lightning strikes to do the damage we were now aware of, but I hadn’t seen the slightest trace of it.

Immediately after that, Gao Bo sent a few younger people off on bicycles to check out the situation, while the rest of us waited anxiously in the office. He and I were the only ones at the Lightning Institute who knew about ball lightning weapons, and we exchanged glances from time to time, with a panic somewhat worse than other people’s. Half an hour later, the bicyclists came back, terror on their faces, like they’d seen a ghost. They had all ridden for three to five kilometers. Everywhere they went, all electronic chips, without exception, had been attacked by some mysterious force, and had been destroyed in the same ratio, around one-third. They panicked and didn’t dare ride any farther, reporting back to the Institute instead. We were a little unaccustomed to being without mobile phones and landlines.

“There’s no hope for us if the enemy really has such a devilish weapon!” someone said.

Gao Bo and I exchanged another glance. My mind was a jumble. “How about we take four of the Institute’s cars and drive off in four directions so we can check out things in a wider area?”

I drove a car through the city to the east. All of the buildings I saw along the way were dark, with people clustered in small groups outside talking nervously. Many of them still held their clearly useless mobile phones. I knew what the situation was in these places without even having to get out of the car, but I still got out a few times, mostly to ask people whether they had seen signs of ball lightning. But no one had seen or heard anything.

Outside of the urban area, I continued to drive, all the way to a distant county seat in the far suburbs. Here, even though the power was out, there were far fewer signs of panic than downtown. I felt a surge of hope in my heart, a hope that I was approaching the edge of the ring of destruction, or at least that I would see fewer signs of damage. I parked the car outside a web café and rushed inside. It was dusk, and the café was very dark without power, but I smelled that familiar burnt odor at once. I grabbed a machine, took it outside, and carefully inspected the motherboard. In the light of the setting sun I saw that the CPU and several other chips were missing. The computer dropped out of my hands and smashed onto my foot, but I didn’t feel the pain. I only shivered heavily in the cold late autumn breeze, and then jumped in the car and went back.

Not long after I got back to the Institute, the other three cars also returned. The one that went the farthest had taken the expressway for over a hundred kilometers. Everywhere they went, things were the same as here.

We urgently searched for information of the outside, but we had no TV or Internet, and no phone. Only the radio worked. But all of the deluxe digitally tuned radios were driven by integrated circuits, and all of them were now junk. It wasn’t easy, but we eventually found a usable vintage transistor radio that an old mail clerk kept in the reception office, which received three fuzzy southern provincial stations, as well as three in English and one in Japanese.

It was only late that night that these stations began to have reports on this bizarre disaster, and from those fragmentary broadcasts, we learned the following: the chip damage zone was centered somewhere in the northwest of China. It covered a circular area with a radius of 1,300 kilometers, or around one-third of the land in the country, an astonishingly large area, but the chip damage rate gradually tapered off the farther you got from the center. Our city was located near the edge of the region.

*

For the next week, we lived in a pre-electricity agricultural society. It was a difficult time. Water had to be trucked in and rationed out in amounts that were barely sufficient to drink. At night we relied on candles for illumination.

During this period, rumors about the disaster flew thick as cow hair. In the public chatter as well as in the media (which for us was limited to radio), the most popular explanation had to do with aliens. But in all of the rumors, there was no mention of ball lightning.