Ball Lightning(98)

The other end was quiet for two seconds, but only two seconds. Then General Lin said evenly, “You are fully capable of giving the order yourself.”

“But, sir—”

“You have been relieved. Hand the phone to Senior Colonel Shi Jian.”

“Sir!”

“Quickly.”

General Du passed the phone to Shi Jian, who snatched it up at once, clearly eager for the opportunity to talk to the brass. He was about to speak when General Lin gave a short, decisive order: “Destroy the fusion point.”

“Yes, sir.”

The senior colonel then set down the phone and turned to a major: “What’s the nearest class two or higher fire point?”

“Red 331. It’s around 150 kilometers away.”

“Immediately transmit the fusion point coordinates to them. Four-point precision. Send them the attack authorization, and connect me with the commander of Red 331.”

The missile base commander was soon on the line. The senior colonel said into the receiver, “Yes. Right. Have you received the coordinates and the attack authorization? Right. Immediately! Good. Treat it as a type-four land target....?You determine that yourselves. Just ensure it’s destroyed. Immediately. I won’t hang up....”

“Hey, don’t we have any other choices? Where macro-fusion is concerned...,” Ding Yi said, pushing forward.

Phone in hand, Senior Colonel Shi Jian turned a fierce glare on Ding Yi, and gave a decisive sweep downward with his other arm, either to say there was no other choice, or to stop Ding Yi from talking at all.

“Good. Acknowledged,” he said into the phone, then set it down. His movements slowed, the anxiety dissipated. He let out a long sigh, like he was free at last of a heavy burden, but also like fear had struck him.

“The missile is in transit. It will arrive in three minutes,” he said.

“Sir, maybe we should pull back a little,” an officer said to General Du.

“No.” General Du waved a hand tiredly and did not raise his bowed head.

Very soon they were able to see the missile. Its white tail traced it in the southern sky like an airplane’s contrail, but far faster.

Lin Yun’s voice sounded through the megaphone from the tent, still calm, as if everything that was happening was nothing more than a fluid piece of music she was playing. Now she was declaring that it had come to an end.

“You’re too late, Dad.”

Macro-fusion is quiet. In fact, the majority of eyewitnesses said that it was quieter than usual at the time of fusion, as if all other sounds in nature had been screened out so that the whole process could be conducted in an incomprehensible silence. As one eyewitness put it, the process of macro-fusion looked like “the rising and setting of a blue sun.” At first, the tent emitted blue light. Then people could see the ball of light, still small, as the tent turned transparent like a sheet of cellophane hanging over the tent poles. But soon it collapsed, as if melting. The collapse strangely drew every part of the tent into the fusion’s center, where it was absorbed into the ball of light as if being sucked into a whirlpool, leaving behind no remains or traces of any kind. After the tent disappeared, the ball continued to grow, and soon emerged in the Gobi Desert like a blue sun. By the time it stopped expanding, its radius had grown to around two hundred meters, the distance at which Ding Yi had predicted that ball lightning’s target selectivity would start. Within that distance, the extreme density of the energy meant that everything was destroyed.

The blue sun remained at its largest state for around half a minute. It was stable during that time, but an eerie stillness enveloped the world, so that the brief period felt like an eternity, as if nothing had changed since the birth of the world. The blue sun outshone the real sun, which was half below the western horizon. It drowned the entire Gobi in its blue light and rendered the world weird and unfamiliar. It was a cold sun, and even close by, no one could feel any heat from it.

Then came the strangest marvel of all: from its ghostly depths, the blue sphere radiated a multitude of glittering small stars that turned immediately into objects of various sizes when they reached its surface. The onlookers were shocked when they realized what the objects were: tents, in a state of quantum superposition! They appeared entirely corporeal, not illusory. The largest was bigger than the original tent and hovered in the air like an enormous black shadow. The smallest was pebble-sized, but was complete and whole, like an exquisite model. The tents soon collapsed under the gaze of the observers into a destroyed state, trailing a series of superimposed images before vanishing into the air. But more quantum tents kept flying out from the center in a tent probability cloud that permeated the nearby space. The blue sun was enveloped within the cloud, its expansion arrested by the presence of observers.

At last a sound broke the stillness: a faint snap from a computer on the desk, and then from everyone’s mobile phone. The sound of electronic chips frying. At the same time, a multitude of small objects passed through the unharmed outer case of the computer and radiated outward—objects that, on closer inspection, turned out to be complete CPUs, memory sticks, and other chips, each in a quantum superposition, existing simultaneously in an unknown number of positions. The flying chips were so numerous that the office building was momentarily choked in a thick chip probability cloud. Then, like an invisible broom, observation returned these chips to a destroyed state and they vanished, dragging tails behind them, collapsing to ash inside the computer case. Soon the air was empty again.