Year 205, Crisis Era(1)

Distance of the Trisolaran Fleet from the Solar System: 2.10 light-years

Darkness. Before the darkness there was nothing but nothingness, and the nothingness was without color. Nothing was in the nothingness. Darkness at least meant that there was space. Soon, disturbances appeared in the darkness of space, penetrating everything like a gentle breeze. It was the sensation of time passing, for the nothingness was without time, but now time took shape in a glacial thaw. Only much later was there light, at first as a shapeless blob of brightness, and then, after another long wait, the shape of the world gradually emerged. The newly resurrected consciousness struggled to make sense of it, at first managing to work out a few thin, transparent tubes, then a human face behind them, which quickly disappeared, exposing the creamy-white light of the ceiling.

Luo Ji awoke from hibernation.

The face reappeared. It belonged to a man with a gentle expression who looked at Luo Ji and said, "Welcome to our era." As he spoke, a field of vibrant roses flashed on his white lab coat, then gradually faded and disappeared. As he continued speaking, the coat displayed a continuous assortment of delightful images that matched his expressions and emotions: seas, sunsets, and woods in the drizzle. He told Luo Ji that his illness had been cured during hibernation, and that his reawakening had gone smoothly. Recovery would take just three days or so, and then he would completely regain normal bodily functions.…

Luo Ji's mind, still sluggish and only partially awake, caught just one piece of information out of everything the doctor said: This was year 205 of the Crisis Era, and he had been in hibernation for 185 years.

He found the doctor's accent peculiar at first, but he soon discovered that although the sounds of standard Mandarin hadn't changed much, it had been stuffed with a large quantity of English words. As the doctor spoke, the text of what he said was displayed on the ceiling, apparently through voice recognition. Perhaps to help the newly awakened better understand, the English words were replaced with Chinese characters.

At last the doctor said that Luo Ji could be transferred from the revival room to the general ward. His coat showed an evening scene in which a setting sun rapidly turned into a starry sky to say farewell. As this was going on, Luo Ji felt his bed begin to move. Just out the door, he heard the doctor call out, "Next." Twisting his head back to look, he saw another bed enter the revival room bearing someone who had obviously just been taken out of the hibernation chamber. The bed was quickly wheeled to a bank of monitors, and the doctor, his coat now a pure white, tapped on the wall with a finger, causing one-third of it to display complex curves and data that he began to manipulate intensely.

Luo Ji realized that his own reawakening was probably not a major event at all, but rather just a part of day-to-day work here. The doctor was friendly, but in his eyes Luo Ji was nothing more than an ordinary hibernator.

Like the revival room, the hallway had no lamps. The walls themselves emitted light, and although it was soft, Luo Ji still had to squint. But as he did so, the walls in the section of corridor he was in dimmed, and the dimmed segment followed him as his bed moved. Once his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he opened them again, at which point the hallway brightened again, remaining in his comfort zone. Evidently the hallway's brightness adjustment system was able to monitor the changes in his pupils.

Judging by that, he had to be in a personalized age.

This far exceeded his expectations.

As the walls passed slowly by, he saw lots of activated displays of different sizes randomly distributed on them. Some of them were moving images that he didn't have the time to look at clearly, and might have been left behind by users who forgot to turn them off.

Sometimes, his automatic bed crossed paths with people walking down the hallway. He noticed that both the soles of their feet and the bed's wheels made luminous, watery waves of pressure where they contacted the ground, like what used to happen when you pressed a finger onto an LCD in his own time. The long corridor gave him an intense sense of cleanliness, as clean as a 3-D computer animation, although he knew all of it was real. He moved through it with a sense of tranquility and comfort he had never known before.

But what impressed him most about the people he saw was that everyone—doctors, nurses, and nonstaff alike—appeared clean and elegant, and smiled warmly at him or waved when they approached. Their clothes displayed gorgeous images, a different style for each person, some abstract, others concrete. He was won over by their expressions, because he knew that the eyes of ordinary people were the best reflection of the level of civilization in a time and place. He had once seen a set of photos taken by European photographers in the late Qing Dynasty, and his deepest impression had been of the dull expressions of the people in the photographs. Officials and commoners alike had eyes that revealed only numbness and stupidity, lacking the slightest shred of vitality. When the people of this new era looked at Luo Ji's eyes, they might be having the same feeling about him. The gazes that crossed his own were full of a vigorous wisdom, and a sincerity, understanding, and love that he had rarely perceived in his own age. But what impressed him most was the confidence in their expressions. The sunny confidence that filled every pair of eyes had evidently become the spiritual backdrop for the people of this new era.

This did not seem to be an age of despair, and that was another unexpected surprise.

Luo Ji's bed moved soundlessly into the general ward, which held two more reawakened hibernators. One of them was lying on a bed. The other, next to the door, was packing his things with a nurse's help and seemed about ready to leave. From the look in their eyes, Luo Ji knew that both of them were from his own era. Their eyes were like the windows of time, and through them he had another glance of that gray era he had come from.

"How can they be that way? I'm their great-grandfather!" Luo Ji heard the hibernator who was about to leave complaining.

"You can't pull seniority in front of them. It's the law: Hibernation doesn't count as age, so in the presence of the elderly, you're the younger generation.… Let's go. They've waited in the reception room long enough," the nurse said. Although she tried to avoid English words, sometimes she stumbled over Chinese words, as if speaking an ancient tongue, and was forced to use the modern language. Then the wall would display a translation into Chinese.

"I can't even understand it when they talk. All that bird-speak mixed in!" the hibernator said, as he and the nurse each picked up a bag and went out the door.

"In this age, you've got to keep learning. Otherwise, you'll just have to go live up top," Luo Ji heard the nurse say. By now he could understand the modern language without difficulty, but he was still unclear what the nurse meant by her last sentence.

"Hello. Did you hibernate due to illness?" the hibernator in the bed beside Luo Ji asked. He was young, and looked to be in his early twenties.

Luo Ji opened his mouth but no sound came out. The young man smiled at him encouragingly. "You can speak. Try harder!"

"Hello," Luo Ji managed hoarsely.

The young man nodded. "The one who just left did. I didn't. I came here to escape from reality. Oh, and my name's Xiong Wen."

"Here … how is it?" Luo Ji asked, much more easily this time.

"I don't really know. I've only been here five days. Still, it's definitely a good era. But for us, it's bound to be difficult to integrate into society. Mostly because we woke up too soon. A few years later would have been better."

"A few years later? Wouldn't that be even harder?"

"No. It's still a state of war now, so society can't take care of us. In a few decades, after the peace talks, there'll be peace and prosperity."

"Peace talks? With whom?!"

"Trisolaris, of course."

Shaken by Xiong Wen's final statement, Luo Ji strove to sit up. A nurse entered and helped him up to a half-sitting position in bed.

"They said they want peace talks?" he asked anxiously.

"Not yet. But they'll have no other choice," Xiong Wen said, nimbly getting out of his bed and coming over to sit down on Luo Ji's. He had clearly been anticipating the pleasure of introducing someone newly awakened to this era. "Don't you know? Humanity is amazing now. Simply amazing!"

"How?"

"Our spacecraft are incredibly powerful. Far more powerful than Trisolaran ships!"

"How is that possible?"

"Why wouldn't it be? Put the superweapons aside and look purely at speed. They can reach fifteen percent of the speed of light! Tons faster than the Trisolarans!"

When Luo Ji turned a skeptical eye toward the nurse, he noticed that she was exceptionally pretty. Everyone in this age seemed to be attractive. She nodded with a smile. "It's true."

Xiong Wen went on, "And do you know how many ships there are in the space fleet? I'll tell you: two thousand! Twice as many as the Trisolarans! And the number's still growing!"

Luo Ji glanced again at the nurse, who nodded.

"You know how badly off the Trisolaran Fleet is now? In two centuries they've passed through the, ah, the space dust they call the snow patch three times. I heard someone say that the most recent time was four years ago, and the telescope observed that their formation has become sparser. They're not holding together. More than half of the ships stopped accelerating long ago, and they decelerated considerably when they crossed the dust. They're crawling now, and they won't reach the Solar System for more than eight hundred years. They might already be broken hulks. Projecting from their current speed, no more than three hundred ships will arrive on time two centuries from now. However, one Trisolaran probe will reach the Solar System soon. This year. The other nine are following afterward and will get here three years later."

"The probe … What's that?" Luo Ji asked in confusion.

The nurse said, "We don't encourage the exchange of practical information. When the previous reawakened hibernator learned about these things, it took him many days to calm down. It's not conducive to recovery."

"It makes me happy, so what's it to you?" Xiong Wen said with a shrug. Then he returned to his own bed to lie down. As he lay watching the soft light emitted by the ceiling, he sighed, "The kids are all right. They're really all right."

"Who's a kid?" the nurse sniffed. "Hibernation doesn't count as age. You're the kid." To Luo Ji's eyes, she actually looked younger than Xiong Wen, although he knew that his appearance-based judgment of age might not be accurate in this era.

The nurse said to him, "The people from your time are all pretty despairing. But things aren't really all that serious."

To Luo Ji, this was the voice of an angel. He felt like he had turned into a child who had just awakened from a nightmare, and all the frightening things he had experienced were taken care of by a smile from an adult. When she spoke, her nurse's uniform shone a fast-rising sun, and under its golden light, the dry yellow earth turned green, and flowers bloomed in wild abandon.…

When the nurse had gone, Luo Ji asked Xiong Wen, "What about the Wallfacer Project?"

Xiong Wen shook his head in confusion. "Wallfacer…? Never heard of it."

Luo Ji asked when Xiong Wen had entered hibernation. It had been before the Wallfacer Project had started, when hibernation was very expensive. His family must have had money. But if he hadn't heard anything about the Wallfacer Project in the five days he had been awake, that meant that even if the program hadn't been forgotten in this era, it was no longer important.

Next, Luo Ji personally experienced the level of technology of this new age in two trivial areas.

Soon after he entered the ward, the nurse carried in his first meal after reawakening, a very small quantity of milk and bread and jam, because his stomach functions were still recovering. He took a bite of bread and felt like he was chewing sawdust.

"Your sense of taste is still recovering, too," the nurse said.

"It'll taste even worse once you've recovered," Xiong Wen said.

The nurse laughed. "Of course, it's not as good as the food grown on the surface in your era."

"Then where does this come from?" Luo Ji asked, through his full mouth.

"It's produced in a factory."

"You're able to synthesize grain?"

Xiong Wen answered for the nurse. "There's no other option but to synthesize it. The land won't grow any crops anymore."

Luo Ji felt sorry for Xiong Wen. There had been people in his era who had become immune to technology and were indifferent to any sort of technological wonder, and Xiong Wen was apparently one of them. He was unable to properly appreciate this new age.

The next discovery was an incredible shock to Luo Ji, although the thing itself was still quite plain. The nurse pointed to the cup of milk and told him that it had been put into a heating cup especially for hibernators, because the people of this era generally did not drink hot liquids. Even coffee was taken cold. If he wasn't used to drinking cold milk, he could heat it up simply by moving a slider near the bottom of the cup to the desired temperature. When he finished drinking, he inspected the cup. It looked like an ordinary glass cup apart from a thick, opaque base which must contain the heat source. But no matter how hard he looked, he couldn't find any controls but the slider, and when he tried to twist the base, he found it was integrated with the rest of the cup.

"Don't mess around with the supplies. You don't understand them yet. It's dangerous," the nurse said after watching Luo Ji's efforts.

"I'd like to know where it gets recharged."

"Re … charged?" The nurse awkwardly repeated the word, evidently hearing it for the first time.

"Charge. Recharge," Luo Ji said in English, but the nurse just shook her head in confusion.

"What happens when the batteries run out?"

"Batteries?"

"Batteries," he said in English. "You don't have batteries anymore?" When the nurse shook her head again, he said, "Then where does the electricity in the cup come from?"

"Electricity? There's electricity everywhere," the nurse said disapprovingly.

"The electricity in the cup won't run out?"

"It won't run out."

"It's inexhaustible?!"

"Inexhaustible. How could electricity run out?"

When the nurse left, Luo Ji still was unable to let go of the cup. He ignored Xiong Wen's ridicule, for his surging emotions told him that he was holding a sacred object, the age-old dream of humanity: a perpetual motion machine. If humanity had really achieved inexhaustible energy, then they could achieve practically everything. Now he believed the words of the pretty nurse: Things might not be so serious.

When the doctor came into the ward for a routine checkup, Luo Ji asked him about the Wallfacer Project.

"I know of it. It's an ancient joke," the doctor replied off handedly.

"What happened to the Wallfacers?"

"I think one of them committed suicide, and another was stoned to death.… It all happened in the project's early days, and it's been nearly two centuries since then."

"And the other two?"

"I don't know. They're probably still in hibernation."

"One of them was Chinese. Do you remember him?" Luo Ji ventured, staring nervously at the doctor.

"You mean the one who cast a spell on a star? I think he was mentioned in premodern history class," the nurse interjected.

"Right. And now he's…" Luo Ji said.

"I don't know. I think he's still in hibernation. I don't pay much attention to that stuff," the doctor said absently.

"And the star? The one he cursed, the star with a planet? What happened to it?" he asked, his heart tensing up.

"What do you think happened? It's probably still there. That spell? What a joke!"

"So nothing at all happened to that star?"

"Nothing I've heard, at any rate. You?" he asked the nurse.

"Me neither," she said, shaking her head. "The world was scared to death back then and lots of silly things happened."

"And then?" Luo Ji said with a sigh.

"Then there was the Great Ravine," the doctor said.

"The Great Ravine? What was that?"

"You'll find out later. For now, rest up," the doctor said with a gentle sigh. "But it's probably better that you don't know about it." As he turned to leave, his white coat displayed billowing dark clouds, and the nurse's uniform displayed lots of pairs of eyes, some of them frightened, some brimming with tears.

When the doctor had left, Luo Ji sat motionless on his bed for a long while, mumbling to himself, "A joke. An ancient joke." Then he began laughing, silently at first, and then in great guffaws, trembling on his bed and frightening Xiong Wen, who wanted to call the doctor.

"I'm fine. Go to sleep," Luo Ji told him. Then he lay down and soon fell asleep for the first time since his reawakening.

He dreamed of Zhuang Yan and the child. As before, Zhuang Yan walked through the snow, the child asleep in her arms.

When he awoke, the nurse walked in and said good morning to him. Her voice was soft so as not to wake the still-sleeping Xiong Wen.

"Is it morning? Why aren't there any windows in this room?" Luo Ji asked, looking around.

"Any place on the wall can turn transparent. But the doctors feel that you aren't ready to look outside. It's too unfamiliar, and it will distract you and affect your rest."

"I've been revived for a while now, but I still don't know what the outside world is like. This affects my rest." Luo Ji pointed at Xiong Wen, and said, "I'm not that kind of person."

The nurse laughed. "That's okay. I'm about to go off shift. Shall I take you out for a look around? You can have breakfast after you get back."

Excitedly, Luo Ji followed the nurse to the on-call room. Looking it over, he could guess what about half of the furnishings were, but he had no idea what the rest were for. There was no computer or similar equipment, but because a display could be activated anywhere on the walls, this was to be expected. Three umbrellas lined up outside the door caught his attention. They were in different styles, but from their shape, they were definitely umbrellas. What surprised him was their bulk. Weren't there folding umbrellas in this age?

The nurse came out of the changing room dressed in her own clothes. Aside from the flashing movies on the fabric, changes to women's fashion in this age were well within the scope of Luo Ji's imagination. Compared to his own era, the major difference was their conspicuous asymmetry. He was pleased that after 185 years had passed, he could still find beauty in women's clothing. The nurse picked up one of the umbrellas, which must have been fairly heavy, because she had to carry it over her shoulder.

"Is it raining out?"

She shook her head. "You think I'm carrying an … umbrella?" she said, unfamiliar with the last word.

"If it's not an umbrella, then what is it?" Luo Ji pointed to the device on her shoulder, imagining that she would say some peculiar name for it.

But she didn't. "It's my bicycle," she said.

When they arrived in the corridor, Luo Ji asked, "Is your home far from here?"

"If you're talking about where I live, it's not far. Ten or twenty minutes biking," she said. Then, standing still and fixing him with her charming eyes, she said something that shocked him: "There are no homes now. No one has them. Marriage, family, they went away after the Great Ravine. That will be the first thing you'll have to get used to."

"That first thing is something I won't be able to get used to."

"Oh, I don't know. In history class I learned that marriage and family had already begun to disintegrate in your own time. Lots of people didn't want to be tied down. They wanted free lives." This was the second time she had mentioned history class.

I was like that once, but then … Luo Ji said to himself. From the moment he'd reawakened, Zhuang Yan and the child had never really left his mind. They were the desktop wallpaper of his consciousness, perpetually on display. But no one here recognized him, and with the situation so uncertain, he couldn't just rashly ask about their whereabouts, even though he was tormented by longing.

They walked a ways down the corridor. Then, after they'd passed through an automatic door, Luo Ji's eyes lit up as he saw a narrow platform extending into the distance and felt fresh air blowing toward him. He sensed that he was now outside.

"What a blue sky!" was the first thing he shouted to the outside world.

"Really? It can't compare to the blue skies of your era."

Definitely bluer. Much bluer. Luo Ji didn't say that out loud, just reveled in the boundless blue embrace and let his soul melt. Then he had a flash of doubt: Was this heaven? In his memory, he had only ever seen such a pure blue sky during the five years he had spent apart from the world, secluded in his Garden of Eden. But this blue sky had fewer white clouds, just a couple of pale wisps in the western sky, like someone had unintentionally left a smudge. The sun that had just risen in the east shone like crystal in the entirely transparent air, with its edge rimmed in dew.

Luo Ji turned his eyes downward and immediately became dizzy. From high up, it took him a long moment to realize that what he saw from here was the city. At first he thought he was looking at a giant forest, the slender tree trunks stretching straight up toward the sky, each one sprouting perpendicular branches of varying lengths. The city's buildings were the leaves hanging off these branches. The layout of the city looked random, and different trees had different densities of leaves. The Hibernation and Reawakening Center formed a part of one of those large trees, and the leaf that contained his bed hung from the narrow platform that now extended out in front of him.

Looking back, the tree trunk his branch was connected to extended so far upward that it disappeared out of view. The branch they were on was located in the middle to upper section of the tree, and above and below them he could see other branches, and the structural leaves that hung on them. On closer inspection, the branches formed an intricate network of bridges in space, bridges with one end left floating in midair.

"What is this place?" Luo Ji asked.

"Beijing."

He looked at the nurse, even prettier now in the morning sun. Looking back at the place she called Beijing, he asked, "Where's the city center?"

"In that direction. We're outside the West Fourth Ring, in Tree 179, Branch 23, Leaf 18, so you're almost able to see the entire city."

Luo Ji looked for a bit into the distance where she pointed, and then exclaimed, "Impossible! How is there nothing left?"

"What would be left? In your day, there was absolutely nothing here!"

"Nothing? The Imperial Palace? Jingshan Park? Tiananmen? The China World Trade Center? It hasn't even been two hundred years. It can't all have been torn down."

"All those things are still there."

"Where?"

"On the surface."

Seeing Luo Ji's terrified look, she burst out laughing so hard that she had to lean on the railing for support. "Ah, ha-ha. I forgot. I'm really sorry. I've forgotten so many times. Look, we're underground here. A thousand meters beneath the surface … If I ever get to time travel to your time, you can get back at me and forget to tell me that the city's on the surface, and I'll be as terrified as you are now. Ha ha ha…"

"But … this…" He held up his hands.

"The sky is fake. The sun is fake, too," the woman said, trying to suppress a smile. "Of course, saying it's fake isn't right, either, because it's an image taken from an altitude of ten thousand meters and displayed down here, so maybe it counts as real, too."

"Why build the city below ground? And a thousand meters—that's really deep."

"For the war, of course. Think about it. When the Doomsday Battle comes, won't the surface be an ocean of fire? Yeah, that battle is another outdated idea now, but when the Great Ravine ended, all the world's cities developed underground."

"So all the cites in the world are underground now?"

"The majority of them."

Luo Ji took stock of the world again. Now he understood that the trunks of the great trees were the pillars supporting the vault of the underground world, and also served as the columns from which the city's buildings were suspended.

"You won't be claustrophobic. Look at how broad the sky is! Up on the surface, the sky's not nearly this wonderful."

Luo Ji looked again at the blue sky, or rather the projection of the blue sky. He now noticed a few small objects—just some scattered bits, at first, but once his eyes got used to looking, he saw that there were so many that they covered the entire sky. Strangely, the objects in the sky reminded him of someplace completely unrelated, the showcase of a jewelry store. Before he became a Wallfacer, back when he had fallen in love with the Zhuang Yan of his imagination, he had once been so obsessed that he wanted to buy his imaginary angel a present. He went to the jewelry store and looked at all the platinum pendants in the showcase, every one of them exquisite, lying there on the black velvet and twinkling under the spotlights. If the black velvet had been blue, then it would have been just like the sky he saw today.

"Is that the space fleet?" he asked excitedly.

"No. The fleet isn't visible from here. It's beyond the asteroid belt. Those, well, they're everything. The ones with a visible shape are space cities, and the points of light are civilian spacecraft. But sometimes there are warships in orbit, too. Their engines are very bright, so you can't stare at them.… Okay, I've got to get going. You should head back soon. It gets windy here."

Luo Ji turned around to say good-bye, but was so surprised he couldn't speak. The woman had her umbrella—or, rather, her bicycle—positioned on her back like a backpack, and then it stood up in back of her and opened overhead to form two coaxial propellers that started up silently, turning in opposition to offset rotational torque. Then she lifted slowly up into the air and hopped over the railing beside her into the abyss that had so dazzled him.

Suspended there, she called to him: "You can see how this is a pretty decent age. Think of your past as a dream. See you tomorrow!"

She flew gracefully, the small propellers churning the sunlight, until she turned into a tiny dragonfly between two giant trees in the distance. Swarms of these dragonflies flew between the giant trees of the city. More notable still were the streams of flying cars like schools of fish navigating endlessly among the plants on the ocean floor. The rising sun shone onto the city and was cut into shafts of light by the trees, coating the traffic with a layer of gold.

Tears streamed down Luo Ji's face at the sight of this brave new world, and the sensation of newborn life permeated his every cell. The past really was a dream.

* * *

When he saw the European man in the reception room, Luo Ji got the feeling that there was something different about him. Later, he realized that it was because the formal suit he wore didn't flash or display any image, but resembled the clothing of a bygone era. Perhaps this was an expression of solemnity.

After Luo Ji shook his hand, the visitor introduced himself. "I'm Special Commissioner Ben Jonathan from the Solar Fleet Joint Conference. I arranged your reawakening at the committee's behest, and now, we're going to attend the final hearing of the Wallfacer Project. Oh, can you understand me? English has changed quite a bit."

Luo Ji could understand what Jonathan said, but listening to him speak, the sense of Western cultural invasion that Luo Ji had felt over the past few days because of the changes to modern Chinese disappeared, because Jonathan's English was peppered with Chinese vocabulary. He said "Wallfacer Project" in Chinese, for example. English, formerly the most widely used language, and Chinese, spoken by the largest population, had blended with each other without distinction to become the world's most powerful language. Luo Ji learned later that the other languages of the world were undergoing the same fusion.

The past isn't a dream, Luo Ji thought. The past catches up with you. Then he recalled that Jonathan had said the word "final" and wondered if there was hope of a quick resolution after all.

Jonathan looked back, as if to make sure the door had been closed, and then walked over to the wall and activated an interface. He gave a few simple taps on the surface, and then all four walls and the ceiling disappeared into a holographic display.

Now Luo Ji found himself in an auditorium. Although everything was greatly changed, and the walls and table glowed softly, the designers had clearly tried to replicate the style of the old era. Everything from the great circular table and the rostrum to the overall layout embodied a nostalgia that allowed him to know at once where he was. The auditorium was empty but for two staffers laying out documents on the tables. Luo Ji was astonished to see that paper documents were still being used. Just like Jonathan's clothes, this seemed to be an expression of solemnity.

"Remote meetings are a common practice now. Taking part in this way won't affect the meeting's importance or seriousness," Jonathan said. "There's still some time before the hearing begins, and you look like you don't know much about the outside world. Do you need me to tell you a bit about the basics?"

Luo Ji nodded. "Of course. Thank you."

Jonathan pointed to the auditorium and said, "I'll be brief. First, the countries. Europe is a single country, called the European Commonwealth, and it includes both eastern and western Europe, but not Russia. Russia and Belarus unified into a country still called the Russian Federation. Canada's French-speaking and English-speaking areas split into two countries. There have been some changes in other regions, too, but these are the major ones."

Luo Ji was shocked. "Those are the only changes? It's been nearly two centuries. I'd have thought the changes would have made the world unrecognizable."

Jonathan turned back from the auditorium and nodded solemnly at Luo Ji. "Unrecognizable, Dr. Luo. The world is indeed unrecognizable."

"No, there were early signs of those changes in our era."

"But there's one thing you never anticipated: There are no longer any great powers. All countries have declined in political power."

"All the countries? Then who rose up?"

"A suprastate entity: the space fleet."

Luo Ji thought this over for a while before realizing what Jonathan meant. "You mean the space fleet is independent?"

"Yes. The fleets do not belong to any country. They form independent political and economic entities that, like countries, are members of the UN. Right now, there are three major fleets in the Solar System: the Asian Fleet, the European Fleet, and the North American Fleet. Their names refer only to their primary region of origin, but the fleets themselves are no longer subordinate to those regions. They are entirely independent. Each one possesses the political and economic might of a superpower of your era."

"My god," Luo Ji exclaimed.

"But please don't misunderstand. Earth is not ruled by a military government. The territory and sovereignty of the space fleets is in space, and they rarely interfere with the internal affairs of terrestrial society. This is stipulated by the UN charter. So right now the human world is divided into two international spheres: the traditional Earth International, and the newly emerged Fleet International. The three fleets of Fleet International—the Asian, European, and North American—make up the Solar Fleet, and the former Planetary Defense Council evolved into the Solar Fleet Joint Conference, nominally the highest command body in the Solar Fleet. However, as with the UN, it has a coordinating function, but no real power. In fact, it's a Solar Fleet in name only. The actual power of humanity's space-based armed forces lies in the hands of the supreme command of the three major fleets.

"Well, then, you now know enough to take part in today's hearing. It was convened by the SFJC, which inherited the Wallfacer Project."

Then a window opened up on the holographic display, and an image of Bill Hines and Keiko Yamasuki appeared in it. They looked unchanged. Hines greeted Luo Ji with a smile, but Yamasuki sat impassively next to him, giving only a slight nod of acknowledgement at Luo Ji's greeting.

Hines said, "I just woke up, Dr. Luo. I was quite sorry to learn that that planet you cursed is still orbiting its star fifty light-years away."

"Heh. A joke. An ancient joke," Luo Ji said self-mockingly, with a wave of his hand.

"But compared to Tyler and Rey Diaz, you're pretty lucky."

"You appear to be the only successful Wallfacer. Perhaps your strategy really has elevated human intelligence."

Hines displayed the same self-mocking smile that Luo Ji had just exhibited, and he shook his head. "No, it really hasn't. I know now that after we entered hibernation, research into the human mind quickly encountered an insurmountable obstacle. Going forward meant approaching the quantum level of the brain's thought mechanisms. But at that point, like all other science, they hit the impassible sophon barrier. We didn't elevate human intelligence. If I did anything at all, it was just to increase some people's confidence."

When Luo Ji entered hibernation, the mental seal had not yet been developed, so he didn't really understand the last thing Hines said. But he noticed that when he said it, a mysterious smile flashed across Keiko Yamasuki's frosty face.

The window vanished, and then Luo Ji realized that the auditorium was full of people. Most of them were dressed in military uniforms whose styles hadn't changed all that much. None of the attendees had pictures decorating their clothing, but their lapel pins and epaulets all glowed.

The SFJC still used a rotating chair system. It was currently held by a civilian officer. As Luo Ji looked at him, he was reminded of Garanin. The thought struck him that he was an ancient man from two centuries ago, but he was at least fortunate compared to those of his own age who had been annihilated by the river of time.

Once the meeting opened, the chair spoke. "Representatives, at this hearing, we will hold the final vote on Proposition 649, put forth by the North American Fleet and the European Fleet at the forty-seventh Joint Conference this year. First, let me read the proposition.

"In the second year of the Trisolar Crisis, the UN's Planetary Defense Council established the Wallfacer Project. It was adopted unanimously by the permanent members of the UN and was implemented the following year. At its core, the Wallfacer Project attempted to develop hidden strategies for resisting the Trisolaran invasion by tasking four Wallfacers nominated by permanent member states with formulating and executing strategic plans in the seclusion of their own minds, out of reach of the sophons' omnipresent surveillance. The UN promulgated the Wallfacer Act to guarantee privileges to the Wallfacers for formulating and executing their plans.

"The Wallfacer Project has been going on for two hundred five years to date, a time frame that has included more than a century's hiatus. During this time, leadership of the project passed from the former PDC to the present SFJC.

"The Wallfacer Project arose out of a unique historical background. The Trisolar Crisis had just begun, and in the face of a devastating crisis unheard of in human history, the international community had descended to unprecedented levels of fear and despair. This was the climate into which the Wallfacer Project was born. It was not a rational choice, but a struggle of desperation.

"The facts of history have proven that, as a strategic plan, the Wallfacer Project was a complete and utter failure. It is no exaggeration to say that it was the most naïve and foolish action that human society as a whole has ever taken. The Wallfacers were granted unprecedented power without any legal oversight, and even possessed the freedom to deceive the international community. This violated the basic moral and legal norms of human society.

"During the execution of the Wallfacer Project, enormous quantities of strategic resources were exhausted for no reason. Wallfacer Frederick Tyler's mosquito swarm was proven to have no strategic significance, while Wallfacer Manuel Rey Diaz's Mercury-chain-reaction plan was unrealizable, even given humanity's present capabilities. Moreover, both of those plans were criminal. Tyler sought to attack and wipe out Earth's fleet, while Rey Diaz's even more sinister goal was to hold every life on the planet hostage.

"The other two Wallfacers were similarly disappointing. The true strategic intent of Wallfacer Hines's mental upgrade plan has not yet been revealed, but the use in the space forces of its preliminary result, the mental seal, is also a crime. It is a serious violation of freedom of thought, which is the foundation of the survival and further progress of human civilization. As for Wallfacer Luo Ji, he first irresponsibly squandered public funds on his own hedonistic lifestyle and then played to the crowds with ridiculous mysticism.

"We believe that given the decisive growth in humanity's strength and its seizure of the initiative in the war, the Wallfacer Project no longer has any meaning. The time has come to bring the problem that history has passed down to us to an end. We propose that the SFJC immediately terminate the Wallfacer Project and abolish the UN Wallfacer Act.

"Here ends the proposition."

The chair slowly set down the proposal document, and, glancing around the auditorium, said, "We will commence the vote on SFJC Proposition 649. All in favor?"

All of the representatives raised their hands.

Voting in this era was still done by primitive methods. Staffers walked through the auditorium solemnly verifying the number of votes, and when they reported the result to the chair, he announced, "Proposition 649 has passed unanimously and is effective immediately." The chair raised his head. Luo Ji didn't know whether he was looking at Hines or himself, because, like at the first remote hearing he had attended 185 years before, he still didn't know where in the auditorium his and Hines's images were displayed. "Now that the Wallfacer Project is terminated, the Wallfacer Act is abolished as well. On behalf of the SFJC, I hereby notify Wallfacers Bill Hines and Luo Ji that your Wallfacer status has been revoked. All associated rights granted you by the Wallfacer Act, as well as the corresponding legal immunity, are no longer in effect. You have recovered your identity as ordinary citizens of your respective countries."

The chair declared the hearing adjourned. Jonathan stood up and switched off the holographic image, switching off Luo Ji's two-century-long nightmare in the process.

"Dr. Luo, as far as I am aware, this is the outcome you were hoping for," Jonathan said to him with a smile.

"Yes. It's just what I wanted. Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. And I thank the SFJC for restoring my ordinary status," Luo Ji said, from the depths of his heart.

"The hearing was simple. Just a vote on a proposition. I've been empowered to discuss matters with you in more detail. You may start with your biggest concern."

"What about my wife and child?" Luo Ji asked, unable to hold back the question that had been tormenting him since reawakening. It was a question he had wanted to ask when he first met Jonathan, before the start of the meeting.

"Don't worry. They're both fine. They're still in hibernation. I can give you their files, and you can apply to reawaken them whenever you'd like."

"Thank you. Thank you." Luo Ji's eyes grew moist, and once again he had that feeling of arriving in heaven.

"However, Dr. Luo, I have a small piece of advice," Jonathan said as he slid closer to Luo Ji on the couch. "It's not easy for a hibernator to get used to life in this age. I advise you to stabilize your own life first before you wake them up. The UN funds are enough to keep them in hibernation for another two hundred thirty years."

"Well, how am I supposed to live out there?"

The commissioner laughed off his question. "Don't worry about that. You might not be used to the times, but living won't be an issue. In this age, social welfare is excellent, and a person can enjoy a comfortable life even if they don't do anything at all. The university you used to work at is still there, right in this city. They said they would consider the question of your work, and they'll contact you later on."

A thought suddenly occurred to Luo Ji, and it nearly made him shudder. "What about my security when I go out? The ETO wants to kill me!"

"The ETO?!" Jonathan burst into laughter. "The Earth-Trisolaris Organization was completely wiped out a century ago. There's no social foundation for them to exist in the world anymore. Of course, there are still people who have those ideological tendencies, but they aren't able to organize. You'll be absolutely safe outside."

As he was about to leave, Jonathan dropped his official attitude, and his suit started shining with an exaggerated, distorted image of the sky. He smiled and said to Luo Ji, "Doctor, out of all the historical figures I've seen, you've got the greatest sense of humor. A spell. A spell on a star. Ha ha ha…"

Luo Ji stood alone in the reception room, ruminating in silence over the reality before him. After two centuries as a messiah, he was once again an ordinary person. A new life was waiting before him.

"You're a commoner, my boy," a gruff voice loudly intruded on Luo Ji's thoughts. When he looked back toward the door, he saw Shi Qiang coming in. "Heh. I heard it from the guy who just left."

It was a happy reunion. They traded experiences, and Luo Ji learned that Shi Qiang had reawakened two months before. His leukemia had been cured. The doctors had also discovered that he was at high risk of liver disease, probably due to drinking, so they had taken care of that, too. To the two of them, it didn't really feel like they had been apart for very long. No more than four or five years, since there was no sense of time in hibernation. But meeting in a new era two centuries in the future added a deeper level to their friendship.

"I've come to pick you up when you're discharged. There's no reason to stay here," Shi Qiang said as he took a set of clothes out of his backpack and had Luo Ji put them on.

"Isn't it … a little big?" Luo Ji asked, opening up the jacket.

"Look at you. Two months late waking up, and you're a yahoo next to me. Try it on."

Shi Qiang pointed out an object on the front of the shirt and told him that he could use it to adjust the sizing. When Luo Ji put on the clothes, he heard a hissing sound, and the clothing slowly shrank to fit the dimensions of his body. It was the same with the trousers.

"Hey, you're not wearing that same set of clothes you wore two centuries ago, are you?" Luo Ji asked, looking at Shi Qiang. He remembered quite clearly that the leather jacket Shi Qiang was wearing now was the same one he had on the last time he saw him.

"Most of my belongings got lost in the Great Ravine, but my family did keep that set of clothes for me. But it wasn't wearable. You've got some things left over from that era too, and when you're settled down you can go pick them up. I tell you, my boy, when you see how that stuff has changed, that's when you'll really know that nearly two hundred years isn't a short length of time." As he spoke, Shi Qiang pressed something somewhere on his jacket and his outfit turned entirely white. The leather texture had just been an image. "I like it like the past."

"Can mine do that too? Can it put up images like theirs?" Luo Ji asked, looking at his own clothes.

"They can, but it's a little hard to get it set up. Let's go."

Luo Ji and Shi Qiang took the elevator in the trunk down to the ground floor, passed through the tree's large foyer, and out into the new world.

* * *

When the commissioner shut off the holographic image of the hearing, the meeting had not actually concluded. Luo Ji had in fact noticed that when the chair declared the meeting adjourned, a sudden voice had rung out. It was a woman's voice, and while he hadn't been able to make it out clearly, everyone in the assembly had turned in a particular direction. Then Jonathan had turned off the image. He must have noticed it, too, but once the chair had adjourned the meeting, Luo Ji, now an ordinary citizen without Wallfacer status, was not eligible to participate even if it was still in progress.

The speaker was Keiko Yamasuki. She said, "Mr. Chair, I have something to say."

The chair said, "Dr. Yamasuki, you are not a Wallfacer. You are allowed to attend today's meeting due to your special status, but you do not have the right to speak."

None of the representatives seemed interested in her. They were getting up to leave. For them, the entire Wallfacer Project was nothing but a footnote in history that they had to spend energy dealing with. But what she said next stopped them in their tracks. She turned to Hines and said, "Wallfacer Bill Hines, I am your Wallbreaker."

Hines, who was getting up to leave, felt his legs buckle at Yamasuki's words, and he sat down in his chair again. The people in the auditorium glanced at each other, and then began to whisper, as the blood gradually drained from Hines's face.

"I hope you have not all forgotten the significance of that title," Yamasuki said imperiously to the assembly.

The chair said, "Yes, we know what a Wallbreaker is. But your organization does not exist anymore."

"I know." She appeared totally calm. "But as the last member of the ETO, I will fulfill my duty for the Lord."

"I should have known it, Keiko. I should have known," Hines said, his voice trembling. He looked weak. He had known that his wife was a devotee of the ideas of Timothy Leary, and he had seen her fanatical desire to alter the human mind through technological means, but he had never connected it with a deeply hidden hatred of humanity.

"First off, I'd like to say that the true goal of your strategic plan was not the elevation of human intelligence. You more than anyone are aware that it is utterly impossible for human technology to accomplish this in the foreseeable future, because you were the one who discovered the quantum structure of the brain. You know that when the study of the mind reaches the quantum level, the sophon lockdown on fundamental physics means that scientific research will be like water with no source: It's got no grounding, and will never succeed. The mental seal was not just a chance by-product of your study of the mind. It was the thing you always wanted. That was the ultimate goal of your research." She turned to the assembly. "Now, what I'd like to know from all of you is this: In the years that we've been in hibernation, what happened to the mental seal?"

"It didn't have much of a history," the representative of the European Fleet said. "Nearly fifty thousand people from national space forces voluntarily accepted faith in victory through the mental seal, and they formed a special class in the military known as the 'Imprinted.' Later on, about ten years after you went into hibernation, the use of the mental seal was found by the International Court of Justice to be a crime, an infringement on the freedom of thought, and the sole mental seal device—the one in the Faith Center—was put into storage. The manufacture and use of that type of equipment was placed under a worldwide ban nearly as strict as nuclear nonproliferation. And, in fact, the mental seal was even harder to obtain than nuclear weapons, primarily because of the computer it used. By the time you entered hibernation, computing technology had basically stopped moving forward. The computer used by the mental seal is still a supercomputer today and is inaccessible to ordinary individuals and organizations."

Then Keiko Yamasuki revealed her first piece of substantive information: "What you don't know is that there was more than one mental seal device. Five were made, each with its own accompanying supercomputer. The other four, Hines secretly handed over to people who had already accepted the seal, the ones you call the Imprinted. There were only around three thousand of them at that time, but they had already formed a tightly knit supranational organization within the militaries of individual countries. Hines did not tell me this. I learned it from the sophons. The Lord does not care about staunch triumphalism, so we didn't take action."

"And how is this significant?" the chair asked.

"Let's hypothesize, shall we? The mental seal device is not a continuously operating piece of equipment. It's only activated when necessary. Each device can be used for quite a long time, and if they're properly maintained, it would be no problem for them to be used for half a century. If the four devices were used in turn, one run into the ground before the next one is started up, they would have been able to last for two centuries. Which means that the Imprinted may not have died off, but might have endured from generation to generation up to the present day. It's a religion that believes in faith hardened by the mental seal, and its induction ceremony is the voluntary use of the mental seal on your own mind."

The representative of the North American Fleet said, "Dr. Hines, you have lost your Wallfacer status and no longer have the legal power to deceive the world. Would you please tell the Joint Conference the truth: Is your wife, or, rather, your Wallbreaker, telling the truth?"

"It's true," Hines said, with a heavy nod.

"That's a crime!" the representative of the Asian Fleet said.

"Perhaps it is," Hines said, and nodded again. "But just like all of you, I don't know whether the Imprinted have endured to the present day."

"That's not important," the representative of the European Fleet said. "I think the next step should be to find the mental seal devices that are still around and seal them up or destroy them. As for the Imprinted, if they voluntarily accepted the mental seal, then that doesn't appear to have violated the laws of the time. If they applied the mental seal to other volunteers, then they were under the dominance of the faith or belief that they had already received through technical means, so they should not be subjected to punishment. So the only thing we need to do is find the mental seals. The matter of the Imprinted might not need to be pursued at all."

"That's right. It's not a bad thing for there to be a few people in the Solar Fleet who have absolute faith in victory. At least, it won't cause any harm. It should remain a matter of personal privacy, and no one needs to know who they are. Although it's hard to understand why anyone would voluntarily undergo the mental seal today, because humanity's victory is so apparent," the representative of the European Fleet said.

Keiko Yamasuki smiled derisively, revealing a seldom-seen expression that conjured up for the assembly an ancient picture of moonlight reflecting off the scales of a snake in the grass.

"You're being naïve," she said.

"You're being naïve," Hines echoed his wife, and deeply bowed his head.

She turned once again to her husband. "Hines, you've always hidden your thoughts from me. Even before you became a Wallfacer."

"I was afraid you'd despise me," he said, head still down.

"How many times did we look silently into each other's eyes in the bamboo grove in the quiet of the Kyoto night? From your eyes I saw a Wallfacer's loneliness, and I saw your desire to speak. How many times did you almost tell me the truth? You wanted to bury your head in my arms, put everything into words through your tears, and obtain total release. But the duty of a Wallfacer prevented you. Deceit, even toward the one you loved the most, was one of your responsibilities. So I could only look into your eyes in the hope of finding some trace of your true thoughts. You don't know how many sleepless nights I spent waiting next to you as you slept soundly, waiting for you to talk in your sleep.… More often, I carefully observed you, studying your every move and capturing your every look, including the years you were first in hibernation. I recalled every detail about you, not out of longing but because I wanted to see your true thoughts. For a very long time, I failed. I knew you wore a mask, but I knew nothing of what was below the mask. The years passed, until finally, when you had just awakened and walked through the neural-network cloud to my side, and I looked into your eyes, I finally understood. I'd matured eight years, while you were still the you of eight years before. And so you were exposed.

"From that moment, I knew the real you: a deep-rooted defeatist and a staunch Escapist. Both before and after you became a Wallfacer, your sole goal was to achieve an exodus of humanity. Compared to the other Wallfacers, your genius lay not in strategic deception, but in concealing and disguising your true worldview.

"But I still didn't know how you would achieve this goal through your research into the brain and thoughts. I was confused even when the mental seal came out, all the way up until the moment I entered hibernation, when I remembered their eyes. The eyes of those people who had been given the mental stamp … they were like yours. And all of a sudden I understood an expression of yours that I'd never been able to read before. That was when I broke through to your real strategy, but it was too late to say anything."

The representative of the North American Fleet said, "Ms. Keiko Yamasuki, I don't think there's anything unusual here. We know the history of the mental seal. In the first group of fifty thousand volunteers, the procedure was carried out under the strictest of supervision."

"That's right," she said. "But the supervision was only absolutely effective so far as the content of the faith proposition was concerned. The mental seal itself was much harder to supervise."

"But the literature indicates that the supervision of the technical details of the mental seal was very strict as well, and it underwent a large number of tests before it was put into operation," the chair said.

Yamasuki shook her head. "The mental seal is an incredibly complicated piece of equipment. Any supervision will have gaps. Specifically, one tiny minus sign out of hundreds of millions of lines of code. Even the sophons didn't detect it."

"A minus sign?"

"When the neural circuit model for judging a proposition to be true was discovered, Hines also discovered the model for judging a proposition to be false. That was what he needed. He concealed this discovery from everyone, including me. It wasn't difficult, because the two models were highly similar. It manifested as the direction of flow of a key signal in the neuron transmission model, and in the mathematical model of the mental seal, it was represented by a sign. Positive for true, negative for false. Working in extreme secrecy, Hines manipulated this sign in the mental seal's control software. In all five devices, the sign was negative."

A deathly silence fell over the auditorium, a silence that had manifested only once before during a PDC Wallfacer Hearing two centuries ago, when Rey Diaz had shown off the "cradle" on his wrist and had told the assembly that the device receiving the anti-trigger signal was nearby.

"Dr. Hines, what have you done?" The chair turned toward him in anger.

Hines raised his head, and everyone could see that his pallid face had returned to normal. His voice was calm and even. "I admit that I underestimated the power of humanity. The progress that you've made is truly unbelievable. I have seen it, and I believe it, and I also believe that victory in the war belongs to humanity. This faith is as steadfast as if it had been imprinted by the mental stamp. The defeatism and Escapism of two centuries ago is truly ridiculous. However, Mr. Chair and representatives, I would like to say to the world that it is impossible to make me repent of what I have done."

"You still think you shouldn't repent?" the representative of the Asian Fleet demanded angrily.

Hines raised his head. "It's not a question of 'should.' It's an impossibility. I used the mental seal to imprint this proposition on myself: Everything about my Wallfacer plan is entirely correct."

The assembly exchanged amazed glances, and Yamasuki even turned to her husband with the same expression.

Hines flashed her a small smile and nodded. "Yes, dear, if you'll permit me to call you that. Only by doing that could I obtain the spiritual strength necessary to execute the plan. Yes, right now I believe all I've done is correct. I absolutely believe it, regardless of what reality says. I used the mental seal to turn myself into my own god, and God can't repent."

"In the not-too-distant future, when the Trisolaran invaders surrender to a more powerful human civilization, will you still think that?" the chair asked, with a look in his eyes that was more curious than amazed.

Hines nodded earnestly. "I'll still think that I'm right. Everything about my Wallfacer plan is entirely correct. Of course, in the face of the facts, I'll be put through a hell of a torture." He turned to his wife. "Dear, you know I've already suffered that torture once, when I believed that water was toxic."

"Let's come back to the present day," the representative of the North American Fleet said, interrupting everyone's whispered discussions. "It's just speculation that the Imprinted have endured. It's been over one hundred seventy years, after all. If a class or organization with such an absolute faith in defeatism exists, why haven't there been any signs of it?"

"There are two possibilities," the representative of the European Fleet said. "One is that the mental seal vanished long ago, and this is just a false alarm.…"

The representative of the Asian Fleet completed his thought. "But there's another possibility: The most frightening thing about the situation is the fact that there aren't any signs."