Ball Lightning

Lighthouse Inspiration

I strove to adapt to my new life. I started playing online games, going to ball games, and playing basketball, or playing cards late into the night. I returned all my specialist books to the library, and checked out a pile of DVDs. I started playing the stock market, and thought about getting a puppy. I maintained the booze habit I picked up in Siberia, sometimes alone, other times with the growing number of friends of all sorts I was now making…. I even thought of finding a girlfriend and starting a family, although I hadn’t found a candidate yet. I no longer had to stare blankly at a pile of differential equations until two in the morning, or tend a computer for ten-plus hours at a stretch, waiting for what was certain to be a disappointing outcome. Where time had once been infinitely precious to me, now I couldn’t spend it all. For the first time I knew what it meant to relax and take it easy. For the first time I saw that life was full of richness. For the first time I had the realization that everyone I had looked down on and pitied in the past had it better than me. What they were living was the most reasonable of lives.

More than a month passed. I gained weight. My thinning hair began to grow back. And I frequently counted my good fortune that I hadn’t come to my senses too late.

But at times, if only for a few seconds, the past returned like a ghost, usually when I awoke during the night. At those moments, I felt like I was sleeping in that distant subterranean cavern, the trapezoidal platform bearing all of those snaking lines towering in the darkness… until the swaying silhouettes of the outside trees cast onto the curtains by the streetlights reminded me of where I was, and then I quickly fell asleep again. It was like having a corpse buried deep in your backyard: though you think you’re free of it, you always know it’s there, and, more importantly, you always know that you know. Later you learn that to be truly free of it, you have to dig it up out of your backyard, carry it to some faraway place, and burn it, but you don’t have the mental energy to do that. The deeper it’s buried, the harder it is for you to dig up, since you can’t dare to imagine what it may have become while underground….

But after more than a month, the frequency of my past self’s resurrection decreased dramatically, because I had fallen in love with a college graduate who had just been assigned to our lab, and I could clearly sense that she had feelings for me. On the first morning of the May Labor Day holiday, I dithered in my dorm for a few minutes before making the decision to ask her out. I got up to head over to her second-floor dorm to find her, but then thought that maybe it would be better to call, so I reached for the telephone…

My new life could have continued smoothly forward: I would have fallen into the river of love, had a family, children, and the sort of career success that others would envy. In sum, I’d have had an ordinary, happy life like so many other people. Maybe, in my twilight years, sitting on the sand at sunset, some of my deepest memories would surface. I’d think of the town in Yunnan, the thunderstorm on Mount Tai, the lightning weapons base outside of Beijing, and the blizzard of Siberia; I’d think of the woman in uniform and the sword tied at her neck… but those would all be so far away, as if they’d happened in a different time.

But just as my hand touched the receiver, the phone rang.

It was Colonel Jiang Xingchen, asking if I had plans for the holiday. I told him I didn’t.

“Interested in taking a ship out into the ocean?”

“Of course. Really?”

“Come on over.”

After setting down the phone, I was a little shocked. I’d only had brief contact with the ship captain, and after meeting him with Lin Yun that one time, I hadn’t heard from him again. So what was behind his invitation? I pulled some things together to catch a plane for Guangzhou. Asking the girl out would have to wait till I got back.

I arrived in Guangzhou that same day. The climate of war was a bit thicker here than farther inland, and air defense slogans and posters were all over the place. For the captain of the Southern Fleet’s carrier to have any leisure at a time like this was astonishing. Still, the next day, I boarded a small sloop in Shekou and set out to sea. With us was another naval officer and a naval aviator. Colonel Jiang enthusiastically taught me the ABCs of sailing, how to read a chart, and how to use a sextant. I found sailing a ship immensely tiring work, and after getting a finger pinched in the rigging, I was unable to help in any way. Most of the time I sat alone at the bow looking at the azure sky and green sea, at the sunlight dancing on the surface, at the undulating reflections of the glistening white clouds, feeling the wonder of being alive.

“You spend all your time on the water. Do you really find sailing relaxing?” I asked Jiang Xingchen.

“Of course not. This trip is for you,” he said cryptically.

At dusk, we arrived at a small island, only two football fields in size, utterly empty but for an unmanned lighthouse. We were to spend the night there. Just as we were carrying the tents and other supplies in from the sailboat, we saw a strange sight in the distance.

The sea and sky out to the west were linked by an enormous column, white at the bottom but stained dark red by the setting sun at the top. It twisted lazily in the air like a living creature. The sudden emergence of this giant monster in the placid ocean felt like a bewitching python slithering up to a picnic on the lawn, turning a familiar world strange and savage in the blink of an eye.

“Okay, now we’ve got something to talk about, Dr. Chen. How big do you think it is?” Jiang Xingchen said, pointing in its direction.

“Hard to say. This is the first time I’ve seen a tornado. Probably… F2,” I said.

“Are we in danger here?” the pilot asked nervously.

“Judging from its heading, I don’t think so,” the colonel said evenly.

“But how do we know it won’t turn in this direction?”

“Tornadoes usually move in straight lines.”

Off in the distance the tornado moved east. At its nearest point to the island, the sky darkened, and we heard a low rumble. I shivered at the sound. Jiang Xingchen remained calm, watching with what almost looked like admiration, until at last it disappeared. Then he turned his eyes away.

“In meteorology, how far has tornado prediction technology gotten?” the colonel asked.

“I don’t think it exists. Tornadoes and earthquakes are the most difficult to predict of any natural disaster.”

“The South China Sea has turned into a high-frequency tornado zone as the global climate has changed. This is a major threat to us.”

“Really? Aircraft carriers are afraid of tornadoes? Of course, I suppose they’d carry off any planes still on deck.”

“Dr. Chen, you’re being naïve,” the naval lieutenant said. “The carrier’s structure can usually only withstand an F2 tornado. If anything larger makes contact, the main deck would be ripped apart. That would be utter disaster!”

The ocean water funneled up by the tornado began to rain down in a short, intense storm. The storm dropped fish onto the island, which we ate for dinner.

That night, the colonel and I walked along the beach under clear stars that reminded me of my night on Mount Tai.

“When you left the ball lightning project, Lin Yun was very upset. The project can’t go on without you, so I’ve taken it on myself to convince you to go back. And I’ve promised Lin Yun I will succeed,” he said.

The sea was dark at night, but I could imagine the colonel’s smile. It would take incredible confidence to undertake such a mission for a lover, but perhaps somewhere in him was a disdain for me on Lin Yun’s part that he wasn’t even aware of.

“Colonel Jiang, it’s hopeless research.” I sighed deeply toward the night and the ocean.

“Lin Yun told me that you were hit hard by that trip to Russia. But you really shouldn’t be frightened by their enormous investment and lengthy time frame. I noticed something in Lin Yun’s explanation after she got back: by applying rigid arms research mechanisms to the study of a basic phenomenon of the natural world, the Soviets left no room for innovative thinking. They lacked imagination and creativity.”

His comment, though brief, was incisive. And categorizing ball lightning research as a basic question showed a measure of foresight.

“Besides, you were once prepared to devote your entire life to the goal of exploring ball lightning. Or that’s what Lin Yun told me, anyway. If that’s the case, then you shouldn’t give up so easily. Take me, for example. My dream was to be a scholar of military strategy, but for various reasons I ended up on this path. Even though I’ve reached the position I’m in, in my heart, I’m still a little disappointed.”

“Let me think it over,” I mumbled.

But our subsequent conversation showed me that things were far more complicated than I had imagined.

“As colleagues for so many years, I’d say I know Lin Yun fairly well. Her thinking contains certain… elements of danger. I’d like you to help her avoid that danger.”

“Do you mean a danger to herself, or to… others?” I asked.

“Both. Let me tell you a story. She could not accept the Ottawa Treaty banning land mines, since she felt mines were anti-invasion weapons. A weapon accessible to the poor. The first year of her doctoral program, she and two classmates developed a new type of mine, using their nano-lab to design it. Her goal was to develop a mine undetectable to soldiers using conventional methods, something strictly banned by the treaty. She accomplished it. Her mine appears very simple.”

I interrupted: “I’ve seen the bamboo segment hanging in her car.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “No, no. That’s just a toy compared to what she created. She invented a liquid mine. It looks like nothing more than a colorless transparent liquid, but it’s actually nitroglycerin altered through nanotechnology to remove the material’s sensitivity to vibration and increase its sensitivity to pressure, so the depth at which the material can be stored is strictly limited. It is carried in vessels divided into lots of non-interconnected layers, to prevent the lower layers from detonating due to pressure from above. Deployment means simply pouring out this liquid on the ground, where it will detonate when stepped on, to incredibly lethal effect. Totally undetectable by conventional soldiers. She recommended the mine to her superiors and requested that troops be equipped with it, but naturally she came under heavy criticism. She swore that she would make them see the potential of the mine on the battlefield.”

“From what I know of her fascination with weapons, new-concept weapons in particular, that’s not hard to imagine.”

“But you might when you hear what happened next. In the first half of last year, those mines turned up in the war between Chile and Bolivia and caused considerable harm.”

I looked at the colonel in surprise as I realized the implications of this information.

“Even harder to believe is the fact that both the Chilean and Bolivian armies were using the mines.”

“What?” I stopped in my tracks, my shock turning to fear. “But she’s only a major. Did she even have access to those channels?”

“Apparently she didn’t tell you much about herself. She doesn’t tell much of this to anyone.” He looked at me, and while I couldn’t see his expression in the dark, I knew it must have been meaningful. “Yes. She had access.”

Back at the tent, I couldn’t sleep, so I pulled open the flap to look at the lighthouse, hoping that the regular on-off pulsing would have a hypnotic effect. It did, and as my consciousness gradually slipped away, the body of the lighthouse dissolved into the night, until eventually only the on-off blink remained suspended in midair, visible when it was lit, but leaving only infinite night when it was extinguished. I found it somehow familiar, and a small voice sounded in my brain like a bubble floating up from the ocean depths to burst upon the surface. It said: The lighthouse is always there, but you only see it when it’s lit.

A spark went off in my mind. I bolted upright and sat there for a long while as the surf sounded around me. Then I nudged Jiang Xingchen awake. “Colonel, can we go back right away?”

“What for?”

“To study ball lightning, of course!”

General Lin Feng

After landing in Beijing, I gave Lin Yun a call. What Jiang Xingchen had told me had made me inexplicably afraid, but when I heard the major’s gentle voice, something in my heart melted, and I yearned to see her.

“Oh, I knew Xingchen would do it!” she said with excitement.

“It’s mostly because I suddenly had an idea.”

“Really? Come over for dinner with my family.”

The invitation caught me by surprise, since Lin Yun had always avoided talking about her family. Even Jiang Xingchen hadn’t mentioned anything about it.

As I left the airport, I ran into Zhao Yu. He had resigned from the Mount Tai Meteorology Station and had some things he wanted to do. He had lots of ideas, things like installing lightning attractors on large swaths of farmland to harness it, in order to produce fertilizer or repair the polar ozone holes. He even brought up lightning weapons, which Lin Yun had discussed with him on Mount Tai, but he was of the opinion that they were unlikely to work.

“You’re done with taking it easy?” I asked.

“With the current state of things, everyone’s nervous, and there’s not much fun in taking it easy.”

Zhao Yu was a smart man, and if he put in the work, he could accomplish many things. Looking at him, I realized that sometimes a philosophy of life might be set in stone, unchanging throughout one’s life, but at other times it could be incredibly weak. The direction of a man or woman’s life might be determined by the era they found themselves in. It’s impossible for someone to distance themselves very far from the times they live in.

Before we parted, Zhao Yu remembered something: “I paid a visit to school recently, and I saw Zhang Bin.”

“Oh?”

“As soon as he saw me, he asked about you. He has leukemia. It’s incurable. I suspect it’s the result of long-term emotional stress.”

As I watched him leave, the words of the Siberian called Levalenkov echoed in my mind:

Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it would have been better to have fallen halfway.

A fear of the unknown future seized hold of me once again.

I was met at the airport not by Lin Yun but a second lieutenant driving a car common to senior officials.

“Dr. Chen, Major Lin sent me to pick you up,” he said after saluting. Then he politely asked me to get into the Red Flag. Along the way, he concentrated on driving, saying nothing. We eventually entered a guarded compound that contained a neat row of residential buildings, all 1950s-style buildings with broad eaves—the sort of building that if you were asked to say the first word that came to mind, it would no doubt be “father.” We passed several rows of poplars and parked at the base of a small two-story building in the same style.

The second lieutenant opened the car door for me and said, “They’re both at home. If you please.” Then he saluted, and watched me as I walked up the steps.

Lin Yun came out the door to greet me. She looked a little more haggard than before, evidently tired from recent work. The change felt sudden, and I realized that in the time we had been apart, I had kept a place in my heart for her, where she lived in her former appearance.

Inside, Lin Yun’s father was sitting on a sofa, reading a newspaper. When he saw me come in, he stood up and shook my hand. He was thin but strong, and his hand was powerful.

“So you’re the academic who’s studying lightning? Greetings! Xiao Yun has talked about you often. Her other friends are mostly from the army, but I say that’s not a good thing. Soldiers shouldn’t limit themselves to a small circle. Otherwise, in times like these, their thinking will calcify.” He turned to Lin Yun, and said, “Auntie Zhang’s probably swamped. Why don’t I whip up a couple of my specialties for Dr. Chen?” Then he said, “It wasn’t just Xiao Yun who invited you today. I did as well. We’ll talk in a bit.”

“Don’t use too much hot pepper, Dad,” she called after him as he went off.

I watched him until he disappeared. We’d met for less than a minute, and already I sensed in him some ineffable dignity which, combined with his amiable approachability, lent him a very unusual demeanor.

All I knew about Lin Yun’s father was that he was in the military, possibly a general. I had caught a sense of his job from scraps of conversation from the people around her, but military ranks weren’t my forte and I couldn’t make a good guess, so even now it was completely unknown. But her father’s easy manner relaxed me. Sitting on the sofa, I smoked the cigarette Lin Yun passed me and surveyed the living room. It was simply furnished, with very little decoration. An entire wall was practically covered by large maps of China and the world. A large desk caught my eye—definitely a working desk—with two telephones, one red and one white, as well as what appeared to be files. The living room was apparently also an office. My eye finally rested upon a clothes rack set up beside the door on which hung a military uniform; from my vantage point I could see one of the epaulets. I took a closer look, and then dropped my cigarette.

There were three stars on the epaulet.

I hastily snatched up the cigarette and put it out in an ashtray, and then set my hands on my knees, like a schoolboy sitting at attention.

Lin Yun laughed when she noticed my posture. “Relax. My dad’s got a science background and gets along well with technical people. He never supported lightning research, and now it looks as if he was right. But when I brought up ball lightning, he was pretty interested.”

Now a black-and-white photo on the wall caught my attention. It showed a young woman with a strong resemblance to Lin Yun wearing a plain military uniform.

Lin Yun got up and went over to the photo, and said simply, “My mom. She died in the border war in ’81…. Let’s talk about ball lightning instead. I hope you haven’t forgotten it entirely.”

“What have you been up to?”

“I had a large-scale computer at a Second Artillery Corps lab run the calculations for our final model. Thirty times, including predictions.” She shook her head gently, and I knew that the model had failed. “That was the first thing I did when I returned. But to be honest, I only ran it so that your work wasn’t a total waste.”

“Thank you. Really. But let’s not do any more mathematical models. There’s no point.”

“I’ve realized that, too. When I got back from our trip, I followed up through other channels and learned that over the past few decades, it wasn’t just the Soviet Union—the major Western powers invested immense sums in ball lightning research, too. Can we gain nothing from any of that?”

“None of them, including Gemow, have disclosed even the slightest bit of technical material.”

She laughed. “Look at you in your ivory tower.”

“I’m too much of a nerd.”

“I wouldn’t say that. If you really were, you wouldn’t have gone AWOL. But that shows that you’ve already seen what’s most important. The trip could have been a new starting point for us, but you turned it into an end point.”

“What did I see?”

“Conventional thinking will never be able to unlock the secret of ball lightning. This conclusion is worth billions!”

“That’s true. Even if we managed to twist the equations and force them into a mathematical model, intuition tells me that it wouldn’t actually describe reality. You can’t explain the sheer improbability of the selectivity and penetration of its energy release using conventional theory.”

“So we ought to broaden our thinking. Like you said, we’re not supermen, but starting now, we need to force ourselves to think in the manner of supermen.”

“I’ve already thought that way,” I said excitedly. “Ball lightning isn’t produced by lightning. It is a structure that already exists in the natural world.”

“You mean… lightning only ignites or excites it?” she rejoindered immediately.

“Precisely. Like electric current lighting a lamp. The lamp was always there.”

“Great. Let’s organize our thoughts a little…. My God! This idea would go a ways toward explaining what happened in Siberia!”

“That’s right. The twenty-seven occurrences of ball lightning at Base 3141 and the parameters for artificial lightning that produced them were totally unrelated. The structures just happened to be present on twenty-seven occasions, and that’s why they were excited.”

“Could the structure penetrate below ground…? Well, why not? People have often seen ball lightning coming out of the ground before earthquakes.”

We couldn’t contain our excitement, and paced the floor. “That means the error in prior research is all too obvious: we shouldn’t be trying to produce it, we should try to find it! Meaning, when we’re simulating lightning, the key factor isn’t the nature and structure of the lightning itself, much less any external factors such as EM fields or microwaves. It’s getting the lightning to cover as large a space as possible.”

“Correct!”

“Then what should our next step be?”

From behind us, General Lin called us to eat. A sumptuous feast was laid out on the table in the living room. “Remember, Xiao Yun, we invited Dr. Chen over as a guest. No work talk over dinner,” General Lin said, as he refilled my glass.

Lin Yun said, “This isn’t work. It’s a hobby.”

Then we turned toward some more casual topics. I learned that General Lin had been a top student at PLA Military Engineering Institute in Harbin, where he had studied electronics. But he hadn’t touched technology work since that time, transferring to pure military affairs and becoming one of the few senior generals in the army with a technical background.

“I suspect Ohm’s Law is the sum total of what you remember of your studies,” Lin Yun said.

The general laughed. “You underestimate me. But it’s computers, not electronics, that most impress me now. The first computer I saw was a Soviet one, I forget the clock speed but it had 4K of memory—magnetic core memory, mind you, held in a box taller than that bookshelf. But the biggest difference from today was in the software. Xiao Yun loves to boast how awesome a programmer she is, but on that machine, she’d find it hard to code a program for ’3+2’ without breaking a sweat.”

“You used assembly in those days?”

“No, just ones and zeroes. The machine had no compiler, so you had to write out your program on paper and then compile it into machine code, instruction by instruction, a string of ones and zeroes. Hand-coding, we called it.” As he was talking, the general turned toward the table behind him, picked up a pencil and paper, and wrote out a string of ones and zeroes for me. “See, this sequence of commands takes the contents of two registers and puts them into the accumulator, and then puts the result into another register. Don’t be skeptical, Xiao Yun. It’s entirely correct. I once used an entire month to code up a program to calculate pi. From then on I could remember the correspondence between instructions and machine code better than the times tables.”

I said, “There’s essentially no difference between computers back then and today. Ultimately, what’s being processed is still a string of ones and zeroes.”

“Right. It’s interesting. Imagine the eighteenth century, or even earlier—the scientists who were trying to invent computers would no doubt have imagined that the reason they failed was because their thinking wasn’t sophisticated enough. But now we know that it was because their thinking wasn’t simple enough.”

“It’s the same with ball lightning,” Lin Yun mused. “Dr. Chen’s grand idea just now made me realize we failed because we weren’t thinking simply enough.” Then she told my new idea to her father.

“Very interesting, and very plausible,” he said, nodding. “You really should have thought of it before. What’s your next step?”

Lin Yun talked through her thought process: “Build a lightning matrix. To obtain results in the shortest possible time, I’d say that it would have to be… an area no smaller than twenty square kilometers. We’d install over one thousand lightning generators in that area.”

“Right!” I said excitedly. “For the lightning generators, we could use the lightning weapon you were developing!”

“But that leaves the question of money,” Lin Yun said, more soberly now. “At three hundred thousand yuan for a superconducting battery, we’d need a thousand of them.”

“That’s enough to fit out an entire Su-30 squadron,” the general said.

“But isn’t it worth it if we succeed?”

“Hey, cut it out with all of the ifs and maybes. How many of those did you have at the start of the lightning weapons project? And how did it turn out? I’d like to say a few words about that project. The General Armaments Department insisted on proceeding with it, and I didn’t interfere, but let me ask you: Is the role you’re playing in this project within the scope of a major’s authority?”

Lin Yun said nothing.

“As for ball lightning, you can’t mess around anymore. I’ll agree to setting up the research project, but there won’t be any money.”

Lin Yun was livid. “That’s the same as not doing anything. What can we do without money? The Western media says you’re one of the most technically minded top brass, but it looks like they have you wrong.”

“I’ve got a technically minded daughter, but can she do anything apart from taking money and washing it down the drain? Isn’t your lightning weapons lab on the outskirts of Beijing still around? Why not just do it there?”

“These are two separate things, Dad.”

“What two things? They’re both lightning, so there’s got to be overlap. So much experimental equipment. I can’t accept that it’s completely useless to you.”

“But Dad, we’ve got to build a large-area lightning matrix.”

General Lin shook his head with a smile. “If there’s an idiotic idea in the world, it’s this one. I really don’t get how you two PhDs are missing the obvious.”

Lin Yun and I exchanged a confused glance.

“Dr. Chen just came back from the ocean, am I correct? Did the fishermen you saw blanket the ocean in nets?”

“You mean… make the lightning mobile? Ah! Dr. Chen’s idea got me so excited I lost my mind for an instant.”

“How do we make it mobile?” I asked, still confused.

“All we need to do is move the lightning weapon’s target from the ground to another helicopter. Then we’ll have a discharge arc in the air, and if the two helicopters fly at the same speed, we can sweep the arc through a wide area. It’ll have the same effect as a lightning matrix, but it will only require one superconductive battery.”

“Like a dragnet in the sky,” I said, thrilled to no end.

“A skynet!” Lin Yun crowed.

The general said, “But implementing the plan won’t be as easy as you’re imagining right now. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the difficulties.”

“First off, there’s the danger,” Lin Yun said. “Lightning is one of the biggest killers in the air, and lightning areas are no-fly zones. We want to have the aircraft bring lightning along with them.”

“Yes,” the general said somberly. “You’re going into combat.”

Attack Bees

When we finished eating, General Lin said that he wanted to speak with me alone. Giving the two of us a wary look, Lin Yun went upstairs.

The general lit a cigarette, and said, “I’d like to speak with you about my daughter. When Lin Yun was a girl, I was away working on the front lines and didn’t spend much time with my family. She was raised by her mother, and had a strong attachment to her.”

He got up and went over to his wife’s memorial portrait. “In Yunnan, on the front lines, she was a company commander in the signal corps. Equipment was still fairly primitive at the time, and front-line communications required massive amounts of telephone wire. These wires were one of the objectives of the many detachments of Vietnamese troops that were active on both sides of the line. Their tactic was to cut the wires, and plant mines or lay in ambush near the site of the break. One day, battle erupted between two divisions, and then a key telephone wire was cut. When contact was lost with the first three-member inspection team, she personally led four communications soldiers out to check the line. They were ambushed near the line break. It was a bamboo forest in which the enemy had cut out a clearing. When they entered the clearing, the enemy fired from the surrounding forest. The first volley killed three communications soldiers. This was on our side of the front line, so the small Vietnamese detachment didn’t dare stay long, and ran off immediately. She and the remaining communications soldier cleared mines as they approached the breakpoint. Just as the woman soldier reached the break, she saw the end of the wire wrapped around a foot-long bamboo segment. When she picked up the end of the wire to remove it from the bamboo, it exploded, blowing her face off… Lin Yun’s mother started to join the wires, but heard a buzzing in the distance. Turning to look, she saw that the Vietnamese soldiers had left behind a small cardboard box that was now spewing a cloud of bees in her direction. She was stung several times, then fled into the bamboo with her head wrapped in camo cloth. But the bees were close behind her, and she had to jump into a shallow pond and submerge herself, only surfacing every thirty seconds to take a breath. The bees swirled above her, refusing to disperse, and she grew anxious, since every minute the communication line was down could mean huge losses for the critical state of the front lines. At last she disregarded all concerns, crawled out of the pond, and returned to the site of the break, chased by the bees. By the time she had repaired the line, she had been stung more times than she could count, and she lost consciousness and was found by a patrol squad. Her skin turned black and festered, her facial features swelled beyond recognition, and a week later she died in immense agony. Lin Yun was five years old when she saw her mother’s misery in the hospital in Kunming…. For an entire year after that, she didn’t utter a word, and when she eventually began to talk again, she had lost her former fluency.”

General Lin’s story shook me. Memories of pain and sacrifice had grown so distant and strange to me, but here they were so raw and immediate.

He continued: “Perhaps that experience would have different effects on different children. For some, it might give rise to a lifelong aversion to war and all things war-related; to others, it might spark attention and even keen interest in it. My daughter, unfortunately, is the second sort.”

“Is Lin Yun’s fascination with weapons, and new-concept weapons in particular, connected to this?” I asked, as delicately as I could. I couldn’t understand why the general was telling me this, and he seemed to sense my confusion.

“As a researcher, you must know that it’s entirely normal, in the course of scientific research, to become fascinated with the subject you’re studying. But weapons research is special. If a researcher becomes infatuated with weapons, it poses a potential danger. Particularly with a weapon like ball lightning, which would have enormous power if successful. For someone as overly fascinated with weapons as Lin Yun, with her ends-before-means personality, that danger is even more obvious…. I don’t know whether you catch what I’m getting at.”

I nodded. “I understand, General Lin. Colonel Jiang spoke of it as well.”

“Oh, really?”

I didn’t know whether the general was aware of the liquid mines, and I didn’t dare ask. I guessed he didn’t know.

“Jiang Xingchen isn’t of much use on this front. His work is pretty distinct from hers. And also—” The general swallowed before quoting, significantly: “They’re both standing among those peaks.”[6]

“So what can I do?”

“Dr. Chen, I’d like to ask you to monitor Lin Yun during ball lightning weapons R&D, and prevent the occurrence of anything unexpected.”

I thought about this for a few seconds, and then nodded. “Very well, sir. I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you.” He went over to the desk, wrote down a phone number, and handed it to me. “If there’s a problem, then contact me directly. Dr. Chen, it’s in your hands. I know my daughter, and I’m genuinely worried.”

The general uttered this last sentence with particular gravity.

Skynet

Lin Yun and I returned to the lightning research base. As we waited at the gate for a few seconds while the guard checked our documents, I was gratified to realize that I had changed significantly since that evening in early spring half a year ago, when Lin Yun had first revealed her idea of using ball lightning as a weapon.

Once again we met Colonel Xu Wencheng, who was in charge of the base. When he learned that the base would not only continue functioning, but would host a new research project, he was overjoyed. But when we told him the details of our project, he was perplexed.

Lin Yun said, “Our first step is to try to use the existing equipment to search for ball lightning, and show the higher-ups its potential as a weapon.”

The colonel gave a cryptic smile. “Oh, I imagine the higher-ups are well aware of its power. Didn’t you know that the most critical location in the country was once subject to a ball lightning attack?”

Lin Yun and I looked at each other in surprise, then Lin Yun asked him where it happened.

“At the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse.”[7]

I had amassed a large collection of eyewitness accounts of ball lightning through the years, the earliest of which dated to the late Ming or early Qing dynasties, and I thought I had covered the field relatively well. But I’d never heard of this incident.

“It was August 16, 1982. Ball lightning simultaneously dropped in two separate locations at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, in both cases rolling down a tree trunk. One was near the reception hall’s eastern wall, where a soldier on guard was taken out immediately. He was standing in front of a two-meter-high guardhouse, approximately two to three meters from the tree. The instant the ball lightning came down the tree, he felt that a fireball was approaching him, and then everything turned black. When he came to, he had lost his hearing, but was otherwise unharmed. But several holes were blown in the concrete eaves of the guardhouse and its brick-faced walls, its interior electric lights were burned out, the light switch was broken, and the telephone line snapped. The other occurred in the southeast corner of the guesthouse compound, roughly one hundred meters from the guardhouse, also down a tree. About two meters away from the tree was a wooden storage shed surrounded by three enormous pagoda trees. The lightning rolled down the eastern tree and entered the shed through a window, putting two holes in the windowpane. It burned the wooden wall on the east side and the southeast corner, two inner tubes of a bicycle hanging on a wall, and also all of the plastic circuit breakers in the shed. The wire for the shed’s electric light was burned in half, too….”

“How do you know so many details?”

“After the incident, I went as part of an expert team to investigate the scene and study prevention methods. Proposals included installing a lightning cage—that is, grounded metal mesh in a building’s doors and windows; stopping up all unnecessary holes in the walls; and installing grounded wire mesh across the mouths of all chimneys and exhaust pipes.”

“Was any of that helpful?”

Colonel Xu shook his head. “The window the ball lightning passed through was already covered in a fairly fine metal mesh, which broke in eight places. But those conventional measures were all that was available at the time. If the stuff can really be put to use in combat, it will be immensely powerful. I know a little about the state of ball lightning research overseas, and you’re probably the first to have this idea. It sounds reasonable, but your next step…” He shook his head. “Lightning is one of the most uncontrollable phenomena in nature. Ball lightning even more so. It not only has lightning’s destructive power, but possesses the subtlety of a phantom. No one knows when its fearsome energy will be discharged, or into what. Controlling it will be no small task.”

“We can only take it a step at a time,” Lin Yun said.

“Indeed. If you’re really able to find ball lightning, it will be a great success for science. And a bit of success for our base as well. But I’m worried about safety. I’ve got an idea: Can’t we put the lightning generator into a car, and have cars drive the electric arc along level ground? The arc would still be able to sweep a large space.”

Lin Yun shook her head. “We’ve thought of that. And we’ve thought of using ships to drag an electric arc over the ocean. But it won’t work.”

Colonel Xu thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Right. The earth and the ocean surface are both conductors, so the induction effect won’t permit a long arc.”

“We also considered using fixed-wing aircraft, which would make parachuting out in the event of an accident somewhat easier compared to a helicopter, but that won’t work either, since air currents at that speed would blow out the arc. We’ll try to adopt as many precautions as possible prior to the actual experiments, like training the pilots to parachute from helicopters under abnormal flying conditions. In addition, naval aviation is introducing an ejection device for helicopters, similar to the kind in fighters, except along the horizontal. We’ve already requisitioned a few from the General Armaments Department.”

Colonel Xu shook his head. “These measures won’t have a significant effect. We’re taking a big risk.”

Lin Yun said, “That is true. But judging from the present situation, with the whole army in second-degree combat readiness, safety isn’t our top priority.”

Her words may have surprised me, but Colonel Xu tacitly accepted her opinion. He seemed like a nice guy, and couldn’t really do anything about Lin Yun and me. On the other hand, with the current state of things, it was time for soldiers to take risks.

The base currently had two domestic-made WZ-9 helicopters. Before the tests formally began, their pilots, two lieutenants, conducted a weeklong parachute training, one of them at the controls doing stunt flying that mimicked plummeting as the other jumped out the rear hatch. They also tried out the ejector, a small rocket affixed across the back of the pilot seat; when triggered, the helicopter would emit a puff of smoke as if it had been hit, and then the pilot would be thrown out of the hatch like a stone for a considerable distance until his parachute opened. It was thrilling to watch.

Once, during a break, a pilot asked Lin Yun, “Major, are we likely to be hit by something? If it’s like what happened to Captain Wang, then practicing this is useless, I’m afraid.”

“The lightning will be far weaker this time. If the aircraft is unexpectedly hit, it won’t cause that extent of damage. The actual test will take place at five thousand meters, so you’ll have plenty of time to jump.”

The other pilot said, “I’ve heard that I’m going to be shooting lightning at another helicopter.”

“That’s right, but the strength is only as high as what you use to drain the residual battery charge.”

The lieutenant broke out laughing. “So you want to use this weapon in air combat? A weapon only capable of firing one hundred meters? In air combat?”

“Of course not. Your two aircraft will pull that electric arc through the air like a dragnet to catch—or, rather, excite—a structure that might be present there. If it’s discovered, the object might be a powerful deterrent weapon.”

“Major, this is all getting really weird. To tell you the truth, I don’t have any confidence in you people anymore. I just hope that I can finish this quickly and return to my unit.”

When the lieutenant mentioned Captain Wang Songlin, who had been struck by lightning from an artificially charged cloud, my heart tightened. I imagined what I’d be like if I had to face such a danger in flight—no question I’d be consumed with terror. On the other hand, if I were Lin Yun, I’d still be unable to speak frankly about it to the two pilots. But their young faces before me looked unperturbed, as if they were only taking a car on a trip to the suburbs.

Later, we came up with many more ways of increasing the safety of the experiment. The one that seemed the most feasible was hanging the lightning generator from a cable attached to the bottom of the helicopter; if it was long enough, it would completely resolve the safety issue. We cursed ourselves for not coming up with such a simple scheme earlier. Then tests showed it wouldn’t work, as the swaying of the suspended generator was severe enough to make precise targeting impossible, and we ultimately had to return to our original, risky plan.

But before that, I grew curious about the principles behind the lightning generator. Even though it had a range of just a hundred meters, using the generator’s small electrode to discharge over such a distance was practically impossible, and maintaining an arc harder still. Because of the secrecy involved, it wasn’t appropriate to ask too many questions, but when I first saw the outside of the system, I discovered a peculiar piece of equipment. It was a short, thick tube set very close to the electrode. One end pointed in the direction of discharge, and the other was inserted into a large-volume device which—judging from the cylindrical shell and the high-voltage wires that wrapped it—appeared to be a small particle accelerator. I decided that it must be connected in some way to the secret of long-distance discharge. Later I found out it was a beam emitter that fired a stream of charged particles at the target prior to electric discharge. The particles ionized the air to form a discharge path that guided the arc to the target.

The weather was good the day of the first test. There was practically no wind at ground level in the early morning. Everyone involved in the project was at the test site. We were few in number: just twenty-odd engineers, staff, and ground crew. An ambulance was parked not far from the helicopter pad, the medics in their snow-white uniforms conspicuous in the dawn light. I had an odd feeling, and got a vague sense of fear from the two empty stretchers sitting on the grass. But the men who might be carried on those stretchers before long were standing beside them joking easily with the two pretty nurses they’d just met. My sense of inferiority came welling up again. The stormy night that had decided the course of my life had given me a far deeper fear of death than most people.

Lin Yun came over with two yellow jumpsuits for the pilots to put on. “These shielded uniforms are from the municipal power bureau, where they’re worn by workmen doing jobs on live high-tension wires. They’re shielded using the principle of the Faraday cage and will offer some protection against lightning.”

One pilot laughed as he took the shielded uniform and said to Lin Yun, “Don’t worry, Major. Your little electric arc won’t be any worse than a Stinger missile.”

Lin Yun described the test procedure for them: “First, ascend to five thousand meters, and then bring the two craft as close together as is safe. When you’re at that distance, ignite the arc, then gradually separate the two craft and hover just under the arc’s maximum range. Then fly forward at the speed given by the ground commander. Pay attention to arc stability and hover if you need to—you’ve done that before. One more thing to watch out for: if the arc goes out, then disengage as fast as possible and turn off the generator. Don’t try to reestablish the arc, since if it’s ignited at long range, it may strike the aircraft! Make sure you remember that. Don’t die a martyr.”

According to the plan, the helicopters would fly with the wind to minimize the relative airspeed. Then they would ignite the arc and fly for a while until it went out, at which point they would come back and repeat the process.

The test helicopters quickly ascended to the predetermined altitude. At this point we had to use binoculars to see them. They flew with the wind and drew closer to each other until it looked from the ground like their rotors were practically touching. Then a bright electric arc appeared between the two craft, projecting a dim yet crisp popping sound down to earth. The helicopters slowly separated, and the arc stretched out, its initial straight line becoming more turbulent as the distance increased. At maximum separation, it seemed like a piece of light gauze dancing on the wind, liable to slip its bindings and fly off into the sky. The sun was still below the horizon, and the bright blue-purple electric arc looked unreal against the dark blue of the sky between the helicopters’ black silhouettes, like the projection of scratched film on a cinema screen.

I had a sudden chill, my stomach tightened, and I began shivering uncontrollably. I set down the binoculars. With the naked eye, all I could see was a blue dot high in the sky, like a nearby star.

When I picked them up again, the helicopters were flying forward at maximum separation, taking with them that dancing, hundred-meter electric arc. Their speed was so low that it was only by comparing them to the thin high clouds, lit by the sun below the horizon, that you could tell they were moving. As they flew east, their sunlit bodies turned into two orange dots, and the arc dimmed slightly.

I exhaled, but then heard shouts from the binocular watchers beside me. I grabbed up my own pair to catch the scene: on the receptor side, the arc had forked. Its main branch still contacted the electrode, but a smaller branch moved erratically along the helicopter’s tail like it was a thin hand searching for something. It lasted only three or four seconds, and then the arc went out altogether.

The situation didn’t look scary and seemed unlikely to have any disastrous consequence on the helicopter. But I was wrong. The instant the arc vanished, I saw a bright light in the tail rotor. It vanished immediately, but then smoke appeared at that spot, and shortly after, the helicopter began to rotate, faster and faster. Later I learned that the lightning had struck a control line for the tail rotor, causing it to stop. Since that rotor was used to balance the rotational torque generated by the main rotor, once it lost power, the helicopter began to rotate in the opposite direction from the main rotor. Through the binoculars I saw the rotation accelerate and the helicopter gradually lose lift, then start a shaky fall.

“Bail!” Colonel Xu shouted into the radio.

But just seconds later, it looked like the pilot had restarted the tail rotor. The rotation of the fuselage slowed, as did the speed of descent, until it once again hovered in the air—but only for a split second. Then, like a clockwork toy, it started to turn again and plummet.

“Bail!” Colonel Xu shouted again.

After a short fall, the helicopter again stopped rotating and slowed to a hover. The next instant it began falling again… and the cycle repeated. Now it was below the safe altitude for parachuting. We could only pray that it reached the ground when it was near a hover state.

When it landed off to the east, its speed had slowed significantly, but it was still far faster than a normal landing. I looked fearfully in that direction and waited numbly. Luckily, no smoke came from that stand of trees.

When we drove up to the crash spot, the other test helicopter had already landed nearby. The site was in an orchard. The helicopter was tilted, crushing a few fruit trees beneath it, and the tops of several other stocky trees around it had been severed by the blades. The cabin glass had shattered, but apart from that, the fuselage did not appear to be seriously damaged. The lieutenant was leaning against a tree pressing a bleeding arm, impatiently trying to push off the nurse and stretcher carrier, but when he saw Lin Yun he used his unharmed hand to give her a thumbs-up.

“Major, your lightning weapon took out a plane!”

“Why didn’t you bail out?” Colonel Xu, who had just arrived, asked in exasperation.

“Colonel, we army aviators have our own rules for when to bail out.”

In the car back to the base, I couldn’t hold back one nagging question, and said to Lin Yun, “You were the designated ground commander for this test. But it was Colonel Xu who gave the order to parachute.”

“It was very possible that Lieutenant Liu would be able to rescue the helicopter,” Lin Yun said evenly.

“There was only a fifty percent likelihood of that. What if he couldn’t save it?”

“Then the experiment would be suspended for quite some time, and the project might even be canceled.”

My stomach turned another somersault. “If you were commanding an attack and there was a minefield in your path, you’d order the soldiers to push through, right?”

“Under the new military regulations, female officers may not serve as front-line battlefield commanders.” As usual, she lightly deflected my question. She added—as if by way of apology for perhaps being too curt—“The military has its own form of conduct, somewhat different from yours.”

“The colonel isn’t military?”

“Of course he is,” she said lightly, a faint contempt noticeable in her tone. She held the same contempt for everyone in the base leadership.

That afternoon, the helicopter underwent emergency repairs at the crash site and then flew back to base.

“Until there are effective measures to guarantee safety, the experiment must stop!” Colonel Xu said resolutely at the base meeting that night.

“Let’s take it up a few more times. Maybe we’ll find a pattern for the arc fluctuations. Then we’d be able to find a flying method that avoids having it strike the fuselage,” the pilot who had been injured said, waving a bandaged arm. From his movements and expression, it was evident that his wounded hand hurt, but to show that he could still work the helicopter controls, he didn’t have it in a sling and was deliberately making large movements.

“We can’t afford to have another accident. There needs to be a reliable guarantee of safety,” Lin Yun said.

The other aviator said, “I’d like to ask you all to get one thing straight: We’re not taking risks for this project of yours. We’re doing it for ourselves. Army aviation needs new weapons now more than ever.”

Lin Yun said, “Lieutenant, you misunderstand why we halted the experiment. We did so out of concern for the project. If we have another catastrophic crash like Lieutenant Wang Songlin’s, the project is over.”

Colonel Xu said, “Let’s all use our brains. We’ve got to come up with workable safety measures.”

An engineer said, “Can we consider using remote-controlled aircraft to conduct the experiment?”

An aviator said, “The only craft capable of hovering and low-speed flight that has sufficient carrying capacity is a helium airship developed by Beihang University,[8] but it’s unclear whether it could be controlled precisely enough to guarantee discharge accuracy.”

Lin Yun said, “And even if it could, it would only eliminate the risk of loss of life. It doesn’t help the experiment itself, since it would still be susceptible to a lightning strike.”

I had a sudden thought. “My master’s advisor developed an anti-lightning paint for use on high-tension wires, but I’ve only heard people talk about it, so I’m not too familiar with the details.”

“Your advisor was Zhang Bin?” Colonel Xu asked.

I nodded. “Do you know him?”

“I was one of his students. He was just a lecturer back then, and hadn’t transferred to your university.” Colonel Xu turned melancholy for a moment. “I called him up a few days ago. I’ve wanted to see him but I haven’t been able to find the time. I’m afraid he doesn’t have much time left. You know of his illness?”

I nodded again.

“He was rigorous in his studies, and he worked diligently his entire life….”

“Let’s get back to the paint!” Lin Yun said impatiently.

“I know of that invention. I was on the appraisal committee. It was remarkably effective in protecting against lightning,” Colonel Xu said.

“The key thing is whether it needs to be grounded in order to work. If it does, then there’s not much point,” Lin Yun said. I had always admired her technical mind. The majority of anti-lightning paints needed to be grounded, but the question was not one a non-specialist was likely to ask.

Colonel Xu scratched his head. “Hmm… it’s been so long that I can’t remember. You’ll have to ask the inventor for the details.”

Lin Yun snatched up the phone and passed it to me. “Give him a call at once and ask him. If it’ll work, then have him come to Beijing. We’ll need to manufacture a batch of it immediately.”

“He’s a cancer patient,” I said, looking at her awkwardly.

Colonel Xu said, “It’s not a problem just to ask.”

I took the receiver from Lin Yun’s hand. “I don’t know if he’s at home or at the hospital…,” I said, flipping open my address book. His home number was on the first page. I dialed, and then a weak voice sounded on the receiver. “Who is it?”

When I gave him my name, the distant voice instantly became stronger and more excited. “Oh, hello! Where are you? What are you up to?”

“Professor Zhang, I’m working on a national defense project. How’s your health?”

“You mean you’ve made progress?” he asked, ignoring my question.

“It’s hard to say on the phone. How’s your health?”

“Diminishing by the day. Zhao Yu visited. He may have mentioned it to you.”

“Yes. How is your treatment going?” As I spoke, Lin Yun whispered urgently, “Ask him…,” but I covered the mouthpiece and snapped, “Get away.”

When I returned the receiver to my ear, I heard Zhang Bin say, “…I’ve pulled together another set of research materials and I’m getting ready to send them to you.”

“Professor Zhang, I’d like to ask you about something else. It’s about the high-tension wire anti-lightning paint you developed.”

“Oh. That stuff had no economic value and was shelved long ago. What do you want to know?”

“Does it need to be grounded?”

“No. It doesn’t need grounding. Its shielding effect is self-contained.”

“We want to use it on aircraft.”

“I’m afraid that won’t work. The paint produces a fairly thick coating, and definitely won’t meet the aerodynamic indicators required for an aircraft surface. Also, the skin of the plane is of an entirely different material from high-tension wires. It might erode the skin it’s painted on in the long term.”

“None of that matters. I just want to know whether it would have an anti-lightning effect on planes.”

“Definitely. Paint it thick enough, and the plane could fly straight through a thunderhead. The paint’s been tested for that before, just not on planes. The academy’s atmospherics lab once had a project to use sonar balloons to probe the structure of storm clouds. But on several occasions, the balloons and the instrument module suspended from them were destroyed by lightning strikes shortly after entering the clouds. So they looked me up, we put a layer of paint on the instrument module and the balloon, and they ended up entering clouds several dozen times without incident. That might possibly be the sole practical application of the paint.”

“Excellent! Is any of the finished paint still around?”

“Sure. It’s in the storage room of the atmospheric electricity lab. It should still be usable. There’s probably enough to paint a small airplane. The administrator has tried to get rid of those sealed barrels on a number of occasions, since they take up space, but I wouldn’t allow it. If they’re useful to you, then take them. I’ve also got a complete set of materials, so it won’t be a problem to fabricate more. I’ve got a question… though if it’s inconvenient, then of course you don’t have to answer: Is this connected to ball lightning research?”

“It is.”

“So you’ve really made progress?”

“Professor Zhang, it’s not just me now. Lots of people are involved in it. As for progress, we just might make some.”

“Great. I’ll come over at once. You’ll need me, at least as far as the paint is concerned.”

Before I had a chance to speak, Lin Yun covered the mouthpiece. She had heard what Zhang Bin said and was evidently afraid I wouldn’t let him come. She whispered, “He can be admitted to 301 Military Hospital once he comes. They’re better equipped for treatment than where he is, right? Besides, if his materials are complete, then he won’t have to expend much energy.”

I looked at Colonel Xu, who picked up the receiver. They were clearly in frequent contact, since without much in the way of salutation, he said, “About how heavy is all of that paint? Roughly two tons? Very well. Wait at home, and we’ll come pick you up.”

The next afternoon, Lin Yun and I went to Nanyuan Airport to meet Zhang Bin. We parked on the tarmac, awaiting the plane. It was the height of summer, but a storm had just passed, taking with it the oppressive heat of the past few days and leaving behind fresh, cool air. After such a long period of hard work, this was a rare occasion to relax.

“You’re growing to dislike me as we work, aren’t you?” Lin Yun asked me.

“Do you know what you’re like?”

“Try me.”

“You’re like a ship on the night sea making its way toward a lighthouse. Nothing in the world has any meaning for you but that flashing lighthouse. Nothing else is visible.”

“How poetic. But don’t you think you’re describing yourself as well?”

I knew she was right. Sometimes what we find hardest to tolerate in others is our own reflection. Now I recalled that one late night in the library in my first year of university, when the pretty girl asked me what I was looking for. Her expression, still clearly imprinted in my memory, was the face of someone looking at something strange. I felt certain that there was a boy who had looked at Lin Yun that way…. We were people untethered to our time, and untethered to each other, and we would never have a way to merge.

The small military transport plane landed, and Zhang Bin walked out of the tail hatch accompanied by Colonel Xu and another officer from the base. Zhang Bin looked far better than I had imagined, better even than how he had seemed at the university when we parted the previous year, not like he had a terminal illness. When I mentioned this to him, he said, “I wasn’t like this two days ago. But when I got your call, I halfway recovered.” He pointed at the four steel barrels that were being unloaded from the plane. “That’s the paint you wanted.”

Colonel Xu said, “We estimate that it will take a barrel and a half to paint a helicopter, so that’s certainly enough for two!”

Before getting in the car, Zhang Bin said, “Colonel Xu has already told me about your idea. I can’t comment on it at the moment, but I have a feeling that this time you and I might see ball lightning again.” He looked up at the clear post-rain sky and let out a long breath. “How wonderful that would be.”

Back at the base, we worked through the night to run some simple tests on the paint, and discovered that it was an excellent shield against lightning. Then, in the space of just two hours, we covered the two helicopters in the black paint.

The second discharge test was carried out before dawn. Before the pilots took off, Zhang Bin said to the aviator with the bandaged hand, “Fly without worries, kid. There won’t be any problems.”

Everything went smoothly. The two helicopters reached five thousand meters and ignited the arc, and then flew with it for ten minutes before landing, to applause from us all.

During the flight, the arc covered an area more than a hundred times larger than Base 3141, but this number was minuscule next to the huge area that needed to be swept.

I told Zhang Bin that the large-area airborne scan would commence in two days.

He said, “Remember to call me over!”

Watching him leave in the car, I felt a hollow emptiness I had never felt before. Facing the two helicopters and their now-still rotors, I said to Lin Yun beside me, “We’ve placed our bets before the natural world. Are we going to lose everything? Do you really believe the net will excite something in the air?”

Lin Yun said, “Don’t overthink it. Let’s just see what happens.”

Ball Lightning

The first scan began in the evening two days later. The two helicopters were on an even line with each other, Zhang Bin and I in one, and Lin Yun in the other. The weather was excellent, the stars glittered in the night air, and the lights of the capital were dimly visible on the distant horizon.

The two helicopters slowly drew closer to each other. At first, Lin Yun’s helicopter was only locatable by its navigation lights, but as it closed the gap, its outline began to stand out against the night sky, and I could gradually make out the serial number and Ba Yi insignia of the PLA. Eventually, even Lin Yun and the face of the aviator, lit red by the instrument panel, were clearly visible.

After a crisp crack, the helicopter was suddenly lit by a blinding blue light that filled our cabin as well. The narrow distance between the two craft meant we could only see a small portion of the arc connecting the electrodes beneath the fuselage, but we still had to avert our eyes from the blue glare. Lin Yun and I waved at each other across the blue-filled space.

“Put on eye protection!” the aviator shouted, reminding me that, during the week of installations and adjustments, the arc had already turned my eyes red and watery. I looked over at Zhang Bin, who wasn’t wearing goggles, or even looking at the arc at all. He was watching the light shining on the cabin ceiling, as if waiting, or deep in thought.

The moment I put on the goggles, I could see nothing but the electric arc. As the helicopters gradually separated, the arc lengthened. It was a wonderfully simple universe I saw through my goggles, just endless black emptiness and a long electric arc. In fact, this universe was the actual context for our search, a shapeless cosmos of electromagnetism within which the physical world did not exist. All was invisible fields and waves…. What I saw drained away the last of my confidence. It was hard to believe, looking at this scene, that there was anything else in this jet-black universe apart from the electric arc. To escape that feeling, I took off the goggles and, like Zhang Bin, confined my gaze to the cabin. The physical world illuminated by the electric light made me feel a little better.

Now the arc was one hundred meters long. It began to move with the helicopter formation as we accelerated toward the west. I wondered what people on the ground would think at the sudden appearance of this long electric arc against the starry night sky. What would they imagine it to be?

We flew for half an hour, during which time we remained silent apart from short radio communication between the aviators. Now the arc had swept a space more than a thousand times the total space covered by all artificial lightning generated in history, but we had found nothing.

The arc was gradually dimming, the superconducting batteries nearly spent. Lin Yun’s voice came over the earpiece: “Attention. Extinguish the arc, disengage, and return to base.” In her voice I sensed a note of consolation for us all.

If there was one ironclad rule in my life it was this: if you expect to fail, then you will. There was, of course, almost a month of midair searching to come, but I’d already anticipated the final outcome.

“Professor Zhang, we might be wrong.” During the whole flight, Zhang Bin had hardly looked outside the cabin, remaining deep in thought.

“No,” he said. “I am more convinced than ever that you’re correct.”

I exhaled softly. “I don’t really have much hope for the next month of searching.”

He looked at me. “It won’t take a month. My intuition tells me that it ought to appear tonight. Can we recharge back at base and then fly out again?”

I shook my head. “You’ve got to rest. We’ll see about tomorrow.”

He murmured, “It’s weird. It ought to have appeared….”

“Intuition isn’t reliable,” I said.

“No. In more than three decades this is the first time I’ve had this feeling. It’s reliable.”

Then the voice of an aviator spoke in our earpieces: “Target located! About one-third of the way from Arc 1.”

Trembling, Zhang Bin and I pressed ourselves against the window. There, thirteen years after my first sighting, and more than forty years since his, we saw for a second time that life-changing ball lightning.

It was orange in color and pulled a short tail behind it as it drifted in a fluctuating path in the night sky. Its path showed that it was utterly unaffected by the strong wind at this high altitude, as if it had absolutely no interaction with our world.

“Attention! Pull back from the target! Danger!” Lin Yun shouted. Afterward I had to admire her cool-headedness, since Zhang Bin and I were totally transfixed, unable to think of anything else.

The helicopters separated, and as the distance grew, the arc soon extinguished. Absent the interference of the electric glow, the ball lightning stood out even clearer against the night, lighting the surrounding cloud cover red, like a miniature sunrise. Our first artificially excited ball lightning floated leisurely in the air for about a minute before suddenly vanishing.

When we returned to base, we immediately recharged the batteries and took off again. This time, after just fifteen minutes in the air, we excited our second ball lightning, and by fifty minutes, the third. That last one was a strange color, a peculiar violet, and it remained the longest—around six minutes, letting Zhang Bin and me savor the feeling of fantasy turned reality.

It was midnight when we landed back at base for the night. The helicopter rotors had come to a complete stop. Zhang Bin, Lin Yun, and I stood on the lawn surrounded by the sound of summer insects. It was a peaceful night, the glittering summer stars shining in the heavens overhead, as if they were countless lamps the universe had lit just for the three of us.

“I’ve finally tasted of the wine, and my life is complete!” Zhang Bin said. Lin Yun looked confused, but I immediately remembered the Russian story he had told me.

Thunderballs

After the success of the first search, I found myself awash in an ecstasy I had never known before. Before my eyes, the world had turned wonderful and new, like I had begun a new life. For Colonel Xu and Lin Yun, however, excitement was tempered by bewilderment, since they had only taken the first of a thousand steps toward their goal. Lin Yun had said that my end point was their starting point. This wasn’t entirely correct. My end point was still very far away.

When the aviators talked about ball lightning, they called it a “thunderball,” perhaps taking inspiration from the James Bond film of that name. This was the first time anyone had used the term thunderball in domestic lightning research, and it was simpler and catchier than earlier names. More importantly, as we now knew, calling the object “ball lightning” was incorrect. So we all quickly adopted the new name.

After the first breakthrough, our progress stopped in its tracks. We were consistently able to excite thunderballs with lightning, more than ten times on the most successful days, but we were sorely lacking in techniques for studying it, apart from various long-range scanners like radar of various wavelengths, infrared scanners, sonar, and spectrum analyzers. Touch probing was flat-out impossible, as was sampling the air the thunderball came into contact with, since the wind speed was high enough to disperse any affected air in an instant. As a result, for several weeks we made little progress in understanding thunderballs.

But Lin Yun was disappointed on another front. At one regular meeting on the base, she said, “This ball lightning doesn’t seem as dangerous as you said. There’s no lethality as far as I can see.”

“Right,” said an aviator. “Are these fluffy fireballs really useful as weapons?”

“You really won’t be satisfied until you see someone burned to a crisp?” I snapped.

“Don’t be like that. Our end goal is making weapons, after all.”

“You can doubt everything about ball lightning, but don’t doubt its lethality. The moment you let your guard down, it will grant you your wish!” I said.

Colonel Xu Wencheng supported me. “I’ve seen a dangerous tendency right now, an increasing disregard for safety. The observer helicopter has been within the stipulated fifty-meter minimum distance from the target on countless occasions, and once as close as twenty meters! This is absolutely prohibited. I want to remind all team members, particularly aviators, that any further orders to approach the thunderballs closer than the set minimum should be refused.”

No one could have anticipated that my ominous prediction would be fulfilled that very night.

The frequency of thunderball discovery remained the same day or night, but because the thunderballs made a better visual effect in the dark, most of the excitement tests were carried out at night. That night, six thunderballs were excited. For five of them, measurements were carried out successfully, including measurements of orbit, radiation intensity, spectral characteristics, and magnetic field strength at the point of disappearance.

When a touch probe was being carried out for the sixth thunderball, disaster struck. When the thunderball was excited, the probe helicopter carefully approached it, flying parallel to its path and trying to maintain a distance of fifty meters. I was in a helicopter a little farther away. After four minutes of flying like this, the thunderball suddenly vanished. But unlike previous occasions, this time we heard a faint explosion, which—taking the helicopter’s excellent noise insulation into account—must have sounded deafening outside. Then the probe helicopter gave off a plume of white smoke, right as it lost control. It plummeted, toppling about, and was soon gone from sight. In the moonlight, we saw a white parachute open below us and felt a tiny bit of relief. Not long after that, a fireball appeared, turning the surrounding area into a conspicuous circle of red against the pitch-black ground. Our hearts seized up, and only when we received the report that the helicopter had crashed into a desolate mountain and no one had been injured did we heave a sigh of relief.

Back at the base, the pilot, still shaken, recalled that when the thunderball had exploded in front of his helicopter, an electric discharge had flared from somewhere in the cabin, followed by smoke, and then the craft lost control. The crashed helicopter was burned beyond recognition, making it impossible to determine which part had been struck.

“What makes you sure that the thunderball had anything to do with the accident? Maybe it was a problem with the helicopter that just happened to coincide with the thunderball explosion,” Lin Yun said at the accident analysis meeting.

The pilot looked her straight in the eye with the expression of someone who had just awoken from a nightmare. “Major, I’d have agreed with you, except… look.” And he held up his hands. “Is this a coincidence?”

Apart from his right thumb and the middle finger of his left hand, which had burnt remnants of fingernails, all of the nails on his fingers were gone. Then he took off his aviators’ boots. His toenails were entirely missing.

“When the thunderball exploded, I had a weird feeling in my fingers. I took off my gloves and saw my fingernails glowing red, but the next instant the light went out and all ten nails turned opaque white. I thought my hands had been burned, so I raised them to cool them in the air, but at the first wave the fingernails vanished in a cloud of ash.”

“And your hands weren’t burned?” Lin Yun said, grabbing his hands for a closer look.

“Believe it or not, they didn’t even feel warm. Besides, my boots and gloves are completely fine.”

The accident gave the project team its first experience of the threat of ball lightning, and afterward, they no longer called it “fluffy.” What surprised everyone the most was that the energy discharged by the thunderball acted on an object fifty meters away. Still, this phenomena was not at all rare in the more than ten thousand eyewitness accounts of ball lightning we had compiled.

And so the project reached an impasse. We had by that point excited forty-eight thunderballs, but we had also experienced a major accident; it was impossible for tests and observations to continue in this form. More importantly, everyone knew in their hearts that there was no point in risking it. We had been shaken not by the thunderball’s power, but by its almost supernatural strangeness. The aviator’s vanished fingernails reminded us that the secrets of the thunderball could not be unlocked through conventional means.

I remembered something Zhang Bin had said: “We’re both mortal men. We may have put far more into the search than other people, but we’re still mortal. We can only make deductions within the framework defined by fundamental theory, and dare not deviate from it, lest we step out into the airless void. But within this framework, we cannot deduce anything.” I included these lines in my report to the GAD leadership.

“Our approach to ball lightning research needs to adopt cutting-edge physics,” Lin Yun said.

“Yes,” Colonel Xu replied. “We need to bring in a superman.”

Ding Yi

GAD convened a meeting to discuss expanding the ball lightning project. The meeting was attended primarily by representatives of civilian sector research institutions, most of them specialists in physics, including several directors of state physics institutes, as well as the physics department heads at a few well-known universities. The chair of the meeting turned over a stack of forms they had collected, brief introductions of the participants’ specialties and achievements, as material for us to use in making our selection.

Neither Colonel Xu nor I was happy after we’d read through the materials.

“These are the country’s most outstanding scholars in the field,” the head of the Institute of Physics said.

“We believe it. But we need something more fundamental,” Colonel Xu said.

“More fundamental? Aren’t you doing lightning research? How fundamental does that need to be? You don’t expect us to simply fetch Stephen Hawking, do you?”

“Hawking would be wonderful!” Lin Yun said.

The GAD team glanced at each other. Then the academy head said to a physics department dean, “Well, send Ding Yi, then.”

“His research is fundamental?”

“The most fundamental.”

“How’s his scholarship?”

“The best in the country.”

“What’s his affiliation?”

“He’s unaffiliated.”

“We’re not looking for an outsider physicist.”

“Ding Yi holds two doctorates, in philosophy and physics, and a master’s in mathematics. I forget which branch. He’s been a senior professor and a CAS fellow, the youngest ever, and he once served as senior scientist on the national neutron decay study, for which he was rumored to be nominated for a Nobel in physics last year. Does that sound like an outsider physicist to you?”

“So why is he unaffiliated?”

The academy head and the physics dean both snorted. “Ask him yourself.”

Lin Yun and I arrived at Ding Yi’s residence in a new apartment building in Haidian District. The door was ajar, and after pressing the doorbell several times with no response, we pushed it open and went in. The large apartment with its three bedrooms and two living rooms was mostly empty and had bare-bones decoration. The floor and windowsills were carpeted white with a large quantity of A4 paper, some of it blank, other sheets covered in formulas and peculiar graphs. Pencils were strewn about everywhere. One room held a bookcase and a computer. There were few books on the bookcase in that room, but it had the largest quantity of paper, rendering the floor barely visible. In a clearing in the center of the room, Ding Yi was sleeping in a deck chair. He was in his thirties, with a thin lanky body, and he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and shorts. A strand of saliva hung from his mouth to the floor. Beside the chair was a small table holding an enormous ashtray and an opened pack of Stone Forest brand cigarettes. A few of the cigarettes had been broken open and their tobacco stuffed into a glass. Evidently he had fallen asleep while working. We called out to him a few times, but he did not respond, so we had to forge a path through the paper to the chair and push him awake.

“Hmm? Oh, right. You called this morning?” Ding Yi said, smacking away saliva. “There’s tea in the bookcase. Pour it yourself if you want some.” After sitting up, he suddenly burst out shouting: “Why did you mess up my calculations? I had them lined up, and now they’re out of order!” He got up and busied himself pushing about the paper we had cleared, blocking our retreat.

“Are you Professor Ding?” Lin Yun asked. She was clearly disappointed by her first impression of him.

“I am Ding Yi.” He opened up two folding chairs and motioned for us to sit down, then returned to his chair. He said, “Before you tell me why you’ve come, let me discuss with you a dream I’ve just had…. No, you’ve got to listen. It was a wonderful dream, which you interrupted. In the dream I was sitting here, a knife in my hand, around so long, like for cutting watermelon. Next to me was this tea table. But there wasn’t an ashtray or anything on it. Just two round objects, yea big. Circular, spherical. What do you think they were?”

“Watermelon?”

“No, no. One was a proton, the other a neutron. A watermelon-sized proton and neutron. I cut the proton open first. Its charge flowed out onto the table, all sticky, with a fresh fragrance. After I cut the proton in half, the quarks inside tumbled out, tinkling. They were about the size of walnuts, in all sorts of colors. They rolled about on the table, and some of them fell onto the floor. I picked up a white one. It was very hard, but with effort, I was able to bite into it. It tasted like a manaizi grape…. And right then, you woke me up.”

With a bit of a sneer, Lin Yun said, “Professor Ding, that’s a schoolboy’s dream. You ought to be aware that protons, neutrons, and quarks would exhibit quantum effects, and they wouldn’t look like that.”

Ding Yi stared at her for a few seconds. “Oh, of course. You’re totally right. I tend to oversimplify things. Imagine how wonderful life would be for me if protons and neutrons really were that big. They’re so tiny in reality that a knife to cut them open would cost billions. So this is just a poor child’s dream of candy. Don’t mock it.”

“I’ve heard that the state didn’t include the large hadron accelerator and collider in the latest sci-tech five-year plan,” I said.

“They said it was a pointless waste of resources, so we physicists have to continue to go cap in hand to Geneva and beg them for a pitiful scrap of experiment time.”

“But your neutron decay project was quite successful. They say you nearly won a Nobel.”

“Don’t go bringing that up. That’s why I’m in the state I’m in today, with nothing to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just a few innocuous remarks. It was last year at… I’ve forgotten where. Definitely Europe. On a prime-time talk show, the host asked me for my thoughts as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics, and I said, ‘The Nobel? It’s never been given to superior minds, but favors competence and luck, like Einstein, who won for the photoelectric effect. Today, the Nobel is just a withered old whore, her charm gone, relying on flashy clothing and intricate tricks to win the favor of clients. I’m not interested in her. But the state invested a mint into the project, so I wouldn’t reject the prize if it was forced upon me.’”

Lin Yun and I looked at each other in surprise, and then burst out laughing. “That’s not cause for termination!”

“They said I was irresponsible, grandstanding, and wrecking it for everyone. Naturally, they all see me as a weirdo. ‘Those whose courses are different cannot lay plans for one another.’[9] So I left…. Okay, why don’t you two tell me why you’ve come.”

“We’d like to invite you to take part in a national defense research project, to be in charge of the theory portion,” I said.

“Research on what?”

“Ball lightning.”

“Great. If they’ve sent you here to insult me, then they’ve succeeded.”

“Why don’t you listen to our explanation before forming a conclusion? Maybe you’ll be able to use this to insult them,” Lin Yun said, opening up the laptop she had brought. She played a recording of the excitation of ball lightning, and explained it briefly to Ding Yi.

“So you’re saying that you’re using lightning to excite some undiscovered structure in the air?” Ding Yi said, staring at the ball lightning floating faintly on the laptop screen.

Lin Yun affirmed that that was the case. I showed Ding Yi Zhang Bin’s notebook with the alternating burnt pages and described its provenance. He took it and looked it over closely and carefully before returning it to me.

He took a bunch of tobacco from the glass, stuffed it into a large pipe, and lit it. He pointed at the loose cigarettes and said, “Take care of those for me.” Then he walked over to a wall and began to smoke. And so we extracted the tobacco from the cigarettes and put it into the glass.

“I know a place that sells pipe tobacco,” I said, looking up at him.

He didn’t seem to hear me, but stood there exhaling smoke. His face was practically pressed against the wall, so that the smoke he blew against it seemed to be issuing from the wall instead. His eyes were focused on the distance, as if the wall was the transparent border of another vast world and he was surveying the profound sights it held.

Before long, he finished his pipe, but maintained his posture against the wall. He said, “I’m not as self-righteous as you might imagine. The first task is to prove that I’m qualified for this project. If I’m not, then you can find someone else.”

“So you’ll join us?”

Ding Yi turned back around. “Yes. Why don’t I go with you now?”

That night, quite a few people at the base found it hard to sleep. From time to time they looked out the window at the tiny red star that flashed intermittently on the broad lightning test ground. That was Ding Yi’s pipe.

After arriving at the base, Ding Yi looked briefly through the materials we had prepared, and then immediately began calculating. He didn’t use a computer, but worked quickly with pencil and paper, and before long the office prepared for him was as covered in paper as his home. He did calculations for two hours straight before stopping, and then moved his chair to the edge of the test ground, smoking his pipe constantly. Its flame, flickering like the summer fireflies, was the light of hope for ball lightning research.

The flame had a hypnotic effect that made me drowsy watching it, so I went to bed. When I woke up, it was two in the morning, and, looking through the window, I could see the tiny star still flashing on the test ground. Now, though, it was moving like a firefly. Ding Yi was pacing. I watched him for a while and then went back to sleep. It was daylight when I awoke, and the test ground was empty. Ding Yi had gone to sleep.

It was almost ten when he got up and declared to us the results of his thinking: “Ball lightning is visible.”

We looked at each other with forced smiles. “Professor Ding, you’re not just… bullshitting us, are you?”

“I mean, unexcited ball lightning. What you called the already existing structure. It’s visible. It causes light to bend.”

“…How do you see it?”

“According to my calculations of the light bend, it should be visible to the naked eye.”

We looked at each other uncertainly. “So… what does it look like?”

“A transparent sphere. It exhibits a round edge due to the bending of light. It looks like a soap bubble, although it lacks a bubble’s iridescence, so overall it is not as conspicuous. But it is definitely visible.”

“But why hasn’t anyone seen it before?”

“Because no one was looking.”

“How is that possible? In the whole of human history, think of how many of these bubbles have been floating in the air. And no one saw them?”

“Can you see the moon during the day?” Ding Yi asked.

“Of course not,” someone said reflexively.

Ding Yi pulled back the curtain on a crystal clear sky. There in the azure was a crescent moon, snow-white and stunning against the sky, looking conspicuously spherical.

“I’ve never noticed it before!” the speaker exclaimed.

“Someone did a survey showing that ninety percent of people have never noticed it, but it has often appeared during daytime throughout human history. Do you really expect people to notice a small, indistinct bubble found only once in several cubic kilometers, or maybe even an order of magnitude less than that?”

“That is a little hard to believe.”

“So let’s prove it. Let’s excite a few more thunderballs, and we’ll see.”

Empty Bubbles

That afternoon, the aircraft that had been grounded for several days took flight once again. They ignited the arc at three thousand meters and excited ball lightning three times. Seven people, including Lin Yun and me, were in the helicopters watching the thunderballs through binoculars until they vanished, but none of us saw the unexcited form.

“Your eyesight isn’t good enough,” Ding Yi said, after learning the results.

“Captain Liu and I didn’t see anything either,” said Captain Zheng, one of the helicopter pilots.

“Then you need better eyesight.”

“What? We’ve got perfect vision. You can’t find anyone with better eyesight!” Captain Liu, the other helicopter pilot, said.

“Then excite a few more and look more carefully,” Ding Yi said, unconvinced.

“Professor Ding, exciting thunderballs is very dangerous. We’ve got to be cautious,” Colonel Xu said.

“I think we should do as Professor Ding says and try once more. Sometimes risks have to be taken,” Lin Yun said.

In the less than two days that Ding Yi had been at the base, Lin Yun’s attitude toward him had experienced a conspicuous transformation, from initial suspicion to respect, a respect that I had not noticed her showing toward any other individual. After the meeting, I mentioned this to her.

She said, “Ding Yi has lots of ideas. He’s contemplating ball lightning on a level far beyond our reach.”

“So far I haven’t seen any impressive ideas from him.”

“It’s not something I’ve seen. It’s a feeling I have.”

“But his abstruse enigmas are supposed to solve our problems? And his practically pathological stubbornness? I dislike it.”

“Ball lightning itself is an abstruse enigma.”

And so the next morning another three hours of exciting flight were undertaken. Two thunderballs were excited, but the results were the same as the previous day’s. Once they disappeared, there was nothing to be seen.

“I still think you need better eyesight. Could we bring in a few more senior aviators, the kind that fly aircraft with wings?” Ding Yi said.

His question angered the helicopter pilots. Captain Zheng barked, “They’re called fighter pilots. And you listen here, the air force and army aviation each have their strengths. One’s not higher or lower than the other. And as far as eyesight goes, our requirements are the same as theirs!”

Ding Yi chuckled. “I’m not interested in military issues. Even so, it’s got to be because of the distance from the target. No one would be able to see a thunderball at that distance.”

“I’m certain that no one could see it from even closer!”

“That is a possibility. It’s a transparent bubble, after all. For a target like that, conditions are quite poor for airborne observations. What we need to do is take it back and observe it on the table.”

Once again, we looked at each other uncertainly. It was a common expression for us when Ding Yi was around.

“That’s right. I’ve got a plan. We can capture an unexcited ball lightning and store it.”

“Is that possible? We can’t even see them!”

“Listen to me. While you’ve been flying, I’ve been reading the background on these,” Ding Yi said, pointing at the two superconducting batteries next to him.

“What’s that got to do with ball lightning?”

“They can store unexcited ball lightning.”

“How?”

“Simple. Contact the thunderball with a superconducting lead, no thicker than half a centimeter, drawn from the battery’s anode, and it will be conducted into the battery and stored like current. It can be released from the cathode in a similar fashion.”

“Ridiculous!” I exclaimed. Ding Yi’s tricks had become intolerable, and I now regretted inviting him.

“It won’t be easy to do,” Lin Yun said, entirely serious. “We can’t see the bubbles, so how are we supposed to contact them?”

“Major, you’re a smart person. Maybe you should think about it a bit?” Ding Yi said with a sly grin.

“Maybe like this? We can see ball lightning in its excited state, so if we extend the lead to that position at the moment it vanishes, we’ll contact the bubble.”

“You’ve got to be quick, though, or the bubble will float away,” Ding Yi said, nodding. The sly smile remained on his face.

It took us a moment to realize what Lin Yun meant. “That’s risking death!” someone shouted.

“Don’t listen to his crap, Major,” Captain Liu said, pointing at Ding Yi.

“Captain, Professor Ding is a world-famous physicist and a CAS fellow. He deserves respect,” Colonel Xu said sternly.

Ding Yi laughed and waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. I’m used to it.”

“Oh, I’ve got an idea! Dr. Chen, I’ve got to take you someplace right away,” Lin Yun said, leading me off.

Lin Yun said she wanted to take a look at something called a “feeler defense system,” and that the strangely named system would solve our safety problem. We drove four or five hours in the direction of Zhangjiakou and arrived at a dusty mountain valley crisscrossed by tracks in the ground. She told me this was the proving ground for the Main Battle Tank 2005.

A major wearing a tank soldier’s uniform ran over and told Lin Yun that the person in charge of the feeler defense system research group was temporarily indisposed, and asked us to wait.

“Please, have some water!”

He wasn’t carrying any. The water came by tank, two glasses held on a tray on the gun muzzle. As the huge vehicle crept slowly toward us, its barrel remained level regardless of how the tank’s body rose and fell, as if a powerful magnet was pulling it by the muzzle. Not a drop of water spilled out of the glasses. The armored corps officers nearby laughed merrily at our surprise.

The MBT 2005 was quite different from the tanks I had seen in the past: flat, angular, with practically no curves. The turret and body were stacked flat oblongs that gave an impression of indestructibility.

In the distance, a tank was firing as it moved. The blasts of its shells were painfully loud, and though I wanted to cover my ears, when I saw Lin Yun and the officers joking beside me, as if the loud noise didn’t even exist, I was too embarrassed to do so.

Half an hour later, we met the project director for the feeler defense system. He first took us to watch a demonstration of the system. We arrived at a small multi-barrel rocket launcher, where two soldiers were loading a rocket into the uppermost slot.

The project director said, “Anti-tank missiles cost too much to use for a demonstration, so we’ll use this instead. Properly pretested, it’s sure to hit the target.” He pointed to the rocket’s target, an MBT 2005 off in the distance.

A soldier pressed the launch button. Out roared the rocket, leaving a cloud of dust and smoke behind us. It trailed a flat arc of white tail smoke behind it in the air as it headed straight for the target. But just as the rocket was around ten meters above the tank, it appeared to have suddenly hit something, and its heading changed at once, veering off to smack headlong into the dirt less than twenty meters away from the tank. Since it wasn’t loaded with a warhead, it merely kicked up a small cloud of dust.

I found my surprise hard to express in words, but asked, “Is there some sort of protection field around the tank?”

Everyone burst out laughing. The project director said through his laughter, “Nothing so outlandish. You’re talking about something that’s only in science fiction stories. The principles of this system couldn’t be any more basic.”

I didn’t understand what he meant by “basic,” so Lin Yun explained: “The principle can be traced back to the time of cold weapons. Cavalry wielded lances that could block the enemy’s arrows, if struck correctly.”

Seeing that I still didn’t get it, the project director said, “We’re too far away, and it happened too fast, so naturally you didn’t see it clearly.” He led me to a nearby display and said, “Take a look at the high-speed camera.”

On the screen, the moment before the rocket struck, a thin pole shot like lightning from the top of the tank, like a long fishing pole. It precisely tapped the rocket’s nose and diverted its path.

The director said, “In combat, it’s sometimes possible to divert an incoming object, but that may cause it to detonate early. For low-speed anti-tank missiles and air-dropped bombs, the efficiency of this defensive system is excellent.”

“What an idea!” I said wholeheartedly.

“Hey, this wasn’t our idea. The concept of the feeler system was proposed by NATO weapons experts at the end of the 1980s, and the French first tested it successfully on their next-generation Leclerc tank. We’re only following in their footsteps.”

Lin Yun said, “Even though the principle of the system is simple, its target sensing and positioning system is highly advanced. Not only can the feeler hit the target in the shortest possible time, but it can select the optimum angle. It’s basically an intimate scale theater missile defense.”

Now I clearly understood Lin Yun’s intent. It was like the thing had been custom-made for us.

The project director said, “Major Lin gave us the details of your situation yesterday, and our superiors instructed us to cooperate closely with you. To tell you the truth, in the past I wouldn’t have given your research a second thought, but things are different now. When I was first exposed to the idea of the feeler system, I thought it was ridiculous, nothing more. I never imagined the success we’ve had. On the battlefield of today, only the stubborn will survive.”

Lin Yun said, “The biggest problem now is the length of the feeler. How long can you make it? It’s very dangerous for the helicopter to get too close to the thunderball.”

“The longest the feeler can be at present is ten meters. Any longer and it won’t be strong enough. But, for your purposes, there’s no strength requirement for contact, and your speed requirements might be one to two orders of magnitude less than ours. In my crude estimation, the feeler could be as long as twenty-five meters. But there’s one more thing: it can carry the superconducting lead you need, but apart from that you can’t affix anything to the tip.”

Lin Yun nodded. “That’s basically enough.”

On the way back, I asked her, “Do you really intend to do it? Isn’t that betting too much on Ding Yi?”

“We’ve got to give it a try. I think Ding Yi really is the person to make a breakthrough in ball lightning research. We’ve said before that this mystery won’t yield to conventional thinking. Now we’ve got some unconventional thinking, but you won’t accept it.”

“The problem now is how to convince Colonel Xu and the aviators.”

Lin Yun sighed softly. “If only I knew how to fly a helicopter.”

Back at the base, Lin Yun described her plan in a hastily convened meeting.

“You want to poke a thunderball with a long pole? Are you insane, Major?” Captain Zheng said loudly.

“Once again, the pole isn’t going to touch a thunderball in an excited state. It will touch the bubble that may possibly exist in that position the instant the thunderball goes out.”

“Professor Ding said that the superconducting lead carried on the pole must reach that location within half a second of the thunderball going out, otherwise the bubble will blow away. Is that level of precision possible? What if it’s half a second too early?”

“The reaction time of the feeler defense system is faster than our requirements by two orders of magnitude, although that’s for the original system’s feeler, which moves when the target appears at a specified location. In our improved system, the feeler moves when the target disappears. And our previous observations of EM radiation and visible light have given us data for a precise determination of the ball lightning’s disappearance.”

“Even if you can do all that, the helicopter still needs to be twenty-five meters from the thunderball. That’s half the distance of the last time there was an accident. You’ve got to be aware of the danger involved.”

“I am aware, Captain. But it’s a risk we must take.”

“I don’t agree with the plan,” Colonel Xu said, with a tone of finality.

“Colonel, even if you agreed, we wouldn’t fly this mission,” Captain Liu said. “The two crews are only on loan to the base. Ultimate command authority rests with the army group. We have the power to refuse any command that endangers the safety of the group. Our division leaders reemphasized this point after the last accident.”

Lin Yun appeared unfazed. “Captain Liu, if you received a command from the army group ordering you to undertake this mission, would you carry it out?”

“That would change things. Of course we’d carry it out.”

“Could I get a guarantee of that?” she said, not moving her eyes from Captain Liu. Her expression frightened me.

“I guarantee it in my capacity as officer in charge of the helicopter group. But, Major, the army group won’t give that order.”

Lin Yun said nothing. She picked up a phone and dialed. “Hello, I’d like to speak with Senior Colonel Zeng Yuanping…. This is Base B436. Yes. That’s me. Yes. Thank you!” She passed the phone to Captain Liu. “Captain, the Eighty-Second Aviation Brigade Commander of the Thirty-Eighth Group Army is on the line.”

Captain Liu took up the phone. “Speaking…. Yes, Commander. I understand…. Yes. Certainly!” He put the phone down without looking at Lin Yun. Then he turned to Colonel Xu. “Colonel, we have received orders to fly this mission. The time and number of flights are to be determined by the base.”

“No, Captain Liu. Please inform your superior officer that until reliable safety measures are found, the base is halting all observation flights,” Colonel Xu said emphatically.

Phone in hand, the captain hesitated, glancing at Lin Yun. Everyone was looking at her.

Lin Yun bit her lip and remained silent for several seconds, then reached for the captain’s phone, hung up, and dialed another number. “Hello, sir? This is Base B436. Yes, it’s me. About the report I made yesterday…. I’d like to know whether the higher-ups have…. Good.” She passed the phone to Colonel Xu. “Deputy director of the GAD.”

Colonel Xu took the phone and listened grimly. He finally uttered two words—“Yes, sir”—and put the phone down. Then he turned to us and said gravely, “The higher-ups have ordered us to proceed with the experiments to capture unexcited ball lightning according to Major Lin Yun’s plan. In addition, they have ordered that all other work at the base be suspended so that our energy can be focused on this experiment, and they expect everyone to dedicate themselves to the work in their respective capacities. Would the technical directors for the projects please stay behind after the meeting?”

On the way back from the tank proving ground, Lin Yun had gone to the city on her own and stayed a full day before returning to the base. Now I knew why she had gone there.

No one spoke after that. They left in silence, and the keen edge of that silence was clearly directed at Lin Yun.

“Captains,” she called softly after the departing aviators. “Please understand that, in wartime, this would be little different from an ordinary combat mission.”

“Do you think we’re afraid of death?” Captain Liu said, jabbing a finger into his chest. “We just don’t want to die worthlessly, for some experiment that’s bound to fail. For a bizarre experiment cooked up by a bizarre individual on the basis of a bizarre theory.”

Captain Zheng said, “I think even Professor Ding isn’t certain that this will really manage to capture a thunderball.”

Ding Yi, who had not said anything during the meeting, was unperturbed by all that had happened. He merely nodded and said, “If everything is carried out precisely as Major Lin has instructed, then I am certain.”

The two aviators left, leaving Colonel Xu, Lin Yun, Ding Yi, and me behind. After a lengthy silence, Colonel Xu said severely, “Lin Yun, this time you’ve gone too far. Think carefully about what you’ve done ever since coming to this base: You’ve acted willfully and arbitrarily, stopping at nothing to get what you want. You have a habit of interfering in everything, even when it’s beyond the scope of your duties, and you frequently go around the base’s leadership to act on your own. This time, by exploiting your privilege through nonstandard channels, you have gone over the heads of several levels of command and delivered your subjective opinion directly to the senior leadership, giving them false information. This is dangerous! Yes, others at the base have previously tolerated you, but they were simply doing their jobs. The army does not exist in a vacuum. We are aware of the part your background plays in this project, and value your connections for communicating conditions up the hierarchy. But you have mistaken this tolerance for indulgence, and are becoming increasingly unreasonable…. When this test is finished, I will write an objective report for my superiors explaining your actions. If you have any self-awareness at all, you will leave the base and this project, since it’s difficult for any of us to work with you.”

Lin Yun bowed her head and placed her hands between her knees. The calm resolve of moments ago was gone, and, like a little girl caught misbehaving, she said softly, “If the experiment fails, I will accept responsibility.”

“And if it succeeds, then your actions were correct?” the colonel said.

“I don’t think anything’s wrong,” Ding Yi said. “Extraordinary research must be advanced through extraordinary measures. Otherwise, in this rigid society, science wouldn’t budge an inch.” He sighed. “If I’d been more alert back then, my accelerator project wouldn’t have had its funding pulled.”

Lin Yun shot him a grateful glance.

Ding Yi stood up and began pacing to and fro, then his face broke out into that sly grin of his. “As for me, I won’t accept any responsibility. We theorists have the task of proposing a hypothesis, and if it doesn’t obtain experimental proof, then our responsibility is simply to propose another one.”

“But lives are at stake in the proof of this hypothesis,” I said.

“Compared to our goals, it’s worth it.”

“That’s easy to say when you’re not going to be in those helicopters.”

“What?” Ding Yi instantly turned furious. “You mean I’m to be put into the helicopter for the sake of demonstrating some sort of spirit? Not a chance! My life belongs to another master, physics. You listen to me: I’m not going on any helicopter!”

“No one’s making you go, Professor Ding,” Colonel Xu said, shaking his head.

With the meeting finished, I walked over to an empty space on the test ground, pulled out my phone, and dialed a number. It only rang once before I heard General Lin’s deep voice say, “Is that Dr. Chen?”

I was caught a little off guard, but I recounted the meeting to him, and he replied at once.

“We’re already familiar with the situation you described. But this is an unusual time and we urgently require the success of this project, so some risks have to be taken. Of course, Lin Yun’s approach is unfortunate. Very bad, you might even say. But that’s her nature. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. We did not put enough thought into this matter previously. Tomorrow, we’ll have GAD send a special commissioner to the base to take charge of communication between the project’s front lines and the higher-ups. But thank you for the news, Dr. Chen.”

“General, what I’d really like to say is that Professor Ding’s theory is really out there. It’s incredibly hard to believe.”

“Doctor, what area of modern physics isn’t out there, or incredibly hard to believe?”

“But…”

“We’ve had other academics and experts look at Professor Ding’s theories and calculations, which Lin Yun brought over, and they’ve given careful thought to her experimental design. In addition, what you may not know is that this isn’t the first time that Ding Yi has taken part in a national defense project. We are confident in his abilities, no matter how strange his theories. This is a risk worth taking.”

Over the next two weeks, I came to realize the difference between soldiers and civilians. This experiment, for example, was incredibly absurd from a common sense angle. The majority of the project team’s members were staunchly opposed to it, and stood in sharp opposition to the minority led by Lin Yun. In a civilian research body, it would be impossible to make smooth progress. Every opponent would slack off, or attempt to secretly undermine the project through any possible means. But it was different here. Everyone put their heart into it. Lin Yun’s orders were resolutely carried out, often by individuals who outranked her. Of course, the role her personal charm played couldn’t be discounted. Quite a few of the highly educated young officers on the project would have followed her blindly, right or wrong.

With us on the tests were a few engineers who had been transferred over from the feeler defense system. They had upgraded the hardware, lengthened the pole one and a half times, and installed it on the helicopter. In addition to altering the target identification module, the engineers modified the system’s control software to reverse the trigger mechanism so that it would whip out the pole the instant the thunderball disappeared.

On the day of the formal test, with everyone on base gathered at the launch site, I was reminded of the first air discharge test more than a month ago. Like on that occasion, it was a clear day with no wind. Now, the only people who seemed truly relaxed were the two aviator captains who were about to risk their lives. As usual, they were chatting up the nurses beside the ambulance.

Lin Yun, wearing a combat uniform as she had done on every previous flight, headed toward the helicopter carrying the feeler system. But Captain Liu stopped her. “Major, the feeler system works automatically. Only a pilot is needed on board.”

She pushed aside his arm without saying a word and climbed into the rear seat. The captain stared at her for a few seconds, then climbed into the cabin and silently helped her strap on the parachute. His burnt-off fingernails had still not grown back.

Ding Yi began to make a fuss, afraid that someone would drag him onto a helicopter. He again declared, without a thought for the looks of withering disdain he received from those around him, that his life belonged to physics. He added that he had done additional calculations to further prove the correctness of his theory. A thunderball was certain to be captured! Now the image of the man before us was no more than an itinerant con artist. Apart from him and Lin Yun, no one held out any hope of success for the experiment. They just prayed that those aboard the two helicopters would escape with their lives.

The helicopters took off with a roar. When the arc crackled to life, tension seized the hearts of everyone on the ground. The plan was that after the thunderball was excited, the arc would go out at once and the feeler system–equipped helicopter would close to a distance of twenty-five meters from the target. When the thunderball extinguished, the pole would whip out, carrying a superconducting lead connected directly to a drained superconducting battery on board the helicopter, into contact with the spot where Ding Yi believed the bubble to be.

The helicopters slowly flew farther out, and the arc turned into a sparkle against the blue sky. What happened next we only heard about later on.

Around twenty-four minutes into the flight, ball lightning was excited. The arc went out, and the feeler-equipped helicopter approached the thunderball to a distance of roughly twenty-five meters, then aligned the feeler. This was the first time a helicopter had been so close to the thunderball since the first one was excited. Tracking flight was difficult, because the thunderball was unaffected by air movement and no one knew what determined the path of its drift, which was volatile and random-seeming. Most dangerously, it might suddenly approach the helicopter. From recordings after the incident we discovered that the helicopter had drawn as close as sixteen meters to the thunderball. It was an ordinary thunderball that glowed orange yellow, and was inconspicuous in the daylight. It remained excited for one minute and thirty-five seconds before it disappeared, at a point 22.5 meters from the helicopter, with an explosion that Lin Yun and Captain Liu could hear clearly from inside. The feeler system triggered, and the twenty-odd-meter pole brought the tip of the superconducting lead to the precise point of disappearance. The recording showed that the time from the thunderball’s disappearance to the arrival of the lead was just 0.4 seconds.

That was immediately followed by a loud noise next to Lin Yun, as if something on the aircraft had exploded. The cabin quickly filled with scalding steam. But the helicopter maintained a normal flight attitude all the way back.

The helicopter landed amid cheers. Like Colonel Xu had said, in this experiment, a safe return was a victory.

Upon inspection, it was a bottle of spring water left under the seat by one of the ground crew that had exploded. The thunderball had released its energy into the water, turning it instantly to steam. Fortunately, since it was under the seat and ruptured without fragmenting, the only injury was a light burn to Lin Yun’s right calf where the steam had penetrated her combat uniform.

“We’re lucky the helicopter is oil-cooled. If it had a water tank like in a car, it would have turned into a bomb,” Captain Liu said with a shudder.

“You’re overlooking another, even bigger way you were lucky,” Ding Yi said, coming over with a mysterious smile, as if none of this had anything to do with him. “You’re forgetting that there was water on the helicopter apart from that bottle.”

“Where?” Lin Yun asked, but then answered immediately, “My God! Inside of us!”

“Yes. Your blood, too.”

We all took a chilly breath. The prospect of all the blood in their bodies turning to steam in the blink of an eye was too much to imagine.

“That means that when ball lightning selects a target to release its energy, the target’s boundary conditions are very important,” Ding Yi said thoughtfully.

Someone said, “Professor Ding, you ought to be thinking about thunderballs that have already released their energy. What were they called? Bubbles? There ought to be one in the battery.”

Ding Yi nodded. “The capture process was carried out with high precision. It ought to be in there.”

We all grew excited, and began to take the superconducting battery off the helicopter. There was more than a bit of irony in this excitement, since most people had already guessed what the outcome would be. The proceedings were a relaxing comedy to celebrate the helicopters’ safe return.

“Professor, when can you bring out the bubble and give us all a look?” someone asked after the heavy battery was finally out. We all expected that Ding Yi would secrete the battery in the lab so that as few people as possible would witness his failure, but his answer caught us by surprise: “Right away.”

Cheers sounded in the crowd, like we were a group of deviant onlookers awaiting a beheading.

Colonel Xu took a step up the ladder of one of the helicopters, and said loudly, “Listen up. Extracting the bubble from the battery requires care and full preparation. The battery will now be taken to Lab 3 and we will inform you of the results presently.”

“Colonel, everyone’s put in so much effort, particularly Captain Liu and Major Lin, who risked their lives. I think they have the right to be compensated,” Ding Yi said, to another chorus of cheers.

“Professor Ding, this is a significant experimental project, not a children’s game. I order the battery to be returned to the lab immediately,” Colonel Xu said firmly. I sensed his kindness, and knew he was doing his best to preserve Ding Yi’s dignity.

“Colonel, don’t forget that the bubble extraction portion of the experiment should be my sole responsibility. I have the right to decide what steps to take for this experiment and when to take them!” Ding Yi said to Colonel Xu.

“Professor, I suggest you calm down,” the colonel said to him quietly.

“And what’s Major Lin’s opinion?” Ding Yi asked the silent Lin Yun.

With a toss of her hair, she said decisively, “Do it now. Whatever it is, it’s better that we face it sooner rather than later.”

“Precisely.” Ding Yi waved his hand. “Next, I’d ask the engineers from the superconductivity department to come forward.”

The three engineers in charge of operating the superconducting battery pushed forward, and Ding Yi said to them, “I’m sure you’re quite clear on the extraction procedure we discussed yesterday. Have you brought the magnetic retaining field assembly?” Receiving an affirmative answer, he said, “Then let’s begin.”

The cylindrical battery was situated on a workbench. One engineer strung a superconducting lead, with a switch attached, to the cathode. Ding Yi pointed at it. “When that switch is pressed, the lead will be connected to the battery, and the bubble within it will be released.”

At the other end of the lead, two engineers set up a device composed of several spools of wire set at equal distances. Ding Yi said to the crowd, “When the bubble is released, no vessel will be able to contain it. It can pass through all matter and move of its own accord. But the theory predicts that the bubble will bear a negative charge, so it can be constrained by a magnetic field. This device produces a containment field to hold the bubble in place for you to observe. Good. Now turn on the field.”

An engineer flipped a switch and a small red light on the field device came on.

Ding Yi took out a square object from behind him. “I brought this along so you’ll be better able to see the bubble.” To our great surprise, it was a Go board.

“Next, let’s welcome this historic moment.” Ding Yi went over to the superconducting battery and placed a finger on the red switch. With everyone’s attention focused on him, he pressed it.

Nothing happened.

Ding Yi’s expression remained dead calm as he pointed at the space within the field generator and declared solemnly, “This is ball lightning in an unexcited state.”

There was nothing there.

For a moment there was silence, other than the faint hum of the field generator. Time passed sluggishly like sticky paste, and I ached for it to flow faster.

A sudden burst behind us made us jump, and we turned around to see Captain Liu doubled over. He’d taken a drink of water, but couldn’t hold back his laughter, and had sprayed it out.

Through his laughter he said, “Look at Professor Ding! He’s basically that tailor from ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’!”

It was an apt analogy, and we burst out laughing at the humor and sheer audacity of the physicist.

“Simmer down and listen up!” Colonel Xu said, waving his hand to suppress the laughter. “We ought to have a proper understanding and attitude toward the entire experiment. We knew that it would fail, but we arrived at the common understanding that a safe return of the experimental personnel would be a victory. Now that outcome has been satisfied.”

“But someone’s got to be responsible for the outcome!” someone shouted. “More than a million yuan has been put into it, and a helicopter and two lives were gambled on it. Is this farce all that we get in return?” The remark drew immediate rejoinders from the crowd.

Then Ding Yi raised up the Go board to a level higher than the generated magnetic field. His movement caught people’s attention, and the hooting quickly died down. When there was complete calm, Ding Yi eased the board downward until the bottom made contact with the generator.

People drew closer to look at the board, and what they saw turned them as still as statues.

Some of the squares on the board were deformed. There was a clear curve to their edges, as if the board had been placed behind an almost perfectly transparent crystal ball.

Ding Yi removed the board, and everyone bent down to peer straight on at the space. Even without the aid of the board, the bubble was visible, a faint circular outline vaguely described in the air, like a soap bubble lacking all markings.

Captain Liu was the first of the frozen crowd to move. He extended a trembling, fingernail-less hand to touch the bubble, but pulled it back in the end without making contact.

“Don’t worry,” Ding Yi said. “Even if you stuck your head in, it wouldn’t matter.”

And so the captain really did stick his head into the bubble. This was the first time that a human had looked at the outside world from within ball lightning, but Captain Liu saw nothing unusual. What he saw was a crowd cheering once again—only this time, their cheers were genuine.

Macro-Electrons

The base was close to the Kangxi Grasslands northwest of the city. To celebrate the experiment’s success, we took a trip to have roast whole mutton. Dinner was outdoors on the edge of that fairly small grassland.

Colonel Xu gave a small speech: “In olden days, there must have been a day when someone had a stroke of inspiration and understood that they were surrounded by air. Later, people learned that they were constrained by gravity, and that their surroundings were an ocean of electromagnetic waves, and that cosmic radiation passes through our bodies at all times…. Now we know something else: that bubbles are there around us, floating nearby in space that appears empty. Now, let me speak for us all, and offer Professor Ding and Major Lin my well-deserved admiration.”

Again, everyone cheered.

Ding Yi went over to Lin Yun, raised up a large saucer (he was a boozer as well as a smoker), and said, “Major, I used to have a prejudice against soldiers. I thought you were the epitome of mechanical thinking. But you have changed my ideas.”

Lin Yun looked at him wordlessly. I had never seen that expression in her eyes before toward anyone—not even, I’m willing to believe, Jiang Xingchen.

And then I realized that in the midst of all of the uniforms, Ding Yi stood out. In the hot summer wind on the grassland, he seemed formed of three flags: one, his wind-tossed long hair, and the two others his large sleeveless T-shirt and shorts that whipped constantly about his thin stalk of a body, like flags hung on a flagpole. Next to him, Lin Yun cut a lovely figure in the evening light.

Colonel Xu said, “Now you all must be brimming with anticipation for Professor Ding to tell us just what ball lightning is.”

Ding Yi nodded. “I know that lots of people have poured immense effort into unlocking the secret of nature, including the likes of Dr. Chen and Major Lin. They devoted their life’s energies to taking the EM and fluid equations and twisting them to mind-shattering degrees, until they nearly broke. Then they put in one patch after another to plug the holes, adding extra struts to support the teetering edifice, ultimately coming up with something far too huge and complicated, and incomparably ugly…. Dr. Chen, do you know where you failed? It wasn’t that you weren’t complex enough. It was that you didn’t think simply.”

It was the same thing I’d heard from Lin Yun’s father. Two uncommon men in two different fields had come up with the same profound observation.

“How simple could it be?” I asked, mystified.

Ding Yi disregarded my question and went on: “Next, I will tell you what ball lightning is.”

At this moment, the few scattered stars that had begun to appear in the heavens seemed to stop their twinkling, as if listening for God’s last judgment.

“It is nothing more than an electron.”

We looked at each other, each of us trying to wrap our minds around this. Eventually we focused our attention back on Ding Yi. His answer was so weird that we lacked the ability to take it any further.

“An electron the size of a soccer ball,” he added.

“An electron the… What makes it like that?” someone stammered.

“What do you think an electron ought to be like? An opaque, dense little ball? Yes, that’s the picture of an electron, proton, or neutron in most people’s minds. First I’ll tell you about the picture of the universe painted by modern physics: the geometry of the universe is not physical.”

“Can you be a little less abstract?”

“What if I put it this way: in the universe, apart from empty space, there is nothing.”

Again we lapsed into silence and contemplated what our minds couldn’t grasp. Captain Liu was the first to speak. He waved half a lamb leg in the air and said, “What do you mean, nothing? It’s all empty space? This roast whole mutton is totally tangible. Are you telling me that I’ve just eaten emptiness?”

“Yes. All of what you’ve eaten is empty space, as are you, since you and the mutton are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, particles that, on a microscopic level, are curved space.” He cleared aside a few plates and drew on the tablecloth with a finger. “Suppose that space is this cloth. Atomic particles are the minute wrinkles in it.”

“That’s something we can understand a bit better,” Captain Liu said thoughtfully.

“It’s still quite different from our conventional picture of the world,” Lin Yun said.

“But it’s the picture that’s closest to reality,” Ding Yi said.

“So you mean that electrons are like bubbles?”

“Closed curved space,” Ding Yi agreed, nodding gravely.

“But an electron… how is it so big?”

“In the briefest period after the Big Bang, all of space was flat. Later, as energy levels subsided, wrinkles appeared in space, which gave birth to all of the fundamental particles. What’s been so mystifying for us is why the wrinkles should only appear at the microscopic level. Are there really no macroscopic wrinkles? Or, in other words, are there no macroscopic fundamental particles? Now we know there are.”

My first thought at this point was that I could breathe at last. My mind had been asphyxiating for more than a decade, and all that time it felt like I’d been immersed in water that was murky at every turn. Now I had burst to the surface, and I took my first breath of air, and saw the vast sky. A blind man probably has the same feeling on regaining his sight.

“We’re able to see the bubbles because the curved space bends the light that passes through, forming visible edges,” Ding Yi went on.

“But what makes you believe they’re electrons, and not protons or neutrons?” Colonel Xu asked.

“Good question. But the answer is quite simple: throughout the process of being excited by lightning, turning to ball lightning, and then returning to bubbles, the bubbles are actually electrons being excited from a low potential to high potential state, and then returning back to a low potential state. Of those three particles, only electrons can be excited in this way.”

“And because it’s an electron, it can be conducted through superconducting leads, and run ceaselessly through a superconducting battery, like a loop current,” Lin Yun said, as understanding dawned.

“What’s weird, though, is that its diameter is about the same as that battery.”

“With macro-electrons, the wave form is dominant in the wave-particle duality, so the significance of its size is completely different from what we generally expect. They also have some pretty unbelievable characteristics, which we’ll gradually observe, and which I believe will change everyone’s view of the world. But right now, we need to choose a name for these large electrons. They’re electrons on a macroscopic scale, so let’s call them macro-electrons.”

“Then do macro-protons and macro-neutrons also exist?”

“They ought to. But since they can’t be excited, we’ll have a hard time finding them.”

“Professor Ding, your dream has become reality,” Lin Yun said, but apart from Ding Yi and me, no one really understood the meaning of her words.

“Yes, yes. There really are watermelon-sized fundamental particles lying on the table of physics. Our next step must be to study their internal structure—a structure formed from curved space. It will be difficult. But innumerable times easier, I believe, than studying the structure of microscopic particles.”

“Then, are there macro-atoms too? The three macro-particles ought to be able to combine into atoms!”

“Yes, there ought to be macro-atoms.”

“The bubble—I mean, the macro-electron—that we caught: is it a free electron, or does it belong to a macro-atom? And if so, where’s its nucleus?”

Ding Yi chuckled. “You’ve got me there. But there’s an immense amount of space in an atom. If a macro-atom is the size of a theater hall, the nucleus would be about the size of a walnut. So if this macro-electron does belong to a macro-atom, then the nucleus would be quite far from here.”

“My God. One more question: If there are macro-atoms, then is there macro-matter, and a macro-world?”

“Now we’re into grand questions of philosophy,” Ding Yi said to the questioner with a smile.

“So is there or isn’t there a macro-world?” the questioner followed. We were like a group of children in the thrall of a story.

“I believe there’s a macro-world. Or a macro-universe. But what it’s like is an unknown unknown. Maybe it’s completely different from our own world. Maybe it corresponds exactly, like the posited matter and antimatter universes, and there’s a macro-Earth with a macro-you and -me. In that case, my brain in the macro-world would be large enough to contain our universe’s entire solar system…. It’s a parallel universe, in a way.”

Night had fallen, and we looked up at the glittering summer sky, each of us straining our eyes into the vast star field, hoping to find, somewhere in the cosmic downy empty depths of the Milky Way, the enormous outlines of Ding Yi’s brain. That macro-atom-made ultra-head was, in my mind, crystal clear. We were amazed that our thoughts had turned so profound all of a sudden.

After the dinner ended, we strolled tipsily on the grassland. I saw Ding Yi and Lin Yun close together, talking intimately. Ding Yi’s three flags looked dashing in the night breeze, and I knew that this thin beanstalk of a guy would easily defeat the full-on masculine appeal of the carrier captain. This was the power of the mind. For whatever reason, my heart was filled with an inexpressible bitterness.

The stars in the heavens were as brilliant as they were on Mount Tai. In the night of the grassland, countless ghostly macro-electrons were drifting by.

Weapons

From the first successful capture of a bubble, research blazed a new trail, and forward progress smoothed out as results came in one after another. It was a little like riding a roller coaster. Once I proposed the excitement hypothesis for ball lightning, and Ding Yi used theory to describe the existence of macro-electrons, Lin Yun’s technical genius began to play a critical role.

The next step in the research was naturally to collect macro-electrons. Ding Yi did not need many for his theoretical research, but the base required an enormous number for weapons research. This initially seemed like a difficult task, since the conventional electric arc collection method was highly dangerous and could hardly be used again.

People dreamed up all kinds of solutions, but the one that received the most support was remote aircraft. Although this would solve the safety problem, it would be costly and highly inefficient to use it to collect the huge number of macro-electrons needed.

Instead, Lin Yun considered detecting unexcited macro-electrons directly, believing that if they were visible to the naked eye up close, they ought to be detectable by highly sensitive optics from farther away. She designed an atmospheric optical detection system that could detect transparent objects that refracted light over a vast range of space. The system used two lasers perpendicular to each other to scan the atmosphere, while on the ground there was a highly sensitive image capture and recognition system that turned the refractions of the lasers in the atmosphere into a 3-D image, similar to how a CT scanner works.

For a while, the base was crawling with non-uniformed personnel: software engineers, optics specialists, pattern-recognition experts, and even a telescope maker.

When the system was complete, rather than macro-electrons, the screen displayed atmospheric turbulence and gas streams, movement that was ordinarily invisible, but was clear as day to the sensitive system. The atmosphere typically appeared as calm as still water, when in actuality it was astonishingly agitated, like water sloshing in a gigantic washing machine. I realized that the system would be quite useful in meteorology, but since our focus was on detecting macro-electrons, I didn’t put much thought in that direction. The macro-electrons showed up amid the complicated airflow disturbances, but since they had a round shape, the pattern-recognition software could easily pick them out of the chaos. And so a large number of macro-electrons were located in the air.

Collection was far easier once we began locating them this way, since, unexcited, they posed no danger. The feeler was no longer necessary, and was replaced by a net formed out of superconducting wires, and we switched to capturing macro-electrons by blimp to save money. Sometimes multiple macro-electrons were collected at once, like trawling for fish in the sky.

Now it was far easier to capture ball lightning and turn it into a human collectible. Looking back on humanity’s arduous process of studying it, the people like Zhang Bin who spent a lifetime on it without anything to show for it, and the grand tragedy of Base 3141 in the Siberian forest, we felt the heartache of knowing that we had taken such a long and winding road that had ended up being an enormous detour.

Colonel Xu said, “That’s what scientific research is. Every step you’ve taken, no matter how absurd, is a necessary one.”

He said this while sending off the helicopter group. After we began using blimps to capture the macro-electrons, the base no longer had any use for helicopters. We bade farewell to the two aviators who had been with us through hardship and danger. Those endless nights of towing the blinding arc would become one of our lives’ most treasured memories and, we believed, part of scientific history.

Before leaving, Captain Liu said to us, “Work hard! We’ll be waiting to install your thunderball machine gun!”

The aviators had come up with another new term, which we actually used in the field of ball lightning weapons.

The success of optical detection of unexcited macro-electrons kindled our hopes for more progress, but turned out only to demonstrate the shallowness of our physics knowledge. After the system’s first success, Lin Yun and I made a beeline for Ding Yi.

“Professor Ding, now we should be able to find the nuclei of macro-atoms!”

“What gives you that impression?”

“We haven’t been able to find them because macro-protons and macro-neutrons aren’t excitable like macro-electrons. But now we can locate bubbles directly by optical means.”

Ding Yi laughed and shook his head, as if forgiving two school pupils for their error. “The primary reason we can’t find macro-atom nuclei isn’t because they aren’t excitable, but because we have no idea what they’re like.”

“What? They’re not bubbles?”

“Who told you they were bubbles? The theory postulates that their shape is completely different from macro-electrons, as different as ice and fire.”

I had a hard time imagining that other forms of macro-particles could be floating around us. It lent an eerie feeling to the surrounding space.

Now we were able to excite ball lightning in the lab. The excitement apparatus started off with a bubble contained inside a superconducting battery. When it was released, it was accelerated in a magnetic field, and then passed through ten separate lightning generators. The total power of the lightning produced by these generators was far greater than that of the arc that excited airborne thunderballs. The amount of lightning to produce was determined by the needs of the experiment.

As for weapons production, what we now needed to know was how to make use of the high target selectivity of the macro-electron’s energy release, the most perplexing, terrifying, and devilish aspect of ball lightning.

Ding Yi said, “It concerns the wave-particle duality of macro-particles. I’ve established a theoretical energy-release model, and have designed an observation experiment that will show you something truly unbelievable. It’s a simple experiment: observe the thunderball’s energy release slowed down by a factor of 1.5 million.”

“1.5 million?”

“That’s right. It’s a crude estimate based on the smallest-volume macro-electron we currently have stored. That’s roughly the factor.”

“But that’s… 36 million frames per second! Where are we going to find recording equipment that’s that fast?” someone asked.

“That’s not my concern,” Ding Yi said, as he lit the pipe he hadn’t touched for some time in a leisurely fashion.

“I’m sure the equipment must exist!” Lin Yun said firmly. “We’ll find it.”

When Lin Yun and I entered the laboratory building of the State Defense Optics Institute, our attention was immediately captured by a large photograph in the lobby: a hand holding a gun whose massive barrel was aimed directly at the photographer; red flame light inside the barrel and tendrils of smoke just beginning to issue from it. The most eye-catching focal point of the photo was a ball suspended in front of the gun, coppery and smooth: the bullet that had just been fired.

“This is a high-speed photo taken during the Institute’s early days. It has a temporal resolution of roughly one ten-thousandth of a second. Using today’s standards, it’s just ordinary fast photography, not high-speed photography. You can find that standard of equipment at any specialty camera store,” a director at the Institute said.

“So who was the martyr who snapped the picture?” Lin Yun asked.

The director laughed. “A mirror. The photo was taken using a reflected light system.”

The Institute had convened a small meeting with several engineers. When Lin Yun put forward our request, that we needed ultra-high-speed camera equipment, several of them grimaced.

The director said, “Our ultra-high-speed equipment is still a ways away from international levels. It’s highly unstable in actual operation.”

“Give us an idea of the numbers you require, and we’ll see what we can do,” an engineer said.

Shakily, I told them our number: “We need to take around 36 million frames per second.”

I had imagined they would shake their heads, but to my surprise they burst out laughing. The director said, “After all of that, and what you’re looking for is just an ordinary high-speed camera! Your notion of ultra-high-speed photography is stuck in the fifties. We’re up to as much as four hundred million frames per second now. The top standards at the world level are around six hundred million.”

After we’d relaxed a bit, the director led us on a tour of the Institute. He pointed to a display and said, “What does this look like to you?”

We looked at it a while, and Lin Yun said, “It looks like a slowly blooming flower. But it’s strange—the petals are glowing.”

The director said, “That’s what makes high-speed photography the gentlest of photography. It can turn the most violent of processes gentle and light. What you see is an armor-piercing shell exploding as it strikes its target.” He pointed to a bright yellow stamen in the flower, and said, “See, this ultra-high temperature, ultra-high-speed jet is piercing the armor. This was taken at a rate of around six million frames per second.”

As we neared Lab 2, the director said, “What you’ll see next ought to satisfy your high-speed photography requirements. It shoots at fifty million frames per second.”

In this photo, we seemed to be looking at a still water surface. A small, invisible stone had landed on the surface, kicking up a bubble, which fractured, sending liquid particles in all directions as waves spread out in rings on the surface….

“This is a high-energy laser striking a metal surface.”

Lin Yun asked inquisitively, “Then what can you film with a hundred million frames per second ultra-high-speed camera?”

“Those images are classified, so I can’t show them to you. But I can tell you that the cameras often record the controlled nuclear fusion process in a tokamak accelerator.”

High-speed imaging of thunderball energy release progressed quickly. Macro-electrons were passed through all ten lightning stages and were excited to very high energy states, with energy levels far higher than any ball lightning ever excited in nature, allowing their energy release process to be somewhat more noticeable. The excited thunderballs entered the target area, which had targets of various shapes and compositions: wooden cubes, plastic cones, metal balls, cardboard boxes filled with shavings, glass cylinders, and so on. They were distributed on the ground or on cement platforms of varying height. Pure white paper was laid out under each, giving the whole target area the feel of an exhibition of modern sculpture. After a thunderball entered the target area, it was slowed by a magnetic damper, so it drifted about until it discharged or went out on its own. Three high-speed cameras were set up on the edges of the target area. They were massive and structurally complicated, and unless you knew what they were, you wouldn’t think they were cameras. Since there was no way of knowing beforehand which target the thunderball’s energy would strike, we had to rely on luck to capture the target.

The test started. Since it was highly dangerous, all of the personnel exited the area. The whole test procedure was directed by remote control from an underground control room three hundred meters from the lab.

The monitor showed the superconducting battery releasing the first bubble, which contacted the first arc. The monitoring system transmitted a distorted rushing sound, but the loud crack carried across the three hundred meters from the lab. The excited ball lightning moved slowly forward under the influence of the magnetic field, passing through nine more arcs as thunder rumbled ceaselessly from the lab. Every time the ball lightning contacted an arc, its energy levels doubled. Its brightness didn’t increase correspondingly, but its colors changed: from dark red, it turned orange, then yellow, then white, bright green, sky blue, and plum, until at last a violet fireball entered the acceleration area, where it was whipped by an acceleration field into a torrent. In the next instant, it entered the target area. Like plunging into still water, it slowed down, and began to drift among the targets. We held our breath and waited. Then, after a burst of energy and a flash of light, a tremendous noise came from the lab that shook the glass cases in the underground control room. The energy release had turned a plastic cone into a small pile of black ash on white paper. But the high-speed camera operators said that the cameras had not been trained on that target, and so nothing had been recorded. Another eight thunderballs were subsequently fired off. Five of them discharged, but none of them struck the targets the cameras were trained on. The last energy release struck a cement platform supporting a target, blowing it to bits and causing an immense mess in the target area, so the experiment had to be halted until the lab, which now smelled heavily of ozone, was set up again.

Once the target area was reset, the tests continued. One macro-electron after another was fired at the target area to play a game of cat and mouse with the three high-speed cameras. The optics engineers worried about the safety of their cameras, since they were the equipment nearest to the target area, but we pressed on. It wasn’t until the eleventh discharge that we captured an image of a target being struck, a wooden cube thirty centimeters on a side. This was a wonderful example of a ball lightning discharge: the wooden cube was incinerated into ash that retained its original cubic form, only to collapse at a touch. When the ash was cleared, the paper beneath it was completely unaffected, with not even a burn mark.

The raw high-speed image footage was being loaded into the computer, since if we were to play it back at normal speed, it would be more than a thousand hours long, of which only twenty seconds would show the target being struck. By the time we had extracted those twenty seconds, it was late at night. Holding our breath and staring at the screen, we pulled back the veil on that mysterious demon.

At a normal twenty-four frames per second, the whole clip lasted twenty-two minutes. At the time of discharge, the thunderball was around 1.5 meters from the target; fortunately, both the thunderball and the target were in frame. For the first ten seconds, the thunderball’s brightness increased dramatically. We waited for the wooden cube to catch fire, but to our surprise, it lost all color and turned transparent, until it appeared only as a vague outline of a cube. When the thunderball had reached maximum brightness, the cube’s outlines had totally vanished. Then the thunderball’s brightness decreased, a process lasting five seconds, during which the position formerly occupied by the cube was completely empty! Then the outlines of the transparent cube began to take shape again, and soon it regained corporeality and color, only gray white—it was now a cube of ash. At this point, the thunderball was entirely extinguished.

Dumb as wooden chickens, we took a few seconds to recover and think of replaying the video. We now went through it frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the video.

“It’s like a cubic bubble!” Lin Yun said, pointing at the outline.

As we continued the playback, only the dimming thunderball and the empty white paper beneath it were visible on screen. We advanced the frames, staring at each of them for ages, but there really was nothing on the paper. Advancing further, the outlines returned, now surrounding a cube of ash….

A cloud of smoke covered the screen. Ding Yi had lit his pipe at some point, and was exhaling at the screen.

“You have just witnessed the dual nature of matter!” he said loudly, pointing at the screen. “In that brief moment, the bubble and the wooden cube both exhibited a wave nature. They experienced resonance, and in that resonance the two became one. The wooden cube received the energy released by the macro-electron, and then they both regained their particle nature, the burnt wooden cube coalescing into matter at its original position. This is the puzzle that has vexed you all, and the explanation for the target selectivity of the thunderball’s energy release. When the target is struck by the energy, it exhibits a wave state and is not at its original position at all. Thus the energy will naturally have no effect on the object’s surroundings.”

“Why is it only the target object, the wooden cube here, that exhibits a wave nature, and not the paper beneath it?”

“This is determined by the object’s boundary conditions, through a mechanism similar to how image processing software can automatically pick out a face from an image.”

“There’s another puzzle that now has an explanation: ball lightning’s penetrative power!” Lin Yun said excitedly. “When macro-electrons exhibit wave nature, they can naturally penetrate matter. And if they encounter slits roughly their size, they will be diffracted.”

“When ball lightning exhibits a wave state, it can cover a large range. So when a thunderball discharges, it can affect objects at a distance,” Colonel Xu said, as realization dawned.

And so the cloud of mystery surrounding ball lightning gradually dissipated. But these theory-based accomplishments did not have much direct application to the development of ball lightning weapons. As far as weapons development was concerned, a large quantity of lethal macro-electrons needed to be collected first, and theory was useless for that purpose. However, the base had captured and stored more than ten thousand macro-electrons already, and that number was swiftly growing, which gave us the liberty to use crude techniques that did not rely on any theory. We already knew that the target selected for energy discharge was determined by the nature of the macro-electron, and unrelated to the lightning that excited it. This was the basis upon which we chose our experiment.

We began conducting a large number of animal tests. The procedure was simple: take animals similar to human targets, such as rabbits, pigs, and goats, place them into the target area, and then release and excite ball lightning. If the ball lightning blast killed an animal target, then that macro-electron was selected for the weapons stockpile.

It was impossible for your spirit not to be affected by watching ball lightning turn group after group of test animals to ash every day, but Lin Yun reminded me that dying from ball lightning was far less painful for the animals than dying in a slaughterhouse. She had a point, and my heart was steadier after that. But as the tests went on, I realized that things weren’t quite so simple: the target selectivity of the ball lightning’s energy release was so precise that oftentimes a macro-electron discharge would incinerate an animal’s bones, or vaporize its blood, but not harm its muscles or organs. Animals suffering those attacks died in a horrible fashion. Fortunately, Ding Yi made a discovery that put an end to that nightmarish experiment.

Ding Yi had been studying ways of exciting ball lightning through means other than lightning. His first thought was lasers, but that was unsuccessful. Then he thought of using high-powered microwaves, to no success. But during the course of a subsequent experiment, he discovered that microwaves were modulated into a complex spectrum after passing through a macro-electron, different spectra for different macro-electrons, like a fingerprint. Macro-electrons that discharged into like targets had like spectra. And hence, recording the spectra of a small number of macro-electrons with a suitable target selectivity made it possible to find many more similar macro-electrons using spectral recognition, without excitation experiments. And so animal testing became unnecessary.

Work on a ball lightning emitter for use in combat was proceeding at the same time. In fact, using previous work as a foundation, the technological fundamentals were basically in place. The thunderball gun consisted of several parts: a superconducting battery to store the bubbles; a magnetic field accelerator rail, which was a three-meter-long metal cylinder with EM coils set at regular intervals that could invert the instant the bubble passed, using the magnetic field created to push and pull it along the series of coils and accelerate it to speed; an excitation electrode, a row of discharge electrodes that would produce lightning to excite the thunderball as it passed; and subsidiary mechanisms, including a superconducting battery to power the system, and a machine gun targeting system. Since it used existing test equipment, the first thunderball gun required only two weeks to assemble.

Once the spectral recognition technology was in place, the search for weapons-grade macro-electrons proceeded much more quickly, and soon we had more than a thousand of them. In an excited state, their energy only discharged into organic life. This quantity of macro-electrons was enough to kill all of the defenders of a small city, without the need to break so much as a dish in a cabinet.

“Doesn’t your conscience bother you even a little?” I asked Ding Yi. We were standing in front of the first ball lightning weapon, which looked not so much like an attack weapon as a radar or communications device, since the acceleration rail and excitation electrode looked like a sort of antenna. Atop it were two superconducting batteries, meter-high metal cylinders in which those thousand-odd weapons-grade macro-electrons were stored.

“Why don’t you go ask Lin Yun?”

“She’s a soldier. You?”

“I don’t care. What I study is on a scale of less than a femtometer, or more than ten million light-years. At those scales, the Earth and human life are insignificant.”

“Life is insignificant?”

“From a physics perspective, the form of matter movement known as life has no more meaning than any other movement of matter. You can’t find any new physical laws in life, so from my standpoint, the death of a person and the melting of an ice cube are essentially the same thing. Dr. Chen, you tend to overthink things. You should learn to look at life from the perspective of the ultimate law of the universe. You’ll feel much better if you do.”

But the only thing that made me feel better was that the ball lightning weapon didn’t seem as fearsome as it did at first. It was possible to defend against it. Macro-electrons could interact with magnetic fields, and if they could be accelerated by fields, they could also be deflected. It was quite possible that the weapon’s power would be exhibited only briefly after its introduction in combat, so the military worked hard on the project’s secrecy.

Not long after the birth of the ball lightning weapon, Zhang Bin came to the base. He was in much weaker health, but he still stayed the entire day. In a trance, he watched the macro-electrons confined by the magnetic field, and watched as each was excited into ball lightning. He was thrilled, as if an entire lifespan was concentrated in that one day.

After meeting Ding Yi, he said excitedly, “I knew that someone like you would solve the riddle of ball lightning. You and my wife, Zheng Min, graduated from the same department. She was a genius like you. If she were still alive today, these discoveries wouldn’t have been yours to make.”

Before leaving, Zhang Bin said, “I know I don’t have much time left. My only wish now is to be cremated by ball lightning when I die.”

I wanted to say some words of comfort, but, realizing that he didn’t need any, I just nodded silently.

Observers

A ball lightning weapons force was established, only a company at first, under the leadership of an unflappable lieutenant colonel named Kang Ming. The force was code-named Dawnlight, a name Lin Yun and I came up with, since the first excitation of ball lightning had been an unforgettable moment, when it turned the surrounding wisps of clouds red like a miniature sunrise.

Dawnlight began intensive training immediately. The core of the training was live fire target practice. To get as close as possible to actual combat conditions, training was conducted outdoors, but it had to be carried out on overcast days to prevent satellite detection. For this reason, several target ranges were chosen in the rainy south, and exercises switched constantly among them.

Across those target ranges flew lines of ball lightning fired from thunderball guns, in lines or fanned out toward their target. The balls made noise as they flew, like a shrill trumpet, or a gale across the wilderness. The sound of the thunderball explosion was very peculiar, with no directionality, as if it came from all of space, or even from within your own body.

One day, we followed Dawnlight as it moved to a new target range. Ding Yi had come; but as he was in charge of theory, there was nothing much for him to do here.

“I came to prevent you from making an error, and to demonstrate something weird,” he said.

As the force was preparing for live firing, Ding Yi asked us, “Do you often engage in philosophical speculation?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Never,” Lin Yun said.

Ding Yi glanced at Lin Yun, and said, “Not surprising. You’re a woman.” When she glared back at him, he added, “It doesn’t matter. Today I’m going to force you to think philosophically.”

We looked around us. The target range was a damp forest clearing under an overcast sky. At the other end were temporary buildings and junked vehicles that served as targets. We couldn’t see anything that could be connected to philosophy.

Lieutenant Colonel Kang came over dressed in camos, and asked Ding Yi about his requests for the shooting.

“They’re simple. First, shut down all monitoring equipment at the site. Second, and most importantly, during the firing, close your eyes as soon as you aim at the target, and don’t open them until my command. This applies to everyone, including the commanders.”

“You… may I ask you why?”

“I will explain, Lieutenant Colonel. First I’d like to ask you a question. At this distance, what is the target hit rate of the ball lightning you fire?”

“Nearly one hundred percent, Professor. Since thunderballs aren’t affected by air movement, their paths are steady after acceleration.”

“Very good. Now begin. Remember, after aiming, everyone must close their eyes!”

When I heard the shout “Target set,” I closed my eyes. Soon afterward, I heard the crackle of the excitation arcs in the thunderball acceleration rails, which caused my flesh to crawl. Then the thunderballs started whistling. It felt like they were being fired at me, and my scalp tightened, but I fought to keep my eyes closed.

“Good. Now you all can open your eyes,” Ding Yi choked out through the ozone produced by the ball lightning explosions.

I opened my eyes and felt a momentary lightheadedness, and listened to the target reporter’s voice on the radio: “Shots fired: ten. Hits: one. Misses: nine.” Then in a softer voice, “What the hell!” A number of soldiers, I noticed, were scrambling to put out brush fires started by the errant ball lightning explosions.

“How did that happen?” Lieutenant Colonel Kang demanded of the shooter behind the thunderball weapon. “Didn’t you aim properly before you shut your eyes?”

“We did! The aim was dead-on!” the sergeant said.

“Then… inspect the weapon.”

“That’s not necessary. There’s nothing wrong with the weapon or the shooter,” Ding Yi said with a wave of his hand. “Don’t forget, ball lightning is an electron.”

“You mean it exhibits a quantum effect?” I asked.

Ding Yi nodded. “Indeed it does. In the presence of an observer, its state collapses to a determined value. This value is consistent with our experience in the macro-world, so it strikes the target. But without an observer, it exhibits a quantum state where nothing is determined, and its position can only be described as a probability. In such circumstances, all of this ball lightning exists in the form of an electron cloud—a probability cloud. And a strike on the target location is very improbable.”

“So you mean that the thunderballs can’t strike anything we can’t see?” the lieutenant colonel asked in disbelief.

“That’s right. Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little too… anti-materialistic,” Lin Yun said, shaking her head in confusion.

“See, now that’s philosophy. It may have been forced, but you’ve done it.” Ding Yi made a face at me, and then said to Lin Yun, “Don’t try to school me in philosophy.”

“Right. I’m not qualified. The world would be a terrible place if everyone shared your ultimate line of thinking,” Lin Yun said, shrugging.

“You surely know a little bit of the principles of quantum mechanics,” Ding Yi said.

“Yes, I do. More than just a little. But…”

“But you never expected to see it in the macro-world, right?”

The lieutenant colonel said, “Do you mean to say that if the thunderballs are to strike a target, we must watch them from start to finish?”

Ding Yi nodded, and said, “Or the enemy could watch them. But there must be an observer.”

“Let’s do it again, and see what a probability cloud looks like,” Lin Yun said excitedly.

Ding Yi shook his head. “That’s impossible. The quantum state is only exhibited in the absence of an observer. Once the observer appears, it collapses into our experienced reality. We will never be able to see a probability cloud.”

“Can’t we just put a camera onto a drone?” the lieutenant colonel said.

“A camera is an observer, too, and will likewise collapse the quantum state. This is why I had all of the monitoring equipment shut off.”

“But the cameras don’t have consciousness,” Lin Yun said.

“Now who’s being anti-materialistic? The observer doesn’t need consciousness.” Ding Yi grinned devilishly at her.

“This can’t be right,” I said, feeling like I’d found a flaw in his thinking. “If it’s as you say, then wouldn’t anything in the vicinity of ball lightning be an observer? Just like they leave an image of themselves in the camera’s photoreceptive system, ball lightning also leave ionized traces behind in the air. The light they give off causes a response in the surrounding plants, and their sound vibrates the sand…. The surrounding environment retains traces of them to some extent. There’s no difference between this and the images taken by the camera.”

“Yes. But there’s a huge difference in the strength of the observer. A camera recording an image is a strong observer. Sand vibrating in place on the ground is a weak observer. Weak observers can also cause the quantum state to collapse, but it is very unlikely.”

“This theory is too bizarre to accept.”

“Without experimental evidence, it would be. But the quantum effect was proven at the microscopic level early on in the last century. Now we’ve finally observed its macroscopic manifestation…. If only Bohr were alive, or de Broglie, or Heisenberg and Dirac…” Ding Yi grew emotional, and paced back and forth as if sleepwalking, muttering to himself.

“It’s a good thing Einstein is dead,” Lin Yun said.

Then I remembered something: Ding Yi had insisted on installing four surveillance systems in the lab where macro-electron excitement had been carried out, in addition to the high-speed cameras. I asked him about it.

“Right. That was out of safety concerns. If all of the systems failed, the ball lightning would be in a quantum state that would engulf a good portion of the base in an electron cloud. Ball lightning could suddenly appear at any location.”

And then I understood why, in so many eyewitness accounts throughout history, ball lightning had appeared mysteriously and drifted randomly, always popping up out of nowhere, with no nearby lightning to excite it. This quite probably was because the observer was within a macro-electron probability cloud, and the chance observation caused the ball lightning’s quantum state to collapse.

I exclaimed, “I thought I already more or less understood ball lightning. I never imagined—”

“There’s lots you haven’t imagined, Dr. Chen. You can’t imagine the sheer oddity of nature,” Ding Yi said, cutting me off.

“What else?”

“There are things I can’t even bring myself to discuss with you,” Ding Yi said in a low voice.

This didn’t sink in at first, but after a second of thought, I shuddered. I looked up at him, and saw him staring at me with a snakelike gleam in his eye that made my whole body shiver. Deep in my consciousness was a dark and shadowy place that I had striven to forget, and had nearly succeeded—a place I did not now dare to touch.

In the next two days of experiments, ball lightning’s macro-quantum effect received further confirmation. When observers were removed, the ball lightning shot from the thunderball weapon missed by wide margins, and hit targets at a rate of only one-tenth of that when an observer was present. We brought in additional equipment and performed more complicated tests, chiefly in an attempt to determine the size of the probability cloud of a macro-electron in a quantum state. Using a strict quantum mechanics definition, this terminology wasn’t entirely correct, since an electron (whether macro or micro) has a probability cloud the size of the entire universe, so it was possible that ball lightning in a quantum state might appear in the Andromeda Nebula, although the probability of that was infinitesimally small. We used “probability cloud” in engineering terms, to refer to a fuzzy boundary beyond which the chance was so low as to be insignificant.

But on the third day, the unexpected happened. Without any observer present, the ten shots from the thunderball gun all struck the target. They were a class of macro-electrons that released energy into metal and had been excited into a high-energy state. A third of the junked armored vehicle serving as the target was liquefied.

“Something must have been overlooked and left behind an observer. Maybe one of the cameras wasn’t turned off. Or, more likely, some soldier snuck a peek, to see what a macro-electron cloud looks like,” Ding Yi said decisively.

And so before the next test, the two cameras were dismantled, and all of the personnel on the target range were removed to a shielded basement cut off from the outside world. With the range empty, the already-aimed thunderball guns were switched to automatic fire mode.

But every one of the fifteen shots of ball lightning struck the target.

I was pleased that something had stumped Ding Yi, even if it was only a momentary difficulty. Looking over the results, he did seem worried, but his worry was different from what I imagined, and he didn’t seem overly perplexed. “Stop all tests and live fire training immediately,” he told Lin Yun.

Lin Yun looked at him, and then glanced up at the sky.

I said, “Why do we have to stop? There was no quantum effect this time despite the complete absence of an observer. We have to find the reason.”

Lin Yun looked up and shook her head. “No, there was an observer.”

I looked up at the sky, and realized that at some point the clouds had parted, and a thin strip of blue was visible through the crack.

Burnt Chips

We returned from the south to a Beijing autumn where the nights were already chilly.

The temperatures dropped, and with them the military’s enthusiasm for ball lightning weapons. Back at the base, we learned from Colonel Xu that the General Staff Department and the General Armaments Department were not planning on equipping troops with these weapons in large numbers, and Dawnlight would not be expanded in size. This attitude on the part of the higher-ups was primarily motivated by the probability that the enemy would build defenses against ball lightning weapons. The weapons we had come up with were their own nemesis: ball lightning could be both accelerated and deflected in a magnetic field, so the enemy could use a reverse magnetic field to defend against it. Once the weapon made it into a combat situation, it would quickly meet an effective defense.

The next stage of research at the base followed two forks: a search for a way to breach the magnetic field defense, and a reorientation of ball lightning’s target from personnel to weapons equipment, particularly high-tech weapons.

The first idea was to collect macro-electrons that would melt wiring. This would be an effective way to disable the enemy’s high-tech weapons. But a serious problem was discovered during experiments: ball lightning that would melt wiring would also discharge into large metal objects, and since melting large metal objects required immense amounts of power, most of the energy in this form of ball lightning was discharged into the metal object, with little released into the wire. Efficiency was poor, and potential damage to the weaponry was very limited.

Our very next thought, naturally, was that electronic chips might make an excellent target for ball lightning weapons. First of all, unlike wires, chips were made of a unique material for which nothing similar yet nonessential existed to split the ball lightning’s energy. Additionally, chips were small, so a relatively minor discharge could destroy a large number of them. Chip destruction was absolutely fatal to modern high-tech weaponry. But macro-electrons that discharged into chips (we called them chip-eating macro-electrons) were very rare, like pearls in the imperial crown of ball lightning. To collect a sufficient quantity of them required capturing a huge number of macro-electrons to subject to spectral recognition, for which substantial funds were needed. But the higher-ups had stopped further investment in the project.

To gain their attention, and to win research funding, Colonel Xu decided to conduct an attack exercise using the chip-eaters we had already collected.

The exercise was conducted at the MBT 2005 test base, where Lin Yun and I had gone to learn about the feeler defense system. Now all was quiet here. Weeds grew in the vehicle tracks. All we could see were two MBT 2005s that had been brought here the day before for use as test targets.

Initially, only General Armaments Department personnel were supposed to watch the tests, but a notice sent two hours beforehand doubled the number of observers. Most of them were from the General Staff Department, and included a major general and a lieutenant general.

We first took them on a tour of the target area. Apart from the two tanks, the targets to be fired upon included several armored vehicles equipped with military electronic equipment. One vehicle held a frequency-hopping radio, another held a radar assembly, and a third held several hardened military-use computers. The computers were switched on, their screens displaying various images on screen saver mode. One additional target was an obsolete surface-to-air missile. The vehicles and equipment were set up in a line.

After showing them the target equipment, we specifically opened the electronic control portion to show them the unharmed chips on the circuit boards.

“Young man, are you telling us that your new weapon will completely destroy these ICs?” the lieutenant general asked.

“Yes, General. But the other parts will remain unharmed,” I answered.

“The ICs will be fried by lightning-produced induction, is that correct?” the major general asked. He was quite young, and evidently a technical officer.

I shook my head. “No. EM induction from ordinary lightning would be drastically weakened by the Faraday cage effect of the tank’s metallic exterior. Ball lightning will penetrate the armor and turn the chips to ash.”

The two generals glanced at each other and smiled, then shook their heads, clearly unconvinced.

Then Lin Yun and Colonel Xu brought us all to the firing site five hundred meters away and showed them the thunderball gun. It was installed on a truck that had once been used for transporting rockets.

The lieutenant general said, “I have a sixth sense about weapons. An immensely powerful weapon, regardless of what it looks like, will have an invisible edge to it. But I can’t see any edge to this thing.”

Colonel Xu said, “Sir, the first atomic bomb looked like a big iron barrel. You wouldn’t have seen any edge on it, either. Your sixth sense is only applicable to conventional weapons.”

The general said, “I hope so.”

Out of safety concerns, we erected a simple cover for the observers out of sandbags. When firing was about to commence, the visitors all filed behind it.

Ten minutes later, firing began. The thunderball gun was operated much like a conventional machine gun, with a trigger-like firing device and sight that were nearly identical to a machine gun’s. In the initial design, firing was carried out via computer, using a mouse to drag the crosshairs across the screen to lock on a target; the thunderball gun would automatically train the launcher on the target. But this required a complicated electro-mechanical system, and the thunderball weapon didn’t need to be aimed particularly precisely—that is, even with a certain amount of deviation, the ball lightning would still incinerate the target. So we decided to use a more primitive means of controlling this advanced weapon, partly because of tight time constraints, but also to make the weapon as streamlined and reliable as possible. Now it was operated by a sergeant, a distinguished marksman from the force.

First we heard a series of deafening crackles, a sound produced by the artificial lightning used for excitation at the head of the launcher, closely followed by the emergence of three lightning balls, glowing orange red. They flew off in the direction of a tank with a shrill whistle, spaced roughly five meters apart, and disappeared when they struck the target, as if melting into the tank. Then, from the tank, came the sound of three explosions, clear and sharp, as if the detonations had not been inside it but right next to our ears. Then the other targets were fired upon, two to five shots of ball lightning apiece. The crackle of the excitation arc, the whistle of the ball lightning, and then the explosion when they struck the target sounded in turn. In the target area five hundred meters away, two balls that had missed their targets or passed through without exploding drifted about….

When the last thunderball struck the surface-to-air missile, calm descended. The two misses floated above the target area for a while before disappearing silently in succession. One armored car was smoking, but the other targets sat there calmly, as if nothing at all had happened.

“What did those signal flares of yours do?” a colonel asked Lin Yun.

“You’ll find out!” she said, full of confidence.

Everyone exited the shelter and walked the five hundred meters to the target area. Although confident about the results we were about to witness, I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous at being surrounded by all of the senior officers who would decide the fate of the project. Ahead of us, the armored car was no longer smoking, but there was a crisp odor in the air that grew stronger the closer we got. One general asked what it was.

Lin Yun said, “Ozone, emitted in the ball lightning discharge explosion. It might replace the smell of gun smoke on the battlefield of the future, sir.”

Lin Yun and I brought them to the armored car first. The observers circled it, peering at it closely, evidently thinking they would find burn traces, but there was nothing to be found. The vehicle body was unchanged. When we opened the door, a few of them stuck their heads in for a look, but apart from a stronger smell of ozone, there was no trace of damage. The four military computers were still lined up inside the vehicle, but it would not have escaped notice that one thing was different: all of the screens were dark. We pulled one of the computers out onto the ground, and Lin Yun quickly opened up its dark green case. I held it up at an angle, and dumped out a white ash intermingled with a few black fragments from the interior. I held the case up high to let them all see the interior, and I heard gasps from the crowd.

On the motherboard, two-thirds of the chips were gone.

The gasps continued. In the MBT 2005, the observers saw that the communications equipment and the radar had more than half of their chips burned to ash. When we finally opened up the nose of the surface-to-air missile, the gasps reached a crescendo, since the missile’s guidance module had been turned into a reliquary for cremated chips. The two soldiers from the missile corps in charge of removing the warhead looked up at Lin Yun and me with fear in their eyes, then looked through the gaps in the crowd to the distant thunderball weapon, looking like they’d seen a ghost.

The lieutenant general declared, “It can take out the main strength of an entire army!”

The observers applauded enthusiastically. If ball lightning weapons were to have an advertising slogan, there was nothing more appropriate.

After returning to base, I noticed a loss of my own: the notebook computer I had taken with me to the exercise wouldn’t turn on. I took it apart, and discovered its insides were covered in a fine white ash. I blew on it, and it took flight and sent me coughing. Taking another look at the motherboard, I saw that the CPU and two 256 MB sticks of ram were missing, turned into the dust now drifting about me. During the firing demonstration, I was in a position half the distance from the ball lightning ignition point that the others were so as to observe and record, but I was still much farther than the customary fifty-meter safe distance.

It should have occurred to me before, really. The chips were so small in size that each could absorb only a small amount of the energy discharged by the ball lightning, leaving the remainder to act at a much larger distance. For tiny targets such as chips, ball lightning’s threat radius was greatly expanded.

Strange Phenomena III

One night under a brilliant moon, Lin Yun, Ding Yi, and I strolled easily along a path on base discussing how the ball lightning weapon could defeat the magnetic defense problem.

“Now we can be certain that, so long as we use charged macro-electrons, the problem is unsolvable,” Lin Yun said.

“That’s my opinion, too,” Ding Yi said. “Recently I’ve been trying to use the motion state of macro-electrons to locate the nucleus of the atom they belong to, but the theory is extremely knotty, and there are certain obstacles that are practically impossible to overcome. It’s a long road, and I fear that humanity won’t make any breakthroughs this century.”

I looked up at the stars, thinned out now due to the full moon, and tried to imagine what an atom five hundred to a thousand kilometers in diameter would be like.

Ding Yi went on, “But on second thought, if we can find a macro-nucleus, that would mean we can obtain chargeless macro-neutrons, which would be able to penetrate EM barriers.”

“Macro-neutrons can’t be excited like macro-electrons, and don’t have energy release. How would they be weaponized?” Lin Yun asked the question I was about to.

Ding Yi was about to answer, but then Lin Yun put a finger to her lips. “Shh—listen!”

We were walking next to the ball lightning excitation lab. Before the advent of spectral recognition, it was here that large numbers of animal tests were performed with select weapons-grade macro-electrons, turning hundreds of test animals to ash. It was the same building that Lin Yun had taken me to on my first visit to the base to demonstrate the lightning weapon. Under the moonlight it looked like an enormous shadow, without definition. Lin Yun motioned for us to stop, and when our footsteps ceased, I heard a sound coming from the lab.

It was the bleat of a goat.

There were no goats in the lab. Animal tests had stopped two months ago, and during that time, the lab had been sealed.

I heard the sound again, unmistakably a goat’s bleat: faint, and a little bleak. Oddly, the sound reminded me of ball lightning explosions, since the two shared the same quality: even though a listener could determine the direction of the sound’s source, it nevertheless seemed to fill all space, and sometimes seemed to be coming from inside your body.

Lin Yun headed toward the lab entrance, Ding Yi following close behind, but my feet were like lead and I stood rooted in place. It was the same old sensation, a whole body chill, as if I were in the grip of an icy hand. I knew they wouldn’t find any goat.

Lin Yun pushed open the lab door, and the heavy iron rumbled loudly as it rolled back on its track, drowning out the faint bleats. When the door sound had subsided, the goat’s bleats were gone as well. Lin Yun turned on the light, and through the doorway, I could see part of the building’s vast interior. A square pen formed from two-meter-high iron fencing had once held the targets for excitation experiments. Several hundred test animals had been incinerated by ball lightning there. Now, the space was completely empty. Lin Yun looked inside the huge lab for a while, but as I had predicted, she found nothing. Ding Yi stood at the entrance, the light casting a long, thin shadow behind him on the ground.

“I clearly heard a goat!” Lin Yun called, her voice echoing in the cavernous interior.

Ding Yi didn’t respond, but turned and walked toward me. When he reached me, he said softly, “Have you come across anything in all these years?”

“What do you mean?” I said, striving to keep my voice from trembling.

“Some… things it would be impossible for you to encounter.”

“I don’t understand.” I forced a laugh, which must have sounded ridiculous.

“Forget it.” Ding Yi clapped me on the shoulder. He had never done that before. The action gave me a smidgen of comfort. “In the natural world, the unusual is just another manifestation of the normal.” As I was considering this, he shouted toward Lin Yun in the lab, “Stop looking and come out!”

Lin Yun turned off the light before she came out, and just as the door was closing, I saw a shaft of moonlight from a high window light up the now-dark lab, casting a trapezoid of light on the floor, right in the center of the pen of death. The building felt cold and sinister, like a long-forgotten tomb.

The Nuclear Power Plant

Actual use of ball lightning weapons took place much earlier than we anticipated.

It was around midday that Dawnlight received an emergency order for immediate departure, fully equipped for combat. The order added that this was not a drill. One platoon carrying two thunderball guns left by helicopter, and Colonel Xu, Lin Yun, and I went along. After a short flight of not much more than ten minutes, we landed. It wouldn’t have taken much longer to go by car on a convenient highway, so this was clearly an emergency situation.

We disembarked and realized immediately where we were. In front of us was a white complex gleaming in the sun, one that had appeared countless times on television. An enormous columnar structure stood conspicuously in the center of the complex. This was a large-scale nuclear reactor, newly built as the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

From our vantage point, the plant appeared exceedingly calm and devoid of people. But our surroundings were bustling. Groups of heavily equipped People’s Armed Police leaped out of the military vehicles that had just pulled up. Three officers next to a military jeep peered in the direction of the plant through binoculars for quite a long while. Beside a police car a group of police officers were putting on bulletproof vests, their submachine guns lying in disarray on the ground. I followed Lin Yun’s gaze to several snipers on a roof behind us, rifles trained on the reactor.

The helicopters had landed in the yard of the plant’s guesthouse. Without saying a word, a PAP colonel led us to a conference room inside that evidently served as the temporary command center. Several PAP commanders and police officers were clustered round a black-suited official looking at a large paper chart that appeared to be an internal blueprint of the plant. Our officer guide informed us that the official was the operational commander. I recognized him from his frequent television appearances. That such a high-ranking official was here indicated the gravity of the situation.

“What are regular troops doing here? Things are getting overcomplicated!” a police officer said.

“Oh, I asked GSD to bring them in. They’ve got new equipment that might be useful,” the operational commander said. This was the first time he had raised his head since we came in. I noticed in his expression none of the tension and anxiety of the military and police officers around him, but rather the faint fatigue of routine that, in this situation, was an expression of inner strength. “Which of you is in charge? Ah, hello, Colonel,” he said to Xu Wencheng. “I have two questions. First, can your equipment destroy a live target without damaging any of the facilities inside the structure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Second… hmm, why don’t you take a look at the site conditions first and then I’ll ask you. Let’s continue,” he said, and he and the group around him turned their attention back to the large chart.

The colonel who had led us in motioned for us to follow him, and we went from the conference room to the door of an adjacent room. It was ajar, and a large number of temporary cables were running through it. The colonel gestured for us to remain in place.

“There’s little time, so I’ll give you only a brief rundown of the situation. At nine o’clock this morning, eight armed terrorists took over the power plant’s nuclear reactor. They entered by hijacking a bus taking elementary school students on a plant tour, and in the course of occupying the reactor, they killed six plant security guards. Now they have thirty-five hostages: twenty-seven students and teachers from the bus, and eight plant engineers and operating personnel.”

“Where are they from?” Lin Yun asked.

“The terrorists? The Garden of Eden.”

I knew about that international terrorist organization. Even an utterly benign idea could be dangerous if taken to an extreme, and the Garden of Eden was a classic example. It had originated as a group of technological escapists who had established an experimental micro-society on an island in the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to break free from modern technology and return to nature. Like many similar organizations throughout the world, it was closed off in the beginning, a community with no aggressive tendencies at all. But as time passed in seclusion, the mentality of these isolationists turned radical, and their flight from technology turned into a hatred of it, their removal from science into an opposition to it. Some extreme diehards left the island they called the Garden of Eden and, with a mission to obliterate all of the world’s modern technology and bring it back to nature, began engaging in terrorist activities. Unlike other stripes of terrorists, the Garden of Eden attacked targets that were bewildering to the public: they blew up the European Synchrotron, burned down the two largest genetics labs in North America, destroyed a large neutrino detection tank deep within a mine in Canada, and even assassinated three Nobel Physics laureates. The group found repeated success at research facilities where scientists were minimally defended, but this was its first attack on a nuclear reactor.

“What measures have you taken?” Lin Yun asked.

“None. We’ve set up an observational perimeter at a distance, but we haven’t dared approach. They’ve put explosives on the reactor and can blow them up at any time.”

“As far as I’m aware, these large nuclear reactors have a very thick and sturdy shell. Several meters of reinforced cement. How much explosive material could they have brought in?”

“Not much. They only took in a small vial of red pills.”

The colonel’s words sent a chill through Lin Yun and me. Garden of Eden may have hated technology, but they would use any means necessary to achieve their goals. It was, in fact, the world’s most technologically sophisticated terrorist organization, and a significant number of its members were top-flight scientists. The red pills were their own creation, enriched uranium, clad in some nanomaterial. Under sufficient impact force, fission detonation was possible without the need to achieve supercritical mass by other means of compression. Their typical method was to weld the muzzle of a large-bore gun shut, place several red pills inside it, and chamber a flattened-down bullet. When the gun was fired, the bullet would strike the red pills, triggering a nuclear explosion. When the Garden of Eden used this gadget to successfully break the world’s largest synchrotron, which was several kilometers underground, into three segments, it threw the world into terror overnight.

Before the colonel led us into the room, he gave us a warning: “Be careful what you say in there. We have set up bidirectional communication.”

After entering, we saw several military and police officers staring at a large screen displaying a surprising scene. For a moment I thought there must be some mistake, for we were watching a teacher leading a class for a group of students. Behind her was a wide control panel with lots of display screens and flashing instruments, probably one of the reactor’s control rooms. It was the teacher who caught my attention. She was in her thirties, plainly dressed, with a gaunt face that made the delicate glasses dangling from a gold chain around her neck look particularly large. A keen intelligence showed in her eyes. Her voice was soft and gentle, and it soothed some of my fear and anxiety to listen to it. My heart immediately filled with respect for the teacher, who had taken her students to visit a nuclear plant and maintained composure in the face of danger, and now was soothing them with a laudable sense of duty.

“She’s the head of the Asian branch of Garden of Eden and is the primary architect and director of this act of terrorism. In North America last March, she assassinated two Nobel laureates in one day and escaped capture. She’s the third most wanted Garden of Eden fugitive in the world,” the colonel whispered to us, pointing at the teacher on the screen.

I lost all grip on the world around me, like I’d been bashed in the head. I twisted around to look at Lin Yun, who didn’t seem particularly surprised. Looking back at the screen, I noticed something unusual: the children were crowded close together and were looking fearfully at the teacher, as if she were a monster who’d popped up out of nowhere. I soon discovered the reason for their fear: a boy was lying on the ground, the top of his skull shattered. His eyes, wide open, stared across the floor with a bemused expression at the abstract painting formed of brains and blood. The teacher’s bloody footprints were on the ground, too, and her right sleeve was spattered with blood. The gun she had used to shoot the kid in the head was lying on the control station behind her.

“Now, children, my dear children. You have been very good in class, and it’s time for a new stage. I’ll ask a question: What are the basic building blocks of matter?” The teacher continued her lesson, her voice still soft and gentle, but I felt like a cold, supple snake had wrapped itself around my throat. The children must have been feeling the same thing, only ten times worse.

When no one responded, the teacher said, “You. You answer,” pointing at a girl. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of if you’re wrong,” she said gently, a kind smile on her face.

“A… atoms,” the girl said, in a trembling voice.

“Very good. See: you’re wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Now I’ll tell you the correct answer. The basic building blocks of matter are—” She emphasized each word with a stroke of her hand. “Metal. Wood. Water. Fire. Earth. Good. Now repeat that ten times. Metal, wood, water, fire, earth.”

The children recited the elements ten times.

“Very good, children. That’s right. The world has been made complicated by science, and we’re going to make it simple again. Life has been raped by technology, and we’re going to make it pure again! Have you ever seen an atom? How do they have anything to do with us? Don’t let those scientists trick you. They are the filthiest, most foolish people in the world…. Now, please wait a moment. I’ve got to finish this lesson before negotiations can continue. I can’t let the children get behind in their lessons.” The last bit was evidently directed at us.

She must have had a display there that allowed her to see us, since she glanced in a different direction when she spoke to us. Then something caught her attention.

“Oh? A woman? Finally you’ve got a woman there. How wonderful!” she said, clearly referring to Lin Yun. Then she clasped her hands together in an expression of sincere surprise.

Lin Yun nodded at the teacher, an icy smile on her face. I realized I felt a certain dependence on Lin Yun now. I knew that the teacher’s ruthlessness wouldn’t frighten her, since she was similarly ruthless, and had the emotional power to combat the teacher. I lacked that power, and the teacher had casually flattened my spirit.

“We have a common language,” the teacher said with a smile, as if talking to a close friend. “Women are intrinsically opposed to technology, not like nauseatingly robotic men.”

“I’m not opposed to technology. I am an engineer,” Lin Yun said evenly.

“I was too, once. But that doesn’t prevent us from seeking out a new life. Your major’s emblem is very pretty. It’s a remnant of ancient armor, that, like humanity, has been so eroded by technology that there’s only a smidgen left. We ought to treasure it.”

“Why did you kill that child?”

“Child? Was he a child?” The teacher looked with frightened eyes at the corpse on the ground. “Our first lesson was about life guidance. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and do you know what the little idiot said? He said he wanted to be a scientist. His little brain was already polluted by science. Yes, science pollutes everything!” Then she turned to the other children, and said, “Good children, let’s not be scientists. Let’s not be engineers or doctors either. Let’s never grow up. We’re all little herders riding on the back of a big water buffalo playing a bamboo flute as we traipse across the green grass. Have you ever ridden a water buffalo? Have you ever blown a bamboo flute? Do you know that there was once a purer and more beautiful age? In those days, the sky was so blue and the clouds were so white. The grass was so green you’d cry, and the air was sweet. Every brook was clear as crystal, life as leisurely as a nighttime serenade, love as intoxicating as the moon… but science and technology stripped away all of that. Now ugly cities blanket the ground, the blue sky and white clouds are gone, the green grass has withered, the brooks have turned black, and the buffalo has been penned up on a farm and turned into a robot making milk and meat. The bamboo is gone, and there’s only maddening rock music played by robots…. What are we doing here? Children, we want to bring humanity back to the Garden of Eden! First, we need to let everyone know how vile science and technology are. And how can we do that? If you want to make people realize how disgusting a boil is, what do you do? You cut it open. Today we’re going to cut open this technological boil, this huge nuclear reactor, and spill out its radioactive pus. Then people will see the true face of technology—”

“Can you grant me one request?” Lin Yun cut in.

“Of course, my dear.”

“Let me be your hostage in place of those children.”

The teacher smiled but shook her head.

“Let me replace just one of them.”

Still smiling, the teacher shook her head again. “Major, do you think I don’t know what you are? Your blood is as cold as mine. After you come in, in point five seconds you’ll have taken my gun, and then you’ll put a bullet through each of my eyes, point two five seconds apiece.”

“From the way you talk, you really do seem like an engineer,” Lin Yun said with a chilly laugh.

“All engineers can go to hell,” the teacher said, still smiling. Then she turned and picked up the gun from the control station, trained it on the camera, and advanced until we could see the rifling inside the barrel. We heard half a gunshot, which the microphone picked up as a hiss, and then the camera cut out and the screen went white.

I left the room and let out a long breath, as if I’d just come up from a cellar. The colonel briefly explained the structure of the reactor and control room, and then we returned to the conference room, in time to hear a police officer say, “…If the terrorists had proposed conditions, we would have agreed to everything for the safety of the children, and then figured something out. But the problem is that they haven’t given any conditions. They came to blow up the reactor, and the only reason they haven’t done so yet is because they are attempting a live broadcast to the outside using a small satellite antenna they brought with them. The situation is already critical. They could blow it up at any time.”

Noticing us coming in, the operational commander said, “Now that you know the situation, I’ll ask my second question. Can your weapon distinguish between adults and children?”

Colonel Xu said that it couldn’t.

“Can’t they avoid the control room where the children are, and only attack the reactor area? That’s the section where the terrorists are working with the bombs,” a police officer said.

“No!” said a PAP senior colonel, before Colonel Xu had a chance to reply. “The teacher brought a remote control with her.” Apparently they had already adopted the nickname “teacher” for this terrible monster of a woman.

“It wouldn’t work, in any case,” Colonel Xu said. “The reactor and the control room are part of the same structure, and the weapon attacks the structure as a whole. Walls don’t stop it. Given its size, no matter where the weapon is aimed, the entire structure will be in lethal range. Unless the children are brought out and taken far away from the reactor structure, they’ll definitely be injured or killed.”

“What is that weapon, anyway? A neutron bomb?”

“I’m sorry. I can only provide further details after authorization from GAD leadership.”

“There’s no need,” the senior colonel said, turning to the operational commander. “It looks like it won’t work.”

“I think it will work,” Lin Yun said, speaking out of turn and making me and Colonel Xu nervous. She went over to the operational commander’s desk, placed her hands flat on the surface, and directed a scorching look at him. He met her stare with a calm face. “Sir,” she said, “I think the present situation is as clear as one plus one equals two.”

“Lin Yun!” Colonel Xu snapped.

“Let the major finish speaking,” the operational commander said, unperturbed.

“I’ve finished, sir.” She dropped her gaze and retreated to the back.

“Very well. Apart from the emergency command center personnel, the rest of you comrades can wait outside,” the commander said. He dropped his gaze too, but he wasn’t looking at the blueprint any longer.

We came to the roof of the guesthouse, where the other Dawnlight members had convened. Two thunderball guns had been set up on the edge of the roof, each covered by a green tarp. Near them were four superconducting batteries, two charged up for the immense power required to excite ball lightning, and the other two containing two thousand anti-personnel macro-electrons.

Two hundred meters away, the huge column of the nuclear reactor stood quietly under the sun.

When the PAP colonel left, Colonel Xu said to Lin Yun in a low voice, “What are you up to? You’re well aware that the main risk of ball lightning weapons right now is that if there’s a leak the enemy can easily build effective defenses against it. Then where’s our battlefield advantage? With tensions as high as they are, the enemy’s surveillance satellites and spies have their attention focused on anything unusual in any part of the country. If we use it—”

“Colonel, this right here is a battlefield! The reactor has a volume ten times that of Chernobyl. If it’s blown up, you’ll have a no-man’s land hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of people might die from the radiation!”

“I’m fully aware of that. If the higher-ups gave the order to use ball lightning, I would resolutely carry it out. The problem is that you shouldn’t have overstepped the scope of your position to influence the director’s decision.”

Lin Yun remained silent.

“You really want to use that weapon,” I said, unable to hold back.

“So what if I do? There’s nothing abnormal about that attitude,” Lin Yun said quietly.

Then we all stopped speaking. The hot wind of early autumn blew across the roof, and the sound of cars screeching to a halt came up from the foot of the building, closely followed by the rapid footfalls of soldiers exiting the vehicles, and metallic clashes of weapons against armor. Apart from a few short commands, there was no talking. But within these sounds I sensed a terrifying deathly silence overwhelming all the other sounds striving madly to escape, and crushing them in its giant palm.

Not much time had passed before the PAP colonel came back. Everyone on the roof stood up, and he said simply, “Would the military commander of Dawnlight please come with me?” Lieutenant Colonel Kang Ming stood up, adjusted his helmet, and followed. The others barely had time to sit back down before he came back in again.

“Prepare to attack! We will determine the number of shots ourselves, but we must ensure that all living targets inside the reactor structure are destroyed.”

“Let Major Lin decide the number of shots to fire,” Colonel Xu said.

“Two hundred dissipative shots, one hundred from each gun,” Lin Yun said, evidently having thought it over already. All of the macro-electrons currently loaded in the weapons were dissipative. Once all of the targets in the structure had been destroyed, the remaining ball lightning would drain their energy in the form of EM radiation, going out gradually, no longer destructive. Other varieties of ball lightning would release excess energy as an explosion, causing random damage to targets other than their selective target type.

“First and second shooting teams, come forward,” Lieutenant Colonel Kang said as he pushed through the group. He pointed ahead and said, “The PAP squad will advance on the reactor, up to the hundred-meter safe line. They will stop there, then we will commence firing.”

My heart seized up as I looked out at the huge nuclear column reflecting the blinding white light of the sun, preventing me from looking at it directly. For a moment I heard voices, as if the sound of the children was being blown over the roof by the wind.

The tarps were taken off the two thunderball guns, and the metal shells of their accelerator rails gleamed in the sunlight.

“Allow me,” Lin Yun said, taking the shooter’s seat at one of the thunderball guns. Lieutenant Colonel Kang and Colonel Xu exchanged a glance, but did not oppose her. I saw in her expression and movement an excitement she could not suppress, like a child finally getting her hands on a coveted toy. It gave me the chills.

Down on the ground, the PAP’s skirmish line had started moving toward the reactor. It already seemed tiny against that massive structure. The line moved quickly, rapidly approaching the reactor’s hundred-meter safety line. Then the thunderball guns ignited the excitement arcs in their accelerator rails, the crisp crackle turning heads down below the building, and even causing the PAP troops to glance backward.

When the line was a hundred meters from the reactor, they halted, then two lines of ball lightning flew off the roof toward the reactor. The deadly hurricane whooshed across two hundred meters. As the first ball lightning struck the reactor structure, more ball lightning was issuing in an unending stream from the accelerator rails, joined into a continuous thread by fiery tails that connected the guesthouse and the reactor with a river of flame.

I watched a video recording afterward of what happened in the control room.

At the time the ball lightning flew in, the teacher had already stopped her class and was stretched across the control station messing with something, while the children, still clustered together, were being guarded by an assault-rifle-wielding terrorist. The ball lightning was unobserved for a short time after it entered the structure and entered a probability cloud state. By the time the reappearance of an observer caused the probability cloud to collapse, the ball lightning had lost its speed and now drifted slowly on a random path. Everyone looked up in fear and confusion at the wandering fireballs, which screamed the cries of a multitude of ghosts as their tails painted a complicated, shifting picture in the air. In the images recorded by the cameras in the control room, the teacher’s face was the clearest. Her glasses reflected the yellow and blue of the ball lightning, but, unlike the others, there was no fear in her eyes, only confusion. She was even smiling, perhaps to let herself relax, or maybe because she genuinely found the fireballs interesting. That was the last expression she wore in this world.

When the first ball lightning exploded, a strong EM pulse cut off the camera image. When it returned several seconds later, the place was empty, except for a few remaining excited lightning balls that drifted until they gradually went out. As their energy levels dropped, their sound grew less terrifying and more mournful, requiem-like.

On the roof of the guesthouse, I heard the explosions from the reactor. The sound rattled all of the glass in the building, but we heard it not through our ears, but in our very organs. It was so nauseating that it must have had infrasonic elements.

I felt like I wouldn’t be able to hold myself together if I entered the reactor room, but I still went in alongside Lin Yun, my psyche so weak that my legs shook and I could scarcely stand still. More than a decade after seeing my parents turned to ash, I stood among the ashes of children. Apart from a very few charred remains, the majority of the deceased had been burned up entirely, but their clothing was basically unharmed. Ball lightning had incinerated them in an instant, with an internal temperature of more than ten thousand degrees and a matter wave resonance that caused its energy to release evenly into every cell.

Several police officers ringed the teacher’s ashes, searching for something in her pockets. The other seven terrorists had also been tidily taken care of, including the two who were preparing to detonate the red pills.

I stepped gingerly among the children’s ashes. Those blooms of life were now white piles beneath as many sets of children’s clothing. Many of them retained the shape of children fallen on the ground, heads and limbs clearly distinguishable. The control room floor had become a huge painting, a work of art describing life and death executed by ball lightning. For a moment I even sensed something transcendent and ethereal.

Lin Yun and I stopped before a small pile of ash which, judging by the undamaged clothing, must have been a girl. Her final position was preserved excellently in ash, and it looked as if she had leaped into a different world with a dance of joy. Unlike the other ash piles, part of her body had escaped destruction: a hand. Her hand was small and white, the wrinkles on each finger unmistakable, as if it still belonged to a living body. Lin Yun squatted down and gently lifted the hand, then held it in both palms. I stood beside her, and we remained motionless; time had stopped for us. I genuinely wished I could become an unfeeling statue and remain with the ashes of the children forever.

After a while, I realized that there was someone else beside us, the operational commander. Lin Yun noticed him too, and gently set down the hand before standing up. “Sir, let me visit the children’s parents. I was the one who conducted the weapon attack.”

The commander slowly shook his head. “The decision was mine. The consequences are not your responsibility. They aren’t the responsibility of any comrade who took part in the action. You did well. I will request commendation for Dawnlight. Thank you all. Thank you.” After saying this, he took steady footsteps toward the door. We knew that no matter what assessment this operation received from various quarters, his political career was over.

After a few steps, he stopped, and without turning around, uttered a sentence that Lin Yun was sure to remember for the rest of her life: “Also, Major, thank you for your counsel about the situation.”

I handed in my resignation as soon as we returned to base. Everyone tried to make me stay, but my mind was made up.

Ding Yi said, “Chen, man, you’ve got to think about this rationally. Without ball lightning weapons, those kids would have died anyway. And they’d have died far more horribly, taking tens of thousands of other people with them. Deaths from radiation sickness and leukemia. And the next generation would have deformities….”

“That’s enough, Professor Ding. I don’t have your pure scientific rationality. Or Lin Yun’s military cool. I don’t have anything. So I’ve got to leave.”

“If it’s because of something I did…,” Lin Yun said slowly.

“No, no. You did nothing wrong. It’s me. Like Professor Ding says, I’m too sensitive. Maybe it’s because of what I experienced as a child. I just don’t have the courage to see anyone else get burned to ash by ball lightning. No matter who they are. I don’t have the emotional strength that’s needed for weapons research.”

“But we’re still collecting chip-burning macro-electrons. Those weapons will end up reducing personnel casualties on the battlefield.”

“They’re the same thing, as far as I’m concerned. At this point I don’t ever want to see ball lightning again.”

I was in the records room, returning all of the confidential material I had used in the course of my work. I had to sign my name onto each document, the last bit of paperwork I had to complete before leaving the base. With each name I signed, I took another step away from this world unknown to the outside where I had spent the most unforgettable period of my waning youth. I knew that when I left this time, I would never return.

When I left, Lin Yun accompanied me for quite a ways. When we parted, she said, “Research on civilian uses of ball lightning may start quite soon. We may have another opportunity to work together then.”

“It will be nice when that day comes,” I said. It was indeed a comforting thought. But a different feeling prompted me not to wait for that possible future reunion, and instead say the words I had long wanted to tell her.

“Lin Yun, the first time I met you on Mount Tai, I felt something I’d never felt before….” I looked off at the distant mountains separating us from Beijing.

“I know… but we’re too different.” She followed my gaze. We remained like that for a while, not looking at each other, but watching the same spot in the distance.

“Yes. Too different… Take care.”

With the clouds of war growing thick and foreboding, she surely understood what I meant by the last two words.

“You too,” she said lightly.

The car had driven a fair distance when I looked back and saw her standing there still. The autumn wind had blown a carpet of leaves at her feet, so it seemed like she was standing in the middle of a golden river. This was the last impression that Major Lin Yun left me with.

After that, I never saw her again.

Strange Phenomena IV

When I returned to the Lightning Institute, I fell into a deep malaise. I spent my days in a stupor, passing the time getting drunk in my apartment. One day Gao Bo visited. He said, “You’re an idiot. That’s the only way to describe you.”

“What for?” I asked lazily.

“Are you under the impression that you’re a saint simply because you left weapons research? Any civilian technology can be put to military use. Likewise, any military technology can benefit the public. As a matter of fact, practically all of the major scientific advances of the past century, in aerospace, nuclear energy, computers, and on and on, were the product of cooperation between scientists and soldiers following different paths. Is even this simple truth too hard for you to understand?”

“I have unique experiences and wounds that others don’t. Besides, I don’t believe you. I’ll be able to find a research project that saves and benefits lives and has absolutely no use as a weapon.”

“Impossible, I’d say. The scalpel can kill, too. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you found something to do.”

It was already late when Gao Bo left. I turned off the light and lay down on my bed. Like every night recently, I entered a state of non-sleep, more exhausting than being awake, since the nightmares came one after another. They rarely repeated, but all of them shared the same background noise, the wailing of ball lightning in flight, like a lonely xun flute blowing endlessly in the wilderness.

A sound woke me. Deet. Just one brief note, but it stood out from the noise of my dream, and I was clearly aware that it came from non-dream reality. I opened my eyes and looked at the strange blue light enveloping the room. The light was dim and flickered occasionally, and rendered the ceiling cold and dark, like the roof of a tomb.

I sat up halfway and noticed that the light was coming from the LCD screen of my laptop, which was sitting on the table. That afternoon, as I was unpacking a travel bag I had been too lazy to open up for the many days I’d been back from the base, I found my old laptop and connected it to a network cable so I could go online. But when I pressed the switch, the screen remained black but for a few lines displaying an error message from the ROM self-check. Then I remembered that it was the machine I’d taken to the ball lightning weapons test exercise, and that its processor and memory had been torched by the ball lightning discharge, the CPU and two RAM sticks turned to ash. And so I just left it there and focused on other things.

But now the computer was running! A computer sans CPU and memory had started up! The Windows startup logo appeared on the screen. Then, with a soft clicking of the hard drive, the desktop popped up, the blue sky so empty and the meadow such a brilliant green that they seemed to belong to a strange other world, as if the LCD screen was a window onto it.

I forced myself out of bed and went to turn on the light, the violent shaking of my hands making it hard to reach the switch. The brief moment from when I flipped the switch until the light came flooding in felt like a suffocating eternity. The light snuffed out the weird blue, but did nothing to lessen the fear that gripped my whole body. I remembered the words Ding Yi had left me with when we parted: “If you come across anything, give me a call,” he had said, meaningfully, looking at me with that peculiar expression of his.

So I picked up the phone and dialed Ding Yi’s cell phone in a fluster. He was evidently not asleep, since the phone only rang once before he answered.

“Come to my place at once! The faster the better! It… it’s turned on. It’s running. I mean, the… the notebook computer is running….” I found it hard to be coherent, given the circumstances.

“Is this Chen? I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything until I get there,” Ding Yi said in a voice that sounded perfectly calm.

After I set down the telephone, I looked back at the laptop. As before, it was quietly displaying the desktop, as if waiting for something. The desktop’s blue-green odd-eyed stare left me unable to remain in the room, so without even getting dressed, I went outside. The hall of the bachelors’ apartments was quiet enough to hear the snoring of my neighbor, and I felt much better and breathed more easily. I stood in the doorway and waited for Ding Yi to get there.

He arrived quickly. Ball lightning theoretical research was to be transferred to the Institute of Physics, so he had been in the city for the past few days in connection with that.

“Shall we go in?” he said, after a glance at the tightly closed door behind me.

“I… I won’t. You go in,” I said, turning aside to let him pass.

“It might be something incredibly simple.”

“Maybe for you. But me… I can’t take it anymore,” I said, pulling at my hair.

“I don’t know whether or not supernatural phenomena exist, but what you’ve seen is certainly not that.”

His words calmed me down a bit, like an adult’s hand grabbed by a child in the terrifying dark, or the firm ground beneath a drowning man’s feet. But this feeling immediately made me depressed. Before Ding Yi, my mind was weak; before Lin Yun, my actions were weak. I was such a fucking weakling—no wonder I placed after Ding Yi and Jiang Xingchen in Lin Yun’s heart. Ball lightning had molded me into this form; from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined. I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.

Biting the bullet, I followed Ding Yi into my room. Past his thin shoulder I saw that the computer on the table had entered screen saver mode, the star field. Then the screen went dark. Ding Yi moved the mouse and the desktop came up again. I had to avert my eyes from the strange grass.

Ding Yi picked up the computer and, after inspecting it, passed it to me. “Take it apart.”

“No.” I pushed it aside. When I made contact with its warm case, my hand jerked back as if shocked. Something about it felt alive.

“Fine. I’ll take it apart. You look at the screen. And find a Phillips screwdriver.”

“You don’t need one. I didn’t put the screws back after the last time.”

And so he began feeling around the laptop. They were ordinarily hard to dismantle, but mine was a late-model modular Dell, so he was easily able to open the bottom of the case. As he worked, he said, “Do you remember the first time we used the high-speed camera to record the ball lightning’s energy discharge? We played it back frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the incinerated wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the image. Do you remember what Lin Yun said then?”

“She shouted: ‘It’s like a cubic bubble!’ ”

“That’s right…. Pay attention to the screen as I look inside,” he said, then bent at the waist and peered into the interior of the open computer.

At that moment, the screen went black, except for two lines displaying a self-check error message, indicating that no CPU or memory had been found.

Ding Yi flipped over the computer to show me the motherboard, where the CPU and RAM slots were empty.

“The moment I observed this, the quantum wave function collapsed.” He set the computer carefully down on the table. Its screen remained black.

“Do you mean that the incinerated CPU and memory sticks exist in a quantum state, just like the macro-electrons?”

“Yes. In other words, when the chips experience matter-wave resonance with the macro-electron, they turn into a macro-particle in a quantum state. Ball lightning’s energy release is essentially the full or partial superposition of the probability clouds of it and its target. The chips’ state is indeterminate—they exist between two states, destroyed and undestroyed. Just now, when the computer started up, they were in the latter state, the CPU and memory completely unharmed and plugged into their slots in the motherboard. But when I observed them, their quantum states collapsed back into a destroyed state.”

“In the absence of the observer, when will the chips exist in an undestroyed state?”

“That’s undetermined. They only exist as the probability of an event. You can consider the chips in this computer to be within the probability cloud.”

“Then the animals that were burned up—are they in a quantum state, too?” I asked nervously, with the premonition that I was nearing an unbelievable truth.

Ding Yi nodded.

I didn’t have the courage to ask my next question, but Ding Yi looked calmly at me, and clearly knew what I was thinking.

“Yes, the people too. All the people who have been killed by ball lightning exist in a quantum state. Strictly speaking, they haven’t really died. They’re like Schrödinger’s cat, and exist indeterminately in two states, living and dead.” Ding Yi stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the deep night. “To them, to be or not to be is indeed a question.”

“Can we see them?”

Ding Yi waved a hand at the window, as if resolutely dismissing the idea from my brain. “Impossible. We’ll never be able to see them, since their collapsed state is death. They exist alive for a certain probability of the quantum state, but when we appear as observers, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state, to their urns or graves.”

“Do you mean they’re alive in some parallel universe?”

“No, no. You’ve misunderstood. They live in our own world. Their probability cloud might cover quite a large area. Perhaps they’re even standing in this room, right behind you.”

The skin crawled on my back.

Ding Yi turned around and pointed behind me. “But when you turn around to take a look, they immediately collapse to a destroyed state. Trust me: neither you nor any other person will ever be able to see them. That includes cameras and other observers. Detection of their presence is impossible.”

“Can they leave traces behind in the real world that are not in a quantum state?”

“They can. I suspect you’ve already seen such traces.”

“Then why don’t they write me a letter!” I shouted, losing control. By “they,” I meant only two people.

“Compared to an object like a computer chip, a conscious being in a quantum state, particularly a human, behaves in a far more complicated manner. How they interact with us in the non-quantum-state world is an unanswered mystery, one that contains many logical and even philosophical traps. For example: maybe they have written, but how large is the probability that those letters would have a non-quantum state for you to read them? Also, is the real world in a quantum state for them? If it is, then they will have a very hard time finding this state of you in your probability cloud. For them, the road home is long and uncertain…. But that’s enough. These are things that can’t be figured out in a short amount of time. Get stuck down a blind alley and you’ll burn out. Take your time to think things over later.”

I said nothing. How could I stop thinking?

Ding Yi picked up a more than half-filled bottle of Red Star erguotou from the table, and poured us each a glass. “Come on. This might push those thoughts from your mind.”

With the fiery spirit burning in my blood, the chaos in my brain did clear out a little. I tried to think of other things instead.

“How’s Lin Yun doing? What’s she up to?” I asked.

“Still collecting chip-attacking macro-electrons. I’m not too sure about the details. Some unfortunate incidents came between us.”

“What happened?”

“I secretly installed a miniature video camera in her apartment.”

I waited.

“She found it and called me a pervert. If it had been any other man, she would have forgiven me, but on the surface I look like someone who’s never had an interest in women. And that is indeed the case: my mind is fully occupied by abstract theory, and naturally I’m obtuse when it comes to these irrational matters. The camera didn’t even capture anything, anyway. It recorded, and then erased the recording. I explained this repeatedly, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“You were trying to install an… observer? Are you worried about the terrorists?”

“Particularly that teacher. She’s got to hate Lin Yun’s guts.”

“Can people in a quantum state attack people who aren’t?”

“I don’t know. From a logical standpoint, there’s too much that’s unclear. But it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“Didn’t you explain your motivation to her?”

“I did. But she said I was bullshitting. With the quantum effect on a macro level, the world has become strange and uncanny, and it’s hard for ordinary people to believe. I couldn’t offer much by way of explanation, and before further research is in, I don’t want to sow confusion on base.”

“My mind is already confused to the extreme,” I said, dropping to the bed in a daze.

“You should find something to do.”