Hold Up the Sky

MIRROR

As research delves deeper, humanity is discovering that quantum effects are nothing more than surface ripples in the ocean of existence, shadows of the disturbances arising from the deeper laws governing the workings of matter. With these laws beginning to reveal themselves, quantum mechanics’ ever-shifting picture of reality is once again stabilizing, deterministic variables once again replacing probabilities. In this new model of the universe, the chains of causality that were thought eliminated have surfaced once more, and clearer than before.

PURSUIT

In the office were the flags of China and the CCP. There were also two men, one on either side of the broad desk.

“I know you’re very busy, sir, but I must report this. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it,” said the man in front of the desk. He wore the uniform of a police superintendent second class. He was near fifty, but he stood ramrod-straight, and the lines of his face were hard and vigorous.

“I know the weight of that last sentence coming from you, Xufeng, veteran investigator of thirty years.” The Senior Official looked at the red and blue pencil slowly twirling between his fingers as he spoke, as if all his attention were focused on assessing the merit of its sharpening. He tucked away his gaze like this much of the time. In the years Chen Xufeng had known him, the Senior Official had looked him in the eyes no more than three times. Each time had come at a turning point in Chen’s life.

“Every time we take action, the target escapes one step ahead of us. They know what we’re going to do.”

“Surely you’ve seen similar things before,” the Senior Official said.

“If it were simply that, it wouldn’t be a big deal, of course. We considered the possibility of an inside job right off.”

“Knowing your subordinates, I find that rather improbable.”

“We found that out for ourselves,” Chen said. “Like you instructed, we’ve reduced the participants in this case as much as possible. There are only four people in the task force, and only two know the full story. But just in case, I planned to call a meeting of all the members and question them one by one. I told Chenbing to handle it—you know him, the one from the Eleventh Department, very reliable, took care of the business with Song Cheng—and that’s when it happened.

“Don’t take this for a joke, sir. What I’m going to say next is the honest truth.” Chen Xufeng laughed a little, as if embarrassed by his own defensiveness. “Right then, they called. Our target called me on the phone! I heard them say on my cell phone, You don’t need this meeting, there’s no traitor among you. Less than thirty seconds after I told Chenbing I wanted to call a meeting!”

The Senior Official’s pencil stilled between his fingers.

“You might be thinking that we were bugged, but that’s impossible. I chose the location for the conversation at random to be the middle of a government agency auditorium while it was being used for chorus rehearsals for National Day. We had to talk right into each other’s ears to hear.

“And similar funny business kept happening after that. They called us eight times in total, each time about things we had just said or done. The scariest part is, not only do they hear everything, they see everything. One time, Chenbing decided to search the target’s parents’ home. He and the other task force member were just standing up, not even out of the department office, when they got the target’s call. You guys have the wrong search warrant, they told them. My parents are careful people. They might think you guys are frauds. Chenbing took out the warrant to check, and sir, he really had taken the wrong one.”

The Senior Official set the pencil lightly on his desk, waiting in silence for Chen Xufeng to continue, but the latter seemed to have run out of steam. The Senior Official took out a cigarette. Chen Xufeng hurriedly patted at his coat pockets for a lighter, but couldn’t find one.

One of the two phones on the desk began to ring.

Chen Xufeng swept his gaze over the caller ID. “It’s them,” he said quietly.

Unperturbed, the Senior Official motioned at him. Chen pressed the speaker button. A voice immediately sounded, worn and very young. “Your lighter is in the briefcase.”

Chen Xufeng glanced at the Senior Official, then began to rummage through the briefcase on the desk. He couldn’t find anything at first.

“It’s wedged in a document, the one on urban household registration reform.”

Chen Xufeng took out the document. The lighter fell onto the desk with a clatter.

“That’s one fine lighter there. French-made S. T. Dupont brand, solid palladium-gold alloy, thirty diamonds set in each side, worth… let me look it up… 39,960 yuan.”

The Senior Official didn’t move, but Chen Xufeng raised his head to study the office. This wasn’t the Senior Official’s personal office; rather, it had been selected at random from the rooms in this office building.

The target continued the demonstration of their powers. “Senior Official, there are five cigarettes left in your box of Chunghwas. There’s only one Mevacor cholesterol tablet left in your coat pocket—better have your secretary get some more.”

Chen Xufeng picked up the box of cigarettes on the desk; the Senior Official took out the blister pack of pills from his pocket. The target was correct on both counts.

“Stop coming after me. I’m in a tricky situation just like you. I’m not sure what to do now,” the target continued.

“Can we discuss this in person?” asked the Senior Official.

“Believe me, it would be a disaster for both sides.” With that, the phone went dead.

Chen Xufeng exhaled. Now he had the proof to back up his story—the thought of disbelief from the Senior Official unsettled him more than his opponent’s antics. “It’s like seeing a ghost,” he said, shaking his head.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do see danger,” said the Senior Official. For the fourth time in his life, Chen Xufeng saw that pair of eyes bore into his.

THE INMATE AND THE PURSUED

In the No. 2 Detention Center at the city outskirts, Song Cheng walked under escort into the cell. There were already six other prisoners inside, mostly other inmates serving extended terms.

Cold looks greeted Song Cheng from all directions. Once the guard left, shutting the door behind him, a small, thin man came up.

“Hey, you, Pig Grease!” he yelled. Seeing Song Cheng’s confusion, he continued, “The law of the land here ranks us Big Grease, Second Grease, Third Grease… Pig Grease at the bottom, that’s you. Hey, don’t think we’re taking advantage of the latecomer.” He pointed his thumb at a heavily bearded man leaning in the corner. “Brother Bao’s only been here three days, and he’s already Big Grease. Trash like you may have held a pretty government rank before, but here you’re lowest of the low!” He turned toward the other man and asked respectfully, “How will you receive him, Brother Bao?”

“Stereo sound,” came the careless reply.

Two other inmates sprang up from the bunks and grabbed Song Cheng by the ankles, dangling him upside down. They held him over the toilet and slowly lowered him until his head was largely inside.

“Sing a song,” Skinny Guy commanded. “That’s what stereo sound means. Give us a comrade song like ‘Left Hand, Right Hand’!”

Song Cheng didn’t sing. The inmates let go, and his head pitched all the way into the toilet.

Struggling, Song Cheng pulled his head out. He immediately began to vomit. Now he realized that the story designed by those who had framed him would make him the target of all his fellow inmates’ contempt.

The delighted prisoners around him suddenly scattered and dashed back to their bunks. The door opened; the police guard from earlier came in. He looked with disgust at Song Cheng, still crouched in front of the toilet. “Wash off your head at the tap. You have a visitor.”

Once Song Cheng rinsed off, he followed the guard into a spacious office where his visitor awaited. He was very young, thin-faced with messy hair and thick glasses. He carried an enormous briefcase.

Song Cheng sat down coldly without looking at the visitor. He had been permitted a visit at this time, and here, not in a visitation room with a glass partition; from that, Song Cheng had a good guess as to who sent him. But the first words out of his visitor’s mouth made Song lift his head in surprise.

“My name’s Bai Bing. I’m an engineer at the Center for Meteorological Modeling. They’re coming after me for the same reason they came after you.”

Song Cheng looked at the visitor. His tone of voice seemed odd: this was a subject that should have been discussed in whispers, but Bai Bing spoke at a normal volume, as if he wasn’t talking about anything that needed hiding.

Bai Bing seemed to have noticed his confusion. “I called the Senior Official two hours ago. He wanted to talk face-to-face with me, but I turned him down. After that, they got on my trail, followed me all the way to the detention center doors. They haven’t seized me because they’re curious about our meeting. They want to know what I’ll tell you. They’re listening in to our conversation right now.”

Song Cheng shifted his gaze from Bai Bing to the ceiling. He found it hard to trust this person, and regardless, he wasn’t interested in the matter. The law might have spared him the death penalty, but it had sentenced and executed his spirit all the same. His heart was dead. He could no longer muster interest in anything.

“I know the truth, all of it,” Bai Bing said.

A smirk flickered at the corner of Song Cheng’s mouth. No one knows the truth but them, but he didn’t bother to say that out loud.

“You began working for the provincial-level Commission for Discipline Inspection seven years ago. You were promoted to this rank just last year.”

Song Cheng remained silent. He was angry now. Bai Bing’s words had dragged him back into the memories he’d worked so hard to escape.

THE BIG CASE

At the beginning of the century, the Zhengzhou Municipal Government began a policy of setting aside a number of deputy-level positions for holders of Ph.D.s. Many other cities followed its example, and later, provincial governments began to adopt the same practice, even removing graduation-year requirements and offering higher starting positions. It was an excellent way to demonstrate the recruiters’ magnanimity and vision to the world, but in reality, the attractive concept amounted to little more than political record engineering. The recruiters were farsighted indeed—they knew perfectly well that these book-smart, well-educated young people lacked any sort of political experience. When they entered the unfamiliar and vicious political sphere, they found themselves swallowed whole in labyrinthine bureaucracy, unable to gain any foothold. The whole business was no big loss in job vacancies, while substantially padding the recruiters’ political résumés.

An opportunity like this led Song Cheng, already a law professor at the time, to leave his peaceful campus study for the world of politics. His peers who chose the same road didn’t last a year before they left in utter despair, beaten men and women, their only achievement being the destruction of their dreams. But Song Cheng was an exception. He not only stayed in politics, but did exceptionally well.

The credit belonged to two people. One was his college classmate Lu Wenming. In their last year as undergraduates, he’d placed in the civil service even as Song Cheng tested into grad school. With his advantageous family background and his own dedicated effort, ten years later he’d become the youngest provincial secretary of discipline inspection in the nation, head of the organization in charge of maintaining discipline within the provincial-level Party. He was the one who’d advised Song Cheng to give up his books for governance.

When the simple scholar first began, Lu didn’t lead him by the hand so much as he toddled him along by the feet, hand-placing Song’s every step as he taught him how to walk. He’d steered Song Cheng around traps and treachery that the latter could never have spotted himself, allowing him to progress up the road that had led to today. The other person he should thank was the Senior Official… on that thought, Song Cheng’s heart gave a spasm.

“You have to admit, you chose this for yourself. You can’t say they didn’t give you a way out.”

Song Cheng nodded. Yes, they’d given him a way out, a boulevard with his name in lights at that.

Bai Bing continued, “The Senior Official met with you a few months ago. I’m sure you remember it well. It was in a villa out in the exurbs, by the Yang River. The Senior Official doesn’t normally see outsiders there.

“Once you were out of the car, you found him waiting for you at the gate, a very high honor. He clasped your hand warmly and led you into the drawing room.

“The décor would’ve given off a first impression of unassuming simplicity, but you’d be wrong there. That aged-looking mahogany furniture is worth millions. The one plain scroll painting hanging on the wall looks even older, and there’s insect damage if you look closely, but that’s Dangheqizi by the Ming Dynasty painter Wu Bin, bought at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong for eight million HKD. And the cup of tea the Senior Official personally steeped for you? The leaves were ranked five stars at the International Tea Competition. It goes for nine hundred thousand yuan per half kilo.”

Song Cheng really could recall the tea Bai Bing spoke of. The liquid had sparkled the green of a jewel, a few delicate leaves drifting in its clarity like the languid notes from a mountain saint’s zither…. He even recalled how he’d felt: If only the outside world could be this lovely and pure. The tarp of apathy was torn from Song Cheng’s stifled thoughts, his blurred mind snapping back into focus. He stared at Bai Bing, eyes wide with shock.

How could he know all this? The whole affair had been dispatched to the deepest oubliettes, a secret among secrets. No more than four people in all the world knew, and that was counting himself.

“Who are you?!” He opened his mouth for the first time.

Bai Bing smiled. “I introduced myself earlier. I’m an ordinary person. But I’ll tell you straight off, not only do I know a lot, I know everything, or at least have the means to know everything. That’s why they want to get rid of me like they got rid of you.”

Bai Bing continued his account. “The Senior Official sat close, one hand on your shoulder. That benevolent gaze he turned on you would have moved anyone from the junior ranks. From what I know (and remember, I know everything), he’d never shown anyone else the same intimacy. He told you, Don’t worry, young man, we’re all comrades here. Whatever the matter, just speak honestly and trust that you’ll get honesty in return. We can always come to a solution… you have ideas, you’re capable, you have a sense of duty and a sense of mission. Those last two in particular are as precious as an oasis in a desert among young cadres nowadays. This is why I think so highly of you. In you, I see the reflection of what I was once like.

“I should mention that the Senior Official may have been telling the truth. Your official work didn’t give you many chances to interact with him, but quite a few times, you’d run into him in the hallways of the government building or coming out of a meeting, and he’d always be the one to come up to you to chat. He very rarely did that with lower-ranking officials, especially the younger ones. People took notice. He might not have said anything to help you at organizational meetings, but those gestures did a lot for your career.”

Song Cheng nodded again. He’d known all this, and had been immensely grateful. All that time, Song had wanted the opportunity to repay him.

“Then the Senior Official raised his hand and gestured behind him. Immediately, someone entered and quietly set a big stack of documents and materials on the table. You must have noticed that he wasn’t the Senior Official’s normal secretary.

“The Senior Official passed a hand over the documents and said, The project you just completed fully demonstrates those priceless assets of yours. It required such an immense and difficult investigation to collect evidence, but these documents are ample, detailed, and reliable, the conclusions drawn profound. It’s hard to believe you did it all in half a year. It would be the Party’s great fortune to have more outstanding Discipline Inspection officials like you…. I don’t need to tell you how you felt at that moment, I think.”

Of course he didn’t. Song Cheng had never been so horrified in his life. That stack of documents first sent him shaking as if electrocuted, then froze him into stone.

Bai Bing continued: “It all started with the investigation into the illegal apportionment of state-owned land you undertook on behalf of the Central Commission, yes….

“I recall that when you were a child, you and two of your friends went exploring in a cave, called Old Man Cavern by the locals. The entrance was only half a meter high, and you had to crouch down to enter. But inside was an enormous, dark vault, its ceiling too high for your flashlights to reach. All you could see were endless bats swishing past the beams of light. Every little sound provoked a rumbling echo from the distance. The dank cold seeped into your bones…. It’s a lively metaphor for the investigation: walking along, following that seemingly run-of-the-mill trail of clues, only to find yourself led toward places that made you afraid to believe your own eyes. As you deepened your investigation, a grand network of corruption spanning the entire province unfolded before you, and every strand of the web led in one direction, to one person. And now, the top-secret Discipline Inspection report you’d prepared for the Central Commission was in his hands! In this investigation, you’d considered all sorts of worst-case scenarios, but you never dreamed of the one that you faced now. You were thrown into total panic. You stammered, H-how did this end up in your hands, sir? The Senior Official smiled indulgently and lifted his hand to gesture lightly again. You immediately got your answer: The secretary of discipline inspection, Lu Wenming, walked into the room.

“You stood and glared at Lu Wenming. How—how could you do this? How could you go against our organization’s rules and principles like this? Lu Wenming cut you off with a wave of his hand and asked in the same furious tone of voice as you, How could you go ahead with something like this without telling me?

“I’ve taken over your duties as secretary for the year you’re undergoing training at the Central Party School, you shot back. Of course I couldn’t tell you, it was against the rules of the organization!

“Lu Wenming shook his head sorrowfully, looking as if he wanted to weep in despair. If I hadn’t caught this report in time… can you even imagine the consequences? Song Cheng, your fatal flaw is that insistence on dividing the world into black and white, when reality is nothing more than gray!”

Song Cheng exhaled long and slow. He remembered how he’d stared dumbly at his classmate, unable to believe that he could say something like that. He’d never revealed thoughts in that vein before. Was the hatred of internal corruption he’d shown in their many late-night conversations, the steadfast courage he displayed as they tackled sensitive cases that drew pressure from all directions, the deeply personal concern for the Party and the nation he’d expressed at so many dawns, after grueling all-nighters at work—was all that nothing but pretense?

“It’s not that Lu Wenming was lying before. It’s more that he never delved that deeply into his soul in front of you. He’s like that famous dessert, Baked Alaska, flash-cooked ice cream. The hot parts and the cold parts are both real. But the Senior Official didn’t look at Lu Wenming. Instead, he slammed a hand onto the table. What gray? Wenming, I really can’t stand this side of you! What Song Cheng did was outstanding, faultless. In that respect he’s better than you! He turned to you and said, Young man, you did exactly as you should have done. A person, especially a young person, is gone forever if they lose that faith and sense of mission. I look down on people like that.”

The part that had struck Song Cheng the deepest was that, although he and Lu Wenming were the same age, the Senior Official only called him “young,” and emphasized it repeatedly at that. The unspoken implication was clear: With me as an opponent, you’re still nothing but a child. In the present, Song Cheng could only concede that he was right.

“The Senior Official continued on. Nonetheless, young man, we still need to mature a little. Let’s take an example from your report. There really are problems with the Hengyu Aluminum Electrolysis Base, and they’re even worse than you discovered in your investigations. Not only are domestic officials implicated, foreign investors have collaborated with them in serious legal trespasses. Once the matter is dealt with, the foreigners will withdraw their investments. The largest aluminum-electrolysis enterprise in the country will be put out of business. Tongshan Bauxite Mines, which provides the aluminum ore for Hengyu, will be in deep trouble too. Next comes the Chenglin nuclear power plant. It was built too big due to the energy crisis the last few years, and with the severe domestic overproduction of electricity now, most of this brand-new power plant’s output goes to the aluminum-electrolysis base. Once Hengyu collapses, Chenglin Nuclear Facility will face bankruptcy as well. And then Zhaoxikou Chemical Plant, which provides the enriched uranium for Chenglin, will be in trouble…. With that, nearly seventy billion yuan in government investment will be gone without a trace, and thirty to forty thousand people will lose their jobs. These corporations are all located within the provincial capital’s outskirts—this vital city will be instantly thrown into turmoil…. And the Hengyu issue I went into is only a small part of this investigation. The case implicates one provincial-level official, three sub-provincial-level officials, two hundred and fifteen prefectural-level officials, six hundred and fourteen county-level officials, and countless more in lower ranks. Nearly half of the most successful large-scale enterprises and the most promising investment projects in the province will be impacted in some way. Once the secrets are out, the province’s entire economy and political structure will be dead in the water! And we don’t know, and have no way of predicting, what even worse consequences might arise from so large-scale and severe a disturbance. The political stability and economic growth our province has worked so hard to attain will be gone without a trace. Is that really to the benefit of the Party and the country? Young man, you can’t think like a legal scholar anymore, demanding justice by the law come hell or high water. It’s irresponsible. We’ve progressed along the road of history to today because of balance, arising from the happy medium between various elements. To abandon balance and seek an extreme is a sign of immaturity in politics.

“When the Senior Official finished, Lu Wenming began. I’ll take care of things with the Central Commission. You just make sure you take over properly from the cadres in that project group. I’ll break off training at the Central Party School next week and come back to help you—

“Scoundrel! The Senior Official once again slammed the table. Lu Wenming jumped in fright. Is that how you took my words? You thought I was trying to get this young man to abandon his principles and duty?! Wenming, you’ve known me for years. From the depths of your heart, do you really think I have so little sense of Party and principle? When did you become so oily? It saddens me. Then he turned to you. Young man, you’ve done a truly exceptional job so far on your work. You must stand fast in the face of interference and pressure, and hand the corrupt elements their comeuppance! This case hurts the eyes and heart to look upon. You must not spare them, in the name of the people, in the name of justice! Don’t let what I just said burden you. I was just reminding you as an old Party member to be careful, to avoid serious consequences beyond your prediction. But there’s one thing I know—you must get to the bottom of this terrible corruption case. The Senior Official took out a piece of paper as he spoke, handing it to you solemnly. Is this wide enough in scope for you?”

Song Cheng had known right then that they’d set up a sacrificial altar and were ready to lay out the offerings. He looked at the list of names. It was wide enough in scope, truly enough, enough in both rank and quantity. It would be a corruption case to astound the entire nation, and with the case’s triumphant conclusion, Song Cheng would become known throughout the country as an anti-corruption hero, revered by the people as a paragon of justice and virtue.

But he was clear in his heart that this was nothing more than a lizard severing its own tail in a crisis. The lizard would escape; the tail would grow back in no time. He saw the Senior Official watching him, and in that moment he really did think of a lizard, and he shivered. But Song Cheng knew, too, that the Senior Official was afraid, that he’d made him afraid, and it made Song Cheng proud. The pride made him vastly overestimate his own capabilities at that moment, but more vitally, there was that ineffable thing running in the blood of every scholar-idealist. He made the fatal choice.

“You stood and took up the pile of documents with both hands. You said to the Senior Official, By the Internal Supervision Regulations of the CCP, the secretary of discipline inspection has the authority to conduct inspections upon Party officials of the same rank. According to the rules, sir, these documents can’t stay with you. I’ll take them.

“Lu Wenming went to stop you, but the Senior Official gently tugged him back. At the door, you heard your classmate say in a low voice behind you, You’ve gone too far, Song Cheng.

“The Senior Official walked you to your car. As you were about to leave, he took your hand and said slowly, Come again soon, young man.”

Only later did Song Cheng fully realize the deeper meaning to his words: Come again soon. You don’t have much time left.

THE BIG BANG

“Who the hell are you?” Song Cheng stared at Bai Bing fearfully. How could he know this much? No one could know this much!

“Okay, we’ll end the reminiscing here.” Bai Bing cut off his narrative with a wave of his hand. “Let me go into the whys and wherefores, to clear up the questions you have. Hmm… do you know what the big bang is?”

Song Cheng stared blankly at Bai Bing, his brain unable to immediately process Bai’s words. At last he managed the response of a normal human and laughed.

“Okay, okay,” Bai Bing said. “I know that was sudden. But please trust that I’m all there in the head. To go through everything clearly, we really do need to start with the big bang. This… Damn, how do I even explain it to you? Let’s return to the big bang. You probably know at least a little.

“Our universe was created in a massive explosion twenty billion years ago. Most people picture the big bang like some ball of fire bursting forth in the darkness of space, but that’s incorrect. Before the big bang, there was nothing, not even time and space. There was only a singularity, a single point of undefined size that rapidly expanded to form our universe today. Anything and everything, including us, originated from the singularity’s expansion. It is the seed from which all living things grew! The theory behind it all is really deep, and I don’t fully understand it myself, but the relevant part is this: With the advancement of physics and the appearance of ‘theories of everything’ like string theory, physicists are starting to figure out the structure of that singularity and create a mathematical model for it. This is different from the quantum-theory models they had before. If we can determine the fundamental parameters of the singularity before the big bang, we can determine everything in the universe it forms too. An uninterrupted chain of cause and effect running through the entire history of the universe…” He sighed. “Seriously, how am I supposed to explain it all?”

Bai Bing saw Song Cheng shake his head, as if he didn’t understand, or as if he didn’t even want to keep listening.

Bai Bing said, “Take my advice and stop thinking about the suffering you’ve gone through. Honestly, I haven’t been much luckier. Like I said, I’m just an ordinary person, but now they’re hunting me, and I may end up even worse than you, all because I know everything. You can hold on to the fact that you were martyred for your sense of duty and faith, but I’m… I just have really shitty luck. Enough shit luck for eight reincarnations. I’ve been screwed over even worse than you.”

Song Cheng only continued to look at him, silently, as if to say: No one can be screwed over worse than me.

FRAMED

A week after he met with the Senior Official, Song Cheng was arrested for murder.

To be fair, Song Cheng had already known they’d take extraordinary measures against him. The usual administrative and political methods were too risky to use on someone who knew so much and was already in the process of taking action. But he hadn’t imagined his opponent would move so quickly, or strike so viciously.

The victim was a nightclub dancer called LuoLuo, and he’d died in Song Cheng’s car. The doors were locked from the outside. Two canisters of propane, the type used to refill cigarette lighters, had been tossed into the car, both slit open. The liquid inside had completely evaporated, and the high concentration of propane vapor in the car had fatally poisoned the victim. When the body was discovered, it was clutching a battered, broken cell phone in one hand, clearly used in an attempt to smash the car windows.

The police produced ample evidence. They had two hours of recordings to prove that Song Cheng had been in most irregular association with LuoLuo for the last three months. The most incriminating piece of evidence was the 110 call LuoLuo had made to the police shortly before his death.

Afterward, the police found a short phone-call recording on the victim’s cell, preserving an exchange between Song Cheng and the victim.

This was a highly professional frame-up. Its brilliance lay in that the evidence the police held was just about 100 percent real.

Song Cheng really had been associating with LuoLuo for a while, in secret, and it could indeed be called irregular. The two recordings weren’t faked, although the second had been distorted.

Song Cheng met LuoLuo because of Xu Xueping, director general of Changtong Group, who held intimate financial ties to many nodes of the network of corruption and no doubt considerable knowledge of its background and inner workings. Of course, Song Cheng couldn’t get any information directly from her, but with LuoLuo he had an in.

LuoLuo didn’t provide Song Cheng information out of any inner sense of righteousness. In his eyes, the world was already good for nothing but wiping his ass on. He was in it for revenge.

This hinterland city shrouded in industrial smog and dust might have been ranked at the bottom of the list of similar-sized Chinese cities for average income, but it had some of the most opulent nightclubs in the nation. The young scions of Beijing’s political families had to watch their image in the capital city, unable to indulge their desires like the rich without Party affiliations. Instead, they got in their cars every weekend and zipped four or five hours along the highway to this city, spent two days and one night in hedonistic extravagance, and zipped back to Beijing on Sunday night.

LuoLuo’s Blue Wave was the highest-end of all the nightclubs. Requesting a song cost at least three thousand yuan, and bottles of Martell and Hennessy priced at thousands each sold multiple cases every night. But Blue Wave’s real claim to fame was that it catered exclusively to female guests.

Unlike his fellow dancers, LuoLuo didn’t care about how much his clients paid, but how much that money meant to them. A white-collar foreign worker making just two or three hundred thousand yuan a year (rare paupers in Blue Wave) could give him a few hundred and he’d accept. But Sister Xu wasn’t one. Her fortune of billions had made waves south of the Yangtze the last few years, and likewise she was smashing the opposition in her expansion northward. But after several months spent together, she’d sent LuoLuo off with a mere four hundred thousand.

It had taken a lot to catch Sister Xu’s eye; after she had broken it off, any other dancer would have, in LuoLuo’s words, swigged enough champagne to make his liver hurt. But not LuoLuo, who was now filled with hatred for Xu Xueping. The arrival of a high-ranking Discipline Inspection official gave him hope of revenge, and he used his talents to entangle himself with Sister Xu once more. Normally, Xu Xueping was closemouthed even with LuoLuo, but once they had too many drinks or snorted too many lines, it was a different story. LuoLuo knew how to take the initiative, too; in the darkest hours before dawn, while Sister Xu slept soundly beside him, he’d silently climb out of bed and search her briefcase and drawers, snapping pictures of documents that he and Song Cheng needed.

Most of the video recordings the police used to prove Song Cheng’s association with LuoLuo had been taken in the main dance hall in Blue Wave. The camera liked to start with the pretty young boys dancing enthusiastically on the stage, before shifting to the expensively dressed female guests gathered in the dim areas, pointing at the stage, now and then smiling confidentially. The final shot always captured Song Cheng and LuoLuo, often sitting in some corner in the back, seeming very intimate as they conversed quietly with heads bent close. As the only male guest in the club, Song Cheng was instantly recognizable….

Song Cheng didn’t have anything to say to that. Most of the time, he could only find LuoLuo at Blue Wave. The lighting in the dance hall was always dim, but these recordings were high resolution and clear. They could only have been taken with a high-end low-light camera, not the sort of equipment normal people would have. That meant they’d noticed him from the very beginning, showing Song Cheng how very amateur he had been compared to his opponent.

That day, LuoLuo wanted to report his latest findings. When Song Cheng met him at the nightclub, LuoLuo uncharacteristically asked to talk in the car. Once they were done, he’d told Song that he felt unwell. If he went back to the club now, his boss would make him get on stage for sure. He wanted to rest for a while in Song Cheng’s car.

Song Cheng had thought that LuoLuo’s addiction might have been acting up again, but he didn’t have a choice. He could only drive back to his office to take care of the work he hadn’t finished during the day, parking in front of the department building with LuoLuo waiting in the car. Forty minutes later, when he came back out, someone had already found LuoLuo dead in a car full of propane fumes. Song Cheng had to open the car door from the outside.

Later, a close friend in the police force who’d participated in the investigation told Song that the lock on his car door didn’t show any signs of sabotage, and the evidence elsewhere really was enough to rule out the possibility of another killer. Logically enough, everyone assumed that Song Cheng had killed LuoLuo. But Song Cheng knew the only possible explanation: LuoLuo had brought the two propane canisters into the car himself.

This was too much for Song Cheng to fight against. He gave up his attempts to clear his name: if someone had used his own life and death as a weapon to frame him, he didn’t have a chance of escape.

Really, LuoLuo committing suicide didn’t surprise Song Cheng; his HIV test had returned positive. But someone else must have prompted him to use his death to frame Song Cheng. What would have been in it for him? What would money be worth to him now? Was the money for someone else? Or maybe his recompense wasn’t money. But what was it, then? Was there some temptation or fear even stronger than his hatred of Xu Xueping? Song Cheng would never know now, but here he could see even more clearly his opponent’s capabilities, and his own naïveté.

This was his life as the world knew it: a high-ranked Discipline Inspection cadre living a secret life of corruption and affairs, arrested for murdering his paramour in a lover’s spat. The temperance he’d previously displayed in his heterosexual relationship only became further proof in the public mind. Like a trampled stinkbug, everything he had possessed disappeared without a trace.

Now Song Cheng realized that he’d been so prepared to sacrifice everything for faith and duty only because he hadn’t even understood what sacrificing everything entailed. He’d of course imagined that death would be the bottom line. Only later did he realize that sacrifice could be far, far crueler. The police took him home one time when they searched his house. His wife and daughter were both there. He reached toward his daughter, but the child shrieked in disgust and buried her face in her mother’s arms, shrinking into a corner. He’d seen the look they gave him only once before, one morning when he’d found a mouse in the trap under the wardrobe, and showed it to them….

“Okay, let’s set aside the big bang and the singularity and all the abstract stuff for now.” Bai Bing broke off Song Cheng’s painful reminiscences and hauled the large briefcase onto the table. “Take a look at this.”

SUPERSTRING COMPUTER, ULTIMATE CAPACITY, DIGITAL MIRROR

“This is a superstring computer,” Bai Bing said, patting the briefcase. “I brought it over, or, if you prefer, stole it from the Center for Meteorological Modeling. I’ll depend on it to escape pursuit.”

Song Cheng shifted his gaze to the briefcase, clearly confused.

“These are expensive. There are only two in the province as of now. According to superstring theory, the fundamental particles of matter aren’t point-like objects, but an infinitely thin one-dimensional string vibrating in eleven dimensions. Nowadays, we can manipulate this string to store and process information along the dimension of its length. That’s the theory behind a superstring computer.

“A CPU or piece of internal storage in a traditional electronic computer is just an atom in a superstring computer! The circuits are formed by the particles’ eleven-dimensional microscale structure. This higher-dimensional subatomic array has given humanity practically infinite storage and operational capacity. Comparing the supercomputers of the past to superstring computers is like comparing our ten fingers to those supercomputers. A superstring computer has ultimate capacity, that is to say, it has the capacity to store the current status of every fundamental particle existing in the known universe and perform operations with them. In other words, if we only look at three dimensions of space and one of time, a superstring computer can model the entire universe on the atomic level….”

Song Cheng alternately looked at the briefcase and Bai Bing. Unlike before, he seemed to be listening to Bai Bing’s words with full attention. In truth, he was desperately seeking any kind of relief, letting this mysterious visitor’s rambling extricate him from his painful memories.

“Sorry for going on and on like this—big bang this and superstring that. It must seem completely unrelated to the reality we’re facing, but to give a proper explanation I can’t sidestep it. Let’s talk about my career next. I’m a software engineer specializing in simulation software. That is, you create a mathematical model and run it in a computer to simulate some object or process in the real world. I studied mathematics, so I do both the model-creating and the programming. In the past I’ve simulated sandstorms, soil erosion on the Loess Plateau, energy generation and economic development trends in the Northeast, so on. Now I’m working on large-scale weather models. I love my work. Watching a piece of the real world running and evolving inside a computer is honestly fascinating.”

Bai Bing looked at Song Cheng, who was staring at him unblinkingly. He seemed to be listening attentively, so Bai Bing continued.

“You know, the field of physics has had huge breakthroughs one after another in recent years, a lot like at the beginning of the last century. Now, if you give us the boundary conditions, we can lift the fog of quantum effects to accurately predict the behavior of fundamental particles, either singly or in a group.

“Notice I mentioned groups. A group of enough particles means a macroscopic body. In other words, we can now create a mathematical model of a macroscopic object on the atomic level. This sort of simulation is called a digital mirror. I’ll give an example. If we used digital mirroring to create a mathematical model of an egg—as in, we input the status of every atom in the egg into the model’s database—and run it in the computer, given suitable boundary conditions, the virtual egg in memory will hatch into a chick. And the virtual chick in memory would be perfectly identical to the chick hatched from the egg in real life, down to the tips of every feather! And think further, what if the object being modeled were bigger than an egg? As big as a tree, a person, many people. As big as a city, a country, or even all of Earth?” Bai Bing was getting worked up, gesturing wildly as he spoke.

“I like to think this way, pushing every idea to its limit. This led me to wonder, what if the object being digitally mirrored were the entire universe?” Bai Bing could no longer control his passion. “Imagine, the entire universe! My god, an entire universe running in RAM! From creation to destruction—”

Bai Bing broke off his enthusiastic account and stood up, suddenly on guard. The door swung open soundlessly. Two grim-faced men entered. The slightly older one turned to Bai Bing and raised his hands to show that he should do the same. Bai Bing and Song Cheng saw the leather handgun holster under his open jacket; Bai Bing obediently put his hands up. The younger man patted Bai Bing down carefully, then shook his head at the older man. He picked up the large briefcase as well, setting it down farther from Bai Bing.

The older man walked to the door and made a welcoming gesture outward. Three more people entered. The first was the city’s chief of police, Chen Xufeng. The second was the province’s secretary of discipline inspection, his old classmate, Lu Wenming. Last came the Senior Official.

The younger cop took out a pair of handcuffs, but Lu Wenming shook his head at him. Chen Xufeng turned his head minutely toward the door, and the two plainclothes police left. One of them removed a small object from the table leg as he left, clearly a listening device.

INITIAL STATE

Bai Bing’s face didn’t show any sign of surprise. He smiled placidly. “You’ve finally caught me.”

“More accurately, you flew into our net on purpose. I have to admit, if you really wanted to escape, we would’ve had a hard time catching you,” said Chen Xufeng.

Lu Wenming glanced at Song Cheng, his expression complicated. He seemed to want to say something, but stopped himself.

The Senior Official slowly shook his head. He intoned solemnly, “Oh, Song Cheng, how did you fall so low…” He stood silent for a long time, hands resting on the table’s edge, his eyes a little damp. No onlooker could have doubted that his grief was real.

“Senior Official, I don’t think you need to playact here,” Bai Bing said, coldly watching the proceedings.

The Senior Official didn’t move.

“You were the one who arranged to frame him.”

“Proof?” the Senior Official asked indulgently, still unmoving.

“After that meeting, you only said one thing about Song Cheng, to him.” Bai Bing pointed at Chen Xufeng. “Xufeng, you know what that whole business with Song Cheng means, of course. Let’s put a little effort into it.”

“What does that prove?”

“It won’t count for anything in court, of course. With your cleverness and experience, you didn’t let anything slip, even in a secret conversation. But he,” Bai Bing pointed again at Chen Xufeng, “got the message loud and clear. He’s always understood you perfectly. He ordered one of the two people earlier to carry out the framing. His name is Chenbing, and he’s his most competent subordinate. The whole process was one formidable engineering project. I don’t think I need to go into detail here.”

The Senior Official slowly turned around and sat down in a chair by the office table. He looked at the ground as he said, “Young man, I have to admit, your sudden appearance has been astonishing in many ways. To use Chief Chen’s words, it’s like seeing a ghost.” He was silent for a while, and then his voice rang out with sincerity. “How about you tell us your real identity? If you really were sent by the central officials, please trust that we’ll assist you however we can.”

“I wasn’t. I’ve said again and again that I’m an ordinary guy. My identity is nothing more than what you’ve already looked up.”

The Senior Official nodded. It was impossible to tell whether Bai Bing’s words had reassured him, or added to his concern.

“Sit, let’s all sit.” The Senior Official waved a hand at Lu and Chen, both still standing, and drew closer to Bai Bing. “Young man,” he said solemnly. “Let’s get to the bottom of all this today, okay?”

Bai Bing nodded. “That’s my plan too. I’ll start from the beginning.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. We heard everything you said to Song Cheng earlier. Just continue where you left off.”

Bai Bing was momentarily at a loss for words, unable to remember where he’d stopped.

“Atomic-level model of the entire universe,” the Senior Official reminded him, but seeing that Bai Bing still couldn’t figure out how to start talking again, he added his own input. “Young man, I don’t think your idea is feasible. Superstring computers have ultimate capacity, yes, providing the hardware basis for running this sort of simulation. But have you considered the problem of the initial state? To make a digital mirror of the universe, you must start the simulation from some initial state—in other words, to construct a model that represents the universe on an atomic level, for the instant the model starts at, you’ll have to input the status at that instant of every atom in the universe into the computer, one by one. Is this possible? It wouldn’t be possible with the egg you mentioned, let alone the universe. The number of atoms in that egg outnumber the number of eggs ever laid since the beginning of time by orders of magnitude. It wouldn’t even be possible with a bacterium, which still contains an astonishing number of atoms. Taking a step back, even if we put forth the near unimaginable manpower and computing power needed to find the initial state of a small object like the bacterium or the egg on an atomic level, what about the boundary conditions for when the model runs? For example, the outside temperature, humidity, and so on needed for a chicken egg to hatch. Taken on the atomic level, these boundary conditions will require unimaginable quantities of data too, perhaps even more than the modeled object itself.”

“You’ve laid out the technical problems beautifully. I admire that,” Bai Bing said sincerely.

“The Senior Official was once a star student in the field of high-energy physics. After Deng Xiaoping’s reforms restored university degrees, his was one of the first classes to receive master’s degrees in physics in China,” said Lu Wenming.

Bai Bing nodded in Lu Wenming’s direction, then turned toward the Senior Official. “But you forget, there’s a moment in time in which the universe was extremely simple, even simpler than eggs and bacteria, simpler than anything in existence today. The number of atoms in it at the time was zero, see. It had no size and no composition.”

“The big bang singularity?” the Senior Official said immediately, almost no delay between Bai Bing’s words and his. It was a glimpse at the quick, agile mind beneath his slow and steady exterior.

“Yes, the big bang singularity. Superstring theory has already established a perfect model of the singularity. We just need to represent the model digitally and run it on the computer.”

“That’s right, young man. That really is the case.” The Senior Official stood and walked to Bai Bing’s side to pat his shoulder, revealing rare excitement. Chen Xufeng and Lu Wenming, who hadn’t understood the exchange that had just taken place, looked at them with puzzled expressions.

“Is this the superstring computer you brought out of the research center?” the Senior Official asked, pointing at the briefcase.

“Stole,” said Bai Bing.

“Ha, no matter. The software for the digital mirror of the big bang is on it, I expect?”

“Yes.”

“Run it for us.”

CREATION GAME

Bai Bing nodded, hauled the briefcase onto the desk, and opened it. Beside the display equipment, the briefcase also contained a cylindrical vessel. The superstring computer’s processor was in fact only the size of a pack of cigarettes, but the atomic circuitry required ultralow temperatures to operate, so the processor had to be kept submerged in the insulated vessel of liquid nitrogen. Bai Bing set the LCD screen upright and moved the mouse, and the superstring computer awoke from sleep mode. The screen brightened, like a dozing eye blinking open, displaying a simple interface composed of just a drop-down text box and a header reading:

Please Select Parameters to Initiate Creation of the Universe

Bai Bing clicked the arrow beside the drop-down text box. Row upon row of data sets, each composed of a sizable number of elements, appeared below. Each row seemed to differ considerably from the others. “The properties of the singularity are determined by eighteen parameters. Technically, there’s an infinite number of possible parameter combinations, but we can determine from superstring theory that the number of parameter combinations that could have resulted in the big bang is finite, although their exact number is still a mystery. Here we have a small selection of them. Let’s select one at random.”

Bai Bing selected a group of parameters, and the screen immediately went white. Two big buttons appeared in striking contrast at the center of the screen.

Initiate Cancel

Bai Bing clicked Initiate. Now only the white background was left. “The white represents nothingness. Space doesn’t exist at this time, and time itself hasn’t begun. There really is nothing.”

A red number “0” appeared in the lower left corner of the screen.

“This number indicates how long the universe has been evolving. The zero appearing means that the singularity has been generated. Its size is undefined, so we can’t see it.”

The red number began to increment rapidly.

“Notice, the big bang has begun.”

A small blue dot appeared in the middle of the screen, quickly growing into a sphere emitting brilliant blue light. The sphere rapidly expanded, filling the entire screen. The software zoomed out, and the sphere once again shrank into a distant dot, but the ballooning universe quickly filled the screen once more. The cycle repeated again and again in rapid frequency, as if marking the beats to some swelling symphony.

“The universe is currently in the inflationary epoch. It’s expanding at a rate far exceeding the speed of light.”

As the sphere slowed in its growth, the field of view began to zoom out less frequently, too. With the decrease in energy density, the sphere turned from blue to yellow, then red, before the color of the universe stabilized at red and began to darken. The field of view no longer zoomed out, and the now-black sphere expanded very slowly now on the screen.

“Okay, it’s ten billion years after the big bang. At this point, this universe is in a stable stage of evolution. Let’s take a closer look.” Bai Bing moved the mouse, and the sphere rushed forward, filling the whole screen with black. “Right, we’re in this universe’s outer space.”

“There’s nothing here?” said Lu Wenming.

“Let’s see….” As Bai Bing spoke, he right-clicked and pulled up a complicated window. A script began to calculate the total matter present in the universe. “Ha, there are only eleven fundamental particles in this universe.” He pulled up another massive data report and read it carefully. “Ten of the particles are arranged in five mutually orbiting pairs. However, in each pair, the two particles are tens of millions of light-years apart. They take millions of years to move one millimeter with respect to each other. The last particle is free.”

“Eleven fundamental particles? But after all that talk, there’s still nothing here,” said Lu Wenming.

“There’s space, nearly a hundred billion light-years in diameter! And time, ten billion years of it! Time and space are the true measures of existence! This particular universe is actually one of the more successful ones. In a lot of the universes I created before, even the dimensions of space quickly disappeared, leaving only time.”

“Dull,” harrumphed Chen Xufeng, turning away from the screen.

“No, this is very interesting,” said the Senior Official delightedly. “Do it again.”

Bai Bing returned to the starting interface, selected a new set of parameters, and initiated another big bang. The formation process of the new universe looked to be about the same as the earlier one, an expanding and dimming sphere. Fifteen billion years after creation, the sphere became fully black: the evolution of the universe had stabilized. Bai Bing moved the viewpoint into the universe. Even Chen Xufeng, least interested out of all of them, exclaimed. Beneath the vast darkness of space, a silvery surface extended endlessly in all directions. Small, colorful spheres decorated the membrane like multicolored dewdrops tumbling on the broad surface of a mirror.

Bai Bing brought up the analysis window again. He looked at it for a while and said, “We were lucky. This is a universe rich in variety, about forty billion light-years in radius. Half of its volume is liquid, while the other half is empty space. In other words, this universe is a massive ocean, forty billion light-years in depth and radius, with the solid celestial bodies floating on its surface!” Bai Bing pushed the field of view closer to the ocean’s surface, allowing them to see that the silvery ocean surface was gently rippling. A celestial body appeared in their close-up view. “This floating object is… let me see, about the size of Jupiter. Whoa, it’s rotating by itself! The mountain ranges look amazing when they’re coming in and out of—let’s just call this liquid water! See the water being flung up by the mountain ranges, along its orbit. It forms a rainbow arc above the surface!”

“It’s beautiful, indeed, but this universe goes against the basic laws of physics,” the Senior Official said, looking at the screen. “Never mind an ocean forty billion light-years deep, a body of liquid four light-years deep would have collapsed into a black hole due to gravity long ago.”

Bai Bing shook his head. “You’ve forgotten a fundamental point: This isn’t our universe. This universe has its own set of laws of physics, completely different from ours. In this universe, the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant, the speed of light, and other basic physical constants are all different. In this universe, one plus one might not even equal two.”

Encouraged by the Senior Official, Bai Bing continued the demonstration, creating a third universe. When they entered for a closer look, a chaotic jumble of colors and shapes appeared on the screen. Bai Bing immediately exited. “This is a six-dimensional universe, so we have no way of observing it. In fact, this is the most common case, and we were lucky to get two three-dimensional universes on our first two tries. Once the universe cools down from its high-energy state, the odds of having three available dimensions on the macroscopic scale is only three out of eleven.”

A fourth universe manifested. To the bafflement of everyone: the universe appeared as an endless black plane, with countless bright, silvery lines intersecting it perpendicularly. After reading the analysis profile, Bai Bing said, “This universe is the opposite of the previous one—it has fewer dimensions than our own. This is a two-and-a-half-dimensional universe.”

“Two and a half dimensions?” The Senior Official was astonished.

“See, the black two-dimensional plane with no thickness is this universe’s outer space. Its diameter is around five hundred billion light-years. The bright lines perpendicular to the plane are the stars in space. They’re hundreds of millions of light-years long, but infinitely thin, because they’re one-dimensional. Universes with fractional dimensions are rare. I’m going to make note of the parameters that produced this one.”

“A question,” said the Senior Official. “If you use these parameters to initialize a second big bang, would it produce a universe exactly the same as this one?”

“Yes, and the evolution process would be identical too. Everything was predetermined at the time of the big bang. See, after physics got past the obfuscation of quantum effects, the universe once again displayed an inherently causal and deterministic nature.” Bai Bing looked at the others one by one. He said seriously, “Please keep this point in mind. This will be key to understanding the terrifying things we’ll be seeing later.”

“This really is fascinating.” The Senior Official sighed. “Playing God, aloof and ethereal. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way.”

“I felt the same,” Bai Bing said as he stood up from the computer to pace back and forth, “so I played the creation game again and again. By now, I’ve initiated more than a thousand big bangs. The awe-inspiring wonder of those thousand-plus universes is impossible to describe with words. I felt like an addict… I could have kept going like that, never coming into contact with you, never getting involved. Our lives would have continued along our orbits. But… ah, hell… It was a snowy night at the beginning of the year, nearly two in the morning, really quiet. I ran the last big bang of the day. The superstring computer gave birth to the one thousand two hundred and seventh universe—this one….”

Bai Bing returned to the computer, scrolled to the bottom of the drop-down list, and selected the last set of parameters. He initiated the big bang. The new universe rapidly expanded in a glow of blue light before extinguishing to black. Bai Bing moved the mouse and entered his Universe No. 1207 at nineteen billion years after creation.

This time, the screen displayed a radiant sea of stars.

“1207 has a radius of twenty billion light-years and three dimensions. In this universe, the gravitational constant is 6.67 times 10–11, and the speed of light in a vacuum is three hundred thousand kilometers per second. In this universe, an electron has a charge of 1.602 times 10–19 coulombs. In this universe, Planck’s constant is 6.62…” Bai Bing leaned in toward the Senior Official, watching him with a chilling gaze. “In this universe, one plus one equals two.”

“This is our own universe.” The Senior Official nodded, still steady, but his forehead was now damp.

SEARCHING HISTORY

“Once I found Universe No. 1207, I spent more than a month building a search engine based on shape and pattern recognition. Then I looked through astronomy resources to find diagrams of the geometrical placement of the Milky Way with respect to the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and so on. Searching for the arrangement within the entire universe gave me more than eighty thousand matches. Next I searched those results for matches for the internal arrangement of the galaxies themselves. It didn’t take long to locate the Milky Way in the universe.” Onscreen, a silver spiral appeared against a backdrop of pitch-black space.

“Locating the sun was even easier. We already know its approximate location in the Milky Way—” Bai Bing used his mouse to click and drag a small rectangle over the tip of one arm of the spiral.

“Using the same pattern-recognition method, it didn’t take long to locate the sun in this area.” A brilliant sphere of light appeared onscreen, surrounded by a large disk of haze.

“Oh, the planets in the solar system haven’t formed yet right now. This disk of interstellar debris is the raw material they’re made up of.” Bai Bing pulled up a slider bar at the bottom of the window. “See, this lets you move through time.” He slowly dragged the slider forward. Two hundred million years passed before them; the disk of dust around the sun disappeared. “Now the nine planets have formed. The video window shows real distances and proportions, unlike your planetarium displays, so finding Earth is going to take more work. I’ll use the coordinates I saved earlier instead.” With that, the nascent planet Earth appeared on the screen as a hazy gray sphere.

Bai Bing scrolled the mouse wheel. “Let’s go down… good. We’re about ten kilometers above the surface now.” The land below was still shrouded in haze, but crisscrossing glowing red lines had appeared in it, a network like the blood vessels in an embryo.

“These are rivers of lava,” Bai Bing said, pointing. He kept scrolling down, past the thick acidic fog. The brown surface of the ocean appeared, and the point of view plunged lower, into the ocean. In the murky water were a few specks. Most were round, but a few were more complicated in shape, most obviously different from the other suspended particles in that they were moving on their own, not just floating with the current.

“Life, brand new,” Bai Bing said, pointing out the tiny things with the mouse.

He rapidly scrolled the mouse wheel in the other direction, raising their point of view back into space to once again show the young Earth in full. Then he moved the time slider. Countless years flew past; the thick haze covering Earth’s surface disappeared, the ocean began to turn blue, and the land began to turn green. Then the enormous supercontinent Pangaea split and broke apart like ice in spring. “If you want, we can watch the entire evolution of life, all the major extinctions and the explosions of life that followed them. But let’s skip them and save some time. We’re about to see what this all has to do with our lives.”

The fragmented ancient continents continued to drift until, at last, a familiar map of the world appeared. Bai Bing changed the slider-bar settings, advancing in smaller increments through time before coming to a stop. “Right, humans appear here.” He carefully shifted the slider a little further forward. “Now civilization appears.

“You can only see most of distant history on a macro scale. Finding specific events isn’t easy, and finding specific people is even harder. Searching history mainly relies on two parameters: location and time. It’s rare that historical records give them accurately this far back. But let’s try it out. We’re going down now!” Bai Bing double-clicked a location near the Mediterranean Sea as he spoke. The point of view hurtled downward with dizzying speed. At last, a deserted beach appeared. At the far side of the yellow sand was an unbroken grove of olive trees.

“The coast of Troy in the time of the ancient Greeks,” said Bai Bing.

“Then… can you move the time to the Trojan Horse and the Sack of Troy?” Lu Wenming asked excitedly.

“The Trojan Horse never existed,” Bai Bing said coolly.

Chen Xufeng nodded. “That sort of thing belongs in children’s stories. It would be impossible in a real war.”

“The Trojan War never happened,” said Bai Bing.

“If that’s the case, did Troy fall due to other reasons?” The Senior Official sounded surprised.

“The city of Troy never existed.”

The other three exchanged looks of astonishment.

Bai Bing pointed at the screen. “The video window is now displaying the real coast of Troy at the time the war supposedly happened. We can look five hundred years forward and back….” Bai Bing carefully shifted the mouse. The beach onscreen flashed rapidly as night and day alternated, and the shape of the trees changed quickly, too. A few shacks appeared at the far end of the beach, human silhouettes occasionally flickering past them. The shacks grew and fell in number, but even at their greatest they formed no more than a village. “See, the magnificent city of Troy only ever existed in the imaginations of the poet-storytellers.”

“How is that possible?” Lu Wenming cried. “We have archaeological evidence from the beginning of the last century! They even dug up Agamemnon’s gold mask.”

“Agamemnon’s gold mask? Fuck that!” Bai Bing laughed harshly. “Well, as the historical records improve in quality and quantity, later searches get increasingly easy. Let’s do it again.”

Bai Bing returned their point of view to Earth’s orbit. This time, he didn’t use the mouse, but entered the time and geographical coordinates by hand. The view descended toward western Asia. Soon, the screen displayed a stretch of desert, and a few people lying under the shade of a cluster of red willows. They wore ragged robes of rough cloth, their skin baked dark, their hair long and matted into strands by sweat and dust. From a distance, they looked like heaps of discarded rubbish.

“They aren’t far from a Muslim village, but the bubonic plague has been going around and they’re afraid to go there,” Bai Bing said.

A tall, thin man sat up and looked around. After checking that the others were soundly asleep, he picked up a neighbor’s sheepskin canteen and took a swig. Then he reached into another neighbor’s battered pack and took out a piece of traveler’s bread, broke off a third, and put it in his own bag. Satisfied, he lay back down.

“I’ve run this at normal speed for two days and seen him steal other people’s water five times and other people’s food three times,” Bai Bing said, gesturing with his mouse at the man who’d just lain down.

“Who is he?”

“Marco Polo. It wasn’t easy to search him up. The Genoan prison where he was imprisoned gave me fairly precise times and coordinates. I located him there, then backtraced to that naval battle he was in to extract some identifying traits. Then I jumped much earlier and followed him here. This is in what used to be Persia, near the city of Bam in modern Iran, but I could have saved myself the effort.”

“That means he’s on his way to China. You should be able to follow him into Kublai Khan’s palace,” said Lu Wenming.

“He never entered any palace.”

“You mean, he spent his time in China as just a regular commoner?”

“Marco Polo never went to China. The long and even more dangerous road ahead scared him off. He wandered around West Asia for a few years, and later told the rumors he heard along the way to his friend in prison, who wrote the famous travelogue.”

His three listeners once again exchanged looks of astonishment.

“It’s even easier to look up specific people and events later on. Let’s do it one more time with modern history.”

The room was large and very dim. A map—a naval map?—had been spread out on the broad wooden table, surrounded by several men in Qing Dynasty military uniforms. The room was too dark to see their faces.

“We’re in the headquarters of the Beiyang Fleet, quite a ways to go before the First Sino-Japanese War. We’re in the middle of a meeting.”

Someone was talking, but the heavy southlands accent and the poor sound quality made the words unintelligible. Bai Bing explained, “They’re saying that for coastal defense purposes, given their limited funds, purchasing heavy-tonnage ironclads from the West is less worthwhile than buying a large number of fast, steam-powered torpedo boats. Each vessel could hold four to six gas torpedoes, forming a large, fast attack force, maneuverable enough to evade Japanese cannon fire and strike at close range. I asked a number of naval experts and military historians about this. They unanimously believe that if this idea had been implemented, the Beiyang Fleet would have won their battles in the First Sino-Japanese War. He’s brilliantly ahead of his time, the first in naval history to discover the weaknesses of the traditional big-cannons-and-big-ships policy with the new innovations in armaments.”

“Who is it?” Chen Xufeng asked. “Deng Shichang?”

Bai Bing shook his head. “Fang Boqian.”

“What, that coward who ran away halfway through the Battle of the Yellow Sea?”

“The very one.”

“Instinct tells me that all this is what history was really like,” the Senior Official mused.

Bai Bing nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t feel so aloof and ethereal after this stage. I started to despair. I had discovered that practically all the history we know is a lie. Of all the noble, vaunted heroes we hear about, at least half were contemptible liars and schemers who used their influence to claim achievements and write the histories, and managed to succeed. Of those who really did give everything for truth and justice, two-thirds choked to death horribly and quietly in the dust of history, forgotten by everyone, and the remaining one-third had their reputations smeared into eternal infamy, just like Song Cheng. Only a tiny percentage were remembered as they were by history, less than the exposed corner of the iceberg.”

Only then did everyone notice Song Cheng, who’d remained silent throughout. They saw him quietly stir, his eyes alight. He looked like a felled warrior rising to stand once more, taking up his weapon astride a fresh warhorse.

SEARCHING THE PRESENT

“Then you came to Universe No. 1207’s present day, am I correct?” asked the Senior Official.

“That’s right, I set the digital mirror to our time.” As he spoke, Bai Bing moved the time slider to the far end. The point of view once again returned to space. The blue Earth below didn’t look particularly different from how it had appeared in ancient times.

“This is our present day shown through the mirror of Universe No. 1207: after decades of continuous exporting of natural resources and energy, our hinterland province still doesn’t have a presentable industry to its name aside from mining and power generation. All we have is pollution, most of the rural areas still below the poverty line, severe unemployment in the cities, deteriorating law and order… naturally, I wanted to see how our leaders and planners did their jobs. What I saw, well, I don’t need to tell you that.”

“What were you after?” asked the Senior Official.

Bai Bing smiled bitterly, shaking his head. “Don’t think I had some lofty goal like him,” he said, pointing at Song Cheng. “I was just an ordinary person, happy to mind my own business and live out my days in peace. What do your antics have to do with me? I wasn’t planning to mess with you, but… I put so much work into this supersimulation software, and naturally I wanted to get some material benefits out of it. So I called a couple of your people, hoping they’d give me a bit of cash for keeping quiet….” He abruptly swelled with indignation.

“Why did you have to overreact? Why did I have to be eliminated? If you’d just given me the money, we’d all be done here!… Anyway, I’ve finished explaining everything.”

The five people sank into a long silence, all of them watching the image of Earth on the screen. This was the digital mirror of the current Earth. They were in there, too.

“Can you really use this computer to observe everything in the world that’s ever happened?” Chen Xufeng said, breaking the silence.

“Yes, every detail of history and the present day is data in the computer, and that data can be freely analyzed. Anything, no matter how secret, can be observed by extracting the corresponding information from the database and processing it. The database holds an atomic-level digital replica of the entire world, and any part of it can be extracted at will.”

“Can you prove it?”

“That’s easy. You leave the room, go anywhere you want, do anything you want, and come back.”

Chen Xufeng looked at the Senior Official and Lu Wenming in turn, then left the room. He returned two minutes later and looked at Bai Bing wordlessly.

Bai Bing moved the mouse so that the point of view rapidly descended from space to hover above the city, which seamlessly filled the screen. He panned around, searching carefully, and quickly found the No. 2 Detention Center at the city outskirts, then the three-story building they were in. The point of view entered the building, gliding along the empty hallway on the second floor. The two plainclothes detectives sitting on the bench outside appeared onscreen, Chenbing lighting a cigarette. At last, the screen displayed the door of the office they were in.

“Right now, the simulation only lags behind reality as it happens by 0.1 seconds. Let’s go back a few minutes.” Bai Bing nudged the time slider left.

Onscreen, the door swung open and Chen Xufeng walked out. The two police on the bench immediately stood; Chen waved them an all’s-well and walked in the opposite direction. The point of view followed closely, as if someone were filming from right behind him with a camera. In the digital mirror, Chen Xufeng entered the restroom, took a handgun from his trouser pocket, pulled the trigger, and returned it to his pocket. Bai Bing paused the simulation here and rotated the view around to different angles as if it were a 3-D cartoon. Chen Xufeng walked out of the restroom, and the point of view followed him back to the office, revealing the four people waiting for him.

The Senior Official watched the screen expressionlessly. Lu Wenming raised his head warily and eyed Chen Xufeng. “That thing really is impressive,” Lu Wenming said with a dark expression.

“Next I’ll demonstrate an even more impressive feature,” said Bai Bing, pausing the simulation. “Since the universe is stored in the digital mirror on the atomic level, we can search up any and every detail in the universe. Next, let’s see what’s in Chief Chen’s coat pocket.”

On the paused screen, Bai Bing clicked and dragged a rectangle over the area of Chen Xufeng’s coat pocket, then opened an interface to process it. With a series of actions, he removed the cloth on the outside of the pocket, revealing a small piece of folded-up paper inside. Bai Bing pressed Ctrl+C to copy the piece of paper, then started up a 3-D model-processing program and pasted in the copied data. A few more actions unfolded the piece of paper. It was a foreign exchange check for 250,000 USD.

“Next, we’ll track this check to its origin.” Bai Bing closed the model-processing software and returned to the paused video window. Bai Bing right-clicked the already-selected check in Chen Xufeng’s coat pocket, then chose Trace from the list of options. The check flashed, and the still screen jumped to life. Time was flowing backward, showing the Senior Official and his retinue backing out of the office, then out of the building, then into a car. Chen Xufeng and Lu Wenming put on earphones, clearly listening in on Bai Bing and Song Cheng’s conversation. The trace search continued, the surroundings continuing to change, but the flashing check remained at the center of the screen as the subject of the search, seeming to tug Chen Xufeng with it through scene after scene. Finally, the check jumped out of Chen’s coat pocket and slipped into a small basket, which then jumped from Chen’s hand into another person’s. At that moment, Bai Bing paused the simulation.

“I’ll resume playing here,” said Bai Bing, selecting normal playback speed. They seemed to be looking at Chen Xufeng’s living room. Onscreen, a middle-aged woman in a black suit stood with the fruit basket in her hand, as if she’d just entered. Chen Xufeng was sitting on the sofa.

“Chief Chen, Director Wen sent me to visit you, and to express his gratitude for last time. He wanted to come in person, but thought it was best not to show up here too often to prevent idle gossip.”

Chen Xufeng said, “When you go back, tell Wen Xiong that he’d better stay on the straight and narrow, now that he’s in good shape. Going too far all the time doesn’t do anyone good. He’d better not blame me for losing patience!”

“Yes, of course, how could Brother Wen forget your advice? Nowadays, he’s been actively contributing to society—he’s built four elementary schools in impoverished districts. He’s also dedicated to making progress in politics. The city has already elected him as its delegate to the National People’s Congress!” As she spoke, the visitor set the fruit basket onto the coffee table.

“Take that with you,” Chen Xufeng said, waving a hand.

“We would never bring anything too fancy, Chief Chen. We know how you’d hate it. This is just some fruit as a token of our gratitude. I suppose you haven’t seen the way Chief Wen tears up whenever he mentions you. He calls you our loving parents reborn, you know.”

Once the visitor left, Chen Xufeng shut the door and returned to the coffee table. He tipped all the fruit out of the basket, picked up the check at the bottom, and slid it in his pocket.

The Senior Official and Lu Wenming eyed Chen Xufeng coldly. Clearly they hadn’t known any of this. Wen Xiong was the director general of Licheng Group, an enormous corporation spanning dining, long-distance travel, and many other services. Its start-up money had come from drug profits from Wen Xiong’s crime syndicate, which had made this city into a crucial hub in the Yunnan-Russia drug-trafficking route. With Wen Xiong’s successful expansion into aboveboard commerce, his underground business, drawing nourishment from the former, grew even more rapidly. The result in the hinterland city was the proliferation of drugs and the decline of public safety. And Chen Xufeng, the backstage supporter, was a powerful safeguard for its continued survival.

“You took payment in dollars? It must have gone to your son,” Bai Bing said cheerfully. “The money that’s paying for his American college education all came from Wen Xiong, after all…. Speaking of which, don’t you want to see what he’s doing right now, on the other side of the planet? That’s easy enough. It’s midnight in Boston right now, but the last two times I saw him, he wasn’t sleeping yet.” Bai Bing sent the point of view up into space, twirled the Earth 180 degrees, then zoomed in on North America. He found the city splendid with lights on the Atlantic coast, then located the apartment building so quickly it was clear he must have searched it before. The point of view entered an apartment bedroom, exposing an awkward scene: the boy in his room with two prostitutes, one white and one black.

“See how your son’s spending your money, Chief Chen?”

Furious, Chen Xufeng tipped the monitor screen-side down onto the briefcase.

The deeply stunned group once again sank into a long silence. At last Lu Wenming asked, “Why did you spend all this time just running away? Didn’t you consider using more… conventional means to free yourself from this predicament?”

“You mean, report to Discipline Inspection? Excellent idea, yes. I had the same idea at first, so I used the digital mirror to run a search on the Discipline Inspection leadership.” Bai Bing raised his head to look at Lu Wenming. “You can guess what I saw. I didn’t want to end up like your old college buddy here. In that case, could I go to the public prosecutors or the Anti-Corruption Bureau? I’m sure Director Guo and Chief Chang process the vast majority of serious accusations strictly by the law, and very carefully tiptoe around a small portion. For what I’d report, they’d join you in hunting me down the moment I told them. Where else could I go? Could I get the press to run an exposé? I think you’re all familiar with those certain key figures in the provincial news media groups. After all, weren’t they the ones who came up with the Senior Official’s shining résumé? The only difference between those reporters and prostitutes is that they sell a different body part. It’s all tied together in one big web, not a strand safe to touch. I didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“You could go to the Central Commission,” the Senior Official said neutrally, closely observing Bai Bing for a reaction.

Bai Bing nodded. “It’s the only choice left. But I’m a nobody. I don’t know anyone. I came to see Song Cheng first to find reliable connections, pursuit or no.” Bai Bing paused, then continued, “But this decision wasn’t an easy one. You’re all smart people. You know the ultimate consequences of doing this.”

“It means that this technology will be revealed to the world.”

“That’s right. Every bit of the fog that covers history and reality will be swept away. Anything and everything, in light and darkness, past and present, will be stripped naked and paraded before the light of day. At that time, light and dark will be forced into a deciding battle for supremacy unlike anything in history. The world’s going to descend into chaos—”

“But the end result will be the victory of the light,” said Song Cheng, who’d been silent until then. He walked in front of Bai Bing and looked straight at him. “Do you know how shadows derive their power? It comes from their very nature of secrecy. Once they’re exposed to the light, their power is gone. You see that with most cases of corruption. And your digital mirror is the burning brand that will tear the darkness open.”

The Senior Official exchanged looks with Chen and Lu.

Silence fell. On the superstring computer screen, the atomic-level digital mirror of Earth hovered placidly in space.

The Senior Official put a hand on Bai Bing’s shoulder. “Why don’t you move the time slider in the simulation farther forward?”

Bai Bing, Chen Xufeng, and Lu Wenming looked uncomprehendingly at the Senior Official.

“If we can accurately predict the future, we can change the present and control the course the future will take. We’d control everything—young man, don’t you think this is possible? Perhaps, together, we can shoulder the great duty of shaping the history to come.”

Bai Bing realized what he was saying and gave a pained smile, shaking his head. He stood and walked over to the computer. He clicked and dragged the time slider bar, extending its length beyond Now into the future. Then he said to the Senior Official, “Try it for yourself.”

INFINITE RECURSION

The Senior Official leapt toward the computer, quicker than anyone had ever seen him move, bringing to mind the dark image of a hungry eagle spotting a baby chick on the ground. He moved the mouse with practiced motions, sliding the time past the Now. In the instant that the slider entered the future, an error window popped up.

Bai Bing took the mouse from the Senior Official’s hand. “Let’s run a debugging program and trace that step by step.”

The simulation software returned to the state it had been in before the error and began to run line by line. When the real Bai Bing moved the slider past the present, the simulation Bai Bing in the digital mirror did the same. The debugging program immediately zoomed in on the digital mirror’s superstring computer display, allowing them to see that, on the simulated screen, the simulated simulated Bai Bing two layers down was also moving the slider past the present. Then the debugging program zoomed in on the superstring computer display in the third layer…. In this way the debugger progressed layer after layer deeper, each layer’s Bai Bing in the process of moving the slider past the present time, an infinite Droste image.

“This is recursion, a programming approach where a piece of code calls itself. Under normal circumstances, it finds its answer a finite number of layers down, after which the answer follows the chain of calls back to the surface. But here we see a function calling itself without end, forever unable to find an answer, in infinite recursion. Because it needs to store resources used by the previous layer on the stack at every call, it created the stack overflow we saw earlier. With infinite recursion, even a superstring computer’s ultimate capacity can be used up.”

“Ah.” The Senior Official nodded.

“As a result, even though the course of the universe was decided at the big bang, we still can’t know the future. For people who hate the determinist idea that everything comes from a chain of cause and effect, this probably provides some consolation.”

“Ah…” The Senior Official nodded again. He dragged out the sound for a long, long time.

THE AGE OF THE MIRROR

Bai Bing discovered that a strange change had overcome the Senior Official, as if something had been sucked out of him. His whole body seemed to be withering, swaying as if it had lost the strength to keep itself upright. His face was pale, his breathing rapid. He put both hands on the chair’s arms and lowered himself into the seat, the movement difficult and painstaking, as if he were afraid his bones would snap.

“Young man, you have destroyed my life’s work,” the Senior Official said eventually. “You win.”

Bai Bing looked at Chen Xufeng and Lu Wenming, finding that they were at a loss like himself. But Song Cheng stood straight-backed and unafraid among them, his face alight with victory.

Chen Xufeng slowly stood, drawing his gun from his trouser pocket.

“Stop,” said the Senior Official, not loudly, but with unsurpassed authority in his voice. The gun in Chen Xufeng’s hand stilled in midair. “Put the gun down,” the Senior Official commanded, but Chen didn’t move.

“Sir, at this stage, we have to act decisively. We can explain away their deaths, shot and killed while resisting arrest and attempting escape—”

“Put the gun down, you mad dog!” the Senior Official roared.

The hand holding the gun fell to Chen Xufeng’s side. He slowly turned toward the Senior Official. “I’m no mad dog. I’m a loyal dog, a dog who understands gratitude! A dog who will never betray you, sir! You can trust someone like me, who’s crawled step by step up from the bottom, to know right and wrong like a good dog toward the superior who made him into who he is today. I don’t think the slick thoughts of intelligentsia.”

“What are you trying to say?” Lu Wenming, who had long been silent, got to his feet.

“Everyone knows what I mean. I’m not like some people, taking a step only after making sure there’s two or three steps of retreat open. Where’s my road out? At a time like this, if I don’t protect myself, who will do it for me?!”

Bai Bing said calmly, “It’s useless to kill me. That’s the fastest way to expose the digital mirror technology to the public.”

“Even an idiot would have realized he’d take precautionary measures. You’ve really lost all reason,” Lu Wenming said quietly to Chen Xufeng.

Chen Xufeng said, “Of course I know the bastard wouldn’t be that stupid, but we have our own technological resources. If we put in everything we have, we might be able to completely wipe out the digital mirror technology.”

Bai Bing shook his head. “That’s impossible. Chief Chen, this is the era of the internet. Concealing and distributing information is easy, and I have the defender’s advantage. You can’t beat me at my game, not even if you put in your best tech experts. I could tell you where I’ve hidden the digital mirror software backups and how I plan to release them after my death, and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing. The initialization parameters are even easier to hide and distribute. Forget about that idea.”

Chen Xufeng slowly put the gun back into his pocket and sat down.

“You think you’re already standing on the summit of history, yes?” the Senior Official said tiredly to Song Cheng.

“Justice stands on the summit of history,” Song Cheng said solemnly.

“Indeed, the digital mirror has destroyed us all. But its power to destroy far exceeds this.”

“Yes, it will destroy all evil.”

The Senior Official nodded slowly.

“Then it will destroy all the corruption and immorality that comes short of evil.”

The Senior Official nodded again. “In the end, it will destroy all of human civilization.”

His words made the others take pause. Song Cheng said, “Human civilization has never beheld such a bright future. This battle between good and evil will wash away all its grime.”

“And then?” the Senior Official asked softly.

“And then, the great age of the mirror will arrive. All of humanity will face a mirror in which every action can be perfectly seen and no crime can be hidden. Every sinner will inevitably meet their judgment. It will be an era without darkness, where the sun shines into every crevice. Human society will become as pure as crystal.”

“In other words, society will be dead,” the Senior Official said. He raised his head to look Song Cheng in the eyes.

“Care to explain?” Song Cheng said, with the mocking note of a victor looking at a loser.

“Imagine if DNA never made mistakes, always replicating and inheriting with perfect fidelity. What would life on Earth become?”

While Song Cheng considered this, Bai Bing answered for him. “In that case, life would no longer exist on Earth. The basis of the evolution of life is mutation, caused by mistakes in DNA.”

The Senior Official nodded at Bai Bing. “Society is the same way. Its evolution and vitality is rooted in the myriad urges and desires departing from the morality laid out by the majority. A fish can’t live in perfectly clear water. A society where no one ever makes mistakes in ethics is, in reality, dead.”

“Your attempt to defend your crimes is laughable,” Song Cheng said contemptuously.

“Not completely,” Bai Bing said immediately, surprising the others. He hesitated for a few seconds, as if to steel his resolve. “To be honest, there was another reason I didn’t want to make the mirror simulation software public. I… I don’t much like the idea of a world armed with the digital mirror either.”

“Are you afraid of the light like them?” Song Cheng demanded.

“I’m an ordinary guy. I’m not involved in any shady business, but there are different kinds of the light you’re talking about. If someone beams a searchlight through your bedroom window in the middle of the night, that’s called light pollution…. I’ll give an example. I’ve only been married two years, but I’ve already experienced that… wearying of the aesthetics, so to speak. So I got… uh, involved with a coworker. My wife doesn’t know, of course. Everyone’s lives are good—better this way even I suspect. I wouldn’t be able to live this kind of life in the age of the mirror.”

“It’s an immoral and irresponsible life to begin with!” Song Cheng said, anger entering his voice.

“But doesn’t everyone live like that? Who doesn’t have some sort of secret? If you want to be happy these days, sometimes, you have to bend a little. How many people can be shining spotless saints like you? If the digital mirror makes everyone into perfect people who can’t take a step out of line, then—then what’s even fucking left?”

The Senior Official laughed, and even Lu and Chen, who’d been grim-faced all this time, cracked a smile. The Senior Official patted Bai Bing on the shoulder. “Young man, your argument might not be particularly high-minded, but you’ve thought far deeper than our scholar over here.” He turned toward Song Cheng as he spoke. “There’s no way we can extricate ourselves now, so you can put aside your hatred and thirst for vengeance toward us. As one so well-learned on the subject of social philosophy, surely you’re not so shallow-minded as to think that history is made from virtue and justice?”

The Senior Official’s words were a potent tranquilizer for Song Cheng. He recovered from the fever of victory. “My duty is to punish the evil, protect the virtuous, and uphold justice,” he said after a moment of hesitation, his tone much calmer.

The Senior Official nodded, satisfied. “You didn’t give a straight answer. Very good, it shows that you’re not quite that narrow-minded yet.”

Here, the Senior Official suddenly shuddered all over, as if someone had dumped cold water over him. He broke out of his daze. The weakness was gone; whatever vitality had deserted him earlier seemed to have returned. He stood, gravely buttoned his collar, and meticulously smoothed the wrinkles from his clothes. Then he said with utmost solemnity to Lu Wenming and Chen Xufeng, “Comrades, from now on, everything can be seen in the digital mirror. Please take care with your behavior and image.”

Lu Wenming stood, his expression heavy. He attended to his appearance as the Senior Official had, then gave a long sigh. “Yes, from now on, Heaven watches from above.”

Chen Xufeng stood unmoving with his head hanging.

The Senior Official looked at everyone in turn. “Very well, I’ll be leaving now. I have a busy day at work tomorrow.” He turned toward Bai Bing. “Young man, come to my office tomorrow at six in the evening. Bring the superstring computer.” Then he turned toward Chen and Lu. “As for you two, do your best. Xufeng, keep your chin up. We may have committed sins beyond pardon, but we don’t need to feel so ashamed. Compared to them,” he pointed to Song Cheng and Bai Bing, “what we’ve done really doesn’t amount to much.”

He opened the door and left with his head held high.

BIRTHDAY

The next day really was a busy day for the Senior Official.

As soon as he entered the office, he summoned key officials in charge of industry, agriculture, finance, environmental protection, and more, one by one, to debrief them on their next orders of business. Though each meeting was short, the Senior Official drew on his ample experience to zero in on important aspects of the work and problems requiring attention. With his well-honed conversational skills, too, each official left thinking that this was only another typical work debriefing. They noticed nothing unusual.

At ten thirty in the morning, after sending away the last official, the Senior Official settled down to document his views on the province’s economic development, and problems he foresaw with large- and medium-scale province-owned enterprises. The compilation wasn’t long, less than two thousand characters, but it distilled decades of reflection and work experience. Anyone familiar with the Senior Official’s philosophies would be astonished reading this document—it differed considerably from his previous views. In his long years at the apex of power, this was the first time he expressed views unadulterated by personal considerations, solely coming from concern for the Party and the country’s best interests.

It was past noon by the time the Senior Official finished writing. He didn’t eat, only drank a cup of tea, and continued work.

The first indication of the age of the mirror occurred then. The Senior Official was informed that Chen Xufeng had shot himself in his office; meanwhile, Lu Wenming seemed to be in a trance, compulsively reaching for his collar button and straightening his clothes, as if someone could be snapping a picture of him at any instant. The Senior Official met the two pieces of news with only a smile.

The age of the mirror had not yet arrived, but the darkness was already breaking.

The Senior Official ordered the Anti-Corruption Bureau to immediately assemble a task force; with the cooperation of the police and the related Departments of Finance and Commerce, they were to immediately seize all records and accounts belonging to his son’s Daxi Trade and Commerce Group and his daughter-in-law’s Beiyuan Corporation, and contain the legal entities according to the law. He took care of his other relatives’ and cronies’ various financial bodies in the same manner.

At four thirty, the Senior Official began to draft a list of names. He knew that, upon the arrival of the age of the mirror, thousands of officials at or above the county rank throughout the province would be sacked. The immediate concern was to seek suitable successors for key roles within each organization, and the list, meant for the provincial and central leadership, presented his suggestions. In reality, this list had existed in his mind long before the appearance of the digital mirror. These were the people he’d planned to eliminate, supplant, and retaliate against.

It was already five thirty, time to leave work. He felt a gratification he had never experienced before: he had spent at least today as a human being.

Song Cheng entered the office, and the Senior Official handed him a thick stack of documents. “This is the evidence you obtained on me. You should report to the Central Commission as soon as possible. I wrote a confession last night complete with supporting evidence and added them here. Aside from looking through and checking the results of your investigations, I also supplemented some material to fill in the gaps.”

Song Cheng accepted the documents, nodding solemnly. He didn’t say anything.

“In a moment, Bai Bing will arrive with the superstring computer. You should tell him that you’re about to inform your superiors of the digital mirror software. The central officials, after considering the matter from all directions, will use it conservatively to begin with. He should therefore make sure the software doesn’t leak to the public beforehand. That would pose serious dangers and adverse effects. Therefore, you will have him delete all the backup copies, whether online or elsewhere, that he made to protect himself. As for the initialization parameters, if he told them to anyone else, have him make a list of names. He trusts you. He’ll do as you say. You must make sure all the backups are gone.”

“We already plan to,” said Song Cheng.

“Then,” the Senior Official looked Song Cheng in the eye, “kill him, and destroy his superstring computer. At this point, you can hardly think I’m plotting for my own sake.”

Once Song Cheng recovered from his surprise, he shook his head, smiling.

The Senior Official smiled, too. “Very well, I’ve said everything I have to say. Whatever happens next has nothing to do with me. The mirror has recorded these words of mine; perhaps one day, in the distant future, someone will listen.”

The Senior Official waved away Song Cheng, then leaned against the back of the chair. He exhaled, slowly, subsumed in a sense of relief and release.

After Song Cheng left, the clock struck six. Bai Bing entered the office on the dot, carrying the briefcase that contained the digital mirror of history and reality.

The Senior Official invited him to sit. Looking at the superstring computer resting on the table, he said, “Young man, I have something to ask of you: May I see my own life in the digital mirror?”

“Of course you can, no problem!” Bai Bing said, opening the briefcase and booting up the computer. He opened the digital mirror software, then set the time to the present and the location to the office. The two occupants appeared in real time on the screen. Bai Bing selected the Senior Official, right-clicked, and activated the tracking capability.

The image onscreen began to change rapidly, so rapidly that the whole image window filled with a blur. But the Senior Official, as the subject of the search, remained in the middle of the screen the entire time, steady like the center of the world. He was flickering rapidly, too, but the figure was discernibly becoming younger. “This is a reverse chronology tracking search. The image recognition software can’t use your current form to identify younger versions of you, so it has to track you step by step through your age-related changes to find the beginning.”

Several minutes later, the screen stopped flashing through time, now displaying a newborn baby’s slick, wet face. The maternity ward nurse had just removed him from the scale. The little creature didn’t laugh or scream; his eyes were open and charming, taking stock of the new world around him.

The Senior Official chuckled. “That’s me, all right. My mother always told me that I opened my eyes as soon as I was born,” the Senior Official said, smiling. He was clearly feigning lightheartedness to conceal the breach in his calm; this time, unlike many other times, he wasn’t particularly successful.

“Look here, sir,” Bai Bing said, pointing to a menu bar below the image. “These buttons let you zoom and change angles. This is the time slider bar. The digital mirror program will continue to move forward in time following you as the search object. If you want to find a particular time or event, it’s not that different from how you’d use the scrollbar to look up things in a large document in a word processor. First find the approximate location with large steps through time, then make smaller adjustments, moving the slider left or right based on scenes you recognize. You should be able to find it. It’s also similar to the fast-forward and rewind functions on a DVD player, although, of course, this disk playing at normal speed would take—”

“I believe nearly five hundred thousand hours,” said the Senior Official, doing the mental math for Bai Bing. He accepted the mouse and zoomed out, revealing the young mother on the maternity bed, and the rest of the hospital room. There were a bedside table and lamp in the plain style of that era, and a window with a wooden frame. What caught his attention was a spot of red-orange light on the wall. “I was born in the evening, about the same time as now. Perhaps this is the last ray of the setting sun.”

The Senior Official shifted the time slider, and the image again began to jump rapidly. Time flew past. When he stopped, the screen showed a small circular table lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. At the table, his plainly dressed, bespectacled mother was tutoring four children. An even younger child of three or four, clearly the Senior Official himself, was clumsily feeding himself from a small wooden bowl. “My mother was an elementary school teacher. She liked to bring the students having trouble with schoolwork back home for tutoring. That way, she could pick me up from nursery school on time.” The Senior Official watched for a while. His child self accidentally spilled the bowl of porridge all over himself. His mother hurriedly got up, reaching for a towel. Only then did the Senior Official move the time slider.

Time skipped forward a few years. The screen suddenly lit up in a blaze of red, apparently the mouth of a blast furnace. Several workers in dirty asbestos work suits were moving, their silhouettes flickering in and out of the furnace flames. The Senior Official pointed to one of the figures. “That’s my father, a furnace worker.”

“You can change the angle to the front,” said Bai Bing. He tried to take the mouse from the Senior Official, who refused him politely.

“Oh, no. This year, the factory worked everyone overtime to increase production. The workers had to be brought meals by family members, and I went. This was the first time I saw my father at work, from this exact angle. His silhouette against the furnace fire impressed itself into my mind very deeply.”

Once more, years passed in the wake of the time slider, stopping on a clear, sunny day. The bright red flag of the Young Pioneers of China waved against the azure sky. A boy in a white shirt and blue trousers gazed up at it as other hands fastened a red scarf around his neck. The boy’s right hand flew above his head in a salute, passionately announcing to the world that he would always be prepared to struggle for the cause of Communism. His eyes were as clear as the cloudless blue sky.

“I joined the Young Pioneers in second grade of elementary school.”

Time jumped forward, and a different flag appeared: that of the Communist Youth League, against the backdrop of a memorial to the fallen. A small group of older children were swearing their oaths to the flag. He stood in the back row, his eyes as bright as before, but tinged with new fervor and longing.

“I joined the Youth League first year of secondary school.”

The slider moved. The third red flag of his life appeared, the flag of the Communist Party this time, in what appeared to be an enormous lecture hall. The Senior Official zoomed in on one of the six teenagers taking their oaths, letting his face fill the screen.

“I joined the Party sophomore year of college.” The Senior Official pointed at the screen. “Look at my eyes. What do you see in them?”

In that pair of young eyes could still be seen the spark of childhood, the fervor and longing of youth, but there was a new and yet immature wisdom, too.

“I feel you were… sincere,” Bai Bing said, looking at those eyes.

“You’d be right. Until then, I still meant every word of the oath.” The Senior Official wiped at his eye, the motion minute enough that Bai Bing didn’t notice it.

The slider moved forward another few years. This time it sped too far, but after a few small adjustments, a tree-shaded path appeared on the screen. He stood there, looking at a young woman turning to leave. She turned her head to look at him one last time, her eyes bright with tears. She gave a powerful impression, solemn but resolute. Then she left, disappearing into the distance between the two rows of tall poplars. Tactfully, Bai Bing got up and prepared to leave some space, but the Senior Official stopped him.

“Don’t worry, this is the last time I saw her.” He put down the mouse, his gaze leaving the screen. “Very well, thank you. You may turn off the computer.”

“Don’t you want to keep watching?”

“That’s all I have worth reminiscing.”

“We can find where she is right now, no problem!”

“That won’t be necessary. It’s getting late; you should leave. Thank you, truly.”

Once Bai Bing left, the Senior Official telephoned the security station, requesting that the building guard come up to his office for a moment. Soon after, the armed police guard entered and saluted.

“You’re… Yang, yes?”

“You have an excellent memory, sir.”

“I didn’t call you up here for anything important. I just wanted to tell you that today is my birthday.”

Taken by surprise, the guard was momentarily lost for words.

The Senior Official smiled indulgently. “Send my regards to the ranks. You may go.” The guard saluted, but just as he turned to leave, the Senior Official seemed to think of something. “Oh, leave the gun behind.”

The guard hesitated, but pulled out his handgun. He walked over and carefully set it on one end of the broad office desk, before saluting again and leaving.

The Senior Official picked up the gun, detached the magazine, and took out the bullets, one by one, until there was only the last. Then he pushed the magazine back in. The next person to handle this gun could be his secretary, or the janitor who came in at night. An empty gun was always safer.

He put down the gun, then stood the removed bullets on the table in a circle, like the candles on a birthday cake. After that he strode to the window, looking across the city to the sun on the verge of setting. Behind the outer city’s industrial air pollution, it appeared as a deep red disk. He thought it looked like a mirror.

The last thing he did was to take the small “Serve the People” pin from his lapel and set it on the flag stand on the desk, beneath the miniature flags of China and the CCP.

Then he sat at his desk, calmly awaiting the last ray of the setting sun.

THE FUTURE

That night, Song Cheng entered the main computer room of the Center for Meteorological Modeling. He found Bai Bing alone, looking quietly at the screen of the booting superstring computer.

Song Cheng came over and patted his shoulder. “Hey, Bai, I’ve already notified your manager. A special car will arrive shortly to take you to Beijing. You’ll give the superstring computer to a central official. Some other experts in the field might listen to your report too. With such an extraordinary technology, it won’t be easy to get people to understand and believe it all. You’ll have to be patient when you explain and give the demonstrations… Bai Bing, what’s wrong?”

Bai Bing remained quiet, not turning from his seat. In the mirrored universe on the screen, the Earth floated suspended in space. The ice caps had altered in shape, and the ocean was a grayer shade of blue, but the changes weren’t obvious. Song Cheng didn’t notice them.

“He was right,” Bai Bing said.

“What?”

“The Senior Official was right.” Bai Bing turned slowly toward Song Cheng. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Did you spend an entire day and night coming up with that conclusion?”

“No, I got the future-time recursion to work.”

“You mean… the digital mirror can simulate the future now?”

Bai Bing nodded listlessly. “Just the very distant future. I thought of a completely new algorithm last night. It avoids the relatively near future, which allows it to sidestep the disruption in the causal chain resulting from knowledge of the future changing the present. I jumped the mirror directly into the far future.”

“How far?”

“Thirty-five thousand years later.”

“What’s society like, then?” Song Cheng asked cautiously. “Is the mirror having its effect?”

Bai Bing shook his head. “The digital mirror won’t exist by that time. Society won’t either. Human civilization already disappeared.”

Song Cheng was speechless.

On the screen, the viewing angle descended rapidly, coming to a stop above a city surrounded by desert.

“This is our city. It’s empty, already dead for two thousand years.”

The first impression the dead city gave was of a world of squares. All the buildings were perfect cubes, arrayed in neat columns and rows to form a perfectly square city. Only the clouds of sandy dust that rose at times in the square grid streets prevented one from mistaking the city for an abstract geometrical figure in a textbook.

Bai Bing maneuvered the viewing angle to enter a room in one of the cube-shaped edifices. Everything in it had been buried by countless years of sand and dust. On the side with the window, the accumulated sand rose in a slope, already high enough to touch the windowsill. The surface of the sand bulged in places, perhaps indicating buried appliances and furniture. A few structures like dead branches extended from one corner; that was a metal coatrack, now mostly rust. Bai Bing copied part of the view and pasted it into another program, where he processed away the thick layer of sand on top, revealing a television and refrigerator rusted down to the bare frames, as well as a writing desk. A picture frame, long fallen over, lay on the desk. Bai Bing adjusted the viewing angle and zoomed in so that the small photo in the frame filled the screen.

It was a family portrait of three, but the three people in the photo were practically identical in appearance and dress. One could guess their gender only by the length of hair, and age only by height. They wore matching outfits similar to Mao suits, orderly and stiff, buttoned to the collar. When Song Cheng looked closer, he found that their features still displayed some variation. The effect of indistinguishability had come from their identical expressions, a sort of wooden serenity, a sort of dead graveness.

“Everyone in the photos and video fragments I could find had the same expression on their face. I haven’t seen any other emotion, certainly not tears or laughter.”

“How did it end up like this?” Song Cheng asked, horrified. “Can you look through the historical records they left?”

“I did. The course of history after us goes something like this: The age of the mirror will start in five years. During the first twenty years, digital mirrors will only be used by law enforcement, but they’ll already be substantially affecting human society and causing structural changes. After that, digital mirrors will seep into every corner of life and society. History calls it the beginning of the Mirror Era. For the first five centuries of the new era, human society still gradually develops. The signs of total stagnation first appear in the mid-sixth century ME. Culture stagnates first, because human nature is now as pure as water, and there is nothing left to depict and express. Literature disappears, then all of the humanities. Science and technology will grind to a standstill after them. The stagnation of progress lasts thirty thousand years. History calls that protracted period the Middle Age of Light.”

“What happens after?”

“The rest is straightforward. Earth runs out of resources, and all the arable land is lost to desertification. Meanwhile, humanity still doesn’t have the technology to colonize space, or the power to excavate new resources. In those five thousand years, everything slowly winds down…. In the era I showed you, there are still people living on all the continents, but there’s really not much to see.”

“Ah…” The sound Song Cheng made resembled the Senior Official’s slow sigh. A long time passed before his shaking voice could ask, “Then… what do we do? Do we destroy the digital mirror right now?”

Bai Bing took out two cigarettes, handing one to Song Cheng. He lit his own and drew deeply, blowing the smoke at the three dead faces on the screen. “I’m definitely destroying the digital mirror. I only kept it around until now so you can see. But nothing we do now matters. That’s one bit of consolation: everything that happens afterward has nothing to do with us.”

“Someone else created a digital mirror too?”

“The theory and technology for it are both out there, and according to superstring theory, the number of viable initialization parameter sets is enormous, but still finite. If you keep going down the list, you’ll eventually run into that one set…. More than thirty thousand years from now, till the last days of civilization, humanity will still be thanking and worshiping a guy named Nick Kristoff.”

“Who is he?”

“According to the historical records: a devout Christian, physicist, and inventor of the digital mirror software.”

MIRROR ERA

^{FIVE MONTHS LATER, AT THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY}

^{CENTER OF EXPERIMENTAL COSMOLOGY}

When the radiant sea of stars appeared on one of the fifty display screens, all of the scientists and engineers present erupted into cheers. Five superstring computers stood here, each simulating ten virtual machines, for a total of fifty sets of big bang simulations running day and night. This newly created virtual universe was the 32,961st.

Only one middle-aged man remained unmoved. He was heavy-browed and alert-eyed, imposing in appearance, the silver cross at his breast all the more striking against his black sweater. He made the sign of the cross, and asked:

“Gravitational constant?”

“6.67 times 10–11!”

“Speed of light in a vacuum?”

“2.998 times 105 kilometers per second!”

“Planck’s constant?”

“6.626 times 10–34!”

“Charge of electron?”

“1.602 times 10–19 coulombs!”

“One plus one?” He gravely kissed the cross at his chest.

“Equals two! This is our universe, Professor Kristoff!”