Supernova Era

^DREAMTIME

Life seemed to proceed along the same old tracks after the New World Assembly, despite a few unusual signs, the most conspicuous of which was that some children no longer studied mornings and evenings but either went to bed or went online after they finished work. The leadership didn’t pay much attention to the phenomenon, since they felt it was a normal manifestation of work fatigue rather than an omen of some kind. But the practice spread swiftly, and soon work-aged children were skipping not only class but work as well, and younger children began to abandon their studies entirely. At this point the leadership realized something else was present beneath the surface, but it was too late. The development of the situation accelerated before they had time to adopt countermeasures, and as a result the children’s world experienced a second social vacuum.

Unlike the first, this vacuum did not take the form of a catastrophe, but of a joyous holiday. It was a Sunday morning, normally the time when the city was at its quietest, since the children would still be sound asleep from the exhausting, extended six-day work week. But this day was different. The children in the NIT found that the city had awakened from the slumber it had been in since the adults’ departure.

Children were everywhere outside, as if all of them had taken to the streets. It reminded them of the hustle and bustle of the adults’ era, long ago. They moved in small groups, holding hands, laughing, singing, and filling the city with delight. For the entire morning, the children strolled through the city, taking a look here, inspecting something there, as if this was their first visit to the city, or to the world, and every fiber of their being was twinging with the same sensation: This world belongs to us!

The Candytown period was divided into two phases: Dreamtime and Slumbertime. Now the first had begun.

That afternoon, the children returned to their schools, where they thought about how carefree they had been during the adults’ time, and reminisced about childhood. They were delighted to be reunited with classmates and friends from the Common Era, and hugged and congratulated each other for surviving the disaster. They set aside worries about what the next day would bring; they had worried enough, and were tired of it. Planning for tomorrow wasn’t a task for kids anyway.

That night the revelry reached a crescendo. All the lights in the city were turned on, and the air shook with fireworks that drowned out the Rose Nebula.

In the NIT, the leaders looked out over the sea of gleaming lights and brilliant pyrotechnics in silence. Watching the crowds of exuberant children on the street, Specs said, “This is the true beginning of the children’s world.”

Xiaomeng sighed softly. “What happens next?”

Specs seemed not at all concerned. “Relax. History is a river that flows where it wills, and no one can stop it.”

“Then what should we do?” Huahua asked.

“We’re part of history, a few drops in that river. Go with it.”

Now Huahua sighed. “I’ve just come to that realization, too. I feel ridiculous thinking back on the feeling I had of us helming of the ship of state.”

The next day, children in critical systems like power, transportation, and telecommunications remained in their posts, but the vast majority of children didn’t go to work. For a second time, the children’s country fell into paralysis.

Unlike the Suspension, this time there weren’t many warning reports. In the NIT office, the child leaders held an emergency meeting, but no one knew what to say or do. After a long silence, Huahua pulled a pair of sunglasses from out of a drawer and said, “I’ll go have a look.” Then he walked out.

When he left the building, he found a bicycle and took it down the avenue. There were as many kids out today as the day before, and they looked even more excited. He parked his bike outside a shopping center. The door was open, and children were going in and out, so Huahua joined them. Lots of children were inside, most of them at the shelves, all of them picking out things they liked.

An electric toy car came squealing along and disappeared under a shelf. Looking back in the direction it came, he saw another shelf of toys, a dense crowd of kids, and toys strewn all over: cars, tanks, and robots careered about and knocked down teetering piles of dolls, to cries of delight. They had come to find toys they liked, but on realizing there were more wonderful things than they could carry off, decided to play with them here. The children were younger than Huahua, and as he passed among them and saw them messing with high-end toys, he was reminded of the world described in the New Five-Year Plan the previous day. He was over the age of being fascinated with toys, but he could appreciate these kids’ enthusiasm.

The children seemed to have separated themselves into two groups, each doing their own thing. One group had assembled fairly large armies out of electric toys: hundreds of tanks and other battle vehicles, a hundred-odd fighter jets, a huge crowd of robots, and tons of weird, nameless weapons, all laid out before them on the terrazzo floor in a flashing, clattering mess.

In front of Huahua the tiny army made a majestic charge. The two lines met four or five meters away from him, clanging and smashing to the delight of the children. It was like they’d walloped a hornets’ nest; half the vehicles toppled and groaned in place, while the others were sent spinning off in all directions. The terrazzo battlefield was now littered with overturned electric cars and detached robot limbs.

Their first battle ended, the children’s enthusiasm was running high, but there wasn’t enough left on the shelves to stage a second engagement. Just then a boy raced in to tell them that he’d found the storeroom, and they all ran off after him. A short, hurried round of hauling later, a dozen crates of war machines and robots had arrived, and the shelves had been pushed aside for more room to fight. A new, larger battle commenced just a few minutes after that, one that carried on with fresh troops continually being added.

Another group was ensconced in a menagerie of stuffed animals and dolls, and had set them up into families sitting next to little houses built out of wooden blocks. The houses went up so fast that they had to push aside the shelves so they could start erecting a city on the floor, to be populated by fashion dolls.

As they looked in satisfaction over the world they had created, the war-hungry first group dispatched a dense phalanx of a hundred remote-controlled tanks that rolled into the charming kingdom without any resistance and flattened it.

Huahua went over to the food department, where a group of young gourmands were digging in. They were hard at work selecting choice delicacies, but they took just one bite of each so as to leave room in their stomachs for more. Littered about the counter and floor were fine chocolates with bites taken out of them, drinks uncapped but tossed aside after just one sip, piles of canned goods with just a spoonful missing from each. Huahua saw a group of girls standing beside a pile of rainbow-colored candies taking a peculiar approach to eating: they unwrapped each piece, gave it a quick lick, and then dropped it before finding another unopened one in the pile. Many of the children were already full but refused to give up, as if they were tied to some sort of torturous work.

He went out the door and ran smack into a four- or five-year-old girl, who dropped a huge armload of dolls, nearly twenty of them. She took the brand-new travel bag she had slung over a shoulder and threw it on the ground, and then sat there beating her legs and bawling. The bag, Huahua noticed, was overflowing with dolls large and small; he couldn’t imagine what she would do with them all. There were more children outside than there had been when he arrived, all of them in high spirits, and a majority of them carrying things that had caught their eye in the shops.

The return journey on his bike was slow, since the streets were full of children at play, as if the city street had been turned into a playground. Some kicked balls around, others played cards. He found children who had gotten cars started and were zigzagging down the road like they were drunk. Three boys sat atop one luxury sedan as others on the roadway dove for cover. The car didn’t get far before crashing into a van parked on the roadside, and the boys tumbled to the ground. The kids inside came out and burst out laughing at their companions struggling to crawl to their feet.

Back in the NIT, Huahua told Specs and Xiaomeng what he had seen outside, and learned from them that conditions were similar in other regions.

Xiaomeng said, “As we understand it, kids out there are taking anything they want as easily as drinking water or breathing air. Work stoppage means that state assets are unprotected, but oddly enough, no one is asserting property rights over assets that do not belong to the state, so no conflicts have arisen when children take things at will.”

Specs said, “That’s not hard to explain. Any losses to private property can easily be recouped elsewhere. That means an end to private property.”

Huahua was shocked. “So economic rules, and the whole form of ownership from the adults’ time, collapsed overnight?”

Specs said, “It’s an extraordinary situation. We’re living in a time of unprecedented plenty, on the one hand due to the drastic decline in population, and on the other, because of the adult society’s tremendous overproduction in the year since the supernova in order to leave behind as much as possible for the children. For today’s society, it’s like per capita material wealth went up by a factor of five or ten overnight! Economic structures and notions of personal ownership will undergo astonishing transformations in light of such fantastic wealth. All of a sudden we’re in a state of primitive communism.”

Xiaomeng said, “So we’re in the future, ahead of schedule?”

Specs shook his head. “This is just a temporary illusion, without a corresponding productive foundation. No matter how much the adults left behind, it’ll get used up eventually, and at that point, economic rules and personal ownership will return to normal, or even go backward. That process might even exact a price in blood.”

Huahua smacked his hand on the table. “We should have the army take immediate action to protect state assets!”

Xiaomeng shook her head. “We’ve deliberated this with the General Staff Department, and the unanimous feeling is that we have to pull the army out of the major cities first.”

“Why?”

“It’s an emergency right now, but the army is made up of kids, too. They’ll naturally be unprepared. To guarantee success, full preparations must be made to put the army into the best possible state. That takes time, but there’s no other way.”

“Very well. But do it quickly. This is more dangerous than when the Epoch Clock ran out. The country’s going to be picked clean!”

The children remained astonished for the next three days: The adults had left behind so much stuff, so many tasty things to eat and to play with. The next feeling was one of confusion: If the ideal world was so close, why had they never made it there before? The children forgot everything; even the older ones who had retained a modicum of sense during the New World Assembly had their anxieties about the future whisked away by the revels. This was the most carefree time in all of human history, and the entire country turned into a pleasure garden of juvenile overindulgence.

In the Candytown period, three students from Zheng Chen’s class, the letter carrier Li Zhiping, barber Chang Huidong, and cook Zhang Xiaole spent their time together now that they didn’t have to go to work. The postal service was practically shut down, so Li Zhiping had no mail to deliver; no one went to Chang Huidong’s shop to get a haircut, because children didn’t care as much for appearances as adults might have wished; Zhang Xiaole the cafeteria chef had even less cause for staying in the kitchen, since the children had far better places to forage. For three days of Dreamtime, every cell in their body had been in a state of excitement and they slept little. They woke every morning just after dawn, as if a voice were calling out to them, “Come, look, another wonderful day has begun.”

Every morning when they stepped out into the fresh air, the three boys felt the joy of birds liberated from the cage. Complete freedom was theirs. With no restrictions and no work to finish, they could go anywhere they pleased, and play whatever they wished.

The past few mornings, children like themselves had played physically strenuous games; younger children who played war games or hide-and-seek could hide so well you’d never find them, since anywhere in the city was fair game. The bigger kids could play cars (real cars!), soccer, and street hockey in the middle of the road. They played hard, since apart from the play itself they had another goal in mind: preparing for the midday feast. They had eaten well the past few days, but they were nowhere near satiated. Every morning, the children did their utmost to play themselves to exhaustion, hoping above all else that when it came time for lunch, they would be able to exuberantly tell themselves, “I’m hungry!”

The games stopped at eleven thirty, and at noon the feast began. With so many possibilities throughout the city, the three boys realized it was unwise to eat at the same spot every time, since each location sourced from the same warehouse every day, so meals lost their novelty.

But the feast at the stadium was different. It was the largest feast in the city, serving more than ten thousand children a day. And the food options were even more plentiful. Walking into the stadium was like entering a labyrinth whose walls were built out of cans and cakes. You had to keep your wits about you or you’d stumble over the piles of choice candies underfoot. One day, Li Zhiping gazed down from a high-up stadium seat at the grubby children swarming over the mountains of food on the playing field like ants on a frosted cake. The mountain was a little lower after each feast, but it was replenished by children making afternoon deliveries.

After a few visits, they gained a bit of experience about eating: if they found something tasty, they could only eat a little of it at a time before it turned unpleasant. Zhang Xiaole learned an illustrative lesson from luncheon meat. The first time he ate eighteen varieties, twenty-four tins all told—he didn’t finish them, of course, but just had a few bites of each—but the stuff had tasted like sawdust in his mouth ever since. They also discovered that beer and hawthorn jelly were useful in this regard, and for the next few days they used them as appetizers.

Although the stadium feast was spectacular, the three boys were even more impressed by the feast they saw at the Asia Pacific Building, which had once housed the city’s fanciest hotel. The tables were piled high with gourmet products they had only seen before in foreign films, but the only diners were kittens and puppies. Drunk on French wine and Scottish whisky, the little animals swayed on unsteady feet to the uproarious amusement of their little masters in the audience.

The midday feast meant that afternoons were devoted to more sedentary pursuits, such as cards, video games, and billiards, or even just watching television. Only one activity was essential: drinking beer. Everyone drank two or three bottles every afternoon to aid digestion. After dark, the three boys joined the citywide revelry of singing and dancing that lasted till midnight, by which point they’d worked up enough of an appetite for dinner.

It wasn’t long before the children were tired of playing. They learned that nothing in the world was fun forever, nothing was eternally delicious, and when everything was easily attainable, it quickly lost all flavor. The children were tired, and gradually, the games and feasts turned into a type of work. And they didn’t want to work.

Three days later, the child army entered the city with the task of protecting state assets. Food and other life necessities had to be divvied up according to actual needs, and a stop was put to profligate indulgence. The situation was brought under control more easily than anticipated, without erupting into large-scale bloodshed.

But subsequent events did not improve in the way that the young leaders had hoped. Every development in the children’s world revealed a new, strange face entirely beyond the imagining of the adults in the Common Era.

The Candytown period entered its second phase: Slumbertime.

^SLUMBERTIME

For the next several days, apart from fetching food from the distribution points, Li Zhiping and his companions did little but sleep. They slept long, eighteen or twenty hours a day. They ate, but with no one to push them to wake up, they simply lay there sleeping. Sleep came easier with practice. The mind grew sluggish and they felt perpetually drowsy. There was no point to doing anything; it was all tiring, even eating.

Now they realized that total idleness was exhausting, and it was a more frightening exhaustion than they had ever known. When they got tired working or studying, they could rest, but now rest itself was tiring, leaving sleep the only recourse, but the more they slept the sleepier they became.

When they lay awake they had no desire to rise, since their very bones felt soft and rubbery. They simply lay there looking up at the ceiling, their minds absent of thoughts, and none likely to come. It was hard to believe that lying in bed with an empty mind could be so tiring. They’d lie for a while, and then fall asleep, and eventually they couldn’t tell day from night.

Humans were a sleeping creature, they decided, and waking was the abnormal state. During those days they became denizens of slumberland, spending the bulk of their day living in dreams. Dreams were better than being awake, since they could return over and over to the country depicted in the New Five-Year Plan, go inside that megatower, ride the huge roller coaster, visit Candytown and taste a piece of windowpane.

The only time the boys communicated now was when they woke up and told each other about their dreams; when they finished, they pulled up the covers again and went back in search of the wonderful world they had just visited. But they never found it, and were taken instead to a different place. Little by little the dreamworlds faded and grew more and more like the real world, until eventually they found it very difficult to distinguish the two.

One time somewhat later when Zhang Xiaole went out to get food, he happened across a box of baijiu, and so the three boys began to drink. They’d started on beer during Dreamtime, but now drinking to excess was widespread, as children discovered that the fluid’s bite brought a tremendous thrill to their numb bodies and psyches. No wonder adults used to love it so! They finished drinking at noon and came to after dark, but to them it was as if only four or five minutes had passed, so soundly had the booze knocked them into a dreamless sleep.

They could all sense that the world was somehow unusual upon waking, but they gave it no more thought, since they’d drunk so much. After a sip of cold water, they considered what was out of the ordinary, and quickly hit upon the answer: The walls of the room weren’t spinning. They had to restore the world to normal, and so began searching for more alcohol.

Li Zhiping found a bottle and they passed it around, letting the blistering fire pour down the throat and set the whole body afire. The four walls gradually started to move again, and their bodies turned into clouds that moved with the walls, up and down and side to side, as if Earth had become a raft bobbing about in the ocean of the universe, liable to capsize at any time. Letter carrier Li Zhiping, barber Chang Huidong, and chef Zhang Xiaole lay there wallowing in the cradle-like rocking and turning, thinking of the wind blowing over them out toward the endless cosmic ocean.

By dint of enormous effort, the children’s national government managed to ensure that key systems maintained essentially normal operations during Slumbertime. Water supply, transport links, telecommunications, and Digital Domain all remained operational, and it was due to these efforts that the Candytown period did not experience the accidents and disasters that swept the country during the Suspension. Some historians described the forty-odd days of Slumbertime as “an ordinary night extended a hundredfold,” which is an accurate comparison. Even though most people are asleep at night, society continues to operate. Other people felt the country was in a coma, retaining essential life functions even while unconscious.

The child leaders used every method at their disposal to wake the country’s children from their deep sleep, but none was successful. They repeatedly resorted to the remedy used during the Suspension, having Big Quantum call up all the phones in the country, but there was no significant reaction. Big Quantum summarized the responses using the New World Assembly method into one statement: “Go away. I’m sleeping.”

The leaders visited the New World community online, which was largely empty and abandoned. The New World Assembly was a vast plain devoid of human life. Since the start of this period, Huahua and Xiaomeng visited Digital Domain practically every day, each time hailing the country’s children with the greeting, “Hey, kids, how’s it going?”

The response was always the same: “We’re alive. Bug off.”

So they said, but the children didn’t actually hate Huahua or Xiaomeng, and they were unsettled if the two of them failed to show up on a particular day, asking each other, “Why aren’t those two good kids online today?”

“Good kids” was something of a sarcastic jab, but it was a friendly one, and it was a name people called them from then on. And hearing the response “We’re alive” every day did give some comfort to the leaders, for so long as it was there, the country hadn’t experienced the worst.

One night when Huahua and Xiaomeng visited the New World Assembly, they found more children than usual, around ten million, most of them pretty wasted. Most of the cartoon avatars were carrying liquor bottles bigger even than the avatars themselves. They wove and stumbled in the assembly or tumbled into piles, conversing drunkenly. Like their counterparts at the computer in the outside world, from time to time the avatars took a swig of digital booze. The liquid, which probably used the same element in the image database for all of the bottles, shone like molten iron and lit up the cartoon bodies when they drank.

“Kids, how’s it going?” Xiaomeng asked from the platform in the center of the assembly, like she did every day, like she was visiting a bedridden patient.

Ten million children answered, and Big Quantum summarized their responses into a stammering “We’re… fine. Alive…”

“But what sort of life is it?”

“It’s… what? How are you living?”

“Why have you totally abandoned work and study?”

“Work… what’s the… point? You’re good kids. You… you can work.”

“Hey! Hey!” Huahua shouted.

“What’re you yelling for? Can’t you see we’re drunk and sleeping?”

Huahua got angry. “You drink and sleep and drink some more. Do you know what you are? You’re little pigs!”

“Watch… watch your mouth. You’re up there cursing at us all day. What kind of class… class monitor are you?” “Class Monitor” was the children’s nickname for Huahua; they called Specs “Studies Rep” and Xiaomeng “Life Rep.” “If you want us to listen to you, fine… fine. Now it’s time for you to down… this bottle!”

Then a huge liquor bottle descended from the blue sky and hovered in front of Huahua, dancing mockingly. He smashed it with a wave of his hand, and its molten iron contents showered down in glittering fountains around the platform.

“Hah, piggies,” Huahua said.

“Still at it?” Bottles came flying from all parts of the assembly, but were caught by a software screen and disappeared into thin air at the edge of the platform. More bottles magically appeared in the empty hands of the children who had thrown them.

Huahua said, “Wait and see. You’ll starve if you don’t work.”

“That includes you.”

“You little piggies really deserve a spanking!”

“Hahaha. You think you can… spank us? You’re talking to three hundred million kids. We’ll see who ends up… spanking who.”

Huahua and Xiaomeng took off their VR helmets and looked through the NIT’s transparent walls at the city outside. This was Slumbertime’s deepest sleep. Few lights were on in the city, and its forest of buildings shone icy blue in the unearthly light of the Rose Nebula, like sleeping snowcapped mountains.

Xiaomeng said, “I dreamed of my mom again last night.”

Huahua asked, “Did she say anything to you?”

Xiaomeng said, “I’ll tell you about something that happened to me when I was younger. I don’t remember how old I was, but I was pretty young. Ever since I first saw a rainbow, I imagined it was a multicolored bridge in the sky, and imagined it was made of crystal and lit with multicolored lights. Once, after a heavy rain, I ran off in the direction of the rainbow as hard as I could. I wanted to reach the end, and to climb up to its scary heights and see what was beyond the mountains on the horizon, and find out how big the world really was. But as I ran, it seemed to move away from me, and then the sun set behind the mountains, and it vanished from bottom to top. I stood alone in an empty field covered head to toe in mud, bawling, and my mom promised me that the next time it rained she would go with me to chase the rainbow. And so I looked forward to the next big rain, and the next time it rained and there was a rainbow, my mom was just coming to fetch me from kindergarten. She put me on the seat on the back of her bike and rode off toward the rainbow. She rode fast. But the sun still set and the rainbow disappeared. Mom said to wait for the next heavy rain. But I waited and waited through lots of rainstorms but there wasn’t another rainbow. Then it started to snow…”

Huahua said, “You liked to fantasize when you were little. But you don’t anymore.”

Xiaomeng gently shook her head. “Sometimes, you’ve got to grow up quick…. But last night I dreamed my mom took me to chase the rainbow again! We caught it, and then climbed up. I climbed to the top of that multicolored bridge and saw the stars twinkling just next to me. I grabbed one. It was cold as ice, and chimed like a music box.”

Huahua said with feeling, “The time before the supernova really does seem like a dream.”

“Yes,” Xiaomeng said. “I just want to dream myself back to the time of the adults, and to be a kid again. I’m having more and more dreams like that.”

“Dreaming about the past and not the future is where you’re making a mistake,” Specs said, coming over with a big cup of coffee. The past few days he had rarely spoken, and hadn’t taken part in the conversations with the country’s children in Digital Domain. Most of his time he had spent alone, deep in thought.

Xiaomeng sighed. “Are there any dreams for the future?”

Specs said, “This is the biggest difference between me and you. You see the supernova as a catastrophe, and so you’re doing everything you can to get through it, hoping the children will grow up as fast as possible. But I think this is a huge opportunity for humanity. It could mean huge breakthroughs, and advancement for civilization.”

Huahua pointed out at the city slumbering in the blue glow of the Rose Nebula. “Look at the children’s world. Is there any hope of that?”

Specs took a sip of coffee, and said, “We missed an opportunity.”

Xiaomeng and Huahua looked at each other, and then Xiaomeng said, “You’ve thought of something again. Out with it!”

“I thought of it at the New World Assembly. Do you remember what I said about the basic motivator of the children’s world? When we went back to the assembly platform after visiting the children’s virtual country, and faced those two hundred million faces, I suddenly realized what that motivation is.”

“What?”

“Play.”

Xiaomeng and Huahua thought about this in silence.

“First we have to figure out the definition of play. It’s an activity unique to children, distinct from the entertainment of adults. Entertainment was only a supplement to the main body of life in the adults’ society, but play can be the entirety of life for children. It’s quite possible that a children’s world might be a play-based world.”

Xiaomeng said, “But how’s that related to the breakthroughs and advancement for civilization? Will play be able to produce those?”

“How do you imagine human civilization advances?” Specs shot back. “Through hard work?”

“It doesn’t?”

“Ants and bees are industrious, but how advanced is their civilization? Humanity’s dim-witted ancestors cleared the earth with crude stone shovels, and then when they found that tiring, learned how to refine bronze and iron. When they found that tiring, they wondered whether they could find anything to do the work in their stead, and so they invented steam engines, electricity, and nuclear energy. Then even thinking became tiresome, so they looked for something to do it for them, and thus computers were invented…. Civilization progresses not due to humans’ hard work, but because of their laziness. One look at the natural world will show you that humans are the laziest of all creatures.”

Huahua nodded. “That’s an extreme characterization, but there’s truth in it. The course of history is a complicated thing, and we shouldn’t simplify it too much.”

Xiaomeng said, “I still don’t agree that civilization can advance without hard work. Do you really believe that it’s the right thing for the children to sleep all day?”

“Haven’t they worked?” Specs asked. “You probably still remember that virtual reality movie that the US put out just before the supernova, a huge Warner Brothers production with a budget of over a hundred million dollars. Everyone said it was the biggest computer-generated virtual model ever. But you all saw the virtual country the kids made. I asked Big Quantum to run the calculations, and it comes out to three thousand times the size of that movie.”

Huahua nodded again. “That’s right! The virtual world was humongous, and every grain of sand and blade of grass was rendered to perfection. Back in computer class it took me a whole day to model an egg. Imagine the work it took to make that virtual country!”

Specs said, “You all think that kids are lazy, that they don’t work hard, but have you ever thought about how after a day of tough work, they’re still at the computer close to midnight working just as hard on building their virtual country? I’ve heard that lots of them even died right in front of their computers.”

Xiaomeng said, “So have we found the cause of our troubles?”

“It’s simple, really. The adults’ society was an economic one. People labored to obtain economic compensation. The child society is a play society. People labor to receive play compensation. But right now, that compensation is practically zero.”

Huahua and Xiaomeng started nodding. Xiaomeng said, “I don’t entirely agree with your theory; for instance, economic compensation is essential in the child society as well, but I see a bit of light shining through the murk that’s clogged my mind for days.”

Specs continued, “For society as a whole, when the principles of play replace the principles of economics in determining the operation of society, it might produce tremendous innovation, releasing the human potential that was constrained under the former economic principles. For example, in the adults’ time, the majority of people couldn’t rationalize paying two-thirds of their life savings for a trip to space, but in the children’s world, most people would, under play principles. This would propel space travel to a pace of development equal to that of information technology in the adults’ time. Play principles are more innovative and pioneering than economic principles; play means traveling far, it means constantly finding out new mysteries of the world. Play will develop toward a high level, just as economics in the adults’ time promoted scientific development, but this will be a far greater driving force, and will ultimately lead human civilization to an explosive leap, meeting or exceeding the critical velocity for survival in this cold universe.”

Huahua said thoughtfully, “This means that even after the children’s world becomes an adult world, play principles must continue on.”

“It’s not an impossibility. The children’s world will create a brand-new culture, and when our world grows into an adults’ world, it will not be a facsimile of the Common Era.”

“Wonderful! Totally brilliant. Now, you just said that you had this idea at the New World Assembly?”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t you tell us before?”

“Is there any point to telling you now?”

Huahua pointed a finger at Specs and said in exasperation, “You really are a giant of thought and a dwarf of action! You’ve always been that way! What’s the point of an idea if you don’t act on it?”

Specs shook his head without any change of expression. “How should I act? We can’t simply accept their crazy five-year plan, can we?”

“Why not?”

Specs and Xiaomeng looked at Huahua as if he were a total stranger.

“Is that five-year plan nothing more than an unreal dream to you?”

“It’s less real than a dream. If humanity ever had a plan entirely divorced from reality, this is it,” Specs said.

“But it’s the highest expression of your idea: a play-driven world.”

Specs said, “You’re right about the plan as an expression of an idea, but it has no practical significance whatsoever.”

“None at all?”

Specs and Xiaomeng exchanged a glance.

“Are you sure you aren’t sleepwalking?” Specs asked Huahua, and then remembered that at the critical moment in the Suspension a few months back, Huahua had asked him the same question.

Huahua said, “Remember the adventure zone that took up the entire northwest? Isn’t that a possibility? Our total population is just a fifth of what it was in the adults’ time, so we can vacate half of our territory—not necessarily the northwest—shut down all of the cities and industries in that entire area, and move the population, so as to leave it uninhabited. Let it gradually return to a natural state, into a national park. The other half of the country still wouldn’t be as crowded as it was for the adults.”

On the heels of their initial shock at Huahua’s suggestion, Specs and Xiaomeng found sudden inspiration.

Xiaomeng said, “That’s right! And one outcome would be that the population in the inhabited half would double, and every child’s average workload would be cut in half. It would solve the problem of overwork and would give them more time to study or play.”

“More importantly,” Specs said, getting into it, “play would be compensation for labor, just like I described. After a stretch of work, children could spend their free time out in the national park. It’s half the country—nearly five million square kilometers—so it ought to be lots of fun.”

Huahua nodded. “And in the long term, it might be possible for the megasized amusement rides to actually be built in that huge park.”

Xiaomeng said, “I think the plan is workable, and it’ll pull the country back from the brink. Migration is the critical thing. It would have been unimaginable in the adults’ time, but children’s social structures are far, far simpler. We’re basically structured like a big school, so for us the large-scale population displacement won’t be too difficult. What do you think, Specs?”

Specs thought a moment, and then said, “That’s a creative idea. It’s just that it’s a huge action so unprecedented that it might bring—”

“We can’t predict what it’ll bring!” Huahua cut in. “There you go again, a dwarf of action. Of course we’re going to give it careful study. I propose an immediate meeting. I’m convinced that implementing this plan will wake the country right up out of its slumber.”

Historians later called that conversation the “Late Night Talk” of the early Supernova Era, and its significance cannot be overstated. During their talk, Specs proposed two important ideas: first, that play is the primary driving force of the children’s world, an idea that later became the foundation for sociology and economics in the early Supernova Era; and second, that the play principles of the children’s world would in some way affect the later adult world, changing the nature of human society. This idea was even bolder, and its influence more profound.

One other major part of the Late Night Talk was Huahua’s proposal of the first future plan based on play principles, which became the basic model for the operation of the world in the future. However, the actual course of the Supernova Era under play principles was far weirder and more shocking than the young leaders could ever have imagined.

As the leadership team was holding its nighttime meeting in the NIT hall to explore the design of the huge national park, the course of history was mercilessly interrupted by the receipt of an email from the other side of the globe. The contents read as follows: