Supernova Era

^ANTARCTICA

A low rumble came across the sea like spring thunder on the horizon.

“The frequency of the breakaways is increasing,” Huahua said, looking in the direction of the sound.

There was another rumble, clearer this time, from a collapse on a mountain of ice close to the shore, and they watched as a chunk of the big silver peak plunged into the ocean, kicking up a high spray. Huge waves quickly reached land and swamped a flock of penguins on the beach; the penguins waddled about in a chaotic scramble once the waves receded.

Lü Gang said, “Last week, Specs and I took the destroyer Huangshan around the barrier, and chunks kept falling off all the time. So much crashing. It’s like the whole continent is melting!”

“Half the shelf over the Ross Sea has melted. At this rate, Shanghai and New York will turn into Venice in two months,” Huahua said with concern.

Huahua, Specs, and Lü Gang were standing on the Amundsen coast of Antarctica. They had arrived on Earth’s southernmost continent a month ago. On that day, after their plane had made its final fuel stop on Tierra del Fuego and crossed the Antarctic coastline for the first time, the pilot had said, “Hey, why does the land look like a panda?” From their high altitude the patchy black-and-white land was vastly different from the expanse of silvery white the children had always pictured in their minds. It was a new face for the continent. A ten-thousand-year-old snowpack was melting, revealing the black stone and dirt of the ground beneath. The patch beside the ocean on which the three children now stood was new ground free from snow. The polar sun hung low on the horizon, casting three long shadows behind them. The wind remained cold, but it had lost its bite, and it carried the damp breath of early spring, a flavor previously unknown here.

“Check this out.” Lü Gang bent down and plucked a small plant from the dirt. It was a weird-looking thing, dark green with thick leaves.

Huahua said, “Those things are everywhere. I’ve heard they’re prehistoric vegetation, extinct everywhere else in the world. Their seeds were preserved in the Antarctic soil, and now they’ve been resurrected after the climate change.”

“Antarctica was warm once, long ago. The world keeps on oscillating,” Specs said.

The armies of the countries taking part in the World Games were assembling in Antarctica. So far, 102 army divisions, with roughly 1.5 million soldiers, had arrived, including twenty-five divisions from the US, twenty from China, eighteen from Russia, twelve from Japan, eight from Europe, and nineteen from other countries. Even if they managed only a single company, practically all of the countries in the world were participating. Troops were still coming in by sea and air, and many countries were shipping materials and troops through waypoints in Argentina and New Zealand.

Since the majority of armies were using Argentina as a transit base and setting off for Antarctica from ports and airports in the southern part of the country, they made landfall across the Drake Passage on the Antarctic Peninsula. But they eventually realized that the peninsula was too narrow for large-scale war games, and so the gaming region was set in the broader region of Marie Byrd Land. In that vast wilderness, countries were at work building their own land bases; to facilitate bringing in supplies directly from the ocean, the bases were clustered near the shore of the Amundsen Sea, along a long, narrow strip between Thurston Island and Cape Dart, spaced anywhere from fifty to a hundred kilometers apart.

The three children watched the breakaways from the shore for a while, and then reboarded one of the three tracked all-terrain vehicles that were waiting. The small convoy set off to the west, heading to the American base for the first meeting of countries participating in the war games. The original plan had been to go by helicopter, but the three young leaders wanted to see the region up close and in person, so they went overland. Passable roads had not yet been cleared between the different countries’ bases, so they had to resort to specialized vehicles originally intended for polar scientific expeditions during the adults’ era.

The scenery was monotonous. The left-hand side fluctuated between black exposed ground and white snow cover, and the terrain was predominantly level with low-lying hills. To the right was the Amundsen Sea and its host of icebergs, and a surface littered with chunks of various sizes broken off from the ice shelf. Farther out were the ships of various countries at anchor. The Ross and Amundsen Seas now held more than fifteen thousand ships, forming the largest fleet ever recorded in human history. They included aircraft carriers and supertankers, like ocean-borne iron cities, as well as fishing vessels of just a few hundred tons. It was this gigantic fleet that had delivered more than a million people and an enormous quantity of material to this desolate continent, and had replaced the loneliness of the Southern Ocean with crowded noise, as if an endless chain of cities had sprung out of the water.

After they had driven for over an hour, a spread of field tents and huts appeared alongside the road: the Japanese base. Teams of Japanese children were doing drills on the beach. They sang military songs in unison as they marched exuberantly with uniform steps. But what caught the Chinese children’s eye was a huge humpback whale lying on the beach, thick pink slabs of flesh and dark-colored organs visible in its sliced-open belly. A group of Japanese children were clambering over its body like a horde of ants crawling over a fish, hacking away huge chunks of whale meat with power saws, and loading them by crane onto a truck to ship back to camp.

The Chinese children got out of their vehicle and stood quietly off to one side. The whale, it turned out, was still alive, and its mouth twitched and the one cloudy eye that faced upward, big as a truck tire, stared at them lifelessly. A few Japanese kids emerged from the belly of the huge animal drenched in blood, straining under the effort of carrying a huge, dark red organ: whale liver. The crane loaded it onto a truck, where it filled up the entire bed and quivered there, steaming. One kid holding a paratrooper knife climbed aboard and cut a few pieces off the liver and tossed them out to a pack of army dogs beneath the truck. The entire scene, the circle of bloodstained snow, the vivisected whale, the children on top of it slicing pieces of flesh, the blood-smeared crane and trucks, the dogs wrestling for scraps on the bloody snow, and the ocean, stained crimson by two rivers of whale blood, was a surreal picture of horror.

Lü Gang said, “The Japanese fleet has been using depth charges against whales in the Ross and Amundsen Seas, stunning them and then dragging them ashore. One charge can stun a whole pod.”

“A century of efforts to protect the whales could be destroyed in a single day,” Specs said with a sigh.

A few Japanese children recognized them and jumped off the whale’s body and raised their bloodstained gloved hands in a salute. Then they climbed back up and went back to work.

Specs said to Huahua and Lü Gang, “I’ve got just one question, and I’d like you to answer me truthfully. When you were young, did you ever truly treasure life, in your heart of hearts?”

“No,” Huahua said.

“No,” Lü Gang said. “When I was at the army with my dad, every day when I got out of class I’d play with the boys from the local villages. We’d shoot birds and catch frogs, and when I saw those little creatures die at my hands, I didn’t feel anything in particular. The others were the same.”

Specs nodded. “Yeah. It takes a lengthy process of life experience to truly appreciate the value of life. In the mind of a child, life doesn’t occupy the same place as in an adult’s. What’s strange is that adults always associate children with kindness, peace, and other wonderful things.”

“What’s strange about that?” Huahua said, giving him a look. “In the adults’ era, children existed within their restrictions. But more importantly, children had no opportunity to take part as a collective in the cruel struggle for survival, so of course their true nature wouldn’t be exposed. Oh, for the past couple of days I’ve been reading the copy of Lord of the Flies you gave me.”

“It’s a good book. Golding was one of the few adults who really got children. It’s a shame that the others mostly judged the hearts of children using the measure of great men,[5] rather than recognizing our basic nature. This was their last and greatest mistake. And that mistake has introduced too many variables into the progress of history in the Supernova Era,” Specs said somberly.

The three children watched in silence for a while longer before returning to the car and setting off again.

If any adult had survived the supernova, they would have thought they were in a nightmare. When all the world’s nuclear weapons winked out in space in the final days of the Common Era, the coming children’s world was, in the adult imagination, a paradise of global harmony, a world brimming with childlike innocence and friendship, in which the children would join hands kindergarten-style and, out of their innate purity and goodness, build a wonderful new Earth. There were even suggestions that all human historical records be obliterated: “Our final hope is that children retain a decent image of us in their hearts. Should those gentle children look back on our history from their wonderful new world of peace and see all the war, power, and plunder, they will realize what sort of unreasonable, deviant creatures we are.”

But what the adults could never imagine was that less than a year into the Supernova Era, the children’s world would erupt into a world war. So grim were its rules of competition, so bloody and barbaric its methods, that they were unprecedented not only in the Common Era but throughout the entirety of human history. The Common Era had no cause to worry about its own image in the hearts of children, since what made them unreasonable in children’s eyes was their restraint and moderation, and their patently ridiculous misgivings and moral codes. International law and behavioral norms were cast aside overnight as everything was flung out into the open, and no one felt the need to hide anymore.

China’s high command was initially of divided opinion about sending troops to Antarctica to take part in the war games. The importance of the Antarctic Games was undeniable, but Xiaomeng brought up a pragmatic question: “Our own neighborhood isn’t very stable. India, for example, is only sending one division, and will retain a million-strong army inside the country. Who knows what they’re planning to do? If we want to fully participate, we’ll need to deploy a sizable proportion of army forces, plus at least two-thirds of the navy. Having two of our three fleets far from home will create a local defense vacuum. Add to that the current domestic situation, and the rising ocean levels and widespread flooding along the coast, and other potential large-scale natural disasters that need major support from the military.”

Huahua said, “Both issues are resolvable. First, India is contained by Pakistan, which will also leave a major force at home. We can launch a diplomatic offensive so that under pressure from other major powers, India will be forced to deploy forces to the games in equivalent measure to us. As for natural disasters, the absence of the military is of course detrimental, but it’s not something we can’t handle.”

Lü Gang brought up another, more unsettling question. “Our armed forces are intrinsically a force for territorial defense. They are untested and incapable of waging a long-distance, intercontinental war. Our navy, for example, is based on ideas derived from land-war theories. It’s only an offshore defensive force, not a deepwater fighting force. The majority of the ships in the fleet can go no farther than James Shoal, which for a modern navy hardly even counts as leaving the backyard. Now we’ve got to voyage to Antarctica. Before they left, the adults told us time and again not to engage in wars across continents or oceans. You’re all aware of that.”

“But the world is very different from what the adults imagined. We can’t be inflexible,” Huahua said.

Specs then laid out his own viewpoint. “If the climate continues to follow the same pattern, half of our country will be drowned or rendered uninhabitably hot. Our future is linked to Antarctica, and so a global contest for the south pole is unavoidable. When the country first contemplated embarking on Antarctic expeditions, one national leader said, ‘In the midst of pressing concerns, taking an idle move like this shows vision.’[6] But for us, sending the army to Antarctica is not an idle move. It is a matter of urgency, and a mistake may cost us the game.”

Huahua added, “Set aside Antarctica’s strategic significance for the time being and consider the war games on their own. The outcome may determine seating order in the children’s world.”

They all agreed that Huahua’s point could have profound implications for the future, and so the question of taking part in the Antarctic Games was settled.

News of the games spread round the country, and it brought the Candytown period to a swift end. The country awoke with a start from its two-month slumber, “as if a tray of ice cubes had been dumped under the covers,” in the words of a later historian. But careful consideration reveals that this was nothing unusual. Nothing is a more powerful stimulant to society than war.

Apart from excitement and tension, the new direction that Antarctica gave the children was a major factor in waking them out of the Candytown period. In the children’s minds, the far-off south pole, a wonderfully mysterious place, became their only hope for shaking off the boredom of life. They had faith that their army would be able to win for the Chinese children an expanse of land on the continent, where the children who settled there could start new lives. In the televised broadcast of the order mobilizing troops to Antarctica, Huahua had this to say:

“Our territory is a paper covered with the adults’ drawings. Antarctica is an empty page where we can sketch whatever we desire, and build the paradise of our dreams!”

His statement led to a serious misunderstanding. A rumor began circulating saying that the country would simultaneously execute two five-year plans, the boring one drafted by the adults for domestic use, and the glorious one the children had depicted in the virtual country for Antarctica. There they would build their parks. The idea whipped up all of the country’s children into a frenzy. For a time, the “Antarctic Park” was the hottest topic online and in the media, and the entire country focused its attention on the far-off war games. After the mobilization order was issued, the tidiness of the Inertia period returned. Children returned to their jobs and resumed work, and soon the country was humming again.

The Supernova War was the first children’s war in human history, and from the start it demonstrated their society’s idiosyncrasies. The adults of the Common Era had no capacity to imagine a war that took the form of a game and proceeded according to the rules of a sports tournament.

Despite the deployment by all the countries of over a million troops, and the bases lined up at fifty-kilometer intervals, peace and calm reigned. There was even communication and interchange among the bases. Were it the adults’ era, war would already have broken out. For example, sea transport lines between the countries and their Antarctic bases were fragile and it was impossible to obtain supplies locally from the untilled land, which meant that a strike severing those supply lines would cause a disastrous collapse of an enemy’s land base. The children did the opposite: the fleets of major powers assisted weaker countries in transporting personnel and material to take part in the games.

Why this occurred is one of the strangest aspects of the children’s war: None of the countries had yet learned who their opponents would be. They were all just athletes at the Olympics, and only when the order of play was set would they know who they would be fighting. And they would be pitted against different opponents in each competition. Although diplomacy was constantly being conducted both openly and in secret, no alliances were formed, and all countries maintained complete nonalignment as they waited on the Antarctic playground for the start of the war games.

After they left the Japanese base, it was another two-hour drive before the Chinese children reached the American base. It was their first visit, and the scale of the place amazed them. It stretched out along the coastline for twenty-odd kilometers, dense clusters of tents and temporary buildings as far as the eye could see. Some of the buildings were quite tall, and sprouted forests of antennas from the rooftops. Radar antennas were distributed in large quantities throughout the base, half of them in white radomes that looked as if some gigantic bird had laid a clutch of eggs at random.

Surrounding the base was a web of rough roads on which all manner of military vehicles were passing by, kicking up clouds of dust alien to Antarctica and befouling every last stitch of snow along the way. Nearer to the impromptu harbor along the coast, mountains of goods of all kinds were piled up near the water. A row of large landing craft had just arrived and opened their black maws toward the shore to disgorge tanks and armored vehicles. The giant iron beasts crossed the shallows to dry land, and the ground shook as they rumbled on both sides of the Chinese children’s snow track. An unending line of transport planes flew low overhead, their enormous shadows flitting across land and sea in the direction of the airstrips, which had been set up in a hurry out of specialized perforated steel plates.

The summit of participating countries was held in an expansive hall constructed out of inflated building material. It was brightly lit and heated to springtime, and the ceiling was filled with balloons in all colors. A military band was playing a cheerful tune, as if this were a holiday celebration. When the Chinese children entered, most of the other leaders were already there. President Davey came over to greet them, and then led them to a long table in the center of the structure where other leaders were munching heartily. Over a hundred metal helmets were laid out on the table, each of them brimming with some sort of shiny substance.

“Try it. Krill from the Ross Sea.”

Huahua picked up one of the translucent krill, and then peeled and ate it. “Raw?”

Davey nodded. “Don’t worry. Everything is clean in Antarctica.” He handed Specs a glass of beer, and then took a few chunks of ice out of a tray on the table and dropped them in the glass, where they hissed and fizzed. “Natural Antarctic ice. It’s got high gas content. The finest restaurants in Europe used to source it specially. It’s quite expensive.”

“It’s all going to disappear pretty soon, judging from the oil slick along the shoreline,” Specs said.

“I’d like to discuss a topic not on the agenda of the meeting,” Huahua said, finding Ōnishi Fumio on the opposite side of the table and pointing a finger at him. “You need to stop the Japanese children from overfishing whales. If this goes on, whales will be wiped out in Antarctica in short order.”

Ōnishi set down his krill and answered with a sneer, “Focus on the games. Otherwise you’ll be wiped out.”

“That’s right, focus on the games,” Davey called out eagerly. “That’s the goal of this meeting. It’s been four months since the last one in D.C., and now that every country has brought a decent amount of naval and land forces to Antarctica, the games can begin. The thing is, no one knows how to play! That is the focus of this discussion. First off—”

“Mr. President, I should be chairing this meeting!” Yagüe said from one end of the table, banging on it with an empty helmet.

“Oh, fine. Mr. IOC President, if you please,” Davey said with a slight nod.

Throughout the first, and final, UN session of the Supernova Era, Yagüe in his capacity of secretary general had tried to restore the doomed international organization, but eventually even he came to the realization that his efforts were pointless, and he ended up sitting all by himself in the ruins of the UN Secretariat with nothing to do. The tower was dark and rumored to be haunted. It was said that when the light of the Rose Nebula shone through the collapsed roof of the General Assembly building, Roosevelt seated in his wheelchair would appear on the half-ruined rostrum, with the UN secretaries general taking turns pushing him. If it was moonlight that shone in through the roof, the hall would echo with the sound of slapping, as if Khrushchev’s ghost were rapping his delegate desk, not with a shoe, but with Kennedy’s skull…. These rumors gave Yagüe the creeps, bad enough that he had to resort to liquid courage at night. Just as he reached his breaking point, he received an invitation from the newly re-formed International Olympic Committee, tasked with organizing the war games, and gladly accepted this new position.

Yagüe waved to either side. “Stop eating, everyone, and sit down. Act like you’re in a meeting.”

The leaders took their seats along the table and put on their translation earpieces, although some of them still snitched a krill or two from the helmets in front of them.

“I told you to stop eating! Mr. President, please have someone take all that away!” Yagüe said.

Davey looked sidelong at him. “Mr. Chairman, you need to understand your position here. You’re just the moderator of the games. You have no power to give orders.”

Yagüe stared at him for a few seconds, and then spat to one side. “Fine. Then let’s begin. I’m sure you all know the national leaders present, so there’s no need for introductions. However, also present today are each country’s top military commanders. Shall we have them introduce themselves?”

The young generals took turns. In their tailored officers’ uniforms with gleaming golden stars on their epaulets and colorful ribbons and medals on their lapels, they cut far more impressive figures than the adult generals had and added considerable luster to the venue.

The last to make an introduction was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, General Scott. When he first took office, he had waffled over modeling himself after Eisenhower or Bradley or Patton or MacArthur, and had changed styles daily, to the bafflement of his young staffers. Today he had chosen MacArthur. He had ordered a staffer to prepare him a corncob pipe, but such a thing couldn’t be found in Antarctica. The staffer brought him a big, shiny black briar, sending the general into a rage. Now he didn’t salute as the other generals had done, but waved the pipe at everyone and said, “You twerps, just you wait! I’m gonna beat you so hard you’ll piss your pants.”

His words elicited laughter. “General Scott, we’re intrigued by your pips,” said the chief of general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Marshal Zavyalova, her tone sarcastic. Scott had seven stars on his shoulder.

“You have reservations about the number of stars? True, the highest rank ever created by the US Army was a six-star general, and that was a posthumous, ceremonial promotion. But I want seven stars on my shoulder. Patton himself could covet decorations, so why can’t I wear one more star? The president hasn’t criticized me, so what are you going to do?”

“I’m just wondering why you’re not wearing eight stars. That would be more symmetrical.”

“No, the layout would be too rigid. I’d prefer nine!”

Lü Gang put in, “Just slap on an American flag, why don’t you?”

Furiously, Scott said, “You’re mocking me, General Lü. I can’t permit this! I won’t!”

“Can you go a single day without getting into a fight?” Davey said.

“He’s mocking me!” Scott said, pointing at Lü Gang.

Davey grabbed the pipe out of Scott’s hand and threw it onto the table. “From now on, no messing around with that wacky crap. Also, take three of the stars off that idiotic shoulder mark. Don’t give the media anything to gossip about.”

Scott’s face reddened as he realized that the day’s choice of style had been a mistake. MacArthur was inappropriate for the president’s presence.

Yagüe rapped the table again with the helmet serving as a gavel. “Okay now, let’s continue. There are two items on the agenda for today’s meeting. First, to set out general principles for the war games, and second, to determine the events. We’ll proceed to the first agenda item. Our proposal for general principles are as follows: To make the games thrilling and fun, the six major military powers taking part, namely the United States, Russia, the European Union (counting as a single country during the war games), China, Japan, and India, as permanent members of the World Games, must abide by the package principle; that is, they must take part in all events. Other countries may selectively participate in the events as they so choose.”

The general principles gained unanimous approval from all countries, and Davey said with delight, “Excellent. A commendable beginning.”

Yagüe rapped the helmet again. “Next we’ll move to the second item, determining the events.”

“I’ll propose one first,” Davey called out. “Carrier battle groups!”

The other children were shocked into silence for a moment, and then Yagüe asked tentatively, “Isn’t that a little too… big? A carrier group? With all the aircraft on the carrier, and the escort of cruisers and destroyers and submarines? It’s too big.”

Davey said, “That’s the point! Don’t kids want to bring out the big guns?”

Huahua stood up. “American kids, maybe. We can’t play that game, though. China doesn’t have an aircraft carrier.”

“Japan doesn’t, either,” said Ōnishi.

Prime Minister Jairu of India said, “We’ve got one, but an old model with traditional propulsion. And we can’t put together a battle group.”

“What you mean is that it’ll be the EU, Russia, and us, and you all watch from the sidelines?” Davey asked.

Yagüe nodded, and added, “That’s not in line with the package principle.”

Huahua shrugged. “That can’t be helped. We can’t fabricate an aircraft carrier.”

“And you all won’t let us make one,” Ōnishi said, and snorted.

Scott pointed at the two of them and said, “The games have only just begun and already you’ve spoiled them!”

Standing up, Lü Gang suggested, “How about this. We use our cruisers and submarines against your carrier groups?”

“No way!” Davey shouted.

“He’s a smart kid,” Lü Gang whispered into Huahua’s ear after sitting down, and Huahua smiled slightly and nodded.

Davey was actually well aware that the adults’ aircraft carriers were an entirely different beast in children’s hands. Child naval aviators had only just learned to fly solo, and their strike rate against ship and ground targets was very low. At the same time, carrier group combat was a highly sophisticated technical process that children could not master in such a short time, so in an actual battle, ships launched from the carrier might be unable to locate their targets. More dismaying to the US Navy was carrier security. Carriers had few defensive capabilities of their own, but relied on the escort in the carrier group for protection. The hardware and software of the Aegis-based carrier defensive system that consolidated the various weapons systems of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines was so complicated it made even the adults’ eyes blur, and there was no way that children could operate it normally. Although the carrier had as usual sailed out surrounded by attending ships, it was actually quite poorly defended, and its ponderous bulk made it an excellent target on the open sea. Lots of weapons were scary to the American children; the Chinese Navy’s C-802 antiship missile (the “Chinese Exocet”), for instance, presented a huge combat threat. It only took a single missile breaking through the Aegis perimeter and striking the carrier to sink it. As the commander of the Pacific Fleet said, “Right now our aircraft carrier is as fragile as an egg floating on the ocean.” A tyrant of the waves in former days, now the best it could do was serve as a transport craft for fighter jets. But it could not be permitted to sink. It was a spiritual support for the American children, a symbol of American power, and so during this event, America’s carriers were off cruising the Pacific, far from shore. Davey had only been bluffing.

“Very well,” Davey said with a sigh. “Let’s make it a destroyer game.”

The permanent members approved unanimously, and Yagüe wrote the event down in a notebook. Then he looked up and said, “Continue suggesting—”

“Submarines!” shouted Prime Minister Green.

“That won’t be any fun, a bunch of kids playing cat and mouse in the dark,” said Marshal Zavyalova, but Yagüe wrote it down anyway.

“Don’t stick to the ocean. How about a land game?” Huahua asked.

“Fine. A tank game!” Russian president Ilyukhin said.

“That’s a major category, so we should be more detailed,” General Scott said. “I have a suggestion: head-on combat. Tank formations start from a distance and advance toward each other simultaneously, and commence firing.”

“That’s well-suited to the flat geography here. To make it more fun, restrict it to the tank’s gun. Don’t use guided missiles,” said Marshal Zavyalova. No one objected.

“Then there ought to be threshold distance. The two sides can only start firing when they’re within that distance,” Lü Gang said, seizing on the key issue. The Abrams, T-90, and Leclerc had far more advanced fire-control systems than the Chinese children’s Type 99.

“Thirty-five hundred meters,” Scott said.

“No, a thousand meters,” Lü Gang said.

The children began arguing, but Yagüe interrupted, “Fine, fine. The technical details can be sorted out by each event’s task force. We’re only deciding on the events in general.”

“This is critical. We need to decide it now,” Huahua said, refusing to give an inch. But they were outnumbered and ultimately a distance of three thousand meters, highly unfavorable to the Chinese children, was decided upon.

“We propose another tank event,” Huahua called out, raising a hand. “Ultra-close wall smashing!”

“What’s that?” The other children were mystified.

“The rules are that opposing tanks each start out behind two parallel brick walls, and when the start command is given, they topple the wall and attack each other. The walls erected on-site are only separated by ten to twenty meters.”

“Hah! Now that’s a thrilling game!” Davey said, laughing. Scott whispered to him that since the Bradley weighed fifty-seven tons, heavier than both the Chinese Type 99 and Russian T-90, and could go from 0 to 30 kph in just seven seconds, it wouldn’t be outclassed in wall tumbling, so he didn’t object to the event.

“There’s an even more thrilling tank game. Foot soldiers versus tanks!” Marshal Zavyalova said.

“Awesome!” Lü Gang exclaimed, and everyone else agreed.

“There’s bound to be lots more fun tank games, but let’s set out these for the time being. We can add new ones as we please,” Yagüe said, writing down the events.

“Jet fighters!” Scott shouted.

No one objected, but someone asked whether the event would be divided into two parts—air-to-air missiles, and guns.

Marshal Zavyalova shook her head. “I don’t see the point. Kids aren’t proficient at flying yet, and it’s tough enough to manage dogfights. Add in extra restrictions, and I’m afraid it won’t be any fun.” And so the event was decided upon.

“Infantry with light weapons,” called out Huahua.

“Hmm. That’s a basic event. But it needs to be subdivided. First, define light weapons,” Marshal Zavyalova said.

“Anything under twenty millimeters.”

“Then maybe we should first divide into two games, fortified positions and charges. In the first, the two sides shoot at each other from within their fortifications. The second is like the tank-charge game, where the two sides advance toward each other and open fire when they reach a certain distance. That distance… doesn’t need to be set right now.”

“It’s like a Russian-style pistol duel,” someone murmured.

“Armored helicopter duels!” Davey shouted.

China and India opposed that game, and Japan remained neutral, but with the US, Russia, and the EU in support, the event was approved.

“Grenades!” Huahua shouted. “Oh, right. That should be a subdivision of the infantry and light weapons.”

“Why are you only pitching that backward stuff?” Davey asked the Chinese children.

“Why are you only pitching the advanced stuff?” Huahua asked back.

Again, it was Yagüe who smoothed things over. “It’s all good. Everyone has the same goal, to play fun games. You’ve got to be understanding. If everyone only picks their strong events and rejects their weaker ones, how are we going to have games to play?”

“Grenades are a basic weapon. Why can’t they be included?” Lü Gang asked.

“Fine. Put them in, then. Don’t imagine we’ll be pushovers, though,” Davey said caustically.

“We should also subdivide grenades into fortifications and charges,” Marshal Zavyalova said. “And with basic weaponry in mind, have you considered artillery?”

As they realized the potential, the children shouted out different artillery games.

“Five-kilometer artillery fights!”

“Ten-kilometer large-caliber!”

“Thirty-kilometer rockets!”

“Self-propelled rockets against a moving target! Heh, on the Antarctic plain that’ll be like a sea battle.”

“Mortars! Who can forget mortars?”

“That’s right. Mortars at close range. And they can be mobile, too. That’ll be tons of fun.”

Scott cut them all off, saying, “Let me make a suggestion. Contests at ranges beyond five kilometers can take advantage of aerial reconnaissance and fire correction.”

“Opposed! That makes the game too complicated, and increases the chance of fouls,” Lü Gang said.

“In favor! It makes the game more interesting,” Prime Minister Green said.

“Stop!” Yagüe rapped the helmet loudly. “I said before, technical details are up to the task force to decide.”

When Yagüe finished recording the artillery games, Davey jumped to his feet. “You’re all interested in quite a lot of events. I’ll suggest another one. Bombers and ground-based air defense!”

Yagüe raised an eyebrow, considering the question. “The game would be like tanks versus infantry. The two sides would be unbalanced, so you’d need to swap roles, which increases the number of heats, and complicates administration and judging. We ought to minimize this sort of game.”

Huahua chuckled, and shot Davey a grin. “I’d wager that President Davey didn’t consider the role-swapping issue. He probably only imagined that the US would do the bombing, and someone else would do the defense. Is that right?”

Davey slapped his head. “Uh, yeah, I overlooked that part.”

“Cognitive inertia. So how about it, do American kids want our H-20 and the Russians’ Tu-22M to bomb their defenses?”

“Uh… since the chairman just mentioned the administration and judging difficulties, we can just take a pass on this event.”

Scott interjected, “We can add a ship-to-shore game, like landing versus land defense.”

“That’s also incredibly hard to organize and administer. And it’ll take an awfully long time. And it might not be any fun. I say forget it,” Marshal Zavyalova said. Yagüe and the other children followed with similar sentiments, and the game did not pass.

“This one ought to work: Missile versus missile!” Davey suggested, undaunted.

Ilyukhin nodded approvingly. “Great. An excellent game. You can subdivide it into close and midrange guided missiles, and ICBMs.”

“Ooh, ICBMs!” exclaimed Davey, waving his hands wildly. “This is the best game so far!”

“But no using TMD or NMD,” Ilyukhin said coolly.

“What? Of course we need to use NMD and TMD!” Scott shouted.

“But most of the permanent member countries don’t have them, so it doesn’t fit the package principle.”

“Who cares! We’re going to use them. We support this a hundred and twenty percent! Otherwise, we’re pulling out of the games,” Davey shouted while his arms flailed about uncontrollably.

“Fine. Use them if you want,” Lü Gang said with a dismissive wave.

“NMD? They can’t even get Aegis going.” Zavyalova punctuated her criticism with a snort of contempt.

Davey let out a long breath. “Good. Now let’s move on.” Then he sat down and looked smugly at the other children.

Huahua raised a hand. “Land mines!”

“Interesting. How do you play?” asked the children.

“Opposing teams set up two minefields over an area to be determined by the task force. In the center of each field is the team flag. The first to clear a path to the opposing team’s flag is the winner.”

Davey curled his lips and said sarcastically, “Fine, give the kindergartners something to play. Write it down, Mr. Chairman.”

Now a head of state from an island in the Pacific stood up. “Some of the smaller countries want me to say a few words for them. You’ve got to give us at least a few chances to play.”

“Can’t you play with the rest of us in those traditional events, the ones the Chinese kids proposed?” Davey asked.

“You’re not getting it, Mr. President. Take my country, for example. Right now we have just one company on Antarctica, fewer than two hundred troops, and even in the simplest infantry game, I estimate we’ll lose combat effectiveness after just one round.”

“You all can propose other games.”

“I’ve got one,” said Lê Sâm Lâm, the prime minister of Vietnam. “Guerrilla war!”

“Wicked! How do you play?”

“The two opposing teams attack each other’s base using a small guerrilla force. The specific rules are as follows—”

“Shut up!” Davey shouted, leaping up and banging the table. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves for proposing such a vile idea!”

“That’s right. You should be ashamed!” Green joined in.

“It’s… it’s going to be a little disruptive,” Yagüe said to Lê Sâm Lâm. “Back at the meeting in Washington, we reached a consensus that country’s bases are sacrosanct. Your proposal disturbs the very foundation of the games.”

The event was vetoed.

“Antarctica has turned into a private club for major powers. What’s the point of us even being here?” Lê Sâm Lâm grumbled.

Yagüe ignored him and said to everyone else, “Our meeting has already achieved some stunning results. Do any other countries have suggestions for new games?” His gaze halted on Ōnishi, far off at the other end of the table, and he called over to him, “Prime Minister Ōnishi, you’ve been silent throughout the proceedings. I recall that at the first UN session, you conveyed Japan’s intense desire to gain the right to speak at the UN, but now that Japan is a permanent member state of the World Games, you’ve gone silent.”

Ōnishi made a slight bow, and then said slowly, “I’ll propose a game none of you have thought of yet.”

“Let’s hear it,” Davey said, and everyone looked expectantly at the Japanese prime minister.

“Cold weapons.”

The children all looked at each other. Someone asked, “Cold weapons? What are those?”

“Swords.” He said nothing beyond that terse reply, but sat there motionless as a statue.

“Swords? None of us have any,” Scott said, somewhat confused.

“I do,” the Japanese kid said, and then from beneath the table took out a long military sword and eased it out of its scabbard. The children gasped at its icy glint. The sword was so thin that its cutting edge seemed almost threadlike. Ōnishi stroked the surface gently with a finger. “It’s crafted from the finest carbon alloy, and is sharper than anything.” Then he blew across the blade, and the children heard a sustained buzz from the sword. “This is a two-layered blade; when one edge gets dull, the other is exposed, so it remains sharp forever without honing.” He placed the sword gently onto the table, where it dazzled the children with its cool light and sent chill wind down their spines. “We can provide ten thousand of these for the games.”

“That’s a little too… barbaric,” said Davey timidly, and the other children nodded along.

Ōnishi didn’t bat an eyelid. “Mr. President, and the rest of you, you all should be ashamed of your weak nerves,” he said, brandishing the weapon. “It’s the foundation of all of the games you all have already suggested, the soul of war. Humanity’s very first toy.”

“Very well. Include a cold-weapons event,” Ilyukhin said.

“Except this kind of military sword… isn’t really necessary, is it?” Davey asked, averting his gaze from the sword on the table, as if the glare hurt his eyes.

“Then rifle bayonets,” Marshal Zavyalova said.

The children’s enthusiasm had vanished. They all stared at the sword in silence, as if they had just awakened from sleepwalking and were trying to figure out what they were in the process of doing.

“Anyone else have a suggestion?” Yagüe asked.

No one answered. There was no sound in the hall, as if the sword had taken away their very souls.

“Okay then. We should get ready to start the games.”

One week later, the opening ceremony of the first Olympic Games of the Supernova Era was held on the broad plain of Marie Byrd Land.

More than three hundred thousand children took part in the opening ceremony, standing in a huge dense crowd. In the distance, the low-hanging sun of this half of the year was mostly below the horizon now, with only a tiny arc shedding a ruddy glow across the mottled monochrome landscape, glinting off the packed mass of helmets. In the dark blue of the sky a few silver stars had begun to twinkle.

The ceremony itself was simple. First there was a flag-raising, in which all of the participating countries dispatched representative soldiers to carry the five-ring Olympic flag around the venue, and then that symbol of peace was run up a tall flagpole over the Supernova Era battlefield. Child soldiers fired into the air in a salute that rippled across the crowd, gunfire trailing off in one area only to be picked up in another, like the rise and fall of ocean waves. On a platform beneath the flagpole, IOC president Yagüe stood waving for what seemed like ages until the shots finally quieted down and he could make his speech. As he opened up his notes, a kid next to him passed him a helmet. He did not immediately understand why, and shoved it aside in annoyance without noticing that the world leaders and other besuited VIPs on the platform were wearing helmets. He pressed on with his speech.

“Children of the new world, welcome to the first Olympic Games of the Supernova Era—”

Just then he heard a burst of rat-a-tat noises, like a shower of hailstones, and after a moment of confusion, he realized it was the sound of bullets hitting helmets and the ground, celebratory gunfire returning to earth. Now he grasped the helmet’s purpose, but before he had sense enough to reach for it, he received a sharp crack on the noggin. A bullet in free fall raised a welt on a scar from a previous head injury, one due to falling glass at the UN Secretariat a few months before. It probably was only a 5.56 × 45 mm NATO round, since if it had been a 7.62 × 39 mm round from one of the Chinese or Russian children’s older AK-47s, it might have knocked him out. Amid laughter, he put on his helmet, fighting back the pain, and reached a hand inside to massage his head. As bullets rained down, he said in a loud voice:

“Children of the new world, welcome to the first Olympic Games of the Supernova Era. This is a war games Olympics, a fun Olympics, a thrilling Olympics, and a real Olympics! Children, the boredom of the Common Era has come to a close, and human civilization has returned to its childhood, to a happy, uncivilized age. We have left the dreary ground and returned to the freedom of the trees, we have shrugged off the clothes of hypocrisy and grown luxurious downy coats. Children, the new motto of the Olympic Games is: ‘Take part! Sharper, Fiercer, Deadlier.’ Let the world go crazy, children! Next, I’ll describe the events.”

Yagüe unfolded that creased piece of notepaper and began reading: “After negotiations by all member states, the events of the first Olympic Games of the Supernova Era have been decided upon, and fall into three categories: land, sea, and air events.

“In the land-events category: Tank battles, tank versus infantry (heavy weapons), tank versus infantry (without heavy weapons), artillery battles (five-kilometer large-caliber guns, fifteen-kilometer rockets, self-propelled mobile rockets, and one-kilometer mortars), infantry battles (machine guns), infantry battles (grenades), infantry battles (cold weapons), guided-missile battles (short-range, midrange, cruise missile, ICBM), land mines.

“In the sea-events category: destroyer battles, submarine battles.

“In the air-events category: fighter-jet battles, attack-helicopter battles.

“Gold, silver, and bronze medals will be awarded in all events.

“Mixed categories, such as air versus land, or sea versus air, were discussed, but due to the complexity of organization and judging, they were not formally included.

“Now, will the representatives of the world’s children taking part in the games take the oath.”

The representatives, a lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, a lieutenant in the Russian Navy, and a lieutenant in the Chinese Army, took the oath as follows:

“I swear first to abide by the rules that govern the games, and to accept all penalties if I break them; and second, to do my best to keep the games thrilling and fun, and to show my opponents no shred of mercy.”

Cheers and gunfire rang out on the plain.

“All armed forces to the battlefield!”

For more than two hours, infantry and armored divisions from every country swarmed past the flagpole, and at the tail end, tanks, armored vehicles, and mobile rocket launchers mixed with crowds of people into a chaotic flood of iron whose dust clouds blotted out the sky. On the sea in the distance, the countries’ ships fired en masse, their guns flashing brilliant white in the blue-black twilight, shaking the ground with their noise and light.

When calm was restored but before the dust had settled, Yagüe called for the last item on the program: “Light the torch!”

The whine of engines filled the air, and the children all looked up to see a fighter jet coming in from the east. In the near-dark sky it was visible only as a silhouette, and seemed cut out of cardboard. As it drew near, they could make out the ugly shape of an A-10 Warthog, its two large engines looking like aftermarket attachments to the tail section. As it passed over a large clearing in the crowd, it dropped a napalm bomb that exploded with a deep rumble, sending flames and black smoke leaping skyward. The crowd on the plain was lit up with orange firelight, and the children ringing the clearing could feel the waves of heat.

The sun was entirely below the horizon now as the Antarctic continent began its long nighttime. But it wasn’t a dark night; lit by aurora australis, greatly intensified by the radiation from the supernova, every inch of the sky was filled with dancing bands of color, while on the vast land below, the Supernova Era’s nightmarish history continued its march forward.

^{GAMES OF BLOOD AND IRON}

The thirty-five tanks in Lieutenant Wang Ran’s battalion advanced at full speed in an attack formation, but in front of them was only an open plain dotted with patches of unmelted snow. They had covered a considerable distance without seeing the enemy. This was the head-on tank vs. tank game. Their starting point was a low-lying depression, an excellent cover position for an armored division, and difficult to locate in this section of the plain.

Under the norms of regular combat, they could enter under cover of night with a considerable gap between vehicles and carefully camouflage themselves once everyone was in place, and then the following day wait until the enemy drew near to attack. But such an approach was impossible now, because the enemy knew their position, and they knew their enemy’s, and each side was fully aware of the other’s strength. The intelligence was 100 percent accurate; they had informed each other directly. They even knew the type and amount of ammunition carried by each of the thirty-five Abrams tanks they were about to fight, and were completely conversant with the defects in tracks and fire-control systems owing to a memo received the previous day from the US Army commander. Everything proceeded as clearly and openly as the unobstructed plain under the southern lights.

The only things they could exploit were their attack-formation design and their shooting skills. Wang Ran had been a driver, but his tank had been destroyed in the games two days ago, and he had barely escaped with his life. The gunner in his current tank had been killed in that game, and he had been put into the position as an emergency replacement. Although he was not at all sure of himself, he was still looking forward to it, since being a gunner was a totally different feeling. He sat up in a much higher seat listening to the roar of the engine and enjoying the feeling of speed. The most satisfying part was when the tank crested a medium-size rise in the ground, since in that instant the tracks left the ground and the Type 99 was entirely airborne, and when it descended again Wang Ran had a delightful sense of weightlessness. For a brief moment the fifty-ton iron beast was as agile as a glider, but in the next instant it landed heavily on the ground, which shifted beneath the impact of its tracks as if it were soft mud. He sunk down with it, like a weighty mountain settling in place. Throughout the whole jump his every cell screamed with excitement, like in a cavalry charge.

“First of all we simplified tank combat into two opposing tanks traveling toward each other across a two-dimensional flat plane. Such conditions don’t actually exist, just like the points and lines of geometry don’t really exist in the real world, but this allows you a clear view of the essential elements of tank combat. In this age, the key to victory is to fire first, and to hit with the first round. The two have a multiplicative relationship, not an additive one; if either is zero, the outcome is a zero. The interesting thing is that they are in opposition: the earlier the fire, the farther from the target, and the lower the first-round hit rate; and vice versa…”

This was a lesson given by an adult officer to the young armored forces a year ago, and his words echoed in Wang Ran’s brain, even though he now felt it was all bullshit. Now, Wang Ran could be that colonel’s instructor, since the colonel had never been in actual tank combat; otherwise he’d have taught Wang Ran and the others some more useful information. Sure, the colonel had mentioned that the modified Abrams fire-control system gave it a first-round hit rate of 78 percent outside of one mile, but he didn’t comprehend the actual implications of that figure. Wang Ran understood. The goal he and his young brothers-in-arms had had upon joining the armored division, to be a hero with dozens of tank kills, was the biggest joke in the world. Their only goal now was to hit one enemy tank before they were destroyed themselves, to not lose on the exchange. It was by no means an easy goal; if every Chinese tank were able to achieve it, the Chinese kids wouldn’t lose the game.

Both sides fired flares, and their surroundings lit up in green light. Wang Ran looked through his scope at the yellowish haze ahead of them, the dust cloud kicked up by tank #105 to their forward left. All of a sudden the yellow dust in his field of vision turned red with flickering firelight. The scene cleared up and he saw #108 slow down, trailing smoke and fire, and then it was far behind them. Ahead to the right another tank was on fire, and was also left behind. At no time did he hear the two tanks get hit. Suddenly a column of dust was kicked up straight ahead of them, and they ran directly into it, stones and shell fragments clattering on the tank’s outer armor. The shot, a high-speed fin-stabilized armor-piercing round, had fallen short of the target. Now his tank was at the head of their formation, and Wang Ran heard in his earpiece the voice of the lieutenant colonel in command of their battalion, from her command vehicle: “Targets sighted directly ahead! Fire at will!”

More bullshit. Just like in the previous engagements, in the crucial moment they never provide you with the information you want. They’re just a distraction. Now the tank slowed down, evidently so he could fire. Wang Ran looked ahead through his viewfinder, and in the light of the flares he saw first the dust clouds blocking out the sky over the horizon, and then, at the base of the cloud, he saw the black dots. He adjusted the focus until the Abrams tanks resolved, and his first impression was that they were nothing like what he had seen in photographs, where they looked as powerfully sturdy as two square iron ingots bolted together. Here, trailing long dust clouds behind them, they looked smaller.

He caught one in the crosshairs, and then pressed the button to lock it, turning the M1A2 into a magnet to attract the 120 mm smoothbore cannon, so that no matter how the tank pitched or rocked, the barrel would remain stubbornly trained onto its target like a compass needle. He pressed the fire button and saw the spurt of fire from the barrel and the dust kicked up ahead of them by the vented air. Then off in the distance the shell exploded in fire and smoke. It was a clean explosion, no dirt, and Wang Ran knew it was a hit. The tank continued to advance, trailing smoke, but he knew that it wouldn’t make it very far before it stopped.

He moved the crosshairs to capture another target, but then from outside the tank came a deafening noise. His helmet and earphones had excellent noise-shielding, but he knew it was a loud noise because it rocked his entire body numb. The viewfinder went dark, and his legs suddenly felt burning hot, like the time when he was young and his father carried him into a hot tub. But the heat turned scorching, and he looked down at the inferno he was now standing in: flames were everywhere in the lower part of the cabin.

The extinguishers went on automatically, filling the cabin with fog and suppressing the fire. Then he realized that a black, branch-like object beneath his feet was twitching. A fire-scorched arm. He grabbed the arm, not knowing whether it belonged to the driver or the loader, but neither would have been so lightweight. He quickly learned the reason: he had pulled up just the upper half of a body, blackened all over, the lower part of the chest still in flames. His hand shook, and the half torso slipped down again. He still couldn’t make out who it was, or why the hand was still moving. He opened the hatch and climbed out as fast as he could. The tank was still moving forward, and he rolled off the back and crashed heavily to the ground, surrounded by clouds of smoke from the tank he had just exited.

After a breeze cleared the smoke, Wang Ran saw his tank at a standstill ahead of him. The smoke had ebbed, but flames were spurting from the interior. It had been hit by a shaped charge, he now knew, one designed to cut through armor by concentrating explosive energy into a high-temperature jet, turning the tank into a furnace. He moved backward, passing a number of other burning tanks, and his burned trousers dropped in shreds from his legs. He turned around at the sound of a dull thud behind him; his tank had exploded and was now a ball of thick flame and smoke. Now he felt an intense pain in his legs and sat right down on the ground, surrounded by explosions and fires, beneath flickering southern lights dulled by the thick smoke in the night sky. He felt the chill wind, and then the colonel instructor’s words echoed in his mind once again:

“…group engagements are more complicated. Now, our tank group and the enemy’s can be thought of in mathematical terms as two matrices, and the entire course of battle as the multiplication of these matrices…”

Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Even now Wang Ran had no idea how matrices were multiplied. Surveying the battlefield, he carefully counted the number of destroyed tanks on each side. The relative damage rate needed to be calculated.

Three days later, and still dragging his injured leg, Wang Ran got into a third tank, this time as driver. They reached the match location before it was light. More than a hundred tanks were parked along a long brick wall for the wall-smashing game, waiting for the start command. When the command came, they and their opponents, parked behind a parallel wall ten meters beyond theirs, would push the walls over and attack each other. The event required fast reflexes, and the key to victory lay in the attack formation, not shooting skills since there was basically no need to even aim when it came time to shoot. Their instructors back in the Common Era would never have imagined that their students would be firing upon enemy tanks at a distance of just a few meters, much less that the command to shoot would be issued by a Swiss judge, surveying the battle from a helicopter far overhead.

For the next several hours, that wall was all of the outside world Wang Ran could see through the tank’s forward window. It flickered between indistinct and crystal clear as southern lights danced overhead. He inspected it in minute detail, down to the last fracture of every brick and the shape of every segment of still-wet cement, enjoying the interplay of light and shadow on the wall from the aurora australis that he couldn’t see. He discovered for the first time that the world had so many things to enjoy, and he made a decision: If he made it out of this game alive, he would enjoy every inch of the world around him as if it were a painting.

His earpiece broke its five-hour silence with the command to attack. The voice came so suddenly, right in the middle of his careful study of the pattern of cracks in the thirteenth brick in the fourth row up, that he froze for a second. But just one second, and then he slammed the accelerator and sent the giant steel beast leaping forward to smack down the wall alongside the other tanks. As bricks scattered and dirt flew, he realized he was already in the enemy’s armored formation. In the brief, chaotic battle that followed, the constant noise of smoothbore cannon fire and exploding shells, blinding flashes outside, the turret above him spinning rapidly, and the ammo loader grinding away as the smell of propellant filled the cabin, he knew that the gunner had only to fire as quickly as possible in all directions with no need to even aim. The firing frenzy lasted less than ten seconds, until there was a thunderous noise and the world exploded before his eyes.

When Wang Ran regained consciousness he was lying in the battlefield first-aid station. Standing next to him was a reporter for the army newspaper.

“How many tanks do we have left in the battalion?” he asked weakly.

“Not a one,” the reporter said. He should have known. The tanks were close enough to set a world record for armored-vehicle combat. The reporter added, “But I should congratulate you: One to one-point-two! We turned around the relative damage rate for the first time! Your tank destroyed two of theirs, one Leclerc and one Challenger.”

“Zhang Qiang’s amazing,” Wang Ran said, nodding, despite his splitting headache, in recognition of his tank’s gunner.

“So are you. Only one was due to shooting. You flipped the other on impact!”

Wang Ran felt drowsy again owing to lack of blood, and he dropped off with the sounds of frenzied shooting echoing in his ears like a rainstorm beating down endlessly on a metal roof. But all his eyes saw were those abstract patterns on the brick wall.

The commander of Wang Ran’s armored division stood on a low hill watching the last of her battalions roll out. When the steel skirmish line reached the enemy’s position and the tanks switched on their smoke generators, all she could see was a band of white smoke. A rapid series of explosions followed, and although from this vantage point she couldn’t see the enemy’s tanks, she could see the explosions of the shells they fired at hers, lighting up the band of smoke with dazzling balls of light. At times a silhouette would momentarily be visible amid the fog and explosions. The thirteen-year-old commander had the sudden sense of familiar recognition: back on the morning of the first Spring Festival she set off firecrackers, she had been so frightened after lighting them she had thrown the entire long strand on the ground, where it cracked and thundered, sending hundreds of tiny flashes into the drifting smoke….

But the battle didn’t even last as long as the firecrackers had, and in fact to the commander it seemed even longer than it actually was. Afterward she learned that the shooting had only lasted for twelve seconds. In twelve short seconds, enough to take six breaths, the commander’s one remaining division was annihilated. The Type 99s sat in flames before her; under the thinning smoke it was almost as if they were torches obscured beneath a gauze curtain.

“What’s the damage rate?” the commander asked a staff officer beside her, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice. She stood on the crossroads between heaven and hell, a ghost asking God which road to take. The staffer took off his wireless earpiece and uttered the fiery, icy figure they had obtained at the price of a hundred-odd children’s lives.

“One-point-three to one, sir.”

“Tolerable. Not over the limit,” the commander said, and let out a long breath. She knew that in the invisible distance, enemy tanks equivalent to ten-thirteenths the number of her own were also aflame. The game was still in progress, but she had completed her mission, and kept their relative damage rate below the limit.

Second Lieutenant Wei Ming, one of Huahua’s classmates, took part in the heavy-weapons subcategory of the tank vs. infantry games with his armored platoon. Unlike the light-arms subcategory, which restricted soldiers to antitank grenades, soldiers in this game were able to use antitank guns and guided missiles against their opponents. By no means did this given them an easier time of it, because while the other game pitted a platoon against a single tank, they were facing three main battle tanks or five light tanks simultaneously.

Today was a group match, and Wei Ming and his young comrades had spent the night poring over the battle plans. The previous day they had watched their company’s Second Platoon use the country’s most advanced antitank missile, the HJ-12, which their adult instructors had raved over, in particular the three types of guidance it utilized, including its cutting-edge visual pattern matching. In the game itself, all three of the missiles Second Platoon had fired were jammed and went wide of their targets, and only five soldiers survived. The rest were taken down by the guns and cannons of three Leclercs. The M1A2 tanks that Wei Ming’s platoon now faced had an even more powerful jamming system, so they had decided to use the more outdated, wire-guided HJ-73 missiles. They had less range, but were resistant to jamming, and the warheads had been improved to increase the armor-penetration capability from 300 mm to 800 mm.

Now their preparations were complete. Three antitank missiles were set up in a line in their small base, no grander-looking than three white-painted wooden pegs. The Indian judge at their side motioned to indicate that the game had begun, and then scurried off to hide behind a line of sandbags and train her binoculars on them. The tank vs. infantry game was not easy on judges; it had already killed two and wounded five.

Wei Ming was operating one of the three missiles. During training in the adults’ time, he had posted the highest total performance in this discipline, owing to his love of playing with a video camera back home. Missile operation consisted of keeping the target captured in the crosshairs from start to finish to guide the missile in its flight.

Dust appeared on the horizon, and through binoculars Wei Ming saw a large group of tanks. With an entire infantry regiment taking part in today’s game, all but three of the M1A2s were attacking other targets. Wei Ming quickly picked out the three that were on their preset path, tiny shapes that didn’t seem at all ferocious from far away.

Letting go of the binoculars, he dropped down to the missile to track one of the tanks in the viewfinder, keeping the crosshairs steady on the black spot that showed indistinctly through the dust. When he was certain it was within his three-thousand-meter firing range, he pressed the button to fire, and the missile next to him took off with a whoosh, trailing the wire behind it. He heard two more whooshes as the other two missiles took off. Now fire flashed from the front of the three M1A2s, like they were opening their eyes, and two or three seconds later the shells landed to the right and back of them, and then a few earsplitting explosions and a storm of dirt and stones rained down on them. More shells followed, and Wei Ming involuntarily shielded his head with his arms amid the explosions. He recovered quickly, but when he turned to the viewfinder all he could see was the horizon, rocking unsteadily. By the time he found the target again and locked it in the crosshairs, he saw a column of dust rising up to the tank’s right side, and he knew that his missile had gone wide. Looking up from the eyepiece, he saw two other dust columns behind the tanks. All three missiles had missed. The tanks charged toward them, clearly recognizing that without any missiles the base was no longer a threat. It had become a light-weapons game, but the platoon was facing not one but three tanks.

“Ready antitank grenades!” Wei Ming shouted, taking out one of his own and crouching in the shell scrape as the tanks grew ever closer. With magnetic material in its head, the grenade was heavy in his hand.

“Sir… how does it work? I never learned!” a kid next to him said anxiously. Indeed they had never learned how; the adults who had trained them had never imagined their charges would be going up against the world’s most ferocious main battle tanks armed only with hand grenades.

As the three iron beasts closed in, Wei Ming could feel their vibrations in the ground beneath his feet. He ducked as machine-gun rounds zipped overhead, and had to estimate the tanks’ distance. When he sensed they were charging into the base, he stood up and hurled his grenade at the middle tank, and at the same moment saw a flash from the muzzle of the turret machine gun pointed straight at him, and a bullet whisked just past his ear. The grenade traced an arc through the air and stuck to the side of the M1A2’s sloped turret a little to the front of the smokescreen outlet, scaring the American kid manning the gun back inside.

Other kids in the platoon came up and hurled their grenades, some of which stuck to tanks, others landing on the ground. The kid next to Wei Ming collapsed to the ground outside the trench with a gaping bullet wound to the back, dropping a grenade that tumbled to a spot two or three meters away. It lay there unexploded; perhaps the kid had forgotten to pull the firing pin. The other grenades exploded, but the three tanks charged onward through the flames and smoke over the trenches, completely unscathed. Wei Ming leapt backward out of his trench and tumbled out of the path of the oncoming tank treads, but many of the other kids were crushed. Then, with a tremendous crash, one tank tipped over into a trench and came to a stop, after hitting and dragging under its tracks a kid right in the middle of throwing a grenade, which exploded, severing the track and dislodging a wheel into the air.

The far-off judge put up a green signal, declaring the game finished. The turret of the crippled Abrams opened with a clang and a helmeted American kid emerged, but at the sight of Wei Ming’s machine gun trained on him, he ducked mostly back inside, leaving just half a head poking out as he called through his translation unit, “Follow the rules, Chinese kids! Keep to the rules! The game is over. Stop fighting!” Once Wei Ming lowered his weapon, he came out, with three other kids on his heels, and climbed off the tank, hands on the guns at their waists as they looked warily around at the surviving Chinese kids on the ground. Then they headed off toward the US base. The last kid, who had a huge translation unit strung round her neck, stopped, turned back toward Wei Ming, saluted, and said what her translator then translated as, “I’m Lieutenant Morgan. You all played well, Lieutenant.”

Wei Ming returned a salute but said nothing. All of a sudden he noticed movement at Morgan’s chest, and a cat poked its head out of the kid’s armored division jacket and meowed. Morgan took the cat out of her jacket and showed it to Wei Ming. “This is Watermelon, our crew mascot.” To Wei Ming, the cat’s ringed markings did make it resemble a watermelon. With another salute, Lieutenant Morgan turned and walked off.

Wei Ming stood still for a while watching the Antarctic horizon shimmer under the spectrum of the southern lights. It was a long time before he walked slowly over to the edge of the trench and his two crushed comrades, and then sat on the soggy ground and burst into tears.

The fighting taking place on the Antarctic continent was an unprecedented form of battle, and one unlikely to be repeated: a game war. In this war, enemies fought using the format of an athletic competition. High command on both sides set the time and location of the battle, determined the strength of each side, and chose or drafted rules of battle that they all would abide by. Then they fought according to the arrangements, while an impartial jury observed the fighting and decided the ultimate victor. All participating countries had equal status, there were no alliances, and they took turns fighting. Below is a transcript of a conversation between two countries’ high command arranging a competition:

Careful thought reveals that this form of warfare is not entirely inexplicable. Rules and agreements suggest the establishment of a system, and a system gains inertia once established; a violation by one side implies the system’s collapse, with unforeseeable consequences. The key point is that this warfare system could only have been established in a children’s world where game thinking was determinative, and could never be reproduced in an adult world.

If anyone from the Common Era had witnessed the game war, what they would have found most surprising would not have been the sports-like form, since such wars could be found, if not quite so glaringly, back in the old days of cold-weapons warfare; no, they would doubtlessly have been shocked, mystified even, by the nature of the roles played by the participating countries. Enemies were established according to the order of play. People later referred to the “athlete role” of the belligerents who competed in battles set up in a manner never before seen in human history.

One other key characteristic of the game war was the specialization of the fighting. Every battle was a single contest of weapons. Integration of forces and cooperative operations were basically nonexistent.

Not long after the Olympics started, the land-based Supernova War transformed into a huge tank battle. Tanks were the children’s favorite weapons; nothing better embodied their fantasies about fighting. During the adults’ era, a remote-controlled tank was guaranteed to be a welcome gift. Once war broke out, their fascination transferred to real tanks and they sent them out onto the battlefield with abandon. All together, the countries brought nearly ten thousand tanks to Antarctica to engage in unbridled tank combat on an immense scale, with hundreds to upward of a thousand tanks pitted against each other in each fight.

On the open plain of Antarctica, these groups of iron monsters raced, fired, and burned. Everywhere you looked were fragments of destroyed tanks, some of them on fire for two or three days and, when the wind let up, releasing long, thin columns of weird black smoke from clusters of wrecks all over the plain. From a distance the land looked like it had a wild head of hair.

Compared with the grandeur and brutality of the tank battles, air combat was a much chillier pursuit. Dogfights ought to have been the most competitive fights of all, but the child pilots had trained for less than a year and had put in less than a hundred hours in high-speed fighters, meaning they had mastered only normal takeoff, landing, and level flight, at best.

The superior skill set and physical fitness required for air combat was simply unattainable for the vast majority of them. Hence, combat between opposing fighter formations could barely even get started; far more planes were lost owing to accidents than were shot down by the enemy. During dogfights, most of a pilot’s concentration was devoted to not crashing, with little energy left for attacking. Moreover, the acceleration produced by a modern fighter in air combat could be over six gees, to as much as nine when evading a radar lock or a tracking missile, more than the children’s fragile cerebral blood vessels could take. There were, of course, a few prodigies, like the American flying ace Carlos (the F-15 pilot who twice evaded missile tracking), but they were in the minority, and avoidable if not provoked.

It was even chillier on the water. Due to the Antarctic’s particular geographic location, ocean supply lines were the lifeline for the armies of every country. A cut supply line was the worst of all possible disasters, and would be like abandoning the children on another Earth.

So as to guarantee transport, no country dared to risk any of its sea power, and hence during naval battles, the opposing sides’ ships stayed far away from each other, usually beyond the line of sight. Attacks at that distance required technical sophistication, but giant missile attack systems had a very low hit rate in the children’s hands. Few strikes actually hit the target, and only a few transport ships were sunk during the games.

It was the same below the surface. Piloting structurally complicated submarines through the inky depths, relying only on sonar in a cat-and-mouse game with the enemy, was a game that required rich experience and top skills the children could not possibly have attained in such a short time.

As in air combat, submarine battles didn’t work. Not a single torpedo struck its target during the whole games. Moreover, since Antarctica had no submarine base, and constructing one was far more complicated than setting up a bare-bones port for surface ships, all countries were forced to use logistics bases in Argentina or Oceania. Conventional subs were ill-equipped for lengthy activities in the Southern Ocean, and few countries had nuclear attack subs. In the course of the underwater games, just one conventional sub was sunk, and that owed to its own malfunction.

During the Olympic Games period of the Supernova War, most of the fighting was concentrated on land, which saw quite a number of peculiar forms of combat brand new to the history of warfare.

Most terrifying of all were the infantry games. Although all games of this type used light weapons, they saw casualties in far greater numbers.

The biggest infantry games were firearm duels, and were played in the fortifications and assault categories.

Fortification infantry games involved opposing sides firing at each other from fortifications across a separation, and they could last as long as several days. But as the children discovered, firing from fortified positions meant there was very little exposure, which minimized the lethality of ordinary firearms. They would rain bullets at each other in volleys so dense they would collide in midair, and the spent casings piled up to calf height in the firing positions, but in the final analysis, apart from chipping away the outside layer of the enemy’s fortifications, they achieved very little.

And so they switched to scope-equipped precision sniper rifles, which cut ammo expenditure to a thousandth of what it was and boosted combat successes by a factor of ten. Now the game saw the young gunners spending most of their time lying low observing the opposite position, scanning inch by inch for the slightest discrepancy in the stones and patches of snow, and sending over a bullet at any potential firing gaps.

Ahead of the line was empty ground, with no creature stirring across the broad plain as the children hid in their bunkers. The characteristic snap of a sniper rifle and then the zip of a bullet through the air, pop—zip pop—zip, only intensified the chilly quiet of the battlefield, as if somewhere out under the southern lights a lonely ghost were randomly plucking a zither. The children chose a striking name for this game: “Rifle Fishing.”

The most thrilling and savage of the infantry games were the grenade events, which were also subdivided into fortifications and assault categories. In the former, fortifications were constructed before the game began, with the two sides separated by just twenty meters, the distance a child could throw a grenade. Once the game started, the children popped up from their defense works, made their throws, and then ducked back down again to avoid the incoming ones.

Wooden stick grenades were used most often, since they were relatively powerful and could be thrown relatively far; egg-shaped grenades were far less common. The game required high levels of strength and courage, and a particularly strong nerve.

After the start command, grenades flew like hailstones, and even within the fortifications the rapid pace of the violent explosions could spook your soul out of your body, to say nothing of keeping you from jumping up to counterattack. The integrity of the fortification was the decisive factor. If an enemy grenade managed to pierce or tear away part of the roof, then it was all over. The game had one of the highest casualty rates, and the kids dubbed it “Grenade Volleyball.”

The assault subcategory of grenade games had no fortified positions. Opposing sides faced each other across open ground, when they closed to within throwing distance, commenced throwing. Then they threw themselves to the ground or beat a retreat out of the fragmentation area to protect themselves. This game mostly used egg-shaped grenades, since it was easier to carry more of them. Attacking and evading, the two sides invariably intermingled, and everyone then just chucked their grenades at crowded areas. It was nothing short of a nightmarish scene of madness: dense smoke and fire of explosions on the open ground, crowds of kids running and diving and occasionally pulling a grenade from a bag and tossing it up, smoking grenades tumbling about on the ground…. The children called this game “Grenade Football.”

Artillery games acquired fanciful nicknames as well. The five-kilometer howitzer subcategory, in which parties towed their units into position and finished aiming before receiving the start command, whereupon they commenced firing immediately, was known as “Cannon Boxing.” Artillery games with self-propelled mobile batteries had far more variables and were known as “Cannon Basketball.” Mortars, in which opposing sides were only separated by one or two thousand meters, within line of sight, was a thrilling, physically demanding game the children dubbed “Mortar Soccer.”

Contrary to their enticing names, the games saw some of the most brutal forms of combat in history. During the battles, weapons exchanged fire more directly than they ever had before, and the casualties they caused topped the ranks of their particular category of combat. For example, in the tank battles, even the winning side saw at least half its tanks destroyed. Blood flowed in rivers by the end of every game in the War Olympics. As for the little soldiers, they prepared for eternity with every sortie.

This led to the later identification of the fundamental misperception the people of the Common Era had where children were concerned. The Supernova War taught people that children placed less value on life than adults, and thus had a much stronger tolerance for death. If necessary, they could be meaner, colder, and crueler than adults. Later historians and psychologists agreed that were this cruel, crazy form of war set in the Common Era, the unimaginable psychological pressures produced would have pushed all participants into a collective mental breakdown.

True, no small number of children fled on the brink of battle, but mental breakdowns were rare. Later generations were in awe of the grit they displayed on the battlefield, particularly in the baffling heroics of heroes who emerged during battle. During the grenade games, for example, there were children known as “pitchbacks,” who never used their own grenades but picked up the ones thrown by the enemy and tossed them back. Although few managed to survive the games, it still was an honor to be a pitchback. They were described in a popular fighting song:

Out of all the games of the War Olympics, cold-weapons events had to be counted among the most barbaric and terrifying. In these games, the opposing sides battled each other with bayonets and other bladed weapons, returning warfare to its most primitive form. Below is an account of one young soldier who took part in an event:

As the Olympics progressed, the outcome that gradually took shape was well afield of anything the advocates of this form of warfare had anticipated.

From a purely military perspective, the game war was nothing like traditional warfare. The more or less fixed position and arrangements predetermined by the two sides meant their forces’ geographic positions were for the first time relatively unimportant. The aim of the battle was not to occupy a city or a strategically important position, but purely to exhaust the enemy’s strength on the battlefield. Ever since the start of the games, the children’s attention had focused on one key point, and now, from high command all the way down to the front-line trenches, the one thing in everyone’s mind and on everyone’s lips was relative damage rate.

In the adults’ era, the relative damage rate for particular weapons received some attention as a factor in war policy, but it rarely was the most important factor. High command could still elect to achieve a particular strategic or tactical objective no matter the cost. But in the children’s war, the relative damage rate took on an entirely different significance, primarily because in their world, heavy weapons were a nonrenewable resource; there was no way for them to manufacture such complicated war machines in such a short time.

When a tank was destroyed, they had one fewer tank; a plane shot down, one fewer plane. Even comparatively simple weapons like howitzers couldn’t be resupplied. Relative damage rates, then, became almost the sole determiner of victory.

On a technological level, the Supernova War was akin to the First World War, in which the land armies’ regular forces played a decisive role. In contrast to high-tech weapon disparities, there was not as great a disparity in the game war in relative damage rates between the parties’ conventional weapons.

Tanks were this war’s most important weapons. NATO’s land-war theory held that armored ground forces were inseparable from low-altitude assault power; without fire cover and aerial reconnaissance provided by armored helicopters, tank groups were sitting ducks on the battlefield. As one American armored commander of the Common Era put it, “An Abrams without an Apache has its pants down.”

The children’s training had been so brief that low-altitude helicopter strikes had as little impact on the Supernova War as the high-altitude air power of fighters and bombers, and helicopters crashed or were shot down in even greater numbers than other aircraft. An Apache piloted by two inexperienced, overwhelmed children flying back and forth over the battlefield proved an excellent target for shoulder-fired missiles. So on the Antarctic battleground, the attack helicopters most desired by army aviation pilots weren’t the American Apaches but the coaxial-rotor-equipped Russian Kamov Ka-50s, whose distinguishing feature was the first-ever helicopter ejection seat.

Surviving an ejection through a helicopter’s rotors would be especially difficult, so the Ka-50’s solution was to blow off the rotors before ejecting, giving the pilot a high chance of surviving a direct hit. In an Apache, on the other hand, if the young pilots were hit while in flight, they simply had to wait it out until the end. Absent low-altitude support and cover, the tank games did not display much of a disparity in relative damage rates.

Time flew by, and before they knew it six months had passed. In that time, ocean levels worldwide continued to rise, swamping the coasts and turning Shanghai, New York, and Tokyo into water cities. Most children in these areas moved farther inland, and the remainder adapted themselves to the liquid life, rafting between skyscrapers and preserving some semblance of life in these formerly bustling metropolises. In Antarctica, meanwhile, the climate continued to warm up, even during the long night, bringing mild, early-winter weather and average temperatures above −10°C. The continent’s temperate weather only served to further underscore its crucial nature.

Negotiations for dividing up Antarctica were set to begin, and the key bargaining chip for every country was its performance in the war games, a fact that motivated all children to redouble their efforts. Fresh troops were constantly arriving in Antarctica, swelling the scale of the games, and the fires of war continued their march across the continent.

The United States, on the other hand, was mired in disappointment and dejection, despite being the instigator of the games. Because high-tech weapons were no threat in the hands of children, the country had not dominated the games in the way its children had hoped, and the multipolar shape of the games worried them ahead of the upcoming Antarctica Talks.

One last event, the ICBM fight, was about to begin, and it was on this that the American children were pinning their final hopes.

“Are you kidding? It’s really heading our way?” Marshal Zavyalova asked the advisor.

“That’s what the radar warning center says. I doubt they’re mistaken.”

“Maybe it’ll change trajectory?” President Ilyukhin ventured.

“Not a chance. The warhead’s in the terminal guidance phase, in an unpowered free fall. It’s coming in like a stone.”

In the command center, everyone in Russian High Command was concentrating on the first ICBM fight with the US. The American children had fired an ICBM from their own territory, ten thousand kilometers away, directly at the Russian command center, a serious violation of the game’s rules. Both sides had set their target areas in advance, and Russia had provided a target zone more than a hundred kilometers distant. There shouldn’t have been any mistake.

“What are you afraid of? At least it’s not a nuclear warhead,” Ilyukhin said.

“A conventional warhead is frightening enough. It’s a Minuteman III. Those were deployed in the 1980s, I think. They can carry three tons of conventional high-explosive warheads. If it lands within two hundred meters we’ll be destroyed!” Zavyalova said.

“And what if it lands right on our heads? We’d be dead even if it wasn’t carrying anything!” a colonel advisor said.

Zavyalova said, “It’s not out of the question. The Minuteman is one of the most accurate ICBMs there are. Hundred-meter precision.”

They heard a low wailing in the air, as if a keen blade were rending the sky in two. “It’s coming!” someone shouted, and everyone held their breath, skin crawling, waiting for the coming impact.

There was a dull thud outside and a gentle tremor in the ground. They poured outside and saw a shower of dirt falling back to the ground about half a kilometer away. Ilyukhin, Zavyalova, and the others jumped into vehicles and hurried over to it. A crowd of soldiers were digging into a crater with shovels, hoes, and a backhoe.

“The warhead apparently released a small drag chute at around ten thousand meters, so it didn’t burrow too deep,” an air force colonel said.

Half an hour later, the bottom part of the buried ICBM’s warhead was exposed, a metal sphere 2.3 meters in diameter with three scorches on the perimeter from blasting bolts. The children inserted a drill rod into a gap they found, and were able to pry apart the metal shell. In wonder they stared at the cornucopia of boxes, all shapes and sizes, lying in a dampening cushion. Then, very carefully, they opened one. Inside were small foil-wrapped objects containing lumps of a brown substance.

“Explosives!” warned one kid.

Zavyalova picked up one of the “explosives” and looked it over. She gave it a sniff, then bit a piece. “Chocolate,” she said.

They opened other boxes, which held not just chocolate but cigars as well. As the other kids were divvying up the chocolate, Ilyukhin took out a fat cigar and lit it, but he’d only taken a few puffs before it blew up in a ball of streamers, and the kids burst out laughing at him standing there stunned with a cigar butt hanging from his lips.

He spat out the cigar butt, and said, “Three days from now, it’ll be our turn to fire on the American kids’ command center.”

“I’ve got a bad premonition,” Specs said during a meeting in the Chinese command center.

“Agreed. We ought to move our command center immediately,” Lü Gang said.

“Is that really necessary?” Huahua asked.

“The American kids attacked the Russian command center in the ICBM game, violating the principle that bases were untouchable. Our base might be hit as a target, and that warhead might contain more than just chocolate and cigars.”

Specs said, “My premonition goes deeper than that. I’ve got a feeling there’s going to be a sudden change in the situation.”

Out the window of the command center, the first white of dawn had appeared on the horizon. The long Antarctic night was coming to an end.

From the desolate plains of northwestern Russia close to the Arctic Circle, a range-extended SS-25 Sickle whooshed into the air from a multifunction missile launcher and crossed the globe in the space of forty minutes. When it reached the sky over Antarctica, the warhead came down in a smooth parabola and hit a patch of snow inside the American base, just 280 meters from the command center. After the launch, American NMD and TMD fired six antiballistic missiles to intercept. The children watched on their screens in breathless anticipation as two glowing dots smacked almost exactly into each other. But each was a letdown, since the intercepting missiles’ suborbital trajectories through the atmosphere passed by each other separated by dozens of meters.

After a moment of shock, the American children went about digging out the warhead, and discovered that what the Russian children had rocketed to them from twenty thousand kilometers away was a copious amount of vodka in shock-resistant bottles, and a pretty box with a note saying it was a gift for Davey. Inside was a Russian doll, and inside that one another one, ten in all, each of them with an uncannily accurate representation of Davey’s face. The outermost was laughing, but farther in the expressions grew less happy and more worried, until the last thumb-sized one had Davey mouth open, bawling.

Enraged, Davey threw the dolls into the snow and seized General Scott with one hand and General Harvey, who was in charge of strategic missile defense, with the other. “You are both relieved of duty! You idiots. You guaranteed that NMD and TMD would work. You—” He broke off and turned to Scott. “Didn’t you say they put us into a strongbox? And you—” He turned to Harvey and shouted, “Where the hell were your prizewinning prodigies? Are they any better than a pack of online hackers?”

“Uh… all six tries only missed by a smidgen,” Scott said, red-faced.

Harvey, who hadn’t slept in three days, pushed Davey aside without regard for presidential dignity and shouted, “You’re the idiot! You think those two systems are there to play around with? The TMD software alone runs to nearly two hundred million lines of code!”

An advisor came over and handed Davey a printout. “This is from Mr. Yagüe. It’s the latest agenda for the Antarctic Talks.”

The children from US High Command stood silently at the edge of the giant crater with a warhead from the other side of the world down at the bottom. Davey was quiet for a moment, and then said, “We have to seize the absolute advantage in the games before negotiations begin.”

Vaughn said, “That’s impossible. The games are practically finished.”

“You know it’s possible. You’re just unwilling to take up that line of thought,” Davey said, jerking around to fix a stare on the secretary of state.

“Surely you don’t mean the new game?”

“That’s right. The new game. That’s exactly it. We should have started earlier!” Scott answered for Davey.

“There’s no way of knowing where it’ll take the Antarctic Games,” Vaughn said. He looked off in the distance, and the depths of his eyes reflected the white light of dawn on the horizon.

“You love to complicate the simplest things in order to show off your knowledge. Even an idiot can see that the new game will give us an absolute advantage throughout the continent, in one stroke. It’ll totally clear up the direction of the games.” Davey took the printout the advisor had just delivered and waved it in Vaughn’s face. “As clear-cut as this memo. There’s nothing that’s unknown about it!”

Vaughn reached out and took the paper from Davey’s hands. “You think this paper is cut-and-dry?”

Davey gave him a puzzled stare, and then looked at the paper. “Of course.”

With his withered hands, Vaughn folded the paper in half, and said, “That’s once.” Then he folded it again. “That’s twice.” Again. “Three times…. Now, Mr. President, do you find this clear-cut? Something easy and predictable?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, I dare you to fold it thirty-five times.” Vaughn held up the thrice-folded printout.

“I don’t get it.”

“Answer me. Do you dare?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Davey went to take the paper from him, but Vaughn caught his hand. At the cold, clammy touch, he felt like a snake was crawling across his back.

“Mr. President, you’re speaking as the supreme decision maker, and every one of your decisions will make history. Think it over again. Do you really dare?”

Davey stared at him in utter confusion.

“You have one last chance. Before you make your decision, wouldn’t you like to predict the outcome, just like you’ve predicted the outcome of the new game?”

“The outcome? The outcome of folding a piece of paper in half thirty-five times? Don’t make me laugh,” Scott said derisively.

“For example, how thick will that folded paper get?”

“Around as thick as a Bible, I’d guess,” Davey said.

Vaughn shook his head.

“Around knee-high,” Harvey said.

Again, Vaughn shook his head.

“As high as the command center?”

Vaughn shook his head.

“You don’t mean it’d be as high as the Pentagon?” Scott said mockingly.

“This sheet of paper is around zero point one millimeters thick. Calculating with that value, after thirty-five folds, it would be 6,871,950 meters thick, or around 6,872 kilometers. That’s roughly the radius of the Earth.”

“What? For just thirty-five times? You’ve got to be joking!” Scott said loudly.

“He’s right,” Davey said. He was no dummy, and had quickly made the connection to the Indian legend of the king and the chessboard.

Vaughn tucked the folded paper into Davey’s shirt pocket. Looking around at the dumbstruck young commanders, he said slowly, “Never be too optimistic about your own judgment, particularly when it comes to the course of history.”

Davey bowed his head and dejectedly accepted his loss. Then he said, “I admit that our minds are simpler than yours. If everyone had a mind like yours, the world would be a really scary place. Still, we can’t be certain of success, nor can we be certain of failure. Why not give it a try? We want to! There’s no way we can be stopped!”

“Mr. President,” Vaughn said coldly. “That is your right. I’ve said all I need to.”

In the first rays of dawn over the Antarctic wilderness, the Supernova Era advanced into the most dangerous place in its young history.

^{A THOUSAND SUNS}

Before the start of their ICBM match with the American children, the Chinese children secretly moved their command center. They loaded all personnel and communications equipment into fourteen helicopters and flew forty-odd kilometers inland. Here the geography was somewhat different from the coast, and featured conical hills where the snow hadn’t entirely melted. The command center was set up in tents backed up against one hill, fronting on a broad plain in the direction of the base.

“Second Artillery Corps Command called to ask what we should load into the warhead,” Lü Gang said to Huahua.

“Hmmm… how about tanghulu?”

Then the children scanned the sky near the coast through binoculars, and a young advisor wearing an earpiece provided them with a general direction, using data transmitted to him by the distant radar warning center about the approaching American ICBM.

“Heads up. They say it’s getting close. Heading 135, inclination 42. Just over there. You should be able to see it now!”

The early-morning Antarctic sky was a deep, dark blue, and scattered stars were still visible, but it seemed blacker than it had during the long night owing to the greatly diminished southern lights. A point of light stood out against the dark blue, moving rapidly but slower than a shooting star. It had a short fiery tail visible through binoculars, caused by air friction during reentry. Then the light disappeared, and nothing was visible in the blue heavens, whether by naked eye or through binoculars, as if it had melted into the infinite darkness. But the children knew that the missile’s warhead had entered the atmosphere and was following a precise, gravity-guided trajectory toward its target.

“Good. It’s target is the base. Or more precisely, the command center!” called the advisor with the earpiece.

“What’ll be in the warhead this time?”

“Maybe Barbie dolls.”

The Antarctic dawn was suddenly bright as midday.

“A supernova!” exclaimed one child in fear.

This was a familiar sight to the children, one they knew in their bones. Indeed, it closely resembled a supernova blast, and the blinding light threw the land and hillside into sudden, sharp clarity. But this time, rather than turning blue, the sky turned deep purple. The light came from the direction of the ocean, and when the children looked toward it, they saw the new sun hanging over the horizon. Unlike the supernova, this sun was a ball larger than the actual sun and so fierce they could feel its heat on their faces.

Realizing what had happened, Lü Gang shouted, “Don’t look at it. It’ll hurt your eyes!”

They all shut their eyes, but the intensifying glare penetrated their eyelids and remained painfully bright, making them feel like they had fallen into an ocean of radiance. They clapped their hands to their eyes, but the light pierced the gaps between their fingers. They stayed in that position until the world darkened again, and then carefully removed their hands. It took their burnt-out eyes some time to readjust.

Lü Gang asked them, “How long do you think that sun lasted just now?”

They thought back on it, and said it seemed like at least ten seconds.

He nodded. “I think so too. Judging from the duration of the fireball, it might have been in the megaton class.”

Now that their vision had returned, the children looked out toward where the sun had appeared and vanished. Something white was rapidly expanding on the horizon.

“Cover your ears!” Lü Gang shouted. “Quickly! Cover your ears!”

They covered their ears and waited, but no explosion came. The mushroom cloud on the horizon, silvery white in the morning light, now touched the sky. The contrast it posed with the land and sky was frankly surreal, as if a gargantuan fantastic image had been superimposed upon a realistic painting. The children stared in silence, and some of them subconsciously lowered their hands from their ears.

Lü Gang shouted again, “Cover your ears! Sound takes two seconds to reach us.”

They covered their ears tightly, and then the ground began to rumble beneath their feet like the surface of a charged drum, throwing dirt and snow knee-high in the air, and sending the snow cover down the hill as if it had melted. The noise penetrated their flesh and bones, bored into their skulls, and they felt as if their bodies were being broken apart and scattered to the four winds, leaving their terrified souls to quiver on the ground.

Lü Gang shouted, “Get behind the hill for cover. The shock wave will be here any moment!”

“A shock wave?” Huahua cocked an eye at him.

“That’s right. It might die down into a stiff wind by the time it reaches us.”

As the children retreated to the back of the hill, a sudden squall picked up around them, ripping the tents from their stakes and sending the equipment inside flying. Half the helicopters on the hillside were knocked over before flying snow whited out the entire scene, but they heard the sound of flying stones pelting airframes. The gale lasted for about a minute before rapidly slackening and finally dying away altogether, letting the snow and dust return gently to the ground. As the curtain fell, it revealed a hazy firelight on the horizon. The mushroom cloud was less distinct now but far larger, and now took up half the sky. The wind had blown its top portion to one side, giving it the look of a gigantic monster with a wild head of hair.

“The base is destroyed,” Lü Gang said soberly.

All communications from the base had been severed, and when they looked toward it through the dust that had yet to settle, all they could see was the dim fire on the horizon.

An advisor came over to tell Huahua that the American president was calling him. Huahua asked, “Will replying give away our position?”

“No. The transmitter is in a different location.”

Davey’s voice came through the wireless receiver. “Hey, Huahua, looks like that atom bomb didn’t have your name on it. You really are clever fellows to think of moving your command center. I’m glad you’re still alive. I’d like to let you all know that we’re starting the new game! Nuclear bombs!” He laughed. “It’s the greatest! Wasn’t that new sun pretty?”

Huahua said angrily, “You shameless pack of pissants. You’ve trampled over every rule of the games! You’ve wrecked their very foundation!”

Davey laughed. “What rules? Fun is the only rule!”

“Your adults were a bunch of scoundrels to leave you with strategic nuclear weapons.”

“Hey now, they only left a few behind carelessly. Our stockpiles were huge. You eat a big piece of bread and you’re bound to drop some crumbs. Besides, don’t you wonder if there might be any crumbs remaining from the Russians’ big hunk of bread?”

“That’s the crucial thing,” Lü Gang whispered into Huahua’s ear. “They won’t dare try a nuclear strike against Russia since they’re afraid of retaliation. With us, they don’t have that worry.”

“Don’t sweat the small stuff if you don’t have to,” Davey said over the radio.

“We’re not sweating it,” Specs said coldly. “In this insane world, there’s no point to getting mad on moral grounds. It’s too tiring.”

“Right, right. Listen to him, Huahua. He has the right attitude. That’s how to keep it fun.” Then Davey cut off the connection.

The Chinese children immediately contacted other Antarctic Games participants to set up an alliance to punish the American children for breaking the rules, but the outcome was a disappointment.

Huahua and Specs called Russia first. Ilyukhin said perfunctorily, “We have learned of what has befallen your country and express our deepest sympathies.”

Huahua said, “This abominable violation deserves to be punished. If this vile precedent is allowed to stand, they will move on to drop atom bombs on other countries’ bases, or even on land outside of Antarctica! Your country ought to stage a nuclear counterattack on the violator’s base. You may be the only one left with that capability.”

“Of course such conduct deserves punishment,” Ilyukhin replied. “I expect that all countries are hoping you will stage a nuclear counterattack to preserve the integrity of the rules. My country also desires to punish the wrongdoer, but Russia has no nuclear weapons. Our venerable fathers and mothers fired all the nuclear bombs into the sun.”

The talk with the EU was even more depressing. The incumbent rotating president, Prime Minister Green of Britain, asked innocently, “Why would your country believe that we have retained nuclear weapons? This is shameless libel of a united Europe. Inform us of your current position and we will deliver a memo of protest.”

Huahua set down the phone. “Those little punks just want to play it safe on the mountaintop and watch the tigers fight it out.”

“Very wise,” Specs said, nodding.

Communications were provisionally restored between the command center and the Chinese base, and an unbroken stream of frightening news began coming over the radio. G Group Army, stationed at the base, suffered a devastating blow; total casualties were still unknown, but it had likely lost all combat effectiveness. The majority of base installations had been destroyed. Fortunately, as the geographic scale of the games had grown, the other two group armies formerly stationed on base had moved over a hundred kilometers away, preserving two-thirds of the Chinese children’s Antarctic forces. However, the port they had spent two months building had been seriously damaged in the nuclear strike, posing a major supply problem for these forces.

An emergency meeting of high command convened in a hastily raised tent at the foot of the hill. Just before it began, Huahua said he had to step out for a moment.

“This is urgent!” Lü Gang reminded him.

“I’ll only be five minutes,” Huahua said. Then he went outside.

About half a minute later, Specs left the tent, too, and seeing Huahua lying motionless on a patch of snow staring straight up at the heavens, he went over and sat down beside him. The dust had settled and a warm, gentle breeze blew through the air, bringing with it the moisture of melting snow and the scent of damp earth. In the sky over the ocean, the expanding mushroom cloud had lost its shape, but had grown even larger, and it was hard to tell where it ended and the clouds began. The other half of the sky was painted by the rays of dawn over the opposite horizon.

“I really can’t keep it up anymore,” Huahua said.

“No one’s doing any better,” Specs said lightly.

“It’s not the same. This is impossible!”

“Think of yourself as a computer. You’re just cold hardware, and reality is just data. Accept your input and perform your calculations. That’s how you keep it up.”

“Is that the strategy you’ve used since the supernova?”

“I did that before the supernova. It’s not a strategy. It’s my nature.”

“But I don’t have that nature.”

“Getting out is easy. Just run out in any direction without taking anything with you. Keep going and you’ll get lost pretty quick, and before long you’ll freeze or starve to death in the Antarctic wilderness.”

“Not a bad idea. I just don’t want to be a deserter, is all.”

“Then be a computer.”

Huahua propped himself up and looked at Specs. “Do you really think that everything can be accomplished purely through cold deduction and calculation?”

“Yes. Hiding behind what you imagine to be intuition is actually a complicated set of calculations and deductions. So complicated as to be imperceptible. We need only two things right now: calm, and more calm.”

Huahua got up and patted the snow off his back. “Let’s go back.”

Specs caught him. “Think carefully about what you’re going to say.”

Huahua gave Specs a thin smile under the morning light. “I’ve thought about it. For a computer, our current situation is really nothing more than a simple arithmetic problem.”

The children were silent for a long time at the start of the meeting, still dazed by the nosedive their already grim situation had taken.

The commander of D Group Army broke the silence by pounding on the table and shouting, “Were our adults really that honest? Why didn’t they leave us any?”

The other children echoed similar sentiments:

“That’s right. Why not even a few?”

“They left us empty-handed!”

“If we had just one, the situation would be completely different!”

“Right! Even one would be good.”

“That’s enough,” Lü Gang said. “Stop it with the useless talk.” Then he turned to Huahua. “What are we going to do?”

Huahua stood up and said, “The two group armies in the interior need to evacuate immediately to save their strength in the event of a further nuclear strike by the enemy.”

Lü Gang stood up and began to pace briskly. “You ought to know what that means. If all of our assembled and combat-ready land forces stand down and evacuate, it will take a long time to reassemble them. We’ll lose all combat capacity on Antarctica!”

Specs said, “It’s like reformatting our hard drive.”

Lü Gang nodded. “That’s exactly what it is.”

“But I agree with Huahua. Evacuate immediately,” Specs said firmly.

Bowing his head, Huahua said, “There’s no other way. If the group armies remain in a dense, combat-ready form, the enemy’s next large-scale nuclear strike could wipe out the entire army.”

Lü Gang said, “But if they divide up into a large number of small forces distributed across a wide area, it will be hard to guarantee supplies. They may not survive very long.”

B Group Army commander said, “We’ll take things as they come. Now is not the time for overthinking. The danger grows with every second we stay here. Give the order!”

D Group Army commander said, “Over our heads a sword is dangling by a thin strand of hair. It could drop at any moment.”

Most of the children supported a swift evacuation.

Huahua looked at Specs and Lü Gang, who both nodded. Then he crossed to the front of the conference table and stood there. “Good. Give the evacuation order to the two group armies. There’s no time to plan out the details, so let the forces disperse themselves into battalions. Speed is paramount. Also please be crystal clear about the consequences of this decision, and prepare yourself mentally. The Antarctic mission is going to be very difficult for us from now on.”

The children stood up. An advisor read over the draft of the order, but no one proposed any changes. All they wanted was speed, as much as possible. The advisor took the order to the radio, but all of a sudden a solemn voice broke in, “One moment, please.”

The children turned to look at the speaker, Senior Colonel Hu Bing, the liaison officer for the five special observers. Saluting Huahua, Specs, and Lü Gang, she said, “Sirs, the Special Observer Team will now carry out its final duty!”

The mysterious body organized by the adults before they left consisted of five senior colonels, three from the army and two from the air force. In the event of war, they had the authority to know all confidential information and to listen in on all of the high command’s deliberations. However, the adults had guaranteed that the team would never interfere. That was how it had been throughout the games, where during every military meeting of the high command, those five children had sat silently to one side, listening. They didn’t even take any notes. They just listened. They never spoke, and even after the meetings adjourned they had little interaction with anyone. Gradually the other children in the high command forgot they were there.

Once, when Huahua asked them who was team leader, Hu Bing had answered, “Sir, the five of us have equal power. There is no team leader, but when it is necessary I will serve as liaison.”

That only deepened the mystery of their mission.

Now the five officers gathered in an odd formation, an inward-facing circle, and stood solemnly at attention, as if a flag were being raised in the center. Hu Bing said, “We have a Situation A. Vote.”

Each of the five raised a hand.

Hu Bing turned toward the ammo boxes serving as a conference table and pulled a white envelope from her uniform. Holding it in both hands, she lowered it decorously to the center of the table, and said, “This letter was sent from the last president of our country in the Common Era and is addressed to the country’s current leadership.”

Huahua picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a letter handwritten in fountain pen. He read it aloud:

The letter closed with the former president’s signature.

The child leaders focused their attention on Hu Bing, who gave a formal salute, and said, “The SOT will now conduct the handover. One Dongfeng 101 ICBM, with a maximum range of twenty-five thousand kilometers, carrying one thermonuclear warhead with a yield of four megatons.”

Lü Gang stared at them. “Where is it?” he asked.

“We don’t know. And we don’t need to,” she said. Then another senior colonel on the SOT set a laptop on the table and opened it. It was already running, and the screen displayed a world map. “Any location on this map can be enlarged for more detail, to a maximum 1:100,000 scale. Double-click on the strike target and the wireless modem will transmit a signal through via a satellite link to the destination, and the missile will fire automatically.”

The children crowded round to stroke the computer, many of them with tears in their eyes, as if they were touching the adults’ warm hands reaching out to them from the beyond.

^{THE CE MINE}

The supernova did not bring massive changes to every part of the world. In a small village in the mountains of southwestern China, for example, life hardly changed at all. Sure, the adults were gone, but there weren’t all that many in the Common Era anyway, since they were all working far from home. The farm work the children did now wasn’t all that much heavier than what they were used to. Their day-to-day lives were the same as before, going to work at sunrise and resting at sunset, although they were even more unaware about the outside world now than they had been in the adults’ time.

But for a period before the adults died, it seemed as if great changes were coming to their lives. A highway was put in past the village into the mountains leading to a valley sealed behind barbed wire. Every day, large trucks in great numbers would go in fully loaded and return empty. Their contents were covered in green canvas tarps, or packed into big boxes, containing who knows what, and if all of it was piled together it would probably have been as high as the hill behind the village.

Day and night the unbroken stream of trucks traveled the highway, going in full and coming back empty. There was also the occasional plane with blades like electric fans that flew into the valley dangling objects beneath it that weren’t there when it flew out again. This went on for about half a year before things went quiet again. Bulldozers tore up the highway, and the village children and the critically ill adults had to wonder: Why didn’t they just leave the highway alone rather than expending so much effort to destroy it? It wasn’t long before the grass grew over the plowed-under right-of-way and it was more or less reabsorbed by the surrounding hillsides. The barbed wire around the valley was torn down, too, and the children were once again able to hunt and cut firewood. When they reached the valley they found that nothing had changed. The forest was the same old forest, and the grass was the same old grass. They had no idea why a thousand outsiders, in military uniforms and plain clothes, had spent the last half year messing around here, much less where all the cargo on the endless river of vehicles had gone. It all seemed like a dream now, and gradually it was forgotten.

They had no way of knowing that beneath the mountain valley was buried a sleeping sun.

Historians called it the Common Era Mine. The ICBM was referred to in this way for two reasons. First, because it occupied the world’s deepest missile silo. The 150-meter shaft was covered over by a further twenty meters of earth, making it undiscoverable even during substantial excavations in the mountain valley. Before launch, directional blasting would blow apart the earthen cover and expose the shaft’s mouth. Second, because it waited unattended for the trigger signal, like a mega-landmine buried inside the country awaiting its target’s approach. The CE Mine stood ninety meters tall, and if set outside would have risen like a metallic spire. Now it was in a deep sleep in the silo, with just a clock and a receiving unit operating. Listening silently on its locked-in frequency, the unit no doubt received all kinds of noise from the outside world, but it was waiting for a long string of digits, a prime so large that it would take the fastest computer in the world until the end of time to match it by brute force. And there was only one other copy of this number in existence, saved on the five observers’ laptop computer. When the timer ticked up to 315,360,000 seconds, that is, ten years after it was started, the CE Mine would wake up to the end of its life, switch on its systems, and fly out of the silo through the atmosphere to an orbit five thousand kilometers above the Earth, where it would self-destruct, leaving a gleaming star visible even in daylight for ten seconds or more.

But when the counter had reached just 23,500,817 seconds, the unit received that huge prime, and after it two other numbers precise to the third decimal place. A simple program in the receiver checked the two numbers; if the first was outside the 0–180 range, or the second outside 0–80, nothing would happen, and the unit would continue listening. But this time, the two numbers, while close to the boundary, were still within their respective ranges, which was enough; the program required nothing further. As dawn approached, the mountains of the southwest still slumbered and the valley was cloaked in a light mist, but the CE Mine awakened its sleeping power.

The warmth of electric current coursed through its enormous body. The first thing it did upon waking was extract the two coordinate values from the receiver and put them into the target database, which immediately added a point to the 1:100,000 scale map of the Earth. In a flash the central computer generated flight path parameters, and, learning from the target database that the target was located on a level plain, set the warhead for airburst at an elevation of two thousand meters. Were it conscious, it would have noticed something strange, since in the countless simulated launches run after its installation to test the reliability of the system, the continent in which this target area was located was the only one it had never tested. But this didn’t matter. Everything proceeded according to the program. In its electronic mind, the world was exceedingly simple; all that mattered was the target far off on the Antarctic continent. The rest of the world was just coordinates describing the target point, a point flashing on the very top of the Earth’s transparent spherical coordinate system, luring it to the completion of its exceedingly simple mission.

The CE Mine switched on the fuel tank heating system. Like most ICBMs, it was propelled by liquid fuel, but for the purposes of long-term storage, the propellant was a solid-liquid conversion fuel ordinarily found in a gel-like state and needed to be melted before firing.

The layer of earth atop the silo was blasted away, exposing the CE Mine to the gaze of the dawn sky.

The deep boom of the explosion was heard by a few of the lighter sleepers in the village, who could tell it came from the direction of the valley, but they thought it was only distant thunder and ignored it.

The next sound that came to the village was enough to keep them from going back to sleep, and it startled even more children awake. This time it was a low rumble, as if some gigantic beast was rousing itself deep within the earth, or a faraway flood was surging in their direction, threatening to swallow up the whole world. The paper of their lattice windows trembled. The sound increased in volume and shifted from a deep rumble to a high-pitched roar that shook the tile-roof houses.

The children all ran outside in time to see a gigantic fire dragon climb slowly skyward out of the valley. The fire was too intense to look at directly, and it spread an orange aura over the surrounding hills. The children watched it ascend and increase in speed, going higher and higher and turning into a point of light as its sound grew more muffled. Eventually the light flew due south and soon dissolved into the dawn sky.

^{COUNTERATTACK}

The Antarctic morning turned overcast followed by heavy snow, but Davey’s mood remained bright. The cocktail party held at the base the previous night to celebrate victory in the games had lasted late into the night, but he had slept very well. Fully refreshed, he was breakfasting with the generals and senior officials who had come to Antarctica. He valued this breakfast opportunity, since children tended to be in a good mood in the morning, rather than irritated and annoyed from the frustrations and work of the day. Many things could be talked through at breakfast.

The army band played pleasant music in the pressurized hall for the children to listen to as they ate, and everyone was in a good mood.

At the table, Davey said, “I predict that the Chinese children will announce their withdrawal from the games today.”

Seven-star general Scott, who was cutting a piece of steak, grinned. “Nothing special about that. After yesterday’s strike, do they have any other choice?”

Davey raised a glass in his direction. “Getting them off of Antarctica is a whole lot easier now.”

Scott said, “And then knocking out the Russian kids and driving them off. And then Japan and the EU—”

“We’ve got to be a little careful about the Russians. Who knows whether or not they’ve got any bread crumbs in their bag?”

Everyone nodded, understanding the implication of those bread crumbs.

“Can we be truly certain that the Chinese kids don’t have any bread crumbs?” Vaughn asked, spearing a live krill with his fork.

Davey shook a fist at him. “They don’t have any! I told you they wouldn’t. Their bread was too small to leave behind any crumbs! Our gamble succeeded, I’m telling you!”

“When are you going to get more optimistic?” Scott said with a sidelong glance at Vaughn. “You bring a blanket of gloom and depression wherever you go.”

“On my deathbed, I’ll be more optimistic than any of you,” Vaughn said coldly, and swallowed the krill whole.

Then a colonel came in carrying a portable phone, and bent down to whisper something into Davey’s ear before passing the phone to him.

Laughing as he took the phone, Davey said gleefully, “It’s the Chinese kids. I told you, they’re definitely going to drop out of the games!” Then he spoke into the handset: “Is this Huahua? How’re you doing?”

All of a sudden he froze, and his expression turned unnatural, his characteristic sweet smile freezing in place for a few seconds before vanishing entirely. He set down the phone and looked around for Vaughn, just as he did in every moment of crisis. When he found him, he said, “They’ve informed us that they’re still in the game, and have just launched a nuclear missile at our base carrying a four-megaton warhead that will strike its target in twenty-five minutes.”

Vaughn asked, “Did he say anything else?”

“No. He hung up right after that.”

All eyes focused on Vaughn. He gently set down his knife and fork, and said calmly, “It’s real.”

Just then another officer came running in and nervously reported that the warning center had detected an unidentified projectile heading in their direction. The warning system had first detected the object when it took off from southwestern China, but by the time the warning had navigated the multiple layers of confirmation, the object had already passed the equator.

All of the young generals and officials stood up at once, eyes wide and faces white, as if a gang of armed assassins had burst into their plush restaurant.

“What do we do?” Davey asked in bewilderment. “Can we hide out in the new underground hangar we just dug?”

The seven-star general shouted, “The underground hangar? Bullshit. One blast from a four-megaton nuclear bomb will turn the whole area into a crater a hundred meters deep. And we’re smack in the center of it!” He grabbed Davey and threw his typical insults back in his face. “You moronic asshole! You’re the one who’s stuck us here. You’re gonna make us die here!”

“The helicopters,” Vaughn said. His simple statement pulled everyone to their senses and they surged toward the exits. “Wait,” he added, and they stopped as if nailed to the ground. “Immediately notify all the planes to take off at once, and to take as much equipment and personnel as possible. But don’t explain why. We must remain calm.”

“And the other branches? Order a total evacuation of the base!” Davey said.

Vaughn shook his head gently. “There’s no point. In the little time we have, no vehicle will be able to escape the blast radius. It would only cause chaos, and in the end no one would escape.”

The children scrambled for the exits. All but Vaughn, who remained behind, sitting at the table and wiping his fingers on a dinner napkin. Then he slowly got up and made his way outside, waving to the band as he passed to signal that it was nothing important.

Out on the tarmac the children fought to board the three Blackhawk helicopters. Scott managed to scramble into the cabin of one, and when the rotors started up, he looked at his watch and said through tears, “Only eighteen minutes left. We’re not going to make it!” Then he turned to Davey. “You’re the fool who got us stuck here. You’re not gonna get away, not even in death!”

“Keep your composure,” Vaughn, the last to climb aboard, said coldly to Scott.

“We’re not going to make it!” Scott choked out through tears.

“What’s so scary about dying?” A rare smile came to Vaughn’s face. “If you’re willing, General, you’ve got another seventeen minutes to become a true philosopher.” Then he turned to another officer next to Scott. “Tell the pilot not to climb, since the bomb will probably detonate at around two thousand meters. Fly with the wind, at top speed. If we can make it thirty kilometers or so, we should be outside the blast radius.”

Three helicopters inclined their rotors and accelerated inland. As Davey looked out through the porthole at the Antarctic base spread out below them, it seemed to gradually transform into an intricate sand-table model, and he shut his eyes tight against the pain.

The sky was foggy, and now that nothing was visible below them, it was almost as if the three helicopters were holding stationary. But Davey knew that they might already have flown beyond the base. He checked his watch. Twelve minutes had passed since they had received the warning.

“Maybe the Chinese kids are just trying to scare us?” he said to Vaughn, who was sitting next to him.

Vaughn shook his head. “No, it’s for real.”

Davey pressed against the porthole and looked outside again, but there was nothing but fog.

“The World Games are over, Davey,” Vaughn said. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back against the cabin wall, and said nothing more.

They found out later that the three helicopters had flown for roughly ten minutes prior to the nuclear explosion, putting them around forty-five kilometers away, outside the blast radius.

The first thing they saw was the outside world drowned in light. In the words of one young pilot, who had not been informed of the situation, “It was like flying through a neon light tube.” The glare lasted for around fifteen seconds and was accompanied by a giant roar, as if the planet below them was exploding. All at once they saw blue sky, a circular region centered on the blast that expanded rapidly outward. It was the nuclear shock wave dispersing the cloud layer out to a radius of one hundred kilometers from the hypocenter, they later learned.

Smack in the center of the blue towered a mushroom cloud. It started off in two parts, one huge ball of white smoke and fire that took shape at two thousand meters after the initial fireball cooled, and a second on the ground where the shock wave kicked up dirt into a low pyramid whose apex extended upward into a thin spire that joined up with the huge smoke ball. The white ball instantly darkened in color as it absorbed the dust sent up by the pyramid, and flames flickered intermittently throughout the surface. Now the fog beneath the helicopter had been banished like the clouds, giving them a clear view of the land. The pilot later recalled, “The ground got fuzzy all of a sudden, like it had turned to liquid, as if an endless expanse of floodwater was surging toward us, and all of those little hills were islands and reefs. I saw cars on temporary roads flip over one after another like matchboxes….”

The three helicopters were battered about like leaves in a storm. A number of times they dropped perilously close to the ground and were pelted by flying stones and sand; then they were flung high into the air. But they didn’t crash. When they finally landed safely on snowy ground, the children jumped out of the cabin and looked back seaward at the tall mushroom cloud, even darker now. The morning sun, still below the Antarctic horizon, was high enough to just light up the top of the cloud, painting its rippling outline in gold against that slowly expanding dark blue circle of sky.

^BLIZZARD

“Now this is Antarctica!” Huahua said, standing in the driving snow and bone-chilling wind. Visibility was poor through the endless whiteness of earth and sky, and even though they were on the coast, there was no distinguishing land from water. The young leaders of all the countries in Antarctica were closely gathered together as the blizzard swirled around them.

“That’s not really accurate,” Specs said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the howling wind. “It rarely snowed in Antarctica before the supernova. It’s actually one of the driest places on Earth.”

“That’s right,” Vaughn said. He was still only lightly dressed, and stood at ease in the cold wind, which had the children burrowing into their coats and shivering anyway. It was like the cold didn’t affect him at all. “Higher temperatures filled the air in Antarctica with moisture, and now the dramatic drop in temperature is turning that moisture to snow. It might be the biggest snowfall on the continent for the next hundred thousand years.”

“Let’s go back. We’ll be frozen stiff if we stay here,” Davey said through chattering teeth, as he stomped his feet.

And so the heads of state returned to the pressurized hall, identical to the one on the US base that had been vaporized by the atomic fireball of the CE Mine. They had gathered here with the intent of holding talks about Antarctic territory, but the long-anticipated conference was entirely meaningless now.

The CE Mine had ended the Antarctic war games. The children of every country had finally agreed to meet at the negotiating table to discuss the question of Antarctic territory. Each country had paid a heavy price during the war games, but now that the contest had unexpectedly returned to its starting point with no major power commanding a decisive advantage, negotiations seemed impossible for the foreseeable future. The children had no clear idea of whether war would break out again on the continent, or if events would follow another path. In the end, however, all of their problems were solved by a sudden change in climate.

Signs had actually started appearing more than a month ago when autumn made its return to the northern hemisphere after a two-year absence, first with a hint of a chill, and then rains, cold weather, and fallen leaves piling up on the ground. After analyzing worldwide climate data, various countries’ meteorological agencies concluded that the impact of the supernova on global climate was only temporary, and it now was returning to a pre-supernova state.

The ocean may have stopped rising, but it fell far more slowly than it had risen, leading many young scientists to predict that it might never return to its previous level. Still, the worldwide flood was over.

In Antarctica, temperatures hadn’t changed as much, and the small drop was taken by most children to be a function of the long night. They expected the rising sun to dispel the cold and for Antarctica to welcome its first spring. Little did they know that the white figure of Death loomed near on the vast continent.

In what later proved to be a wise decision, countries began withdrawing personnel from Antarctica once they reached the conclusion that the climate would recover. The war games had claimed the lives of five hundred thousand children, half in conventional games and half to nuclear explosions, but the death toll would have been four to five times worse if they had not effected an immediate withdrawal as the climate began to return to normal.

Their bases were largely built to withstand winter temperatures no colder than around −10°C, and were incapable of sustaining the bitter −30°C temperatures that were to come. In the first month, the temperature changed only gradually, allowing the withdrawal of 2.7 million children at a speed that would have astonished the adults. However, equipment still needed to be evacuated, and countries also desired to maintain a certain presence, so nearly three hundred thousand children remained behind as the climate changed. The temperature plummeted nearly 20°C in a single week, and blizzards swept the continent, turning it into a white hellscape.

An emergency evacuation of the remaining children left more than two hundred thousand on the shore, since the worsening weather had grounded virtually all aircraft, and the ports had all iced over in the space of a week, preventing ships from entering. Because most young heads of state were still gathered on the continent for the territorial negotiations, they naturally assumed the role of evacuation command. Leaders wanted to assemble their own country’s children, but the crowds on the shore were a mixture of all countries, leaving them at a loss as to how to proceed.

In the pressurized hall, Davey said, “Now that you’ve seen how things are out there, we have to come up with a solution, and quickly. Otherwise more than two hundred thousand people will freeze to death on the seashore.”

“In a pinch, we could retreat to the inland bases,” Green said.

“No,” Specs said, “most base facilities were dismantled earlier in the withdrawal. And with minimal fuel remaining, all these people wouldn’t survive very long. Going back and forth would waste tons of time and miss any chance to evacuate.”

“We can’t go back,” someone added. “Even if the bases were in perfect order, in this kind of weather we’d still freeze to death in those buildings.”

Huahua said, “All our hopes are on the ocean now. Time is too tight to transport so many people by air even if the routes were passable. The critical question is how to deal with the frozen harbors.”

Davey asked Ilyukhin, “When can your icebreakers get here?”

“They’re in the middle of the Atlantic. It’ll be ten days at the earliest before they make it here. Don’t count on them.”

“How about blasting a channel through the ice with heavy bombers?” Ōnishi suggested.

Davey and Ilyukhin shook their heads, and Scott said, “Bombers can’t even get off the ground in this weather.”

Lü Gang asked, “Aren’t the B-2 and Tu-22 all-weather bombers?”

“Pilots aren’t all-weather.”

Marshal Zavyalova nodded. “The adults didn’t actually think that all-weather meant wretched stuff like this. Besides, even if they did take off, visibility is so poor that it would be impossible to blast a precise channel. They’d just punch a few holes in the ice, and ships still couldn’t get in.”

“What about large-caliber naval guns? Or mines?” Pierre ventured.

The generals shook their heads. “Same problem with visibility. Even if they could make a navigable channel, there’s not enough time.”

“Besides,” Huahua said, “it’ll damage the ice surface and render the one viable solution impossible.”

“What solution?”

“Walking across the ice.”

The several kilometers of snow-blown coastline was densely dotted with abandoned cars and hastily erected tents, all covered in a thick layer of snow that made it a piece with the snowy plain behind and the frozen ocean on either side. When the children saw the group of young leaders walking toward them along the coast, they came out of tents and cars and ran over, surrounding them with a huge crowd of people. The children were shouting something, but their words were carried away by the wind. A few Chinese children were close to Huahua and Specs, and called to them, “Class Monitor, Studies Rep, what are we going to do?”

Huahua didn’t reply immediately, but climbed on top of a tank buried in the snow next to them and shouted down to the crowd below, “Children, walk across the ice. Walk to the edge of the ice shelf, where lots of ships are waiting for us!” He realized his voice wasn’t carrying very far in the gale, and crouched down to say to the nearest kid, “Pass that on back!”

His words spread through the crowd, passing to other nationalities through translation units, or through gestures that made his meaning clear enough to keep it from getting distorted.

“Have you gone crazy, CM? The wind is so stiff out on the ocean and the ice is so slippery, we’ll be blown away like sawdust!” yelled one of the children.

Specs said, “If everyone holds hands, we won’t blow away. Pass that back.”

And so, lines of children soon appeared out on the ice, almost a hundred in each, all holding hands and walking through the blizzard. As they crept away from the shoreline they looked like stubborn wriggling bugs. The line of national leaders advanced onto the ice first. Huahua had Davey to his left and Specs to his right, followed by Ilyukhin. Dense, windblown snow tumbled over their feet, making the children feel as if they were walking through the white deluge of surging rapids.

“So that’s how this period of history ends,” Davey said to Huahua through his translation unit, with the volume turned to maximum.

Huahua replied, “That’s right. Our adults had an old saying, ‘This too shall pass.’ No matter how hard things might get, time always just keeps going forward.”

“Makes sense. But things are going to be even harder. The passion that Antarctica sparked in children’s hearts has turned to disappointment, and American society may lapse back into violent games.”

“Chinese children might return to their indifferent stupor, and the interrupted Candytown might return.” He sighed. “It’s gonna be tough.”

“But I might not be involved in any of that.”

“Is Congress really going to impeach you?”

“Those sons of bitches!”

“But you might end up luckier than me. A head of state isn’t a job for anyone.”

“Yeah. Who would have thought that a thin page of history could fold up to be so thick?”

Huahua didn’t quite get Davey’s last reference, and he didn’t bother to explain. The bitter cold and strong ocean wind prevented them from speaking, and it was all they could do to keep moving forward, or occasionally help up companions who slipped on the ice.

A little more than one hundred meters away from Huahua, Second Lieutenant Wei Ming was also trudging arduously through the blizzard. During a sudden lull in the wind, he heard the call of a cat. At first he thought it was just a figment of his imagination, but when he looked around he noticed a stretcher he had just passed on the ice. It was buried in the snow and he had mistaken it for a snowdrift. The meowing was coming from underneath. He left his column and slipped and slid over to the stretcher, where the cat had jumped down and was shivering in the snow. He picked it up, and then recognized it: Watermelon.

Pulling the army blanket off the stretcher, he saw Morgan lying there, clearly seriously wounded. Her face wore a white beard of frost, and her eyes glittered with fever. She didn’t appear to recognize Wei Ming, and when she spoke a few words, her voice was as weak as a thread in the driving wind. Without a translation unit, Wei Ming couldn’t understand her anyway. He tucked the cat back under the blanket, pulled it over Morgan, and then went around to the front of the stretcher and started pulling. He made slow progress; when the next column of children caught up to him, a few members broke away and came over to help him carry the stretcher forward.

For ages, swirling snow was all the children could see in the expanse of white around them, and although they strove to move forward, they felt as if they were frozen in place on the ice. But just as they were too numb to move, hazy black silhouettes of ships appeared ahead of them, and they were informed via radio not to proceed any farther. They had reached the edge of the ice shelf, where the ice was not frozen solid, and they could fall through at any time. The ships would dispatch landing craft and hovercraft to fetch them. By the time they received the message, over a thousand children had already fallen through crevasses into the icy sea, but the vast majority of them managed to reach the edge of the ice.

Smaller black shadows, separate from the distant fleet, gradually took shape through the snow, dozens of landing craft pushing through the floating ice. When they reached the solid ice, they opened their rectangular maws to let the children swarm aboard.

Wei Ming and the other children carried the stretcher onto one of the landing craft. It was a vessel especially for the wounded, so his companions left at once and he never knew what countries they were from. Under the cabin’s dim yellow light, Wei Ming saw Morgan staring blankly at him from the stretcher. She clearly hadn’t recognized him yet, so Wei Ming picked up Watermelon and said, “You can’t take care of him anymore. Why don’t I take him with me to China?” He set the cat down and let it lick its master’s face. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. We went through so many devilish games and made it out alive, and life will go on. We’ve survived the impossible, so blessings must be in store. Goodbye.” Then he put Watermelon into his backpack and left the boat.

Huahua and a few generals from other countries were coordinating the boarding, and preventing the children who were temporarily unable to board from crowding too far forward and collapsing the ice shelf with their numbers. Farther back on the ice, children from different countries clustered together into large masses to shelter from the cold as they waited. All of a sudden Huahua heard someone call his name, and he turned around to see Wei Ming. The two former classmates embraced.

“You came to Antarctica too?” Huahua asked incredulously.

“I came a year ago with B Group Army’s advance team. I’ve actually seen you and Specs quite a few times from far off, but it didn’t feel right to disturb you.”

“Out of our class, I think Wang Ran and Jin Yunhui also joined the army.”

“Correct. They came to Antarctica too,” Wei Ming said, his expression faltering.

“Where are they now?”

“Wang Ran was evacuated last month with the first batch of wounded, but I don’t know if he made it back home. He was seriously injured in the tank games. He managed to stay alive, but his spine was severed, and he’ll probably never walk again.”

“Oh… and Jin Yunhui? I recall he was a fighter pilot?”

“Correct. A J-10 in the First Airborne Division. His fate was much happier. He crashed into a Su-30 during a fighter game, and both planes were blown to bits. He was posthumously awarded a Nebula medal, but everyone knows he only hit the enemy plane by accident.”

To cover up his own sadness, Huahua asked another question: “Any other kids from our class?”

“We kept in touch the first few months, but by the start of Candytown, most of them, like all the other kids, left their assigned jobs. I don’t know where they ended up.”

“Didn’t Ms. Zheng leave a kid behind?”

“Correct. At first, Feng Jing and Yao Pingping were looking after him. Xiaomeng sent someone to look for the kid, but Ms. Zheng’s final instructions were ‘You may not use your connections to give him any special treatment,’ and so they didn’t let anyone find him. At the start of Candytown, the kid’s nursery was hit by an epidemic, and he ran a high fever. He survived, but the fever took away his hearing. The nursery was disbanded near the end of Candytown, and the last time I saw Feng Jing, she said he had been transferred to another one. No one knows where he is now.”

Huahua was too choked up to speak. A deep sadness came over him, and the numbness he had begun to acquire at the harsh pinnacle of power instantly melted away.

“Huahua,” Wei Ming said, “do you still remember our graduation party?”

Huahua nodded. “How could I forget?”

“Specs talked about how the future can’t be predicted. Anything could happen. He proved it using chaos theory.”

“That’s right. He also mentioned the uncertainty principle…”

“Who would have thought back then that we’d run across each other in a place like this?”

Huahua could no longer hold back his tears. The wind blew them cold on his face almost immediately, and then they froze. He looked up at his classmate. Wei Ming’s eyebrows were white with ice, and the skin on his face was dark and rough and patchy with scars and frostbite and the visible and invisible nicks and scratches left by life and war. His child’s face was already weathered by time.

“We’ve grown up, Wei Ming,” Huahua said.

“Correct. But you’ve got to grow up faster than us.”

“It’s hard for me. And for Specs and Xiaomeng, too.”

“Don’t let anyone know. You can’t let the country’s children know that.”

“And I can’t talk to you about it?”

“I can’t help you, Huahua. Give my regards to Specs and Xiaomeng. You’re the glory of our class. The absolute glory.”

“Take care of yourself, Wei Ming,” Huahua said with feeling as he shook his classmate’s hand.

“You too.” Wei Ming gripped his hand for a moment, and then turned and disappeared into the snow.

Davey boarded the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Anchored close to shore, this supercarrier launched in the 1990s was a black iron island in the blizzard. Across the runway on the snow-covered flight deck, Davey heard the sound of shots from the gun platform, and asked the captain who had greeted him what was going on.

“Lots of kids from other countries want to board. Marines are preventing them.”

“You dumbass!” Davey roared. “Let every kid aboard who can, no matter where they come from!”

“But… Mr. President, that’s impossible!”

“That’s an order! Tell those marines to get the hell away!”

“Mr. President, I have to be responsible for the safety of John C. Stennis.”

Davey smacked the captain across the head, knocking off his hat. “And you’re not responsible for the lives of the kids on the ice? You’re a criminal!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President. As captain I cannot execute your order.”

“I am the commander in chief of the United States of America, for the time being at least. If I so desired, I could have you thrown into the sea this instant, just like your hat. Dare me to try?”

The captain hesitated, and then said to a marine captain, “Tell your people to withdraw. Let anyone who wants to come aboard.”

An unending stream of children from different countries surged up the gangway and onto the deck. The wind was fiercer here, and the leeward side of fighter jets was the only respite from it. Lots of children had fallen into the ocean while boarding the landing craft, and their soaked clothing had now frozen into sparkling coats of ice.

“Let them into the cabins. These kids won’t last long out here before they freeze to death,” Davey said to the captain.

“Can’t do that, Mr. President. The cabins are full to bursting with the American kids who came aboard first.”

“And the hangars? There’s tons of space in there, enough for a few thousand people. Are those full too?”

“They’re full up with planes!”

“Then bring the planes up onto the flight deck.”

“Impossible. The flight deck already has too many other fighters that the horrible weather forced to make an emergency landing here. See, the elevator to the hangars is completely blocked!”

“Then push them into the sea!”

And so, one after another, the ten-million-dollar fighter planes were pushed over the side of John C. Stennis and into the ocean, and the broad flight deck quickly filled with more planes brought up from the hangars on the enormous elevator. The international group of children left the deck for the warm refuge of the cavernous hangars, which soon held thousands of occupants. Once the children had warmed up a bit, they gasped in wonder at the sheer size of the carrier. But on the flight deck out in the snowstorm, over a hundred drenched children had frozen to death.

The final evacuation took three days, and then the huge fleet of more than fifteen hundred ships carrying the last three hundred thousand children off of the continent split into two groups bound for Argentina and New Zealand. More than thirty thousand children succumbed to the cold during the evacuation, the last group of casualties in the Supernova War to die in Antarctica.

The Amundsen Sea returned to its empty state free of its covering of ships. The snow had stopped, but the wind was as fierce as ever, scouring the cold air over the water. As the sky cleared up and a crack appeared in the clouds over the horizon, the newly risen sun shed golden light over Antarctica, onto the deep blanket of snow that now covered the once-exposed rocks and dirt. Perhaps, in some distant future, crowds of people would again set foot on this frigid land in search of the snow-covered bodies of five hundred thousand children, the wreckage of countless tanks, and the two ten-kilometer craters the nuclear blasts left behind. During the continent’s brief springtime, three million children from all over the world had fought each other amid flames and explosions, unleashing their lust for life. But now the epic tragedy of the Supernova War seemed little more than a bad dream in the long night, a mirage beneath the brilliant southern lights. In daylight, the land was a lonely expanse of white. It was as if nothing had ever happened.