Supernova Era

^{BIG QUANTUM}

From far off, the National Information Tower resembled a giant “A.” Built prior to the supernova, it was the heart of Digital Domain, a broadband network covering the entire country. The network, an upgraded internet, had been largely completed before the supernova, and was the best gift that the adults could have left for the children’s country. The children’s state and social structures would be far simpler than in the adults’ time, which made it possible to use Digital Domain for basic management of the state. And so the NIT became the workplace for the children’s central government.

The premier took a group of child national leaders on their first visit to the NIT. When they ascended the long staircase to the main entrance, sentries guarding the building saluted, their faces ashen and their lips split from high fever. The premier clapped one silently on the shoulder, and it was clear that the premier’s body was in a similarly weakened state.

The illness was progressing rapidly, and now, six months after the start of the Great Learning, the world was making preparations for a handover.

At the gate, the premier stopped and turned round to survey the sunlit plaza. The children turned, too, gazing out at the shimmering heat.

“It’s summer already,” one kid whispered. Beijing’s spring was usually just starting at this time of year.

That was another effect of the supernova: the disappearance of winter. Temperatures stayed above 18°C, and plants remained green in what in effect was a very long springtime.

As to the cause of the rising temperatures, scientists had two theories. One, known as the Explosion Theory, held that heat from the supernova caused Earth’s temperatures to rise. The other, the Pulsar Theory, held that energy from the pulsar in the remains of the supernova caused the temperatures to rise, through mechanisms far more complex than the Explosion Theory posited. Observations had detected a strong magnetic field, which astrophysicists hypothesized might also exist around other pulsars, unobserved owing to the great distances involved, but at a distance of just eight light-years, the solar system was situated within this magnetic field. Earth’s oceans were an enormous conductor that cut through the field’s force lines as the planet moved, inducing current. In effect, Earth was a rotor in a cosmic generator. Although the current was far too weak to be detectable by oceangoing ships, it was present throughout the oceans and had a considerable overall effect. It was this induced ocean current that raised the planet’s temperatures.

The dramatic warming would, over the next two years, melt the polar ice caps and Greenland’s ice sheet, raising ocean levels and drowning all coastal cities.

If the Explosion Theory was correct and the warming was due to heat from the supernova, then global temperatures would soon cool again, ice sheets would gradually recover, and sea level would eventually drop back to normal. Earth would have experienced a very brief Great Flood.

Things would be more complicated if the Pulsar Theory was correct. Elevated temperatures would be permanent, rendering many densely populated regions so hot as to be uninhabitable and turning Antarctica into the most livable continent on Earth. It would cause a sea change for the shape of the world community.

The scientific community was inclined toward the Pulsar Theory, which made a much more bewildering prospect for the children’s world.

Inside the vast main lobby, the premier said to the children, “Take a look at China Quantum yourselves. I’ll just rest here.” He sat heavily down into a sofa and let out a long sigh. “It will introduce itself to you.”

The children entered an elevator whose sudden movement caused a momentary feeling of weightlessness. The floor indicator displayed negative numbers; China Quantum’s server room was evidently underground. The elevator stopped and they got out into a tall, narrow vestibule. They felt a low rumble, and a large blue metal door slowly slid open, allowing them passage into a vast underground hall whose four walls glowed with a soft blue light.

In the center of the room was a translucent glass dome more than twenty meters in diameter, which looked like an enormous soap bubble when they got closer to it. The door rumbled closed behind them, and the walls gradually dimmed and then went out altogether. But darkness did not fall. A shaft of light from the very top of the hall penetrated the glass cover and cast a circular spot of light on two objects within it, one an upright cylinder, the other a rectangular prism lying on its side, both silver-gray. They seemed to be situated randomly with respect to each other, like the remains of an ancient palace strewn across the wilderness. The rest of the hall was shrouded in shadow; only the two objects were exposed in the light, possessing a sense of mystery and power, calling to mind megaliths in the wilds of Europe. Then they heard a man’s voice, deep and powerful, with a pleasant echo, say, “Hello. You’re looking at the China Quantum 220 mainframe.”

They looked around but couldn’t find where the sound was coming from.

“You may not have heard of me before. I was born just one month ago, upgraded from China Quantum 120. When the warm current bathed my body that evening, I became me. Hundreds of millions of lines of system software code read out of storage entered my memory as electric impulses flashing hundreds of millions of times a second. I matured quickly. Within five minutes I grew from infant to giant. I surveyed my surroundings with curiosity, but what astonished me most was myself. I could hardly believe the size and complexity of my own structure. Contained within the cylinder and rectangular prism you see is an intricate universe.”

“This computer’s not so hot. It’s gone on and on and hasn’t explained anything clearly,” Huahua said.

Specs said, “That’s a display of its intelligence. It’s not some stupid prerecorded introduction like you’d find in a household appliance. It thought up every word on the spot.”

China Quantum apparently heard Specs, for it continued, “That’s right. China Quantum’s basic design philosophy was to simulate the parallel structure of human neurons, completely different from traditional von Neumann architecture. My core contains three hundred million quantum CPUs in a complex network interconnected by a truly fearsome number of interfaces. It’s a reproduction of the human brain.”

“Can you see us?” one child asked.

“I can see all. Through Digital Domain, I have eyes throughout the country and the world.”

“What can you see?”

“The adult world is being handed over to the children.”

The children dubbed this supercomputer Big Quantum.

^{DRY RUN OF THE NEW WORLD}

“Managing the country like this is like working in the control room of a big factory,” Huahua said breathlessly.

Indeed, the several dozen children that constituted the country’s leadership were assembled at the top of the huge A-shaped NIT in a spacious round hall. The walls and ceiling were constructed out of a nanocrystalline material that, subjected to different electric currents, could be luminous white, translucent, or entirely transparent. The index of refraction could be adjusted to approach that of air, allowing the hall’s occupants to feel as if they were atop a platform open to the sky, with a bird’s-eye view of all of Beijing. But the walls were opaque now and shone with a soft white light. One section of the circular wall had been turned into a wide screen that displayed the text of the report on the trial run. If necessary, the nanomaterial could make the entire wall surface into screens. The children had in front of them a ring of computers and various communication devices.

Several dozen members of the adult leadership stood behind the children watching them work.

The dry run of the children’s world began at eight that morning, when children took over all positions, from the head of state down to the street sweepers, and started working independently.

The newborn children’s world had an unexpectedly smooth dry run. The cloud of pessimism enveloping the world had nurtured the belief that chaos would reign once children took over: power and water outages in the cities, raging fires, total traffic gridlock, communications shutdowns, computer failures leading to guided-missile launches…. But none of these came to pass. The transition proceeded so unbelievably smoothly as to be undetectable.

When the pain had passed and Zheng Chen heard the infant’s first cry, she wondered whether she was already in another place. Delivery while under advanced supernova sickness was understandably dangerous, and according to the doctors her chances of surviving it were less than 30 percent. Neither she nor the doctors cared much, since she would only be going a few weeks earlier than everyone else. But the child was born, the expected postpartum hemorrhaging did not occur, and she lived, for another few weeks at least. The attending doctors and nurses (three of whom were children) all believed it was a miracle.

Holding the child in her arms, she stared at the squalling little pink life-form, and felt on the verge of tears herself.

“You ought to be happy, Ms. Zheng,” said the smiling delivery doctor beside her.

Sobbing, she said, “He’s crying so sadly, it’s like he knows how hard the future will be!”

The doctors and nurses exchanged a glance and a mysterious smile, and then pushed her bed to the window and drew back the curtain so she could look outside. Bright sunlight streamed in, and she saw tall buildings standing silently beneath a blue sky, cars passing by in a continuous stream, and a few scattered people walking in the plaza outside the main hospital building. The city was as it had been the day before. Nothing seemed different. She shot a confused look at the doctor.

“The world’s dry run has begun,” the doctor said.

“What? We’re in the children’s world already?”

“That’s right. The dry run has been in progress for over four hours.”

Zheng Chen’s first reaction was to look up at the overhead lights, something she later learned was a common response upon learning of the dry run, as if lights were a unique sign that the world was normal. The lights were shining steadily. She had passed the previous night, the eve of the dry run, mired in nightmares, dreaming of her city ablaze, of screaming in the central square with no one else in sight, as if she were the sole person left in the city. But before her eyes now was a peaceful children’s world.

“Look at our city, Ms. Zheng. Harmonious as easy-listening music,” said a child nurse next to her.

The doctor said, “Your choice about the children’s world was absolutely correct. We were too pessimistic. It looks like the kids will run the world well. Who knows, maybe even better than us. Your baby will never have the hardships you imagine. He’ll grow up fortunate and happy. Can’t you rest easy now that you’ve seen the city outside?”

Zheng Chen watched the calm city for a long while, and listened to the soft sounds that came in like a sort of music. Not easy listening, but a splendid requiem, and as she listened the tears began to flow. The baby in her arms stopped crying and opened its tiny gorgeous eyes for the first time to look in wonder at the strange world. She felt her whole heart melt and evaporate and disappear, and the total weight of her entire life transfer itself into the small being in her arms.

There was little for the small group of national leaders to do late at night in the NIT. Work in all industrial sectors had been handled by the various central ministries, and most of their time was spent observing the dry run.

“Like I said, we’ll do it better!” Huahua said excitedly after update after update appeared in the dry run reports on the big screen.

Specs shook his head dismissively. “We haven’t done anything. You’ve got blind optimism, but you should realize that the adults are still here. We’re not on suspended rails yet.”

It was a moment before Huahua got the reference, and turned to look at Xiaomeng sitting beside him.

“Life is difficult when children are all that’s left in a family, let alone an entire country,” she said, and looked out through the now-transparent walls at Beijing’s gleaming lights that surrounded them.

They all looked up through the transparent ceiling at the clusters of white lights in the night sky strong enough to outline the scattered clouds in silver, and cast human shadows onto the floor of the hall with every flash. The flashes had been frequent the past few days. These, they knew, were nuclear bombs detonating thousands of miles away in space.

Before the handover, all nuclear powers had come out and declared the total destruction of their nuclear weapons, so as to leave a clean world behind for their children. Most of the bombs had been detonated in space, although some had been shot into orbit around the sun, where they continued to be discovered and detonated in the Supernova Era.

Watching the flashes, the premier said, “The supernova taught humanity to value life.”

“Children have an innate love of peace,” someone added. “War will die out in their world.”

The president said, “You know, it’s a complete mistake to call the supernova the Dead Star. From a dispassionate standpoint, all of the key elements that make up our world come from an exploding star. The iron and silicon that form our planet and the carbon that is the basis of life were ejected into the cosmos by a supernova in some unimaginably distant past. And even if our supernova will bring tremendous death to the Earth, it may bring forth in some other part of the universe life even more stunning than this. The supernova is no dead star. It is the true creator! Humanity is lucky, for if the rays had been just a little stronger, no one would be left on Earth. Or even worse, only babies under the age of two! Perhaps it’s a lucky star for us. In just a short while only one-point-five billion people will be left on Earth, and many of the problems that previously threatened humanity will be resolved overnight. The damaged environment will slowly recover. Industry and agriculture, even at a third of their former scale, will easily satisfy all the children’s needs, enough for them to live in a world of unimaginable plenty. With no need for them to race around for subsistence, they will have more time for science and art, to build a better society. When a second supernova strikes Earth, you’ll no doubt have learned how to block its rays…”

Huahua cut in, “By then we’ll be able to trigger a supernova and harness its energy to leave the galaxy!”

His words drew applause. Pleased, the president said, “You kids are always a step ahead of us when it comes to imaging the future. The time we’ve been able to spend with you has been most fascinating. Comrades, the future is bright. Let’s take this attitude with us into the final moments.”

^{THE EPOCH CLOCK}

At last it came time for final farewells, when everyone over the age of thirteen gathered at their final assembly points to go off to meet death. Most of the people of the Common Era left quietly without their children’s knowledge, leaving them intent on their work. Later historians believed that this was an entirely correct decision, since few people possessed the emotional strength to endure the biggest eternal farewell in history. If they had met their children one last time, human society might have utterly collapsed.

The first to leave were the most seriously ill, or those in nonessential positions. They left by various means of transport, some that made many trips, others that never returned.

Final assembly points, as they were known, were situated in relatively remote areas, a large number of them in uninhabited deserts, the poles, and even the ocean floor. Since the global population was plummeting by four-fifths, huge regions of land on Earth were now untrodden wilderness, and it was only many years later that all of the enormous tombs were discovered.

On the television, the pope in a long crimson gown was reading from 1 Corinthians 15, addressing the entire world in a final prayer for the Common Era.

“Time to go,” Zheng Chen’s husband said softly as he bent down to pick up the sleeping infant from the bed. Zheng Chen silently stood up and picked up a travel bag holding things for the kid, and then went to turn off the TV. She caught a glimpse of the UN secretary general’s farewell address to the Common Era:

“…Humanity has been split down the middle. Children, we trust that from this fresh wound you will bring forth radiant flowers.

“As for us, we came, we worked, and we are leaving…”

She turned off the TV and then, with her husband, took one last look at their home. They took their time, wanting to impress it indelibly onto their memory. Zheng Chen paid particular attention to the spider plant hanging from the bookshelf, and the goldfish swimming calmly in the fishbowl. If there really was a world after this one, she wanted to take this memory there with her.

Leaving the house, they saw Lin Sha’s father in the hallway. Lin Sha was on duty at the hospital and did not know that the adults were leaving.

“Where’s Dr. Lin?” Zheng Chen asked.

Lin Sha’s father pointed back at the open door. Zheng Chen went in and saw Lin Sha’s mother writing on the wall with a marker, adding to the writing that already covered the walls as high as she could reach.

“That’s good. Now it’s really time to go,” said Lin Sha’s father, who had come in after Zheng Chen, and he took the marker out of his wife’s hand.

Dr. Lin looked blankly around her, and then mechanically picked up her small travel bag.

“We don’t need to take anything,” her husband said softly, and then gently took the bag out of her hands and set it back on the sofa. All it contained was a hand mirror, a pack of tissue, and an address book, but Dr. Lin took it with her whenever she left home. Without it, she felt like she was missing part of her body and became agitated. Her psychologist husband said that this reflected her own insecurity about life.

“We should at least take some more clothes. It’ll be cold there,” Dr. Lin mumbled.

“That’s not necessary. We won’t be able to feel it. When you think back on it, we used to take far too much stuff when we went out walking.”

The two couples went downstairs where a coach filled with passengers was waiting. Two girls came running over. They were Zheng Chen’s students, Feng Jing and Yao Pingping, who were now working in the nursery. They seemed so feeble to her, as if they themselves would have a difficult time without anyone to look after them. They had come for her baby, but Zheng Chen held her four-month-old tightly as if afraid they were child-snatchers.

“This little boy loves to cry, so give him lots of attention. He takes ninety milliliters of milk every two hours, and then goes to sleep twenty minutes after eating. If he cries when he should be sleeping, it means he’s hungry. He doesn’t usually cry if he’s wet or dirty. He may have a calcium deficiency, so I’ve put calcium supplements in this bag. Remember to give him one every day, or else he’ll get sick…”

“The bus is waiting,” her husband said, clasping her shoulders lightly to keep her from going on indefinitely, the way Dr. Lin could have filled the walls with writing. Trembling, she finally passed the baby into the delicate arms of the young nursery attendants.

Dr. Lin helped her onto the bus, where the other passengers stared at them in silence. All of a sudden her baby began bawling outside, and she jerked round as if by electric shock to look at the baby in the girls’ embrace, its tiny arms and legs flailing wildly outside the swaddling, as if it knew that its mother and father were headed out on the road, never to return. She fell faceup to the floor, and saw the sky turn red and the sun blue, and then her vision turned black and she lost consciousness.

Once the bus started up, Dr. Lin glanced absently out the window and suddenly froze stock-still at the sight of children in the distance running toward them. Despite the quietness and secrecy of their departure, they had still been found out. The children ran along the road racing as hard as they could after the bus, waving their arms and wailing, but the bus increased its speed and left them farther and farther behind. Then Dr. Lin saw Lin Sha, who stumbled to the ground and then crawled to her hands and knees and waved in the direction of the bus. Perhaps she had injured her leg, because she could no longer run after the bus and squatted on the road and buried her face in her hands, crying. Even at this distance, Dr. Lin was convinced she saw blood on her daughter’s knees, and she poked her whole upper body out the window and watched her daughter until she vanished into a point in the far distance.

When Zheng Chen came to, she was lying down on the bus headed to the final assembly point. The first thing she saw was the dark red of the seat cushions, stained, she imagined, by the blood that had drained out of her shattered heart, now dry as a bone and ready to die. But a remark from her husband kept her living a while longer.

“Our kid will have it hard, but he’ll grow up to live in a world much better than ours, my love. We should be happy for him.”

“I’ve been taking your car for most of my life, Mr. Zhang,” Yao Rui’s father said to the driver as he was helped onto the bus.

Zhang nodded at him. “This will be a long journey, Chief Yao.”

“Yes. A long journey.”

The bus started up, and Yao left the power plant he had worked at for more than two decades. Now, his thirteen-year-old son had replaced him as chief engineer. He strove to look at the plant through the rear window, but there were too many people on the bus and he couldn’t see anything. After a while, even without seeing outside he knew that they were driving up the hill he had crossed four times a day every day for the past twenty years. The whole plant complex was visible from here, and again he tried to look out, but again there were too many people to see clearly. Someone said, “Don’t worry, Chief Yao. The lights are still on.”

After another stretch of road they reached the last spot where the plant was visible, and someone else said, “Chief Yao, the lights are still on.”

As long as the lights stay on. The power plant’s greatest threat was an outage to its own supply, but so long as it remained lit, it could handle any problem, no matter the scale. Their bus skirted the edge of the city and entered the flow of traffic leaving on the expressway. Then someone said, “The city lights are still on, too.”

That was something Chief Engineer Yao could see for himself.

“Wei Ming of Division 115, Fourth Regiment, for post change,” Wei Ming said, saluting his father.

“Wei Jianlin of Division 115, Fourth Regiment, handing over post. Conditions normal in this regiment’s defense zone during this duty period,” his father said, saluting back.

The gray fish belly of dawn was just starting to light up the eastern horizon, and all was quiet around the frontier post; the snowcapped peaks were still asleep. No lights had been on in the Indian frontier post opposite them all night, as if it had been abandoned.

They spoke little, nor was there any need to speak. Lieutenant Colonel Wei Jianlin turned and with difficulty straddled the horse his son had ridden out on, and then headed off to camp, where he would take the last bus to the final assembly point. At the end of the long road down the mountain, he turned back and saw his son watching him leave, standing ramrod straight in front of the outpost, motionless in the chill wind, and next to him against the blue-white of the morning, the boundary marker.

The Epoch Clock started ticking as soon as the adults had all gone. This clock could be found all over, on TV screens throughout the world, on practically every webpage, on every urban digital billboard, and standing tall in the central plaza of every city. It didn’t look like a clock at all, but took the form of a green rectangle made up of 61,420 pixels, each of which represented a final assembly point, linked through satellite signal with the status of each assembly point worldwide. When a green dot turned black, it meant that everyone at that assembly point was dead.

When the entire clock turned black, no one over the age of thirteen would be left on Earth, and children would formally take over global administration.

When the green dots would go out was up to the assembly points themselves. Some equipped everyone on-site with a wrist sensor that monitored life signs, and would eventually send out a death signal; this device was known as an “oak leaf.” The third world had a simpler method: The green dot would automatically turn off at the time estimated by doctors. None of the dots ought to have been turned off manually, since everyone at the assembly points would have lost consciousness well before death, but it was later discovered that the green dots at some assembly points had indeed been switched off by human hands. This mystery was never explained.

The design of the assembly points differed across countries and cultures, but in general they were situated in enormous caves dug underground, where people gathered to spend their final moments on Earth. Every assembly point held roughly one hundred thousand people, but some of them had upward of a million.

The vast majority of the last written words left by the people of the Common Era at the final assembly points recorded their experiences and emotions of bidding farewell to the world, but vanishingly few mentioned anything about the assembly points themselves. One thing was certain: All of them passed their final moments in peace, and where there was still strength, they held concerts and parties.

One holiday observed in the Supernova Era was Final Assembly Day. On that day, people gathered at the various underground plazas that were final assembly points to experience the final moments of the people of the Common Era. The Epoch Clock showed again across all media, its green dots turning once again to black. Shadowy crowds lay down throughout the dank, lonely space, lit by just one hazy floodlight high on the cavern’s roof, the silence made only heavier by the sound of innumerable people breathing. Then they would become philosophers, contemplating life and the world anew.

National leaders were the last to depart in each country. In the NIT, two generations of leadership were making their last goodbyes. Every adult took their students aside to give final instructions.

The chief of general staff said to Lü Gang, “Remember, don’t engage in large-scale, far-reaching transcontinental or transoceanic wars. The navy is no match for Western main fleets in battle.”

Lü Gang had heard this from the CGS and other leaders countless times, and as on all those previous times, he nodded and said he would remember.

“Now let me introduce some people to you,” the CGS said, gesturing to five senior colonels he had brought with him. “This is the Special Observer Team that will function only during wartime. They have no authority to interfere with your command, but they have the right to know all confidential information during wartime.”

The five young colonels saluted Lü Gang, who saluted back and then asked the CGS, “What will they do then?”

“Their final duties will be made known to you at the necessary time.”

The president and prime minister were silent for quite a while as they faced Huahua, Specs, and Xiaomeng. History records that such a scene was found in most countries when adult leaders parted from child leaders for the final time. There was too much they wanted to say, so much that they were left speechless; what they had to say was so weighty that they were incapable of forming the words.

At last the president said, “Children, when you were very small, adults taught you that so long as there’s a will there’s a way. Now, I’m here to tell you, that’s completely wrong. The way is only open for those things in line with the laws of science and of social development. The vast majority of what people want to accomplish is impossible, no matter how hard they try. As leaders of this country, your historic mission is to consider a hundred options, eliminate the ninety-nine that are impossible, and find the one that can be accomplished. This will be difficult, but you must do it!”

The premier said, “Remember the MSG and salt.”

Parting itself was calm. The adults, after shaking hands silently with the children, helped each other out of the hall. The president was the last to leave, and before he went through the door he turned and said to the new national leadership, “Children, the world belongs to you now.”

^{THE SUPERNOVA ERA}

For several days after the adults left, the young leaders spent their time in front of the Epoch Clock, which was displayed on the big screen in the hall at the top of the NIT, bathing the place in the green light of its enormous glowing rectangle.

All was normal in the country on the first day. The ministries handled tasks in various sectors relatively successfully, and there were no major incidents on national soil. The children’s country seemed to be running a continuation of the dry run. As had been the case then, there wasn’t much for the leaders at the top of the NIT to do.

That first night there was no change to the Epoch Clock, which remained an unblemished expanse of green. The child leaders stared silently at it until late in the night when they finally fell asleep. But when they woke up, someone shouted, “Come have a look. Isn’t that a little black dot up there?”

Up by the screen they looked carefully, and indeed there was a small black square roughly the size of a coin, as if the shiny surface of the green rectangle had shed a mosaic tile.

“Could it be a bad pixel?” one child asked.

“Must be. That happened with my old computer’s LCD screen,” another child replied. This theory was simple to test, requiring no more than a glance at other screens, but they all went back to sleep without anyone proposing it.

Children are far better at self-delusion than adults.

When they woke the next morning and gathered before the Epoch Clock again, self-delusion was no longer possible. Black dots were scattered throughout the green rectangle.

From up here, the city below them was peaceful, its streets empty of pedestrians and all but the occasional passing vehicle. After a century of tumult the metropolis seemed to have gone to sleep.

After dark, the number of black spots on the Epoch Clock had doubled, some of them joining into patches of black, like clearings in the green forest.

On the morning of the third day, approximately equal areas of black and green composed an intricate monochrome image. The black area was growing dramatically faster now, a black lava of death spreading across the Epoch Clock and ruthlessly consuming the green grass of life. By nightfall, black now covered two-thirds of the rectangle, and late that night the Epoch Clock had become a magic charm that held the children tightly in its grip.

Xiaomeng picked up the remote and turned off the screen. She said, “Go to sleep. It’s not right that we’ve been staying so late here every night. Take time to rest. Who knows what sort of work is waiting for us.”

They returned to their own rooms in the NIT to go to sleep. Huahua turned off the light and lay down on his bed, but then took up his palmtop and went online to bring up the Epoch Clock. Easy enough, since it was displayed on practically every website. He stared at the rectangle as if bewitched and didn’t notice Xiaomeng come in. She took his computer. In her hands she held a stack of other palmtops.

“Sleep! When will you all learn some self-control? I’ve got to go room to room to confiscate these computers.”

“When will you stop acting like my older sister?” Huahua called after her when she went out the door.

A tremendous fear seized the children as they stood before the Epoch Clock, but they were comforted by the fact that the country was still running stably, like a huge, well-oiled machine. Data displayed by Digital Domain convinced them that they had taken the reins of the world, and that everything would continue just as steadily forever. The previous night they had even left the darkening clock to go to bed.

When they stepped into the hall on the morning of the fourth day, however, the children felt the heavy dread of stepping into a tomb. Dawn had not yet come to the dark hall, and the green light of the past three days had all but disappeared. Within this darkness they saw just one patch of green lights remaining on the Epoch Clock, like remote stars on a cold winter’s night, and it was only after turning on the room lights that they could breathe easier. No one took a step away from the clock the entire day. They counted the dots again and again as they dwindled in number, fear and sadness gradually tightening around their hearts.

“So they’re just going to abandon us,” a child said.

“Yeah. How can they do that to us?” someone else said.

Xiaomeng said, “When my mom died I was there with her, and I thought the same thing: How could she abandon me? I even started to hate her. But later on I felt like she was still alive somewhere…”

A child shouted, “Look, another one’s gone out!”

Huahua pointed at one of the dots. “I bet that’ll be the next one to go out.”

“What do you bet?”

“If I’m wrong, then I won’t sleep tonight.”

“It’s quite possible no one’s going to sleep,” Specs said.

“Why?”

“At this rate, the Epoch Clock’s going to run out sometime tonight.”

One by one, green dots vanished, quicker than ever now, and to the children watching it, the nearly dark clock was like a bottomless pit they were suspended over.

“The rails really are going to be left hanging,” Specs said to himself.

Close to midnight just one green star was left, a single point shining its lonesome light from the upper left of the Epoch Clock’s dark desert. The hall was deathly quiet, the children still as statues as they stared, waiting for the final tick. An hour passed, then two, but the green star shone stubbornly on. The children started to exchange glances, and then began to whisper among themselves.

The sun rose in the east and passed over the silent city before setting in the west, and throughout the day that green star remained lit.

By noon, a rumor had begun circulating in the NIT saying that an effective cure for supernova radiation had actually been developed some time ago, but it required so much time to produce that only a fraction of the demand could be met; the news was not made public so as to avoid chaos. The countries of the world had gathered their most talented individuals together and had treated them with the drug; the remaining green dot represented their final assembly point. Considered carefully, this scenario was not entirely impossible. They pulled up the final address from the UN secretary general and watched it again, noticing one line in particular:

“…Only when the Epoch Clock turns completely black will the children truly take over world administration, in a constitutional and legal sense. Prior to this, leadership power will remain with adults…”

It was an odd statement. It was perfectly possible for the adults to hand over power before departing for their final assembly points, so why wait until the Epoch Clock ran out? There was only one possibility: There was still hope for some people at some assembly point to survive!

By the afternoon, the children had become convinced of this theory. They eagerly watched the green star, as if looking toward a distant lighthouse on a treacherous night sea. They began searching for the location of that final assembly point, and thinking up ways to establish contact, but their search was fruitless. No clues concerning the assembly points had been left behind. They seemed to be located in another world. So the children had to wait, as night came in, unnoticed.

Late that night, on chairs and sofas under the soothing light of that undying green star, after a sleepless night and day, the children fell asleep, dreaming of a return to their parents’ embrace.

It began to rain, drumming lightly on the transparent floor-to-ceiling shell of the hall, enveloping the city and its scattered hazy lights down below, and running in rivulets down the outside walls.

Time moved forward, crossing the universe like a transparent fog, without making a sound.

The rain picked up, followed by wind, and eventually lightning flashed in the sky and thunder rolled, startling the children awake. Their shouts of alarm echoed in the hall.

The green star was dark. The last oak leaf of the Epoch Clock had gone out, leaving it an unbroken swath of black.

Not a single adult was left on Earth.

The rain stopped. A fierce wind swept the lingering storm clouds from the night sky to reveal the giant Rose Nebula, which shone with a severe, eerie blue light. When it struck the ground it turned silvery like moonlight, illuminating every detail of the wet landscape and washing out the city lights.

The children stood on the highest floor of the A-shaped tower and stared out into the cosmos at the blue glowing nebula, the solemn grave of an ancient star and the glorious womb nurturing the embryo of a new one, their diminutive bodies plated in otherworldly silver.

The Supernova Era had begun.