Supernova Era

^{HOUR ONE}

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 1}

The children stood at the transparent walls looking out at the magnificent Rose Nebula and the capital under its glow, considering in bewilderment the world that adults had left to them.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 2}

“Oh…” said Huahua.

“Oh…” said Specs.

“Oh…” said Xiaomeng.

“Oh…” said the children.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 3}

“So it’s just us left now?” Huahua asked.

“Just us?” Xiaomeng asked.

“Is it really just us?” the children asked.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 4}

The children fell into a deep silence.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 5}

“I’m scared,” one girl said.

“Turn on all the lights,” another girl said.

And so all the lights in the hall went on. But the children’s shadows cast on the floor by the Rose Nebula were sharp as ever.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 6}

“Close the walls. I can’t stand it in the open,” the girl said.

And so the walls and ceiling of the hall were set to opaque, shutting the newborn Supernova Era outside.

“And that big black thing. It’s really scary!”

And so the Epoch Clock disappeared from the screen.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 7}

An enormous map of the country replaced the Epoch Clock on the screen, so detailed that even though it was four meters high and ten meters wide, the smallest symbols and text were no larger than you would find on an ordinary printed map. Even standing right beneath it you could only make out the bottom bit, but any portion could be circled and magnified for a closer look. An intricate mesh of glowing lines and colored areas covered that wall of the hall, turning it into a spectacle of vibrant images.

The children waited quietly, not moving a muscle as the small star representing Beijing flashed red.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 8}

A short buzzing sound was followed by a line of text appearing at the bottom of the map:

On the map, a long red line linking Beijing and Shanghai appeared, with a label at its midpoint displaying the channel number: 79633. At the same time, a boy’s voice said, “Hello? Beijing! Beijing! Beijing? Is anyone there?”

Huahua answered, “We’re here. This is Beijing!”

“You’re a kid. Are there any adults?”

“There aren’t any adults here. Or anywhere. Didn’t you see the Epoch Clock run out?”

“There aren’t any anywhere?”

“That’s right. Where are you?”

“I’m in Shanghai. I’m alone in the building.”

“How are things over there?”

“How are things? Do you mean outside? I don’t know. I can’t see anyone on the street out the window, and there’s no noise. It’s all cloudy here, and it’s raining. There’s blue light coming through the clouds. It’s scary!”

“Hey, it’s just us left now.”

“What should I do?”

“How should I know?”

“Why don’t you know?”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re Beijing!”

Another buzz. The screen displayed:

Another red line extended from Beijing and terminated at a city beside the Yellow River: Jinan. Huahua pressed the R key a second time and another boy’s voice sounded from a thousand kilometers away: “Beijing! Beijing! I need Beijing!”

Xiaomeng said, “This is Beijing.”

“Oh, it’s connected,” the boy said, apparently to the children who were with him. Huahua and Xiaomeng heard a rustling, no doubt from the other children crowding round the telephone.

“Beijing, what should we do now?”

“What’s the matter?”

“We… the adults gathered us all here before they left, but now there’s no one to look after us.”

“Where are you? How many of you are there?”

“At school. I’m calling from the office. There are more than five hundred kids out there. What should we do?”

“I don’t know….”

“You don’t know?!” Then the kid said, apparently to someone nearby, “Beijing says they don’t know. They don’t know what we should do!”

Other, softer voices chimed in:

“Beijing’s clueless too?”

“How should they know? They’re just like us, only kids left.”

“Are we really on our own?”

“Yeah. Who else is there?”

“Didn’t the adults tell you what to do?” said another voice, different from the others, as if another kid had grabbed the phone.

“What happened to your local leaders?”

“Who knows? They’re unreachable!”

More buzzing. Three new lines appeared on the map, connecting Beijing to Xi’an, Taiyuan, and Shenyang. There were five now, each labeled at the midpoint with a corresponding port number. The screen showed PORTS CURRENTLY AT CALL STATE: 5. Huahua clicked on the line to Shenyang, and they heard a girl’s sobbing voice. She sounded around four or five years old.

“Hello? Hello?” she said through sobs.

“This is Beijing. What’s wrong?”

“I’m hungry. Hungry!”

“Where are you?”

“At home… home…” She trailed off into sobbing.

“Did your mom and dad leave you anything to eat?”

“No.”

Like an auntie, Xiaomeng said to the invisible little girl, “Don’t cry. Take a look around, okay? That’s a good kid.”

“I… I can’t find anything.”

“Nonsense! There can’t be nothing to eat in the house,” Huahua exclaimed.

“God, you’re going to scare her,” Xiaomeng said, glaring at him. Then she said to the girl, “Look in the kitchen, sweetie. You’ll find something to eat there.”

The line went silent. Huahua was anxious to patch in another communications port, but Xiaomeng insisted on waiting. Before long, the sobbing girl returned to the phone. “It’s locked. The door’s locked.”

“Well… think back. In the mornings before you go to preschool, where does your mom give you food?”

“I eat onion pancakes for breakfast at preschool.”

“What about Sundays?”

“Mom gets food from the kitchen.” She broke down again.

“Oh for… is it always the kitchen?”

“Sometimes I have instant noodles.”

“Good. Do you know where the instant noodles are?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Go get them.”

The line went silent again, but very soon they heard a rustling. “I found them. I’m hungry,” the girl sobbed.

“Then eat!” Huahua said in exasperation.

“The bag… I can’t open the bag.”

“Sheesh. Idiot. Just bite a corner, and then use your hands to tear an opening.”

“For heaven’s sake. You think she can bite it? She probably doesn’t have any teeth!” But just as Xiaomeng was about to tell her how to open the bag, they heard a tearing sound followed closely by the crunch of dried noodles.

“No, don’t eat it like that. Look around for a thermos.”

The girl ignored Xiaomeng completely and continued to munch noisily. Huahua went to switch to another location, but when he looked up at the map, he stopped in surprise. A dozen new lines had appeared, and more were being added, most of them from major cities. Some cities had two lines, and all of them pointed toward Beijing. The screen showed that more than fifty ports were calling (not all of them displayed on the map), and the number was ticking upward. The children stared in shock, and by the time they recovered enough to patch in another city, the map had more lines than it was possible to count. More than thirteen hundred ports calling, according to the display. And this was just one of the NIT’s ten web addresses, so what they had received was only the tip of the iceberg.

All of the country’s children were calling Beijing.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 15}

“Hello, Beijing? Why haven’t Mom and Dad come back yet?”

“What? You mean you don’t know?”

“I don’t know where they went. They told me not to run off, to wait at home.”

“They surely didn’t tell you they’d be back?”

“Oh. No.”

“Then listen: They’re not coming back!”

“What?”

“Go out and look around. Find some other kids. Go!”

“Mommmeee! I want my mommy!”

“Don’t cry. How old are you?”

“Mommy told me… three. Three years old.” Sobs.

“Listen, don’t look for your mom. She won’t be back for a long, long time. Go next door and find some older kids.”

“Hey, Beijing! When should I turn in my homework?”

“What?!”

“When we gathered here, the teachers left us lots and lots of homework. They told us to go to sleep if we got tired, and do homework when we woke up. And not to go outside, or go anywhere. Then they left.”

“Do you have food and water?”

“Yes. But I was asking about the homework.”

“Oh, do whatever the hell you want.”

“Hello, Beijing? Is it true there aren’t adults anymore?”

“That’s right. They’re gone….”

“Beijing, who’s looking after us?”

“Go and ask your direct superiors.”

“Hey! Hello! Hello?”

In the space of fifteen minutes, the children in the NIT answered a huge number of similar calls but had not even tackled 1 percent of the total number: the display showed more than eighteen thousand ports calling Beijing, and the map was densely covered in red lines. The children began to be selective about the calls, listening for a few words and switching to another line if the situation wasn’t important.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, MINUTE 30}

“Hey, Beijing! We have a problem here. The oil depot is on fire, and the big drums are exploding! A river of burning oil is heading our way! It’ll reach our town at any moment!”

“Where’s the fire brigade?”

“I don’t know! I’ve never heard of any fire brigade.”

“Listen: Tell all of the kids to get out of town!”

“So… we’re just abandoning it?”

“Abandon it! And hurry!”

“But… this is our home.”

“This is an order! An order from the central government!”

“…Yes, sir!”

“Beijing? This is _____. We’ve got fire. All over the place. The biggest is at the department store!”

“Where’s the fire brigade?”

“Right here!”

“Have them put out the fire!”

“We’re at the fire. But the hydrants don’t have any water!”

“Call the government to fix it. Then take some cars and go fetch water from a nearby source…. Oh, clear all of the kids out of the area first.”

The number of calls coming into the hall had skyrocketed above a hundred thousand. The map only displayed what the system determined to be high-level information, but even so the map was practically covered in red lines, new ones replacing the old. Practically every region in the country had a red line reaching out to Beijing.

“Hey! Beijing! I’ve finally gotten through! Is everyone dead? Why have you left us all alone?”

“Are you dead? You think we can take care of everything?”

“Listen to this!”

There was a noise on the line.

“What’s that?”

“Babies crying.”

“How many of them?”

“Too many to count. Almost a thousand. Are you just abandoning them here?”

“Holy crap! You mean there are nearly a thousand little babies gathered there?”

“The youngest aren’t even a year old!”

“How many of you are looking after them?”

“Just over fifty of us.”

“When the adults left, didn’t they leave nurses to watch them?”

“There were a few hundred of us, but just now some cars came and took them all away. They said they had a more urgent situation. It’s just the few of us here now.”

“God! Listen, first, half of you go out to find other kids, anyone you meet, doesn’t matter who, and bring them in to help take care of the babies. Hurry. Your best bet is to broadcast it over the radio.”

“Right.”

“What are the babies crying about?”

“Maybe they’re hungry? Or thirsty? We have no idea. We found some peanuts, but they won’t eat them.”

“You moron! You want to give babies peanuts? They need milk!”

“Where do we get milk?”

“Are there any shops nearby?”

“Yes!”

“Go and look there. They’ll have milk powder.”

“So… we just break down the door, is that it?”

“That’s right. Don’t bother about the counter. And if there’s not enough, then go to the warehouse. Hurry!”

“Hey, Beijing! We’ve got a flood here!”

“It’s springtime! Where’s the water coming from?”

“They say it’s because they forgot to raise the sluice at the reservoir upstream, and the water rose too high and collapsed the dam! One half of the city’s underwater, and the kids are all coming over to this side. But the water’s coming too fast, and we can’t outrun it!”

“Have the kids go up onto the roof.”

“But people say buildings will collapse when they get waterlogged.”

“They won’t. Spread the word. Use the loudspeaker.”

“Beijing! Hey! Listen to all the babies crying!”

“You don’t have anyone looking after them either?”

“There aren’t any doctors!”

“Doctors? What for?”

“They’re all ill!”

“How can all of them be ill? Couldn’t they be crying from hunger?”

“No. We’re ill too! All the kids in the city are ill. The water is poisonous. If you drink it, you feel dizzy and get diarrhea.”

“Go to the hospital. See a doctor.”

“There’s no one at the hospital!”

“Find the mayor!”

“I am the mayor!”

“You’ve got to find the doctors! And get to the water company and find the source of the contamination. And collect clean water, bottled water, as soon as you can, or else the consequences will be even worse!”

“Beijing! This is _____. The government is surrounded by ten thousand kids or more. They all look ill. They’re crying and asking us for their parents!”

“Hello! Hey! Beijing!” A cough. “The chemical plant outside the city exploded and released toxic gas.” Another cough. “The wind blew it into the city, and now we can’t breathe!” Another cough.

“Beijing! A train carrying over a thousand kids derailed. I don’t know the number of casualties. What should we do?”

“Beijing! That big black rectangle is scaring us. We’re so afraid!”

Crying and frightened shouts from a huge crowd of children.

“Hi. This is Beijing. Where are you? What’s wrong?”

Crying, shouting.

“Hey! Hey!”

Crying, shouting.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 1}

Onscreen the number of calls received by Beijing rocketed with frightening speed past three million. In their panic, someone accidentally clicked the Broadcast All button, and all channels played simultaneously, filling the hall with a wave of noise that pounded over them again and again. The children covered their ears to the sound of millions of voices all repeating the same word: “Beijing! Beijing! Beijing!”

Just during the time the children were standing in shock, the number of calls ballooned by a million to a total of more than four million. The wave of voices from throughout the country seemed ready to swallow up the entire hall. They heard uncontrollable wailing, and after what seemed like an eon of fiddling with the controls, Huahua finally shut off the sound, right as the children were on the brink of madness. Silence descended immediately, and then they went back to taking the millions of calls one by one.

All of the country’s children were calling Beijing, as if crying out to the sun still below the horizon. Beijing was hope, Beijing was power, Beijing was the sole source of sustenance in this strange new loneliness. The megadisaster had come so quickly that the adults could not possibly have had time to arrange everything, but the multitude of voices were crying out to a group of thirteen-year-olds, who like their peers had no source of support, and like them were facing this newborn world of children under the weight of profound terror and infinite bewilderment.

The child leaders answered the endless series of phone calls knowing that they were little better off than the faraway children calling in. Still they answered every one. They understood that every word transmitted from the capital was like a ray of light for the terrified and lonely children struggling against the darkness, giving them a huge boost of comfort and strength. They kept at this urgent work until they were dazed and dizzy from fatigue, until they grew hoarse, unable to talk, and had to take turns handling the incoming calls. They were disgusted at their own weakness, frustrated that they couldn’t speak through ten thousand mouths. Answering the millions of voices was like draining the sea with a teacup.

Xiaomeng sighed, “Who knows how bad it’s gotten in the outside world.”

Huahua said, “We can take a look for ourselves,” and tapped the remote to turn the walls transparent. What they saw froze them to the spot. Fires sent columns of smoke into the air, like black feathers stuck into the city, tinged red by the flickering firelight, or stained green by shorts in electrical equipment. A few children dashing down the empty streets looked like tiny black dots. All of a sudden, those black dots, streets, and the city itself plunged into darkness, leaving clusters of buildings lit only in flashes by the flickering fires. The city had lost power.

A chilly voice rang out in the hall: “External electricity interrupted. Switching to NIT emergency power.”

Then Big Quantum displayed the latest national status report onscreen:

Then a map appeared again, this time covered in red patches indicating regions with high levels of danger. Other maps appeared in succession showing differently distributed patches of red that indicated areas of electrical, water, transport, and fire danger, before settling on a composite image in which the country was covered in urgently flashing red, like a sea of fire.

The children began to buckle under the immense psychological pressure. The first to break was the girl in charge of national health care. She threw down the receiver and her fragile frame crumpled to the floor, and she began bawling and crying out for her mother: “Mama! Mama!”

Zhang Weidong, in charge of light industry, also threw down his receiver and shouted, “This isn’t work for children. I can’t do it. I quit!” And then he headed toward the door.

Lü Gang blocked him at the door and pushed him back.

But it was too late. Things had already gotten out of control. Many were in tears, and some, overagitated, dropped their receivers and surged toward the door.

“I can’t do it either. I’m leaving.”

“I knew I couldn’t handle it, but they made me. I want to leave too.”

“Yeah. We’re just kids. We can’t take on this kind of responsibility.”

Lü Gang pulled out a pistol and fired two shots straight up. The bullets pierced the ceiling, and two snowflake cracks appeared in the nanomaterial. “I’m warning you,” he barked. “You can’t chicken out.”

But the shots only stopped the group for a few seconds. Zhang Weidong said, “You think we’re afraid to die? No. The stuff we’re doing now is worse than death.”

The kids behind him pushed toward the door again. Someone said, “Go ahead and shoot us.”

Someone else added, “You’d be doing us a favor.”

Lü Gang sighed and put the gun down. Zhang Weidong passed by him and pulled open the door, and the children followed him outside.

“Wait. I’ve got something to say,” Huahua shouted after them to no effect. But what he said next stopped them in their tracks, as if by magic. “The adults are coming!”

They turned around to look at him, and those that had left the hall came back inside. Huahua went on, “They’ve come back into the NIT… wait… they’re in the elevators. They’re about to get here.”

“Are you dreaming?” someone asked.

“Whether I’m dreaming is irrelevant. What’s critical right now is, what are we going to do? When they enter the hall, what are we going to do?”

The children fell silent.

“We’ll have to say to them: Welcome to the children’s world! Your instructions are appreciated! But you have to understand that this is the children’s world, and children have solemnly accepted it according to the law and the constitution. The world is ours now. We’ll have hardships and difficulties, and no end of disasters and sacrifices, but everything is our responsibility, and we will shoulder it. We are in this position not because of any skill of our own, but because of the unexpected disaster. But we have the same duty as the adults who occupied the position before us, and we will not shirk it!”

Then Xiaomeng flipped on one of the computer’s communication channels, and the sound of crying children, clearly a large group of them, filled the hall. She said, “Listen to that, all of you. By leaving your posts, you’re the greatest criminals in history!”

“Whether or not we leave doesn’t matter. We’re not capable of leading the country!” one kid said.

Gazing out at the fires burning brightly in the city down below, Huahua said, “Let’s consider that question from a different perspective. Several of us are from the same class and have studied and played together for six years. We know each other’s goals. Do you remember the graduation party just before the supernova? Lü Gang wanted to be a general, and now he’s chief of general staff. Lin Sha wanted to be a doctor, and now she’s health commissioner. Ding Feng wanted to be a diplomat, and now he’s minister of foreign affairs. Chang Yunyun wanted to be a teacher, and she’s minister of education. Someone said that the greatest joy in life is to realize your childhood aspirations, so we must be the happiest people of all time! I can’t remember how many times we’ve fantasized together about the future. We were all thrilled about the wonderful future we imagined, and afterward had to sigh, ‘Why aren’t we grown up yet?’ Now we’re building that imagined world ourselves, and you all want to run away? When that last green star was still burning, I was like you, and thought the adults would manage to survive. But my reaction was entirely different from yours. All I felt was disappointment.”

His last sentence shocked them all, and one kid said, “You’re lying! You wanted the adults to come back just like we did.”

“I’m not lying,” he said firmly.

“…But it’s just you who has that weird feeling.”

“No. I felt it too.”

The voice, not a loud one, came from a place in the hall it took a while to locate: Off in a remote corner, Specs sat cross-legged on the floor. At some point they had all forgotten about him, since he hadn’t joined them in answering the phones. Surprisingly, next to him on the ground were three empty cardboard instant-noodle containers. In a period of unprecedented emotional upheaval, a time that later historians would call the Emotional Singularity, when the child leadership team was bending under the weight of immense pressures, who had any time to eat? They had missed two or three meals already, but there Specs was, nonchalantly munching away. He sat on the floor—to make himself comfortable he had taken a sofa cushion and was using it to lean on the leg of a computer desk, leisurely, holding a cup of instant coffee in one hand (he was one of the few children who enjoyed it).

“Hey man, what do you think you’re doing there?” Huahua shouted at him.

“What’s most needed: thinking.”

“Why aren’t you answering phones?”

“With so many of you answering them, my presence won’t make a difference. If you’re so keen on it, I’d suggest pulling a few hundred kids off the street to help. They won’t be any worse than you are.”

His expression remained emotionless, as if the extraordinary events before his eyes didn’t actually exist. His attitude had an enormous calming effect on the other children. Slowly standing up and coming over to them, he said, “The adults may have made a mistake.”

They stared at him in confusion.

“The children’s world isn’t anything like what they imagined. It’s not even what we imagine.”

Huahua said, “The situation’s urgent, and you’re here sleepwalking.”

Without changing his tone, Specs said, “You’re the ones sleepwalking. Look at what you’re doing. At a time like this, the supreme leaders of the country are instructing fire brigades how to put out fires, urging nurses to feed babies, and even teaching a little girl how to eat. It’s shameful, don’t you think?” Then he settled back down against the computer desk and said no more.

Huahua and Xiaomeng looked at each other, and for a few seconds no one spoke. Then Xiaomeng said, “Specs is right.”

“Yeah. We lost our minds for a moment,” Huahua said with a sigh.

Xiaomeng said, “Turn off the walls,” and the walls quickly returned to an opaque creamy white, instantly cutting them off from the chaos of the outside world. She pointed around them and continued, “Turn off the computers and screens, too. Let’s have three minutes of peace. No talking, and no thinking. For three minutes.”

The screens went blank. The cream walls surrounding them seemed to form a chamber carved from a block of ice, and in this quiet space, the child leaders slowly began to recover their senses.

^SUSPENSION

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 2}

When the three minutes were up, a suggestion to turn the computers and screens back on was countered by Huahua: “We’re really pathetic. The situation is nothing worth panicking over. First off, I want us all to realize that the current state of the country is something we should have foreseen long ago.”

Xiaomeng nodded in agreement. “That’s right. The stability of the dry run was the unusual thing. There’s no way children could have done that themselves.”

Huahua said, “And as for handling the current state of emergency, we’re no better at handling the details than the agencies lower down. We need to focus on our own duties: working out the reasons—the deep, underlying reasons—why this happened.”

The children started talking, and before long they began voicing the same question: “It’s weird. The children’s world was running so smoothly, so why did it suddenly plunge into chaos?”

“Suspension,” said Specs, who had come out of his corner to make another cup of instant coffee.

The word meant nothing to the children.

He explained, “We came up with the concept when we were watching Huahua walk on train tracks eight months ago, when we were brought out to have a look at MSG and salt. We wondered how well he’d manage if the tracks were suspended in midair. Before the Epoch Clock ran out, the children’s world was running on tracks firmly grounded in the adult world, and we could ride smoothly along them. But after the clock ran out, the ground fell away, leaving the tracks suspended in midair over a bottomless pit.”

The children murmured their agreement with Specs’s analysis.

Huahua said, “Clearly, that last green star going out triggered the instability. When the children realized there were no adults left, their emotional support vanished all at once.”

Specs nodded. “And we should acknowledge the frightening mass effect of that emotional imbalance. Put together, a hundred minds in that state could outstrip ten thousand in isolation.”

Xiaomeng said, “Mom and Dad have gone and left us here. We all feel that. Here’s my analysis of the state of the country, and you can judge whether or not I’m right. All of the children in the country are looking for emotional support to fill in for the adults. Children in the provincial and metropolitan leadership are no different from the rest, so the midlevel leadership is paralyzed. That means that the wave of panic sweeping the country is crashing straight into us without any buffer.”

“Then our next step is to restore the capabilities of the intermediate leadership,” a child said.

Xiaomeng shook her head. “That’s impossible in the short term, since we’re already in an emergency. What we’ve got to do now is find a new emotional support for the children. That way, leadership at all levels will recover naturally.”

“And how do we do that?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when we were handling fires and other emergencies just now, our solutions were no better, and were sometimes worse, than what the children on the scene had. But they calmed down and got the situation under control as soon as they received our reply.”

“How do you know?”

Lü Gang said, “We were all answering calls, but only Xiaomeng followed up afterward. From time to time she would ask how the situation was progressing. She pays attention to details.”

“And so,” Xiaomeng went on, “what the children need from us is a new emotional support.”

“So we should make a speech on television!”

She shook her head. “Video and audio of speeches like that have been playing constantly. But they’re useless. Children find emotional support in a different way from adults. What they’re looking for right now is a hug from their departed mother and father, parental love that’s directed at them alone, not spread out among all the children in the country.”

“That’s astute,” Specs said, nodding. “Every lonely and threatened child can only find emotional support when they personally contact the central government and know that we care about them as an individual.”

“Which means that we’ve got to go back to answering phones.”

“How many calls can we take? We should bring in tons of kids and have them contact all the children in the country on behalf of the central government.”

“How many? There are three hundred million kids. We’d never finish.”

Once more they despaired of ever draining the ocean with their teacups. All they could do in the face of such an impossible task was sigh.

Then a kid asked Specs, “Professor, since you know so much, what do you think we should do?”

Specs swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “I can analyze problems, but I can’t find solutions.”

Huahua said abruptly, “Have you thought about Big Quantum?”

Everyone’s eyes brightened. They had been impressed with Big Quantum’s capabilities ever since they first arrived at NIT. It was like a giant reservoir swallowing up the muddy flood of data from Digital Domain, but what issued forth from the spillway was clear statistics and data analytics. It could use Digital Domain to monitor the entire country in enough detail to capture every work team, or even every individual. Without it, the country of children could not function at all.

“That’s right! Let Big Quantum answer the calls for us!” Now that they had this idea, the children turned the big screen back on immediately. The flaming map popped up again, its red areas larger now, shining dull red light throughout the hall.

Huahua asked, “Big Quantum, can you hear us?”

“I can. I’m waiting for your instructions,” said Big Quantum’s voice from somewhere in the hall. It was a dynamic adult male voice, one that gave the children the fantasy that adults were still present somewhere, and they trusted this supercomputer implicitly.

“You’re aware of the situation. Can you answer the calls coming in from across the country?”

“I can. My knowledge banks give me an advantage in handling power outages, fires, and other emergencies. And I can remain on the line until I am no longer needed.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that before? That wasn’t very nice!” Zhang Weidong shouted.

“You never asked,” Big Quantum said evenly.

Huahua said, “Then get to work. Help the children handle their emergencies, but more importantly, tell them that the country has survived. Let them know that we’re here with them, that we care for each and every one of them.”

“Very well.”

“Wait. I’ve got an idea,” Xiaomeng said. “Why do we have to wait for the kids to call in? We can have the computer call up everyone in the country to establish contact, and to provide necessary, individualized assistance. Can you do that, Big Quantum?”

Big Quantum paused briefly before responding: “This will require two hundred million audio processes to run simultaneously. It may result in the loss of some mirror redundancy capabilities.”

“In plain language.”

“That means I need to access a capacity previously reserved for handling emergency failures. Operational reliability will take a hit.”

Huahua said, “That doesn’t matter. The kids will at least know that we’re standing with them.”

Specs said, “I don’t agree. Who can predict what the consequences of turning over the state to a computer might be?”

Huahua said, “It’s easy to predict the consequences if we don’t.”

Specs had no answer for that.

Lin Sha asked, “What voice should we have Big Quantum use?”

“This adult voice, of course.”

“I disagree,” Huahua said. “We need to get the children to trust other children rather than relying on adults who will never come back.”

And so they had Big Quantum cycle through different children’s voices and ultimately decided on a serene boy’s voice.

Then Big Quantum awakened its slumbering power.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 3}

Another huge screen appeared on another white wall displaying another national map, but this one consisted only of glowing lines on a black background sketching out administrative regions. Big Quantum informed the children that the map contained roughly 200 million pixels, each of which represented a terminal or telephone somewhere in the country, and which would light up when a connection was made.

If the process of Big Quantum calling the entire country were represented visually, it would resemble a spectacular explosion. Digital Domain could be imagined as a gigantic network made up of countless information explosions—its servers—triggered by a complex web of fiber and microwave channels, its center dominated by the super bomb of Big Quantum (eight additional units, four of them hot backups, were distributed in other municipalities). When the calls began, the super bomb detonated, and the flood of information radiated outward, crashing into second-tier servers and detonating ten thousand of them before surging onward to trigger the even more numerous third-tier servers. The information explosion cascaded down until the final level of detonation split the wave of explosions into 200 million narrow information channels and at last to 200 million computers and telephones, covering the whole of the country in a huge digital net.

On the map on the screen, black territory lit up like stars that multiplied and clustered, until after just a few minutes the whole country was a contiguous sheet of white light.

At that moment, all the phones in the country started ringing.

In a smallish nursery in urban Beijing, Feng Jing, Yao Pingping, and the four infants under their care (including Ms. Zheng’s child) were in a large room. Ms. Zheng and their parents had gone off into the endless dark night, leaving them as orphans taking care of even smaller orphans. Many years later someone said to them, “You lost both parents overnight. It’s hard to imagine how sad you must have felt.” But in fact what weighed heaviest on the children was not sadness but loneliness and fear. Oh, and anger as well, anger at the departed adults: Had Mom and Dad really gone off without us? Humans are far more able to cope with death than with loneliness. The classroom that served as Feng Jing and Yao Pingping’s nursery seemed huge and empty now that the babies who had been crying during the day had gone silent, as if suffocated by the deathly stillness. To the two girls, the world seemed dead already, with the children in this room the only survivors left on the entire planet.

Outside was dead calm, no person or any other sign of life, as if even the earthworms and ants underground had died off. They kept the TV on and flipped through the channels one by one, but there hadn’t been any picture since the Epoch Clock ran out (they later learned the cable station had crashed). They ached to see something, anything, and even the most annoying old commercial would have moved them to tears. But the screen showed only snow, cold and desolate, like a snapshot of the world that led to blurred vision if stared at too long. And the snow persisted as they looked back at the room and out the window.

Later, when it was light, Feng Jing wanted to have a look around outside, and after a number of false starts, eventually found the courage to open the door. She and Yao Pingping, who was holding Ms. Zheng’s child, had been huddled close together, and when she got up and lost contact with their warm bodies, it was like leaping off a life raft into an endless icy ocean. She reached the door, and when her hand touched the lock she shivered: she heard faint footsteps outside. People didn’t scare her, but these footsteps weren’t from a person! She recoiled and returned to clasp Yao Pingping and the baby tightly. The footsteps grew louder, evidently headed in their direction. Whatever it was reached the door and stopped for a few seconds—God—and what did they hear next? Claws at the door! The two girls screamed at the same time and shook uncontrollably. But then the sound stopped and the footsteps retreated. Later they found out it was a starving dog.

The phone rang. Feng Jing dashed to pick it up. A boy’s voice said, “Hello. This is the central government. According to the computer record of your nursery, you’re a two-person team, Feng Jing and Yao Pingping, in charge of four infants.”

It was a heavenly sound. Tears streamed down her face, and she was too choked up to say anything. After a moment, she managed a “Yes.”

“Your area is not currently in danger. According to the most recent records, you have sufficient food and water. Please take care of the four little boys and girls in your charge. I’ll let you know what to do next. If you have any questions or emergencies, please dial 010-8864502517. No need to write that down. Your computer is on, so I’ve put the number up onscreen. If you want someone to talk to, you can call me. Don’t be afraid. The central government is with you at all times.”

Data from across the vast territory converged on Big Quantum in a reverse of the massive series of explosions that had just rocked Digital Domain. More than 200 million snippets of conversation poured into Big Quantum’s memory at light speed, where they were abstracted into long waveforms, silhouettes of mountains whose peaks receded into the distance. These waveforms floated cloud-like over the pattern database, while higher up, the eyes of the pattern-recognition routine were fixed on their mighty procession, searching the ground of the database for analogues to each snippet, abstracting every syllable and word to pour down in a torrential rain into the buffer canyon, and join up into language code segments that were then chopped and kneaded by the teeth of the semantic analyzer to extract their real meaning.

When Big Quantum digested all of the information it had collected, another process started, this one more complicated than can be described in words: An inference engine hurricane swept across the sea of the knowledge database, churning results up from the depths and covering the surface with wave foam. The bits of foam then underwent an inversion of the process, modulated into waveforms that surged out of Big Quantum’s memory and flooded into Digital Domain, at last resolving into the boy’s voice that issued from countless telephones and computer speakers.

In the server room two hundred meters underground, lights on the cylindrical mainframe blinked madly, while the cooling unit in the separate cooled server room ran at maximum, pumping huge amounts of liquid helium into the interior of the enormous computer, to keep the operating temperature of the superconducting quantum circuits as close as possible to absolute zero. Inside the computer, a typhoon of high-frequency electric pulses roared through superconducting chips, tides of zeros and ones flowing, ebbing, and flowing again.

If someone were shrunk several hundred million times and inserted into this world, his first sight would be a scene of astonishing chaos: on the chip, a raging torrent of a hundred million pieces of data flowing at the speed of light forced through a channel just a few electrons wide, converging, diverging, and crisscrossing into more torrents that turned the chip into a vast, intricate spiderweb. Data fragments flew everywhere, and addresses traversed like arrows. A drifting master control program waving a myriad of thin transparent tentacles threw thousands upon thousands of cycling program blocks into the roar of data. In a dead-calm desert of a memory unit, a tiny point suddenly exploded, sending an electrical pulse skyward in an enormous mushroom cloud; a solitary line of code passed through the data storm like lightning in search of a slightly darker-colored raindrop.

But it was also a world of astonishing order: The muddy flood of data, after passing through a fine index filter, turned at once into a lake so clear you could see the bottom; the sorting module flitted through the data blizzard like a ghost, arranging the snowflakes by shape into an endlessly long string a thousandth of a second. In this typhoon of zeros and ones, should a single water molecule be incorrect, should a zero be mistaken for a one, or a one for a zero, the entire world could collapse. A gigantic empire, but one for which the blink of an eye meant a hundred dynasties. But from the outside, it appeared as nothing more than a cylindrical object underneath a transparent cover.

The following are accounts of conversations between two ordinary children and Big Quantum:

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 4}

To the delight of the children in the hall at the top floor of the NIT, the red patches on the onscreen national map began to contract, slowly at first and then faster, as if a heavy rain were putting out a forest fire.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 5}

The map’s red patches had turned to red points that were rapidly winking out.

^{SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 6}

Although a large number of red points remained on the map, the report from Digital Domain announced that the country as a whole was no longer in danger.

At the start of the Supernova Era, human society underwent shocks and changes more drastic than any in history; periods were reckoned not in the decades or centuries of the previous era, but in days or even hours. To later historians, the first six hours of the new era were treated as a single period, known as the Suspension.

Exhausted child leaders emerged onto the balcony outside the hall, where they shivered under a crisp breeze. Fresh air entered their lungs and flowed throughout their bodies, and in the space of a few seconds it was as if their veins had been injected with new blood in place of the old. Their heartbeat and breathing grew more vigorous. It was still a while till sunrise, but the sky was already light and the city was visible in every detail. Fires and smoke had vanished; the streetlights glowed, proving that power had been restored, but few lights were on in the buildings, and the streets were empty. The city was at peace, like it had just dropped off to sleep. A bird of some kind passed swiftly through the clear sky overhead, uttering a brief call.

The eastern horizon brightened. The new world waited to welcome its first sunrise.