Supernova Era

^INSPECTION

Suspension shattered all of the dry run’s fantasies of smooth operations, and destroyed the confidence the children had built up during that time. At last they understood that life was far more difficult than they imagined. Regardless, the children’s country still managed to struggle to its feet.

During the first two months of the new era, the country focused on recovering from the wounds Suspension had inflicted, and strove to keep on the rails. Work was hard going. To gain a sense of the state of the country, the three child leaders carried out two weeks of inspections throughout the country.

Children say what they mean. Wherever they went, children in all sectors spoke their minds, and the leaders were privately shocked by what they learned about social conditions. The public’s state of mind was summed up in three words: tired, bored, and disappointed.

On the first day of the inspection, a kid in Tianjin showed Huahua a copy of his daily schedule: Rise at 0600, eat a quick breakfast, humanities class at 0630, grade 5, primarily by self-study. At 0830 start work. Get off work at 1700. After dinner, at 1900, begin specialty classes in job-related knowledge and skills. Finish at 2200, add another hour of humanities. The day didn’t end until 2300.

The kid said, “I’m tired. Just tired. My greatest wish these days is to sleep all the way till doomsday.”

In Shanghai, the child leaders inspected a nursery. In the children’s world, caring for infants was work for society, so nurseries were quite large. Right as the three leaders came in the door, they were stopped by a group of nurses who insisted they spend an hour taking care of babies for themselves. Despite strong protests from their aides and bodyguards, they were essentially held hostage by the growing crowd, who soon numbered more than a thousand, and ultimately had to submit. In a large room they were each put in charge of two babies. Xiaomeng managed the best, keeping her two babies happy and content, but when the hour was up her back ached and her legs were shaky. Huahua and Specs were a wreck. Their four babies kept crying but refused milk and wouldn’t go to sleep. They just wailed like train whistles, loud enough to wake up the babies in the surrounding beds, and soon all twenty-odd babies in the room were fussing and crying. By the end of it, Huahua and Specs felt on the verge of a mental breakdown.

“Now I see how hard a time my mom had with me,” Huahua said to an accompanying reporter.

A nurse sniffed. “Your mom only had the one of you. Each of us has two or three babies to look after! And at night we have class. It’s a huge drag!”

“That’s right. We can’t do this work. Get someone else to do it,” other nurses added.

Their visit to a coal mine in Shanxi, where they watched the whole workflow of a team of child miners, left the deepest impression on the child leaders. The coal cutter broke down as soon as the shift started, and in the dank, claustrophobic darkness of the mine hundreds of meters underground, repairing the huge machine stuck in a seam of waste rock was a nightmarish task that required strength, finesse, and patience.

When they finally got it fixed, a length of conveyor belt snapped off. The miners were blackened head to toe after shoveling coal off the belt, apart from the white of their teeth whenever they opened their mouths. Replacing the belt was an exhausting ordeal, and when it was finished they were pretty much tired out. It was close to the end of the shift, so they only managed to fill one cartload, but then the cart derailed only a little ways down the tracks.

The children struggled for a while with crowbars and jacks but the cart didn’t budge, and in the end they had to remove the coal to rerail the cart, more backbreaking work in air thick with choking dust. Once the cart was righted, they reloaded the coal, which took more energy than unloading it. When they finally came off shift, they lay down on the floor of the changing room, covered in coal dust, too tired even to shower.

“That went well!” said one of the miners. “At least no one got hurt. There are six kinds of things in the mines: coal, rocks, iron, wood, bones, and flesh. Bones and flesh are the softest, and children’s most of all!”

Maintaining normal society in the children’s country required working with the strength and endurance of adults, which was impossibly hard for the vast majority of them. That wasn’t the half of it: children had to be at least eight years old to do typical work, and ten for more complicated tasks, so the working-age population was far smaller, proportionally, than it had previously been, making work far more intense for the children than the adults. Add to that their classes, and you can imagine how tired out they got. Practically all of them had experience of headaches and fatigue, and the overall health of the child population plummeted.

But the young leaders were most worried about the children’s mental state: their fascination with the novelty of their work had long since evaporated, and they had realized that the vast majority of the work was mindlessly dull. Their immature minds had a hard time conceptualizing their lives in a planned, systematic way, and they lacked the motivating presence of a family, which meant they had a hard time grasping their work’s significance.

Without a spiritual support, heavy, tedious work naturally turned into a form of torture. When the leaders inspected a power plant, a child vividly described that emotional state: “See how we have to sit at this control station all day staring at the dials and screens, and making occasional adjustments when the numbers have gone off. I feel nothing about the work anymore. It’s like I’m just a part in a huge machine. What’s the point?”

On the plane back to Beijing, the three leaders looked down at the undulating mountains, lost in thought.

Huahua said, “I don’t know how much longer this will hold up.”

Xiaomeng said, “Life is never easy. Kids are still stuck in an elementary-school mind-set. But they’ll come around eventually.”

Huahua shook his head. “I’m skeptical. The lifestyle the adults set out for us may not be workable. They were thinking about children from their adult perspective, but they didn’t understand what makes kids different.”

Xiaomeng said, “There’s no other way. Think about the MSG and salt. The price of that is hard work.” That vital lesson from the end of the Common Era had made “MSG” and “salt” bywords for economic fundamentals.

Huahua said, “Hard work doesn’t mean painful work, or work without hope or delight. Kids ought to work in their own fashion. Specs had it right. We haven’t uncovered the rules for the children’s world.”

They turned back toward Specs. He had spoken little throughout the entire inspection tour but had watched in silence. He never made public speeches, and when a major company had pressed him to speak during a visit, he had said simply, without expression, “I’m responsible for thinking, not speaking,” which became a popular quotation thereafter. Now he was his typical self, holding a cup of coffee, staring blankly at the clouds and land out the window, perhaps enjoying the scene or perhaps lost in thought.

Huahua called to him, “Hey, professor. You’ve got to give us some opinions.”

“This isn’t the real children’s world,” he said.

Huahua and Xiaomeng stared at him, baffled.

He said, “Think about how big a transformation the supernova brought to humanity? Overnight, only children were left in the world. And that brought about other huge changes. A random example: There are no families in today’s society. In the past, just that one fact would have completely altered the very fabric of society. The Suspension proved that there are so many aspects of the children’s world we’ve never even imagined. But now? It’s like nothing has fundamentally changed from the time of the adults. Society is running along the same track. Don’t you find that odd?”

Xiaomeng said, “So what do you think it ought to be like?”

Specs shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I’m just sure that it shouldn’t be this way. What we see now might really be only the product of inertia from the adults’ society. Deep down, things have got to be accumulating; they just haven’t made themselves known yet. The real children’s world may not have even started.”

Huahua asked, “Do you mean we’re headed for another Suspension?”

Specs shook his head again. “I don’t know.”

Huahua stood up. “We’ve done enough thinking the past few days. Let’s do something different. How about we go to the cockpit and watch them fly the plane?”

“You can’t just keep bothering folks!” Xiaomeng said.

But Huahua insisted. He often went up front during the course of their inspections and had grown friendly with the child pilots. At first he only asked a few questions, but then he began pestering them to let him fly the plane. The pilots staunchly refused, saying he had no license, but this time he made such a fuss that the captain let him have a go. No sooner had he taken the yoke than the Y-20 began careening like a roller coaster, and he had to return the yoke to the captain.

Huahua said, “Why can’t we just switch jobs?”

The captain smiled but shook his head. “I’m not switching. Piloting a country is far harder than flying a plane. You’re in big trouble right now.”

But in fact, at that very moment, on the ground twenty thousand meters below them, Specs’s accumulation had come to an end and was about to demonstrate its power.

^{THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY}

Historians believe that the child leaders’ use of Digital Domain and the quantum computer to put an end to the six-hour Suspension at the start of the Supernova Era was a stroke of genius, and the reams of subsequent research, including mathematical modeling, proved that if the situation had not swiftly been brought under control, the country quite likely would have experienced an irreversible collapse.

But as time moved on, that decision acquired a more profound level of significance. This was the first time humanity had used computers and the internet to unite all of society into a single group. In a way, at that moment, all of the children in the country were sitting in the same classroom. It was not solely the technological foundation provided by quantum computing and Digital Domain that made this possible, but more importantly, the comparatively simple structure of the children’s society. In the more complicated adult era, it would have been hard to gather all of society online.

Their experience of Suspension meant that the children were deeply impressed by Digital Domain and the quantum computer that had rescued them from their fear and loneliness, and their dependence on the network remained.

In the toil of the Inertia period, the network became a refuge for the children, a place to escape reality, and they spent their all-too-brief stretches of free time online. Since the country operated atop the foundation of Digital Domain, most of the children’s work and schooling also involved the network, and thus it gradually became a second reality for them, a virtual reality where they were far happier than in the real world.

A large number of virtual communities had been set up in Digital Domain, and practically every child old enough to go online was a member of one or more of them. Deep wounds left by the Epoch Clock running out and the Suspension gave the children an instinctive fear of being alone, and they relied on groups to shake off their loneliness at being so abruptly abandoned by the adults. It was the same online. The larger the group, the more easily it attracted new members, and this led to the massive expansion of a few of them through mergers and absorptions of other, smaller-scale communities. One community, “New World,” grew the fastest. By the time the three young leaders began their inspection tour, it claimed a membership of more than fifty million.

The child leaders had not paid much attention to the growth of online society. Huahua devoted his scant free time to online gaming, so he was most familiar with New World’s massively multiplayer games. One popular war game set in the Three Kingdoms period had more than ten million players on each of two opposing teams, and in the giant battles, cavalry buried the ground in a brown deluge. A naval war game had fleets of hundreds of thousands of ships, and in one air-combat game, every engagement involved millions of fighter planes that choked the air like a dust cloud.

Upon their return from the inspection tour, the shape of Digital Domain had fundamentally changed. New World, which had now grown to an astonishing size, around 200 million members, was the only community left. That is, practically every child in the country old enough to go online was a member.

Specs took this development very seriously. “This means we have a virtual country overlaid on top of the real one. It’s extraordinary. We should set up a committee specifically to track the online country and begin to engage it.”

But things developed far faster than they anticipated, and by the third day after their return, Big Quantum said to them, “New World’s membership want a dialogue with the country’s three top leaders.”

Huahua asked, “Which members?”

“All of them.”

“Aren’t there nearly two hundred million of them? What kind of dialogue? Chat room? BBS? Email?”

“Those primitive methods are unworkable when you’re talking about so many people, but an entirely new form of dialogue, the assembly, has been developed in Digital Domain.”

“An assembly? Sure, I can make a speech to two hundred million people, but how can they talk to me? Through representatives?”

“No. The assembly will allow all two hundred million people to speak to you.”

Huahua burst out laughing. “That’s going to be noisy.”

Specs said, “It’s probably not that straightforward.” Then he asked Big Quantum, “Is there one of these assembly conversations every day?”

“That’s right. Today, the members are discussing having a conversation with you. The assembly begins at twenty-three thirty.”

“Why so late?”

“Most children don’t get off work or school till then, so that’s when they have time to go online.”

“Let’s take a look first as ordinary guests,” Specs suggested to Huahua and Xiaomeng. They agreed, and called over the engineer in charge of Digital Domain, a boy named Pan Yu who had won gold at the Information Olympics back in the adult era and now was the leading domestic authority on computers. They explained their goal, and he sent someone to fetch four virtual reality helmets.

Specs lowered his eyebrows. “I’ll get dizzy as soon as I put it on.”

Pan Yu said, “New World has two modes: image and VR. It only looks real in VR mode.”

In the hall at the top of the NIT, the leadership was working late, some of them reviewing documents, some making phone calls, and some speaking with ministry heads who had come to make work reports, but they would all get off at 2300. By 2320, only the top three and Pan Yu were left. They put on their VR helmets, which were already plugged in.

At once the four children felt like they were suspended above a blue plaza, the Windows desktop, as it turned out, only three-dimensional, with its icons standing upright like statues. The mouse pointer flew across the plaza and clicked something, and then a window containing a crowd of animated little cartoon people arranged in orderly ranks rose up.

They heard Pan Yu’s voice: “You can design your own appearance in the community, but that’s a hassle so we’ll just use premade ones.”

And so they each selected a cartoon-character avatar, and were amused to see their three companions’ avatars floating beside them.

Pan Yu said, “The assembly is about to begin. We’ll go right there rather than try out anything else in the community.”

In the blink of an eye, they were in New World’s assembly space. Their first impression was that it was enormous and empty. Above them was a pure blue sky extending farther than they could see, and below them was flat, endless desert. The line NEW WORLD ASSEMBLY was written in the sky in glowing letters that shone down on the vast desert like a row of suns. There was nothing else in the world.

“Where is everyone? Why is it empty?” Huahua asked. Indeed, apart from his three companions floating next to him, there was only sand and sky.

Pan Yu’s cartoon avatar opened its big eyes even wider in surprise. “What, you can’t see anyone?”

The three leaders looked about them, but could see no one.

Pan Yu seemed to realize something, and said, “Let’s go down.” He moved the mouse, and the four of them began descending toward the desert. Before long, the sand below them resolved into intricate structures, and then the three of them realized that every grain was a cartoon character. It impressed upon them the sheer scale of the number: the vast desert consisted of 200 million cartoon characters.

Most of the country’s children were here.

They continued to descend to the ocean of people and soon were in their midst, surrounded on all sides by cartoons. There seemed to be something in the air, black dots that had just appeared in the sky and were falling to earth. Two landed in their vicinity, two more cartoons, and they realized that children were still entering the area.

“Why are you still guests?” asked a cartoon next to them. He had no feet, but was supported by a flashing wheel. When he extended his long, thin arms, a head appeared on each palm, the same as the head on his neck. He juggled the three heads, replacing the one on his neck again and again. “Hurry up and log in as registered members. The national leaders are coming to talk to us, and as guests your words won’t be tabulated.” How he distinguished between guests and members they weren’t able to tell.

“That’s right,” said another nearby cartoon with a sniff. “Who’d have thought there would still be unregistered guests.”

“And too lazy to make a proper avatar. Selecting a ready-made—it’s indecent,” said another.

But they weren’t much more decent themselves. One of them may have been too lazy to make a proper body, and had connected two long legs directly to a head. It had no arms, and a pair of wings sprouted from its ears. The other was nothing but a head, a big egg floating half a meter above the ground, with a tiny, fast-spinning rotor poking out of its forehead.

Then another line of glowing red text appeared in the sky: ATTENDANCE HAS REACHED 194,783,453. THE ASSEMBLY IS ABOUT TO BEGIN.

The rightmost digits of the 190 million number continued to turn over.

Then a voice sounded in the air, the familiar voice of Big Quantum. “I’ve conveyed your request to the national leadership.”

Pan Yu said to the three leaders, “Notice how Big Quantum refers to a single request?”

“When will they be here?” said a child’s voice. Boy or girl it was hard to tell, but it was loud and carried a long echo. At the same time, a line of red text appeared in the air: VIRTUAL CITIZEN 1: 98.276%.

“Who’s that speaking?” Huahua asked Pan Yu.

“That’s Virtual Citizen 1.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s not a ‘who.’ It’s a person made up of nearly two hundred million children.”

“I noticed just now that everyone around us was moving their lips as if they were speaking, but I couldn’t hear anything.”

“That’s right. They were all speaking, but only Big Quantum heard the nearly two hundred million messages. It summarized them into the one statement you just heard.”

“That’s what you mean by the assembly format?”

“Right. This format allows an individual to carry on a simultaneous conversation with more than a hundred million conversation partners. Right now, two hundred million children have turned into just one, so Big Quantum referred to ‘your request’ and not ‘your requests.’ It’s a highly complicated process that requires advanced intelligence and fast processing speed. The short, simple statement you just heard would, if printed out, fill enough paper to circle the globe. Only a quantum computer can handle it.”

Then Big Quantum answered Virtual Citizen 1: “They said they need to think it over before making a decision.”

Specs cut in, “Just one problem. What if the two hundred million children have a difference of opinion that can’t be summarized into one statement?”

Pan Yu put a finger to his lips. “Shhh. You’ll see what happens very soon.”

Another voice sounded, pitched differently from the previous one so it sounded like someone else was speaking. “They’ll definitely come.” And the text in midair read, VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: 68.115%.

Pan Yu whispered an explanation: “The percentage indicates the proportion of people who hold that opinion.”

A voice at a different pitch said, “That’s not certain. They may not come.” The text in midair read, VIRTUAL CITIZEN 3: 24.437%.

“Can they not? They’ve got to come! They’re the leaders of the country, and they’ve got to talk to the country’s children.” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 4: 11.536%)

“What do we do if they don’t?” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 3: 23.771%)

“We do it on our own.” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 5: 83.579%)

“I told you, they’re definitely going to come.” (VIRTUAL CITIZEN 2: 70.014%)

Pan Yu said, “You see, if there’s disagreement, the virtual citizen will split into two or more parts. How many is determined by the chosen level of precision. At the most precise, all messages will be listed out. That’s impossible, of course. What’s important is that each virtual citizen is usually more or less a defined group with its own particular character traits. They’ll continue to appear, just like an individual. VC 2 and VC 3, for example, returned just now.”

After watching for a while, Huahua said to Pan Yu, “Let’s leave.”

“Press the exit button on your clothes.” The button was on the cartoon’s torso, and pressing it returned them instantly to the Windows space.

“That was amazing!” Huahua exclaimed after removing his helmet.

Xiaomeng said, “They don’t need any leaders at all in that network country. They accomplish everything through discussions among two hundred million kids.”

Specs said thoughtfully, “This will have a profound effect on the real world, too. We paid attention too late.”

Xiaomeng asked, “Then should we speak with them?”

Specs said, “We’ve really got to be careful. This is like nothing else in history. No one knows what might happen. We should think about it longer and more carefully before acting.”

“There’s no time. It’s like I said: If we don’t go, then something’s definitely going to happen,” Huahua said.

With Specs and Xiaomeng in agreement, they spent the night in a conference studying the issue, and discovered that quite a few members of the leadership team had been to the New World Assembly and were familiar with the situation. They mostly felt that it was a positive thing. One kid said, “We’re all doing things that are beyond our own abilities. If the country really can be run like this, it’ll free us up.”

Everyone agreed that the central government, as represented by the three top leaders, would attend the New World Assembly and talk to the 200 million children.

They entered the New World Assembly area a second time, this time using their real-world appearances for avatars. Big Quantum erected a tall podium for them in the center of the space. They came early to prepare, and to get used to the environment, and as the country’s 200 million children logged in and entered, the dense crowd of cartoon characters began to blot out the sky like a layer of clouds. They watched as the avatars fell from the sky like a storm. When the endless sea of people finally calmed, 200 million pairs of eyes were fixed on the platform.

“I feel like I’m going to melt,” Xiaomeng whispered.

Huahua, on the other hand, drank it in. “It’s different for me. For the first time I’ve found what leading a country feels like! How about you, professor?”

Specs said without emotion, “Don’t bug me. I’m thinking.”

When the assembly began, Virtual Citizen 1 led off. According to the figures showing in the sky, he represented a 97.458 percent share.

“We’re extremely disappointed in this new world. The adults left, leaving us kids behind, so it should be a fun world. But it’s not fun at all. It’s not even as fun as the world was when the adults were around.”

Xiaomeng said, “The adults used to give us food and clothing, so of course we had time to play and take it easy. But not now. We’ve got to work, or else we’ll starve to death. We can’t forget the MSG and salt.”

Virtual Citizen 2 (63.442%): “Xiaomeng, don’t let that trainload of MSG and ten trainloads of salt scare you. That was for one-point-three billion people in the adults’ time. We don’t eat that much.”

Virtual Citizen 3 (43.117%): “Why does Xiaomeng sound so much like an adult? Boring!”

Virtual Citizen 1 (92.571%): “Regardless, we don’t like this world now.”

Huahua asked, “So what kind of world do you want?”

Later historians studying the virtual citizens’ answers to this question looked through the raw records of individual member responses kept by the quantum computer; although only a small proportion were retained, it still amounted to forty gigabytes, or around twenty billion Chinese characters. If printed out as a trade-paperback-size volume, it would be eight hundred meters thick. Below are some representative responses:

Big Quantum distilled these 200 million messages into one sentence that was uttered by Virtual Citizen 1, representing 96.314 percent of the members in attendance:

“We want a world of fun!”

Xiaomeng said, “The adults have drawn up a detailed five-year plan for the country, and we have to follow it.”

Virtual Citizen 1: “We think the adults’ five-year plan is boring. We’ve drawn up our own five-year plan.”

Huahua asked, “Can you give us a look?”

Virtual Citizen 1: “That’s the point of this assembly. We’ve built a virtual country to show off our five-year plan. Have Big Quantum give you a tour. You’re sure to love it!”

Huahua said to the sky, “Great. Big Quantum, show us around!”

^{A COUNTRY OF FUN}

No sooner had he uttered those words than the blue sky and the crowd vanished before their eyes, leaving the three children hanging in an endless black void. When their eyes adjusted, they saw stars appear in the remote distance, and then a blue orb take shape in space. It hung like a glowing crystal ball in the dark ocean of the infinite cosmos, and spread across its surface a swirl of snow-white clouds. It looked so fragile, liable to shatter at the slightest touch and spill out its blue blood into the cold isolation of space. As the blue crystal ball drew closer, they realized how huge it was, and eventually the gigantic blue planet filled all the sky, and the children could see clearly the borders between oceans and continents. Now all of Asia was visible at once, and a twisting red line appeared on the brown land, a closed loop demarcating the borders and coastline of that ancient country in the east. Its territory drew nearer, and they could begin to make out the ripples of mountain ranges and veinlike rivers. Then Big Quantum spoke: “We’re now in orbit at a height of more than twenty thousand kilometers.”

Earth slowly rotated beneath their feet, and they seemed to be flying toward something. Xiaomeng suddenly shouted, “Look! It’s like there’s a thread up ahead.”

The thread ran from space to the land below, its top half clearly visible against the blackness behind it, almost like a long strand of spider silk joining the Earth to a point in space. Its lower half merged in with the colors of the land and was hard to make out, but with effort they could see that it terminated in the vicinity of Beijing. The children were flying toward the spider silk, and as they got closer they could see that it was as shiny as a silken thread. Sections of it reflected the bright sunlight at times, and its far end flickered like a lamp. It gained width as they drew nearer, and then they could make out details of its structure. Now they knew what the long spider silk actually was: it wasn’t hanging down from space, but was rising from the surface. They could hardly believe their eyes.

“Wow!” Huahua exclaimed. “It’s a building!”

Indeed it was a skyscraper, clad in fully reflective mirrors, towering into space.

The voice of Virtual Citizen 1 sounded in the children’s ears: “All children in the country call this home. This building is twenty-five thousand kilometers high and has three million floors. Each floor is home to an average of one hundred children.”

“You mean every child in the country lives in this one building?” Huahua asked in surprise. But when they landed on the roof, they realized it was not at all impossible. Their impression of the spider silk as narrow was due to their distance and its ratio of height to width, but the rooftop might have been large enough to hold the Workers’ Stadium twice over. The giant flashing signal light in the center, as tall as an ordinary twenty-story building, rotated and shone so brightly they couldn’t look at it head-on; perhaps it was a warning light for passing spacecraft.

They crossed to the other side of the roof, where there was an entrance to the top floor—floor 3 million—of the supertower. This floor, they noticed at once, was one big grassy lawn, with a fountain smack in the center reflecting a warm artificial light. Scattered about the lawn were a few dozen finely wrought cabins of the sort only found in fairy tales, the dwellings of this floor’s hundred children. Inside one of them they saw a typical kid’s room, toys of all kinds strewn about the bed and table. In another, also clearly a kid’s room, the decoration was entirely different, and they found that every room they went into was unique and personalized.

The floor below was another grassy meadow, but in place of the fountain there was a clear brook, with the children’s homes distributed along its banks. They went into a few of them, and as before each one was different.

The scene changed dramatically on the next floor, a serene snowscape that shone faintly blue in the eternal twilight, and snowflakes drifted downward in an uninterrupted stream, landing in thick white blankets on the roofs of the children’s houses. There were snowmen in front of some of them. Evidently the children on this floor loved the winter.

One floor down was a forest with houses built in clearings. A thin morning fog was pierced by shafts of light from the sun rising beyond the trees. Birdcalls rang out at times from within the forest.

They descended more than twenty floors, each of them its own unique world. In one, it never stopped raining; another was a desert of golden sand; one was even a miniature ocean, with children living in boats drifting about on the surface.

“How did you manage to make all these?” Specs asked.

Big Quantum replied, “This was produced using one of the virtual country’s gaming programs, an old city simulator. The virtual country uses plug-ins provided by a component library to build the virtual world, and it can create virtual images on its own.”

They looked carefully about them, at every blade of grass and every pebble, all of them true to life. “An immense amount of work went into this building,” Huahua exclaimed.

Virtual Citizen 1 replied, “Of course. More than eighty million children had a hand in its construction, and more than a hundred million designed their own homes.”

Led by Big Quantum, the children entered a streamlined, transparent elevator that protruded from the side of the building. From within they could see the glittering stars and the Earth below.

Xiaomeng said, “You’re not really planning on building a building like this in the real world, are you?”

Virtual Citizen 1 said loudly, “Of course we are. Why else would we have drafted these plans? Everything you see down there on the ground we want built for real!”

Huahua said, “Sucks if you have to go to the roof, and have to take a twenty-five-thousand-kilometer elevator ride.”

“That’s no problem. All the elevators in this building are little rockets, and are faster than the satellite boosters of the adults’ era. Take a look!”

Just then an elevator car spurting flames rocketed past them at astonishing speed, and just as it was about to reach the roof, the flames at the bottom of the streamlined car vanished, and reappeared out of the top to slow it down. Virtual Citizen 1 explained, “These elevators can reach speeds of sixty thousand kph, making the journey up from the ground in a little over twenty minutes.”

Specs snorted. “Judging from the deceleration we just saw, I’m afraid the passengers were smashed to a pulp.”

Virtual Citizen 1 made no reply, evidently caring not a whit for such a minor problem. Then the top of their car spurted flame and they began descending with terrifying speed. They felt the speed for the first few seconds, but then as the wall of the building blurred into one smooth continuous track, they seemed almost motionless, apart from the floor indicator that ticked backward rapidly in the thousands place. There was no sense of downward acceleration; rather, they stood firmly on the floor of the elevator, as if the VR program had overlooked this particular level of reality. But one thing it did get right: Despite being in space, they were not weightless, since weightlessness in orbiting objects is due to their motion rather than their height; even at this height, Earth’s gravitational attraction remained strong.

Huahua said, “Set aside the building’s feasibility for the moment. What’s the point of it? Why do all kids in the country have to live in one building?”

Virtual Citizen 1 said, “To leave all the other places for playing in!”

Many years later, historians found profound significance in the notion of the supertower, tracing it to the loneliness common to every child’s heart when the Epoch Clock ran out.

“The country is enormous. That’s not enough for you to play in?” Xiaomeng asked.

“As you’ll find out shortly, it’s not!”

“Still, the building’s actually pretty cool,” Huahua said with feeling.

“It’s even cooler than this down there!”

The rocket elevator continued to plummet. Eventually the arc of the Earth’s edge wasn’t so pronounced, and the ground below them became more detailed.

Xiaomeng looked from the top of the building to the bottom, both ends too far to see, and exclaimed, “The height of the building is twice the diameter of the Earth!”

Specs nodded. “It’s like a long strand of Earth hair.”

Huahua said, “And think about how it’ll pass from the dark side to the sunward side, and how the sun will light up its enormous height. What a magnificent sight!”

The elevator’s rockets switched from top to bottom, and they began to decelerate. Soon they could make out the separations between building floors, and just a few seconds later the elevator came to a halt, the VR program once again ignoring the fact that the force of such a quick deceleration would crush the elevator’s passengers into meat paste. The children could see that the elevator was still in space, but Virtual Citizen 1 said, “Our present position is on the two hundred and forty thousandth floor of the building, at a height of two thousand kilometers. We won’t take the elevator the rest of the way but will use a different method of descent. Look down, what do you see?”

They looked out from the elevator and saw a long line rising from the Earth, its terminus nearly invisible because it was so thin. As it rose, it traced two large loops and a range of curves and bends, as if some naughty child had scribbled across a photograph of the Earth. The line extended toward the building and joined it just below their elevator. Close up they could see it was a narrow train track.

Virtual Citizen 1 asked, “Can you guess what that is?”

Huahua said, “It looks like a giant picked up one end of the railroad from Beijing to Shanghai and attached it here.”

Virtual Citizen 1 laughed. “What a description! You must be a writer. But this track is much longer than that. It’s more than four thousand kilometers long. It’s a roller coaster we’re planning to build.”

A roller coaster? The children looked in amazement at the long track and its two huge loops glittering attractively in the sunlight.

“You mean it goes all the way to the ground?”

“That’s right. We’re going to take it down.”

As he spoke, a small boat-shaped vehicle with five two-person seats like the roller coasters they had seen in amusement parks emerged on rails from the building and stopped under the elevator. A hatch opened in the elevator floor right over the car (at this point the VR program ignored the vacuum of space).

As soon as the three of them were in the car, it started sliding smoothly along the rails. It moved slowly at first, but once it was out of the building’s shadow and into the bright sunlight, it reached the first big drop and catapulted them forward. Since their VR helmets only provided visual sensations and they weren’t able to actually feel the acceleration, they missed out on experiencing the first feeling of weightless during their time in space. Supergravity replaced no gravity as the roller coaster entered the first loop, and they saw the stars and the Earth revolve around them. When they leveled out again, Xiaomeng looked back from the rear seat. The loop was well behind them already, and the supertower was now just a thin thread of spider silk that seemed to be dangling from the glittering galaxy itself. The second loop was even bigger than the first one but took the same amount of time to complete; clearly, they were still speeding up. Then came a long descent, not monotonic, of course, since the roller coaster traced a series of troughs and crests, some of them quite lofty. The coaster twisted into a spiral at the end of that stretch, and when the children entered it, they felt like they were at the center of the universe with the Earth and stars spinning endless circles around them.

Starting off level, the spiral eased downward until it was almost perpendicular, making the Earth into a huge record spinning round and round in front of them. Out the spiral’s other end, the tracks stayed vertical, dropping them straight at the Earth and creating another situation where they ought to feel weightless. Ahead of them the tracks twisted into a tangle perhaps a hundred kilometers in diameter, and it felt like they were threading that labyrinth forever, nearing the exit multiple times only to be dragged back on a path toward the entrance again. They weren’t at the center of the universe now; their cosmos was a box in the hands of a fidgety child who turned it over and over in random directions.

The roller coaster escaped the maze at last and entered a straight-line descent, picking up speed again. This stretch lasted a long while; up ahead the tracks blurred into a smooth belt which made it hard to judge their speed. The color above them had turned from black to a light purple that gradually became deep blue; the stars had grown fuzzy, and there was little curvature to the horizon.

Sitting in front, Huahua saw a flame at the tip of their streamlined car that quickly blossomed until it enveloped the entire car; the program clearly had not ignored atmospheric friction. After the flames disappeared, the children found they were above a sea of clouds. The sky above them was a clear blue, shining with sunlight that, in contrast to the stark black-and-white illumination of outer space, seemed to permeate every last wrinkle in their clothes. On the tracks up ahead was another series of loops, climbs, and dips, and the presence of clear reference objects meant that their ride was far more heart-stoppingly crazy than back in space.

During the moments when the roller coaster slid smoothly, the children could see gigantic frames towering up from the ground in the distance, all of them at least ten thousand meters tall, piercing the clouds. Some of them formed right triangles with the ground, while others were shaped like giant doors, as if they were enormous upright compasses and set squares. Huahua asked what they were, and Virtual Citizen 1 replied, “Slides and swings. For little kids to play on.”

Huahua couldn’t imagine what kind of little kid could slide down a ten-thousand-meter slide, much less how they could get such a gigantic swing swinging.

The roller coaster’s final segment was an easy slope that descended toward what the children thought was a grassy plain covered in colorful flowers, but when they finally landed, they realized the plain was actually formed from a huge number of multicolored rubber balls, blown-up versions of the kind you’d find in a ball pit, only here, stretching as far as the eye could see, it had to be called a ball ocean. They slid quite a long ways through this ball ocean before stopping, kicking up balls around them that then clattered back down again in a kaleidoscope of rain. They couldn’t think of who would dive into such a weird ocean, or how they’d get out afterward; they knew from previous experiences of “swimming” in ball pits as younger kids that movement wasn’t easy. Then two giant wheels popped out of the roller coaster, one on each side, churning the balls into motion with a strange gurgling sound. The virtual citizen informed them that the ocean of balls covered nearly a thousand square kilometers.

“It’ll use up all of the rubber in the country. How will we make car tires after that?” Xiaomeng asked, but the virtual citizen didn’t answer, clearly uninterested.

After the roller coaster emerged from the ball ocean, the children were able to observe the giant slide from up close. It was a water slide. Water came rushing down the wide slide from a top that was farther than they could see, as if a river were pouring down from the sky. Imagining himself sliding down that river for ten thousand meters, Huahua felt his entire body tremble with anticipation, and he asked if he could have a ride.

“You’re only out for fun, Huahua. We’ve got serious things to do,” Xiaomeng said as she held him back.

The virtual citizen added, “That’s right. It’s another forty kilometers from here to the lift, and we shouldn’t waste that time. Besides, what’s the point of doing it in a virtual, computer-hosted form? Wait until we’ve built the real thing—that’ll be a thrill!”

Leaving the super water slide, the children saw a huge wide platform, big enough to hold several hundred people, hanging from thick steel cables dropped from above. At first they thought it was an athletic field, but it was only when the virtual citizen informed them that it was the seat of the gigantic swing that they noticed the poles towering skyward a thousand meters away on either side. And then they discovered how the swing would be set in motion: the platform had rocket engines attached to its underside.

Next they visited the bumper car arena. Each car was the size of one of the dump trucks from the adults’ time, each wheel more than two meters tall. The inflatable bumpers on all sides turned them into huge monsters. Thousands upon thousands of them colliding and chasing after each other on a vast plain would kick up enough dust to blot out the sky. It would certainly take guts and a sacrificial spirit to play that game.

The virtual citizen explained, “This is the first development zone for the New Five-Year Plan, and focuses on the construction of huge carnival rides. You still haven’t seen the giant Ferris wheel and Challenger UFO; they’re more than a hundred kilometers away, but on a good day you could see them. Now let’s go to Zone Two, the gaming zone.”

No sooner had he spoken than their environment changed, and they found themselves in a huge city built of tall, oddly shaped buildings, some of them like enormous castles, others wrapped in tangles of pipes or covered in holes like Swiss cheese.

“These are all video game arcades?” Huahua asked.

“No. Each of them is a gaming console.”

“They’re enormous! Then… where are the screens?”

“The idea behind these consoles is new. To play, you’ve got to go inside, where the setting is all holographic or made of actual devices. Each game begins from the console’s bottom floor, and you work your way up until the conclusion at the top floor. You don’t play with a mouse or joystick like you used to, but you’re actually part of the game world and are running around and fighting all the time. Like that castle console: it’s a royal palace, and you’ve got to defeat tons of enemies before you become king. The one with all the holes is a monsters’ den, and you use your laser sword to kill monsters like poison dragons and rescue the princess. Of course, these games are for the little kids. Since they’re so small, they can only run small-scale games.”

“What? These are only small-scale games? How big are the big ones?”

“Large-scale machines don’t have a fixed form. Most of them take up an entire zone.”

The environment changed again, and they found themselves on a broad plain where in the distance formations of ancient foot soldiers were advancing, helmets glittering in the sunlight, their raised spears like a densely planted wheat field. “You see? This is a game of ancient warfare. The players command a robot army ten thousand strong and pit it against another one. There’s also a Western game where you ride a horse into the wilderness armed with your revolver and have all sorts of adventures.”

“How much land does Zone Two cover?”

“A million square kilometers, more or less, would be enough to build all the consoles. Now I’ll show you Zone Three: the zoo.”

Their environment switched to the boundary between a forest and a plain. Hordes of animals cavorted on the plain and ran in and out of the forest. “These megazoos are true animal kingdoms. They have no cages, and all the animals can move freely through the natural environment. When you go into these zoos, you’re entering the mountains and wilderness where you may come across all sorts of animals. You’ll wear powered protective clothing, so no wild beast will be able to hurt you. You’ll travel through the forest atop an elephant, or take a photo with a Bengal tiger. The biggest zoo is nearly three hundred thousand square kilometers in area, even bigger than the UK. That one doesn’t have any roads; helicopters are the only form of transportation available, and when you go in, you’ll feel like you’re entering a primeval world right at the dawn of humanity. We’ll also build three animal cities with streets and buildings just like human ones, but they’ll be filled with cute puppies and kittens and other animals kids can be friends with. You can go in and play with them, and you can take the ones you like back with you…. This zone covers an area of nearly one million square kilometers.”

“Does it need to be that big?”

“What kind of a question is that? Animals need freedom of migration. Birds need to fly freely. Can they do that without enough space? Next I’ll show you Zone Four, the adventure zone.”

Their environment changed rapidly, from the foot of a steep snow-covered mountain to an endless savannah to a deep mountain gorge to the banks of a raging river…

When they stopped at last beneath a huge waterfall, Huahua remarked, “There doesn’t seem to be anything built in these places.”

“That’s right. All of the old cities will be torn down, and the zone will be restored to its pristine state.”

“What for?”

“Adventuring!”

“Can’t you adventure in some of the Zone Two games?”

“That’s totally different! In games, the program is preset. Everything is predictable. It’s totally different here. You don’t know what you’ll find. That’s what makes it exciting. Besides, this is far bigger than any game in Zone Two.”

“How large is Zone Four?”

“The entire northwest!”

“That’s excessive.”

“The hell it is. It’s got to be big. Where’s the adventure if the edge is just a few steps away?”

“Well, if you do it that way, our country doesn’t have nearly enough territory.”

“And that’s why Zone Five only contains one small project.”

“There’s a Zone Five?”

“Right. Candytown.”

The city they now found themselves in was an exquisite miniature in comparison to the gigantic scale of the previous zones. The buildings were short, and its most striking characteristic was that it was colored in vibrant monochromes, as if it were built from big wooden blocks. “This is Candytown. All the buildings are built from candy. The brown stadium you’re looking at is made entirely of chocolate. That translucent building over there is made of rock sugar.”

“Can you eat it?”

“Of course!”

Huahua went up to the stadium and clicked on a brown pillar beside the door; a chunk came right off. Xiaomeng went over to a small, dainty building and lightly touched a window; the glass shattered, and she picked up a fragment imagining how sweet the thin bit of sugar crystal would taste on her tongue.

Specs broke his long silence to snort, “This is a violation not only of the laws of economics but of science as well. Is candy strong enough to build with?”

The virtual citizen replied, “That’s the reason there are no tall buildings in Candytown. And they’ve got steel skeletons for strength.”

“Won’t they melt in the heat?”

“Excellent point.” Their environment changed again, but not by much. Now they were on the outskirts of Candytown, at one of the small hills that ringed it. The brilliant colors and soft lines of the hills made them seem plucked from a watercolor painting.

The virtual citizen said, “It’s a shame you can’t smell them, but they’re delicious. These are the Ice Cream Hills.”

When they looked closer, they saw rivulets of cream running all over the hills, some of them tumbling in creamy waterfalls. The streams joined into a river flowing down the valley, an undulating flow of milk-colored soft ripples and waves that passed without sound. “Climate conditions were somewhat ignored, so the ice cream is melting. Candytown might have to be constructed someplace colder.”

Later Supernova Era historians devoted considerable research to the Candytown concept, first of all to the puzzle of why, when children of the Common Era didn’t care much for candy, were they so captivated by it in the new world of their imagination? Maybe candy was for children a representation of something adults could never understand, a symbol of beauty.

From their analysis of Big Quantum’s original records, historians learned that the architects of the New Five-Year Plan and the virtual country were mainly children between the ages of five and eleven, bolstered by younger children, and by sheer force of numbers they held an unbeatable advantage under the statistical and inductive principles of the New World Assembly. Disappointment with the real world led a significant proportion of older children to join them, and in the frenzy that gradually developed, only a minority of children maintained any sense of rationality.

^DEBATE

Their environment changed a final time, returning the three young leaders to the platform in the New World Assembly at the center of a sea of people. Looking down, they saw not just a sea of eyes but a sea of mouths, two hundred million mouths constantly in motion speaking words that only Big Quantum could hear and remember.

Virtual Citizen 1 (91.417%) asked, “What do you think of the New Five-Year Plan? Can you guide us to make it real?”

Huahua said, “Are you the only one here? There’s no Virtual Citizen 2?”

Virtual Citizen 1 said, “VC 2 has been around a few times, but is really annoying. I told them to piss off. Hey, VC 2, come out and speak if you’ve got any guts!”

And so the country launched into a huge debate, the biggest ever seen in human history, in which direct participants numbered more than 200 million. Across the vast territory of the country, children could be found on the phone or at their computers shouting or typing away, each of them vying to contribute their 1/200,000,000th part toward the world of their dreams. The smaller of the two competing groups of children had a larger average age, but tragically, Big Quantum’s summarized statements did not (or could not) take age into account, and so the larger group held an absolute advantage. And thus, with a huge number of younger children taking part in the debate to determine the fate of the country, the least rational and most capricious formed a highly dangerous social force.

The timid voice of Virtual Citizen 2 (8.792%) ventured, “Don’t listen to them, Huahua, Specs, and Xiaomeng. That’s just the jeering of a group of ignorant babies who only care about playing. I recommend that the assembly’s rules for tabulation and summarization should be altered to incorporate an age-based weighting.”

A commotion shook the sea of people down below. The cartoon avatars shouted and whirled about, as if a stiff wind had churned up waves on the ocean.

Xiaomeng said, “And how does this fun world of yours produce food? Without food, we’ll all starve to death.”

Xiaomeng shouted. “My friends, the adults put a lot of work into getting enough to eat.”

Huahua said, “Let’s take a giant step back. Even if we tackle your five-year plan, can you all handle such a strenuous task?”

Huahua said, “You might have to work twenty-hour days.”

Huahua said, “If half of you were Ph.D.s, it might have a chance of working.”

Huahua said, “Nuts. You’re tired enough as it is.”

Human group effects are powerful, as can be seen from a crowd of soccer spectators numbering in the tens of thousands; when two hundred million people (and children at that) were all in one place, the effect was more powerful than sociologists and psychologists of the past could have imagined. Individual minds ceased to exist, subsumed into the flood of the group. Years later, many of the participants at that New World Assembly recalled how they abandoned all control of themselves; logic and reason lost all meaning for millions of young children. Now they didn’t want to listen, they didn’t want to act, they just wanted, and wanted, and wanted, wanted that dreamworld, that country of fun.

The three leaders exchanged glances. Xiaomeng said, “My friends, you’ve lost your senses. Go home and think it over again.”

Then new virtual citizens began splitting off.

The tumult in the ocean settled down, and then turned into a listless desert.

Xiaomeng said, “My friends, it’s late. Let’s all go to sleep. There’s still work tomorrow.”

The already feeble voice gradually trailed off, and the children began to ascend out of the ocean and exit the session in a reversal of the rain of cartoon avatars they had seen at the start, as if a puddle were evaporating in the sun. Soon it was gone entirely, and the ground popped up a line of text: NEW WORLD ASSEMBLY #214 CONCLUDED.

After taking off their helmets, the three young leaders remained silent for a long while.

This brought the Supernova Era to the end of its second period, a three-month stretch, longer than the Suspension, that again took its name from Specs’s casual description. “Inertia” was what later historians later dubbed it.

After three months coasting on the inertia of the adults’ time, the children’s world at last showed its true face.