Ball Lightning

Base personnel gathered at the fusion point, where the tent and everything within it had vanished without a trace. Before them was a smooth mirror roughly two hundred meters in radius lying flat on the sands, formed when the silicon of the ground instantly liquefied and then solidified. Like other objects melted by ball lightning, the ground had not emitted an appreciable amount of heat when it melted, but had been transformed while in a wave state in some other space. It was now cool to the touch. Its surface was astonishingly smooth, and reflected their faces with great clarity. Try as he might, Ding Yi found nothing to indicate how the ground had solidified, or by what mechanism this part of the Gobi had been made so flat and smooth after melting. The people stood around the huge mirror in silence, looking at the beautiful reflection of the sunset in the western sky, then the stars that came out one by one in the reflection of the heavens.

Meanwhile, the macro-fusion wave of energy was propagating outward. It passed all three target circles, turning all eighty thousand tons of chips in the hundred-kilometer radius to ash, then kept going. It expanded to more than a thousand kilometers before the volume of chips it passed along the way was enough to weaken it, thereby dragging one-third of the country back to an agricultural age.

Lin Yun II

The rain had stopped at some point, and outside the window, the first light of dawn was coming.

As on that birthday night in my youth, I was no longer the person I was the day before. I had lost too much—although, for the moment, I wasn’t sure of what I had lost, only that I had been reduced to a weak, hollow shell.

“Do you want to keep listening?” Ding Yi, his eyes bloodshot, said drunkenly.

“Hmm? No, I don’t want to listen anymore.”

“It’s about Lin Yun.”

“Lin Yun? What more is there to say about her? Go on.”

* * *

On the third day after macro-fusion, Lin Yun’s father arrived at the fusion point.

By this point, most of the more than three hundred captured macro-nuclei had been released into the air. When the electromagnets that attracted them cut out, the strings danced away fairly quickly, and soon disappeared without a trace. The thirty-odd strings kept for research use were transferred to a safer storage point. Base personnel had mostly dispersed, and stillness returned to this part of the Gobi Desert that had witnessed two massive energy discharges in two separate centuries.

Only Colonel Xu and Ding Yi accompanied General Lin to the fusion point. The general looked more haggard and far older than he had at the meeting in Beijing not long before, but he maintained an indomitable spirit that made him appear unbroken.

They reached the edge of the huge mirror created by macro-fusion. The mirror’s surface was covered in a thin layer of sand, but it was still smooth and bright and reflected the clouds that swirled overhead, like a patch of sky fallen into the Gobi, or a window into another world. As General Lin and the other two stood there in silence, time in their world seemed to have stopped. In the world of the mirror, it raced breakneck forward.

“This is a unique monument,” Ding Yi said.

“Let the sand slowly bury it,” General Lin said. A few wisps of white hair that had appeared on his head wafted in the wind.

And then Lin Yun appeared.

The clunk of a security officer pulling back a rifle bolt alerted them. When they looked up, they saw Lin Yun standing on the other side of the mirror—four hundred meters away, but even at that distance, they all recognized her. She strode across the mirror toward them. General Lin and the others quickly realized it was the real Lin Yun, not an illusion, since they could hear the light crunch of her feet on the surface like the tick of a second hand, and they could see the footprints she left in the thin layer of sand. The clouds continued their tumble across the mirror as she walked atop them, at times raising a hand to brush away her short hair where the Gobi wind had blown it onto her forehead. When she had nearly reached them, they could see her uniform was trim, like new, and although her face was a little pale, her expression was clear and calm. Finally, she stood in front of her father.

“Dad,” she said softly.

“Xiao Yun, what have you done?” General Lin said. His voice wasn’t loud, and it was tinged with a deep sorrow and despair.

“Dad, you look tired. Why don’t you sit down.”