Ball Lightning

“There’s only one option left,” Lin Yun said. “Subterfuge. We’ll upload our data to the SETI@home servers. It’s no hassle to hack them. Then, all of those computers that have downloaded their screen saver will do our work, and the program will send the results back to us.”

I didn’t object. I had discovered how weak moral constraints seemed when you crave something. But I rationalized: “They’ve got more than a hundred thousand computers working for them. We only need two thousand, and we’ll leave when we’re done. It won’t affect them much.”

Lin Yun’s conscience didn’t need soothing. She hooked up the broadband and quickly got to work. She worked so adeptly I had a hard time imagining how she’d learned that. Two days later, she had successfully put our data and programs onto the SETI@home server (at UC Berkeley, we found out later).

Lin Yun, I was learning, had far fewer moral constraints than I did, in that she dared to act recklessly to achieve her goals.

Just two days later, all of the two thousand screen savers had been downloaded from the SETI@home server, and the calculation results began streaming into our server. For several days, Lin Yun and I sat for hours watching the data build up, imagining in exhilaration the two thousand computers scattered across the globe working for us.

But on the eighth day, I turned on my computer and logged on to the New Concept server to discover that the updates had stopped. The last transmission was a text file, which read:

We are devoting our meager funds to the service of humanity’s greatest endeavor, but find ourselves subjected to such a brazen intrusion. You should be ashamed of yourselves!

Norton Parker

Director, SETI@home

I felt a chill in my heart like I’d plunged into an ice pit, and was too disheartened even to call Lin Yun.

She called instead. “I know. But that’s not why I called,” she said, and added, “Look at the guestbook on our old web page.”

I opened up SML@home and saw another message in English in the guestbook:

I know what you are calculating. BL. Don’t waste your life. Come and find me!

24th Street, Bldg 106, #561

Nekrasovsky Naukograd, Novosibirsk, Russia

BL. Short for ball lightning.

Siberia

“Ah, the sigh of wind in the pines!” Lin Yun said excitedly. My mind wasn’t on aesthetics, but on tightening my coat around me. Through the swirling snow and fog, the distant peaks were vague shadows.

The plane from Moscow took four hours to reach Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, adding an additional layer of strangeness atop the one I felt upon landing in Moscow the week before, except with a modicum of comfort at the thought that this place was closer to China.

After receiving the message, we instinctively felt that there had to be something behind it, but I never dreamed I would ever get the chance to go to Siberia. A week before, Lin Yun informed me that she and I would travel to Russia with a technical advisory group. China and Russia, she said, had basically completed negotiations for in-China assembly of Sukhoi Su-30 fighters, and the advisory group was accompanying low-level representatives to Russia to work out the details. I would be the group’s sole lightning expert. Finding this an odd coincidence, I asked her how she’d found this opportunity, and she said mysteriously, “I exercised a certain privilege, one I didn’t use when looking for the mainframe. This time there was no other way.”

I didn’t know what privilege she was talking about, but I didn’t ask further.

After reaching Moscow, I found I had absolutely nothing to do in the delegation’s activities, nor did Lin Yun. We visited the Sukhoi Design Bureau and a few military-industrial assembly plants.

One evening in Moscow, Lin Yun asked for leave from the group leader and went out, only returning to the hotel late at night. I visited her in her room, where she was sitting woodenly, eyes red and face stained with tears, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought of her as the type to cry. She said nothing and I asked nothing, but for the next three days in Moscow she was depressed. This episode informed me that her life was far more complicated than I imagined.

When the delegation boarded the plane to fly home, we boarded a different plane headed in basically the same direction, but for a much closer destination. Novosibirsk wasn’t all that much closer to Moscow than to Beijing.