Ball Lightning

At a normal twenty-four frames per second, the whole clip lasted twenty-two minutes. At the time of discharge, the thunderball was around 1.5 meters from the target; fortunately, both the thunderball and the target were in frame. For the first ten seconds, the thunderball’s brightness increased dramatically. We waited for the wooden cube to catch fire, but to our surprise, it lost all color and turned transparent, until it appeared only as a vague outline of a cube. When the thunderball had reached maximum brightness, the cube’s outlines had totally vanished. Then the thunderball’s brightness decreased, a process lasting five seconds, during which the position formerly occupied by the cube was completely empty! Then the outlines of the transparent cube began to take shape again, and soon it regained corporeality and color, only gray white—it was now a cube of ash. At this point, the thunderball was entirely extinguished.

Dumb as wooden chickens, we took a few seconds to recover and think of replaying the video. We now went through it frame by frame, and when we reached the point where the wooden cube was a transparent outline, we paused the video.

“It’s like a cubic bubble!” Lin Yun said, pointing at the outline.

As we continued the playback, only the dimming thunderball and the empty white paper beneath it were visible on screen. We advanced the frames, staring at each of them for ages, but there really was nothing on the paper. Advancing further, the outlines returned, now surrounding a cube of ash….

A cloud of smoke covered the screen. Ding Yi had lit his pipe at some point, and was exhaling at the screen.

“You have just witnessed the dual nature of matter!” he said loudly, pointing at the screen. “In that brief moment, the bubble and the wooden cube both exhibited a wave nature. They experienced resonance, and in that resonance the two became one. The wooden cube received the energy released by the macro-electron, and then they both regained their particle nature, the burnt wooden cube coalescing into matter at its original position. This is the puzzle that has vexed you all, and the explanation for the target selectivity of the thunderball’s energy release. When the target is struck by the energy, it exhibits a wave state and is not at its original position at all. Thus the energy will naturally have no effect on the object’s surroundings.”

“Why is it only the target object, the wooden cube here, that exhibits a wave nature, and not the paper beneath it?”

“This is determined by the object’s boundary conditions, through a mechanism similar to how image processing software can automatically pick out a face from an image.”

“There’s another puzzle that now has an explanation: ball lightning’s penetrative power!” Lin Yun said excitedly. “When macro-electrons exhibit wave nature, they can naturally penetrate matter. And if they encounter slits roughly their size, they will be diffracted.”

“When ball lightning exhibits a wave state, it can cover a large range. So when a thunderball discharges, it can affect objects at a distance,” Colonel Xu said, as realization dawned.

* * *

And so the cloud of mystery surrounding ball lightning gradually dissipated. But these theory-based accomplishments did not have much direct application to the development of ball lightning weapons. As far as weapons development was concerned, a large quantity of lethal macro-electrons needed to be collected first, and theory was useless for that purpose. However, the base had captured and stored more than ten thousand macro-electrons already, and that number was swiftly growing, which gave us the liberty to use crude techniques that did not rely on any theory. We already knew that the target selected for energy discharge was determined by the nature of the macro-electron, and unrelated to the lightning that excited it. This was the basis upon which we chose our experiment.

We began conducting a large number of animal tests. The procedure was simple: take animals similar to human targets, such as rabbits, pigs, and goats, place them into the target area, and then release and excite ball lightning. If the ball lightning blast killed an animal target, then that macro-electron was selected for the weapons stockpile.

It was impossible for your spirit not to be affected by watching ball lightning turn group after group of test animals to ash every day, but Lin Yun reminded me that dying from ball lightning was far less painful for the animals than dying in a slaughterhouse. She had a point, and my heart was steadier after that. But as the tests went on, I realized that things weren’t quite so simple: the target selectivity of the ball lightning’s energy release was so precise that oftentimes a macro-electron discharge would incinerate an animal’s bones, or vaporize its blood, but not harm its muscles or organs. Animals suffering those attacks died in a horrible fashion. Fortunately, Ding Yi made a discovery that put an end to that nightmarish experiment.