Ball Lightning

“Something must have been overlooked and left behind an observer. Maybe one of the cameras wasn’t turned off. Or, more likely, some soldier snuck a peek, to see what a macro-electron cloud looks like,” Ding Yi said decisively.

And so before the next test, the two cameras were dismantled, and all of the personnel on the target range were removed to a shielded basement cut off from the outside world. With the range empty, the already-aimed thunderball guns were switched to automatic fire mode.

But every one of the fifteen shots of ball lightning struck the target.

I was pleased that something had stumped Ding Yi, even if it was only a momentary difficulty. Looking over the results, he did seem worried, but his worry was different from what I imagined, and he didn’t seem overly perplexed. “Stop all tests and live fire training immediately,” he told Lin Yun.

Lin Yun looked at him, and then glanced up at the sky.

I said, “Why do we have to stop? There was no quantum effect this time despite the complete absence of an observer. We have to find the reason.”

Lin Yun looked up and shook her head. “No, there was an observer.”

I looked up at the sky, and realized that at some point the clouds had parted, and a thin strip of blue was visible through the crack.

Burnt Chips

We returned from the south to a Beijing autumn where the nights were already chilly.

The temperatures dropped, and with them the military’s enthusiasm for ball lightning weapons. Back at the base, we learned from Colonel Xu that the General Staff Department and the General Armaments Department were not planning on equipping troops with these weapons in large numbers, and Dawnlight would not be expanded in size. This attitude on the part of the higher-ups was primarily motivated by the probability that the enemy would build defenses against ball lightning weapons. The weapons we had come up with were their own nemesis: ball lightning could be both accelerated and deflected in a magnetic field, so the enemy could use a reverse magnetic field to defend against it. Once the weapon made it into a combat situation, it would quickly meet an effective defense.

The next stage of research at the base followed two forks: a search for a way to breach the magnetic field defense, and a reorientation of ball lightning’s target from personnel to weapons equipment, particularly high-tech weapons.

The first idea was to collect macro-electrons that would melt wiring. This would be an effective way to disable the enemy’s high-tech weapons. But a serious problem was discovered during experiments: ball lightning that would melt wiring would also discharge into large metal objects, and since melting large metal objects required immense amounts of power, most of the energy in this form of ball lightning was discharged into the metal object, with little released into the wire. Efficiency was poor, and potential damage to the weaponry was very limited.

Our very next thought, naturally, was that electronic chips might make an excellent target for ball lightning weapons. First of all, unlike wires, chips were made of a unique material for which nothing similar yet nonessential existed to split the ball lightning’s energy. Additionally, chips were small, so a relatively minor discharge could destroy a large number of them. Chip destruction was absolutely fatal to modern high-tech weaponry. But macro-electrons that discharged into chips (we called them chip-eating macro-electrons) were very rare, like pearls in the imperial crown of ball lightning. To collect a sufficient quantity of them required capturing a huge number of macro-electrons to subject to spectral recognition, for which substantial funds were needed. But the higher-ups had stopped further investment in the project.

To gain their attention, and to win research funding, Colonel Xu decided to conduct an attack exercise using the chip-eaters we had already collected.

* * *

The exercise was conducted at the MBT 2005 test base, where Lin Yun and I had gone to learn about the feeler defense system. Now all was quiet here. Weeds grew in the vehicle tracks. All we could see were two MBT 2005s that had been brought here the day before for use as test targets.

Initially, only General Armaments Department personnel were supposed to watch the tests, but a notice sent two hours beforehand doubled the number of observers. Most of them were from the General Staff Department, and included a major general and a lieutenant general.