Ball Lightning

Outside of the urban area, I continued to drive, all the way to a distant county seat in the far suburbs. Here, even though the power was out, there were far fewer signs of panic than downtown. I felt a surge of hope in my heart, a hope that I was approaching the edge of the ring of destruction, or at least that I would see fewer signs of damage. I parked the car outside a web café and rushed inside. It was dusk, and the café was very dark without power, but I smelled that familiar burnt odor at once. I grabbed a machine, took it outside, and carefully inspected the motherboard. In the light of the setting sun I saw that the CPU and several other chips were missing. The computer dropped out of my hands and smashed onto my foot, but I didn’t feel the pain. I only shivered heavily in the cold late autumn breeze, and then jumped in the car and went back.

Not long after I got back to the Institute, the other three cars also returned. The one that went the farthest had taken the expressway for over a hundred kilometers. Everywhere they went, things were the same as here.

We urgently searched for information of the outside, but we had no TV or Internet, and no phone. Only the radio worked. But all of the deluxe digitally tuned radios were driven by integrated circuits, and all of them were now junk. It wasn’t easy, but we eventually found a usable vintage transistor radio that an old mail clerk kept in the reception office, which received three fuzzy southern provincial stations, as well as three in English and one in Japanese.

It was only late that night that these stations began to have reports on this bizarre disaster, and from those fragmentary broadcasts, we learned the following: the chip damage zone was centered somewhere in the northwest of China. It covered a circular area with a radius of 1,300 kilometers, or around one-third of the land in the country, an astonishingly large area, but the chip damage rate gradually tapered off the farther you got from the center. Our city was located near the edge of the region.

* * *

For the next week, we lived in a pre-electricity agricultural society. It was a difficult time. Water had to be trucked in and rationed out in amounts that were barely sufficient to drink. At night we relied on candles for illumination.

During this period, rumors about the disaster flew thick as cow hair. In the public chatter as well as in the media (which for us was limited to radio), the most popular explanation had to do with aliens. But in all of the rumors, there was no mention of ball lightning.

Out of the mess of information, we could conclude one thing: the attack was unlikely to have come from the enemy. It was obvious that they were as confused as we were, which let us breathe a little easier.

I came up with a hundred different possibilities during that time, but none of them was convincing. I was convinced that this was connected to ball lightning, but I was also certain that ball lightning wasn’t that powerful. So what was?

The enemy’s behavior was also mystifying. Our territory had been dealt such a blow that our defensive capability was basically gone, yet they halted their attack. Even the routine daily airstrikes disappeared. The world media had a fairly convincing explanation: in the face of such a strong, unknown force that could easily destroy the entire civilized world, no one wanted to act rashly before figuring out what it was.

In any event, it gave us the most peaceful period since the start of the war, albeit an ominous and chilly one. Without computers or electricity, we had nothing to do, and no way to dispel the terror in our hearts.

One evening, as an icy autumn rain began to fall outside, I sat by myself in my chilly apartment listening to the raindrops. It felt as if the outside world had been swallowed up by an infinite darkness, and the lonely flickering candle in front of me was the only light in the entire universe. An infinite loneliness crushed me, and my all-too-brief life played back like a movie rewinding in my mind: the abstract painting made up of children’s ashes in the nuclear plant, Ding Yi putting the Go board behind the bubble, long electric arcs in the night sky, Siberia in the blizzard, Lin Yun’s piano playing and the sword at her neck, the thunderstorm and starry sky on Mount Tai, my university days on campus, and finally back to that stormy birthday night…. I felt like my life had gone in a huge circle, bringing me back to my point of origin, only now there was no sound of thunder in the rain, and there was only one candle left in front of me.

Then there was a knock at the door. Before I could get up to answer it, someone pushed it open and came in. He took off a wet raincoat, his thin body shivering from the cold, and when I made out his face in the candlelight, I cried out for joy.

It was Ding Yi.

“Do you have anything to drink? Preferably something hot,” he said, through chattering teeth.