Death's End

Chu Yan turned and pressed the giant red button hovering in air. The button flashed, and the number below it turned from 0 to 1. Next, the two vice-captains of Blue Space pressed the buttons in quick succession. The tally went up to 3. Then the other senior officers of Blue Space, followed by the junior officers and enlisted men, filed past the red button in a long line, pressing the button again and again.

As the red button flashed, the tally crept up. These were the final beats of the heart of history, the final steps taken toward the terminal point.

When the number reached 795, Guan Yifan pressed the button. He was the first person from Gravity to support the broadcast. After him, several more officers and enlisted men from Gravity also pressed the button.

Finally, the number reached 943, and a large line of text appeared above the button:

The next affirmative vote will activate the universal broadcast.

The next person to vote was an enlisted man. Many others were lined up behind him. He placed his hand above the button, but didn’t push. He waited until the ensign behind him put his hand on his, and then more hands joined theirs in a thick stack.

“Please wait,” Captain Morovich said. He drifted over and, as everyone watched, placed his hand atop the pile.

Then dozens of hands moved together, and the button flashed one more time.

Three hundred fifteen years had passed since that morning in the twentieth century when Ye Wenjie had pushed another red button.

The gravitational wave broadcast began. Everyone present felt a strong tremor. The feeling seemed to come not from without, but from within each body, as though every person had become a vibrating string. This instrument of death played for only twelve seconds before stopping, and then everything was silent.

Outside the ship, the thin membrane of space-time rippled with the gravitational waves, like a placid lake surface disturbed by a night breeze. The judgment of death for both worlds spread across the cosmos at the speed of light.

Post-Deterrence Era, Year 2 The Morning After the Great Resettlement, Australia

The noises around her quieted down, and Cheng Xin could hear voices coming from the information window over the city government tent. She could tell one of the voices belonged to Sophon, in addition to two others. But she was too far away to make out exactly what they said. She thought their voices cast a spell because the noises around her faded and finally disappeared. The world seemed to be frozen.

Then a tsunami erupted around her, and Cheng Xin trembled. She had been blind for a while, and the images of the real world in her mind were being squeezed out bit by bit by illusions. The sudden bedlam made her feel as if the Pacific had risen up all around her and swallowed Australia.

It took a few seconds before she understood that the crowd was cheering. What’s there to cheer about? Has everyone gone mad? The clamor did not subside, though it was eventually replaced by speech. So many were talking at once it was as if, after the continent had been flooded, a storm lashed the surface of the sea. She could not tell what anyone was saying in the tumult.

But she picked out “Blue Space” and “Gravity” more than once.

Her hearing gradually recovered its acuity, and she noticed a faint sound amidst the general commotion: footsteps in front of her. She felt someone stop there.

“Dr. Cheng Xin, what is wrong with your eyes? Can you not see?” Cheng Xin felt movements disturbing the air. Perhaps the man was waving his hands before her eyes. “The mayor sent me for you. We’re going home, back to China.”

“I don’t have a home,” Cheng Xin said. The word “home” stabbed into her heart like a knife, and her heart, numbed by extreme pain, nevertheless convulsed one more time. She thought of that winter night three centuries ago when she left her home, thought of the dawn that had greeted her outside her window…. Both of her parents had died before the Great Ravine. They could never have imagined where their daughter had ended up, tempest-tossed by time and fate.

“No. Everyone’s getting ready to go home. We’re all leaving Australia and going back to where we came from.”

Cheng Xin whipped her head up. She still couldn’t get used to this stubborn darkness before her wide-open eyes. She tried to make out something, anything. “What?”

“Gravity initiated the universal broadcast.”

How is that possible?