Death's End

When the sea is drying, the fish have to gather into a puddle. The puddle is also drying, and all the fish are going to disappear.

Are all the fish here?

The fish responsible for drying the sea are not here.

We’re sorry. What you said is really hard to understand.

The fish who dried the sea went onto land before they did this. They moved from one dark forest to another dark forest.

The last sentence was like a thunderclap. The three inside the pinnace cabin and everyone in the distant two mother ships hearing the exchange via a faint link all shuddered.

Dark forest… what do you mean?

The same thing you mean.

Are you going to attack us?

I’m a tomb; I’m dead; I won’t attack anyone. There is no dark forest state between spaces of different dimensions. The lower-dimensional space cannot threaten the higher-dimensional space, and the resources of the lower-dimensional space are of no use to the higher-dimensional space. But the dark forest exists everywhere between those sharing the same dimensions.

Can you give us any suggestions?

Leave this puddle immediately. You are thin pictures. You’re fragile. If you stay in the puddle, you’ll turn into tombs in no time…. Wait, there seem to be fish on your pinnace.

Guan sat there, stunned for a few seconds, and then realized that the pinnace really did have some fish. He always carried an ecological sphere with him, about the size of a fist. Inside the glass sphere was water, a tiny fish, and some seaweed; together, everything formed a carefully designed miniature enclosed ecosystem. This was Guan’s favorite possession, so he had taken it with him on this adventure. If he couldn’t return, this would have accompanied him into the afterlife.

I like fish. Can I have it?

How do we give it to you?

Toss it over.

The three put on the helmets for their space suits and opened the pinnace’s hatch. Guan lifted the ecological sphere to his eyes. Carefully, since he was in four-dimensional space, he held the sphere by its three-dimensional edge, and gave it a final glance. From this four-dimensional perspective, every detail in the sphere was revealed, and this tiny world of life seemed even more rich, varied, and colorful. Guan swung his arm and tossed the sphere in the direction of the Ring. He watched as the small, transparent sphere disappeared in space. Then he closed the hatch and continued the conversation.

Is this the only puddle in the universe?

There was no answer. After that, the Ring remained silent and responded no more to attempts at communication.

Gravity informed them that more micrometeoroids had struck Blue Space. An increasing number of drifting objects, including some small-scale four-dimensional objects, possibly debris from ships or other artifacts, surrounded both ships. Captain Chu ordered their immediate return. The plan to board the Ring had to be scrapped.

Since they now knew their distance from the mother ship, the return trip could be covered twice as fast. In two hours, they were back in the vicinity of Blue Space, and successfully located a warped point to return home.

The explorers were treated as heroes and given a celebratory welcome—even if their discoveries appeared to yield no practical applications for the future of the two ships.

Captain Chu asked, “Dr. Guan, what do you think is the answer to the last question you asked the Ring?”

“I go back to the analogy I made before. The probability that we managed to stumble into the only soap bubble with a diameter of forty to fifty astronomical units on the surface of a sheet of paper sixteen billion light-years across is so minuscule that it might as well be zero. I’m certain that there are other soap bubbles, probably many more.”

“Do you think we’ll encounter more in the future?”