Death's End

At this distance, the Earth still resembled a star, but it was possible to see a pale blue in its glow. The final deceleration stage had begun, and as the stellar drive came online, the crew, who had been floating in zero gravity, drifted toward the portholes like leaves falling in autumn, and finally landed against the broad sheets of glass. The artificial gravity generated by deceleration gradually increased until it reached 1G. The portholes now formed the floor, and the people lying down felt the weight like the embrace of Mother Earth ahead of them. Excitement echoed around the chamber.

“We’re home!”

“Can you believe it?”

“I’ll get to see my kids again.”

“We can have kids!”

When Bronze Age left the Solar System, the law had dictated that no one could be born on the ship unless someone died.

“She said she’d wait for me.”

“If you’ll have her! You’re now a hero of the human race; you’ll have a flock of pretty girls after you.”

“Oh, I haven’t seen flocks of birds in ages!”

“Doesn’t everything we’ve been through seem like a dream?”

“I feel like I’m dreaming now.”

“I’m utterly terrified of space.”

“Me too. I’m retiring as soon as we get back. I’m going to buy a farm and spend the rest of my life on solid ground.”

—————

It had been fourteen years since the complete destruction of the Earth’s combined fleet. The survivors, after engaging in separate internecine battles of darkness, cut off all contact with the home planet. However, for a year and a half thereafter, Bronze Age continued to receive transmissions from Earth, most of which were surface radio communications, but which also included some transmissions intended for space.

And then, at the beginning of November in Year 208 of the Crisis Era, all radio transmissions from Earth ceased. Every frequency fell silent, as though the Earth was a lamp that had been suddenly shut off.

Excerpt from A Past Outside of Time Nyctohylophobia

When humanity finally learned that the universe was a dark forest in which everyone hunted everyone else, the child who had once cried out for contact by the bright campfire put out the fire and shivered in the darkness. Even a spark terrified him.

During the first few days, even mobile phone use was forbidden, and antennas around the world were forcibly shut down. Such a move, which would have once caused riots in the streets, was widely supported by the populace.

Gradually, as reason was restored, so were the mobile networks, but severe restrictions regarding electromagnetic radiation were put in place. All radio communications had to operate at minimum power, and any violators risked being tried for crimes against humanity.

Most people surely understood that these reactions were excessive and meaningless. The peak of the Earth’s projection of electromagnetic signals into space had occurred during the age of analog signals, when television and radio transmission towers operated at high power levels. But as digital communication became prevalent, most information was transmitted via wires and optical cables, and even radio transmissions for digital signals required far less power than analog signals. The amount of electromagnetic radiation spilling into space from the Earth had fallen so much that some pre-Crisis scholars had fretted that the Earth would become impossible to discover by friendly aliens.

Electromagnetic waves are, moreover, the most primitive and least power-efficient method of transmitting information in the universe. Radio waves attenuate and degrade rapidly in the vastness of space, and most electromagnetic signals spilling from the Earth could not be received beyond two light-years. Only something like the transmission by Ye Wenjie, which relied on the power of the sun as an antenna, could be intercepted by listeners among the stars.

As humanity’s technology advanced, two far more efficient methods of signaling became available: neutrinos and gravitational waves. The latter was the main method of deterrence that humanity later deployed against Trisolaris.

The dark forest theory had a profound impact on human civilization. That child sitting by the ashes of the campfire turned from optimism to isolation and paranoia, a loner in the universe.

Deterrence Era, Year 12 Bronze Age

Most of the crew aboard Bronze Age attributed the sudden cessation of all signals from the Earth to the complete conquest of the Solar System by Trisolaris. Bronze Age accelerated and headed for a star with terrestrial planets twenty-six light-years away.