The Three-Body Problem

“Let me tell you what I see. It’s a countdown! One second after another, it keeps on ticking precisely. Are you saying this is all in my head?”

The doctor gave him a tolerant smile. “You know how much the mind can affect vision? Last month we had a patient—a girl, maybe fifteen, sixteen. She was in class when she suddenly lost the ability to see, went completely blind. But all the tests showed that there was nothing wrong with her eyes physiologically. Finally, someone from the Department of Psychiatry treated her with psychotherapy for a month. All of a sudden, her vision returned.”

Wang knew that he was wasting his time here. He got up. “All right, let’s not talk about my eyes anymore. I have one last question: Do you know of any physical phenomenon that can operate from a distance and make people see visions?”

The doctor gave this some thought. “Yes, I do. A while ago I was part of the medical team for the Shenzhou 19 spacecraft. Some taikonauts engaged in extravehicular activities reported seeing flashes that didn’t exist. The astronauts on the International Space Station reported similar experiences. It was because during periods of intense solar activity, high-energy particles struck against the retina, causing them to see flashes. But you’re talking about numbers—a countdown, even. Solar activity can’t possibly cause that.”

Wang walked out of the hospital in a daze. The countdown continued to hover in his eyes, and he seemed to be following the numbers, following a ghost that would not leave him. He bought a pair of sunglasses and put them on so that others would not see his eyes wandering around as though he were sleepwalking.

Before entering the main lab at the Nanotechnology Research Center, Wang took off his sunglasses. Even so, his colleagues noticed his apparent mental state and gave him concerned looks.

Wang saw that the main reaction chamber in the middle of the lab was still in operation. The main compartment of the gigantic apparatus was a sphere with many pipes connected to it.

They had made small quantities of a new, ultrastrong nanomaterial that they’d given the code name “Flying Blade.” But the samples so far were all made with molecular construction techniques—that is, using a nanoscale molecular probe to stack the molecules one by one, like laying out bricks for a wall. This method was very resource-intensive, and the results might as well have been the world’s most precious jewels. It was impractical to produce large quantities this way.

At the moment, the lab was attempting to develop a catalytic reaction as a substitute for molecular construction so that large numbers of molecules would stack themselves into the right arrangement. The main reaction chamber could rapidly run through a large number of reactions using different molecular combinations. There were so many combinations that normal manual testing methods would have taken more than a hundred years. In addition, the apparatus augmented actual reactions with mathematical simulations. When the reaction reached a certain stage, the computer would build a mathematical model of it based on intermediate products and finish the remainder of the reaction via simulation. This greatly boosted the experimental efficiency.

When the lab director saw Wang, he hurried over and began to report a series of malfunctions with the main reaction chamber—a recent ritual whenever Wang arrived at work. By now the main reaction chamber had been in continuous operation for more than a year, and many sensors had lost sensitivity, resulting in measurement errors that required shutting down the apparatus for maintenance. But as the lead scientist on the project, Wang insisted that the machine would not be shut down until the third set of molecular combinations was finished. The technicians had no choice but to jury-rig more and more kludges onto the main reaction chamber to compensate. And now those kludges required their own kludges, a state of affairs that exhausted the project staff.

But the lab director carefully avoided the topic of shutting down the machine and temporarily halting the experiment, as he knew that such discussions tended to enrage Wang Miao. He just laid out the difficulties before Wang, though his unspoken desire was clear.

Engineers rushed around the main reaction chamber like doctors around a critical patient, trying to keep it going for a little longer. In front of the whole scene, the countdown appeared.

1174:21:11, 1174:21:10, 1174:21:09, 1174:21:08 …

Just stop. Try it. Shen’s words came to Wang.

“How long would it take to completely overhaul the sensors?” Wang asked.

“Four or five days.” Now that the lab director saw a ray of hope, he quickly added, “If we work fast, it will take only three days. I guarantee it, Chief Wang!”