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.
I passed him half a bottle of Red Star erguotou. He held it over the candle flame to warm it, but he soon grew impatient and tossed back a few mouthfuls. Wiping his mouth, he said, “No beating around the bush. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Ambush at Sea
This is the account that Ding Yi gave me of what happened at the ball lightning research base after I left:
Because the nuclear plant operation was such a big success (from the military’s point of view, at least), the sidelined ball lightning weapons project began to receive renewed interest, followed by substantial investment. This investment was mostly put toward collecting chip-striking macro-electrons, as highly selective strikes on integrated circuits were believed to be the area of ball lightning weapons with the greatest potential. After a large amount of work, there were finally more than five thousand of these rare macro-electrons in storage, enough to constitute a combat-capable weapons system.
When war broke out, the base entered a state of nervous excitement. Practically everyone there believed that ball lightning would be to this war what the tank was to the First World War and the atom bomb to the Second, a history-making weapon. Overflowing with enthusiasm, they prepared to make history, but their instructions from the higher-ups were just two words: await orders. And thus Dawnlight was the idlest of all the units in the war. At first, people imagined that High Command might want to use the weapon in the most critical position at the most critical moment, but Lin Yun learned through her channels that they were thinking too highly of themselves; High Command had a fairly low opinion of the weapon. They believed that the nuclear plant operation had been a special case and did not prove the weapon system’s battlefield potential. None of the branches had much of an interest in putting the weapon to use. Hence, investment in the project dried up again.
After the destruction of the Zhufeng carrier battle group, the base was fraught with anxiety. The staff were baffled that the demonstration of the enormous power of a different new-concept weapon had done nothing to shake up old attitudes toward ball lightning. They felt that their weapon was the only hope left for turning the tide of the war.
Lin Yun repeatedly asked her father to give Dawnlight a battle assignment, but each time she was refused. On one occasion, General Lin told his daughter, “Xiao Yun, don’t let your fascination with weapons develop into superstition. Your thinking about war needs to be deeper, more holistic. The notion that the entire war can be won by relying on one or two new-concept weapons is, frankly, naïve.”
Here Ding Yi said, “As a believer in science, my faith in the weapons was even stronger than Lin Yun’s. I firmly believed that ball lightning could determine the outcome of the war. At the time, I ascribed High Command’s attitude toward ball lightning weapons to rigid thinking that was impervious to reason, and I was far more annoyed than most of the people at the base. But the way things developed ultimately demonstrated our naïveté.”
At last there was a turning point. The base and Dawnlight received orders to carry out an exploratory attack on an enemy carrier group in coastal waters.
The headquarters of the South Sea Fleet convened a war meeting. Personnel in attendance were not of high rank, so clearly the higher-ups did not place much value on this combat operation. Two senior colonels chaired the meeting: one the director of the fleet’s Operations Division, the other from the army, the second commander of the Southern Military Region’s coastal defense system. The other twenty-odd officers mostly hailed from submarine units and the coastal force of the South Sea Fleet.
The defense commander started off by describing the battlefield situation: “You are all aware of recent events that have seriously weakened our blue-water sea power. The enemy’s naval forces are encroaching on our coastal waters. The enemy fleet has on several occasions come within range of our shore-based anti-ship missiles, but our strikes have failed. Their missile defense systems have successfully intercepted the vast majority of our anti-ship missiles. If we can destroy or partially destroy the systems’ early warning capability, then our land-based missiles will be able to effectively attack the enemy. The primary mission of the present operation is this: the electronics in the enemy fleet’s missile defense system will be destroyed using ‘Maple Leaf,’ partially or totally crippling the system to give our land-based defenses an opportunity to attack.”