He thought of one possibility. “Give us an advanced energy technology. Something environmentally friendly that won’t contribute to climate change. The technology has to be able to satisfy existing energy needs while also being much cheaper than fossil fuels. If you give us that, it won’t be ten years before the market will force all fossil fuels out of contention.”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Encouraged, he went on. “Then teach us how to achieve controlled nuclear fusion.”
“You vastly underestimate the difficulties. We still haven’t achieved any breakthroughs in that field. There are fusion reactor power plants, but they aren’t even as competitive in the market as fission plants in your time. Also, fusion reactors require the extraction of fuel from seawater, a process that may lead to more environmental damage. We can’t give you controlled fusion, but we can give you solar power.”
“Solar power? What do you mean exactly?”
“Collecting the sun’s power from the surface of the Earth.”
“With what?”
“Monocrystalline silicon, the same material you use in your time.”
“Oh, come on! You literally just made me facepalm. I thought you had something real for a minute there…. Actually, do you still say ‘facepalm’?”
“Sure we do. Old-timers like me have kept lots of expressions like that alive. Anyway, our monocrystalline silicon solar cells have far higher conversion efficiency.”
“Even if you achieved one hundred percent efficiency it would be irrelevant. How much solar power reaches each square meter on the Earth’s surface? There’s no way that a few solar panels can satisfy the energy needs of contemporary society. Have you been hallucinating that your youth was spent in some preindustrial farmers’ paradise?”
He heard his future self laugh. “Now that you mention it, the technology really does evoke shades of agrarian nostalgia.”
“‘Evoke shades of agrarian nostalgia’? When did I start to talk like a coffee shop writer?”
“Heh, the technology really is called the silicon plow.”
“What?”
“The silicon plow. Silicon is the most abundant element on Earth, and you can find it everywhere in sand or soil. A silicon plow cuts furrows in the earth just like a regular plow, but it extracts the silicon out of the soil and refines it into monocrystalline silicon. The land it processes turns into solar cells.”
“What… what does a silicon plow look like?”
“Like a combine harvester. To start it, you need an external energy source, but then it relies on the power provided by the solar cells it leaves behind. With this technology, you can turn the whole Taklamakan Desert into a solar power plant.”
“Are you telling me that all the plowed land will become black, shiny cells?”
“No. The plowed land will just look darker, but the conversion efficiency will be phenomenal. After the land has been plowed, you just attach wires to the two ends of the furrow to get a photovoltaic current.”
As the holder of a doctorate degree in Energy Planning, he was entranced by the promise of this technology. His breathing sped up.
“I just sent you an email with all the technical details. At your technology level, you shouldn’t have any trouble mass-producing it—that’s also one of the reasons I chose to contact your era instead of an earlier time. Starting tomorrow, you must dedicate yourself to spreading this technology. I know you have the necessary resources and the skills. How to popularize the technology is up to you. Maybe you can take advantage of the report you’re drafting right now. But you have to remember one thing: under no circumstances can you reveal that the technology comes from the future.”
“Why did you choose me? You should have picked someone more senior.”
“I have to take care to reduce the potential negative side effects from my interference. You and I are the same person. Can you think of a better choice?”
“Tell me, just how high have you climbed on the career ladder?”
“I can’t reveal that. It took a lot of convincing for the Embodied International to decide to interfere in history at all.”
“Embodied International?”
“The world is divided between the Embodied International and the Virtual International—never mind, I’ve said too much. Don’t ask me about anything like that again.”
“But… if I do as you’ve asked, how will you see the world change? Are you going to wake up the next day and find everything different?”
“It’ll be even faster than that. The minute you open my email and decide on your course of action, my world will likely change instantly. But we two are the only people—the only person—who will know this. For everyone else in my era, history is history, and in the new timeline, which is also their only timeline, the period of fossil fuel use between your time and my time never happened.”
“Will you call me again?”
“I don’t know. Every contact with the past is a major undertaking. International conferences have to be held. Goodbye.”
He returned to his bedroom and turned on the computer. The inbox showed the email from the future. The body was blank, but there were more than a dozen attachments, totaling more than a gigabyte. He browsed through them quickly and found detailed technical drawings and documents. Although he couldn’t make sense of everything yet, he saw that the technical language was accessible to someone of his era.
One particular photograph caught his attention. It was a wide-angle shot of an open space. A silicon plow, which really did resemble a combine harvester, sat in the middle of the field, and the soil behind it was slightly darker. The perspective of the shot made the plow look like a small brush painting the earth dark stroke by long stroke. About a third of the land in the frame had already been plowed, but the part of the photo that most attracted his attention was the sky of the future. It was a dusty gray, but not overcast. Maybe it was taken at dawn or dusk, since the plow cast a long shadow. This was an age without blue skies.
He began to think through his next steps. As a staff member of the Planning Office of the Ministry of Energy, he was responsible for, among other things, gathering information on the progress of new energy development projects across the country. The report he was drafting would be passed on to the minister, who would then deliver it to the State Council at their upcoming meeting. Part of China’s four-trillion-yuan stimulus package in response to the economic crisis was set aside for developing new energy technologies, and the State Council meeting would decide where to invest the funds. His future self apparently wanted him to take advantage of this opportunity. But before he could put this technology into his report, he had to first find a research lab or company to pick it up as a development project. He would have to be very strategic in this choice, but he was certain that if the technical documents were real, he would find a good company to undertake the work. Even in the worst case, whoever decided to move forward with this research wouldn’t lose much…
He shuddered, as if waking from a dream. Have I already decided to go down this path? Yes, I have. There could only be two outcomes from his decision: success or failure. If his effort would eventually succeed, the future should have already been altered.
Mere mortals doing what needed to be done a hundred years earlier would have the same effect as divine intervention.
He stared at the email on the screen, and suddenly had the urge to respond to it. He wrote only two words in the reply: Got it. Immediately, a response came back informing him that the address was undeliverable. He picked up his phone and looked at the caller ID, an ordinary number from China Mobile. He pressed the “call” button, and a recorded voice informed him that the number was not in service.