A helicopter was approaching over the hill, and when it stopped and hovered over the battlefield, an adult’s voice over a loudspeaker said, “Children! Hold your fire! The game is over!”
THE STATE
It had just turned dark when three helicopters carrying fifty-four children took flight toward the city. Eight of the children on board, including Huahua, Specs, Xiaomeng, and Lü Gang, were from Zheng Chen’s class, and they were accompanied by Zheng Chen and four other teachers.
They landed in front of a plain 1950s-style building whose lights were blazing. Zhang Lin and the leader of the valley-game directorate led the fifty-four children through the main gate and down a long corridor, at the end of which stood a large leather-covered door with a gleaming brass handle. When the children neared, two guards eased it open and they entered a huge hall, one that had witnessed so many historic events whose shadows even now seemed to dance between the columns.
There were three people in the halclass="underline" the president of the country, premier of the State Council, and chief of staff of the army. They seemed to have been there a while, and were talking in low voices when the door opened and they turned to look at the children.
The two leaders went on ahead to make a brief, whispered report to the president and premier.
“Hello, children!” the president said. “This is the last time I’ll treat you as children. History requires that you grow from thirteen to thirty over the next ten minutes. The premier will outline the situation for you now.”
The premier said, “As you’re all aware, a month ago there was a supernova in the vicinity of Earth. You’re all familiar with the details so I won’t go into them. Instead, I’ll tell you some things you don’t know. After the supernova, health agencies the world over studied its effects on humans. We’ve received reports from authoritative medical institutions on all continents that match the conclusions of our own domestic institutions: namely, the supernova’s high-energy radiation destroys chromosomes in human cells. This radiation has a penetrative power never seen before. No one was unaffected, even if they were indoors or down a mine shaft. But in one population group, chromosomes have the ability to repair themselves when damaged, ninety-seven percent in thirteen-year-olds, and one hundred percent in those aged twelve and under. Damage suffered by everyone else is irreversible. They’ll survive only for another ten months to a year at most. Visible light from the supernova lasted for a little over an hour, but the invisible radiation continued for an entire week—that’s when the sky was filled with aurora borealis. The Earth completed seven revolutions during that time, so the whole world was affected identically.”
The premier spoke with a calm solemnity, as if discussing something more ordinary. The children listened numbly for a while as his words sank into their minds. For a long time it didn’t make sense, and then all of a sudden it did.
Decades later, when the second generation of the Supernova Era was growing up, they were curious about how their parents’ generation felt when they first heard the news, since after all it was the most shocking piece of information in human history. Historians and astronomers had made countless attempts to re-create that scene, none of them accurate. The following conversation between a young reporter and an elder took place forty-five years after the incident:
REPORTER: Can you describe how you felt when you first heard the news?
ELDER: I didn’t feel anything, because I still didn’t understand.
REPORTER: How long did it take for you to understand?
ELDER: It depended on the person. No one got it immediately. Some people took half a minute, others several minutes, and others a few days. Some kids stayed in a trance all the way up until the Supernova Era actually began. It’s weird thinking back on it. Why was such a simple piece of information so hard to digest?
REPORTER: And yourself?
ELDER: I was lucky. I got it in three minutes.
REPORTER: Can you describe the shock?
ELDER: It wasn’t a shock.
REPORTER: Then… was it fear?
ELDER: No, not fear.
REPORTER: (laughs) That’s what they all say. I do understand, of course, how it might be hard to put that degree of fear and shock into words.
ELDER: There were no feelings like shock and fear back then. Please believe me, even if it might be hard for you to understand now.
REPORTER: Then what did you feel?
ELDER: Unfamiliarity.
REPORTER: …
ELDER: Back in our day, we had this story: A man blind from birth accidentally fell down the stairs one day, and the impact somehow jostled the nerves in his brain enough to restore his sight. He looked at the world around him brimming with curiosity…. That’s how we felt. The world was going to turn strange for us, as if we’d never seen it before.
In the huge hall, the beating heart of the country, fifty-four children shared the experience of this powerful unfamiliarity, as if an invisible razor had dropped, severing the past from the future, and they were staring into a strange new world. Through the wide window they could see the newly risen Rose Nebula, which projected its blue radiance on the floor like an enormous cosmic eye staring into this inexplicable world.
For an entire week high-energy rays had traversed every part of the solar system, and high-energy particles battered the Earth like a rainstorm pouring down on land and sea, tearing through human bodies at unimaginably high velocity, penetrating every cell. And the tiny chromosomes in each of those cells were buffeted like fragile crystalline threads by those high-energy particles, which unraveled the DNA double helix and sent nucleotides spinning away. Damaged genes continued to operate, but the precise chain that had evolved through hundreds of millions of years of copying life had been snapped, and the mutated genes now spread death. Earth revolved humanity through a deadly shower, winding up the death clock in billions of bodies that now ticked slowly away….
Everyone above the age of thirteen would die, and Earth would become a children’s world.
The fifty-four children were different from the rest. A second piece of information would take the world that had just been made unfamiliar and shatter it into pieces, leaving them hanging in a bewildered void.
Zheng Chen came round first. “These children, Premier, if I’m not mistaken…”
The premier nodded, and said calmly, “You’re not mistaken.”
“That’s impossible,” she cried out in alarm.
The state leaders looked at her in silence.
“They’re just kids. How can they…”
“What do you think we ought to do, young lady?” the premier asked.
“…You at least ought to have held a nationwide search for candidates.”
“Do you really think that’s possible? How would we select them? Kids aren’t adults. They don’t belong to a hierarchical national social structure, so in such a short time frame it’s frankly impossible to choose the most talented and best suited from among four hundred million children to take on this responsibility. Ten months is just an estimate; we might actually have far less time than that. The adult world could become inoperative at any moment. This is humanity’s darkest hour. We must not leave our country headless at a time like this. Did we have any other choice? Like every other country in the world, we adopted exceptional methods to make the selection.”