“No. A tank.”
Wang Ran was silent for a few seconds before throwing open the door and bounding to the ground.
“Here’s the thing,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Our branch has, for various reasons, only just now considered bringing children in to take over. Time is tight, and we’re looking for people with some driving fundamentals so we can get started quicker.”
“Is driving a tank like driving a bulldozer?”
“In some ways. They’re both caterpillar-track vehicles.”
“But a tank is harder to drive, right?”
“Not necessarily. For one thing, a tank doesn’t have that big blade, so you don’t have to worry about frontward force when you’re driving.”
And just like that, Wang Ran the son of a ninth-dan go master became a tank driver in an armored division.
On the fourth day, Zheng Chen visited Feng Jing and Yao Pingping, who had been assigned to work in a nursery. In the upcoming children’s world, the family unit would vanish and the nursery would be a key institution for a fairly long period. Lots of children would spend their remaining childhood years there bringing up infants even younger than themselves.
When Zheng Chen found her students, their mothers were instructing them in baby care, but like all the rest of the older children in the nursery, they were helpless in the face of wailing babies.
“I can’t stand it!” Yao Pingping said as she stared at the baby crying incessantly on the bed.
“You need to be patient,” her mother said. “Babies can’t use words. Crying is how they talk, so you have to figure out what they mean.”
“Then what’s he saying now? I’ve given him milk, but he won’t eat.”
“He wants to sleep.”
“He should just go to sleep, then! What’s he crying for? He’s so annoying.”
“Most children are like that. You’ve got to pick him up and walk with him, and he’ll stop crying.”
And that’s all it took.
Pingping asked her mom, “Was I like that when I was little?”
Her mother laughed. “You were hardly that compliant. You’d usually fuss for an hour before you fell asleep.”
“What a chore it must have been, bringing me up.”
“You’ll have it even harder,” her mother said sadly. “Babies in day care all have parents, but in the future it’ll be up to you all to raise them.”
Zheng Chen kept silent during her time at the nursery, to the point that Feng Jing and Yao Pingping asked her if she was feeling well. Her thoughts were on her own unborn child.
The nations of the world had all banned further procreation in what for many of them was their final legislation of the Common Era. But laws and ordinances were ineffective; half of pregnant women, Zheng Chen among them, chose to carry their babies to term.
On the fifth day she returned to school, where lower grades were still attending classes taught by upperclassmen training to become teachers. She entered her classroom and found Su Lin and her mother, also a teacher at the school, working on teacher training.
“These kids are idiots. I’ve told them over and over but they still don’t get how to add and subtract two-digit numbers!” Su Lin angrily pushed aside a stack of workbooks.
Her mother said, “Every student understands things at a different pace.” She flipped through the papers. “See, this one doesn’t know how to carry. And this one, no concept of places. You’ve got to address them independently. Take a look at this one….” She handed Su Lin a workbook.
“Idiots! Plain idiots. They don’t even know simple arithmetic.” She glanced at the workbook but tossed it aside. Shakily scrawled numbers formed lines of two-digit addition and subtraction problems, all of them making the same stupid mistakes she had grown tired of over the past two days.
“It’s your own workbook from five years ago. I saved it for you.”
Surprised, Su Lin picked up the workbook, but could hardly recognize the clumsy script as her own handwriting.
Her mother said, “A teacher has to have patience for hard work.” She sighed. “But your students are the fortunate ones. What about you? Who’s going to teach you?”
“I’ll teach myself. Mom, didn’t you tell me that the first college teacher had never been to college?”
“But you’ve never even been to middle school!” Her mother sighed again.
On the sixth day, Zheng Chen sent off three of her students at the West Railway Station. Wei Ming, whose father was a lieutenant colonel, and Jin Yunhui, whose father was an air force pilot, were headed to the military. Zhao Yuzhong’s parents were migrant workers, and they were taking their son back home to a village in Hebei. Zheng Chen promised to visit Jin Yunhui and Zhao Yuzhong, but Wei Ming would be stationed in Tibet on the Indian border, and she knew that she would never make it there in the ten months she had remaining.
“Ms. Zheng, when your baby is born you’ve got to write to tell us where he ends up, so we can take care of him,” Wei Ming said, and then shook her hand forcefully before boarding the train without looking back, resolute in his final farewell.
As she watched the train depart, she again broke down and had to cover her face to hide her tears. She had now become a child, but her students had grown into adults overnight.
The Great Learning was the most rational and orderly period in history, all things proceeding on an urgent, organized schedule. But before it began, the world very nearly succumbed to madness and despair.
After a brief moment of calm, various portents of doom began to make themselves known. First was the mutation of plants, and then mass die-offs of animals: bodies of birds and insects littered the ground, and the ocean surface was awash in dead fish. A great number of species vanished within the space of days. The rays’ effects on humans became apparent. People exhibited identical symptoms: low fever, full body fatigue, inexplicable bleeding. The regenerative ability of children had been discovered but was not definitively proven, and although national governments made plans for a world of children (the Valley World was in session during this time, so the children were unaware of the chaos outside), a few medical institutions concluded that everyone would eventually die of radiation sickness. The terrifying news quickly spread round the globe despite government efforts to suppress it.
Society’s initial reaction was to count on luck, to place their hope in the god of medical science. Rumors occasionally circulated saying that such-and-such an organization or research facility had developed a lifesaving drug. Meanwhile, leukemia drugs like cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, doxorubicin, and prednisone were worth more than gold, even though doctors explained time and again that what people were suffering was not leukemia. A significant number of people did place their hope on the possible existence of a real god, and for a while, cults of all kinds spread like wildfire, the huge-scale or peculiar forms of their devotion returning certain countries and regions to a picture of the Middle Ages.
But it wasn’t long before the bubble of hope popped, spurring a chain reaction of despair in which increasing numbers of people lost their senses, culminating in mass hysteria that spared not even the most unflappable. The government’s hold on the situation slipped away, since the police and military who ought to have maintained order were themselves in a highly unstable state. At times, the government was partially paralyzed under the most intense psychological pressure ever felt in human history. In the cities, car crashes piled up in the thousands, explosions and gunfire came in waves, and pillars of smoke rose from tall buildings burning out of control. Frenzied crowds were everywhere. Airports shut down due to the chaos, and air and surface links between Europe and the Americas were severed. The chaos and paralysis affected the news media, too. The universal mood of the time can be demonstrated by a headline that ran in The New York Times in scarily large type: