Religious adherents either grew more fervent, to bolster their spiritual strength in the face of death, or abandoned religion entirely in a torrent of verbal abuse. A newly invented tag, “GODOG,” began popping up in urban graffiti as a contraction of “God is a dog.”
However, once children’s regenerative abilities were confirmed, the mad world calmed down at once, at a speed one journalist described as “flipping a switch.” An entry in a woman’s diary on that day reveals the prevailing attitude:
My husband and I huddled together on the sofa. Our psyches really couldn’t take it anymore. We were certain to die from the torment if our illness didn’t finish us off first. The picture came back on the TV, and the bottom scroll had the government’s announcement confirming children’s regenerative abilities. When we read it, it was like we’d come to the end of a marathon, and we exhaled heavily, letting our weary bodies and minds relax. Amid the worry for ourselves these past few days, we were more concerned with little Jingjing. I prayed with all my might that Jingjing wouldn’t get this fearsome illness! When I learned that children will live on, my heart could start beating again, and all of a sudden my own death turned less frightening. Now I’m extremely calm, and find it hard to believe I’m facing death so casually. But my husband hasn’t changed. He’s still trembling all over, practically fainting on top of me. He used to be so strong and confident. Maybe I’m calm because when I became a mother, I felt the power of life firsthand, and I know that there is nothing to fear from death! So long as boys and girls will live on, that resistance will continue, and soon there will be new mothers, and new children. Death doesn’t scare me. “What should we prepare for Jingjing,” I lean over and whisper to him, as if we’re about to go away on business for a few days. But god that painful anxiety returns as soon as I say it, since isn’t it an acknowledgment that the world will soon have no adults? What will the children do? Who will cook for Jingjing? Who will pat him to sleep? Who will help him across the road? What will he do in the summer? And in the winter? God, we can’t even leave him with someone else, since there’ll only be kids left. Just kids! It’s unreal, unreal! But so what? It’ll be winter soon. Winter! I’m only half-finished knitting Jingjing’s sweater. I have to stop writing and go work on it…
As soon as this news broke, the Great Learning commenced.
This was one of the most peculiar phases in human history, in which human society assumed a form it had never taken before and was unlikely to take again. The world became an enormous school where children nervously studied all the skills necessary for humanity’s survival, to acquire a basic ability to run the world in the space of just a few months.
In most professions, children of the world succeeded their parents and learned from them the required skills. The approach brought about a number of social ills, but it was the most workably efficient solution that anyone could come up with.
The particular duties of relatively senior leaders meant they were typically recruited internally and then given training in their posts; selection standards varied from country to country. This approach proved difficult owing to the special characteristics of child society, and future events suggested that most selections were unsuccessful, although they nevertheless preserved basic social structures.
Most difficult was the selection of national leaders, a practically impossible task to accomplish in such a short time. The world’s countries independently arrived at the same unusual method: model countries. The scale of the simulations varied, but they all operated in a way almost cruelly similar to the way actual countries operate, in the hope that the hardships and extreme environment of blood and fire would reveal children with leadership ability. Later historians found this the most astonishing thing about the end of the Common Era, and the brief history of these simulated countries became rich fodder for the fantastic literature of the Supernova Era. The period gave birth to whole categories of novels and films, and these microhistories grew ever further disconnected from reality and gradually took on the color of myth. Opinions of that era varied, but most historians acknowledged that under the era’s extreme conditions, the choice they made was a rational one.
Without question, agriculture was a key skill, and fortunately this was one that children found relatively easy to acquire. Unlike urban children, rural kids had to a greater or lesser extent taken part in their parents’ labors; it was in the large-scale farms of more industrialized countries that they had a harder time of it. On a global scale, children could take advantage of existing agricultural equipment and irrigation systems to produce all the food they needed, which provided a cornerstone for the survival of humanity as a whole.
Children also proved relatively quick studies at other basic skills essential for a functioning society, such as commerce and the service sector. Finance was rather more complicated, but with enough effort they were able to make the sector partially operational. Besides, finance would operate far more simply in the children’s world.
Skilled labor was also a fairly easy acquisition, which came as a great surprise to the adults. Children quickly became basically qualified if not especially proficient at driving, machining, welding, and, most surprisingly, piloting fighter planes. Children, they now realized, had an inborn aptitude for dexterous work that slipped away when they got older.
But technical work requiring background knowledge was far more difficult. Children could learn to drive quite quickly, but they had a harder time becoming qualified auto mechanics. The young pilots could fly planes, but it was practically impossible for ground personnel to correctly assess and handle aircraft failures. Engineer-level technicians were even hard to find among the children. And so one of the most formidable tasks of the Great Learning was getting the complicated technologies essential for society’s operation, such as the power grid, up and running; this task was only partially completed. It was practically certain that technology would take a major step backward in the children’s world—half a century in the rosiest predictions, with many people anticipating a return to a preindustrial age.
But the areas that children had the biggest difficulty mastering were scientific research and high-level leadership.
It was hard to imagine science in a world where children with only an elementary education would have to follow the long road to acquire the abstract thought necessary for cutting-edge scientific theory. And although fundamental scientific research was imperative for humanity’s survival in the present circumstances, it faced a critical threat: Children were ill-equipped for theoretic thinking, meaning that scientific advancement would be suspended entirely for an indefinite period. Would scientific thinking ever return? If not, would the loss of science return humanity to the Dark Ages?
Senior leadership talent was a more practical, pressing problem. Maturity is hard to acquire, and top leaders need a broad knowledge of politics, economics, and history, a keen understanding of society, experience in large-scale management, skill at interpersonal relations, correct situational judgment, and the stable character required to make major decisions under pressure, all of which children lack. Moreover, it was impossible to teach character and experience in such a short time—those were unteachable skills, only acquired in a lengthy process. So the young senior leaders might end up making bad decisions acting on impulse and naïveté, decisions that had the potential for terrible, even catastrophic consequences, and that might prove to be the biggest threat to the children’s world. Future events would prove this fear correct.