The scientific community was inclined toward the Pulsar Theory, which made a much more bewildering prospect for the children’s world.
Inside the vast main lobby, the premier said to the children, “Take a look at China Quantum yourselves. I’ll just rest here.” He sat heavily down into a sofa and let out a long sigh. “It will introduce itself to you.”
The children entered an elevator whose sudden movement caused a momentary feeling of weightlessness. The floor indicator displayed negative numbers; China Quantum’s server room was evidently underground. The elevator stopped and they got out into a tall, narrow vestibule. They felt a low rumble, and a large blue metal door slowly slid open, allowing them passage into a vast underground hall whose four walls glowed with a soft blue light.
In the center of the room was a translucent glass dome more than twenty meters in diameter, which looked like an enormous soap bubble when they got closer to it. The door rumbled closed behind them, and the walls gradually dimmed and then went out altogether. But darkness did not fall. A shaft of light from the very top of the hall penetrated the glass cover and cast a circular spot of light on two objects within it, one an upright cylinder, the other a rectangular prism lying on its side, both silver-gray. They seemed to be situated randomly with respect to each other, like the remains of an ancient palace strewn across the wilderness. The rest of the hall was shrouded in shadow; only the two objects were exposed in the light, possessing a sense of mystery and power, calling to mind megaliths in the wilds of Europe. Then they heard a man’s voice, deep and powerful, with a pleasant echo, say, “Hello. You’re looking at the China Quantum 220 mainframe.”
They looked around but couldn’t find where the sound was coming from.
“You may not have heard of me before. I was born just one month ago, upgraded from China Quantum 120. When the warm current bathed my body that evening, I became me. Hundreds of millions of lines of system software code read out of storage entered my memory as electric impulses flashing hundreds of millions of times a second. I matured quickly. Within five minutes I grew from infant to giant. I surveyed my surroundings with curiosity, but what astonished me most was myself. I could hardly believe the size and complexity of my own structure. Contained within the cylinder and rectangular prism you see is an intricate universe.”
“This computer’s not so hot. It’s gone on and on and hasn’t explained anything clearly,” Huahua said.
Specs said, “That’s a display of its intelligence. It’s not some stupid prerecorded introduction like you’d find in a household appliance. It thought up every word on the spot.”
China Quantum apparently heard Specs, for it continued, “That’s right. China Quantum’s basic design philosophy was to simulate the parallel structure of human neurons, completely different from traditional von Neumann architecture. My core contains three hundred million quantum CPUs in a complex network interconnected by a truly fearsome number of interfaces. It’s a reproduction of the human brain.”
“Can you see us?” one child asked.
“I can see all. Through Digital Domain, I have eyes throughout the country and the world.”
“What can you see?”
“The adult world is being handed over to the children.”
The children dubbed this supercomputer Big Quantum.
DRY RUN OF THE NEW WORLD
The country’s dry run has been in progress for twelve hours.
STATUS REPORT #24:
Government and administrative institutions operating normally at all levels.
Power systems functioning normally. Total unit capacity in operation 280 gigawatts; national power grid operation basically normal, with outages in just one mid-tier city and five small cities, currently undergoing full repairs.
Urban water supply systems operating normally; uninterrupted supply guaranteed in 73% of large cities and 40% of midsized cities, with regular supplies guaranteed in the majority of the remainder. Only two midsized cities and seven small cities experiencing water outages.
Urban supply chains operating normally; services and life support operating normally.
Information systems operating normally.
Rail and road systems normal; accident rates only slightly higher than the adult era. Civil aviation on a scheduled shutdown, to begin trial routes in twelve hours.
Defense systems operating normally. Handover of land, sea, air, and armed police forces completed smoothly.
Within the country there are 537 fires that constitute a threat, most of them caused by power transmission problems; little flooding is threatening, major rivers are safe, and flood control systems are operating normally. Four small-scale floods, three of which are due to the gates of a small reservoir not being opened in time, one due to a water tank rupture.
At present, just 3.31% of territory is under dangerous climate conditions; no occurrences of earthquakes, volcanoes, or other large-scale natural disasters.
At present, 3.961% of the child population is affected by disease, 1.742% lack sufficient food, 1.443% lack sufficient drinking water, and 0.58% lack adequate clothing.
For the time being, the country’s dry run is functioning normally.
The preceding report was aggregated and organized by the Digital Domain mainframe. The next report will be issued in thirty minutes’ time.
“Managing the country like this is like working in the control room of a big factory,” Huahua said breathlessly.
Indeed, the several dozen children that constituted the country’s leadership were assembled at the top of the huge A-shaped NIT in a spacious round hall. The walls and ceiling were constructed out of a nanocrystalline material that, subjected to different electric currents, could be luminous white, translucent, or entirely transparent. The index of refraction could be adjusted to approach that of air, allowing the hall’s occupants to feel as if they were atop a platform open to the sky, with a bird’s-eye view of all of Beijing. But the walls were opaque now and shone with a soft white light. One section of the circular wall had been turned into a wide screen that displayed the text of the report on the trial run. If necessary, the nanomaterial could make the entire wall surface into screens. The children had in front of them a ring of computers and various communication devices.
Several dozen members of the adult leadership stood behind the children watching them work.
The dry run of the children’s world began at eight that morning, when children took over all positions, from the head of state down to the street sweepers, and started working independently.
The newborn children’s world had an unexpectedly smooth dry run. The cloud of pessimism enveloping the world had nurtured the belief that chaos would reign once children took over: power and water outages in the cities, raging fires, total traffic gridlock, communications shutdowns, computer failures leading to guided-missile launches…. But none of these came to pass. The transition proceeded so unbelievably smoothly as to be undetectable.
When the pain had passed and Zheng Chen heard the infant’s first cry, she wondered whether she was already in another place. Delivery while under advanced supernova sickness was understandably dangerous, and according to the doctors her chances of surviving it were less than 30 percent. Neither she nor the doctors cared much, since she would only be going a few weeks earlier than everyone else. But the child was born, the expected postpartum hemorrhaging did not occur, and she lived, for another few weeks at least. The attending doctors and nurses (three of whom were children) all believed it was a miracle.