Gazing out at the fires burning brightly in the city down below, Huahua said, “Let’s consider that question from a different perspective. Several of us are from the same class and have studied and played together for six years. We know each other’s goals. Do you remember the graduation party just before the supernova? Lü Gang wanted to be a general, and now he’s chief of general staff. Lin Sha wanted to be a doctor, and now she’s health commissioner. Ding Feng wanted to be a diplomat, and now he’s minister of foreign affairs. Chang Yunyun wanted to be a teacher, and she’s minister of education. Someone said that the greatest joy in life is to realize your childhood aspirations, so we must be the happiest people of all time! I can’t remember how many times we’ve fantasized together about the future. We were all thrilled about the wonderful future we imagined, and afterward had to sigh, ‘Why aren’t we grown up yet?’ Now we’re building that imagined world ourselves, and you all want to run away? When that last green star was still burning, I was like you, and thought the adults would manage to survive. But my reaction was entirely different from yours. All I felt was disappointment.”
His last sentence shocked them all, and one kid said, “You’re lying! You wanted the adults to come back just like we did.”
“I’m not lying,” he said firmly.
“…But it’s just you who has that weird feeling.”
“No. I felt it too.”
The voice, not a loud one, came from a place in the hall it took a while to locate: Off in a remote corner, Specs sat cross-legged on the floor. At some point they had all forgotten about him, since he hadn’t joined them in answering the phones. Surprisingly, next to him on the ground were three empty cardboard instant-noodle containers. In a period of unprecedented emotional upheaval, a time that later historians would call the Emotional Singularity, when the child leadership team was bending under the weight of immense pressures, who had any time to eat? They had missed two or three meals already, but there Specs was, nonchalantly munching away. He sat on the floor—to make himself comfortable he had taken a sofa cushion and was using it to lean on the leg of a computer desk, leisurely, holding a cup of instant coffee in one hand (he was one of the few children who enjoyed it).
“Hey man, what do you think you’re doing there?” Huahua shouted at him.
“What’s most needed: thinking.”
“Why aren’t you answering phones?”
“With so many of you answering them, my presence won’t make a difference. If you’re so keen on it, I’d suggest pulling a few hundred kids off the street to help. They won’t be any worse than you are.”
His expression remained emotionless, as if the extraordinary events before his eyes didn’t actually exist. His attitude had an enormous calming effect on the other children. Slowly standing up and coming over to them, he said, “The adults may have made a mistake.”
They stared at him in confusion.
“The children’s world isn’t anything like what they imagined. It’s not even what we imagine.”
Huahua said, “The situation’s urgent, and you’re here sleepwalking.”
Without changing his tone, Specs said, “You’re the ones sleepwalking. Look at what you’re doing. At a time like this, the supreme leaders of the country are instructing fire brigades how to put out fires, urging nurses to feed babies, and even teaching a little girl how to eat. It’s shameful, don’t you think?” Then he settled back down against the computer desk and said no more.
Huahua and Xiaomeng looked at each other, and for a few seconds no one spoke. Then Xiaomeng said, “Specs is right.”
“Yeah. We lost our minds for a moment,” Huahua said with a sigh.
Xiaomeng said, “Turn off the walls,” and the walls quickly returned to an opaque creamy white, instantly cutting them off from the chaos of the outside world. She pointed around them and continued, “Turn off the computers and screens, too. Let’s have three minutes of peace. No talking, and no thinking. For three minutes.”
The screens went blank. The cream walls surrounding them seemed to form a chamber carved from a block of ice, and in this quiet space, the child leaders slowly began to recover their senses.
SUSPENSION
SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 2
When the three minutes were up, a suggestion to turn the computers and screens back on was countered by Huahua: “We’re really pathetic. The situation is nothing worth panicking over. First off, I want us all to realize that the current state of the country is something we should have foreseen long ago.”
Xiaomeng nodded in agreement. “That’s right. The stability of the dry run was the unusual thing. There’s no way children could have done that themselves.”
Huahua said, “And as for handling the current state of emergency, we’re no better at handling the details than the agencies lower down. We need to focus on our own duties: working out the reasons—the deep, underlying reasons—why this happened.”
The children started talking, and before long they began voicing the same question: “It’s weird. The children’s world was running so smoothly, so why did it suddenly plunge into chaos?”
“Suspension,” said Specs, who had come out of his corner to make another cup of instant coffee.
The word meant nothing to the children.
He explained, “We came up with the concept when we were watching Huahua walk on train tracks eight months ago, when we were brought out to have a look at MSG and salt. We wondered how well he’d manage if the tracks were suspended in midair. Before the Epoch Clock ran out, the children’s world was running on tracks firmly grounded in the adult world, and we could ride smoothly along them. But after the clock ran out, the ground fell away, leaving the tracks suspended in midair over a bottomless pit.”
The children murmured their agreement with Specs’s analysis.
Huahua said, “Clearly, that last green star going out triggered the instability. When the children realized there were no adults left, their emotional support vanished all at once.”
Specs nodded. “And we should acknowledge the frightening mass effect of that emotional imbalance. Put together, a hundred minds in that state could outstrip ten thousand in isolation.”
Xiaomeng said, “Mom and Dad have gone and left us here. We all feel that. Here’s my analysis of the state of the country, and you can judge whether or not I’m right. All of the children in the country are looking for emotional support to fill in for the adults. Children in the provincial and metropolitan leadership are no different from the rest, so the midlevel leadership is paralyzed. That means that the wave of panic sweeping the country is crashing straight into us without any buffer.”
“Then our next step is to restore the capabilities of the intermediate leadership,” a child said.
Xiaomeng shook her head. “That’s impossible in the short term, since we’re already in an emergency. What we’ve got to do now is find a new emotional support for the children. That way, leadership at all levels will recover naturally.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when we were handling fires and other emergencies just now, our solutions were no better, and were sometimes worse, than what the children on the scene had. But they calmed down and got the situation under control as soon as they received our reply.”
“How do you know?”
Lü Gang said, “We were all answering calls, but only Xiaomeng followed up afterward. From time to time she would ask how the situation was progressing. She pays attention to details.”
“And so,” Xiaomeng went on, “what the children need from us is a new emotional support.”