“So we should make a speech on television!”
She shook her head. “Video and audio of speeches like that have been playing constantly. But they’re useless. Children find emotional support in a different way from adults. What they’re looking for right now is a hug from their departed mother and father, parental love that’s directed at them alone, not spread out among all the children in the country.”
“That’s astute,” Specs said, nodding. “Every lonely and threatened child can only find emotional support when they personally contact the central government and know that we care about them as an individual.”
“Which means that we’ve got to go back to answering phones.”
“How many calls can we take? We should bring in tons of kids and have them contact all the children in the country on behalf of the central government.”
“How many? There are three hundred million kids. We’d never finish.”
Once more they despaired of ever draining the ocean with their teacups. All they could do in the face of such an impossible task was sigh.
Then a kid asked Specs, “Professor, since you know so much, what do you think we should do?”
Specs swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “I can analyze problems, but I can’t find solutions.”
Huahua said abruptly, “Have you thought about Big Quantum?”
Everyone’s eyes brightened. They had been impressed with Big Quantum’s capabilities ever since they first arrived at NIT. It was like a giant reservoir swallowing up the muddy flood of data from Digital Domain, but what issued forth from the spillway was clear statistics and data analytics. It could use Digital Domain to monitor the entire country in enough detail to capture every work team, or even every individual. Without it, the country of children could not function at all.
“That’s right! Let Big Quantum answer the calls for us!” Now that they had this idea, the children turned the big screen back on immediately. The flaming map popped up again, its red areas larger now, shining dull red light throughout the hall.
Huahua asked, “Big Quantum, can you hear us?”
“I can. I’m waiting for your instructions,” said Big Quantum’s voice from somewhere in the hall. It was a dynamic adult male voice, one that gave the children the fantasy that adults were still present somewhere, and they trusted this supercomputer implicitly.
“You’re aware of the situation. Can you answer the calls coming in from across the country?”
“I can. My knowledge banks give me an advantage in handling power outages, fires, and other emergencies. And I can remain on the line until I am no longer needed.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that before? That wasn’t very nice!” Zhang Weidong shouted.
“You never asked,” Big Quantum said evenly.
Huahua said, “Then get to work. Help the children handle their emergencies, but more importantly, tell them that the country has survived. Let them know that we’re here with them, that we care for each and every one of them.”
“Very well.”
“Wait. I’ve got an idea,” Xiaomeng said. “Why do we have to wait for the kids to call in? We can have the computer call up everyone in the country to establish contact, and to provide necessary, individualized assistance. Can you do that, Big Quantum?”
Big Quantum paused briefly before responding: “This will require two hundred million audio processes to run simultaneously. It may result in the loss of some mirror redundancy capabilities.”
“In plain language.”
“That means I need to access a capacity previously reserved for handling emergency failures. Operational reliability will take a hit.”
Huahua said, “That doesn’t matter. The kids will at least know that we’re standing with them.”
Specs said, “I don’t agree. Who can predict what the consequences of turning over the state to a computer might be?”
Huahua said, “It’s easy to predict the consequences if we don’t.”
Specs had no answer for that.
Lin Sha asked, “What voice should we have Big Quantum use?”
“This adult voice, of course.”
“I disagree,” Huahua said. “We need to get the children to trust other children rather than relying on adults who will never come back.”
And so they had Big Quantum cycle through different children’s voices and ultimately decided on a serene boy’s voice.
Then Big Quantum awakened its slumbering power.
SUPERNOVA ERA, HOUR 3
Another huge screen appeared on another white wall displaying another national map, but this one consisted only of glowing lines on a black background sketching out administrative regions. Big Quantum informed the children that the map contained roughly 200 million pixels, each of which represented a terminal or telephone somewhere in the country, and which would light up when a connection was made.
If the process of Big Quantum calling the entire country were represented visually, it would resemble a spectacular explosion. Digital Domain could be imagined as a gigantic network made up of countless information explosions—its servers—triggered by a complex web of fiber and microwave channels, its center dominated by the super bomb of Big Quantum (eight additional units, four of them hot backups, were distributed in other municipalities). When the calls began, the super bomb detonated, and the flood of information radiated outward, crashing into second-tier servers and detonating ten thousand of them before surging onward to trigger the even more numerous third-tier servers. The information explosion cascaded down until the final level of detonation split the wave of explosions into 200 million narrow information channels and at last to 200 million computers and telephones, covering the whole of the country in a huge digital net.
On the map on the screen, black territory lit up like stars that multiplied and clustered, until after just a few minutes the whole country was a contiguous sheet of white light.
At that moment, all the phones in the country started ringing.
In a smallish nursery in urban Beijing, Feng Jing, Yao Pingping, and the four infants under their care (including Ms. Zheng’s child) were in a large room. Ms. Zheng and their parents had gone off into the endless dark night, leaving them as orphans taking care of even smaller orphans. Many years later someone said to them, “You lost both parents overnight. It’s hard to imagine how sad you must have felt.” But in fact what weighed heaviest on the children was not sadness but loneliness and fear. Oh, and anger as well, anger at the departed adults: Had Mom and Dad really gone off without us? Humans are far more able to cope with death than with loneliness. The classroom that served as Feng Jing and Yao Pingping’s nursery seemed huge and empty now that the babies who had been crying during the day had gone silent, as if suffocated by the deathly stillness. To the two girls, the world seemed dead already, with the children in this room the only survivors left on the entire planet.
Outside was dead calm, no person or any other sign of life, as if even the earthworms and ants underground had died off. They kept the TV on and flipped through the channels one by one, but there hadn’t been any picture since the Epoch Clock ran out (they later learned the cable station had crashed). They ached to see something, anything, and even the most annoying old commercial would have moved them to tears. But the screen showed only snow, cold and desolate, like a snapshot of the world that led to blurred vision if stared at too long. And the snow persisted as they looked back at the room and out the window.
Later, when it was light, Feng Jing wanted to have a look around outside, and after a number of false starts, eventually found the courage to open the door. She and Yao Pingping, who was holding Ms. Zheng’s child, had been huddled close together, and when she got up and lost contact with their warm bodies, it was like leaping off a life raft into an endless icy ocean. She reached the door, and when her hand touched the lock she shivered: she heard faint footsteps outside. People didn’t scare her, but these footsteps weren’t from a person! She recoiled and returned to clasp Yao Pingping and the baby tightly. The footsteps grew louder, evidently headed in their direction. Whatever it was reached the door and stopped for a few seconds—God—and what did they hear next? Claws at the door! The two girls screamed at the same time and shook uncontrollably. But then the sound stopped and the footsteps retreated. Later they found out it was a starving dog.