The phone rang. Feng Jing dashed to pick it up. A boy’s voice said, “Hello. This is the central government. According to the computer record of your nursery, you’re a two-person team, Feng Jing and Yao Pingping, in charge of four infants.”
It was a heavenly sound. Tears streamed down her face, and she was too choked up to say anything. After a moment, she managed a “Yes.”
“Your area is not currently in danger. According to the most recent records, you have sufficient food and water. Please take care of the four little boys and girls in your charge. I’ll let you know what to do next. If you have any questions or emergencies, please dial 010-8864502517. No need to write that down. Your computer is on, so I’ve put the number up onscreen. If you want someone to talk to, you can call me. Don’t be afraid. The central government is with you at all times.”
Data from across the vast territory converged on Big Quantum in a reverse of the massive series of explosions that had just rocked Digital Domain. More than 200 million snippets of conversation poured into Big Quantum’s memory at light speed, where they were abstracted into long waveforms, silhouettes of mountains whose peaks receded into the distance. These waveforms floated cloud-like over the pattern database, while higher up, the eyes of the pattern-recognition routine were fixed on their mighty procession, searching the ground of the database for analogues to each snippet, abstracting every syllable and word to pour down in a torrential rain into the buffer canyon, and join up into language code segments that were then chopped and kneaded by the teeth of the semantic analyzer to extract their real meaning.
When Big Quantum digested all of the information it had collected, another process started, this one more complicated than can be described in words: An inference engine hurricane swept across the sea of the knowledge database, churning results up from the depths and covering the surface with wave foam. The bits of foam then underwent an inversion of the process, modulated into waveforms that surged out of Big Quantum’s memory and flooded into Digital Domain, at last resolving into the boy’s voice that issued from countless telephones and computer speakers.
In the server room two hundred meters underground, lights on the cylindrical mainframe blinked madly, while the cooling unit in the separate cooled server room ran at maximum, pumping huge amounts of liquid helium into the interior of the enormous computer, to keep the operating temperature of the superconducting quantum circuits as close as possible to absolute zero. Inside the computer, a typhoon of high-frequency electric pulses roared through superconducting chips, tides of zeros and ones flowing, ebbing, and flowing again.
If someone were shrunk several hundred million times and inserted into this world, his first sight would be a scene of astonishing chaos: on the chip, a raging torrent of a hundred million pieces of data flowing at the speed of light forced through a channel just a few electrons wide, converging, diverging, and crisscrossing into more torrents that turned the chip into a vast, intricate spiderweb. Data fragments flew everywhere, and addresses traversed like arrows. A drifting master control program waving a myriad of thin transparent tentacles threw thousands upon thousands of cycling program blocks into the roar of data. In a dead-calm desert of a memory unit, a tiny point suddenly exploded, sending an electrical pulse skyward in an enormous mushroom cloud; a solitary line of code passed through the data storm like lightning in search of a slightly darker-colored raindrop.
But it was also a world of astonishing order: The muddy flood of data, after passing through a fine index filter, turned at once into a lake so clear you could see the bottom; the sorting module flitted through the data blizzard like a ghost, arranging the snowflakes by shape into an endlessly long string a thousandth of a second. In this typhoon of zeros and ones, should a single water molecule be incorrect, should a zero be mistaken for a one, or a one for a zero, the entire world could collapse. A gigantic empire, but one for which the blink of an eye meant a hundred dynasties. But from the outside, it appeared as nothing more than a cylindrical object underneath a transparent cover.
The following are accounts of conversations between two ordinary children and Big Quantum:
I was at home, in an apartment tower on the top floor, the twentieth floor. I remember that when the phone rang I was sitting on the sofa staring at the blank TV screen. I ran over and grabbed the phone, and heard a child’s voice: “Hello. This is the central government. I’m here to help you. Listen: The building you’re in is on fire. The fire has reached the fifth floor.”
I put down the phone and craned my neck out the window. It was already getting light in the east, and the Rose Nebula was half below the horizon in the west, and the blend of its blue light and the sunlight cast an eerie glow over the city. I looked down and saw empty streets. There was no sign of a fire at the base of my building. I pulled back and picked up the phone again, and said there wasn’t any fire.
“No, there’s definitely a fire.”
“How do you know? Where are you?”
“In Beijing. The infrared fire sensor in your building has detected a fire and sent a signal to the central computer of the municipal Public Security Bureau. I’ve already spoken to that computer.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You can go out and feel the elevator door, but don’t open it. It’s dangerous.”
I did as he said. There were no signs of fire out the front door, but as soon as I touched the elevator door I staggered, because it was burning hot! I remember that the fire safety booklet they issued to each household said that when there’s a fire in a tall building, the elevator shaft acts like a chimney to suck the fire upward. I ran back into the room and looked out the window again, and saw yellow smoke just beginning to come out of the bottom floor, and right afterward more smoke from windows on the second and third floors. I rushed back and grabbed the telephone.
“Tell me what to do.”
“The elevator and stairwells are impassable. You’ve got to slide down an escape chute.”
“An escape chute?”
“It’s a long flexible fabric tube strung along a standpipe from the roof of the building to the ground. When a fire breaks out, people in the building can slide down the tube to safety. If you start sliding too fast when you’re inside, you can slow down by grabbing the fabric walls.”
“And our building has one of those installed?”
“Yes. On every floor at the entrance to the stairwell, there’s a small red iron door that looks like it goes to a garbage chute. That’s the entrance to the escape chute.”