The kid said, “I’m tired. Just tired. My greatest wish these days is to sleep all the way till doomsday.”
In Shanghai, the child leaders inspected a nursery. In the children’s world, caring for infants was work for society, so nurseries were quite large. Right as the three leaders came in the door, they were stopped by a group of nurses who insisted they spend an hour taking care of babies for themselves. Despite strong protests from their aides and bodyguards, they were essentially held hostage by the growing crowd, who soon numbered more than a thousand, and ultimately had to submit. In a large room they were each put in charge of two babies. Xiaomeng managed the best, keeping her two babies happy and content, but when the hour was up her back ached and her legs were shaky. Huahua and Specs were a wreck. Their four babies kept crying but refused milk and wouldn’t go to sleep. They just wailed like train whistles, loud enough to wake up the babies in the surrounding beds, and soon all twenty-odd babies in the room were fussing and crying. By the end of it, Huahua and Specs felt on the verge of a mental breakdown.
“Now I see how hard a time my mom had with me,” Huahua said to an accompanying reporter.
A nurse sniffed. “Your mom only had the one of you. Each of us has two or three babies to look after! And at night we have class. It’s a huge drag!”
“That’s right. We can’t do this work. Get someone else to do it,” other nurses added.
Their visit to a coal mine in Shanxi, where they watched the whole workflow of a team of child miners, left the deepest impression on the child leaders. The coal cutter broke down as soon as the shift started, and in the dank, claustrophobic darkness of the mine hundreds of meters underground, repairing the huge machine stuck in a seam of waste rock was a nightmarish task that required strength, finesse, and patience.
When they finally got it fixed, a length of conveyor belt snapped off. The miners were blackened head to toe after shoveling coal off the belt, apart from the white of their teeth whenever they opened their mouths. Replacing the belt was an exhausting ordeal, and when it was finished they were pretty much tired out. It was close to the end of the shift, so they only managed to fill one cartload, but then the cart derailed only a little ways down the tracks.
The children struggled for a while with crowbars and jacks but the cart didn’t budge, and in the end they had to remove the coal to rerail the cart, more backbreaking work in air thick with choking dust. Once the cart was righted, they reloaded the coal, which took more energy than unloading it. When they finally came off shift, they lay down on the floor of the changing room, covered in coal dust, too tired even to shower.
“That went well!” said one of the miners. “At least no one got hurt. There are six kinds of things in the mines: coal, rocks, iron, wood, bones, and flesh. Bones and flesh are the softest, and children’s most of all!”
Maintaining normal society in the children’s country required working with the strength and endurance of adults, which was impossibly hard for the vast majority of them. That wasn’t the half of it: children had to be at least eight years old to do typical work, and ten for more complicated tasks, so the working-age population was far smaller, proportionally, than it had previously been, making work far more intense for the children than the adults. Add to that their classes, and you can imagine how tired out they got. Practically all of them had experience of headaches and fatigue, and the overall health of the child population plummeted.
But the young leaders were most worried about the children’s mental state: their fascination with the novelty of their work had long since evaporated, and they had realized that the vast majority of the work was mindlessly dull. Their immature minds had a hard time conceptualizing their lives in a planned, systematic way, and they lacked the motivating presence of a family, which meant they had a hard time grasping their work’s significance.
Without a spiritual support, heavy, tedious work naturally turned into a form of torture. When the leaders inspected a power plant, a child vividly described that emotional state: “See how we have to sit at this control station all day staring at the dials and screens, and making occasional adjustments when the numbers have gone off. I feel nothing about the work anymore. It’s like I’m just a part in a huge machine. What’s the point?”
On the plane back to Beijing, the three leaders looked down at the undulating mountains, lost in thought.
Huahua said, “I don’t know how much longer this will hold up.”
Xiaomeng said, “Life is never easy. Kids are still stuck in an elementary-school mind-set. But they’ll come around eventually.”
Huahua shook his head. “I’m skeptical. The lifestyle the adults set out for us may not be workable. They were thinking about children from their adult perspective, but they didn’t understand what makes kids different.”
Xiaomeng said, “There’s no other way. Think about the MSG and salt. The price of that is hard work.” That vital lesson from the end of the Common Era had made “MSG” and “salt” bywords for economic fundamentals.
Huahua said, “Hard work doesn’t mean painful work, or work without hope or delight. Kids ought to work in their own fashion. Specs had it right. We haven’t uncovered the rules for the children’s world.”
They turned back toward Specs. He had spoken little throughout the entire inspection tour but had watched in silence. He never made public speeches, and when a major company had pressed him to speak during a visit, he had said simply, without expression, “I’m responsible for thinking, not speaking,” which became a popular quotation thereafter. Now he was his typical self, holding a cup of coffee, staring blankly at the clouds and land out the window, perhaps enjoying the scene or perhaps lost in thought.
Huahua called to him, “Hey, professor. You’ve got to give us some opinions.”
“This isn’t the real children’s world,” he said.
Huahua and Xiaomeng stared at him, baffled.
He said, “Think about how big a transformation the supernova brought to humanity? Overnight, only children were left in the world. And that brought about other huge changes. A random example: There are no families in today’s society. In the past, just that one fact would have completely altered the very fabric of society. The Suspension proved that there are so many aspects of the children’s world we’ve never even imagined. But now? It’s like nothing has fundamentally changed from the time of the adults. Society is running along the same track. Don’t you find that odd?”
Xiaomeng said, “So what do you think it ought to be like?”
Specs shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I’m just sure that it shouldn’t be this way. What we see now might really be only the product of inertia from the adults’ society. Deep down, things have got to be accumulating; they just haven’t made themselves known yet. The real children’s world may not have even started.”
Huahua asked, “Do you mean we’re headed for another Suspension?”
Specs shook his head again. “I don’t know.”
Huahua stood up. “We’ve done enough thinking the past few days. Let’s do something different. How about we go to the cockpit and watch them fly the plane?”
“You can’t just keep bothering folks!” Xiaomeng said.
But Huahua insisted. He often went up front during the course of their inspections and had grown friendly with the child pilots. At first he only asked a few questions, but then he began pestering them to let him fly the plane. The pilots staunchly refused, saying he had no license, but this time he made such a fuss that the captain let him have a go. No sooner had he taken the yoke than the Y-20 began careening like a roller coaster, and he had to return the yoke to the captain.