The floor below was another grassy meadow, but in place of the fountain there was a clear brook, with the children’s homes distributed along its banks. They went into a few of them, and as before each one was different.
The scene changed dramatically on the next floor, a serene snowscape that shone faintly blue in the eternal twilight, and snowflakes drifted downward in an uninterrupted stream, landing in thick white blankets on the roofs of the children’s houses. There were snowmen in front of some of them. Evidently the children on this floor loved the winter.
One floor down was a forest with houses built in clearings. A thin morning fog was pierced by shafts of light from the sun rising beyond the trees. Birdcalls rang out at times from within the forest.
They descended more than twenty floors, each of them its own unique world. In one, it never stopped raining; another was a desert of golden sand; one was even a miniature ocean, with children living in boats drifting about on the surface.
“How did you manage to make all these?” Specs asked.
Big Quantum replied, “This was produced using one of the virtual country’s gaming programs, an old city simulator. The virtual country uses plug-ins provided by a component library to build the virtual world, and it can create virtual images on its own.”
They looked carefully about them, at every blade of grass and every pebble, all of them true to life. “An immense amount of work went into this building,” Huahua exclaimed.
Virtual Citizen 1 replied, “Of course. More than eighty million children had a hand in its construction, and more than a hundred million designed their own homes.”
Led by Big Quantum, the children entered a streamlined, transparent elevator that protruded from the side of the building. From within they could see the glittering stars and the Earth below.
Xiaomeng said, “You’re not really planning on building a building like this in the real world, are you?”
Virtual Citizen 1 said loudly, “Of course we are. Why else would we have drafted these plans? Everything you see down there on the ground we want built for real!”
Huahua said, “Sucks if you have to go to the roof, and have to take a twenty-five-thousand-kilometer elevator ride.”
“That’s no problem. All the elevators in this building are little rockets, and are faster than the satellite boosters of the adults’ era. Take a look!”
Just then an elevator car spurting flames rocketed past them at astonishing speed, and just as it was about to reach the roof, the flames at the bottom of the streamlined car vanished, and reappeared out of the top to slow it down. Virtual Citizen 1 explained, “These elevators can reach speeds of sixty thousand kph, making the journey up from the ground in a little over twenty minutes.”
Specs snorted. “Judging from the deceleration we just saw, I’m afraid the passengers were smashed to a pulp.”
Virtual Citizen 1 made no reply, evidently caring not a whit for such a minor problem. Then the top of their car spurted flame and they began descending with terrifying speed. They felt the speed for the first few seconds, but then as the wall of the building blurred into one smooth continuous track, they seemed almost motionless, apart from the floor indicator that ticked backward rapidly in the thousands place. There was no sense of downward acceleration; rather, they stood firmly on the floor of the elevator, as if the VR program had overlooked this particular level of reality. But one thing it did get right: Despite being in space, they were not weightless, since weightlessness in orbiting objects is due to their motion rather than their height; even at this height, Earth’s gravitational attraction remained strong.
Huahua said, “Set aside the building’s feasibility for the moment. What’s the point of it? Why do all kids in the country have to live in one building?”
Virtual Citizen 1 said, “To leave all the other places for playing in!”
Many years later, historians found profound significance in the notion of the supertower, tracing it to the loneliness common to every child’s heart when the Epoch Clock ran out.
“The country is enormous. That’s not enough for you to play in?” Xiaomeng asked.
“As you’ll find out shortly, it’s not!”
“Still, the building’s actually pretty cool,” Huahua said with feeling.
“It’s even cooler than this down there!”
The rocket elevator continued to plummet. Eventually the arc of the Earth’s edge wasn’t so pronounced, and the ground below them became more detailed.
Xiaomeng looked from the top of the building to the bottom, both ends too far to see, and exclaimed, “The height of the building is twice the diameter of the Earth!”
Specs nodded. “It’s like a long strand of Earth hair.”
Huahua said, “And think about how it’ll pass from the dark side to the sunward side, and how the sun will light up its enormous height. What a magnificent sight!”
The elevator’s rockets switched from top to bottom, and they began to decelerate. Soon they could make out the separations between building floors, and just a few seconds later the elevator came to a halt, the VR program once again ignoring the fact that the force of such a quick deceleration would crush the elevator’s passengers into meat paste. The children could see that the elevator was still in space, but Virtual Citizen 1 said, “Our present position is on the two hundred and forty thousandth floor of the building, at a height of two thousand kilometers. We won’t take the elevator the rest of the way but will use a different method of descent. Look down, what do you see?”
They looked out from the elevator and saw a long line rising from the Earth, its terminus nearly invisible because it was so thin. As it rose, it traced two large loops and a range of curves and bends, as if some naughty child had scribbled across a photograph of the Earth. The line extended toward the building and joined it just below their elevator. Close up they could see it was a narrow train track.
Virtual Citizen 1 asked, “Can you guess what that is?”
Huahua said, “It looks like a giant picked up one end of the railroad from Beijing to Shanghai and attached it here.”
Virtual Citizen 1 laughed. “What a description! You must be a writer. But this track is much longer than that. It’s more than four thousand kilometers long. It’s a roller coaster we’re planning to build.”
A roller coaster? The children looked in amazement at the long track and its two huge loops glittering attractively in the sunlight.
“You mean it goes all the way to the ground?”
“That’s right. We’re going to take it down.”
As he spoke, a small boat-shaped vehicle with five two-person seats like the roller coasters they had seen in amusement parks emerged on rails from the building and stopped under the elevator. A hatch opened in the elevator floor right over the car (at this point the VR program ignored the vacuum of space).
As soon as the three of them were in the car, it started sliding smoothly along the rails. It moved slowly at first, but once it was out of the building’s shadow and into the bright sunlight, it reached the first big drop and catapulted them forward. Since their VR helmets only provided visual sensations and they weren’t able to actually feel the acceleration, they missed out on experiencing the first feeling of weightless during their time in space. Supergravity replaced no gravity as the roller coaster entered the first loop, and they saw the stars and the Earth revolve around them. When they leveled out again, Xiaomeng looked back from the rear seat. The loop was well behind them already, and the supertower was now just a thin thread of spider silk that seemed to be dangling from the glittering galaxy itself. The second loop was even bigger than the first one but took the same amount of time to complete; clearly, they were still speeding up. Then came a long descent, not monotonic, of course, since the roller coaster traced a series of troughs and crests, some of them quite lofty. The coaster twisted into a spiral at the end of that stretch, and when the children entered it, they felt like they were at the center of the universe with the Earth and stars spinning endless circles around them.