When the lightning had stopped, the children ran out of the classroom, where they found themselves in a phosphorescent world. Everything beneath the night sky, the trees, the buildings, the ground, all glowed blue-green, as if the ground and everything on it had been transformed into translucent jade and a green moonlike source deep beneath the ground was flooding light through everything. Green-lit clouds hung in the air as flocks of startled birds sped by like glowing fairies. Most frightening to the children was that they were phosphorescent, too, like images from a photo negative, or a group of ghosts.
“Like I said,” said Specs, “anything can happen.”
The classroom lights turned back on, as did the lights of the city, and the children realized that there had been a blackout. The glow faded as the lights came on, and they initially thought the world had returned to normal. But they soon found to their shock that the episode was not over.
A red light emerged in the northeast, and before long clouds glowing dark red rose in that part of the sky, as if heralding the dawn.
“It’s daybreak for real this time!”
“Idiot! It’s not even eleven!”
The red clouds marched across half the sky, at which point the children realized that they were glowing with their own light. When they were directly overhead, the children could see they were composed of huge bands of light, like strips of slowly twisting red drapes hanging from the sky itself.
“Northern lights!” someone shouted.
The aurora soon covered the whole sky, and for the next week, night skies across the whole world danced with red bands of light.
When the auroras disappeared for good a week later and the glittering stars returned, one final, glorious movement of the supernova’s symphony was left: A shining nebula appeared at the very spot where the Dead Star had been just days before. The explosion’s dust cloud was excited by the high-energy pulse of the star’s remains and emitted synchronized radiation in the visible spectrum for humanity to see. The nebula grew until it was roughly the size of two full moons in the sky. This rosette-shaped radiant body, later given the name “Rose Nebula,” emitted a strange, harsh blue light into the heavens that shone over the earth with a moonlight-like silver, illuminating every detail on the ground with the brightness of a full moon, washing out the glow of the cities below.
The Rose Nebula would shine over human history until the day the inheritors of the dinosaurs’ rule over the planet were wiped out, or were reborn.
2 THE SELECTION
A WORLD IN A VALLEY
The Dead Star was unquestionably a major event in human history. The earliest recorded supernova was on an oracle bone inscription from 1300 BCE; the most recent from 1987, a supernova outside the galaxy in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud, at a distance of roughly 170,000 light-years from us. In astronomical terms, it was imprecise to call this latest supernova “neighboring”; it was practically on top of us.
Still, the world’s fascination endured for just a fortnight. As science was just beginning its investigation, and with the worlds of philosophy and the arts well below a critical mass of inspiration, ordinary people had already turned back to their ordinary lives. Their interest in the supernova was limited to how large the Rose Nebula might grow and how its shape might change, but this attention was mostly casual in nature.
Two of the most important discoveries, as far as humanity was concerned, went practically unnoticed.
In an abandoned mine shaft in South America, an enormous cistern holding more than ten thousand tons of still water was monitored day and night by a host of precise sensors, part of humanity’s neutrino-detection effort. The neutrinos, after penetrating five hundred meters of rock, would cause minute flashes in the cistern water, detectable only by the most sensitive of instruments. On duty in the mine that day were Anderson, a physicist, and Nord, an engineer. Bored out of his mind, Nord was counting the water stains that glittered under the dim lights on the rock walls and breathing in the dank subterranean air, imagining he was in a tomb.
He took a bottle of whiskey out of a drawer as Anderson extended a glass. The physicist used to hate drinking on duty and had once fired an engineer for it, but now was past caring. During their five years half a kilometer beneath the surface, not a single flash had made itself known, and they had lost all faith. But now the flash buzzer went off, heavenly music to their ears after the five-year wait.
The whiskey bottle fell to the ground and shattered as they threw themselves over to the monitor. It was totally black. They gaped at it for several seconds, and then the engineer recovered enough to race out of the control room to the side of the cistern, which resembled a tall, windowless building. Peering through a small porthole, he saw with his own eyes the ghostly blue spark in the water, so powerful it had oversaturated the sensitive instruments, which was why nothing was visible onscreen. The two men returned to the control room, where Anderson bent over another instrument for a closer inspection.
“Neutrinos?” the engineer asked.
Anderson shook his head. “The particle’s got obvious mass.”
“There’s no way it would make it here. It would stop after interacting with the rock.”
“It did interact. We detected its secondary radiation.”
“Are you insane?” Nord shouted straight at Anderson. “How powerful would it need to be to produce secondary radiation through five hundred meters of rock?”
At the Stanford University Medical Center, hematologist Grant arrived at the lab to pick up the test results for two hundred samples he had submitted the previous day. Handing Grant a stack of forms, the lab chief said, “I didn’t know you had so many beds.”
“What do you mean?”
The chief pointed at the forms. “Where’d you come across all those poor bastards? Chernobyl?”
Grant inspected a few pages, and went into a rage. “Did you screw this up again! Aiming to get fired? These were control samples from normal people, for a statistical study!”
The chief stared at Grant for a moment, his eyes betraying a growing terror that made Grant’s skin crawl. Then he seized Grant and dragged him back into the lab.
“What are you doing! You imbecile!” Grant protested.
“Draw blood! I’ll do mine. And you all!” he shouted to the technicians. “Blood samples from everyone!”
Two days before school restarted after the summer holiday, halfway through a faculty meeting, the principal was summoned away for a phone call. He returned wearing a grave expression, motioned to Zheng Chen, and the two of them exited the conference room as the other faculty looked on in shock.
“Xiao Zheng,” the principal said, “gather your class at once.”
“Why? Classes haven’t even started yet.”
“Your graduating class, I mean.”
“That’s even harder. They’re split up among five different high schools, and I don’t know if they’ve even started class. Besides, how are we still involved with them?”
“The registration office will assist you. The director of education called in person.”
“Did Director Feng say what to do after I’ve gotten them together?”