But now you have opened it.
Opening the letter means that your world is entirely beyond our imagining. Everything we want to say no longer has any meaning, apart from one thing:
The letter closed with the former president’s signature.
The child leaders focused their attention on Hu Bing, who gave a formal salute, and said, “The SOT will now conduct the handover. One Dongfeng 101 ICBM, with a maximum range of twenty-five thousand kilometers, carrying one thermonuclear warhead with a yield of four megatons.”
Lü Gang stared at them. “Where is it?” he asked.
“We don’t know. And we don’t need to,” she said. Then another senior colonel on the SOT set a laptop on the table and opened it. It was already running, and the screen displayed a world map. “Any location on this map can be enlarged for more detail, to a maximum 1:100,000 scale. Double-click on the strike target and the wireless modem will transmit a signal through via a satellite link to the destination, and the missile will fire automatically.”
The children crowded round to stroke the computer, many of them with tears in their eyes, as if they were touching the adults’ warm hands reaching out to them from the beyond.
THE CE MINE
The supernova did not bring massive changes to every part of the world. In a small village in the mountains of southwestern China, for example, life hardly changed at all. Sure, the adults were gone, but there weren’t all that many in the Common Era anyway, since they were all working far from home. The farm work the children did now wasn’t all that much heavier than what they were used to. Their day-to-day lives were the same as before, going to work at sunrise and resting at sunset, although they were even more unaware about the outside world now than they had been in the adults’ time.
But for a period before the adults died, it seemed as if great changes were coming to their lives. A highway was put in past the village into the mountains leading to a valley sealed behind barbed wire. Every day, large trucks in great numbers would go in fully loaded and return empty. Their contents were covered in green canvas tarps, or packed into big boxes, containing who knows what, and if all of it was piled together it would probably have been as high as the hill behind the village.
Day and night the unbroken stream of trucks traveled the highway, going in full and coming back empty. There was also the occasional plane with blades like electric fans that flew into the valley dangling objects beneath it that weren’t there when it flew out again. This went on for about half a year before things went quiet again. Bulldozers tore up the highway, and the village children and the critically ill adults had to wonder: Why didn’t they just leave the highway alone rather than expending so much effort to destroy it? It wasn’t long before the grass grew over the plowed-under right-of-way and it was more or less reabsorbed by the surrounding hillsides. The barbed wire around the valley was torn down, too, and the children were once again able to hunt and cut firewood. When they reached the valley they found that nothing had changed. The forest was the same old forest, and the grass was the same old grass. They had no idea why a thousand outsiders, in military uniforms and plain clothes, had spent the last half year messing around here, much less where all the cargo on the endless river of vehicles had gone. It all seemed like a dream now, and gradually it was forgotten.
They had no way of knowing that beneath the mountain valley was buried a sleeping sun.
Historians called it the Common Era Mine. The ICBM was referred to in this way for two reasons. First, because it occupied the world’s deepest missile silo. The 150-meter shaft was covered over by a further twenty meters of earth, making it undiscoverable even during substantial excavations in the mountain valley. Before launch, directional blasting would blow apart the earthen cover and expose the shaft’s mouth. Second, because it waited unattended for the trigger signal, like a mega-landmine buried inside the country awaiting its target’s approach. The CE Mine stood ninety meters tall, and if set outside would have risen like a metallic spire. Now it was in a deep sleep in the silo, with just a clock and a receiving unit operating. Listening silently on its locked-in frequency, the unit no doubt received all kinds of noise from the outside world, but it was waiting for a long string of digits, a prime so large that it would take the fastest computer in the world until the end of time to match it by brute force. And there was only one other copy of this number in existence, saved on the five observers’ laptop computer. When the timer ticked up to 315,360,000 seconds, that is, ten years after it was started, the CE Mine would wake up to the end of its life, switch on its systems, and fly out of the silo through the atmosphere to an orbit five thousand kilometers above the Earth, where it would self-destruct, leaving a gleaming star visible even in daylight for ten seconds or more.
But when the counter had reached just 23,500,817 seconds, the unit received that huge prime, and after it two other numbers precise to the third decimal place. A simple program in the receiver checked the two numbers; if the first was outside the 0–180 range, or the second outside 0–80, nothing would happen, and the unit would continue listening. But this time, the two numbers, while close to the boundary, were still within their respective ranges, which was enough; the program required nothing further. As dawn approached, the mountains of the southwest still slumbered and the valley was cloaked in a light mist, but the CE Mine awakened its sleeping power.
The warmth of electric current coursed through its enormous body. The first thing it did upon waking was extract the two coordinate values from the receiver and put them into the target database, which immediately added a point to the 1:100,000 scale map of the Earth. In a flash the central computer generated flight path parameters, and, learning from the target database that the target was located on a level plain, set the warhead for airburst at an elevation of two thousand meters. Were it conscious, it would have noticed something strange, since in the countless simulated launches run after its installation to test the reliability of the system, the continent in which this target area was located was the only one it had never tested. But this didn’t matter. Everything proceeded according to the program. In its electronic mind, the world was exceedingly simple; all that mattered was the target far off on the Antarctic continent. The rest of the world was just coordinates describing the target point, a point flashing on the very top of the Earth’s transparent spherical coordinate system, luring it to the completion of its exceedingly simple mission.
The CE Mine switched on the fuel tank heating system. Like most ICBMs, it was propelled by liquid fuel, but for the purposes of long-term storage, the propellant was a solid-liquid conversion fuel ordinarily found in a gel-like state and needed to be melted before firing.
The layer of earth atop the silo was blasted away, exposing the CE Mine to the gaze of the dawn sky.
The deep boom of the explosion was heard by a few of the lighter sleepers in the village, who could tell it came from the direction of the valley, but they thought it was only distant thunder and ignored it.
The next sound that came to the village was enough to keep them from going back to sleep, and it startled even more children awake. This time it was a low rumble, as if some gigantic beast was rousing itself deep within the earth, or a faraway flood was surging in their direction, threatening to swallow up the whole world. The paper of their lattice windows trembled. The sound increased in volume and shifted from a deep rumble to a high-pitched roar that shook the tile-roof houses.