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Four years after entering Red Coast Base, Ye and Yang married. Yang truly loved her. For love, he gave up his future.

The fiercest stage of the Cultural Revolution was over, and the political climate had grown somewhat milder. Yang wasn’t persecuted, exactly, for his marriage. However, because he married a woman who had been deemed to be a counter-revolutionary, he was viewed as politically immature and lost his position as chief engineer. The only reason that he and his wife were allowed to stay on the base as ordinary technicians was because the base could not do without their technical skills.

Ye accepted Yang’s proposal mainly out of gratitude. If he hadn’t brought her into this safe haven in her most perilous moment, she would probably no longer be alive. Yang was a talented man, cultured and with good taste. She didn’t find him unpleasant, but her heart was like ashes from which the flame of love could no longer be lit.

As she pondered human nature, Ye was faced with an ultimate loss of purpose and sank into another spiritual crisis. She had once been an idealist who needed to give all her talent to a great goal, but now she realized that all that she had done was meaningless, and the future could not have any meaningful pursuits, either. As this mental state persisted, she gradually felt more and more alienated from the world. She didn’t belong. The sense of wandering in the spiritual wilderness tormented her. After she made a home with Yang, her soul became homeless.

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

On this day, however, Ye saw something odd when she glanced at the waveform display. Even experts had a hard time telling with the naked eye whether a waveform carried information. But Ye was so familiar with the noise of the universe that she could tell that the wave that now moved in front of her eyes had something extra. The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul. She was certain that the radio signal before her had been modulated by intelligence.

She rushed to another terminal and checked the computer’s rating of the signal’s recognizability: AAAAA. Before this, no radio signal received by Red Coast ever garnered a recognizability rating above C. An A rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of AAAAA was a special, extreme case: It meant the received transmission used the exact same coding language as Red Coast’s own outbound transmission.

Ye turned on the Red Coast deciphering system. The software attempted to decipher any signal whose recognizability rating was above B. During the entire time that the Red Coast Project had been running, it had never been invoked even once in real use. Based on test data, deciphering a transmission suspected of being a message might require a few days or even a few months of computing time, and the result would be failure more than half the time. But this time, as soon as the file containing the original transmission was submitted, the display showed that the deciphering was complete.

Ye opened the resulting document, and, for the first time, a human read a message from another world.

The content was not what anyone had imagined. It was a warning repeated three times.

Do not answer!

Do not answer!!

Do not answer!!!

Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, Ye deciphered a second message.

This world has received your message.

I am a pacifist in this world. It is the luck of your civilization that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!

There are tens of millions of stars in your direction. As long as you do not answer, this world will not be able to ascertain the source of your transmission.

But if you do answer, the source will be located right away. Your planet will be invaded. Your world will be conquered!

Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!

As she read the flashing green text on the display, Ye was no longer capable of thinking clearly. Her mind, inhibited by shock and excitement, could only understand this: No more than nine years had passed since the time she had sent the message to the sun. Then the source of this transmission must be around four light-years away. It could only have come from the closest extra-solar stellar system: Alpha Centauri.[34]

The universe was not desolate. The universe was not empty. The universe was full of life! Humankind had cast their gaze to the end of the universe, but they had no idea that intelligent life already existed around the stars closest to them!

Ye stared at the waveform display: The signal continued to stream from the universe into the Red Coast antenna. She opened up another interface and began real-time deciphering. The messages began to show up immediately on the screen.

During the next four hours, Ye learned of the existence of Trisolaris, learned of the civilization that had been reborn again and again, and learned of their plan to migrate to the stars.

At four in the morning, the transmission from Alpha Centauri ended. The deciphering system continued to run uselessly and emitted an unceasing string of failure codes. The Red Coast monitoring system was once again only hearing the noise of the universe.

But Ye was certain that what she had just experienced was not a dream.

The sun really was an amplifying antenna. But why had her experiment eight years ago not received any echoes? Why had the waveforms of Jupiter’s radio outbursts not matched the later radiation from the sun? Later, Ye came up with many reasons. It was possible that the base communication office couldn’t receive radio waves at that frequency, or maybe the office did receive the echo but it sounded like noise and so the operator thought it was nothing. As for the waveforms, it was possible that when the sun amplified the radio waves, it also added another wave to it. It would likely be a periodic wave that could be easily filtered out by the alien deciphering system, but to her unaided eye, the waveform from Jupiter and from the sun would appear very different. Years later, after Ye had left Red Coast, she would manage to confirm her last guess: The sun had added a sine wave.

She looked around alertly. There were three others in the main computer room. Two of the three were chatting in a corner, while the last was napping before a terminal. In the data analysis section of the monitoring system, only the two terminals in front of her could view the recognizability rating of a signal and access the deciphering system.

Maintaining her composure, she worked quickly and moved all of the received messages to a multiply-encrypted, invisible subdirectory. Then she copied over a segment of noise received a year ago as a substitute for the transmission received during the last five hours.

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Translator’s Note: Alpha Centauri, though appearing to the naked eye as a single star, is actually a double-star system (Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B). A third star, called Proxima Centauri and invisible to the naked eye, is probably gravitationally associated with the double-star system. The Chinese name for the objects () makes it clear that the “star” is really a system of three stars.