Chapter 1
The Braking Era
I have never seen the night. I have never seen the stars. I have never seen spring, fall or winter. I was born as the Braking Era ended, just as the Earth stopped turning.
It had taken forty-two years to halt the Earth’s rotation, three years longer than the Coalition had planned. My mother told me about the time our family watched the last sunset. The Sun sank very slowly, as if stuck on the horizon. It took three days and three nights to finally set. Of course, afterward there was no more ‘day’ or ‘night’. The Eastern hemisphere was shrouded in perpetual dusk for a long time, maybe a decade or so. The Sun lay just below the horizon, its glow filling half the sky. During that endless sunset, I was born.
Dusk did not mean darkness. The Earth Engines brightly illuminated the whole Northern hemisphere. They had been installed all across Asia and North America – only the solid tectonic plate structure of these two continents could withstand the enormous thrust they exerted. In total, there were twelve thousand engines scattered across the Eurasian and North American plains.
From where I lived, I could see the bright plasma beams of hundreds of engines. Imagine an enormous palace, as big as the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Inside the palace, countless massive columns rise up to the vaulted ceiling, each one blazing with the blue-white light of a fluorescent tube. And you, you are just a microbe on the palace’s floor. That was the world I lived in. Actually, that description was not totally accurate. It was the tangential thrust component generated by the engines that halted the Earth’s rotation. Because of this, the engine jets needed to be set at a very precise angle, causing the massive beams to slant across the sky. It was like the grand palace that we lived in was teetering on the verge of collapse! When visitors from the Southern hemisphere were exposed to the spectacle, many of them suffered panic attacks.
But even more terrifying than the sight of the engines was the scorching heat they produced. Temperatures reached as high as seventy or eighty degrees Celsius, forcing us to don cooling suits before we stepped outside. The heat often raised torrential storms. When a plasma beam pierced the dark clouds, it was a nightmarish scene. The clouds would scatter the beam’s blue-white light, throwing off frenetic, surging rainbow halos. The entire sky glowed as if covered in white-hot lava. My grandfather had grown senile in his old age. One time, tormented by the implacable heat, he was so overjoyed to see a downpour arrive that he stripped to the waist and ran out the door. We were too late to stop him. The raindrops outside had been heated to boiling point by the superheated plasma beams, and his skin was scalded so badly that it sloughed off in large sheets.
To my generation, born in the Northern hemisphere, all of this was perfectly natural, just as the Sun, stars, and Moon had been natural to the people who lived before the Braking Era. We called that period of human history the Ante-solar Era – and what a captivating golden age it had truly been!
When I started primary school, as part of the curriculum, our teachers led our class of thirty children on a trip around the world. By then, Earth had completely stopped turning. Except for maintaining this stationary state, the Earth Engines were only being used to make small adjustments to the planet’s orientation. Because of this, during the three years from when I was three until I turned six, the plasma beams were less intensely luminous than when the engines were operating at full capacity. It was this period of relative inactivity that allowed us to take a trip to gain a better understanding of our world.
First, we visited an Earth Engine up close. The engine was located near Shijiazhuang, by the entrance to the railway tunnel that ran through the Taihang mountains. The great metallic mountain loomed over us, filling half the sky. To the west, the Taihang mountain range seemed like a series of gentle hills. Some children exclaimed that it must be as tall as Mount Everest. Our head teacher was a pretty young woman named Ms Stella. She laughed and told us that the engine was eleven thousand meters tall, two thousand meters taller than Mount Everest.
‘People call it “God’s Blowtorch”,’ she said. We stood in its massive shadow, feeling its tremors shake the earth.
There were two main types of Earth Engines. Larger engines were dubbed ‘Mountains’, while smaller ones were called ‘Peaks’. We ascended North China Mountain 794. It took a lot longer to scale Mountains than Peaks. It was possible to ride a giant elevator straight to the top of a Peak, but the top of a Mountain could only be reached via a long drive along a serpentine road. Our bus joined an endless procession of vehicles creeping up the smooth steel road. To our left, there was only a blank face of azure metal; to our right, a bottomless chasm.
The traffic mostly consisted of massive, fifty-ton dump trucks, laden with rubble from the Taihang mountains. Our bus quickly reached five thousand meters. From that height, the ground below appeared blank and featureless, washed out by the bluish glare of the Earth Engine. Ms Stella instructed us to put on our oxygen masks. As we drew closer to the mouth of the plasma beam, the light and heat increased rapidly. Our masks grew shaded, and the micro-compressors in our cooling suits whirred to life. At six thousand meters, we saw the fuel intake port. Truckload after truckload of rocks tumbled into the dull red glow of the gaping pit, consumed without a sound. I asked Ms Stella how the Earth Engines turned stones into fuel.
‘Heavy element fusion is a difficult field of study, too complex for me to explain it to you at this age,’ she replied. ‘All you need to know is that the Earth Engines are the largest machines ever built by humankind. For instance, North China Mountain 794 – where we are now – exerts fifteen billion tons of thrust upon the earth when operating at full capacity.’
Finally, our bus reached the summit. The mouth of the plasma beam was directly above us. The diameter of the beam was so immense that, when we raised our heads, all we could see was a glowing wall of blue plasma that stretched infinitely into the sky. At that moment, I suddenly recalled a riddle posed to us by our philosophy teacher.
‘You are walking across a plain when you suddenly encounter a wall,’ our haggard teacher had said. ‘The wall is infinitely tall and extends infinitely deep underground. It stretches infinitely to the left and infinitely to the right. What is it?’
A cold shiver washed over me. I recited the riddle to Ms Stella, who sat next to me. She teased it over for a while, but finally shook her head in confusion. I leaned in close and whispered the riddle’s dreadful answer in her ear.
Death.
She stared at me in silence for a few seconds, and then hugged me tightly against her. Resting my head on her shoulder, I gazed into the far distance. Gargantuan metal Peaks studded the hazy earth below, stretching all the way to the horizon. Each Peak spat forth a brilliant jet of plasma, like a tilted cosmic forest, piercing our teetering sky.
Soon after, we arrived at the seashore. We could see the spires of submerged skyscrapers protruding above the waves. As the tide ebbed, frothing seawater gushed from their countless windows, forming cascades of waterfalls. Even before the Braking Era ended, its effects upon the Earth had become horrifyingly apparent. The tides caused by the acceleration of the Earth Engines engulfed two-thirds of the Northern hemisphere’s major cities. Then, the rise in global temperatures melted the polar ice caps, which turned the flooding into a catastrophe that spread to the Southern hemisphere. Thirty years ago, my grandfather witnessed giant hundred-meter waves inundating Shanghai. Even now, when he described the sight, he would stare off into space. In fact, our planet had already changed beyond recognition before it even set out on its voyage. Who knew what trials and tribulations awaited us on our endless travels through outer space?
Copyright © 2013 by ??? (Cixin Liu)
