“I didn’t call you up here for anything important. I just wanted to tell you that today is my birthday.”
Taken by surprise, the guard was momentarily lost for words.
The Senior Official smiled indulgently. “Send my regards to the ranks. You may go.” The guard saluted, but just as he turned to leave, the Senior Official seemed to think of something. “Oh, leave the gun behind.”
The guard hesitated, but pulled out his handgun. He walked over and carefully set it on one end of the broad office desk, before saluting again and leaving.
The Senior Official picked up the gun, detached the magazine, and took out the bullets, one by one, until there was only the last. Then he pushed the magazine back in. The next person to handle this gun could be his secretary, or the janitor who came in at night. An empty gun was always safer.
He put down the gun, then stood the removed bullets on the table in a circle, like the candles on a birthday cake. After that he strode to the window, looking across the city to the sun on the verge of setting. Behind the outer city’s industrial air pollution, it appeared as a deep red disk. He thought it looked like a mirror.
The last thing he did was to take the small “Serve the People” pin from his lapel and set it on the flag stand on the desk, beneath the miniature flags of China and the CCP.
Then he sat at his desk, calmly awaiting the last ray of the setting sun.
THE FUTURE
That night, Song Cheng entered the main computer room of the Center for Meteorological Modeling. He found Bai Bing alone, looking quietly at the screen of the booting superstring computer.
Song Cheng came over and patted his shoulder. “Hey, Bai, I’ve already notified your manager. A special car will arrive shortly to take you to Beijing. You’ll give the superstring computer to a central official. Some other experts in the field might listen to your report too. With such an extraordinary technology, it won’t be easy to get people to understand and believe it all. You’ll have to be patient when you explain and give the demonstrations… Bai Bing, what’s wrong?”
Bai Bing remained quiet, not turning from his seat. In the mirrored universe on the screen, the Earth floated suspended in space. The ice caps had altered in shape, and the ocean was a grayer shade of blue, but the changes weren’t obvious. Song Cheng didn’t notice them.
“He was right,” Bai Bing said.
“What?”
“The Senior Official was right.” Bai Bing turned slowly toward Song Cheng. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Did you spend an entire day and night coming up with that conclusion?”
“No, I got the future-time recursion to work.”
“You mean… the digital mirror can simulate the future now?”
Bai Bing nodded listlessly. “Just the very distant future. I thought of a completely new algorithm last night. It avoids the relatively near future, which allows it to sidestep the disruption in the causal chain resulting from knowledge of the future changing the present. I jumped the mirror directly into the far future.”
“How far?”
“Thirty-five thousand years later.”
“What’s society like, then?” Song Cheng asked cautiously. “Is the mirror having its effect?”
Bai Bing shook his head. “The digital mirror won’t exist by that time. Society won’t either. Human civilization already disappeared.”
Song Cheng was speechless.
On the screen, the viewing angle descended rapidly, coming to a stop above a city surrounded by desert.
“This is our city. It’s empty, already dead for two thousand years.”
The first impression the dead city gave was of a world of squares. All the buildings were perfect cubes, arrayed in neat columns and rows to form a perfectly square city. Only the clouds of sandy dust that rose at times in the square grid streets prevented one from mistaking the city for an abstract geometrical figure in a textbook.
Bai Bing maneuvered the viewing angle to enter a room in one of the cube-shaped edifices. Everything in it had been buried by countless years of sand and dust. On the side with the window, the accumulated sand rose in a slope, already high enough to touch the windowsill. The surface of the sand bulged in places, perhaps indicating buried appliances and furniture. A few structures like dead branches extended from one corner; that was a metal coatrack, now mostly rust. Bai Bing copied part of the view and pasted it into another program, where he processed away the thick layer of sand on top, revealing a television and refrigerator rusted down to the bare frames, as well as a writing desk. A picture frame, long fallen over, lay on the desk. Bai Bing adjusted the viewing angle and zoomed in so that the small photo in the frame filled the screen.
It was a family portrait of three, but the three people in the photo were practically identical in appearance and dress. One could guess their gender only by the length of hair, and age only by height. They wore matching outfits similar to Mao suits, orderly and stiff, buttoned to the collar. When Song Cheng looked closer, he found that their features still displayed some variation. The effect of indistinguishability had come from their identical expressions, a sort of wooden serenity, a sort of dead graveness.
“Everyone in the photos and video fragments I could find had the same expression on their face. I haven’t seen any other emotion, certainly not tears or laughter.”
“How did it end up like this?” Song Cheng asked, horrified. “Can you look through the historical records they left?”
“I did. The course of history after us goes something like this: The age of the mirror will start in five years. During the first twenty years, digital mirrors will only be used by law enforcement, but they’ll already be substantially affecting human society and causing structural changes. After that, digital mirrors will seep into every corner of life and society. History calls it the beginning of the Mirror Era. For the first five centuries of the new era, human society still gradually develops. The signs of total stagnation first appear in the mid-sixth century ME. Culture stagnates first, because human nature is now as pure as water, and there is nothing left to depict and express. Literature disappears, then all of the humanities. Science and technology will grind to a standstill after them. The stagnation of progress lasts thirty thousand years. History calls that protracted period the Middle Age of Light.”
“What happens after?”
“The rest is straightforward. Earth runs out of resources, and all the arable land is lost to desertification. Meanwhile, humanity still doesn’t have the technology to colonize space, or the power to excavate new resources. In those five thousand years, everything slowly winds down…. In the era I showed you, there are still people living on all the continents, but there’s really not much to see.”
“Ah…” The sound Song Cheng made resembled the Senior Official’s slow sigh. A long time passed before his shaking voice could ask, “Then… what do we do? Do we destroy the digital mirror right now?”
Bai Bing took out two cigarettes, handing one to Song Cheng. He lit his own and drew deeply, blowing the smoke at the three dead faces on the screen. “I’m definitely destroying the digital mirror. I only kept it around until now so you can see. But nothing we do now matters. That’s one bit of consolation: everything that happens afterward has nothing to do with us.”
“Someone else created a digital mirror too?”
“The theory and technology for it are both out there, and according to superstring theory, the number of viable initialization parameter sets is enormous, but still finite. If you keep going down the list, you’ll eventually run into that one set…. More than thirty thousand years from now, till the last days of civilization, humanity will still be thanking and worshiping a guy named Nick Kristoff.”