“Do you know what else Shen has been up to?” Shi Qiang asked.
“Just the Frontiers of Science. She’s busy with it all the time. Lots of people show up every day.”
“She didn’t ask you to join?”
“Never. She never even talks to me about it. I don’t care, either. That’s just the way I am. I don’t want to care about anything. She knows it, and says I’m an indolent man without any sense of purpose. The organization doesn’t suit me and would interfere with my research.”
“Have you made any progress with the three-body problem?” Wang asked.
Compared with the general state of the field, my progress could be said to be a breakthrough. Some years ago, Richard Montgomery of UCSC and Alain Chenciner of Université Paris Diderot discovered another stable, periodic solution to the three-body problem.[30] Under appropriate initial conditions, the three bodies will chase each other around a fixed figure-eight curve. After that, everyone was keen to find such special stable configurations, and every discovery was greeted with joy. Only three or four such configurations have been found so far.
But my evolutionary algorithm has already discovered more than a hundred stable configurations. Drawings of their orbits would fill a gallery with postmodern art, but that’s not my goal. The real solution to the three-body problem is to build a mathematical model so that, given any initial configuration with known vectors, the model can predict all subsequent motion of the three-body system. This is also what Shen Yufei craves.
But my peaceful life ended yesterday.
“This is the crime you’re reporting?” Shi Qiang asked.
“Yes. A man called yesterday and told me that if I didn’t cease my research, I would be killed.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Phone number?”
“Don’t know. Caller ID showed nothing.”
“Anything related to report?”
“Don’t know.”
Da Shi laughed and tossed his cigarette butt into an ashtray. “You went on and on forever, and in the end all you have to report is one line and a few ‘I don’t know’s?”
“If I hadn’t gone on like that, would you have understood the import of that call? Also, if that were all, I wouldn’t have come here. I’m lazy, remember? But there was another thing: It was the middle of the night—I don’t know if it was today or yesterday—and I was in bed. As I was drifting halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I felt something cold moving on my face. I opened my eyes and saw Shen Yufei, and I almost died of fright.”
“What’s so frightening about seeing your wife in the middle of the night?”
“She stared at me in a way that I had never seen. The light from outside fell on her face, and she looked like a ghost. She held something in her hand: a gun! Moving the barrel over my face, she told me that I had to continue working on the three-body problem. Otherwise she’d kill me.”
“Oh, now this is getting interesting.” Da Shi gave a satisfied nod. He lit another cigarette.
“Interesting? Look, I’ve nowhere to go. That’s why I came to you.”
“Tell us exactly what she said.”
“She said: ‘If you succeed in solving the three-body problem, you will be the savior of the world. If you stop now, you’ll be a sinner. If someone were to save or destroy the human race, then your possible contribution or sin would be exactly twice as much as his.’”
Da Shi blew out a thick cloud of smoke and stared at Wei Cheng until he squirmed. He pulled a notepad out of the mess on his desk and picked up a pen. “You wanted us to take notes, right? Repeat what you just said.”
Wei did.
Wang said, “What she said is indeed strange. What does she mean by exactly twice as much?”
Wei blinked. “This seems pretty serious. When I came, the officer on duty immediately sent me to see you. It looks like you’ve already been paying attention to Shen and me.”
Da Shi nodded. “Let me ask you something else: Do you think the gun your wife held was real?” He saw that Wei didn’t know how to answer. “Could you smell gun oil?”
“Yes, there was definitely an oily smell.”
“Good.” Da Shi, who had been sitting on his desk, jumped off. “Finally we have an opening. Suspected illegal possession of firearms is enough to justify a search. I’ll leave the paperwork until tomorrow, because we have to move right away.”
He turned to Wang. “No rest for the weary. I have to ask you to come and advise me some more.” Then he turned to Xu Bingbing, who’d been silent the whole time. “Bingbing, right now I have only two men on duty, and that’s not enough. I know the Information Security Division isn’t used to fieldwork, but I need you to come along.”
Xu nodded, glad to leave the smoke-filled office.
In addition to Da Shi and Xu, the team for conducting the search consisted of Wang Miao, Wei Cheng, and two other officers from the Criminal Division. The six of them rode through the predawn darkness in two police cars, heading toward Wei’s neighborhood at the edge of the city.
Xu and Wang were in the backseat. As soon as the car started, she whispered to Wang, “Professor Wang, your reputation in Three Body is very high.”
Somebody mentioned Three Body in the real world! Wang was excited, right away feeling close to this young woman in a police uniform. “Do you play?”
“I’m responsible for monitoring and tracking it. An unpleasant task.”
Wang anxiously asked, “Can you tell me its background? I really want to know.”
In the faint light coming through the car window, Wang saw Xu give a mysterious smile. “We want to know as well. But all its servers are outside the country. The system and firewall are very secure and hard to penetrate. We don’t know much, but we can be sure it’s not operated for profit. The software quality is uncommonly high, and the amount of information contained in it even more unusual. It doesn’t even seem like a game.”
“Have there been any…” Wang carefully picked the right words. “… supernatural signs?” Wang’s night had been filled with coincidences: He had been called in to discuss the three-body problem with Wei Cheng immediately after he solved the Three Body game. And now Xu was telling him she was monitoring the game. Something didn’t seem right.
“We don’t think so. Many from all around the world participate in the game’s development. Their collaboration method seems similar to popular open-source practices, like the kind used to make the Linux operating system. But they’re definitely using some very advanced development tools. As for the content of the game, who knows where they’re getting it? It does seem a bit… supernatural, like you said. However, we still believe in Captain Shi’s famous rule: All this must be the work of people. Our tracking efforts are effective, and we’ll have results soon.”
The young woman was not experienced in lying, and her last remark made Wang realize that she was hiding much of the truth from him. “His ‘rule’ is famous now?” Wang looked at Da Shi, who was in the driver’s seat.
When they reached the house, the sun had not yet risen. It was about the same time of night that Wang had seen Shen playing Three Body. A second-story window was lit, but all the other windows were dark.
30