A man hurried toward them. He was running so fast that, as he knelt down, he couldn’t catch his breath. He was the emperor’s astronomy minister.
“Sire, the calculations were in error. Disaster is about to befall us!”
“What are you babbling about?” Without even waiting for the emperor to speak, Newton kicked the man. “Don’t you see that the sun is rising at the exact moment predicted by our precise calculations?”
“But…” The minister half straightened, one hand pointing at the sun. “How many suns do you see?”
Everyone gazed at the rising sun, confused. “Minister, you received a proper Western education and obtained a doctorate from the University of Cambridge,” Von Neumann said. “You must at least know how to count. Of course there’s only one sun in the sky. And the temperature is very comfortable.”
“No. There are three!” The minister cried, tears flowing from his face. “The other two are behind that one!”
Everyone stared at the sun again, still confused.
“The Imperial Observatory has confirmed that right now we are experiencing the extremely rare phenomenon of a tri-solar syzygy. The three suns are in a straight line, moving around our planet at the same angular speed! Thus, our planet and the three suns are in a straight line with our world at the end!”
“You’re certain that the observation is not in error?” Newton grabbed the collar of the astronomy minister.
“Absolutely certain. The observation was conducted by the Western astronomers of the Imperial Observatory, including Kepler and Herschel. They’re using the largest telescope in the world, imported from Europe.”
Newton let go of the minister and stood up. Wang saw that his face was pale, but his expression was one of pure joy. He clasped his two hands in front of his chest and said to Qin Shi Huang, “Oh Greatest, Most Honorable Emperor, this is the most propitious sign of them all! Now that the three suns are orbiting around our planet, your empire is the center of the universe. This is God’s reward for our efforts. Let me check the calculations one more time. I will prove this!”
While the rest remained stunned, Newton slipped away. Later, others would report that Sir Isaac had stolen a horse and left for parts unknown.
An anxiety-filled moment of silence later, Wang suddenly said, “Your Imperial Majesty, please unsheathe your sword.”
“What do you want?” Qin Shi Huang asked, baffled. But he gestured at the soldier by his side, and the soldier pulled the sword out of its scabbard.
Wang said, “Please try to swing it.”
Qin Shi Huang held the sword and waved it around. His expression turned to one of surprise. “Oh, why is it so light?”
“The game’s V-suit cannot simulate the feeling of diminished gravity. Otherwise we’d feel that we’re much lighter as well.”
“Look! Down there! Look at the horses, and the men!” Someone cried out. Everyone looked down and saw a column of cavalry moving at the foot of the pyramid. All the horses seemed to be floating. Each horse drifted over a long distance before the four hooves struck ground again. They also saw several running men. With each step, the men leapt a dozen meters, falling slowly back to the ground. On top of the pyramid, a soldier tried to jump up, and easily reached the height of three meters.
“What is going on?” Qin Shi Huang looked at the soldier slowly falling back down.
“Sire, the three suns are over our planet in a straight line, so their gravitational forces are added together….” The astronomy minister tried to explain, but discovered that his two feet had already left the ground and he was now horizontal. The others were also floating in the air, leaning at different angles. Like a bunch of men who had fallen into water without knowing how to swim, they clumsily waved their limbs, trying to stabilize themselves but colliding into each other instead.
The ground they had just left now cracked open like a spiderweb. The cracks grew fast, and, accompanied by thunderous crashes and sky-obscuring dust, the pyramid below them broke into its constituent blocks. Through the slowly drifting gigantic blocks, Wang saw the Great Hall below come apart. The large cauldron that had once cooked Fu Xi and the iron stake to which he had once been bound were both adrift.
The sun rose to the middle of the sky. Everything that floated—men, colossal blocks of stone, astronomical instruments, bronze cauldrons—began to rise slowly, then accelerated. Wang glanced at the human-formation computer and saw a nightmarish sight: The thirty million men who had formed the motherboard were floating away from the earth and rising, like a swarm of ants sucked up by a vacuum cleaner. The ground they left behind clearly displayed the marks of the motherboard circuits. The set of intricate, complex markings that could only be taken in from a great height would become an archaeological site that would confuse the next Three Body civilization, in the distant future.
Wang looked up. The sky was obscured by a strangely mottled layer of clouds. The clouds were made of dust, stones, humans, and other odds and ends. The sun sparkled behind them. In the far distance, Wang saw a long range of transparent mountains also rising up. The mountains were crystal clear, and changed shapes as they sparkled—they were formed from the ocean, which was also being attracted into space.
Everything on the surface of the Three Body world rose toward the sun.
Wang looked around and saw Von Neumann and Qin Shi Huang. As he drifted, Von Neumann shouted at Qin Shi Huang, but there was no sound. A small set of subtitles appeared: I figured it out! Electronic elements! We can use electronic elements to make gate circuits and combine them into computers! Such computers will be many times faster and take up much less space. I estimate that a small building will be sufficient…. Your Imperial Majesty, are you listening?
Qin Shi Huang swung his long sword at Von Neumann. The latter kicked at a giant block of stone drifting nearby and dodged out of the way. The long sword struck the stone, causing sparks to fly, and broke itself into two pieces. Right after, the giant block of stone collided with another, with Qin Shi Huang in the middle. Stone chips and flesh and blood scattered everywhere, an appalling sight.
But Wang did not hear the noise made by colliding stones. Around him it was completely silent. Because the atmosphere was gone, there was no more sound. As the bodies drifted, their blood boiled in the vacuum and their inner organs were vomited out, until they turned into strange blobs surrounded by crystalline clouds made from the liquid they exuded. Also, due to the lack of an atmosphere, the sky turned pitch black. Everything that had floated into space from the Three Body world reflected the sunlight and formed a brilliant, starry cloud in space. The cloud then turned into a giant vortex, spiraling toward its final resting place: the sun.
Wang now saw the sun changing shape. He understood that he was actually seeing the other two suns, both peeking out from behind the first sun. From this perspective, the three stacked suns formed a bright eye in the universe.
Against the background of the three suns in syzygy, text appeared:
Civilization Number 184 was destroyed by the stacked gravitational attractions of a tri-solar syzygy. This civilization had advanced to the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.
In this civilization, Newton established nonrelativistic classical mechanics. At the same time, due to the invention of calculus and the Von Neumann architecture computer, the foundation was set for the quantitative mathematical analysis of the motion of three bodies.