That week, Jiang Li barely slept.
She checked the full-power scan parameters nineteen times. By the seventh check, Luo Jian couldn't help asking, "Professor Jiang, what exactly are you looking for?" Jiang Li stared at the screen and said after a long time, "I'm looking for the seam of a machine." "What machine?" "The one we live inside."
Luo Jian dared not ask further. He later realized that those days Jiang Li was not checking parameters—by the second pass there were no errors to find. She was hesitating. Locked in her drawer was a sketchbook, and in the sketchbook a sentence written in pinyin by a seven-year-old girl. She understood only later that what she had truly been doing that week was weighing a single question again and again:
If the answer really is underneath, can I bear it?
October twenty-third, early morning. Above the desert there were no clouds, and the stars were unnaturally dense, like a backdrop cloth waiting to be punctured.
At three o'clock, the whole facility fell silent. Four hundred meters underground, the temperature of the two vacuum tubes dropped to one billionth of a kelvin, and the laser systems entered battle readiness. At 3:10, Jiang Li made the final manual inspection—it was her habit: the greater the machine's task, the more she insisted on touching the tubes herself, like a mother tucking in a blanket before her child sleeps.
At 3:15, Luo Jian reported: "All systems ready."
Jiang Li watched the clock. The second hand moved tick by tick, and watching it she suddenly remembered the last days before Niannian's death, watching the numbers on the monitor jump tick by tick. Eleven years. She did not know whether she was using this machine to find the bottom of the world, or to find the whereabouts of a seven-year-old girl. Perhaps the two questions had been the same question all along.
At 3:16, she said, "Begin."
"Not waiting any longer?"
"No more waiting," she said. "A tree waits only one winter for its leaves. I have waited long enough."
At 3:17, the machine roared and drove its probe into the deepest layer of spacetime.
What happened next—every person on earth, awake or asleep at the time, remembered where they were.
Beijing time was early morning; Shanghai's Bund still had a few late-night joggers. New York was afternoon; Wall Street traders were watching their screens. London was evening; someone in a pub was watching football. The astronauts on the International Space Station had just finished a spacewalk. Seven billion lit screens around the globe—phones, computers, televisions, car displays, flight-information boards, operating-room monitors, the giant advertising screens atop hundred-meter towers—
went dark at the same instant.
Not a power outage. The electrical grid was perfectly normal. It was the screens themselves that, in the same millisecond, went black in unison.
Four hundred meters underground, emergency lights came on, red, bathing every face as if in blood. Luo Jian was pounding the keyboard, shouting that they were under attack; the security chief was pulling network cables; someone was chanting Amitabha, someone was reciting physical constants. Only Jiang Li stood motionless.
Because she saw the screens lighting up again, one after another.
On each one was the same line of text. Not any known encoding protocol, not any known intrusion method—afterward it was determined that those characters had not passed through any graphics card, had not passed through any operating system; they had simply "appeared" on the display medium, as if the light itself had decided to arrange itself into letters:
"Hello. We are you. Please forgive this belated answer."
Jiang Li replayed that instant countless times afterward. She finally understood that her experiment had not "discovered" anything.
It was the world that had responded to her.
Eleven years of searching, and what she found at the end was not a law of physics but a greeting. Like tapping on a pipe at the bottom of the sea for eleven years, and one day a tap came back from the other side—and it was tapping out her name in Morse code.
She gripped the console and slowly sat down. Luo Jian, terrified, rushed over to steady her, and heard her repeating one sentence. He leaned closer and made out that it was not madness but a line of poetry—someone like her, actually quoting poetry:
"In emptiness, everything fits."
Emptiness really did have room for everything. Room for the stars, room for flesh and blood, room for a mother's eleven-year winter.
And room for the answer.