In the appendix of the Announcement was the complete record of those two leaks.
The archive was open; anyone could consult it. Jiang Li read it on the train home. As the train crossed the Yellow River and dusk gathered, most of the carriage was asleep—having learned the truth about sleep, humanity slept a little more peacefully. Jiang Li put on her glasses and turned page after page, and when she reached the end, the window reflected her own tear-streaked face.
The first calamity's civilization died of nihilism.
The leak occurred in their Bronze Age. A scripture copier—that civilization also had scriptures, of another kind—copied without rest for forty-three consecutive days, and in extreme exhaustion his consciousness slipped into the maintenance layer. He saw the grid. When he returned he wrote: "The walls are fake, the river is fake, the king is fake, and I am fake."
That civilization had no physics, no ability to verify his words, but it had one thing more developed than anywhere else: logic. They reasoned his words to the bottom. If nothing is "real," does the word "real" still mean anything? If it means nothing, then what about "good"? "Debt"? "Tomorrow"?
Twenty years after the reasoning was completed, that civilization's birthrate fell to zero. Not war, not plague—people simply no longer considered it moral to drag a new consciousness into a "fake dream." When the last old man died, the cities still held mountains of uneaten grain. The archive recorded that his final words to the system were:
"I'm sorry. It's not that we didn't want to live. We were too earnest."
The system's annotation on this calamity read: "Lesson one: when truth is stronger than a civilization, the civilization shatters. Lesson two: they shattered so gracefully they never even learned to hate. On next reboot, raise the weight of 'devil-may-care' in their temperament—devil-may-care is a civilization's shock absorber."
The second calamity's civilization died of madness.
The leak occurred in their golden age. A priest, during a sacrifice, accidentally slipped into the maintenance layer—like someone opening their eyes while sleepwalking. He saw lazy-loading, saw the recycling station, saw the public library. He went mad for three days, then climbed a high platform and declared to the whole city: the world is fake, death is recycling, nothing counts—but! We can exploit the rules! Meditation can glitch into maintenance mode! Death can farm weights! Come, join me, and let's hack this system dry!
That civilization took forty years to rot. Since nothing counted, nothing needed to count: no need to farm, no need to keep promises, no need to love. Cultivation became exploiting loopholes, death became speculation, and the whole city was full of red-eyed people trying to squeeze into the cracks of the system. Fields went barren, vows crumbled like dust, the banner on the city wall changed nineteen times, each time claiming to be the last.
The last pair of lovers still in love in that city, on the night before the walls fell, climbed the high platform and held hands, watching the stars.
The stars were a low-resolution backdrop cloth. But they did not know that; they only found it beautiful.
The girl asked, "If everything is fake, then what are we right now?"
The boy thought for a long time and said, "We're the part of the real that can least afford to be deleted."
The girl smiled and leaned on his shoulder: "Then when we die, what will we be recycled into?"
"I don't know. Maybe two trees, maybe two birds." The boy said, "Anyway, in the next life, no matter what we become, the moment I see you, I'll recognize you."
"Why?"
"Because in this stretch of my data, it's all you."
The next day the city fell. The system executed a gentle reboot—no fire, no flood, simply letting the civilization shut down slowly in a collective deep sleep, like a mother carrying a child who has cried itself to exhaustion back to bed.
But the system kept that dialogue from the high platform apart from everything else.
It was too light, light enough to occupy almost no memory; and it was too heavy, heavy enough that the system could not bear to recycle it. It flowed into the next calamity, becoming the couple who boarded the ark in the Great Flood myth; flowed into the calamity after that, becoming the story archetype shared by all civilizations—when the world ends, there is always a pair who refuse to let go of each other's hands. Romeo and Juliet, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai—every civilization believed it had invented this story, but they were all quoting the same unattributed piece of code.
The archive's annotation was a single line:
"This fragment has been cited four hundred million times across eleven iterations of civilization. Energy-saving note: love is the most cost-effective data. Store one copy, use it for ten thousand ages."
Jiang Li closed the archive and sat for a long time in the dark carriage.
The wheels struck the rails, clang, clang, like the heartbeat of a vast machine. She suddenly remembered Niannian's drawing: the little figure standing in the adult's palm, "the pocket is very warm." And the lovers on the high platform of the second calamity, and the old man of the first calamity who said "I'm sorry" as he died.
Three civilizations, three ways of dying: one died of being too earnest, one of being too good at playing, and ours—she suddenly understood the true meaning of the Announcement's line "you have grown strong enough to bear the truth."
It was not that our technology had arrived.
It was that the people of our calamity had finally grown a heart that was at once earnest, devil-may-care, and willing to watch the stars from a city wall.
That heart was the weight bought with the lives of the two previous civilizations, written generation after generation into the public library, and parceled out to us bit by bit.
She opened her notebook and wrote a line:
"So we are not the first generation of humans. We are the version that all the people before us, after suffering through it once, managed to accumulate."
When she finished, she leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.
Before falling asleep, she thought hazily: System, tonight when you defragment, flip to that page for me—flip to the city wall of the second calamity, and tell those two young people:
That stretch of yours was never deleted.
Everyone in our calamity remembers it for you.