The Three-Body Problem

Their red flags fluttered restlessly around the brigade building like flames yearning for firewood.

The young Red Guard tumbled down along with her flag, her light form descending even more slowly than the piece of red fabric, like a little bird unwilling to leave the sky.

When this physics professor walked onto the stage in front of the crowd, his expression clearly said: Let the cross I bear be even heavier.

Dressed in military uniforms and equipped with bandoliers, they exuded youthful vigor and surrounded Ye Zhetai like four green flames.

In China, any idea that dared to take flight would only crash back to the ground. The gravity of reality is too strong.

“Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?” Ye’s sudden counterattack shocked those leading the struggle session.

The only thing that moved was a thin stream of blood. Like a red snake, it slowly meandered across the stage, reached the edge, and dripped onto a chest below.

She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero.

The rotting leaves made the water appear crimson, like blood.

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair.

As the wind blew past it, the dish emitted a howl that could be heard from far away.

For the first time since the death of her father, she experienced warmth in her heart and allowed herself to relax, momentarily letting down her guard against the world.

Ye Wenjie! Director Zhang’s two black eyes were trained on her like the barrels of two guns. I am warning you: Framing others will only make your problem worse.

For the rest of his life, he never mentioned Ye Wenjie, and we do not know if he ever felt remorse or repented for his actions.

Ye Wenjie couldn’t tell if the contents of the document were true or false, but she was sure that every character and every punctuation mark had the potential to deliver a fatal political blow.

She felt that the entire universe was a huge block of ice, and she was the only spark of life within it.

The flag-bearer kept on changing, but the flag waved ceaselessly, like a perpetual pendulum, counting down the remainder of her short life.

Yang hesitated and finally revealed his real concern: “It’s easy to make ideological mistakes in theory.”

Other than the undiscovered country beyond death from which no one has ever returned, the place she wanted to be the most was this peak, separated from the rest of the world.

One flock of birds flew into the region of air the antenna pointed at, and against the background of the faintly glowing cloud, the birds dropped out of the sky.

She stared at the antenna and thought it looked like an enormous hand stretched open toward the sky, possessing an ethereal strength.

On the faces of everyone around the table, Wang could read one sentiment: We’ve done all we can. Let’s fucking get it over with, already.

If you string it across a road, a passing car would be sliced into two halves like cheese—but what can’t be used for criminal purposes?

The soft glow lit up her supple hair and highlighted her white neck above the collar of her overalls, as though a single flower was blooming in a metal ruin after a violent thunderstorm.

In his imagination, Wang placed the figure that lingered in his mind at the far end of the valley. Surprisingly, it made the entire scene come alive, as though the world in the photograph recognized that tiny figure and responded to it, as though the whole scene existed for her.

All the evidence points to a single conclusion: Physics has never existed, and will never exist.

“If we send him, he’d be a meat dumpling thrown to the dogs.”

The entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age till now, no real crisis has occurred. We’ve been very lucky. But if it’s all luck, then it has to end one day. Let me tell you: It’s ended.

The fourth time, the black ball shot around the room like a frightened sparrow, finally taking refuge in your jacket pocket.

“It means that laws of physics that could be applied anywhere in the universe do not exist, which means that physics … also does not exist.”

The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys.

The numbers arranged themselves vertically to fit along the curve of the tree trunk, allowing the white numbers to show up against the dark coloring of the dead tree like a crawling snake.

He examined the interior with a magnifying glass and checked every dustless component without discovering anything out of place.

Desperate, Wang picked up the pile of film rolls, like a tangled nest of snakes, like a bunch of ropes tied into an impossible knot.

The suit allowed the player to experience the sensations of the game: being struck by a fist, being stabbed by a knife, being burned by flames, and so on.

The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body.

He shut his eyes, and the countdown remained in the darkness of his vision, looking like mercury flowing against a black swan’s feathers.

Wang walked out of the hospital in a daze. The countdown continued to hover in his eyes, and he seemed to be following the numbers, following a ghost that would not leave him.

Engineers rushed around the main reaction chamber like doctors around a critical patient, trying to keep it going for a little longer.

“Three days from now—that’s the fourteenth—between one and five in the morning, the entire universe will flicker for you.”

Wang subconsciously thought of her as the long-obsolete DOS operating system: a blank, black screen, a bare “C:\>” prompt, a blinking cursor.

It is morning. But the sun doesn’t always rise in the morning. That’s what a Chaotic Era is like.

His body turned soft and lost its shape like a melting candle.

King Wen gave Wang a frightened look. “What are you talking about? Three flying stars … pray that such a thing never happens.”

He climbed onto the edge of the cauldron and jumped in, stirring up a cloud of vapor.

The fingers of his two hands began a series of rapid, complex movements, like components of a calculating machine.

Soon, the lake was covered by a layer of man-shaped floating skins, each rapidly absorbing the water and expanding.

The snowflakes turned thin and translucent... Those snowflakes are now composed of solidified oxygen and nitrogen.

The long years had ground away all the hardness and fierceness in their personalities, until all that was left was a gentleness like that of water.

From the depths of his memory arose a tingling sadness, fragile and pure like morning dew, tinged with a rosy hue.

The expression on her face was the same as when she saw a pretty wildflower.

“Do you realize what that would mean? The universe would flicker like a fluorescent tube that’s about to burn out!”

How can we get more attention than China Mobile, China Unicom, China Netcom? Without money, the secrets of the universe are worth shit.

The line’s color became red, like a snake awakening after hibernation, wriggling as its skin refilled with blood.

The more transparent something was, the more mysterious it seemed. The universe itself was transparent; as long as you were sufficiently sharp-eyed, you could see as far as you liked.

The entire sky flickered, as if the universe was but a quivering lamp in the wind.

The domed ceiling was hidden by the flashing red light of the background radiation, and he was an ant crawling through the cracks in the floor.

I’m a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass.

I can sense the plan, a very comprehensive, intricate plan: damage scientific research installations, kill scientists, drive scientists like you crazy and make you commit suicide—but the main goal is to misdirect your thoughts until you’re even more foolish than ordinary people.

When a scientist dies, another will take his place. But if his thoughts are confused, then science is over.

Its head tilted slightly up, as though questioning sky and earth. “That’s Confucius,” Mozi said.

“No, the sun rose that day as well. It rose to the middle of the sky, and then went out.”

These lakes had been covered by dust and had merged into the dun ground, but now they turned into numerous mirrors, as though the earth had opened many eyes.

The glowing horizon arched upward and became a curve that spread from one edge of his visual field to the other.

The surface of the giant sun became a fiery earth, and he felt himself falling toward this brilliant hell.

In his current state, his mental stability depended on two pillars: this old woman, who had weathered so many storms and become as gentle as water, and Shi Qiang, the man who feared nothing because he knew nothing.

Most people did not want to be indispensable, because they understood that in highly classified projects like this, once someone was put into a core technical position, it would be very difficult for him to be transferred out.

Red Coast is a microwave oven, and its heating targets are the enemy’s space vessels.

She was stunned to see programming code scrolling across each of them, and the operators were free to edit and test the code using the keyboard.

Seen through them, the code on the screen became flickering flames. This was the first time she had cried since the death of her father.

However, this choice would extinguish the last ray of hope she had of ever leaving Radar Peak.

It was a fairy tale for the ages, even more incredible than the commissar’s lies.

It’s dangerous if extraterrestrials only hear their voices. We should speak up as well.

This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth!

Someone truly neutral will then be able to comment on whether we’re the heroes or villains of history.

Our call was like the buzzing of a mosquito in the sky. No one could hear it.

In the dead of the night, I could hear in my headphones the lifeless noise of the universe.

The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace.

This is a football game at the scale of the universe. The players are the three suns, and our planet is the football.

On such days, the surface of the planet would turn into a smelting furnace in a second, and the heat would be enough to melt rocks.

The sizzling grease from the dead man inside oozed out on the ground and caught fire, giving the armor a pair of burning wings.

The sky burned, displaying a hellish, maddening beauty.

Any combination of numbers appears to me as a three-dimensional shape. Of course I can’t describe the shapes of numbers, but they really do appear as shapes.

But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements.

I felt like a libertine who has always fluttered carelessly from one woman to another suddenly finding himself in love.

“Buddha, please help my Lord break away from the sea of misery.”

I looked up at it and thought it a silvery, strange eye that gazed down at me, the light suffused with an eerie chill.

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.

They went upstairs and entered the room with a light on, their shoes splashing in a pool of blood.

Every morning when I see the sunrise, it feels like sunset.

“Instead of mathematicians, we’ll use common laborers. But we need many of them, at least thirty million. We’ll do mathematics using human wave tactics.”

“When they marched, he shouted”—here he switched to a Sichuan accent—“STRAW-CLOTH-STRAW-CLOTH.… That’s the kind of soldier we need. Except we need thirty million of them.”

“The three soldiers form a computing component. It’s a type of gate, an AND gate.”

But when a flock of birds wandered above the phalanx, the birds immediately felt the potential for death from below and scattered anxiously in chaos.

Each of them holds a pen and a notepad, and they’re responsible for recording the results of the calculations.

Replace the malfunctioning component and behead all the soldiers who made up that gate.

The Imperial Observatory has confirmed that right now we are experiencing the extremely rare phenomenon of a tri-solar syzygy.

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.

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.

“I find it strange, terrible, but also beautiful. So much information is hidden beneath a simple representation.”

The mirrorlike surface could be deformed into any shape, and they communicated with each other by focusing light with their bodies.

“No matter what the Trisolarans are like, their arrival will be good news for the terminally ill human race.”

But from the perspective of aesthetics, I must be right and the universe must be wrong.

The pendulum line, made of some ultrastrong material, was so thin as to be almost invisible, and the weight seemed to float in the air between the two towers.

“God is a shameless old gambler. He has abandoned us!”

The first sun shook the deepest geological structure of the planet; the second sun tore open a great rift in the planet that went straight to the core; and the third sun ripped the planet into two pieces.

Wang also thought of the pendulum as a gigantic metal fist, swinging eternally against the unfeeling universe, noiselessly shouting out Trisolaran civilization’s indomitable battle cry.

The silence of hundreds of millions created a suffocating sense of strangeness.

The people of Trisolaris mutely gazed as their hope gradually shrunk in the western sky.

The ultimate goal and ideal of the ETO is to lose everything. Everything that now belongs to the human race, including us.

The human race is an evil species. Human civilization has committed unforgivable crimes against the Earth and must be punished.

Before anyone could react, she wrapped one of her slender arms around Pan’s neck, placed her other hand on top of his head, and, by applying her unexpected strength at just the right angle, she twisted Pan’s head 180 degrees with practiced ease.

Thus he could take credit for all of Ye’s research results and papers, and cast himself as an exemplary political officer with both technical acumen and revolutionary zeal.

The times were close, but the solar outages had occurred sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds after the arrival of the Jovian radio outbursts on Earth.

Ye had carefully studied these membranelike boundary surfaces suspended in the high-energy plasma ocean of the sun and discovered them to be full of wonderful properties.

Earth civilization had a way to transmit at the level of a Kardashev Type II civilization.

The Red Coast antenna seemed like a giant sunflower at that moment, slowly turning to follow the descending sun.

Outside the window, the sun’s edge was already approaching the mountains on the horizon, red as blood.

A star-powered radio wave, like a majestic tide, had already crossed the orbit of Jupiter.

The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul.

I am a pacifist in this world. It is the luck of your civilization that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!

The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers.

Since you’ve decided to treat the entire human race as your enemy, there’s no longer anything we wouldn’t do to you.

While she held the destructive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT in her hands, she smiled brightly, as though enjoying applause and praise on a spotlit stage.

“I would never have thought that actual fucking aliens would be involved!”

Even if we assumed the worst and that really did happen, the outer space invaders would surely drown in the ocean of the people’s righteous war!

There would never be another chance. I took out my hacksaw and cut through the rope.

I didn’t care what price had to be paid, either by me or by others. I also knew that the entire human race would pay an unprecedented price for this goal.

The fire of the three suns would torment her and burn her forever. This was punishment for her betrayal, the betrayal that exceeded all others.

Leisurely, they blew smoke out of their mouths, and the smoke, filled with sunlight, gave off a silvery glow much like the fine hairs on their plump limbs.

The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm.

In the frozen tundra of her soul, a tiny, clear lake of meltwater appeared.

In a moment, the deputy minister’s kind smile turned to frost, as though he had impatiently pulled off his mask.

“Then who will repent to us?” the one-armed woman asked.

The small sliver of hope for society that had emerged in her soul had evaporated like a drop of dew in the sun.

There was a slope covered by green forests, as though an old, yellowing canvas had been accidentally blessed with a splash of green paint.

They struggled in the sticky oil, looking like black statues made out of asphalt, only their eyes proving that they were still alive.

The entire forest seemed like a mulberry leaf being devoured by silkworms on all sides.

“The entire human race is the same. As long as civilization continues to develop, the swallows I want to save and all the other swallows will go extinct. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Human civilization is no longer capable of improving by its own strength.”

Human civilization had finally given birth to a strong force of alienation.

Human civilization was like a young, unworldly person walking alone across the desert of the universe, who has found out about the existence of a potential lover.

Most Redemptionists with some in-depth math and physics knowledge had attempted the three-body problem, and even after knowing that the problem was mathematically unsolvable as posed, the effort did not cease, because solving the three-body problem had become a religious ritual of their faith.

I started the fire, but I couldn’t control how it burnt.

Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died.

From the perspective of a more advanced civilization in the universe, bonfires and computers and nanomaterials are not fundamentally different.

“If I tell you more, you really won’t be able to sleep. Forget it. What’s the point of worrying? We should learn to be as philosophical as Wei Cheng and Shi Qiang.”

But if they just emptied a cartridge clip at the server hard drive or other storage media, it would all be over, and doing so would take no more than ten seconds.

If you’re talking about dropping some bombs and turning that ship into smithereens, yeah, you military are the experts. But if you’re talking about retrieving something out of it without damage, I don’t care how many stars are on your shoulder, you aren’t even as good as a thief.

The air seemed frozen. Everyone present stayed still like stone statues. Even the droning from the computers all around them seemed more careful.

The attendees, all under heavy stress, felt a bit of release tinged with the smell of blood.

Wang gazed at the space between the pillars. There seemed to be nothing there, but the deadly zither was already in place.

The ship was a mountain gliding across solid earth.

By the time the intolerable noise ended, Judgment Day was spilled on the shore like a stack of plates carried by a stumbling waiter, the plates near the top having traveled the farthest.

In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation.

The thin curve, rising and falling, seemed to possess a soul.

They would have been forcibly dehydrated, and the resulting dry fibers cast to the flames. Trisolaris did not keep the idle around.

The fate of Trisolaran civilization was now tied to these slender fingers.

For you, dehydration followed by burning is not even remotely adequate as punishment. You’re old, and you will not live to see the final destruction of Earth civilization. But I will at least make sure that you know that you cannot save her.

The massive metal pendulum swung magnificently, pounding the frigid air.

This is not an expedition, but a funeral procession!

Project Sophon, to put it simply, aims to transform a proton into a superintelligent computer.

Six Trisolaran hours later, everyone outside noticed the strange lights in the air, gossamer threads that flickered in and out of existence.

About half an hour later, the solids filled more than half the sky, as though a giant child had emptied a box of building blocks in the firmament.

It was so large that it seemed to represent the gaze of the universe upon Trisolaris.

The mirror in space formed the base of the cone, and the tip stabbed into the heart of the capital, turning everything there incandescent at once.

Those objects, some as large as mountains, had almost no mass. They were like immense silver illusions; even a baby could have moved them easily.

The heavens separated into two pieces. Between the two, the pattern of the stars did not match, as though two photographs of the sky had been stacked together, with the smaller one overlaid on top of the big one.

It is, in fact, a giant in four-space, and our world is like a thin, three-dimensional sheet of paper. The giant stands on this sheet of paper, and we can only see the trace where its feet touch the paper.

A sophon observing three-space from six-space is akin to us looking at a picture on a two-dimensional plane.

This kind of experiment is akin to looking for a raindrop of a slightly different color in a summer thunderstorm.

The science of Earth has been completely locked down, and the lock is so secure that humans will never be able to escape from it by their own strength.

Everyone in the Battle Command Center saw the message in their eyes, just like Wang Miao’s countdown. The message flashed into existence for only two seconds and then disappeared, but everyone got it. It was only a single sentence: You’re bugs!

It’s like how you don’t need to hide the bottle of bug spray from the little critters. Let’s toast the bugs!

The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

“My sunset,” Ye whispered. “And sunset for humanity.”

I struggled to grasp the bone-chilling vastness and profundity with my imagination, felt the weight of an immense terror and awe, and simultaneously enjoyed a druglike euphoria.

Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.

The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.

Finally, I thank Liu Cixin, who entrusted me with his work and, in this process, became my friend.

The military representative had the final vote on judicial matters.

Poincaré showed that the three-body problem exhibited sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which we would now understand as characteristic of chaotic behavior.

Mêlée weapons, guns, grenades, mines, cannons, etc. were all used.

Their red flags fluttered restlessly around the brigade building like flames yearning for firewood.

The only thing that moved was a thin stream of blood. Like a red snake, it slowly meandered across the stage, reached the edge, and dripped onto a chest below.

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair.

“It means that laws of physics that could be applied anywhere in the universe do not exist, which means that physics … also does not exist.”

“Three days from now—that’s the fourteenth—between one and five in the morning, the entire universe will flicker for you.”

The line’s color became red, like a snake awakening after hibernation, wriggling as its skin refilled with blood.

This is a football game at the scale of the universe. The players are the three suns, and our planet is the football.

The silence of hundreds of millions created a suffocating sense of strangeness.

The ultimate goal and ideal of the ETO is to lose everything. Everything that now belongs to the human race, including us.

Ye had carefully studied these membranelike boundary surfaces suspended in the high-energy plasma ocean of the sun and discovered them to be full of wonderful properties.

I am a pacifist in this world. It is the luck of your civilization that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!

The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers.

There would never be another chance. I took out my hacksaw and cut through the rope.

“Human civilization is no longer capable of improving by its own strength.”

Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died.

By the time the intolerable noise ended, Judgment Day was spilled on the shore like a stack of plates carried by a stumbling waiter, the plates near the top having traveled the farthest.

This is not an expedition, but a funeral procession!

Project Sophon, to put it simply, aims to transform a proton into a superintelligent computer.

This kind of experiment is akin to looking for a raindrop of a slightly different color in a summer thunderstorm.

The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.