The Redemption of Time Read online

  She did not know where Tianming had acquired the advanced technology he brought with him. Although his ship couldn’t escape the black domain, it was able to satisfy virtually all their other needs. Even on this desolate planet, the two of them lived a life of relative ease that rivaled conditions back in the Solar System.

  A few days earlier, while bathing in the lake—the water did contain some trace metals, but was safe enough to bathe in—she had been reminded of the time in her life when she and Cheng Xin had experimented with antique bath soap bars. She told Tianming the story, and then, half joking, she said, “Oh, I wish I could get a bar of sweet-smelling bath soap! Wouldn’t it be nice to take a bubble bath here?”

  She wasn’t serious, of course, but to her surprise, Tianming entered his ship and returned a few minutes later to toss her a bar of soap. The fragrance was even stronger than the bar she had found in the museum hundreds of years ago. She had no idea how Tianming had managed it.

  There was also the miniature universe that Tianming had brought as a gift for Cheng Xin. She had seen the floating rectangular outline with her own eyes. Although she had never entered it, the very concept seemed to her an almost inconceivable invention. A small, self-contained universe that existed independent of the larger universe around? How could the Trisolarans possess such advanced technology? If they did, they wouldn’t have worried about the destruction of Trisolaris, because moving to mini-universes would have solved all their problems. So how did such a marvel end up in the hands of Yun Tianming?

  She changed her mind. “I’m warm now. Why don’t you continue? It’s better to let it all out. No matter what, I’m on your side.”

  Tianming lifted his face to the sky, deep in reverie. Only after a long pause did he speak again. “I’ll tell you about the day I woke up, a day I will never forget.”

  *

  Tianming woke up and saw that he was lying in bed.

  He had a body.

  It must be a clone, he realized. This was a body without cancer cells, and he felt healthier and stronger than he had on Earth. Everything around him was automated; he didn’t see any Trisolarans. Perhaps the extraterrestrials don’t want to reveal themselves to me, lest their frightening alien appearance become a barrier for effective communication.

  He got up and surveyed the room. There was a door, unlocked. After a moment of hesitation, he pushed it open, stepped through, and found himself in a garden. It was filled with sights familiar to him from the Common Era: an open lawn, a bridge over a thin stream, a rock formation, a small pagoda … replicas made by the Trisolarans based on their understanding of Earth. The garden was surrounded by a tall wall that blocked his view of what lay beyond. Puffy clouds drifted in the clear sky, and the sun was bright and warm.

  He figured that this whole place was just a part of a Trisolaran ship, which had been modified into a comfortable cage for him. The sky was probably the result of holographic projection. How did the Trisolarans plan to communicate with him?

  A line of text appeared in the sky: “Dear Mr. Yun Tianming, welcome to our world.”

  The greeting, which was the first time the Trisolarans had talked to him, shocked him. But he maintained a calm demeanor and nodded. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Fine.” The Trisolarans got right to the point. “We woke you because we need you to help us complete the plan for the conquest of Earth.”

  This is it.

  A complicated smile curved up the corners of Tianming’s mouth. He wasn’t entirely surprised by the request. When he had refused to pledge his loyalty toward the human race at the United Nations, he had known such a day might come. It was time to make a decision.

  “Why should I betray my people?” he asked coldly.

  “Divisions between species do not represent unbridgeable gaps. On Earth, many have already pledged their allegiance to us without our asking.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re severely mistaken if you equate me with those pathetic cowards in the ETO.”

  The Trisolarans weren’t angered by his response. “We all know that humans on Earth didn’t treat you with kindness. It was no coincidence that you came to be among us. For the last few years, by studying your brain and mind, our society has already made great strides, and your name is highly esteemed by the Trisolaran people. If you agree to help us, you will become the most honored citizen of Trisolaris, with privileges second only to the princeps. We understand that our material goods may be of no interest to you, but once our fleet arrives at Earth, you will have the resources of the entire planet at your disposal, and you can have whatever humans dream of.”

  Tianming sneered. “What would I do with any of that if humanity is exterminated?”

  “We won’t eradicate all humans; your species will certainly continue. The need for scientific research alone requires a small number of humans to be preserved—say, in the range of a few hundred thousand to a few million. We’ll set aside a reservation on Earth for them, and we’ll make you their absolute ruler. With the help of our advanced technology, you’ll live better than any king or emperor in the history of your world.”

  Since the Trisolarans were incapable of lying, Tianming knew that their promises were genuine.

  “What if I refuse?” he asked.

  “We would be sorry to hear that. But we won’t do anything to you … except return you to sleep in our dreams.”

  Tianming trembled uncontrollably. He knew what the Trisolarans were promising: a perpetual nightmare from which he would never wake up. This was far worse than any physical torture they could devise.

  Tianming had had enough. Why should he continue to live in that hell in his head? For the sake of his human compatriots? What was humanity? They were the ones who pulled him out of a quiet end in euthanasia, cut out his brain, froze it in a space probe, and then sent it here to a fate worse than death. Why should he care about them?

  The dark thoughts flitted across his mind, demanding that he not be foolish. Tianming knew that the Trisolarans were waiting patiently for his answer.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to say no,” he said. He didn’t know exactly why he chose to resist. He knew that if he yielded, even if every human being on Earth cursed his name, he wouldn’t have felt guilty at all. This wasn’t a burden that he should have been made responsible for. Perhaps he refused not out of any sense of duty, but because of an anachronistic sense of nobility.

  To hold on to one’s independent will, to refuse to submit to enslavement, to despise enticements as well as threats—such was the dignity and pride of each individual human being. This was something that the Trisolarans, guided by the philosophy of survival above all else, could never understand and perhaps did not want to understand.

  “Do you need more time to consider our proposal? We have noticed that humans seem to require some time to think before making important decisions.”

  “There’s no need,” Tianming said.

  *

  He wasn’t sure how much time had passed.

  He found himself standing on a tree-lined path with golden leaves drifting down around him. It was fall, and he was next to the open lawn at the heart of his college campus. A few students sat on the grass, reading; in the distance a couple held each other tightly; on the basketball court next to the lawn a group of athletes played, cheering and shouting … Aimlessly, he walked along the path. He decided that he must still be a student here, but he was too shocked to think about how he had returned.

  The whole world seemed to brighten as a familiar figure appeared at the end of the path, gradually growing as the distance between them closed: a young woman dressed in a pale yellow windbreaker. She stopped in front of him, a smile on her face.

  “You came,” she said.

  Tianming heard the affectionate tone in Cheng Xin’s voice. He saw her take his arm and lean against his side as though they were lovers. He was perplexed. When … how …

  Love and tenderness filled his heart, but he immediately reali
zed that it was all too perfect and too sweet to be true. With a deep shudder, he realized that this was yet another dream, the beginning of another horrible session of torture.

  “No!” he cried out. But he didn’t wake up. Cheng Xin gazed at him, puzzled.

  Anxiously, Tianming looked around. Was the sky going to open up and rain down blood? Would the earth crack under his feet? Would all those students around them turn into zombies and attack him and Cheng Xin? For that matter, was Cheng Xin about to turn into a mummy with wispy white hair or a monster with bloody boils all over her body? Would the two of them be buried alive or slaughtered in cold blood? What kind of horrors and evil lay in wait for them in this dream of paradise?

  “What’s wrong, Tianming? Are you all right?” Cheng Xin asked, concerned.

  He gazed into her clear and innocent eyes; he could not imagine the trials and tortures that would be inflicted on her. He fell to the ground, unable to bear this twisted version of “life.”

  “Stop it! Please. Please don’t make me dream any more. I … I will cooperate. Do you hear me?!”

  Everything around him disappeared. Tianming found himself lying in bed in the room in which he had awakened earlier. Sweat drenched his body.

  “I will ask for only one thing,” he said. “I want to dream of being together with Cheng Xin every night. Dreams of happiness, not nightmares.”

  “That’s not a problem at all,” replied the Trisolarans with a line of floating text. Tianming imagined the alien sneer on the faces of the Trisolarans behind the text: You’re nothing but a bug. No matter how you struggle, in the end we will win.

  *

  Though he paused in his account, Tianming remained mired in reminiscence. From behind, 艾 AA wrapped her arms about him and muttered, “It’s not your fault. It’s not.” But she couldn’t sort through her own complicated emotions; a sense of dread and bitterness grew in her heart.

  The hero she worshiped turned out be as vulnerable as any ordinary human.

  Tianming gave another wry smile. “My story isn’t so simple.”

  *

  Having reached an understanding with him, the Trisolarans gave Yun Tianming all the data and references he requested. In total, the information amounted to the capacity of a large library. After perusing the files for some time, Tianming explained that the task of helping the Trisolarans deceive humans was extremely difficult, and he needed time to think.

  The Trisolarans left him alone. Tianming paced back and forth in his artificial environment, sitting down to rest from time to time. There was a seven-story pagoda in the garden, and he climbed to the top to survey his world from that elevated perch, deep in thought.

  The next day, he returned to the top of the pagoda and sat there for about an hour. The Trisolarans did not bother him. He concluded that perhaps the Trisolarans had relaxed their vigilance against him.

  On the third day, he climbed the pagoda again as before, but when he had reached the top, he leapt over the guardrail and plunged toward the ground more than twenty meters below.

  He had planned the entire sequence of initial refusal, surrender in the dream, and postdream proposal to collaborate; the goal of his deception was his own death. The gravity here was similar to gravity on Earth, and he had thought long and hard about where and how to make his leap. He was accelerating toward the ground with his head first, and as soon as his skull cracked open, his brain would be splattered. No matter how advanced Trisolaran technology was, he suspected that they couldn’t put back together this cracked egg. The only fear he had was that the Trisolarans might possess the ability to generate a force field in midair to prevent him from striking the ground.

  As the ground neared and filled his sight, he barely had time for a flash of relief and joy before it all went dark. Tianming was the happiest suicide in the history of the world.

  *

  “So how did they revive you?” AA’s voice trembled. The knowledge that Tianming had survived the suicide attempt couldn’t dispel a nameless terror from her.

  “I woke up again and found myself, unharmed, lying in that same room. Everything had been reset,” Tianming said.

  “How … how was that possible? Do you mean … oh—” AA had guessed at the truth.

  “That’s right. I never jumped off the pagoda.” Tianming’s face now held a self-mocking expression. “There was no pagoda, no ‘waking up,’ no cloned body. The entire experience was nothing more than another dream injected into my mind by the Trisolarans. They didn’t care what I did, because I was never in any real danger. This wasn’t a deliberate act of deception on their part; they didn’t inform me of this detail because they didn’t think it was important. Although communicating with me through a dream had been done out of convenience, the Trisolarans later told me that they were impressed by my attempt at deception followed by suicide, a trick they could never have devised. If they had truly revived me in a cloned body, they suspected that they wouldn’t have been able to stop me. This only reassured them that I was the right person to carry out strategic deception. Ironic, isn’t it?

  “After that, the contest of wills between the Trisolarans and me heated up. Since I refused to collaborate, they invented a variety of cruel nightmares to punish me. Whenever I couldn’t take it anymore, I would agree to help them and then come up with excuses for delay or bad suggestions. Of course, such tricks became harder and harder to pull off, because the Trisolarans had studied my brain for such a long time that my thoughts were comparatively more transparent to them than other human beings’. Deceiving them grew increasingly difficult.

  “On the other hand, my mind also grew more inured to various scenes of horror and mental tortures, and I even learned to consciously override some of the sensations of physical pain they injected into me. Finally, they grew tired of this cat-and-mouse game, and decided to bypass my consent and use my brain directly.”

  “Use your brain directly?” AA asked.

  Tianming explained that the human brain was to some extent a problem-solving machine. When stimulated, it responded in certain predictable ways. Much of the process didn’t require the participation of consciousness. Many important cognitive tasks were carried out subconsciously, with consciousness only providing supplemental functions like monitoring, storing, organizing, and refining. Nonetheless, if a person was unwilling to cooperate, they could consciously disrupt the nearly automatic processes. In order to make Yun Tianming’s brain serve them subconsciously, the Trisolarans carefully isolated his consciousness from the rest of his mind, and then used their computers to control and direct what remained of his cognitive functions.

  The test, however, resulted in a failure. The Trisolarans discovered that a computer could not substitute for the reflective and refining functions of consciousness itself, especially not a Trisolaran computer that was ill-matched to human minds. The Trisolarans had to make all of Tianming serve them, including his conscious will.

  So, the Trisolarans resorted to other techniques to induce some semblance of cooperation. For example, they used drugs to bring Tianming’s brain into a hallucinatory state and attempted to question him for ideas on strategic deception. However, Tianming’s confused and unfocused mental state while drugged prevented him from giving useful suggestions.

  The Trisolarans also tried a technique that Tianming later dubbed “soul-shock therapy.” This involved injecting questions into Tianming’s brain and forcing him to think about how to solve them. Whenever Tianming tried to resist, his brain center emitted a specific signal, which triggered a “soul shock,” a powerful surge of stimuli that caused Tianming extreme mental anguish and the sensation of physical pain. By this means, the Trisolarans hoped to remove his resistance through aversive conditioning.

  They were somewhat successful at first. But eventually Tianming learned mental techniques familiar to yoga and Chan Buddhism practitioners. Instead of actively resisting, Tianming made his mind go blank. By not thinking of anything, he created a hidden part
ition in his mind in which thoughts could continue without interruption. He also developed the nearly superhuman capacity to endure the painful tortures the Trisolarans subjected him to without breaking down.

  The average person used only a small part of the potential of their brain, and the cruel Trisolarans unintentionally forced Tianming to realize more and more of his mind’s infinite potential. Despite repeated all-out assaults in this epic of psychomachia, the technologically far superior Trisolarans failed to breach the fortress Tianming had constructed in his mind, and had to admit defeat.

  *

  AA was now even more baffled. “If the Trisolarans couldn’t conquer your mind, why did you surrender to them in the end?”

  “What do you think is the key to a successful lie?” Tianming countered.

  AA hesitated. “I guess … to account for the details? Or maybe to understand the other side’s psychology?”

  “No. It’s sincerity. To be so sincere that even the liar believes it.” Tianming sighed.

  The Trisolarans were not of a single mind. Encounter with human civilization had shocked their society to the core. The early years of the Deterrence Era, when Tianming and the Trisolarans struggled over his soul, also saw Trisolaran society face its own unprecedented crisis. The creation of the deterrence system put the dream of Earth’s conquest out of reach, and the sense of defeat led to social instability. The popularity of Earth culture and the advent of cloud computing further buffeted the foundation of traditional Trisolaran society. Gradually, the sparks of revolution spread both on Trisolaris and in the Trisolaran Fleet. And soon after, an unexpected Chaotic Era struck, leading to social collapse and the turbulence of the Trisolaran Revolution.

  Because they lived in such an inhospitable environment, stability was the overriding goal of Trisolaran political philosophy. Throughout Trisolaran history, there were few events that could be classified as true revolutions. Even if there had been seeds of rebellion, the Trisolarans’ inability to lie meant that revolutionary techniques such as secret plots and underground organizations were inapplicable—it was impossible for Trisolarans harboring rebellious thoughts to disguise them, and they would have been prosecuted for their thought crimes long before they could put them into action. It wasn’t until the Trisolarans encountered humans that they realized that a secret organization aiming to change the status quo was even possible.