“Everyone in the photos and video fragments I could find had the same expression on their face. I haven’t seen any other emotion, certainly not tears or laughter.”

“How did it end up like this?” Song Cheng asked, horrified. “Can you look through the historical records they left?”

“I did. The course of history after us goes something like this: The age of the mirror will start in five years. During the first twenty years, digital mirrors will only be used by law enforcement, but they’ll already be substantially affecting human society and causing structural changes. After that, digital mirrors will seep into every corner of life and society. History calls it the beginning of the Mirror Era. For the first five centuries of the new era, human society still gradually develops. The signs of total stagnation first appear in the mid-sixth century ME. Culture stagnates first, because human nature is now as pure as water, and there is nothing left to depict and express. Literature disappears, then all of the humanities. Science and technology will grind to a standstill after them. The stagnation of progress lasts thirty thousand years. History calls that protracted period the Middle Age of Light.”

“What happens after?”

“The rest is straightforward. Earth runs out of resources, and all the arable land is lost to desertification. Meanwhile, humanity still doesn’t have the technology to colonize space, or the power to excavate new resources. In those five thousand years, everything slowly winds down…. In the era I showed you, there are still people living on all the continents, but there’s really not much to see.”

“Ah …” The sound Song Cheng made resembled the Senior Official’s slow sigh. A long time passed before his shaking voice could ask, “Then … what do we do? Do we destroy the digital mirror right now?”

Bai Bing took out two cigarettes, handing one to Song Cheng. He lit his own and drew deeply, blowing the smoke at the three dead faces on the screen. “I’m definitely destroying the digital mirror. I only kept it around until now so you can see. But nothing we do now matters. That’s one bit of consolation: everything that happens afterward has nothing to do with us.”

“Someone else created a digital mirror too?”

“The theory and technology for it are both out there, and according to superstring theory, the number of viable initialization parameter sets is enormous, but still finite. If you keep going down the list, you’ll eventually run into that one set…. More than thirty thousand years from now, till the last days of civilization, humanity will still be thanking and worshiping a guy named Nick Kristoff.”

“Who is he?”

“According to the historical records: a devout Christian, physicist, and inventor of the digital mirror software.”

MIRROR ERA

FIVE MONTHS LATER, AT THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
CENTER OF EXPERIMENTAL COSMOLOGY