That night, Song Cheng entered the main computer room of the Center for Meteorological Modeling. He found Bai Bing alone, looking quietly at the screen of the booting superstring computer.

Song Cheng came over and patted his shoulder. “Hey, Bai, I’ve already notified your manager. A special car will arrive shortly to take you to Beijing. You’ll give the superstring computer to a central official. Some other experts in the field might listen to your report too. With such an extraordinary technology, it won’t be easy to get people to understand and believe it all. You’ll have to be patient when you explain and give the demonstrations … Bai Bing, what’s wrong?”

Bai Bing remained quiet, not turning from his seat. In the mirrored universe on the screen, the Earth floated suspended in space. The ice caps had altered in shape, and the ocean was a grayer shade of blue, but the changes weren’t obvious. Song Cheng didn’t notice them.

“He was right,” Bai Bing said.

“What?”

“The Senior Official was right.” Bai Bing turned slowly toward Song Cheng. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Did you spend an entire day and night coming up with that conclusion?”

“No, I got the future-time recursion to work.”

“You mean … the digital mirror can simulate the future now?”

Bai Bing nodded listlessly. “Just the very distant future. I thought of a completely new algorithm last night. It avoids the relatively near future, which allows it to sidestep the disruption in the causal chain resulting from knowledge of the future changing the present. I jumped the mirror directly into the far future.”

“How far?”

“Thirty-five thousand years later.”

“What’s society like, then?” Song Cheng asked cautiously. “Is the mirror having its effect?”

Bai Bing shook his head. “The digital mirror won’t exist by that time. Society won’t either. Human civilization already disappeared.”

Song Cheng was speechless.

On the screen, the viewing angle descended rapidly, coming to a stop above a city surrounded by desert.

“This is our city. It’s empty, already dead for two thousand years.”

The first impression the dead city gave was of a world of squares. All the buildings were perfect cubes, arrayed in neat columns and rows to form a perfectly square city. Only the clouds of sandy dust that rose at times in the square grid streets prevented one from mistaking the city for an abstract geometrical figure in a textbook.