Ball Lightning

“Okay. Let me tell you what a quantum state really is. In a quantum state, you—ah, supposing you’ve already been incinerated by ball lightning—you are just a probability cloud. In that cloud, everything you do is indeterminate. You lack the free will to decide where you will appear. Your position in the probability cloud, and whether you will be alive or dead when you appear, is indeterminate, decided only when God rolls his dice. If you are burned up on the fishing boat, then the probability cloud for quantum-you will be centered on that boat. In the surrounding space, you have a very small probability of appearing in the carrier’s arsenal or fuel storage. You will most likely appear in the water, and if you’re in a live state at that time, you will very quickly drown. Then your quantum state will no longer include the probability of being alive; you will be dead in every probability. Taking a huge step back, even if you hit the probability jackpot and appear in some critical part of the enemy carrier, will you be alive then? How long can you stay there? An hour, or a tenth of a second? Also, the moment one enemy, or one of the enemy’s cameras, catches sight of you, you will immediately collapse into that pile of ash in the center of the probability cloud to await your next jackpot. And when that opportunity comes, the carrier will be eighteen thousand kilometers away and there may no longer be any war left on Earth…. Finally, you’ve forgotten one point: those Dawnlight soldiers died from artillery shells, not ball lightning. Before their sacrifice, the ball lightning weapons were destroyed and sent to the bottom of the sea, so the soldiers did not turn quantum…. Lin Yun, you’re like the little match girl, seeing all kinds of illusions. You really need to rest.”

Lin Yun abruptly flung aside her helmet, then leaned against Ding Yi’s shoulder and started crying as if heartbroken. She cried sorrowfully, her slender frame trembling in Ding Yi’s embrace, as if letting out all of the anguish in her life at once….

* * *

“You can imagine how I felt at the time,” Ding Yi said. “I thought I was the sort of person for whom all emotions apart from rational thought were nonessential, and that impression has been reinforced on several prior occasions. But now I know that something else in addition to rationality can occupy a person’s entire mind…. Lin Yun seemed to have shrunk down. The old unshakable, goal-oriented major was now a fragile, helpless little girl. Was that who she really was?”

“Maybe a combination of the two. I understand women even less than you,” I said.

“Jiang Xingchen’s death already weighed heavy on her, then the failure of the mission smashed through the limit of what her psyche could endure.”

“That’s not a good state to be in. You should get in touch with her father.”

“Listen to yourself. How could I contact someone so high up?”

“I’ve got General Lin’s phone number. He gave it to me himself, and asked me to look after Lin Yun.”

I noticed that Ding Yi had not moved, and was staring at me. “It’s no use.”

His words frightened me. It was only then that I realized: Ding Yi’s story was cloaked in a shroud of sadness.