News of the terrorist attack on the Earthcore Research Institute finally broke, sweeping across social media. Major television networks quickly produced special reports tracing the history of the mysterious institution. Yet when it came to the identities of the attackers, every report without exception could ultimately offer only the same sentence: “As of this time, no organization or faction has claimed responsibility for the attack.”
Late at night, in the residential compound for families of the Hua Academy of Sciences. Fine rain had begun falling again, wetting the glass. Droplets slid slowly downward, leaving long trails of moisture behind them. The sound of the television echoed through the empty room.
“The Earthcore Research Institute is one of the world’s leading comprehensive scientific research institutions. In the twenty years since its establishment, it has produced remarkable results. The Deep-Earth Neutrino Joint Observation Array, developed under its leadership, was the first to achieve long-term joint inversion of multi-site data across continents… After mirages began appearing on a large scale, the Institute also established the world’s first mirage multispectral archive and stability classification standard.”
“Today, a substantial portion of the remote environmental sampling, spatial-anomaly early warning, and anomalous-exposure screening technologies used by Anomalous Case Departments in multiple countries also originated from the Institute…”
The camera changed, showing the Earthcore Research Institute campus located within Country M.
It had already been reduced to ruins. The enormous crater left by the explosion looked like a scar carved into the forested campus that could never be erased, shocking to behold.
“Following the attack, Country M’s Department of Anomalous Incident Control and counterterrorism authorities immediately sealed off the area and began continuous underground search-and-rescue operations as well as victim identification…”
What followed was nothing but footage of the rescue operation.
Vehicles drove into the site one after another, carrying equipment, tents, heavy machinery, and all kinds of personnel hurrying back and forth.
The television screen cast rows of abbreviated logos and short English phrases clearly into a pair of eyes. The teenager’s eyelashes trembled, but there was no emotion in his clear gaze.
“DAIC. Anomalous Case Department.” His lips moved as he murmured softly, “Department of Anomalous Incident Control.” Then, “…Anomalous.”
The housekeeper carried away the plate sitting nearby. The carefully prepared food had not been touched even once with chopsticks and had long since gone cold. After walking several steps, she couldn’t help looking back. The teenager in the blue sweatshirt had a thin silhouette as he sat there on the floor, a deflated backpack lying beside him.
A photograph of one of the deceased scientists appeared on the screen. A middle-aged woman with short hair smiled at the camera. Beside her was a brief introduction: Fang Lan, age fifty-two, PhD in biophysics, senior researcher, with long-term research focused on life-system homeostasis under extreme physical environments and the biological effects of high-energy particles.
Distant memories returned.
A small town. A bitterly cold winter. An afternoon of skating after school. Seven or eight children laughed and played on the frozen riverbed. No one noticed when the crack first appeared. By the time anyone did, one child after another was screaming as they plunged into the bone-chilling river. Fortunately, passersby noticed what had happened and rushed over to rescue them. Yet beside the hole in the ice stood one child who, despite being completely dry from head to toe, was trembling uncontrollably as though badly frightened or frozen to the core. He was quickly taken to the hospital along with the others.
After examining him, the doctors determined that the child had not fallen into the water, yet he was still suffering from mild hypothermia. One of the children who had been skating with him insisted that they had personally seen him fall into the river and cry for help, only for his body to flicker and return to where he had originally been standing in an instant, as though he had a superpower. For a while, the incident became one of the small town’s local mysteries.
When Fang Lan came to pick him up, she usually drove her eighth-hand Chevrolet, but not that night. She held Fang Huan Xing’s hand as they walked home from the hospital. She seemed distracted the entire way and even smoked a cigarette.
The wind was strong. They stood at a crosswalk for a long time and missed three green lights in a row.
“I’ve told you over and over again that you have to control yourself when you’re outside. If you fall into the water, then you fall into the water. Even if you can’t swim, can’t you just wait for someone to rescue you?!” Fang Lan tightened her grip on his hand, her tone severe. “There were so many people by the river, all of them watching. People will think you’re a monster. Do you understand?”
“I’m sorry,” Fang Huan Xing said.
Fang Lan studied him for a moment, stubbed her cigarette out against a trash can, then crouched and looked at him very seriously. “We’re hiding here. We can’t expose where we are so easily. I know you didn’t mean to do it, and I’m glad you saved yourself, but you have to listen to me. You understand why, don’t you?”
Fang Huan Xing nodded.
“Then swear.”
Fang Huan Xing raised his hand. “I swear.”
Fang Lan looked as though she wanted to smile, but her face darkened again. Irritated yet oddly gentle, she pinched his cheek once.
They had already lived in the little town for two years.
The name Fang Huan Xing was something Fang Lan had made up on the spot when she enrolled him in school. Fang Lan herself also used an alias. She worked as a sales clerk at a department store several streets away from the school, spending every day standing behind a counter in high heels and forcing fake smiles onto her face while introducing products to customers. By the time she came home at night, the tops of her feet would be badly swollen. She would soak them while watching television dramas, then collapse onto the sofa and snore.
By then, television stations had already begun reporting on mirages.
No one knew that Fang Lan was a physicist who understood far more than any of the experts appearing on television.
Whenever she heard a report related to mirages, Fang Lan would pick up the remote and change the channel, regardless of whether Fang Huan Xing was still watching. “Kids don’t need to see that. It’s boring. You don’t need to know so much.”
But those days lasted only another two years.
During the third week after the skating incident, Fang Lan suddenly appeared on Fang Huan Xing’s school playground in a hurry. It was physical education class. Because of the heavy snowfall the night before, the teacher had made an exception and allowed the children to play freely in the snow.
“We have to go.”
Those were the first words Fang Lan said when she found Fang Huan Xing.
She was wearing an ankle-length chestnut mink coat, something she clearly couldn’t afford. The expensive store tag was still hanging from it.
Fang Huan Xing looked bewildered. “Where are we going?”
School wasn’t over yet.
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. We just have to leave here right now.”
Fang Lan pulled him up from the ground. Fang Huan Xing looked reluctant. “But I want to finish it.”
His snowman already had its basic shape. Its eyes were made from stones, and it only needed a nose. It looked adorably foolish.
“They’ve caught up with us.” Fang Lan kicked the snowman over. “I’ll let you build ten next time.”
The classmate beside them jumped in fright. Fang Huan Xing looked once at the smashed snowman. “…Oh.”
Fang Lan roughly dragged him by the arm toward the school entrance.
The teacher was having a snowball fight with the students and didn’t notice them at all.
When they reached the school gate, Fang Huan Xing asked, “Are we coming back?”
“No.”
The eighth-hand Chevrolet started up, the heater turned all the way up. Before long, the fog on the windows disappeared. Fang Huan Xing sat in the back seat and couldn’t help looking behind them. He could still faintly hear the laughter from the playground, but the farther the car drove, the smaller the school became.
They passed an ATM along the way, and Fang Lan withdrew every bit of cash they had left.
They went to another small town, one even more remote and close to the border. People came and went constantly, and members of various ethnic groups lived there, simple and unpretentious. Fang Lan wore heavy makeup every day that completely concealed her original appearance and dyed both her own hair and Fang Huan Xing’s a new color. She also stopped sending Fang Huan Xing to school.
“I can teach you at home,” Fang Lan said disdainfully. “Whatever little nonsense they teach at school, I can teach you myself.”
In reality, she was unbelievably lazy and had no desire to teach him at all.
Fang Huan Xing didn’t know many characters. Aside from reading comics, all he could do was watch melodramatic prime-time television dramas with her, stories about three people entangled in love, hatred, heartbreak, and passion.
“You should learn from these,” Fang Lan even told him. “Love, hatred, passion, grudges. Actually living is more important than learning knowledge.”
And so, at eight years old, Fang Huan Xing’s relationship with school came to an end.
Fang Lan stopped showing herself outside as well. Unable to find work, she could only stay home and take on small handicraft jobs assembling bead bracelets and necklaces.
The border town suffered frequent power outages back then, and Fang Lan always procrastinated until the very last moment before delivery, then frantically rushed to finish her work by candlelight. She wrapped both her own legs and Fang Huan Xing’s in a quilt to keep warm, balanced a tray on top, and complained while stringing beads. “Every damn day, it’s this garbage. If I have to spend the rest of my life stringing beads in this godforsaken place, I’d rather fucking die.”
By the candlelight, Fang Huan Xing was struggling to recognize the words in some battered comic Fang Lan had scavenged somewhere. He put the book down and picked up a little twig.
Fang Lan automatically held out her palm.
Swearing meant getting hit on the palm. It was a new rule they had recently invented.
After her palm had been smacked, Fang Lan rubbed it and suddenly remembered that Fang Huan Xing was still practically semiliterate.
So she began force-feeding him physics far beyond his age.
“Look. These beads are like the atoms I told you about.” She became interested and paid no attention whatsoever to whether a child could understand her. “Different atoms are like beads of different colors and sizes. Countless atoms combine in different ways to create all the different kinds of matter we see. Take these beads. Change their order, change the combination, and you can string together completely different bracelets.”
“Imagine that there were so many different kinds of beads you couldn’t even count them, and we could string them together however we wanted. How many different kinds of bracelets do you think there could be?”
Fang Huan Xing looked at the beads they had. “A lot.”
Fang Lan smiled approvingly. “Exactly.”
Now thoroughly enthusiastic, she asked another question. “Then, Xiao Xing, do you think completely identical bracelets could ever appear?”
Fang Huan Xing thought for a while. “I don’t know.”
“If you make enough of them, eventually two completely identical bracelets will appear.”
After saying this, she picked up two beads and moved them close together.
“And there’s something else amazing. If this bead once formed a special connection with another bead, then even if they later ended up on different bracelets, they would still respond to each other. By observing one, you could know what state the other one is in.”
Fang Huan Xing stared intently at the two beads, only half understanding.
With a click, Fang Lan pressed the beads together and enclosed them in her palm. “This is like quantum entanglement in physics. You can’t see it or touch it. Why nature allows this kind of relationship, what its underlying essence really is—no one knows. Distance can’t sever that correspondence. They continue to maintain a mysterious connection with each other.”
Lately, there had been more and more news about “mirages.” Fang Lan could change the channel three times and find reports about them on two of those channels.
Fang Huan Xing had an excellent memory. He remembered experts studying mirages mentioning quantum entanglement as well.
He asked Fang Lan, “Are those mirages happening because some of the ‘beads’ changed? Like the ‘parallel worlds’ they talked about on the news?”
For once, Fang Lan did not stop him from being curious about mirages. “You can understand it that way. But you could also think of it as a kind of interference.”
Interference?
Fang Huan Xing didn’t understand.
Fang Lan said, “If the change in the ‘beads’ on one side exceeds what the correspondence between them can withstand, causing the ‘beads’ on the other side to be affected, then an unstable state forms and produces interference. If we can control that change, perhaps the interference will disappear. Different realities will stop affecting one another, and mirages will no longer appear.”
Fang Huan Xing thought for a long time. Only after Fang Lan had finished stringing two more bracelets did he ask a real question for the first time. “Is there this kind of interference inside me too?”
Fang Lan looked startled.
Fang Huan Xing picked up a blue bead from the tray. His small hand began trembling, producing layer upon layer of afterimages.
The bead in his palm also began changing continuously.
Blue.
Purple.
White…
Large, small, one after another, constantly changing.
Fang Lan stared at him for a very long time. Only after a long silence did she slowly speak, her eyes wet.
“No. You aren’t ‘being interfered with.’ Because all realities exist simultaneously in you.”
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