Lesson 24 Bring Her Eyes / Liu Cixin

Lesson 24  Bring Her Eyes / Liu Cixin

I'm going on vacation, and the director asked me to bring another pair of eyes.

　　The director handed me a pair of eyes, pointed to the large screen in front of me, and introduced the owner of the eyes to me, a little girl who seemed to have just graduated, in the fat spacesuit, she looked very petite, and there was a weightless pencil floating in the air in front of her. 

　　I asked her where she wanted to go. 

　　The decision seemed difficult for her, her hands in the gloves of her spacesuit, her chest in her hands, her eyes half-closed, as if thinking that Earth was about to explode after our short trip, and I couldn't help but laugh. 

　　"Then go where we went before we set sail!" She said.

This is where mountains meet grasslands, stretching from front of me to the sky, with the mountains behind them covered with dark green forests and several peaks with silvery canopies of snow. 

　　I pulled out her eyes and put them on. 

　　The so-called eye is a pair of sensing glasses, when you wear it, all the images you see are emitted by ultra-high frequency information waves, which can be received by another person wearing the same sensing glasses in the distance, so he can see everything you see, as if you were carrying his eyes; It can also emit both touch and taste by collecting the brain waves of the person wearing it. Now, every astronaut who has been working in space for a long time has another pair of eyes on Earth, which are brought by the lucky ones who can really go on vacation, so that the homesick person in outer space can share his happiness. 

　　"It's nice here!" Her soft voice came out of her eyes, "I'm like rushing out of the deep, deep water to breathe air now, I'm too afraid of closure." ”

　　I really heard her taking deep breaths in my eyes, and I said, "But you're not closed now, this prairie is too small compared to the space around you." ” 

　　She was silent and seemed to stop breathing, but after a few seconds, she suddenly exclaimed: "Ah, flowers, there are flowers!" I didn't have it last time I came! ”

Yes, the vast steppe is dotted with little flowers. "Can you get a closer look at the flower?" She asked. I crouched down to look. "Oh, what a beauty! Can you smell her? No, don't pull her out! I had to lie on the ground and smell, a faint fragrance, "Ah, I smelled it too, it was really like a faint serenade..." 

　　I wandered aimlessly across the prairie and soon came to a stream hidden in the grass. She stopped me and said, "I really want to put my hand in the river." I crouched down and put my hand into the stream, and a cool stream flowed through my body, her eyes using ultra-high-frequency information waves to transmit this feeling to her far away in space, and I heard her exclamation again. 

　　"You're hot there, aren't you?" I remembered her narrow control module and unusually well-insulated spacesuit seen on the screen. 

　　"Hot, hot like... Hell. Oh my God, what is this? Wind in the steppe?! "I had just taken my hand out of the water, and the breeze was chilling on my wet hands. I raised my hands in the breeze of the steppe until my hands were blown dry.

I took her eyes around the prairie for a day, and she longed to see every wildflower on the prairie, every little grass, every ray of sunlight dancing in the grass; A stream that suddenly appears, an unexpected breeze, will make her excited... I felt that her emotions for the world had become abnormally rich. 

　　Before sunset, I walked to a lonely white hut in the middle of the prairie, a small inn for tourists, seemingly unvisited for a long time, with only a dull old-fashioned robot watching over everything in the inn. 

　　As soon as I fell asleep at night, she woke me up through her eyes: "Please take me out, okay?" Let's go see the moon, it's time for the moon to rise! ” 

　　I got up reluctantly in my sleepiness. When I got outside, I found that the moon had really just risen, and the grassland under the moonlight was also sleeping. 

　　I stretched out and said to the night sky, "Don't you see the moon in space?" Hey, tell me the approximate location of your spaceship, maybe I can see it." ” 

　　Instead of answering my words, she hummed a piece of music herself, and after a short melody, she said, "This is Debussy's Moonlight." "It wasn't until I went back to bed an hour later, she was still humming music, and the soft sound of music was wafting in my dreams. 

　　Early the next morning, with clouds filling the sky and the prairie shrouded in a misty drizzle, I heard her soft sigh in my eyes. 

　　"I can't see the sunrise, I really want to see the sunrise in the steppe... Listen, this is the first bird call of the day, and there are birds in the rain! ” 

Back to the gray life and busy work, the above experience quickly faded. A long time later, when I remembered washing the clothes I wore on that trip, I found two or three grass seeds on the legs of my trousers. At the same time, in the back of my consciousness, there was a little seed left. In my lonely spiritual desert, that seed has grown imperceptible green shoots. Although unconsciously, when the day's work is over, I can already feel the faint poetry of the evening breeze on my face, the chirping of birds has caught my attention, I even stand on the flyover at dusk, watching the night fall on the city... The world is still gray in my eyes, but bits of tender green appear in it and are increasing. When this change developed to the point where I became aware, I thought of her again. 

　　It's also unconscious, and in her leisure time and even in her sleep, her environment often appears in my mind, the closed and narrow control module, the strange heat-insulating spacesuit... And then all of these things disappeared from my consciousness, and only one thing stood out, and that was the weightless pencil spinning over her head. For some reason, as soon as I closed my eyes, this pencil always floated in front of my eyes. Finally, one day, I walked into the tall foyer of the Space Center at work, and I was fascinated by a huge mural that I had seen countless times, which depicted the blue Earth taken from space. The floating pencil appeared before my eyes again, superimposed on the mural, and I heard her voice again.

    "I'm afraid of closure..." A bolt of lightning appeared in my mind. 

　　I ran upstairs like crazy, slammed the door of the director's office, and he wasn't there, and I knew where he was, so I ran to the little room where my eyes were kept, and sure enough, he was in it, looking at the big screen. She's on the big screen, in that enclosed control module, wearing that spacesuit, frozen in that previous recording. "It's for her." The director said, eyes still looking at the screen. 

　　"Where the hell is she?!" I asked aloud. "As you might have guessed, she's the navigator of Sunset Six." 

　　Everything was understood, and I slumped limply on the carpet. 

In addition to space, there is another place where weightlessness occurs.

　　The "Sunset Project" is a series of expedition voyages that operate in almost the same way as other flights at the Space Center. The only difference is that instead of flying into space, the Sunset spacecraft dives deep into the Earth. 

　　A century and a half after the first spaceflight, humans began an expedition in the opposite direction, and the "Sunset" series of groundcraft was the first attempt of such exploration. 

　  I remember the launch of Sunset One. It was late at night, and a fireball like a small sun appeared in the middle of the Turpan Basin, and when the fireball darkened, "Sunset No. 1" had dived into the formation. Only a small lake of magma was left at the dive point, emitting a dazzling red light. That night, hundreds of kilometers away, you could feel the slight vibrations of the spacecraft as it passed through the formation. 

    Astronautia is lonely, but astronauts can see infinite space and magnificent constellations; The ground navigators on the ground spacecraft can only see this scene from the holographic rearview TV on the spacecraft: the hot magma is shining, rolling, and as the spacecraft dives, it quickly closes up in the stern, instantly filling the space through which the spacecraft passes. The huge amount of formation material above the spacecraft is constantly thickening, producing a sense of depression unimaginable to people on the ground.　　

The first five ships of Project Sunset have all successfully completed stratigraphic navigation and returned safely to the surface. The Sunset Six voyage started smoothly, but an alarm appeared when the spacecraft was 15 hours and 40 minutes away. From the detection of formation radar, it is known that the density of materials in the navigation area increases sharply, the material composition suddenly changes from silicates to iron-nickel-based metals, and the state of matter also changes from solid to liquid. The spacecraft apparently strayed into the core area, and Sunset Six immediately made a swerving in an attempt to break out of this dangerous area. When the spacecraft turned in liquid iron-nickel that was much greater than the design density and design pressure, the joint between the engine and the main module broke, the spacecraft that lost the engine lost power in the formation, and the "Sunset VI" sank to the center of the earth in the ground and matter of the business. 

　　The current groundcraft strayed into the core, just like the moon landing spacecraft in the mid-21st century that deviated from the moon and lost its fans in outer space, there is no hope of salvation. 

　　Fortunately, the hull of the main module of the "Sunset Six" is reliable, and the neutrino communication system on board still maintains good contact with the ground control center. Over the next year, the Sunset Six crew continued to work to send a large amount of valuable information from the Earth's core to the ground. The spacecraft is wrapped in 6,000 kilometers thick material, let alone air and life, not even space, surrounded by liquid iron-nickel with a temperature of up to 5,000 degrees Celsius and pressure that can turn carbon into diamond in a second! They're so dense that only neutrinos can pass through Sunset Six, which is in a huge steelmaking furnace! What is life in such a world? Can it be described only in terms of vulnerability?

　　Later, two other ground sailors in the crew were injured in the accident and died soon after, and since then, she has been alone on Sunset Six. 

　　Now, the interior of Sunset Six is completely weightless, and the spacecraft has sunk to a depth of 6,300 kilometers, which is the deepest part of the earth, and she was the first person to reach the center of the earth. 

　　Her world at the center of the earth is that muggy control module with a range of less than 10 cubic meters. There's neutrino-sensing glasses on the spacecraft, and this device keeps her somewhat connected to the terrestrial world. But this lifeline-like connection could not last long, and the neutrino communication equipment in the spacecraft was finally exhausted, and this connection was broken two months ago, specifically on my way back to the space center from the grasslands.

Sunset Six's neutron material shell is strong enough to resist the enormous pressure of the center of the earth, and the spacecraft's life cycle system can operate for 50 to 80 years, and she will spend the rest of her life in this less than 10 cubic meters of the earth's center world. 

　　I heard a recording of her last correspondence with the ground, when the neutrino beam from the base salary was weak, and her voice was intermittent, but it was calm. 

　　“...... In the future, I will work hard according to the entire research plan. In the future, maybe a geocentric spacecraft will find Sunset Six and dock with it, and hopefully the information I left behind will be useful then. Rest assured, I am now used to this place, no longer feel narrow and closed, the whole world surrounds me, I can see the prairie above when I close my eyes, and I can clearly see every little flower there..." 

In the years that followed, the earth often became transparent in my mind, and more than 6,000 kilometers below me, I saw the Sunset Six groundcraft moored in the center of the earth, felt her heartbeat coming from the center of the earth, heard her chant "Moonlight".

　　One thought comforted me: no matter where I go, I would never be far from her.