March 22, 2051.
The Ordovician glided silently through the pitch-black void, like a crystal droplet sliding across a slab of dark marble, solitary and bound for Mercury, a hundred million kilometers away.
As humanity's first jointly constructed interplanetary starship, the Ordovician had a sleek cigar-shaped hull that combined the two most cutting-edge technologies of the era: controlled nuclear fusion and room-temperature superconductors. At its stern, six symmetrically arranged fusion engines blazed with a dazzling cobalt-blue glow—the signature Cherenkov radiation of nuclear reactions. Their immense thrust propelled the vessel at nearly 0.3 percent the speed of light toward Mercury. This was the first human-made craft to truly cross the threshold into quasi-relativistic effects. Mathematically speaking, when the thirteen astronauts returned to Earth, they would be a few seconds younger than their loved ones left behind—a tiny gift from the vast cosmos to these brave souls.
Born from global cooperation, the Ordovician's crew comprised thirteen members from China, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the European Union, and Japan, divided into a five-person flight team and an eight-person science team. The captain and flight-team leader was American Neil Musk, whose rich and legendary record of space missions, combined with his proud family legacy, had set him apart from countless outstanding candidates. He was the first commander of the Starship interstellar vessel. The science-team leader was the sixty-one-year-old Chinese geologist Yan Ran. Unlike the physicists, astronomers, or chemists who usually headed research groups in past space expeditions, Yan Ran was a geologist—yet he had been unanimously chosen by the United Nations Space Committee (UNSC) to lead the finest scientific minds of humanity into the future. It could be said that without Yan Ran, this mission would never have existed. As the then-UN Secretary-General Guterres had put it more than thirty years earlier: "Yan Ran not only cracked the code of an ancient civilization, but also handed humanity the key to a new world."
Yet a new world had never been the force that united humankind. Only a common enemy or catastrophe could do that. After the Cold War ended in 1991, humanity's enthusiasm for space exploration plummeted. Governments slashed aerospace budgets, and for seventy-seven years since Apollo 17's final crewed lunar landing in 1972, no human had set foot on another celestial body. Politicians poured all their passion into the scramble for power, money, and status; most scientific projects became mere vote-buying chips. Busy raising funds, they had no time to look up at the stars—until the "Ordovician Discovery" of 2016 changed everything. Humanity had never before felt such an urgent longing to fly into space.
The construction of the Ordovician was not so much rapid as rushed. Scientists from every nation poured their latest breakthroughs into this silver giant—158 meters long, 29 meters in diameter, and weighing 14,000 tons. Rockets from China, the United States, Russia, Japan, and the EU ferried materials and engineers to low Earth orbit in a continuous stream. According to the UNSC's allocation, Russia was primarily responsible for building the orbital shipyard, the US, China, and the EU for assembling the vessel itself, Japan and Israel for crew training, and other member states for supporting infrastructure according to their strengths. Throughout the 2040s, dozens of massive rockets lifted off from launch sites around the world every day. People grew accustomed to gazing at the twinkling "little stars" in the night sky, watching them converge toward one bright "big star," only to be swallowed and extinguished—then seeing that big star grow brighter day by day, like a cosmic game of Pac-Man in space. From the moment of the Discovery, humanity spent five years mastering room-temperature superconductors, nine years achieving controlled nuclear fusion, six years engineering both technologies, and nearly ten years arguing over who would lead construction. Only in 2040 did actual building begin, and another seven years were needed to complete and test-fly humanity's first first-generation interplanetary vessel—the Ordovician. The great physicist Edward Witten once grumbled bitterly: "If not for those ignorant politicians' pointless squabbles, we would already have a far more perfect second-generation starship."
The scientists' dissatisfaction was justified. The foundational theories and technologies unlocked by the Discovery had only broken through in the late 2020s; more time was needed for proper engineering trials. Yet the political haggling among nations wasted precious years and starved critical projects—superconducting supercomputers, new space materials, neutrino communications—of funding. The result: the Ordovician, powered by six fusion engines, could reach only 0.3 percent of lightspeed—far short of the scientists' dream of 12 percent. The world's engineers had compressed every milestone into under a decade, while the politicians had spent an entire decade fighting over leadership, even gambling the future of 7.5 billion people. In his speech at the 89th UN General Assembly, Yan Ran declared: "Politics cannot deliver the Fourth Industrial Revolution—only science and technology can advance humanity." In his eyes and those of many scientists, the Ordovician was merely a political compromise, not a perfect product. Humanity still needed more time to digest the gifts the Discovery had brought.
Theoretically, the Ordovician could reach Mercury in just 120 hours, but its fragile hull materials could not withstand such acceleration, nor could the human crew survive hundreds of Gs. In practice, the voyage would take about nine months. By now, the ship had already been traveling for four months and twenty-seven days—exactly halfway. From the vessel, Earth was still visible 56 million kilometers away, a blue glass marble embedded in the abyss of space. Although the holographic projection was sharper and more vivid, Yan Ran preferred to gaze at the real Earth through the narrow aft porthole. Many crew members did the same; from time to time someone would stand before the window and stare at the distant planet, as if they feared it would vanish if they looked away for even a day. "Because it is observed, it exists," was the famous saying of the Chinese physicist Yu Xiangdong aboard the ship.
The Ordovician carried thirteen crew members. The flight team consisted of one Chinese, two Americans, and two Russians; the science team comprised two Chinese, one American, one Briton, one Frenchman, two Germans, and one Japanese—all from the UNSC's seven permanent member states. Unlike previous crews, the ship for the first time included dedicated weapons officers: Russian deputy captain Moros Morozov and Anton Sidorov. If Captain Neil Musk burned like fire, Moros Morozov was undoubtedly the ice of Siberia—the perfect companion for vodka. Because humanity had yet to make major breakthroughs in hull materials or plasma shielding, the Ordovician used a double-layered hull to bolster structural strength. To protect against meteoroids during high-speed travel, it was equipped with two ultra-high-power laser cannons powered by two of the nine fusion reactors. According to the collision-avoidance protocol, the AI would automatically maneuver to dodge large meteoroids; for small ones or micrometeoroids, the lasers would vaporize them on contact, minimizing maneuvers. Normally the two weapons officers had no need to intervene manually, but space was never short of surprises—sometimes the human touch was more reliable.
The UNSC maintained contact with the Ordovician through the deep-space networks of China, the United States, Russia, and the EU, with synchronized command centers on the ground and a large tracking station at the orbital shipyard. Besides routine scheduled communications, the UNSC would occasionally transmit the latest interpretations of the Discovery to the ship, where Yan Ran would convene the crew for study sessions. The decoding process had already lasted thirty-three years. As research deepened, the theories and technical guidance within the Discovery grew ever more complex; the apples of Eden became harder to pick, and major scientific breakthroughs grew rarer. The briefings sent to the ship were increasingly about social structures and humanistic arts. Moros and Yu Xiangdong often mocked the study sessions as "boring exhibitions of ancient space paintings," slipping away to steal drinks of vodka, while the young French biochemist Anna Kamille became utterly addicted to those "colorful exploding lines," plastering them all over her cabin.
Besides Moros's hidden stash of vodka, the most frequent sound aboard was the impact alarm of ultra-tiny meteoroid particles. Most were smaller than three millimeters, nearly impossible for radar to detect, and generally harmless to the hull, so the laser cannons rarely responded. The monotonous MIDI-like beeps were maddening. Yan Ran, plagued by insomnia, had repeatedly asked the AI to change the alert tone, only to be refused with "no suitable track available." After several fruitless exchanges, the furious Yan Ran printed a note reading "Stupid binary" and slapped it on the supercomputer center door, mocking the superconducting supercomputer for not being quantum-based.
The piercing alarm sounded again—this time not the lowest-level beeps, but the wailing of a Level-2 orange alert. The flashing orange lights in the crew quarters jolted Yan Ran awake just as he was about to fall asleep. He immediately shut off the wrist alert, pulled off his headphones, and hurried toward the forward command center.
Once everyone had assembled, Captain Neil signaled navigator-communications officer Li Yi to silence the alarm. He spoke slowly to the entire crew:
"Nineteen minutes ago we received an alert from ground control. According to the latest upgrade of the Jiangmen Neutrino Detector, the explosion of Betelgeuse was not a natural stellar death—it was caused by an external force. Specifically, it was artificial. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada have confirmed this. Yu—you're up."
A holographic projection of Betelgeuse floated silently above the conference table. A bulge protruded from the star's upper-left quadrant, like a rolling, malformed red tumor. In visible-light mode, the star that had exploded four hundred years earlier still appeared as a red supergiant, struggling futilely to maintain its gaseous structure.
"Last month, guided by the latest research from the Discovery, the Chinese Academy of Sciences completed an upgrade to the Jiangmen Neutrino Detector, increasing its precision nearly a hundredfold," Yu Xiangdong explained, sliding his finger to switch the holographic display. "The expert team discovered two neutrino radiation sources during Betelgeuse's explosion, separated by about 0.3 astronomical units. Data also show that the energy released was 8.3 percent lower than predicted—meaning roughly two solar masses were lost."
He switched images again. "This is an infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope at the L2 Lagrange point. It recently replaced all eighteen mirror segments, greatly enhancing its observational power. We can see that the protruding section of Betelgeuse is far brighter and hotter—about 8,400 K, roughly 5,000 K above the star's surface temperature. For a red supergiant, this is extremely abnormal. After receiving the Jiangmen data, the UNSC redirected multiple space telescopes for deeper observation and obtained a shocking result: the bulge on Betelgeuse's surface contains a solid entity with a mass of approximately 4.4 × 10²⁷ tons—nearly twice the mass of the Sun. In other words…"
"In other words, that's the mass Betelgeuse lost after its explosion," Yan Ran interjected, though unscientifically phrased, "or rather—it escaped."
"Exactly," Yu confirmed. "Before the Ordovician Discovery, scientists predicted Betelgeuse would not explode for at least another hundred thousand years. That conclusion was correct and matched the new evolutionary model post-Discovery. Yet Betelgeuse exploded unexpectedly 423 years ago—around 1626. Even more astonishing, a prehistoric civilization 4.5 billion years ago somehow foresaw this anomaly. Limited by detection methods and basic theory, we previously assumed it was model error. Only recently has the UNSC reconstructed the entire explosion sequence."
Everyone stared unblinking at the hologram. The flames surrounding the spherical bulge on Betelgeuse's surface suddenly extinguished. A black sphere ten thousand kilometers in diameter shot toward the star's center at near-light speed. Roughly 105 minutes later, at 0.3 AU from the center, it came to an abrupt halt. Betelgeuse's brightness surged; two bright cores appeared inside, surface flames roiled more violently, and the star's volume expanded and contracted wildly—like the chest of a dying man gasping in agony. The colossal body resembled a bloodshot scarlet eyeball, horrifying and chilling. Suddenly the entire star fell silent. All frenzy stopped. Betelgeuse held its breath. The black sphere shot upward along the star's rotational axis and vanished in an instant. The red supergiant shuddered violently; a blinding white light flooded the cabin. Betelgeuse had exploded.
…
Long after, the crew regained their vision. The command center was deathly quiet.
"Kh-kh-kh…" Moros suddenly let out a eerie laugh. In a chilling voice he said, "Yan, you've opened a Pandora's box."