You're always so idealistic, those stars don't go alone
They glow just as a waste of energy."
It was the end of the summer of 4097 in Rotterdam, and the car was speeding on the road, feeling like it was going into the sea. The sound of stepping waves was heard in my ears, and I saw the sky and the forest stained red by dusk.
I didn't know where the destination was, so I had to keep my feet on the accelerator. It was dark, the night was low, and the stars filled the universe.
Yu Zheng was a point in the vast starry sky.
(i)
"Don't go gently into that good night—" The sound of the recitation was broken by a noise. The icy sound of the machine, mixed with the noisy sound of electricity, was broadcasting, "Notice: The cosmic tide is about to reach the earth, please take a reasonable shelter for the citizens." ”
Yu Zheng and I glanced at each other, quickly packed up our belongings, left the classroom and fled to the bunker to hide. The crowd was raging, my glasses fell to the ground, and I could only be pulled by Yu Zheng to run forward, looking back for glasses, but I could only see the magnificent sky, I froze - this was the first time in my life to see the sunset before the tide.
The white clouds contain gray-green auroras, and the moon is now infinitely close to the surface, close enough to see storms and eddies on the lunar surface. The star, called the sun, occupies half the sky, and the yellow is clear, like the flow of high-mail salted duck eggs recorded in the history books.
The strange sunset moments, the chaotic escape, seem to have a romantic meaning.
Entering the bunker, all those who were hiding here closed their mouths, tilted their heads, and swallowed spit loudly. Yu Zheng and I were huddled in the crowd, surrounded by all kinds of sweat and perfume smells from all over the world, and we were a little disgusted. Suddenly, a cold and clean hand covered my nose, and a loud noise came from the surface of the ground, just like the flood engulfed the land. I looked at Yu Zheng and leaned into his arms, and we were as close as we were when we were born snuggled in the reproductive cabin.
The wave ended on the third day, pushing open the heavy door of the bunker, and the dust was raised, making the crowd cough incessantly. After the wave, only the ruined walls remained, and the crowd silently walked out of the bunker and rebuilt their homes. If you experience too much of this kind of thing, you will lose your sad emotions and become numb.
Yu Zheng and I's home is on the outskirts of the main city, and only the foundation remains at this time. So all that was left was the way back to the center of human growth and accepting the numbering arrangement of the center. But then we might be separated, so we hesitated.
We eventually returned to the wing of the center, because we were going to starve to death, and we were not yet underage and unable to work. Luckily, when we returned to the center, we were not separated, and we could sit on the lawn and have lunch together, and the people around us flowed like water, and when we looked up, we saw many faces, black, white, brown, and pale yellow, like the five-colored leaves of autumn in the wind, dazed, nervous, and rapidly skimming away.
In the center of the lawn stands a statue of a great shore, the statue has no name, only that he is a village teacher, an ancient profession. In the ancient Earth period, because he transmitted a five-star civilization such as Newton's law to his students, he accidentally shocked the alien starship, and the entire earth escaped the attack.
Tastelessly chewing on the sandwich, Yu Zheng suddenly asked me where I was going to go as an adult, I told him that I had not yet thought it out, he looked very dissatisfied, he was determined to become an astronaut, like the predecessors on the Adventurer.
Yu Zheng wants me to be the same as him, but I am not here, whether it is my interests or achievements. But that was what I thought before I was seventeen.
(ii)
Adventurer 01 transmitted the last video in 4054: they found traces of aliens three hundred million light-years away, and when they were ready to land, the entire planet seemed to be crushed by a huge force, and Adventurer was affected, and half an hour later, it was completely lost to the Earth, eternally dormant in space, and the Earth incarnated as an island.
Then in 4055, the first cosmic wave struck. Because of the example of alien annihilation, Earth sacrificed tens of thousands of spaceships in exchange for hope for life. The earth thus entered a state of emergency.
Two years before I was born, female citizens rioted because they were dissatisfied with their status as a womb, which made women's resources too nervous for a while. So the fertilized eggs can only be in the reproductive cabin, soaked in artificial amniotic fluid waiting to mature, and the birth of Yu Zheng and me is an accident and a miracle.
We were put into the same reproductive capsule by careless researchers, sharing just enough for one cell to fully grow, and everyone thought we would kill each other before we were born, but we both survived.
I thought, it must be Yu Zheng who let me go.
This was very rare, so we were in a lot of attention at the time, and Yu Zheng's excellence amazed the researchers, but unfortunately I never showed any talent.
This made me very frustrated, sighed in the library for a while, sleepy and confused, and then stopped thinking about why I was so useless, hiding in the history books, studying poetry and studying ancient earth civilization, but such research was very useless for the survival of the earth, and it was full of a mesmerizing sound.
At the age of seventeen, my physical and chemical grades became more and more confused than to enter the graduate school; my physical fitness was not enough to become a military officer. Originally, there was nothing, but if we lived to adulthood with such achievements, Yu Zheng and I would inevitably be separated, and even never reunited.
This is a very serious thing for me. So I stopped obsessing over poetry and literature, and immersed myself in physics.
But how to learn can not learn, those characters like tadpoles, transformed, become another meaning. Confused, Yu Zheng finally saw that something was wrong with me, and I was finally able to tell him that I was uncomfortable.
Yu Zheng listened and laughed softly. I don't think he understood me at all and was laughing at me. After all, for him, these things are too simple.
Turning to leave, Yu Zheng grabbed me, and he pinched my face and said, "You don't have to learn this, just keep learning what you like." I knocked his hand off and told him that what I liked was useless, that it would not help him in any way, and that it would speed up our separation.
Yu Zheng was silent for a while, and he said that he had never thought of separating from me.
We don't want to be separated from each other, but what's the use? Yu Zheng was bound to enter the space center of the military department, and I could only become a worker bee. We need to repay the human center for the human center's nurturing at the cost of money, and if we do not pay the price, we can only obey the arrangement of the human center and have no freedom.
At this time, even if I regret it a lot, it will not help.
(iii)
I pointed to the celestial bodies on the observatory and asked Yu Zheng: Aren't there so many shining stars in the vast universe, but only very few galaxies have civilizations, and those stars that do not illuminate civilizations are not very lonely?
Yu Zheng said: "You are always so idealistic, those stars will not be lonely, they are just a waste of energy when they shine."
Hearing his answer, I continued to mop the floor in a deep sense of boredom. After leaving the Human Center, I became a cleaner at the Space Center, and although I was not very decent, I was very close to Yu Zheng.
Every day, the human-centered reminder on my watch wakes me up, disgusted, and longing for freedom. I asked Yu Zheng if he had successfully repaid it? He didn't say a word, but I think his high salary must have been repaid soon.
On a rare day off, he did not want to live in his tin house, so he ran into Yu Zheng's home, which was mostly books on cosmic astronomy, very boring.
I actually turned out a book of poems with a poem on the cover that he often chanted: "Don't walk gently into that good night." It was funny, and I asked him why he liked the poem so much, and he said that it was the only words left by his predecessors on Adventurer 01.
Don't wait for death to come, but let out the roar of mankind toward the universe. When Yu Zheng spoke, his eyes shone brightly, which I could not understand. The brilliance of the predecessors is to him, just as the ancient literature is to me, is the air is water and carbohydrates, and without them, we are the walking dead.
In 4080, Yu Zheng was finally able to fly the spaceship independently, and he said that it would take a lot of time to go to the universe to recover the drifting spaceship. I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard his mission, not a high-risk mission of the exploration class.
On the day the spacecraft was launched, I slipped a note that read, "Don't go gently into that good night," into his pocket, and hurried to work. Actually, I mean don't go obediently, I don't want to say goodbye to you and separate. But Yu Zheng must have thought I was encouraging him.
There is also a sentence on the back of the paper: Come back to watch the sunset together and wait for the beautiful moon together. He probably didn't understand the sentence.
The moment the spacecraft left the atmosphere, I looked at the flames erupting from the tail of the spaceship, and my heart was empty, even more desolate than the wilderness.
The day Yu Zheng left, my normal life, boring and boring, poetry seems to sprout in the heart again. Wrote many poems for Yu Zheng, hoping that when he returned, he would read them to him word by word.
During this time, I joined the humanistic association of the workers' organization and met many close friends. Accidentally got the seed of the rose, heard that the rose has a very special meaning, so he painstakingly cultivated a rose successfully, and when it blossomed, cut off the branches and leaves to seal, and waited for Yu Zheng to return and give it to him.
We have never been apart for so long, and occasionally we can't sleep when we think about Yuzheng, so we will climb up the roof, look at the stars, roll paper into cylinders, and use it as a telescope, hoping to see the whereabouts of Yuzheng's spaceship. Because my grade is too low to use the Institute's astronomical glasses. I think his Adventurer will probably drag a pile of salvaged wreckage back to Earth in a predetermined orbit. Wouldn't that be boring? But Yu Zheng was never afraid of being alone.
Would the scenery of the universe be nice? Before he left, he told me that he would take many pictures and share them with me little by little when he returned.
It wasn't until the winter of 4087 that I was taken to the conference room and was in a foggy state. The projection begins with a video of the camera looking directly at the cosmic tide, which strikes like a black hole, illuminating the silent universe like a burst of light, like a daytime firework.
The radio waves were momentarily interrupted, the world of the camera suddenly fell silent, the heavy gasps from humans suddenly stopped, and my heart tugged.
Finally the camera trembled and turned around, it was Yu Zheng. He caressed the camera with both hands, his lips moved slightly, and I didn't know what he was talking about. sunset? miss? Or do you love you? Crying with a headache.
The final positioning of Adventurer 1014 is shown in the Hippo Galaxy, a billion light-years away from the solar system.
Yu Zheng died in that cosmic wave, I only witnessed, but actually died in the aftermath of that wave. The sunset, dreams, and youth seem to become the dust in the daytime fireworks, and when it is blown lightly, it disappears.
I can't remember the chaotic period, but Yu Zheng's sacrifice allowed me to receive a pension and his saved salary, and according to the suicide note he left, I repaid it to the human center, and I was thus freed.
Since then, I have suddenly realized that Yu Zheng is for my dream and for me to become an astronaut. He didn't go this time to recycle the ship of his predecessors, but to risk the life of mankind and me.
He never seemed to want to come back alive.
The last cosmic wave struck without forecast, the storm, the sky was illuminated by lightning in most of the way, and the crowd scattered and evaded. I was standing in the wilderness, the wind was blowing me up, and the high-speed flowing air caused me to lack oxygen and faint.
When I woke up, I landed on a soft grassy area, and not a single building was damaged around. The cosmic wave seems to carry infinite compassion for human beings, running in the storm of thunder and lightning, disappearing into the wilderness with thunder and lightning, disappearing into the boundless sky.
Half a year later, the red-eye AI concluded that the cosmic wave would not come again. Countless signal towers monitoring the fluctuations of the tide were turned off one by one, and the annoying sound of electric current suddenly stopped. The earth became silent, so quiet that the cries of frogs could be heard, teaching people not to get used to it.
For the sake of global reconstruction, the exploited Adventurer was melted into steel, placed under a building, and buried in the dirt. The wreckage in space is left to drift, and resources are no longer wasted to recycle.
A difficult and magnificent era ended in such a sloppy way, and everything became an ant-like insignificant text in the simple history of mankind, and Yu Zheng did not even have a name.
End:
The car eventually docked at the Astronomy Center in Rotterdam, a former center of human growth that houses the world's largest telescope, but even so, it can't see galaxies a billion light-years away.
I was bored walking around, and there were many places remodeled here, and I accidentally saw the lawn. Nine years ago, Yu Zheng and I spent time there basking in the sun, eating sandwiches, and seeing a motionless white cloud in the sky.
Then I saw the statue of the village teacher, which was still in its original place, but there was no Yuzheng from nine years ago on the side. Nine years is faster than a second for him, but for me, it's a long road. Thinking of this, I suddenly felt a little hot in my eyes.
Yu Zheng and his companions became the last victims of the cosmic wave. And those who stayed behind, like me, had to endure a lot of things, and live slowly in the chaos of devastation.
However, I decided not to continue to live like this.
I went deep into the building and opened the door of a warehouse that housed an undamaged Adventurer that I bought from a military fan and spent all my savings.
The ship was fueled enough to lead me to that distant galaxy, and a reunion was just around the corner. Sitting in the cockpit, with the flickering lights in the distance being the remnants of the signal tower, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and hold down the red start button.
It is also miraculous to say that I actually finished learning a large room of books left by Yu Zheng, and learned physics and mechanical knowledge that I had never learned in the first half of my life. The flames of the tail flame illuminated the entire astronomical center, and through the portholes I could see the restless crowd, but they couldn't see my waving.
It was earth night, a night of insignificant silence a billion light-years away. Solemnly say goodbye to all things and walk gently into this good night.