Letters Sent Back to Earth (Part 2)
This suicide mission will be nothing more than a routine "manned space experiment" in your journalistic coverage.
But even with less than a ten percent chance, it's still worth staking my life on this gamble. Because if this plan succeeds as designed, you will witness the Creator.
That's right—I said the Creator. The being that constructed everything we know.
If I said these words on Earth, I'd be carted off to a psychiatric hospital within minutes. But here aboard the Paper Kite, this is no joke.
Sylvia, I'm about to face my ultimate destiny—either I'll vanish in a spectacular blaze, or I'll orbit in silence above the Earth forever, carrying my longing for you.
This was my own choice, and I have no regrets. My greatest hope is that you will live happily, that your life will be full and complete.
Best wishes.
August 2, 2018.
3
I just received a message from headquarters. They say the jockeying among the great powers has entered its final stage and will soon be settled. In other words, I'll be executing the final plan very soon.
I don't know why, but I'm incredibly nervous—like walking into the exam room for the first time, my whole body unsettled. In this state, I try my hardest to recall the most beautiful moments of my life, but every memory that surfaces is of you, Sylvia.
I regret not asking for your photograph before departure. Now I can only summon your face from memory. But even that memory is slowly blurring.
Someone once said: when you can no longer picture her face, recall the time you spent together. But the time we shared amounts to only that one segment from your interview at the Space Academy training center—from beginning to end, not even half an hour. That half hour was just work for you, but for me, it contained an entire lifetime.
If time could be turned back, let me return to those thirty minutes—perhaps I'd summon the courage to ask you out for coffee after work, or to catch a movie. Even just to brush a strand of your hair would have been enough.
I believe that when you receive my letters, you'll surely look up at the sky, hoping to find my position. But you can't see me—I'm farther away than the most distant twinkling star you can see at night. Gazing at space from Earth is a beautiful thing. The night sky is so vast, the stars so boundless, it always fills you with infinite wonder. But when you're actually out here, you discover it's not nearly as romantic as it seems.
Beyond the viewport window is sheer black darkness—like an abyss with no bottom. I've been orbiting in high Earth orbit for nearly twenty days now. No one to talk to, no one to interact with. The boredom is maddening. The communication equipment receives nothing but messages from headquarters. No other signals come through at all, yet I have to keep it on twenty-four hours a day, listening to the same monotonous static from the other end. I feel like a grain of sand lying in the desert, waiting for the end of eternity.
An hour ago, I caught a glimpse of a meteor streaking into low orbit—it burned brilliantly, carving a dazzling trail of fire across the black. But it left me utterly unmoved.
Aside from you, Sylvia, I have no attachment left to this world.
Even though I'm about to trigger the most magnificent explosion in human history—to shatter the barrier that the Creator has imposed upon our civilization—I don't feel particularly grand. Compared to the Creator, I am infinitesimally small.
I remember during that interview at the training center, you jokingly asked me whether the Paper Kite's launch was to find aliens. I know you were kidding—a spacecraft that can only reach high Earth orbit and can't even leave the solar system has no business searching for extraterrestrial life. But even so, my heart lurched, because we've always been seeking a response from alien civilizations, and no matter how many signals we broadcast into the cosmos, we receive no feedback whatsoever. Scientists call this the "Great Silence."
Some say this is normal—perhaps there simply are no aliens. But think carefully, and it's actually profoundly abnormal. The reason is enough to make your blood run cold—it's like being in an enormous room and not finding a single speck of dust. That can only mean one thing: someone has cleaned the room.
Our universe is a swept-clean universe.
Therefore, the more silent the cosmos, the more it indicates the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization—and a god-tier civilization at that. Because of this civilization's presence, the development of other civilizations has been suppressed, which is why the universe appears so silent. I don't want to say this, but the truth likely is: the universe is not our universe—it is their universe.
Why did they leave humanity alone? We have no way of knowing. Perhaps human beings are just dust growing in an unnoticed corner, anytime waiting to be wiped away.
Even for the sake of our own fate, scientists never abandoned their exploration. And the most unsettling realization is: what kind of life form are they? Biologists generally believe that whether they are carbon-based or silicon-based life forms, they must have already evolved beyond the need for a "physical body," achieving a state of pure energy—existing as energy.
Sounds absurd, doesn't it? But that's not even the most extraordinary part. Energy dissipates too; it has an expiration date, which seems incompatible with a god-tier civilization. Therefore, Dr. Hawking posited that to ensure their permanent survival, they likely stored their own data across carriers spread throughout the entire universe—carriers such as particles.
Reaching this level, they would truly deserve the title of a god-tier civilization. They made themselves into data, made the universe their hard drive, and stored their own existence within it. This is a form beyond human comprehension.
But wouldn't even a hard drive eventually be damaged? If they're a god-tier civilization, they must exist as gods do.
What is a god?
A god is the Lord, is the Creator. It created our existence, gave us this objective world, but simultaneously erected barriers, causing human civilization to stagnate once it reaches a certain height. Some say science is dead, but we know that's not our fault—the limitations of our physical conditions had already predetermined the boundaries of what we could observe.
Perhaps all of this was destined from the start.
Just as laws forbid you from killing, our study of the universe is also constrained by fundamental laws: the laws of mechanics, the conservation of energy, the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality... It is these endless laws that restrict our development. We've reached the boundary of what the laws will permit. Yet it is also because of these laws that this ever-changing universe possesses constant patterns, orderly and cyclical, enabling us to exist and to observe.
This is the paradox at the heart of it. We are constrained by laws, and yet we benefit from laws. You might say that laws determine everything about us.
But now I must tell you an astonishing fact. Based on the cosmic microwave background radiation I've observed from the Big Bang, these laws did not exist from the very beginning.
You must think this sounds absurd, but Sylvia, trust me—this is the truth. I've captured photons from the primordial era, photons that have traveled alone through the cosmos for billions of years, carrying crucial information from the birth of the universe—like a snapshot taken right after the Big Bang. At that time, there was no question of any laws or rules. Everything was a boiling sea of particles, matter in a free state, the speed of light fluctuating, energy being born and vanishing in constant devouring and spitting—unstable and unconserved. Data from primordial gravitational waves show that planets at that time didn't even have their own orbits. Everything was a mess, like a room full of headless flies.
But here's the critical point: none of this prevented the birth of civilization.
Then, when the universe reached the age of roughly 1.5 billion years, everything changed. In an extraordinarily brief span of time, the universe underwent a fundamental transformation. The laws and rules we know today appeared—and they didn't emerge gradually or evolve slowly, but descended suddenly, like a newborn infant, and began governing the entire operation of the universe. Remember what I said earlier? This is not our universe—it is their universe.
That's right—they are the laws.
This is the true posture of gods. They disdained discarding their physical bodies for pure energy, they disdained embedding themselves in particles; they did the most inconceivable thing in the universe—they discarded everything and transformed themselves into the laws.
Do you understand what this means? They exist within the physical laws we depend on for survival, within gravity and the speed of light, within your every breath, within 1+1=2. In other words, we cannot use the laws to find them, because they