My Dear, Don't Walk Toward That River
Dr. Fang, this is Earth's first extraterrestrial aid mission. Everything is in your hands.
Those words kept echoing in my mind. I knew that as Earth's top epidemiologist, this journey carried immense responsibility.
So from the moment I received the aid notification, I hadn't dared to delay. I contacted my team, arranged departure procedures, verified the tickets, packed my luggage—having completed all of this decisively, I looked up at her.
It was a gaze that spanned years. I hadn't looked my wife properly in the eyes for a long time.
"Will you come back?" she asked.
She wore a tattered straw hat, her weathered face half-hidden in shadow. I couldn't read her expression—only those burning, urgent eyes met mine.
Even now, she still didn't seem to grasp the situation, as if she thought we still lived in an era when leaving the ground meant leaving for a lifetime.
"I will," I replied perfunctorily, too exhausted to explain further. I'd been run ragged by the extraterrestrial aid mission for days, drained body and soul.
My wife asked nothing more, which surprised me. As she looked away, the word "aging" suddenly came to mind.
I looked into her eyes and realized that human aging wasn't defined by physical external signs but by the eyes themselves.
My wife's eyes held a weathered quality—a mix of exhaustion, worry, indignation, and the desolation of disappointment. These emotions hadn't arrived suddenly; they had accumulated over the years, growing so concentrated they enveloped me like miasma, nearly suffocating me.
For many years, ever since university, I had been continuously disappointing her. And she, me.
I was still young, brimming with ambition, my eyes fixed on the stars and the sea.
In the end, my wife turned and walked into her fields, never looking back.
I knocked my forehead and opened my eyes, looking out the porthole. The blue planet had already receded far into the distance. The control center reminded me to lower the sunshade—the ship was accelerating and about to pass the sun.
I severed my last threads of attachment and looked around the cabin. Every seat was occupied by my fellow countrymen.
Before leaving Earth, we had come from all over the world—Asian, African, European and American—subdivided into various ethnicities. But after leaving Earth, we shared a single name: "Human."
This was Earth's first medical expert aid team to venture into the cosmos. A hundred elite personnel had assembled on this spacecraft, now traversing the vast universe toward their target destination beyond the solar system: Proxima Centauri.
Centuries ago, when commercial space travel began, Earth gradually integrated with the interstellar community, broke through technological bottlenecks, unlocked the secrets of time, and ultimately entered a period of explosive development.
Our civilization advanced triumphantly. The days of being "closed off" by technological limitations were gone forever. Peaceful openness had allowed Earth's people to reap the dividends of the era.
After long-standing interstellar diplomacy, humanity increasingly recognized that the greatest fear stemmed from the unknown.
A thousand years ago, ancient people hearing thunder believed it was divine punishment; seeing a meteor fall, they thought it was the apocalypse. A century ago, the science fiction our predecessors created was mostly about how aliens would invade and crush Earth.
But truly developing to this era and contacting alien civilizations, we discovered it wasn't so terrifying after all.
The universe's resources were inexhaustible, but friends were precious. All planets adhered to the principles of peaceful coexistence and non-interference—a fact Earth only discovered after advancing two civilization levels.
"I don't regret any of the decisions I've made, even though they've all run counter to my wife's wishes. After all, she's fallen behind the times." I spoke of my wife. "It's laughable, really—she's still farming, working as a peasant."
"Peasants are great, but peasants belong in history books," said Charles, the diplomat seated beside me. He had been the one responsible for liaising with Proxima Centauri from the start.
"Agriculture has long been fully automated. Isn't she just making life harder for herself?"
"Yes. She's taken up an occupation eliminated centuries ago. She's a bit better now—the year before last she was even raising livestock. Now she labors in the fields from dawn to dusk, like one of those gleaners in that painting by Jean-François Millet from thousands of years ago.
"She used to be truly beautiful. Now she's sun-darkened all over. This behavior serves no purpose except self-isolation."
"Then why does she do it, Dr. Fang?"
"Perhaps she's a relic of her era, making a futile stand. My wife resists technological progress and interstellar openness. She advocates closing the borders—or more precisely, 'locking down Earth.'"
"In an era of interstellar integration, such thinking is indeed untenable," Charles said. "If I compare your wife's behavior to an ostrich burying its head in the sand, I hope you won't take offense."
"I won't." Of course not—I was just a team doctor, while Charles was a government official.
"To be honest, just because Earth survived this pandemic unscathed doesn't mean we'll escape the next disaster. I'm not cursing Earth, of course—no one can predict what will happen in the universe.
"Faced with the vast and profound cosmos, all civilizations are equally insignificant. Only by banding together can we achieve mutual benefit. This time we save the galaxy; next time, our friends in the galaxy will come to our aid.
"When one place is in trouble, assistance comes from all directions—that's the benefit of peace and openness," Charles said.
"I agree."
So in this aid mission, Proxima Centauri was only the first stop. After this, Earth would dispatch second and third medical aid teams to other planets in the galaxy, helping their people through the crisis.
Earth would use this opportunity to further strengthen interstellar cooperation and truly become interstellar.
Speaking of which, rather than saying Earth possessed more advanced medical technology, it would be more accurate to say Earth had better luck—because that medical technology, like the meteorite itself, had fallen from the sky.
The story began five months ago.
Five months ago, Earth's aerospace agency observed a massive celestial fragmentation event in space. The Centaurus system was significantly affected, and the solar system would experience some perturbation as well.
However, when the celestial debris traveled all the way to Earth, it had shrunk to nothing more than a marble-sized meteorite, landing in the central square of a Western city. A child playing nearby picked it up, examined it, sniffed it, then tossed it aside.
That night, the child developed a high fever with an excruciating headache. Doctors diagnosed meningitis—common in children. But the next day, the child's parents also developed fevers.
Further diagnosis revealed a form of viral meningitis transmitted through the respiratory tract. It was highly contagious, but the virus responsible was vastly different from ordinary viral meningitis pathogens—so different that its classification couldn't even be determined.
Within a single day, the city had fallen under the shadow of an unknown infectious virus.
It wasn't until they received notification that several planets in the Centaurus system had reported similar outbreaks that Earth realized the virus had been carried by meteorites from the celestial fragmentation.
In this era of interstellar integration, where planets maintained close contact, the virus spread throughout the galaxy in short order—hence the name "Interstellar Pandemic."
The disease targeted all biological life across planets, but different planets experienced varying severity.
Compared to Earth's people, aliens were more sensitive to the virus. Proxima Centauri, relatively close to Earth, saw deaths increasing exponentially. Their medical systems were on the verge of collapse, and the entire planet was shrouded in grief.
Other planets weren't as severely affected but were still struggling. In any case, vaccine development across all planets was urgent—otherwise, it would be the end for the entire star system.
Earth's medical teams also intensified their research into treatments, employing both traditional and modern medicine.
I was one of the leading practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. After receiving the notification, I rushed to the research base overnight and worked around the clock for a week without making headway. Then I contracted meningitis myself, with a persistent high fever for days. More than half my fellow doctors fell ill alongside me.
Earth's research had indeed been yielding minimal results, stalled and stagnant. Many had begun putting their affairs in order. Even my wife, laboring in her fields, had received my critical condition notice.
The catastrophe that fell from the sky seemed headed toward a dead end—as if the ancients from thousands of years ago had been right: a falling meteor was indeed a curse, an apocalypse.
Yet after the pandemic raged for a month, a turning point emerged. My mind cleared one morning, and other patients' symptoms also showed improvement.
Our bodies had made peace with the virus and were gradually healing on their own. Evidently, though we still didn't know exactly what the virus was, Earth's people possessed resilient vitality and had produced antibodies at remarkable speed, beginning to coexist with the unknown virus.
With an answer in hand, working backward became much easier, and subsequent medical experiments progressed smoothly.