This was the sixteenth eclipse of the month. Each one lasted longer than the last. The first had been a brief affair, under two minutes. Now, four hours in, the sky remained a vault of gloom. The sun was reduced to a slender, pallid arc—a lingering scar, as if something had punctured the celestial body and this was all that remained. The scar had lost its light, plunging the world into perpetual twilight.
The scientists insisted it wasn't the moon blocking the sun. Then what was it?
Stare at the eclipsed disc too long, and a searing pain begins behind the eyes. Your vision blurs, the retina threatening to burn its own dark spot into existence, mirroring the wounded sun. Something… sinister seems to pulse at the edge of perception, waiting to seep through that imagined breach into the mind. Li Xingyuan finally looked away.
"Chen," Li Xingyuan addressed his childhood friend, a wry grin forming. "Or should I fall in line and call you Professor Chen?"
Professor Chen ignored the jibe. "Report. How bad is it out there?"
"You've been sequestered here for a month? Then brace yourself. Cancer rates are still climbing exponentially." Li Xingyuan met the other man's gaze. "Hospitals are overflowing—morgues and wards have become one. The living who can have barricaded themselves indoors, but it's no guarantee. Even behind locked doors, people vanish. Silently. Without a trace."
He narrowed his eyes, peering towards the pitch-black mountains. Massive lamps from the Helios Station carved a stark, luminous arc through the forest, a desperate beacon for the last stragglers seeking refuge. Beyond their reach lay a darkness so profound it seemed to swallow the very idea of night. "And then there are the… phenomena. Remember those pulp horror magazines we devoured as kids? The ones passed around until the pages were soft? What I saw on the road here… it made those stories seem like nursery rhymes."
"I'm no marine biologist, but the wounds… they were all wrong. Not from any known predator, not from any natural cause. It looked…" he struggled for the words, the absurd horror of it resurfacing, "as if something of unimaginable scale had simply bitten into it. Like a child taking a single, careless bite from an apple and tossing the rest aside. This thing… it must have plucked the whale from the depths, taken a bite, and discarded the remains on a mountain road."
Now it was Li Xingyuan's turn. He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a tense whisper, eyes locked on his friend's. "Chen. What in God's name is happening?"
Chen Yancheng—childhood friend, prodigy of high-energy physics—drew deeply on his cigarette. The ember flared, illuminating a face etched with exhaustion and a despair he rarely showed. A grim, utterly joyless smile twisted his lips. "That depends," he replied, the smoke curling into the dark like a dying thought. "Do you want the official lie? Or the physicist's nightmare?"
"An unprecedented high-energy particle storm has struck Earth. It came from a supernova thousands of light-years away, crossed the interstellar void, pierced our atmosphere, and hit us dead on." Chen looked up at the sky. "That's the official story, agreed upon by the major powers. Some think it's easier for people to swallow."
"But from a physicist's perspective," he took a long drag on his cigarette, blowing pale smoke into the dark sky, "you have to understand. For a century, generations of us built an entire edifice of physics. Sure, it had its cracks and shadows—but within the realm of our ordinary experience, it explained most things."
"The real debate was always whether the laws we'd pieced together were universal truths."
"We thought we'd have to wait until our probes left the solar system to find out."
Chen stubbed out his cigarette, his face vanishing into the gloom.
"We were too optimistic."
"The universe's laws didn't wait for us to find them. They came crashing down on us instead."
"You mentioned the sea. Let's use that. Imagine the universe is an ocean. Humanity, Earth, the solar system... we're just temporary islands, lifted above the water by a violent tidal surge."
"We built our civilization in the trough between waves." Chen gestured with both hands in the dark. "We thought we lived on dry land, constructing our physics, our chemistry—maybe even our math—from beach sand. But the truth is, when the tide rolls back, everything we built from sand washes away."
Li Xingyuan listened in silence. He didn't fully understand, but the deep despair in Chen's voice was unmistakable. "So... physics is gone?"
In the darkness, Chen's head shake was clear. "Not gone. It never existed."
The eclipse finally seemed to be passing. The thing blotting out the sun didn't move away; it seemed to coalesce, to draw in on itself. The sun slowly regained its shape from the edges inward, a faint outline filling out, but it remained pale and terribly distant.
"Shouldn't we get inside?" Li asked. "They say the sunlight now... it increases cancer risk."
"The cancer rates have nothing to do with the sunlight. I can promise you that." Chen's face looked haggard and puffy. It was the first time Li had seen him clearly in over six months; he seemed to have aged twenty years. "I'd rather stand in the light than hide in the shadows now."
Chen fished another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. "As for why everyone's getting sick... think back to that metaphor. We weren't born in the deep sea."
"Every bit of our evolution adapted us for life on the shore. How could we possibly survive in the ocean? The physical laws that permitted human existence have ended. And maybe... somewhere on Earth, in its deepest, darkest trenches, life from the last deep-sea epoch still lurks. What form it takes, whether it's begun to stir with the crashing of the waves... that, we don't know."
Li was silent for a long time. The image of the whale on the mountain path returned to him—bloated, reeking of its own decay. He shook his head, forcing the thought away. "You're talking like we're already finished. So why bring me here? For a last goodbye?"
"Humanity is finished. That's what most people who know the truth believe." Chen inhaled half the cigarette in one go, but a fierce light kindled in his eyes. "But I think there's a chance. A slim one. If you believe me, there might still be a sliver of hope."
"Before the wave hit, my team at the institute found something." He took another drag, finishing the cigarette, then dropped and crushed the butt under his heel. As if drawing strength from the nicotine, his eyes grew brighter. "Something. No one believes it. It might not even work. But it might—just might—be enough to get us, to get humanity, through this."
"What did you find?"
"Light," Chen said. "I captured a beam of light."