11_Mind Decryption and the End
Outside the observation window of Tiangong-7’s low-orbit hub, a blue-white curve shivered against the dark. Wu Yong tightened his grip on the handrail—the quantum prediction console had just flashed a new value: the global thought-curve synchrony had hit 1. Someone, or something written in code, had forced the future of humanity to collapse into a single, prewritten line.
Three hours earlier, four hundred meters beneath Huaxia’s National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center, Chen Si had pressed the “Mind Decryption” initialization key. In front of him hung a thirty-centimeter quantum brain-machine coupling sphere. Seven nested topological superconducting rings, locked in a flux state a thousand kelvins below absolute zero, did not decode language but the probability distribution of synaptic firing. From that moment on, any emotion, any decision, could be written in real time into a cloud-based Hilbert space and run forward like a simulation.
The message reached the Stars-and-Stripes State’s Strategic Foresight Bureau in the same second. Supercomputer “Constraint-16” confirmed the same outcome: future divergence had dropped to zero; every variable had converged. During an emergency security hearing in the Senate, someone proposed firing an orbital kinetic weapon at Tiangong-7. But the projection showed that any strike would be sensed in advance by Chen Si and turned into public-relations theater, ultimately reducing the state’s international credit by 67%. Every branch on the decision tree was already annotated.
Chen Si now sat alone in a lab on the Moon’s far side, staring at a freshly written formula on the screen: P(t+Δ)=P(t). To him, the greatest invention in history was the erasure of the unknown itself. Li Xin—his only trusted colleague—challenged him over a laser channel with a three-second delay: “Are you really sure? If free will is only statistical noise, what meaning is left for civilization?” Chen Si answered, “At least we have ended fear. Where there is nothing unknown, there is nothing to be afraid of.”
But fear did not disappear; it merely changed its shape. When stock exchanges, elections, and love letters could all be forecast in advance, morality and law lost the room they had once had for games and bargaining. Within two weeks, the global economy flattened into zero volatility, and insurance became pointless. Within a month, literature withered—readers already knew how every story would end. Newborns’ résumés were drafted, printed, and signed before they took their first breath. In the station log, Wu Yong wrote that civilization had entered a “state of inevitability”; living had become indistinguishable from replay.
Eight months later, the first “Fate Boundary Instrument” between Earth and Moon went online. It used controlled quantum decoherence noise to try to smuggle genuine randomness back into the world. But its startup sequence fell straight into the field of “Mind Decryption,” which produced a simple prediction: if the instrument succeeded, the return of uncertainty would trigger world war; if it failed, humanity would go on sleeping. After reading the briefing, the heads of state unanimously chose “failure.” At the instant the resolution passed, everyone present felt the absurdity of it at the same time, yet not one of them could step outside the forecast they had already seen.
Eons later, the Sun had cooled to a white dwarf and humanity had long since placed itself in deep freeze under an entropy-minimization protocol. A wandering probe delivered a titanium plaque to a dead star in Andromeda, engraved with the moment that button had been pressed. The text ended:
“When the future loses the unknown, civilization loses its breath. The blade of technology points toward the edge of the universe and reflects only the designer’s fear.”
Wu Yong’s log drifted through the quiet vacuum: “Direction matters more than speed. If the direction is wrong, even light becomes an instrument of punishment.”