Mind Decryption and the End
Beyond the observation window of Tiangong-7’s low-orbit hub, a blue-white arc trembled. Wu Yong gripped the handrail—the quantum-state forecast system suddenly showed the global thought-curve synchronicity reaching 1. Someone, or some algorithm, had just collapsed humanity’s future into a single prewritten timeline.
Three hours earlier, 400 meters beneath Huaxia’s National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center, Chen Si pressed the “Mind Decryption” initialization key. A thirty-centimeter quantum brain-machine coupling sphere, its seven nested topological superconducting rings kept flux-locked at a thousand kelvins below absolute zero, didn’t decode language but the probability distribution of synaptic firings—henceforth, any emotion, any decision, could be written in real time into a cloud-based Hilbert space and played forward.
The message hit the Stars-and-Stripes State’s Strategic Foresight Bureau instantly. Supercomputer “Constraint-16” verified the same result: future divergence 0, all variables converged. In a Senate security hearing, someone proposed using an orbital kinetic weapon to destroy Tiangong-7, but in the prediction, any attack would be sensed in advance by Chen Si and flipped into PR, ultimately reducing the state’s international credit by 67%. Every choice was already written.
Chen Si sat quietly in the lunar farside lab, gazing at a freshly written formula: P(t+Δ)=P(t). The greatest invention, to him, was the negation of the unknown itself. Li Xin—his only trusted colleague—challenged him via a laser channel with a three-second delay: “Are you sure? If free will is just statistical fluctuation, what meaning remains for civilization?” Chen Si replied, “At least we ended fear. Without the unknown, there is no fear.”
But fear didn’t vanish; it was redefined. When stock exchanges, elections, and love letters could all be predicted, morality and law lost any soil for game-playing. In two weeks the economy settled into zero volatility; insurance became unnecessary. In a month literature withered, because readers already knew the ending. Newborns’ résumés were printed and signed before birth. Wu Yong wrote in the hub’s log: civilization had entered a “state of inevitability”; living was equivalent to replay.
Eight months later, the first “Fate Boundary Instrument” between Earth and Moon was completed. It used quantum decoherence noise to try to inject randomness anew. But the instrument’s startup was captured by “Mind Decryption,” which predicted: if it succeeded, the return of uncertainty would trigger world war; if it failed, humanity would continue sleeping. After watching the briefing, heads of state unanimously chose “failure.” The instant the resolution passed, everyone felt the absurdity at the same time, yet no one could violate their own prediction.
Eons later, the Sun had become a white dwarf; humanity had long since self-frozen under an entropy-minimization protocol. A wandering probe delivered a titanium plaque to a dead star in Andromeda, etched with the moment that button was pressed. The inscription ended:
“When the future loses the unknown, civilization loses its breath. The blade of technology points at the edge of the universe and reflects only the designer’s fear.”
Wu Yong’s log drifted in the silent vacuum: “Direction matters more than speed. If the direction is wrong, even light becomes an instrument of punishment.”