Ark of the Zero Constant

In the dark quantum tunnel, a cursor blinked like the heartbeat of the universe. Wu Yong stared at the screen, and felt the breath of another civilization at his back—though he was alone in the room. That breath was slow, once per second, in sync with the cursor. It was as if an unseen cosmos waited in the dark for a reply. He finally hit Enter.

This was 700 meters below ground at Huaxia’s National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center. The AI “Jiaolong-Λ” was self-evolving high-dimensional topological equations, seeking non-equilibrium initial states for the next-gen quantum engine, the only way to raise specific impulse per ton of fuel by six orders of magnitude—enough to jump to Proxima.

At three a.m., the equations froze and output an indecipherable hyper-dimensional matrix. Wu Yong cooled the quantum chip with liquid helium and wrote the matrix directly into the drive stack. In the particle-cloud chamber, interference fringes curled at once; the tunneling current produced an imaginary-time echo theoretically confined to the Planck scale. The instrument delivered a shiver of a result: the cosmological constant ≈ 0.

It meant space itself could be viewed as a differential series of zero-point amplitudes—in other words, so-called reality was a recurrent numerical call. The report was encrypted and sent to the SCO Quantum Security Union’s Fifth Bureau, with automatic copies to the Stars-and-Stripes lab. Ten minutes later both control centers issued the same order: “pre-jump.” Humans always press the start key first.

The equations were injected into the orbital test ship Longmen I. After thirty seconds of computation, the hull fell out of phase with the local Hubble sphere and vanished, leaving a fading afterglow of neutrinos. The world held its breath; every deep-space radar searched for the fifty-thousand-ton ghost. Nine minutes later, the laser ranging chain locked onto a target 0.17 light-seconds away—Proxima’s orbit. Humanity had achieved its first interstellar jump, though no one grasped the underlying principle.

At the monitoring console, Wu Yong watched in silence—the matrix had begun to self-erase, the code fading line by line like a comet’s tail. He understood: when equations exceed the brain’s parsable dimension, cognitive scale itself becomes a civilization’s event horizon. Perhaps the jump had repeated countless times, and we are but one iteration in a numerical loop.

He turned off the screen and stepped outside. Dawn haze was as thin as a comment in code; the rising sun refracted into countless echoes, as if the universe demonstrated “run” again and again. Standing in the light, Wu Yong murmured, “The limit isn’t interstellar distance; it’s understanding itself.”