4_Ark of the Zero Constant

In the dim quantum tunnel, a cursor blinked like the universe’s heartbeat. Wu Yong stared at the screen and felt, impossibly, the breath of another civilization on his back—even though he was the only one in the room. The breath came slow, once a second, syncing with the cursor. It was as if some unseen cosmos were waiting in the dark for a reply. At last, he hit Enter.

All of this was happening seven hundred meters underground, in Huaxia’s National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center. The AI “Jiaolong-Λ” was evolving its own high-dimensional topological equations, hunting for non-equilibrium initial states for the next-generation quantum engine—the only way to push specific impulse per ton of fuel up by six orders of magnitude, enough for a jump to Proxima.

At three a.m., the equations stalled and spat out an indecipherable hyper-dimensional matrix. Wu Yong cooled the quantum chip with liquid helium and wrote the matrix straight into the drive stack. In the particle-cloud chamber, interference fringes curled up at once; the tunneling current produced an imaginary-time echo that, in theory, should have been trapped at the Planck scale. The instruments returned a result that made his skin crawl: the cosmological constant ≈ 0.

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

The equations were injected into the orbital test ship Longmen I. After thirty seconds of computation, the hull slipped out of phase with the local Hubble sphere and vanished, leaving only a fading afterglow of neutrinos. The world held its breath; every deep-space radar swept the sky 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 pulled off its first interstellar jump, though no one truly understood why it worked.

At the monitoring console, Wu Yong watched in silence as the matrix began to erase itself, the code fading line by line like a comet’s tail. He understood: once equations exceed the brain’s parsable dimension, cognitive scale itself becomes a civilization’s event horizon. Maybe the jump had already happened countless times, and we’re just one more run in a numerical loop.

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