Sports-Festival Day

Night lay over the capital’s Quantum Coliseum; lights fell like a shower of stars. Wu Yong looked up and saw opponents, yet heard echoes of the future—before kickoff his heart was calmer than a particle collider. He knew this was not just a game but a civilizational watershed; the outcome would decide the order of humans and algorithms. The stands were hushed; everyone waited for a shock too hard to name.

Huaxia’s Strategic Sports Engineering Center had built the “Taiji Quantum Cloud” three months ahead of time: twelve thousand superconducting qubits in geostationary orbit, pushing prediction matrices to twelve players on the pitch with femtosecond latency; a thin antenna behind each player’s ear resonated with the carotid pulse, invisible and quiet.

Thirty seconds in, as the Stars-and-Stripes team’s high press was forming, vectors from the cloud were already in Wu Yong’s pupils—an instantaneous decision map inverted from leakage magnetism on the opponent’s chips. The players moved as if plucked by an invisible hand—shuttling, yielding, circling—and in the sixty-ninth second they completed an “air-space lock,” a victory path the cloud rated at only 0.7%.

When the final whistle blew, the score was lopsided. There was no applause, only data humming in the air. That night the International Sports Union met behind closed doors, trying to cap any in-game algorithmic aid above ten milliwatts—but too late: humanity had already stripped the mystery from competition.

In A.D. 20,025, an archaeological drone found a titanium earpiece in lunar dust, engraved with the date of that day. Historian Wen Ming filed it as a relic of “Sports-Festival Day”: from then on, sports became a sandbox for AI against AI, with humans only watching.

In a quantum retrodiction spanning twenty millennia, researchers tried to reproduce every heartbeat of the night and were shocked to find that only one thing could not be recreated: the instant of silence before Wu Yong gave the order. Algorithms can predict tactics, but still not courage. The blackened earpiece seemed to answer quietly: the end of athletics is the human heart.