The Three-Body Problem

While Wang travels home, the events of the past two days and the knowledge he has just acquired about Red Coast start to blend together. He logs in to Three Body, creating a new ID for himself: Copernicus. The Western username transports him to a Western-style world with a Gothic palace and ancient Greek clothing. He enters the Great Hall of the palace to find several men sitting around a table. They introduce themselves as Pope Gregory, Aristotle, and Galileo.

Galileo mocks the Eastern focus on “meditation” and “epiphany,” explaining that he prefers to understand the world “through observation and experiment.” Wang explains that Mozi also used observation and experiment, but the Western scholars scoff at this. Wang then tells the men that he has created a model of the universe; though he does not yet have a calendar, he hopes this model will allow them to predict the pattern of the sun.

Nervously, Wang argues that the world of the game has three suns. He suggests that “under the influence of [the suns’] mutually perturbing gravitational attraction, their movements are unpredictable—the three-body problem.” Stable Eras occur when the game planet revolves around one of the suns in a consistent orbit. But when one or more of the other suns comes too close, its gravitational pull disrupts the game planet’s steady orbit and sends it into a Chaotic Era. In other words, Wang says, “this is a football game at the scale of the universe. The players are the three suns, and our planet is the football.”

The scholars burst out laughing, and Pope Gregory orders his servants to burn Wang. Galileo questions why nobody has ever seen three suns; Wang explains that the flying stars in the distance are actually the other suns. Wang also explains why three flying stars in the distance make      for extreme cold: that means all three suns are far away from the planet.

Aristotle still pushes back; he argues that there cannot be three suns because no one has ever seen three suns in the sky at the same time. Leonardo da Vinci interrupts, suggesting that some societies may have seen three suns and just not lived to tell the tale. Wang agrees, arguing that “tri-solar days are the most terrifying catastrophes for our world.” Still, the scholars are not convinced, and Pope Gregory calls for Wang to be burned, with the same strange glee that King Zhou once had.

As the scholars prepare to burn Wang, da Vinci explains that if Wang’s avatar is killed in the game, he can never log in again. But before Wang can be thrown into a cauldron, three suns appear in the sky, devastating the world. As the planet collapses, a message appears in the game, informing Wang that Civilization 183 was “destroyed by a tri-solar day.” But because Wang has “successfully revealed the basic structure of the universe,” he is now able to log on to the second level of the game.