53: Chapter 53 Sima Bei's Escape

The assistant in Sima Bei's livestream room cropped a screenshot and put it on the screen.

It was a screenshot of a Twitter post from the official account of the International Astronomical Union. Posted just a minute ago, it had already surpassed nine million retweets.

Black text on a white background, the beginning was packed with dense technical jargon, but everyone only saw the most critical lines.

[International Astronomical Union Emergency Announcement]

[Eastern Time: 09:10]

[From 09:07 to 09:10 Eastern Time, all bands of electromagnetic radiation from the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona facing Earth—including but not limited to visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays—experienced a synchronized interruption.]

[Seventeen observatories worldwide with high-resolution solar spectroscopic observation capabilities, including the Mauna Kea Solar Observatory in Hawaii, the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands, SALT in South Africa, the Huairou Solar Observing Station in the East, and the Sacramento Peak Observatory in New Mexico, have independently confirmed this phenomenon.]

[Observation methods covered adaptive optics, magnetographs, extreme ultraviolet imagers, and radio heliographs, with no data link correlation between them.]

[The following are the consensus conclusions: First, this radiation interruption was not a 'solar eclipse projection.' No obscuring objects existed between the Sun and Earth; the observation units detected no absorption spectra or scattering characteristics of any solid or plasma obscuring structures during the interruption.]

[We were not blocked; we witnessed the disappearance of the Sun.]

[Second, during the interruption, the Sun's spectral characteristics completely vanished, but the Sun remained in its original position. The gravitational lensing effect was undisturbed, and the extreme ultraviolet afterglow from the SOHO coronagraph also indicated the stellar body was still there.]

[But its radiation did not reach Earth during those three minutes of interruption, as if someone had 'turned off' the Sun.]

[Third, this phenomenon has no corresponding model in known astrophysics.]

[Before publishing this announcement, we exhausted all explanations based on the Standard Model, stellar evolution theory, general relativity, and quantum field theory; none were valid.]

[This is not a solar activity anomaly as we understand it, it is not a level achievable by human technology, and it is certainly not an illusion.]

[Based on the above facts, the International Astronomical Union hereby issues the following statement: We are not qualified to interpret the political implications of this event.]

[However, as astronomers, we have an obligation to remind the global public and national governments that being able to completely eliminate all radiation output of a G2V-type main-sequence star for three minutes and restore it perfectly three minutes later without leaving any engineering traces...]

[...means the other party does not possess 'stellar shielding technology,' but rather stellar-level energy manipulation technology.]

[The difference between the two is equivalent to 'holding up an umbrella to block the sunlight' versus 'deleting the Sun from the universe and then rewriting it.']

[Please do not provoke them further. Based on energy scale calculations, if the operation they are capable of were used to heat the Earth's atmosphere instead of turning off the Sun, it would only take a few seconds to raise the surface temperature above the boiling point.]

[Therefore, the phrase 'mass destruction' is by no means a rhetorical device.]

[We are not publishing this announcement for any other reason. It is simply to remind everyone: The Sun is still there because they are still letting it shine.]

[End.]

Sima Bei stared at the screen, his entire body shaking like a leaf, constantly wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead.

However, the bullet comments still crashed in like a delayed flood peak.

[Call him Daddy!]

[Where's that stubborn mouth from just now?]

['Illusion,' 'Old tricks.']

['Illusion'???? What do you take those seventeen observatories for?]

[All warfare is based on deception, right?]

[Can I get a refund for the courses I bought?]

[The first streamer on the entire internet to be face-slapped by aliens.]

[The observatory said 'do not provoke them,' and Sima Bei was still talking about illusions just now.]

[Quit the internet, stop talking nonsense.]

[Quit the internet!]

Sima Bei didn't look at the comments anymore. With a click of his mouse, the livestream room instantly went black.

The comment section scrolled for another half-second before people realized what happened. The screen was suddenly filled with [????] and [He ran away].

——————

In the White House, the President sat in that high-backed chair. No one in the Situation Room made a sound; everyone was silent.

Bang!

The secretary suddenly pushed open the door and shouted, "Mr. President, an emergency meeting request from the leaders of the Permanent Five."

The President's body snapped upright in his chair. His spine seemed to turn into a taut bowstring, and the vacancy in his eyes was instantly ignited by something.

"Patch them in immediately. Everyone else, out."

No one asked a single question; their footsteps quickly receded down the hallway.

The screen lit up.

Four windows emerged from the darkness. The leaders of the East, Mao Xiong, France, and John all came online at this moment.

No one spoke first.

The silence lasted for a full fifteen seconds. In an emergency meeting connecting four continents simultaneously, those fifteen seconds of silence felt longer than the last false nuclear alarm in the United States.

The Leader of Mao Xiong blinked and tilted his head as if listening to something.

"Why is it so noisy on your end?"

The President gave a bitter smile. He pulled out his phone, opened a surveillance feed, and flipped the screen toward the camera.

Pennsylvania Avenue outside the South Lawn of the White House had turned into a river of human flesh.

They were still holding up signs, but the words on them had changed from 'Humanity will not kneel' to 'We want the Sun, not Mars,' and from 'Get off Earth' to 'Please protect us.'

Some were crying, some were kneeling on the ground, and some buried their heads in their companions' shoulders.

A young girl held up a piece of fluorescent cardboard with 'My brother is only four years old, he wants to live to see tomorrow's sun' written on it in marker.

The President pulled back his phone. "The people on my side are shouting for us to surrender."

The Leader of Mao Xiong didn't respond; his expression was equally grim.

The Leader of John spoke up: "Alright. I believe everyone is clear on the current situation."

"Regarding armies and will—those words still had meaning yesterday. Now, in the face of a power that can extinguish the Sun, our so-called military strength and will to resist have lost all meaning."

"You mean," the Leader of Mao Xiong said with a cold, sharp gaze, "to surrender?"

"What else?" the Leader of France's voice came from Paris. "Does your Mao Xiong's iron flood still have nuclear bombs? Could they even leave a scar if they hit the Sun?"

Silence fell once more. On the question of surrender, no one was willing to be the first to say it.

The President took a deep breath. He had been waiting for this moment for a long time.

Ever since he sat alone in the Oval Office yesterday watching the ice melt in his Coke, since the first piece of intelligence from Maya was delivered to Advisor Cole, and since the sociologists used pencils to draw the triangle between Chen Mu, the Commander, and the Emperor on paper, he had harbored this thought.

He hadn't discussed this thought with anyone; it could even be called his own personal, frantic delusion.