I have been fixing pipes for twelve years. Twelve years in the bowels of Engine 77, which is one of twelve thousand planetary engines that are pushing Earth out of the solar system. I am not a hero. I am a pipe fixer.

The job is simple: check for cracks. Tighten loose bolts. Record the maintenance date on a pipe with a wrench. That is it. Twelve-hour shifts, four hundred degrees Celsius, ninety percent humidity. The air tastes like metal. The noise is a constant roar, like the inside of a jet engine that never stops.

My wife died in the relocation. A mine collapse in the Chongqing underground city. She was a geologist, working on the tunnel expansion project. Twelve thousand people died that day. I was not there. I was in the Andes, fixing pipes.

My two daughters went back to the Midwest. Sarah, eighteen, wanted to be a navigator. Lily, twelve, wanted to be a teacher. I have not seen them in four years.

The rebellion started on a Tuesday. I knew it was Tuesday because the mess hall served beef stew, which they only do on Tuesdays. The first explosion was at 06:47. I was on Level 4, checking冷却管道, when the vibration hit. Not the engine—the explosion. Something above us had detonated.

I went to Level 3 and saw smoke. The corridors were filled with smoke and the sound of shouting. Then the order came over the intercom: "All personnel evacuate to emergency shelters."

My foreman, a Russian named Dmitri, grabbed my arm. "Frank, we need to stay. If the cooling system shuts down, the engine core will overheat in two hours. The whole Andes cluster will blow."

"How many of us?" I asked.

"Seven. Including you."

The rebels took the control center at 08:30. By 10:00, they had begun executing the engineers who refused to tell them how to shut down the engine. I heard the shots from Level 4. I did not look up. I kept fixing pipes.

Dmitri was shot at 11:15. He was standing in the corridor, facing three rebels with assault rifles. He had his hands up. He spoke in Russian: "I am a pipe fixer. I fix pipes. I do not know how to shut down the engine."

They shot him anyway.

I did not cry. I have not cried since my wife died. Crying is a luxury that pipe fixers cannot afford.

I worked for six more hours. I repaired three cracked pipes, tightened forty-seven bolts, and recorded each one with my wrench on the pipe surface. Each mark is a date: the day, the month, the year. June 4th, 2058. June 4th, 2058. June 4th, 2058.

Sarah came at 16:00. She was wearing a navigator's uniform—dark blue, with the emblem of the Earth Engine Command on the shoulder. She appeared at the maintenance hatch on Level 2, looking small and lost in the enormous space of the engine interior.

"Dad," she said.

"Sarah."

She came down to me. We stood side by side, looking at the pipes. The noise was deafening, but we did not shout. We spoke in normal voices, like people in a kitchen.

"Dad, I hate this place."

I looked at her. She was my daughter, but she had her mother's face. "I know."

"Why did you stay?"

"This is where your mother worked last. Before the mine. I wanted to be close to her."

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: "I'm going to be a navigator. I'm going to help steer the Earth to a new star."

"That's good," I said.

She kissed me on the cheek and left. Five minutes of conversation. That was all we got.

The helium flash began at 23:47.

I felt it before I heard it—a vibration through the engine structure, a deep shaking that was not the normal operational tremor. The engine roared. Pipes burst. The temperature spiked to six hundred degrees.

Something fell from the ceiling—a steel beam, maybe three hundred pounds. It hit my right leg. I heard the bone break. I did not scream. I used my left foot to brace myself against the pipe bracket and held on with my right hand—the hand that holds the wrench.

The shaking lasted for eleven minutes. Then it stopped.

I was alone. The corridor was filled with dust and the smell of burning insulation. I was sitting on the floor with a broken leg. I had not screamed.

They pulled me out three days later. I survived. Not beautifully—just survived. Right leg broken in three places. Severe burns on my left side. Lung damage from inhaling smoke. I will never work again.

They transferred me to the surface. This was the first time in forty years I had seen real sunlight. The Sun was wrong—red, bloated, filling a third of the sky. It was the color of blood.

I sat on the surface of the Andes and looked at the Sun and thought about Kansas. I had been born in Kansas before the engines. Before the mining. Before my wife died. Before I became a pipe fixer.

I had a pocketful of wheat seeds. I had brought them from Kansas sixty years ago, when I was a boy. They were in a small paper bag, and the bag was in my work boot, and I had forgotten them until now.

I took them out. Seven seeds. I scattered them on the ground. They would never grow. The soil was too hot. The air was too thin. The Sun was going to explode.

But I scattered them anyway.

New Sun era. That is what they call it now. The Sun has stabilized. It is a different Sun—a red dwarf, smaller and cooler. Earth has settled into orbit around it. People are rebuilding.

Sarah is a navigator. She has never seen me fix a pipe. But she knows that I lived. That is enough.

--- [Objective Tensor Code / 客观张量编码] Name: The Weight of a Nation Code: OTMES-v2-0E10A4-M9-52-113FD0 TI: 89.6 E_total: 16.43 Dominant Mode: M9 Dominant Angle: 225 Rank: 20 Irreversibility: 0.5 M: [7.0, 0.5, 4.0, 5.0, 4.5, 5.5, 3.5, 7.0, 2.0, 8.0] N: [0.8, 0.2] K: [0.2, 0.8]