I was born in the twilight of the Brake Era, when the great engines had just ceased their roaring and the sky settled into its permanent slant of blue-white fire. I have never known night. I have never known stars. I have never known spring or autumn.

My grandmother Catherine used to sit by the window of our underground chamber and speak to the wall. She was mad, or so the doctors said, but sometimes her madness contained truths that the sane men of the United Government refused to acknowledge. On certain nights, when the engines below us hummed their eternal note and the plasma columns outside cast their cathedral light through the reinforced glass, she would press her face to the window and whisper: The sun will die. The sun will die and we will not be ready.

The Leviathan Engines rose from the Scottish Highlands like the spires of some impossible Gothic cathedral. Each one stood eleven thousand meters tall, taller than any mountain God had placed there, taller than any tower men had ever built. They consumed the mountains themselves—half the peaks of Asia and the Americas had been fed into their maws, crushed and fused into the plasma that pushed our world through the black. From my chamber window, I could see three of them, their blue-white columns tilting at a sickening angle, as if the heavens themselves were about to topple upon us.

The Order of the Earth had built them. My family—the Blackwoods—had built them for three generations. My grandfather designed the mechanical structure of Engine 794. My father, Colonel Reginald Ashworth of the Royal Engineers, commanded the orbital defense fleet during the debris-clearing campaign. He never returned. The official report said his single-seat micro-ship was vaporized by a fragment of asteroid, struck at one hundred kilometers per second. No pain, the Admiral assured me. Not a moment of it.

I did not believe him. Nothing could be without pain, not even death in the void.

Eleanor Vance came to the engine control center on a day when the plasma columns were particularly bright, throwing prismatic shadows across the steel floor. The Vance family had designed the energy cores—my father and hers had worked together, two engineering dynasties bound by blueprints and ambition. When she looked at me across the holographic display of the solar system, I saw in her eyes the same weight I felt: the knowledge that our families had built something that would outlive us all, and that the thing we had built might be wrong.

We were engaged before the叛乱. We did not have time for anything else.

The Ark Society whispered in the corridors of the underground city. They were the nobility—the old families who had always believed that humanity's salvation lay not in moving the planet but in building arks, great ships that would carry a chosen few to Proxima Centauri. They called the Order of the Earth fools. They called us martyrs who refused to see the truth.

The truth, according to the Ark Society's astronomers, was simple: the sun had not changed. After four centuries of warnings, of engines burning mountains, of humanity driven underground, the sun was exactly as it had always been. The helium flash prediction was a lie. The entire planetary migration was a lie.

I wanted to believe them. God, how I wanted to believe them. Because if they were right, then my father died for nothing. Then the thousands who had perished in the magma floods of the underground cities died for nothing. Then the fifty thousand who had frozen on the ice plains when the engines first started—died for nothing.

But I had seen the data. I had worked with my father's instruments. The sun was changing. I could not prove it to myself, not completely, but I could not disprove it either. And that uncertainty was a wall— infinite in height, infinite in depth, infinite in every direction.

Death, I thought. That is what the wall is.

The叛乱 came on a day that I still cannot describe without my hands trembling. It began in the plazas, where speakers stood on crates and shouted until their voices broke. The world had been betrayed. The United Government had fabricated the helium flash to establish a dictatorship. They had destroyed the earth. They had destroyed human civilization. Citizens with conscience, take up arms and save our planet!

Eleanor stood in the crowd and did not move. I reached for her hand, and she pulled away. Not then. She turned and walked toward the weapon distribution point, where citizens were receiving submachine guns. She did not look back.

Three days later, the叛乱 erupted on every continent simultaneously.

The Order held the engine control centers. For three months, the rebels could not advance—not because they lacked numbers or will, but because they refused to destroy the engines. In the vast theater of East and Central Asia, the twelve army groups of the United Government held out against overwhelming odds, protected by the very machines they had sworn to defend.

Then the desertion began. One army group after another turned their weapons around. The Central Asian and East Asian lines collapsed in two months. The United Government, with fewer than one hundred thousand soldiers, was surrounded in the engine control center near the coast.

I was among the remnants—a major in a army that no longer existed, nursing a laser-scarred arm in the casualty station. It was there that I learned Eleanor had been killed in the Australian campaign. Everyone in the station drank themselves senseless. We did not care about the war anymore.

Then a man with a general's star stood on a crate and spoke. He said we had stood on the wrong side of history, that we could still save our souls. He said the engine bridge was three blocks away, and we should take it and hand it to the rational people outside.

I drew my pistol with my uninjured hand and followed them.

The engine bridge was larger than anything television could convey. We entered a black space that extended infinitely in every direction, suspended within a holographic simulation of the solar system. The Earth's trajectory appeared as a red spiral expanding outward from the sun's distant point, and at its outermost edge, the line turned bright green—the road we had not yet traveled. The green line stretched past our heads into the starfield, disappearing into the depths.

Five thousand people stood on the engine bridge: the highest officials of the United Government, most members of the Interstellar Migration Committee who had implemented the planetary migration plan, and the ordinary soldiers who had remained loyal to the end.

The Supreme Director's voice echoed through the black space. He said they could have fought to the last man, but that might have caused the engines to失控, and the excess fused matter would have burned through the earth or evaporated all the oceans. So they had chosen to surrender.

We understand all of you, he said. Because in forty generations of艰难奋斗, to maintain reason forever is indeed a luxury. But please remember us, all of you. Remember the five thousand people standing here. Here is the Supreme Director of the United Government, and here are ordinary privates. We held onto our信念 until the last moment. We all know that we will not live to see the day when the truth is confirmed. But if humanity survives for ten thousand generations, all future people will shed tears at our graves. This planet called Earth is our eternal monument.

The massive sealed doors opened, and the five thousand walked out in groups, escorted by rebels toward the coast. The crowds on both sides spat at them, threw ice and stones. Some of their sealed suit visors cracked, and the minus-one-hundred-degree cold麻木ed their faces, but they kept walking. I saw a little girl raise a large block of ice and throw it with all her strength at an old man. Her eyes burned with a furious hatred that I could not blame her for feeling.

When I heard that all five thousand had been sentenced to death, I thought it was too lenient. Is a single death enough to atone for their crimes? Could it clear the crime of destroying the earth and human civilization with a bizarre and twisted imagination? They should die ten thousand times.

The executioners found a fitting method: they removed the nuclear batteries from each condemned person's sealed suit, then drove them onto the ice plain of the sea, letting the hundred-degree cold slowly take their lives.

The five thousand stood in a dark mass on the ice, with over one hundred thousand people watching from the shore. Ten thousand teeth clenched. Ten thousand eyes burned with the same fury as the little girl's.

All the Leviathan Engines had been shut down. The magnificent stars appeared above the ice plain.

I could imagine the cold piercing their bodies like ten thousand knives, their blood freezing, life flowing from them drop by drop. The imagined sensation became a pleasure that spread through my body. The people on shore grew cheerful as the criminals on the ice slowly died, and they all began to sing The My Sun together. I sang with them, my eyes fixed on a point in one direction of the starfield, where a slightly larger star emitted yellow light. That was the sun.

Oh, my sun, mother of life, father of all things, my great god, my god! What is more stable than you? What is more eternal? We tiny carbon-based bacteria, crowded on a small stone orbiting you, dared to predict your end. How could we be this stupid?

One hour passed. The criminals on the ice still stood, but not a single one was alive. Their blood had frozen solid.

Then my eyes went blind.

For several seconds, I could see nothing. Then my vision slowly returned, and the ice plain, the coast, and the crowd on shore slowly came into focus—sharper than before, because the world was now bathed in blinding white light. The starless sky had been swallowed by this light, as if the entire universe had been dissolved. The light burst from a single point in space—the point I had been staring at.

The sun's helium flash had erupted.

The合唱 of The My Sun stopped abruptly. The hundred thousand people on shore stood frozen, as if they had become rock alongside those on the ice.

The sun gave its last light and heat to the earth. The frozen carbon dioxide dry ice on the ground melted first, rising in white steam. Then the surface ice of the sea began to melt, and the unevenly heated sea ice emitted earth-shaking roars. Gradually, the light softening on the ground became gentle, and a faint blue appeared in the sky. Then auroras appeared in the sky from the intense solar wind—giant colorful curtains of light飘动 across the firmament.

The five thousand former members of the Order of the Earth still stood steadily on the ice, like five thousand statues.

The solar eruption lasted only a short time. Two hours later, the intense light began to diminish rapidly, then extinguished. At the position of the sun appeared a dark red sphere, its volume slowly expanding until it reached the same apparent size as the sun had appeared from Earth's orbit—meaning its actual volume had expanded beyond Mars's orbit. Mercury, Mars, and Venus, the three companion planets of Earth, had already been reduced to wisps of smoke in radiation of hundreds of millions of degrees. But this was no longer the sun. It no longer emitted light or heat. It looked like a cold red sheet pasted against the sky, its dark red glow merely scattered starlight. This was the final destiny of a low-mass star: red giant.

Five billion years of magnificent life had become a drifting dream. The sun was dead.

Fortunately, some were still alive.

I sat on the ice plain and watched the red giant expand. Eleanor's face appeared in the light, young and beautiful, running toward me across a green earth that did not yet exist. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, the stars were still there. The engines would restart in five hundred years. The earth would continue its journey. And I would carry the weight of the five thousand monuments forever.

OTMES v2: VIC-2026-SCOT-TRAGICMONUMENT-4ACT-1350W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM