“Oh my God,” he said.
“JieMin, what is it?” she asked.
“ChaoLi, I think I know what’s in the hole.”
“What is it, JieMin? What’s in the hole?”
“Reality.”
JieMin had no after-shocks on Sunday, but he didn’t pursue anything on Sunday either. He did not do any work on or thinking about the problem.
ChaoLi always cooked big on Sunday, and packaged up various intermediate steps of her cooking for use during the week. That Sunday she ran a big batch in the rice cooker, and packaged up much of that. She chopped vegetables, and packaged much of that. And she cut beef and chicken up into chunks, and packaged much of that. That made stir fry and egg fried rice during the week easy and fast for dinner after work.
They ate about two in the afternoon, and then went for a walk in the park. Flowers were blooming, the sun was shining, and children laughed and played.
That evening they ate a light snack. After supper, ChaoLi studied a textbook in her heads-up display.
JieMin sat curled up in the big armchair in the northeast corner, looking sightlessly toward the lights of the downtown to the south-southeast, and let his mind drift.
When he got to his office that Monday morning, JieMin faced one big question. Could he draw the puzzle with the hole in the center? He saw it in his mind, but could he draw it?
JieMin began by starting a three-dimensional drawing in the projection display. The pieces of his puzzle were the big chunks of modern physics.
For electricity and magnetism, he had Maxwell’s equations. For quantum mechanics, he had the Uncertainty Principle and Planck’s constant and electron orbitals and quantum foam. There was special relativity, and general relativity, and unified field theory.
Then he got into the combinational bits, like quantum electrodynamics, the integration of electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics.
JieMin added all the things he knew to his drawing. All the parts of modern physics. He placed them haphazardly at first, then started organizing them.
As he went, JieMin identified other parts of physics he needed, but did not know. String theory, and entangled particles, and inflation cosmology, and dark matter, and dark energy.
JieMin began speed-auditing classes on these other issues. For further depth in some of these areas, he audited books by having the display read the book to him while he watched the words and equations scroll by, just soaking it all in.
As JieMin learned, he kept adding pieces to his drawing. Moving pieces around. Connecting them. When he saw holes in the structure as it developed, he tracked down more books on those areas and audited them.
As the weeks passed, JieMin continued to have major and minor integration shocks as he went, which resulted in new pieces of the puzzle or, more often, some adjustment to the arrangement of the pieces he already had.
There was something there. Chen JieMin knew it. He saw it. And he would find it, and define it, whatever it took.
The greatest mathematical mind the human race had produced in centuries, with all humanity’s written works and its most advanced visualization and computation tools at his fingertips, applied himself to the question of the nature of reality itself.
ChaoLi noted JieMin’s increasing distraction as he got deeper and deeper into the problem he was working on. He often got up in the middle of the night, scribbled madly away in his notebook for a half-hour or even an hour, and then would come back to bed.
ChaoLi took great pains not to disturb JieMin during the week. This was not that difficult, for she was also taking a heavy load of schoolwork, to finish the undergraduate degree in two years or less.
But ChaoLi also enforced a rigid rule for the weekends. On long projects, one needed ‘away time,’ periods when one set the project aside and did other things, enjoyed life outside the project.
Every weekend, ChaoLi planned outings for both days. Sometimes they had a picnic in the park. Sometimes they went to the beach, either swimming in the ocean or walking along the beach.
They discovered a secret spot, several miles north of the bus stop and the artificially widened public beach. This stretch of the coast was still on public property, part of the protected coastline so close the city. Their little secret cove was secluded and beautiful, and they made long, slow love there on occasion, then floated in the water in the afterglow.
One weekend, ChaoLi rented an autodrive car, and they drove up into the mountains, to Chagu, for two days. ChaoLi met all of JieMin’s relatives, and saw where he grew up. JieMin’s brothers camped out on the floor of the living room of the small four-room house so the young couple could have the boys’ room on Saturday night.
On Saturday, JieMin showed ChaoLi the dam he had designed – that he had seen in his head and that Chen Zufu had financed. Chen GangJie told them how much it had changed the productivity of the valley, and showed them the new areas it had opened to cultivation.
On Sunday, they hiked up into the valley above the dam to a beautiful little meadow, sprinkled with mountain flowers. They spread their lavalavas on the ground and made love there, surrounded by the jagged mountains, the wispy afternoon clouds floating above.
During this period, when JieMin was deeply into his project, the colony celebrated the centennial of its founding. September fifteenth fell on a Saturday this year, and the government had declared Thursday and Friday as colony holidays. ChaoLi enforced her ‘no work’ rule for the entire four-day holiday weekend.
On Saturday, they went up on the roof of the apartment building to watch
