英文本 流浪地球

I have never seen the night. I have never seen the stars. I have never seen spring, fall or winter. I was born as the Braking Era ended, just as the Earth stopped turning. It had taken forty-two years to halt the Earth’s rotation, three years longer than the Coalition had planned.

My mother told me about the time our family watched the last sunset. The Sun sank very slowly, as if stuck on the horizon. It took three days and three nights to finally set. Of course, afterward there was no more ‘day’ or ‘night’. The Eastern hemisphere was shrouded in perpetual dusk for a long time, maybe a decade or so. The Sun lay just below the horizon, its glow filling half the sky.

During that endless sunset, I was born. Dusk did not mean darkness. The Earth Engines brightly illuminated the whole Northern hemisphere. They had been installed all across Asia and North America – only the solid tectonic plate structure of these two continents could withstand the enormous thrust they exerted. In total, there were twelve thousand engines scattered across the Eurasian and North American plains.

From where I lived, I could see the bright plasma beams of hundreds of engines. Imagine an enormous palace, as big as the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Inside the palace, countless massive columns rise up to the vaulted ceiling, each one blazing with the blue-white light of a fluorescent tube. And you, you are just a microbe on the palace’s floor. That was the world I lived in. Actually, that description was not totally accurate. It was the tangential thrust component generated by the engines that halted the Earth’s rotation.

Because of this, the engine jets needed to be set at a very precise angle, causing the massive beams to slant across the sky. It was like the grand palace that we lived in was teetering on the verge of collapse! When visitors from the Southern hemisphere were exposed to the spectacle, many of them suffered panic attacks. But even more terrifying than the sight of the engines was the scorching heat they produced. Temperatures reached as high as seventy or eighty degrees Celsius, forcing us to don cooling suits before we stepped outside. The heat often raised torrential storms.

When a plasma beam pierced the dark clouds, it was a nightmarish scene. The clouds would scatter the beam’s blue-white light, throwing off frenetic, surging rainbow halos. The entire sky glowed as if covered in white-hot lava. My grandfather had grown senile in his old age.

One time, tormented by the implacable heat, he was so overjoyed to see a downpour arrive that he stripped to the waist and ran out the door. We were too late to stop him. The raindrops outside had been heated to boiling point by the superheated plasma beams, and his skin was scalded so badly that it sloughed off in large sheets.