He tapped the countdown. "They're not here to talk. They're here to lock our science. They're scrambling our particle colliders, blinding our telescopes, and reading our every thought. We are in a chaotic era , Dr. Durand. Just like their world."

The message would take two hundred years to reach a potentially hostile civilization. The Trisolarans, reading his plan via the sophons, went silent for the first time. They realized the horror: the humans were willing to turn the entire galaxy into a dark forest, where every star is a hunter's campfire.

Then the words dissolved into a chaotic orbit: the path of a three-body problem. Three suns, eternally chasing, colliding, flinging their planets from fire into ice. The universe, Saul realized, was not silent. It was screaming.

"A what?"