Fate's Choice: Livestream at the Start Summoning Billions of Ravens

The UN office in South Sudan received more than forty emergency reports within two hours.

The communications officer on duty held the phone between his shoulder and ear, his left hand frantically typing on the keyboard, while his right hand gripped his third cup of ice-cold instant coffee.

"No, I heard you right. You said the vegetation coverage jumped from 7% to 94%."

The frontline observer on the other end of the phone was hoarse from shouting.

"I've said it three times, did you even write it down?!"

The communications officer on duty pushed the cup of coffee aside and picked up the red internal telephone on the table.

"Sir, I think you need to see the situation at Camp Juba in person."

Three minutes later, Olsen, the head of the office, rushed into the command center with his tie askew at the second button of his shirt, clearly having been woken up from bed.

"Summarize all frontline reports on the main screen."

The deputy handed over a stack of printing papers.

"Sir, the reports are highly consistent, but their bizarre nature prevents us from directly issuing confirmation."

Olsen flipped through two pages, put down the paper, and turned to face the communications station.

"Activate satellite access, with the highest privileges. I need the latest images of Juba within ten minutes."

The communications officer's fingers danced across the keyboard for a few seconds.

"A low-Earth orbit commercial satellite passed overhead eleven minutes ago, and images are being decompressed and transmitted."

During the eleven minutes of waiting, the air in the command center was so quiet that you could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

The instant the image was transmitted back to the big screen, the coffee cup in Olsen's hand slipped from between his fingers, the porcelain bottom hitting the marble floor and shattering into three pieces.

No one picked it up.

Satellite infrared spectroscopy and vegetation index analysis confirmed a fact with cold blocks of color and numbers: within a precise five-kilometer radius around the Juba refugee camp, the surface vegetation coverage jumped from seven percent to ninety-four percent in a very short period of time.

The boundaries were so clear it looked as if someone had drawn them with a compass.

Is this a rendering error or a sensor malfunction?

The deputy's voice was weak.

Olsen stared at the emerald green disc embedded in the tawny desert on the screen, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.

"Have the technical team perform a second calibration, and cross-validate it using another satellite."

The results of the second calibration came out eight minutes later, and the data matched perfectly with a deviation of less than 0.3%.

Olsen shut down all thoughts of finding a reasonable explanation and picked up the encrypted phone to dial New York.

"This is Olsen at the South Sudan office. I need to activate the highest-level disaster assessment and contingency plan for the East Africa region."

There was a two-second pause on the other end of the phone.

"Disaster assessment and contingency plan? Olson, is the current situation in Juba a disaster?"

Olsen stared at the perfect green disc on the big screen, his mouth agape, unable to find a precise word to define it.

"I don't know what to call it, but it doesn't belong to any existing classification framework."

He lowered his voice by half an octave.

"Simultaneously recruit personnel from three locations: Kampala in Uganda, Nairobi in Kenya, and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Send as many as you can, including agricultural experts, nutritionists, and biosecurity experts, as quickly as possible."

There was a silence of nearly five seconds on the other end of the phone.

"Olsen, are you sure it's not a mass mental breakdown among the frontline personnel?"

"If you saw this satellite image, you wouldn't be asking this question."

Four hours later, three UN helicopters landed on the edge of the Juba Oasis from three directions, the airflow from their rotors blowing waist-high corn stalks this way and that.

The first rapid assessment team consisted of seventeen people, all dressed in full white biochemical protective suits, with goggles and breathing masks covering their faces so that only their eyes were visible.

The team's chief agronomist, Niels, is Danish and has worked at the United Nations World Food Programme for 23 years, visiting 47 food crisis countries around the world.

When he jumped out of the helicopter, the soles of his boots sank into the soft, black mud, the mud covering the tops of his shoes.

Niels crouched down, picked up a handful of dirt with his glove, and rubbed it between his fingers.

"This is Grade A agricultural soil."

His assistant leaned out from behind him.

"Niels, a geological survey report from three months ago showed that the entire area is saline-alkali, with the groundwater level below six meters, making it unsuitable for any agricultural development."

Niels stood up and brushed the mud off his gloves.

"I know."

He walked to the nearest row of corn, reached out and pinched the husk of an ear of corn, and slowly peeled it open.

The grains are golden and plump, arranged so tightly that there are almost no gaps, and you can feel the starchy texture inside when you press them with your fingernail.

"Bring a portable mass spectrometer."

Biosafety experts opened the aluminum alloy equipment case, set up the instrument on the ridge of the field, and used a micro-drill to take a 0.5-gram sample from the surface of a corn kernel.

The data jumped around on the screen for about ninety seconds.

The biosafety expert took off his goggles, wiped the condensation off the lenses, put them back on, and looked at the scene again.

"Niels, come and take a look at this."

Niels walked over and bent down to get closer to the small screen.

"Heavy metal content?"

"Below the detection limit."

"Mycotoxins?"

"zero."

"Radioactive markers?"

"Background radiation levels are completely normal."

Niels straightened up.

What about the nutritional components?

The biosafety expert switched the screen to the second page and tapped on several sets of data.

"It contains 71.4% starch, 9.8% protein, and twice the lysine of regular corn. The ratio of iron and zinc is so precise that I thought it was a fortified grain formulated in a laboratory."

Niels stared at the data, his breathing noticeably pausing.

"Test the cassava as well."

The cassava results came out five minutes later. The data structure was exactly the same as that of corn, ridiculously clean and ridiculously perfect.

Niels pulled a seedling that had just grown to knee height from the soil, broke off the stem, and stuffed the cross-section into the stage of the portable microscope.

The view below the lens made his finger stop on the focus knob.

"That's not right."

The assistant came closer.

"What's wrong?"

Niels' voice was flat, but he spoke at twice the usual pace.

"Count the cell division rate yourself."

The assistant pressed his face against the goggles and counted to thirty, then looked up, the color draining from his face little by little.

"This cell division frequency is ten times that of normal corn cells."

"To be precise, nine point seven times."

Niels took off his gloves and threw them on the ground. He touched the broken end of the stem with his bare hand, and the sap got on his finger.

"The growth cycle of all plants on this land has been compressed to one-tenth of its normal value."

He turned around, looking at the green ocean stretching to the horizon behind him, his voice hoarse.

"The first round is the peak period, after which it will enter a stable cycle. Corn and sorghum have a complete cycle of about ten days, while root vegetables and wild fruits can be harvested in three to four days."

The assistant's hand holding the pen began to tremble.

"Nils, you mean this land can automatically grow a crop of staple food every one or two weeks?"

"No fertilizer, no irrigation, no pest control needed."

Niels squatted back down, resting his hands on his knees, his eyes fixed on the black soil beneath his feet.

"Enough to feed 70,000 people."

The assistant swallowed hard, and it took him a while to squeeze out a sentence.

"How is this possible?"

Niels did not answer, because he himself could not answer.

Just then, UN security personnel accompanying the assessment team jogged over from the other end of the field, their bulletproof vests covered in mud.

"Mr. Niels, you need to check on the situation over there."

Security personnel led him to the vicinity of the military blockade line on the east side of the oasis, where three South Sudanese government soldiers were squatting next to a cassava plant, their expressions ranging between rage and fear.

"We observed a phenomenon while performing monitoring tasks."

The security personnel pointed to the soldiers.

"These armed men tried to harvest the crops multiple times, but each time, the fruit crumbled into mud the moment it touched their palms."

Niels walked over and stood two meters behind the soldier, watching him.

A soldier gritted his teeth and reached out to grab the thickest cassava in front of him. The moment his fingers touched the skin, the white flesh began to turn gray from the point of contact, and within three seconds the entire tuber went limp and turned into a puddle of wet mud.

The soldier shook the mud off his hands and cursed in the local dialect.

Immediately afterward, an old woman, who was so hungry she was practically skin and bones, walked over and pulled out another cassava from the same plant. It was intact, white, and plump. The old woman carried the cassava and staggered away.

Niels stood there, watching this scene, and remained silent for a long time.

He returned to the equipment case, pulled a blank report from his backpack, leaned over the aluminum alloy case lid, and wrote a handwritten note at the end of the report with a pen. The handwriting was slightly messy due to the slight tremor of his wrist.

"This is not an agricultural phenomenon; it is a rule that possesses judgment."

He capped his pen and looked up at the refugee camp surrounded by lush green crops.

Seventy thousand people were harvesting in the fields, the laughter of children and the cries of women mingling together, carried by the wind to his ears.

He lowered his head, folded the report paper, stuffed it into the inner pocket of his protective suit, and zipped it up.

Then he said something into the walkie-talkie.

"Notify New York headquarters that the World Food Programme needs to immediately revise all current assessment models for the South Sudan region."

"Because the old model is no longer of any reference value."