Rehydrate

Episode 1: Silent Spring

In chapter 1, we’re introduced to Ye Wenjie who witnesses her father, Ye Zhhetai, getting murdered by a mob persecuting him for being a “reactionary” during the early stages of China’s cultural revolution in 1967.

They tried to make him say that the theory of relativity was an American capitalist idea, but he would not, even despite his wife, Shao Lin, also a physics professor, trying to force him to do so in front of the gathered mob

They considered the big bang theory that Ye Zhetai taught to be reactionary since prior to the big bang, there was nothing and leaves open the idea that there is a god, and Ye would not definitively say that there was no god, just that he didn’t know since there has been no evidence either way “according to science”

In chapter 2, 3 years later, Ye Wenjie is at the Production and Construction Corps, a labor camp in Inner Mongolia, responsible for cutting trees and dealing with the forest in an area surrounding the mysterious Radar Peak, where people noticed strange phenomena around the appearance of a antenna that seemed to make the ice melt and turned the snow to rain. There are also soldiers that have authorization to shoot anyone who approached the peak.

At the camp, Ye Wenjie meets Bai Mulin, a reporter that introduces her to Silent Spring, an American book that talks about the death of a small town from pesticides. Bai wants to write a letter to the government in Beijing saying that the work they’re doing to the forests of Inner Mongolia are harmful and should be stopped. He eventually asks Ye Wenjie to copy the letter he had written to make it more legible, and Ye agrees.

Later Ye Wenjie is arrested and charged with being a reactionary when Bai Mulin says that she was the one that actually wrote the letter in order to save himself from charges.

Ye Wenjie is given the opportunity of leniency by signing a document, supposed to be written by her sister, saying that she had overheard conversations from her father about a defense project that he was supposed to have been working on. When Ye refuses to sign since she was not aware of the conversations, she is forced to remain in isolation in a cell in the freezing Inner Mongolian winter.

Episode 2: Frontiers of Science

Ye Wenjie wakes up to find that she is being transported on a helicopter. She meets Yang Weining, a former graduate student of Ye’s father, with whom they would disagree about theoretical vs. applied physics and which makes a bigger impact.

Upon arriving at Red Coast Base, Ye is given the choice to remain there and work on what they refer to as a “large-scale weapons research project” or take the helicopter back and face a 6-10 year sentence for her supposed crimes. She quickly agrees and enters the base. She witnesses a test of the base... one that seemingly generates a transmission of large amounts of electrical energy that lights up the sky.

Forty years later, we’re introduced to Wang Miao, who is met at his house by police and members of the army, asking if he has spoken with members of the Frontiers of Science. Wang Miao is told that a general has requested that he attends a meeting later that day.

At the meeting in Beijing, Wang Miao along with Shi Qiang (nicknamed Da Shi) meets with an international group of scientists, military, and police. We find out that Wang Miao is working on nanomaterial, a technology that can be made into a string as thin as one-hundredth of a hair and cut a speeding car in half if it were to pass through it.

Wang finds out that the reason they have asked to meet with him is that several high-profile members of the Frontiers of Science, including one he was familiar with, Yang Dong from his time at the Liangxiang particle accelerator, had recently committed suicide. The Frontiers of Science is a well-known group of academics that asks the question, what is the limit of science?

Yang Dong had said in her suicide note “All the evidence points to a single conclusion: Physics has never existed, and will never exist.” After some goading from Da Shi, Wang agrees to join the Frontiers of Science to find out a potential cause.

Wang leaves the meeting and General Chang gives him an ominous warning... life as he knows it will be changed, and he should prepare for the worst.

Episode 3: A Game of Pool

After the meeting in Beijing, Wang Miao goes to visit a disheveled Ding Yi at his apartment. Ding Yi tells Wang that he should not get involved with the police or military and that the Frontiers of Science had nothing to do with the death of the scientists.

Ding runs a simple experiment with Wang, pocket a pool ball on a pool table in different parts of the room. When the experiment predictably succeeds, he says that large scale particle accelerators that he and his colleagues work on are similar to a pool table.. However when they ran their experiments, particles would collide and react in unpredictable ways. When Wang asks what this means, Ding responds: “It means that the laws of physics are not invariant across time and space.” The same sentiment that was in Yang Dong’s suicide note.

Later Wang Miao, an amateur photographer, is out taking pictures.. but when we develops them, he notices strange numbers on a photograph, starting with 1200:00:00

He proceeds to frantically develop more pictures, using different film, and even different cameras, all with the same numbers appearing, but counting down. For some reason only pictures he personally takes yield photographs with the countdown.

Wang decides to contact Shen Yufei, a member of the Frontiers of Science to see if she has any idea what might be happening.

Upon arriving at Shen Yufei’s house, she doesn’t offer any advice as to why the countdown is appearing, but rather cryptically tells him that he needs to stop his research into nanomaterial.

Later, back at home, Wang finds that the countdown has returned, not on his photographs, but directly in his vision, no matter where he looks, the countdown follows him. After consulting a doctor and finding nothing wrong with his eyes, he returns to work and is presented with an opportunity to shut down his nanomaterial research project for maintenance for a few days. As soon as the experiment is shut down, the countdown stops. Wang again contacts Shen Yufei, who tells him that it is not simply a trick, and that in 3 days, he should look to the sky and he will see the universe flicker for him.

Episode 4: The Universe Flickers

Wang Miao is introduced to the Three Body V-Suit game. A simulation of a seemingly desolate planet that’s inhabited with historical Chinese figures who talk of Stable and Chaotic eras. These eras are made up of periods of intense cold and heat depending on the apparent random appearance of the sun.

In order to cope with this unstable climate, the inhabitants have developed the ability to “dehydrate” where they shed all the water from their bodies and transform into 2 dimensional skins.

Wang continues through the game and learns the goal: To figure out the pattern of Stable and Chaotic eras and save the civilization of Three Body. Wang’s traveling companion, King Wen travels to King Zhou who tells him that he has figured out the accurate calendar of the Stable and Chaotic eras. When they are supposed to enter a 3 year stable era, King Zhou dramatically orders all of his subjects to “rehydrate”.

However, Wen’s calculations are wrong, and after Wang sees 3 flying stars, there is no sunrise, and the game ends with a message that Civilization 137 has been destroyed, covering the entire world in a deep snow.

After Wang leaves the game, at the suggestion of Ding Yi, he goes to visit Yang Dong’s mother, who turns out to be Ye Wenjie from Red Coast Base.

Ye Wenjie is able to arrange for a place for Wang to observe the cosmic microwave background, as Shen Yufei had asked him to do.

At the observatory, Wang meets with Sha Ruishan, a former student of Ye Wenjie, who allows Wang to observe the background radiation of the universe, but is skeptical that he’ll actually observe any change, let alone the 5% that Wang is anticipating that he will see.

At the time that Wang had been told, he indeed does see the background radiation start to fluctuate and flicker. Sha is initially skeptical, but confirms the reading with other stations.

Wang observes the wavelengths and uses Morse code to decode the signal, which corresponds back to the same countdown that he previously saw.

After leaving the observatory and feeling overwhelmed with what he had just seen, he is met by Da Shi, who tells him “Hahaha, another one bites the dust!”

Episode 5: Da Shi

After Wang Miao’s experience of seeing the universe flicker, Da Shi takes him out to a restaurant for drinks and some tripe. At the restaurant, Shi lets Wang know his ultimate rule: “Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”

The next day, after sobering up, Shi fills Wang in on his thoughts about what has been going on:

• The crimes that have been committed have no seeming motivation, just for the purposes of destruction

• Movies other media have recently had anti-science perspective

• He concludes: “Everything that’s happening is coordinated by someone behind the scenes with one goal: to completely ruin scientific research.”

He assumes that this effort is coordinated and that whoever is behind this is most afraid of scientists, but that the best way to react is to continue his research as well as continue with the Three Body game

Wang takes the advice and returns to the world of Three Body, where he runs into another historical Chinese figure, Mozi, who says civilization 137 was destroyed 362,000 years ago.

Mozi has built a complex model of what he believes to be the universe. He theorized that the universe is 2 hollow spheres sitting in a sea of fire. The holes in the inner sphere are stars and a large hole on the outer sphere is the sun.

His model has predicted that they are about to enter a 4 year stable era, however the Blue Space of the sky soon filled with the very large and very hot sun, burning everything in the world, including Mozi and Wang, forcing the inhabitants to dehydrate, and ultimately destroying civilization 141

Afterwards, Wang goes again to visit Ye Wenjie, and when the subject of the Red Coast base comes up, she agrees to tell Wang her history at the secretive base

Episode 6: Red Coast

Ye Wenjie tells her story of her time at Red Coast Base. She serves under a cover story working in the transmission and monitoring departments. Only after she gains the trust of Commissar Lei does she get told the true purpose of the base, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI.) However, Ye laments that no contact was ever made or received, and that the base eventually ran out of funds and closed. Also during her time at the base she married Yang Weining, and together they had a daughter, Yang Dong. However an accident at the base killed both Yang and Lei.

In Three Body, Wang tries to convince European scholars such as Galileo and Aristotle that the world actually has 3 suns only to be not believed before seeing a tri-solar day destroy civilization once more. Afterwards he is called to the office of Da Shi, where he meets Wei Cheng, Shen Yufei’s husband.

Wei, a naturally gifted, but very lazy, mathematician, tells the story of how he met Shen at a Buddist temple and leaves to join her when he is offered unlimited resources to try to solve a problem that has vexed mathematicians, the three-body problem.

Wei reports that recently he has been threatened both by phone to stop his research and by Shen herself to continue his research. When he accompanies Da Shi and Wang Miao to his house, he finds that Shen has been murdered. Pan Han is the primary suspect since Wei had heard them arguing about the arrival of a “Lord” earlier, but he is nowhere to be found. Wei then asks Wang to take his solution to the three-body problem and publish it

Wang again enters Three Body and sees another failed experiment this time that included millions of soldiers forming a human computer to run calculations to predict the Stable and Chaotic eras. After the civilization is once again destroyed, Wang is invited to a meet-up of other players.

At the meet-up, Wang finds that the organizer is Pan Han, who tells the assembled players that the world of Three Body is actually a real place called Trisolaris. The point of the game and the meet-up is to find people sympathetic to the cause of the Trisolarans coming to Earth to conquer the human race. Wang plays along to find out more.

Wang sees that even more catastrophic events have happened to Trisolaris in the Three Body game. The planet has split in two and is theorized that they will eventually fall into the sun. The only way for their civilization to live on is for them to leave. The Trisolarans develop interstellar ships that can travel 1/10th the speed of light. Wang is able to watch the fleet take off for the nearest star 4 light years away.

Episode 7: Sunset for Humanity

Wang Miao attends another Three-Body meetup where Pan Han is denounced and killed for his killing of Shen Yufei by the commander of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, Ye Wenjie.

Ye tells Wang that at Red Coast Base. she secretly discovered a way to use the sun to amplify the broadcast signal many times over, and 8 years later received a reply from Trisolaris, but it is a warning:

• Do not answer!

• Do not answer!!

• Do not answer!!!

Ye, already disillusioned with the human race from the events of the Cultural Revolution, her father getting killed, and an escalating Cold War, quickly sends a reply inviting the sender to come to Earth and says she will help them conquer it.

She tells Wang that he needs to stop his nanomaterial research to ensure the Trisolarans can come to Earth to conquer it. Just then, Da Shi leads the police and army to take down the ETO. He quickly acts when a member says they have a nuclear bomb and shoots it, causing the conventional explosives to detonate, but prevents the nuclear explosion.

The police arrest the ETO members and interrogate Ye, where she reveals that she was the one that killed both her husband and Commissar Lei.

She had intended to only kill Lei after he discovered the message that the base had received from Trisolaris. She will cut his rope as he rappels down the mountainside to fix a ground wire that she had sabotaged. Her husband Yang shows up and also rappels down to help, and with no other opportunity, Ye cuts the rope, killing both of them.

In the following year she gives birth to Yang Dong and sees society move on from the events of the Cultural Revolution that killed her father, and ends with her “unshakable ideal”: “to bring superior civilization from elsewhere in the universe into the human world.”

Episode 8: Bugs

Ye Wenjie tells us the backstory and danger of Mike Evans, a self-described “pan-species communist” billionaire that stars the ETO with Ye. In order to continue to receive messages from Trisolaris, he builds a second Red Coast Base on a oil tanker renamed Judgement Day

With the collected messages from Trisolarais are onboard Judgement Day, and Da Shi comes up with a “demonic” plan to obtain them before they can be destroyed by the crew. He uses Wang Miao’s “flying blade” nanomaterial, stretched across the Panama Canal to slice the ship into slices.

Da Shi’s plan is successful, and via the messages we’re given a Trisolaran perspective on the events of the book. The original message that Ye Wenjie sent was received from a pacifist Listener who warns her to not respond to ensure that the Earth is not conquered by members of his species.

However, Ye’s response ultimately gives away the location of Earth, and the Trisolarans get to work on developing a faster way of communication. After a few false starts, they develop a way to unfold an 11-dimensional proton into 2 dimensions allowing them to imprint computer circutity onto the surface before folding back to 11 dimensions and sending what they call Sophons, at light speed towards Earth.

Once the Sophons reach Earth, they're able to communicate via quantum entanglement across great distances. Since the Trisolarans are worried about the speed of human scientific progress, they task the Sophons to sabotage and block human scientific progress by interfering with particle accelerators and causing the other “miracles.”

One of the miracles is the ability to convey messages directly onto retinas, the method that Trisolaris uses to convey their feeling towards the insignificant human race: “You’re bugs!”

Finally, we end with Ye returning to the long-forgotten site of Red Coast Base, now rusty and covered in vines. Upon seeing the sunset, she whispers, “My sunset, and sunset for humanity.”