Fusion Battery (12,000 Words)

On television, the field reporter was still standing on a mountainside viewing platform, introducing the brightly lit plant behind him to viewers across the country.

In a home in Huilongguan, Changping, the family making dumplings had frozen in place.

A rolling pin still rested on a sheet of dough, and several freshly wrapped dumplings had fallen onto the table.

The camera had cut back to the plant. As one, the family looked up at the lightbulb overhead.

"So... when the light flickered just now, was that fusion power coming through?"

"Of course it was. Didn't you hear the news? They've already sent fusion power to Changping."

The light in their home was still as warm as before. Nothing about it had changed.

Yet somehow, it felt different to all of them.

Just then, the youngest child burst into tears. Pointing at the lightbulb, he cried,

"Does that light have radiation? Are we going to die?"

The whole family stared for a moment, then burst out laughing.

Still laughing, the mother put the fallen dumplings back on the board, picked up the child, and wiped away his tears.

The father took off his glasses and wiped the tears he had laughed onto the lenses.

Whatever the field reporter said next, no one paid attention.

Meanwhile, "Sunfire" had shot to the top of the trending searches.

Right below it was "We Lost."

Six months earlier, Huaxia had lost out during the natural gas crisis.

A blogger called Energy Observer had written a long post titled "We Lost."

That post had now been pushed onto Weibo's front page and had over a million comments.

[Is the blogger doing okay?]

[You're not going to delete this post, are you? Please don't. It's a historical artifact now.]

[Can we stop being so hard on