Content Warning: This section includes a reference to death by suicide, which appears in the source text.

The narrator explains that the following story is a piece of their memory, although the nature of time and space make it difficult to truly call it history.

During the fall of Constantinople, Helena, a self-proclaimed witch, comes to Constantine XI, claiming that she can go anywhere and retrieve anything undetected. To prove this, she kills a prisoner by extracting his brain; to do this, she goes to a secret minaret where she can perform magic. Constantine tasks her with bringing him the head of Sultan Mehmed II. She fails, and the city falls. When Constantine’s men find her, she claims the magic is gone, so they kill her.

Helena’s abilities actually came from a four-dimensional fragment that intersected with Earth for nearly a month. When it disappeared the day before the sultan’s final attack, Helena was left powerless.

Yang Dong walks through the particle accelerator she oversees. Her mother, Ye Wenjie, was the first person to make contact with the civilization of Trisolaris. Yang Dong contemplates the encrypted messages she recently found showing how her mother invited the aliens to save Earth by destroying humanity—her revenge for her family’s suffering during China’s Cultural Revolution.