13
My gaze lowers in respect and my hands wrap around each other in the Daoist gesture of the Yin Yang, but I refuse to stop. “Please, listen, Shifu!” I don’t wait for permission. “Remember how you told me Bruce Lee changed fighting when he made white men stop bullying the Chinese because they may know kung fu? And how he did that even though he had only a fraction of the power you and your Phoenix friends had when you were young?”
Shifu pauses in silence—probably the closest to a permission I will ever get for this little insurrection of mine.
“Yesterday, the spirits of all the animals of China came to visit me at the Insights Grove and I realized I too must travel to become the immortal you want me to become. Find other sources of inspiration and create my own style. Test it in real situations, against people who know nothing of what kung fu can do, people who know things I’ve never seen done. Test my ideas until they work.”
Not even Shifu would dare to challenge the ancient spirits of Wudang.
“I know what to do, Shifu. In honor of my mother, I must create my style, teach it, make it so famous the world will respect not only me but all women, because they may know my kung fu too. And remember how you said I was poised to either die young or be the first immortal of our clan? If I achieve that, people will know me, they will have my picture on the walls of their schools, they will discuss my ideas for generations, so when my eclosion comes and its time I reach the Dao, their memories will make my soul eternal like you want me to be.”29
My heart is racing. Shut up, Yinyin. Wait. Let him talk now.
He waits. Pondering or just to torture me, I’m not sure. Then walks a set of steps that reminded me of the Bugang dance30 he liked to do when things got too out of control. “This style of yours….Do you have any original idea yet?” He asked.
“I don’t. But the animals in China have come to tell me …”
He draws a line on the sand, grabs six coins from his pockets—five identical, plus a darker one—and throws them up. Shifu knows the i-Ching by memory, so by the time he collected the coins back, he knew the read already.
“Feng. Fullness,” he says, solemnly. “Everything flows, nothing abides.”
Abundance, he lectures me on it. On how the Zenith requires one to let go. How, in order to understand fullness, one must accept the imminence of the emptying. “Are you ready for that change, Tigress?”
On my knees, I beg him for advice. “I don’t want to become empty, Shifu. I’ve barely started to become filled.”
“It may be time for a new master, and a new mountain, Tigress,” he says, with eyes glistering more than usual. “But do nothing for now. I need to do something myself first.” My stomach turns. Was he so angry he just expelled me? Was Wudang pissed at my arrogance? Were the animals from my vision just demons testing my will? It was the end of that conversation. The Dao has spoken, and so has he. Waiting was my only choice.
In a way, I won, but it didn’t feel like it.
“Where is he now, your Shifu?” Yewa asks, her voice coming out of nowhere, startling me so much I almost fall from my seat.
“One week after I arrived in America, he died,” I tell her.
She whispers something unintelligible, which the subtitles translate to “I’m sorry.”
I am too.
Of everything, sleeping is still the hardest part of the routine. Especially when the interrogation throws me so violently onto my most painful memories. Did my ego cause all that? Shifu’s death, these creatures released into the world? I shut my eyes and let darkness settle. Darkness and stillness. My conscience, I drag into the breathing. Xin, ping, qi, he, I guide myself. Heart, peace, breath, harmony.
Nothingness, welcome to my mind.
Suspended in the air, I float weightless in a gloomy semi-dream. No intention or need. Just letting the Dao speak. Afar, a dim light invites my attention. What is the universe trying to tell me now?
Wu wei, I think. Action without action. The currents bring me to the bright spot in the corner of my mind and put me somewhere else. It looks like the office space in the building, where my spirit hovers behind the shoulder of a man: Dr. Simon O’Dell—he likes late nights in the lab. There is music, and lights, and I think I can hear his thoughts, somehow. The empty floor, his quiet kingdom. His favorite symphony blasting at the heights it deserves. He watches a live feed of the White Room. A live feed of me, training. Landings at twenty-two percent are marked in red in the upper corner. He seems disappointed. But keeps watching, searching for something.
What is the Dao trying to tell me?
“Nice axe kick,” he observes. “Like the cockroach!” Simon toggles to another window and presses play. “Such a beauty,” he voices in his own head. The images on the screen, I recognize them, somehow. A roach and a wasp, fighting, wrestling. Let go, Yinyin. Whatever it is, let the Dao be.
Roaches are known to be among the most resilient creatures on the planet, and an entire department of Oak Tree Technologies’ bio enhancement division is dedicated to them. There’s something to be said about them. We humans like to see ourselves as the winners of the evolutionary war, but bugs, with their simple neurological circuits made purely for survival constitute a much larger part of the planet than we do. In biomass terms, victory is theirs. Weird. Does it have to do with the visions of the animals in Wudang? I mean, there are Praying Mantises, why not roaches and wasps? He changes the music. A flute and a guqin now pour their soothing melody around us. That’s sweet of him. The air gets lighter and I can almost smell the creeks and the bamboo of the mountains where I grew up.
Oblivious to my appreciation, Simon’s attention slides to a stack on his desk. An automated report generated by a little artificial intelligence agent he programmed to keep an eye out for any studies on hymenopterans. That’s where he got the emerald wasp attacking a roach.31 He presses play and I am confident this isn’t his first time watching that video. The wasp is gnarly. First, a sting to the thoracic ganglion to paralyze the front legs. Then, a second sting on the brain, in the precise section that controls the escape reflex. Now the wasp could carry the much larger insect using its antennae as a leash and feed it to her larvae. Alive! In the eyes of morality, this may seem cruel. But in the judgment of nature and the objective eyes of science, it’s beautiful, insightful, even magnificent.
What is happening here?
The emerald wasp’s strategy had been known since the 1940s, I comment to myself as if I’d always known this. But it was only recently, with the advent of high-speed cameras, that scientists have been able to observe the attack more carefully. I can’t tell if this is Simon’s thinking or if, somehow, I knew this already. Regardless, I cannot make it stop.
Lazy roaches—I’m sure that ain’t how the study referred to them—had no chance. But, among the ones who tried to defend themselves, two third escaped. Simon (and I, through his back) watched the slowed-down video of the struggle a few times, one of us aware of how stupid he looked when his impulses mimicked the strikes in the bugs’ bout. Twenty-nine percent in twenty-four hours he thinks Pretty solid. Simon scrubs through the footage, searching for something abnormal he may have missed.
On the other screen, the main subject sits by the desk, throws her feet up, bored out of her mind. It’s me, but not. I’m not in the room. I’m the prowling ghost behind the scientist. Behind and inside him. That me on the video is someone else. She roots around in a mini-fridge. Lays on her back as she speaks to Yewa. The data pours into the systems. She eats the food as she sits on the floor, leaning against the bed. Minutes later she’s jumping, kicking the air and twisting her body again, like a snake made of wind. He thinks he needs to learn that.
In the monitor, my body uses the reading chair to reach the camera. Turn it to the wall. Simon laughs and opens another window, another angle. Motherfucker. I’m on the toilet now, pants pulled down, the creep watching everything. However, I don’t feel as angry as I thought I would. Everything’s so distant. In the live feed, I’m on the bed now. Tossing back and forth, restless. I do it quite often for someone who’s that active, actually. Simon likes it, I can tell. Resting will speed up the process; high heart rates make it harder for the bots to land on the right place. The oxygen tank, I ignore. Same with the chocolate. Although he seems pretty confident I will learn—the brain needs them badly once the volume of synapses grows.
The voyeurism continues. Now bouncing on my toes, shadowboxing all by myself. Pushups and more pushups. Two arms, one arm, two fingers. He thinks I am hardcore. At the keypad next to the door, I try a few combinations. Of course, they don’t work. More door banging—seen that before. Next? Another meal. “C’mon, Claudia, this is getting boring.”
Does he know I am here? “Simon?”
Chocolate, finally, he thinks. Good girl.
No. He can’t see me.
Thirty-four percent. Fast but not too fast. If Lambrechts had let me use the newer version, we would have been done by now, he thinks. A quick combination of keys and he switches to the live feed window. I’m still there. Seated in a Daoist pose, meditating. I want to scream: “Wake up, Yinyin! He’s watching you!”
That’s when the tablet starts to beep, and Simon looks back over his shoulder. Can he…Flash.
Then darkness is back. A vast, oppressive nothingness squeezes my lungs up to my throat. Xin, ping, qi, he. It’s just you and the music now, Yinyin. The healing notes, the healing breaths. Forget this place. Forget these people. It’s just you and your inner orbit. Forget research. The bots. The flashes. The leap. The headaches. Forget Simon and his peephole. You can punch him later. For now, let them all go. Them, and whatever comes next. You need to calm down, Yinyin. Breathe.
Jason once saw me trying to meditate like this, even attempted to give me a lesson. He said, “Thinking is like eating; you need to bite the knowledge through reading or listening, then you digest it, then you use meditation to let all the impurities and toxins out of your thoughts and body.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Which means right now I am taking a mental crap.” We laughed for two hours straight. It’s been a while. I miss Jason.
Forget him too.
Just…forget. Everything. Focus on your breath. In…out.
Sit in oblivion, Shifu would say.
Unexpected and uninvited, an image takes shape. A memory? Imagination? I don’t know anymore. Feels real to me. A giant brain, a blimp floating in the cavernous hangar of a cranium. Synaptic reactions spark all around like lightning strikes in an electric storm. I’m probably stealing it from the demo in the room with the flying pixels.
There are voices somewhere. I try to escape them. Ignore them. But they persist. So, I let them come and pass.
Shifu tells me I am destined to become an immortal or die young. “Then I need to rush to achieve something good before I’m gone,” I reply.
We never had that conversation, I’m pretty sure.
Back in the brain shit. Entering one of the wrinkled canyons, a blood vessel runs, pulsing red. Where is this all coming from? Blood cells fly through the canyon, resembling a river. A buzzing sound. Distant but crisp. I see it now: a nanobot. It flies past, followed by an entire swarm. The little mechanical lightning bugs fly out of the stream of blood cells and begin to soar over the flaring brain. Other swarms fly out of other canyons. One by one, the terminator bugs land on the mushy surface of the brain, do a collective dance like the bees in Simon’s glass box and each one finds their spot. Then sheenk! Using their tiny, sharp legs, they latch onto the gray matter underneath. I contemplate whether it’s time to let go of them too. Bugs, brain. I don’t need you. But they insist. Their yellow LEDs switch on.
This is my head, I know. Or I think I do. My inner skull is a twinkling landscape of tiny lights. As more yellow dots appear, I move away. Further and further into the darkness until breath expels me from my own body. I see myself from the outside. As if I am watching it from a security cam. I’m still meditating, undisturbed by the activity in my head. Will I ever be able to disconnect for real? To stop thinking, imagining things, asking myself the same questions? See?
The air comes cold as I breathe in through my nose, and warm as I breathe out through my mouth. The tongue stays on the top of the palate, like Shifu taught me once. In through the nose, straight to the belly and to all the life that emanates from there, out through the mouth again…In and out…In and out…
Flash!
Simon checks the numbers on his little screen: fifty-nine percent. It can’t be true. That’s way too fast now. Reboot. Wait. Check again. Sixty-one percent now. BEEP! BEEP! The alarm bawls from the computer.
“How unlikely….” says a voice from his back. Dr. Lambrechts, watching behind his shoulder.
“She’s good,” Simon says. Landings at sixty-one…sixty-four percent already. “Must be the music indeed.”
“They’ll decelerate,” says the old man. “Takes time for stragglers to make it. Do we have enough to get started?”
Simon zooms in on my face. My eyes. They glow yellow.
“Go ahead,” says Dr. Lambrechts. “Let’s see if it works.”
He pushes a button and…flash again.
Brownstone walls. Towers. Distant voices, loud. Some sharp, some blurry and diffuse. At a rich kids’ school, I guess. On a corner of the patio, a young, freckled boy with very high cheekbones is pushed against the wall. He can’t be much older than ten. Skinny, dressed in a poorly-made, hand-knit sweater and faded shorts. A few older kids taunt him. Push, scream, show their fists. The words are garbled, but the scene is clear.
I have to interfere.
That’s when Dr. Lambrechts grabs my hand.
“He shouldn’t have done that,” I say.
“Done what?”
“Freezing.”
Then the world pauses. Just like TV, but real. Everything around us, with the exception of myself, Dr. Lambrechts, and the boy, who stays there, weeping, hunched for a hit that isn’t coming.
“You don’t know who he is, do you?”
I search again. “Is that…?”
“Simon, yes,” he says.
“So, what do we do?”
“We watch.”
Time resumes, and young Simon gets slapped a few times. Behind his back, things get blurry and I guess the bigger boys pouring through his backpack while the smaller but louder leader holds him by the collar. A voice interrupts.
“Hey! Stop that!”
Everything is crisp again. Little Simon’s head swivels to the sides, trying to understand what’s going on. A young girl, about his age, or maybe a bit older, steps between him and the bullies. The little thugs laugh, and the leader tries to push the girl to the side, but she parries his hand and BAM! punches him in the stomach. As the young thug folds, she knees him in the head. The boss kid face-plants, moaning and crying. In shock and without their leader, the other two struggle to decide what to do. She growls at them and they screech as if they have seen the scariest of all ghosts. An instant later, they are nowhere to be seen.
The girl kisses Simon on the cheek. “Next time you call me, Ok?”
He doesn’t blush, or thank, or even breathe. A girl just kissed him after all. He should think that’s sweet. Instead, little boy Simon comes our way. Eyes fiery and resolute. “Years later I hacked his bank and donated all his family’s assets to charity. Left them nothing. He cried too.”
From nowhere, or maybe from inside of us, a flash sparks so bright we go blind for a moment. And when the world unblurs, we are somewhere completely different.
Oakland, midnight. I am running. World is falling apart, and I trot by Simon and Dr. Lambrechts, who watch me with what resembles contempt. They wave at me, but I don’t notice. More flashes. I’m in my first fight at The School. They watch me from the back. Another flash. A place I know so well, a place where I haven’t been in a long time. Still, there I am, seated beside Shifu, like we used to sit when I was really young. He’s operating his shadow theater, the light so powerful it feels like it could blind us forever if we stare directly at it. That’s what the kids say, at least. The kids. I remember this day. My purple dress, my yellow shoes. The day Shifu told them the story of a tigress, a beehive, and a mysterious monkey made of shadows. He calls us to the screen, and just like I remember, he tells the story of my curse.
He looks at me with a smile so tender I let a tear escape. That didn’t happen. The tear. Not in the real memory. Just now. I watch the entire story unfold just as it happened. The great battle of yang. The death of the mightiest creature in the mountains. The effortless victory of the Shadow Monkey. The music is grand and powerful. The applause, thunderous.
“What’s the secret of the Shadow Monkey, Tigress?”
I know the answer! “Wu Wei, Shifu. He did nothing.”
“Good job,” he says, and brushes his knuckles on the sides of my cheeks. It tickles. I know I will never feel that again. Come on, Yinyin, hug him! Hug him!
A few feet away, in that odd world between memory and imagination, Simon and Dr. Lambrechts observe in their lab coats. Their tears roll as if they can feel what I feel. Then Shifu, who can’t see my Westerner friends monitoring us, stands up to go see his crowd. He trips on the lights, making them point straight at my face. The world goes white.
We unblur on Jason, our first date. His kisses, the way he poured himself into me, unrushed as if he knew he would have me forever, no one else, and no other version of me. I’m lighter when I’m in his arms. The cloud I want to be. He kisses my neck and I push him deeper inside me. Come. A whisper. Not from him. From Simon, against the wall, next to my wooden dummy. He scoffs. Before I can yell, he snaps his fingers and another flash explodes.
When sight resumes, we are in the back of a classroom. Small, organized, clean. Boys only. All well-groomed, all wearing the exact same ridiculous uniform that makes them look like mini grown-ups. Nobody can see us. Neither the students, all too petrified to peek to the side, nor the teacher, a bald fat priest with a mean bulldog face. Beside me is Simon, the adult one. He thinks it’s funny he was watching me in bed. I give him a light punch to the liver, enough to cause him a long lingering pain. Stupid egg.
Over the blackboard, there is a poster. An old painting of a building under construction. Thick, high, stretching all the way to the clouds. Babel, say the green letters underneath. The priest points at the image: “And men decided to challenge God by building a tower so tall it could reach the heavens. So, God warned: ‘Proceed with your arrogance and I will send destruction and pain to punish you and everyone in this land.’ Since they didn’t listen, the Almighty had to take it all down by himself. But that’s for next week.”
The priest reaches back to his desk, ready to dismiss the class, when a kid in the first row raises his hand.
“Father Wilcox, why is God so afraid of us?”
There were thunders and screams of horror. Next to me, Simon scoffs at that too, taps me on the arm. “Do you like it?” He whispers, “The Anamnodome? I programmed it myself.” With a double clicking sound of his tongue, the entire reality decomposes into multiple squares around us, each labeled with words like “memory” and “expanded view,” and on each corner, a certainty level that varied from forty-three to a hundred percent. Inside this madness, all I can think is it’s like my flashes, just a bit more under control. Maybe he CAN fix those too. But how would I talk to him about it without seeming totally cuckoo? It doesn’t matter. He continues his puffed-up explanation, unaware that I have something else in my head. “It uses a generative adversarial network to fill in the perspective gap and outpaints three-sixty-degree memories beyond the eyes of the subject, so we are always ahead of the action,” he says, “then another adversarial network to force it to look real. I stole the code from a video game company.”32
One more tongue-click and the lights go off. When they come back on, we are in an office I’ve never seen. Heavy furniture, ornate moldings, a giant cross hanging on the wall, practically staring us down. The principal’s office. The headmaster seemed as angry as the teacher. “Sit, please,” he orders. Next to the kid, Perry’s mother’s hands slithered in and out of each other. Perry was scared, like any nerd in his shoes would be.
“Mrs. Lambrechts, we have been patient because of what happened,” says the headmaster. “But I won’t tolerate blasphemy in this school. This is my last warning. One more of those and being expelled will be the least of his problems. Damnation isn’t a joke, young man.”
Little Perry takes a deep breath and starts to raise a finger but is interrupted by a kick on the ankle. Mrs. Lambrechts speaks, instead: “Thank you, Father Cruz. It’s all very clear. Things have been difficult since my husband…”
“God bless his immortal soul,” the skinny priest says.
“Amen,” she replies, and promises to take better care of the boy. They stand and, at his command, kiss the headmaster’s hand. From where we stand, the principal’s face is now blurry, but neither he nor the young widow show any reaction when young Perry whispers to us, “Did you know we may be the first generation to live forever?”
A blink and I am back in the lunatic’s room at Oak Tree Technologies. Simon is a few inches from my face. Inside my head, I can feel a hum, a faint vibration. The kind of little headache that won’t make much of a difference for hours, until it does. He says, “Do you like it?” and offers me candy from a bowl.
“Chocolate?” I ask, confused to my bones.
“No, the Anamnodome!”
He takes a Kit Kat for himself, Dr. Lambrechts pushes him to the side. “Do you believe in some sort of god, Ms. Yang? I always questioned why, if God had made us in his own image, there were so many features we never inherited. It took me some time to realize it was up to us to earn those features ourselves. And guess what? If we survive the Robot Apocalypse, in our lifetime science may unlock some of our most miraculous features. Immortality, omniscience, omnipresence….”
One more blink, and everything is white. The prisonous White Room. Blurred, empty. Filled with sterile light and Chinese musical notes. I rub my eyes again. Where’s everyone?
“Claudia?” Simon’s voice is sharp and crisp as if he was still there. Though I am definitely alone. I go check the door—still locked. I spot the speakers. Tell him unless he’s letting me out, to just leave me alone.
“We’re letting you out,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” I scream at the speakers again.
“The hive is transmitting.”
“Oh, you mean my hallucinations of you? Or are you talking about your secret cameras? Yeah, I know about them, asshole. And I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it.” I walk to the second camera hiding in the sprinkler and flip him off.
“Those hallucinations…” he says, “do you really think that’s what they were?”
“Fuck you, Simon. I’m not going to talk to you through an intercom anymore.”
“Tsk…tsk. Do you really think it’s the intercom?”
“What do you mean?”
“Take a look in the mirror.”
My eyes. They glow amber, just like Simon’s and Perry’s did when I arrived. This is really happening. “Believe me now?” says Simon. I can imagine his hands waving in victory. I turn to the speaker: “So are we…?”
“Yes. And you still think it’s through the intercom that I’m speaking?”
“How? Did those things really latch onto my brain? I didn’t feel anything.”
“There are no pain receptors in the brain, dear. Only in the skull and the surrounding head.”
The mirror again. It’s as if I could see Simon behind my own glowing eyes. I have to hold on to the wall to avoid falling. The air thins. “Oxygen, take some.” His voice continues to haunt me. “Then come on down. I can show you everything.”
My chest feels tight. My head threatens to spin. I take a deep breath from the tank. Tell him to open this dragon shit door.
“Open it yourself,” he responds.
I don’t know the combination.
“Of course you do. I know it, so you know it too.”
Understanding washes over me. I walk over to the door and punch in a code. No hesitation. And just like that, the door slides open.
29. Daoists are obsessed with immortality. Their version of it. I was told they treat the end of life as the beginning of a new one—not as reincarnation, but a different stage of our existence, in another plane. They don’t even call it death, but Yuhua, a word that originally comes from the act of ecloding, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Now, it’s used to represent the ascension to heaven to become an immortal—although only the best ones would; the rest may go to hell or decompose to dust, the five elements of the universe.
30. The Bugang Dance is a Daoist Ritual that connects the priest to the stars, in particular the Big Dipper, who are considered gods. It is usually a ceremony performed by a group of priests together. In the scene where Shifu performs it by himself to find an answer to whether Yinyin should move to America or not, I wondered if he was also connecting to his friends…in America.
31. If you think humans are ruthless, read this: “Direct Injection of Venom by a Predatory Wasp into Cockroach Brain” by Gal Haspel, Lior Ann Rosenberg, Frederic Libersat in Journal of Neurobiology, February 21, 2003
32. During the 2019 EmTech, a future of technology event in San Francisco, organized by MIT’s Technology Review, video game maker Nvidia showed how Generative Adversarial Networks are being used in gaming to automatically generate realistic images that require no human supervision. They recently published a paper on that subject called “Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation, Karras, T., Aila, T., Laine, S., Lehtinen, J., April 30, 2018. Published” during the Sixth International Conference on Learning Representations in 2018.