22
Some people are brought to life to prove they can develop their power. I came to show I can tame mine. Controlling the beast was the quest the Dao chose for me even before I was born. Yang, my family name, sounds like one of the most common in China, but written like mine, like the harder force in the yin-yang, worked as the curse that prematurely killed every one of my ancestors. My mother tried to soften it by calling me Yinyin, unbothered that it sounded like a boy’s name. Yang Yinyin, the same name as the majestic symbol of the mountain on the trigram. Wisdom, she told Shifu, and peace. I would need both. Later I tried picking Claudia as my Westerner alias, to allude to the clouds in Wudang, which are soft but have no trouble moving around the peaks. Shifu liked it, for he used to say words have power, and every time someone called me by either one of my names, they would be helping me escape my old destiny. Though after I grew a little and he had a chance to understand my personality, he only addressed me as Mulaohu: The Tigress. That’s where my ring name came from.
“Which name did we use again?” Simon asks, barely pretending to be confused. On his little screen, he picks the file named Tigress and sends it to the nearest printer. His smugness tells it all. He knows. Not everything, but he can sense it. Are we connected now? I check the hum. Nope. I am just being transparent, I bet. The papers: I flip through the pages to the third one. A line saying “one year,” a strikeout in red, done with visible rage, and my own handwriting replacing it with “four weeks and that’s all.”
“I wanna stay,” I say, “a bit longer, at least. There’re a few things I need to explore.” Despite that it’s never been posed as a question, Simon nods, victoriously.
“Well,” Dr. L responds, “now that we tested the technology and know it is working, I am not sure we will need you longer than that, Ms. Yang.”
He only calls me that when he wants to sound like the boss.
“What do you mean? Those creatures are after her, you’ve seen it!” yells Simon. Thanks.
“I don’t know, Simon. You’ve had your Rocky Balboa fantasy; we got our data….”
“No,” I say, “you haven’t learned shit. I can prove it.” I take my stance and wait for the hum, which Simon gladly initiates. Right after, Dr. L twists his eyebrows, intrigued, and joins us too.
Bent legs, raised guard chin tucked in, the two scientists take position. Their eyes glow in the brightest yellow. As I cross my gaze with Simon’s, he winks, and some steamy images that have no business at the workplace flash in the back of our heads. Dr. L rolls his eyes in disbelief. I must agree with the old man. What the fuck, Simon?!
A bow to honor both and they charge in perfectly mirrored moves. Two flying kicks aimed at my chest. I swerve sideways, walk right between them. “Do you know why this is called martial arts? Because unless you let your spirit show, you have nothing.”
They try again, both a straight punch and an hourglass step, then a frontal kick. Once more I walk between them, roll my arms under their legs and throw their heads onto the mat. “At least you’re not afraid of dying anymore.”
Takes a few attempts for them to learn to pick different positions and moves. But getting hit does that to your mind. Teaches that if you do the easy thing, it hurts.
“Very Pavlovian,” says Dr. L, rubbing his neck.
“Perhaps we should start, then?” I smile, because I didn’t need to hear their thoughts to know what they are thinking. Yes, folks. That was just the warm-up. From now on, you do something silly, I am going to hurt you.
“You know we can hear you think your next move too, right?”
Really? How has it been working for you, so far? I think.
Dr. Lambrechts nods. “The kid has a point.”
“Ready? Come.”
They do. Simon on the right with a double punch, Dr. Lambrechts on the left with a roundhouse linked to a spinning kick. They stare me in the eye, trying to listen to my next move. Idiots. I let my brain drift and once again move between them, my foot stomping the foot of the young, knee to the balls and a palm strike to the chin. Then, just to keep it simple, an elbow into the skull of the other. PA-POW! Their brains shut down. The hum disappears, and their bodies lay flat on the floor. And people think Tai Chi is nice…
There is a huge bang. The door bursting open. Yewa blasts in, eyes stretched wide, her mouth covered by her pretty hands. “Oh my god!”
“Don’t worry, they’ll come back,” I say.
“I’m not worried,” says Yewa, a strangely satisfied grin creeping onto her face.
We wait. And while we wait, we talk a bit more. “They were pretty confident they could beat you,” she whispers. For a scientist, Yewa is quite funny. When she dares to speak, at least. I tell her the Chinese tale of a praying mantis that thought it was so strong it could stop the emperor’s carriage. So it waited on the road for months until one day the emperor came. From the window, he pointed at the dancing insect and said, “How adorable!” Then drove his carriage right over the bug.
She laughs. “They’re cute like that too.” Then, after a pause, she asks me to ignore the conversation we had the other day. “It’s not that I am unsure about what we are doing. It’s the right thing. It’s just that when Dr. Lambrechts talks about building gods…I was raised to feel guilty about that.”
Interesting creature, this Yewa. A bio-nanoroboticist struggling with faith. Not that I can judge. We Daoists have our superstitions too. I raise my knuckles and offer a fist bump. “He’s going to let you stay on the project, don’t worry,” she says, “Do you know how crazy you all look when you come back? Kind of high.”
The good girl then realizes what she said. Shakes her head fast. Contorts her face in shame. “Sorry, forget I said that.” I want to know more, but to her luck, Simon starts to move. Then comes Dr. Lambrechts. Yewa and I are holding their heads—little infants with no neck control. “You’ve been knocked out. Can call yourselves men now?”
“Did you…take control of our minds?” says Dr. Lambrechts, still groggy, eyes wandering like a lost and scared little bird, just fallen from its nest.
“It wasn’t that,” says Simon. “Everything was clear. Until she stopped transmitting.”
“Guys, did you hear what I said? Congratulations…on being knocked out…” They aren’t listening.
The old man insists: that’s not possible. That I stopped transmitting, that is, not that they got knocked out. They were listening, after all. He asks Yewa to bring him the numbers and she promptly disappears behind the only working station in the corner of the dojo. “You…stopped…transmitting. That’s not possible.”
“Yes, it is. It’s called Wu Wei.”
He scoffs, and I continue, “No intention. No-mind. To turn off the fear, you turn off the thinking.”
“Not possible,” the old man insists.
“Don’t listen to him,” says Simon “Keep going.”
Funny how alien this idea is for Westerners. In Wudang, you learn about it before you walk. Wu wei. You do that in life, you live by the Dao. You do that in a fight, you flow with the Dao. You move faster, react, yield, use every move of your opponent in your favor, without ever thinking about it. “Get it? No thinking, no transmitting, you don’t listen to what I’m going to do next, my fist on your face.” I pat both men on their shoulders. “Guess your little robots aren’t all that powerful, huh?”
“It can’t be,” protests the boss. “You must be inhibiting the signal, somehow.”33
But then the reports arrive. Charts covered in lines pointing everywhere. Brain activity, it says on the top of the page. One of the lines has a drop like the cliffs in Wudang, and only returns much later. He says, “Those gaps. Never seen them before!”
Simon’s eyes grow to the size of tangerines. He points at another line. The levels on my primary motor cortex or something obtuse like that. It was much higher during the gaps. “Yewa, what’s her current landing rate?”
“Ninety-seven percent. Stable for a few days, now.”
“Can we raise it? Redeploy some units?”
“The units are there; they are just not connecting. I think this may be…”
“Thanks, Yewa,” dismisses the old man.
“How do you do that?” Dr. L asks when Yewa is gone. “Hide your thoughts.”
“Westerners are too obsessed with thinking. There’s a Daoist idea that says that once you catch a rabbit, you no longer need a trap; when you catch an idea, you no longer need thoughts.” Instead of grasping, they try to go back to dissecting the thought: “Since there is no such a thing as not thinking…she must be in a state of deep free flowing…suppressing the…, but the amplitude…unless…” So much for those big brains.
“Simon, are you thinking what I am thinking?” asks Dr. L, who seems to miss the irony of the sentence altogether. Simon nonetheless agrees, says he remembers some studies showing, “before the brain triggers an action, whatever the subcortical regions have already thought about that decision.”34 The old doctor finishes his partner’s thought: “If someone dives in a deep flow state like the charts indicate…”
“Maybe the thoughts are moving directly from the motor cortex, without any filter or consideration from the outer cortex?” Simon continues, excited like a puppy. This is getting ridiculous. I raise my hand. Ask if they know I’m still there. As in right next to them, while they talk about my brain. They ignore me.
“That explains…” Dr. Lambrechts takes a little notebook from his pocket, makes a few drawings without completing the thought. “Here, here and here,” he points. Like me, Yewa seems confused, what with so many thoughts being skipped, while Simon keeps nodding in agreement to the words unsaid. Can I listen to the thoughts too? I try. Nothing comes. They are flowing, and hard! Like me in a fight, leaping silently from the non-thinking parts of their brains. It’s just that instead of fists, they are swinging their science shit.35
“Now go back to a regular situation, a regular person…” the old scientist says.
Do I need to explain I’m not regular?
Simon continues from where he left off, “If we find a way to hear these thoughts before the cortex picks its plan, we can choose the actions we want to unlock! Yewa, can the new bots read subcortical signals?”
“That can help with pushback ratios, Simon! That’s a big Eureka, do you see?”
For all their supposed intelligence, the geniuses are getting it all wrong. “The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao,” I say.
“What?” they reply together, more annoyed than curious.
“That’s the first line of the Dao De Jing. To see the mystery, you need to be still. Your mind needs to be still. That’s how you do it. Not hearing deeper, but not hearing at all. You guys must be…”
Dr. L interrupts. Or, rather, dismisses me altogether. “That solves the scale dilemma, you see? If large numbers of people start to dispute every idea, that could cause massive halts in the system….” He grabs a little notebook from his back pocket and furiously scribbles a few more notes. “But if we could make them choose the right ideas…” he mumbles.
“These new bots of yours, they aren’t the same ones in my head, are they?”
Yewa shakes her head and remains silent. Our minds are not connected, but I bet our thoughts must be exactly the same. Dr. Lambrechts’s God Complex, it has no end. I bring up the question of my contract. “Does that mean we can continue?” I ask.
Yewa hands them oxygen masks and they dismissively agree, completely swept up by thoughts so consuming there’s no point bothering with such an ordinary issue like this little contract of mine.
33. All martial arts training, at some point, will push the practitioner to stop trying to rationalize moves and flow with them. Though the styles with Daoist roots take it much further—beyond fighting and into a way of living that respects the intellectualization of an issue as a starting point, just to establish that real understanding once you need no words for those thoughts. One of their most famous allegories (carefully told in Daoism Explained, by Hans-Georg Moeller) is the fishnet allegory, that carries all their commitment to a more natural, not over-rationalized life. The fish trap exists, they say, to catch the fish. Once it’s caught, you don’t need the trap anymore. The same happens with words and ideas. Once you grasp a concept, you no longer need words.
34. A third of a second before the command is sent to the muscles, actually. It’s as if the deeper areas of the brain conceive multiple plans of action in real time, letting the outer cortex just decide which plan to release, which ones to erase once the situation is over. As mentioned in The Cognitive Sciences (2013 by Carolyn Sobel & Paul Li, pp. 361-363), about Libet, B. (1989, March/April). “Neural Destiny: Does the Brain have a Will of its Own?”, published on the New York Academy of Sciences website
35. When scientists talk about intuition, they often describe it as an advanced way of thinking that skips language. It is interesting how similar that is to the Daoist ideal of skipping language and words in meditation in order to see the mystery of the Dao.