30
Needle at the Bottom of the Sea
The smell takes me back from the deep dive into my soul. For all their flawed philosophy, their sloppy lifestyle, their fucked-up science that is about to destroy everything, pizza makes Western civilization worth saving. “Are you still there?” Simon asks, trying to mask his anxiety.
“No, I went to Disneyland,” I say, “Gotta meet Mickey Mouse before I’m sent back.”
“I can bring you to Orlando once this is all over, I promise.”
“Will this ever be over?” I ask myself. I pause my Tai Chi, grab the slice he extends my way, fold, bite. Just like the girls from the park have taught me. The margarita makes me float. I needed it. Badly.
Without the anchor of my Tai Chi, Simon’s pacing around is very aggravating. Even worse is the avalanche of questions, all so rapid I must assume most are either rhetorical or just an attempt to annoy me. Isn’t she coming? Why did he agree with such a bad idea? Can’t you just teleport there instead? And “Why did you pick that day?” Hmm. Interesting one. I grant him my attention, he digs deeper: “Why that moment?”
“I didn’t pick anything. It was more like it pulled me.”
He finally pauses, lost in a thought I guess must be full of big words and little numbers. But in the end, all he says are two cryptic words. “Entangled moments…”
Ok, smartass, how would a normal human being say that? We weren’t connected, but between cramming my face with a chunk of crust and setting my eyes in a squint, I made myself clear.
“Your equations. Seemed like quantum mechanics and relativity, combined.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I say.
“Don’t worry, no one does,” he laughs. Apparently, it was a joke. I ask him if he does and the asshole responds with a smirk, proceeds to tell me physicians have been trying to unite those two for decades. “Your equations seemed to describe a hyper-connection through low-energy wormholes. Too hard to grasp?”
Simon grabs a slice of pizza, takes a bite and continues with his mouth full. “What you laid on that board was an interwoven universe.” He picks up a pen, and finds a page with enough empty space, draws a square. “Here, you know this, a square, right? If I draw another square next to it and connect the edges, you see a cube, correct? A cube is a 3D square. Now…” he continues to draw, makes another cube and connects all the edges of the two figures, “this is what we call a hyper-cube, a figure our brains can’t comprehend, but it’s one object in four dimensions. It can be here, and here and in all the points in between, because it is connected beyond space, through many spaces. Then…” he now draws another one of those aberration cubes and starts to connect all the edges again, “ow you have a fifth dimension. Time. All these points now co-exist through time. What I don’t know is: one, how you managed to create this portal to leap through dimensions; two, how do you navigate through them. You said you didn’t choose, right?”
It’s complicated, I tell him. The leaps, the ones in space as he says, I have some choice, though under my restricted field of vision. The time part, I don’t know. It’s more like a call than a decision.
He takes one more look at his watch. “Where’s your friend?” Then, back to the inquiry, he adds a third quest, “And why you? There must be something on our training that wired your body to—”
For a smart guy, he’s so obtuse. “So when scientists can’t explain reality, they try to find new formulas to explain what they were seeing, right?”
“Generally, correct.”
“What if the problem isn’t with the laws they’re writing, but with the reality they’re trying to explain?” I ask. “What if what you see as reality isn’t what reality really is? If those other dimensions are the real world and we are just a little experiment the immortals run to understand how we would behave?”
Simon stops chewing, stops pacing. I guess he even stops breathing for a while. “You lost me at immortals, to be honest.”
“Like the monkeys you created,” I say. “From their point of view, their world is real and ours is the game. What if they’re right? Or if we’re both layers of a game someone else is watching? And the Dao is just a glitch that allows us to peek behind the screen, see the puppeteer behind the shadow puppets?”
“A back door into our reality?” He mumbles to himself. I keep my face straight for as long as I can, then finally cackle with laughter. Damn it, Yinyin, you could have kept it up a little longer.
“You call me an asshole,” he says. And offers to reconnect. Maybe together we can figure this out. Bad idea, I tell him. When we connect, we always end up either punching each other or fucking each other. Right now, we have more important things to do. Like finding another place to go after they find our location.
On that thought, even the pizza has lost its flavor.
“Once we find that answer,” he says, holding my anxious feet from bouncing, “we won’t need to worry about being caught anymore.”
It’s like being caught between a sword and a spear. I think of Shifu and how heartbroken he would be if he heard that I’m trying to crack the family secret with a white guy. In my fantasy, I ask the Dao, as if I was asking my master himself: If that has to happen, if the secret will be broken anyway, should it remain secret at all? Wouldn’t it be better if everyone has access to it?
It’s like my spirit is being ripped apart.
Unfortunately, the skies don’t bother. They send no answer. So I aim at Simon instead. “What if it’s actually better to let the government handle something that powerful?”
“When they thought they were just learning how to connect brains, the board of directors at Oak Tree Technologies had the exact same question,” he explains. That’s his way of telling me I’m not that dumb. Thanks, Simon. “Intentions,” he continues. “Leave it to the government, they’ll want to use this power to control everyone. In the hands of academia, it will turn into a frozen chaos. This opportunity needs leadership to flourish. It’s not like we’re connecting inanimate machines like the internet…we’re building a cognitive Super Highway. A Brainternet! Yeah, a Brainternet, an internet of brains. Get it?”
His pride in the new name is kind of endearing. He was still catching his breath after his big spiel when the light flickered. Is it the Dao speaking to me? ‘Cause that used to happen in Wudang too.
Back in the mountains, where the qi was strong, and the electricity weak, when lights flickered, power could go out for days. Always taking water with it, making us have to rely on traditional bathrooms—a little wooden room outside, with a hole in the floor. I hated it so much. Though, when that happened during the winter, or even late in the fall, Shifu would light a small fire in the backyard, so we could sleep under the eyes of the stars, dragons and the mountains. That part, I loved. He would tell me stories of when he was young, after the bombs unbalanced the qi of the planet and the government took control of everything. People started to believe there was no use for martial arts anymore, unless it was practiced for sports, or national pride. He and a few friends, the most skilled fighters in the mainland, remained close and would meet around fires like that to study what was left of the traditions, and hope the Dao would let them fill the gaps left by secrecy. He told me one day the Party called them with a problem. Shifu didn’t want to go, but the others convinced him to listen. There was a village in the South where a man had built a small army that terrorized the villages in the entire region. The government tried to send forces but the tyrant defeated them all. Somehow, Shifu told me, the soldiers from Beijing would turn against each other and attack themselves, as if they had been hypnotized by a demon. Before they had to resort to methods dangerous for civilians, they decided to call the old-time masters to break through the warlord’s defense line and cut the head of the snake. A battle of spirit and skill, against sorcery and malevolence. Shifu said it took them days of hiding, meditating, attacking, leaving, more meditating, coming back….Eventually, Shifu defeated the demon but lost some friends along the way too. “Why did you do it?” I asked him. “Wasn’t there anyone else?” And Shifu said, “Because that man, the evil one, was one of my students. A master should take responsibility for what he puts in the world.”
The last time he told me about this, there were only four of them left. And they all pledged to retire from fighting, to dedicate their lives to the preservation of the skills the world may need again someday. I always thought of that as yet another one of his parables—a story to teach me about traditions and responsibilities. I’m not so sure anymore. Of anything.
“And what happened to your student?” I asked back then. Shifu turned somber. Said in revenge the villagers burnt his palace down and put his head and all of his lieutenants on sticks for everyone to see.
I can see it. The fire. The feast. The spikes with so many heads leading to the final one, placed higher than all the other ones. But when I looked…it was just a decapitated body of a white man, in a modern lab coat! Then someone taps my shoulder and when I look back, Shifu is right behind me. Livid. He waves his sword and, right before the blade touched my neck, a voice boomed from the skies, “The power supply is one of their favorite targets.”
What?
I blink and it’s Simon staring at me, unaware of how far away my mind has gone. “The monkeys,” he insists with urgency, “they like power attacks because it makes it harder for their hunters to attack them. They may know where we are already.”
“Oh, yes, the monkeys,” I say, trying not to look dismissive. No time for debates. My heart still races—is the Dao trying to tell me Dr. L is the reincarnation of the sorcerer Shifu killed? That Shifu is about to leap through time to kill me too?
“You know what I think?” I tell Simon, “If this Brainternet, as you say, gets controlled by the government, it can be bad. But I don’t want it in the hands of a corporate demon either. Slavery is slavery, regardless of who’s holding the whip.”
He says no one can prevent evolution. “What is at stake right now isn’t if it will happen. But by whom. Why not us?”
Because he’s the one who created the problem, I tell him.
“Yes, I created the creatures,” he admits, “If I hadn’t, someone else would have. But because I did, I know their weaknesses, I can control them, I can fix them and use them to speed up our process to protect ourselves. Use evil against evil.”
Westerners. Always looking for domination. “How do you know what’s better?” I ask. In my mind, I am still expecting Shifu to come kill us. Then a scary thought occurs to me and freezes my fucking guts. That time he left alone…What if he didn’t go to kill my father, but to kill me instead, at another time, in the future. What if that’s why he came back so sad? My entire body shakes. “Simon, we gotta stop this. We are in danger.”
“Duh! The U.S. Government is chasing us—of course, we are! A killer race of AI too. But I am smarter than they are. And you…you have your powers. You just need to unlock them.
“No, I don’t mean the Government. I mean Shifu. I think he’s gonna leap here and kill us both.”
In another circumstance, Simon probably would have laughed. Called me paranoid and childish. But things have changed since our leap in time. “We cross that bridge when we get to it,” he says. “Besides, we are on the good side. Why would he do it?”
I ask him if he’s sure. “Turning humanity into a single mind, like an army of zombies…”
“As I said, it’s still better….”
“Better than the alternative,” I insist, “you said that. Dr. Lambrechts said that. But what if the alternative is just a boogeyman? What if it was never bound to happen?” Simon shakes his head as if I had said the stupidest of stupid things. “The technology can only reach superficial levels of the brain, which means there’s always some level of control and independence. Just like we turned our link on and off today.”
Except that he can turn on the links and I can’t. He gives me a cup of coffee. “Things are moving too fast, I know,” he says. “I’ll work on the control part later. Why is she taking so long to get here?” I was thinking the same.
“Wanna hear something interesting?” He says, in an attempt to clear the air. “One of Dr. Lambrechts’s stories about why he started this?”
To each, their master. I have Shifu, Simon has the near-bald demon who wants to be God. The clock on the wall has barely moved. I wish I could dive into meditation, because there’s way too much to decide and I need all my qi for when things unfold. But since he won’t let me, I better keep my mind busy. “Go ahead,” I say.
“There is a collection of feelings we know as pleasure, love, hate…Those are all electric functions of the outer side of the brain. Right where our bots are. Once we’re connected at scale, we may be able to appreciate beauty like we never have before. Dr. Lambrechts calls this the Spark of God, a mental state that only a timeless, all-knowing being can have.”
“I bet that hate happens there too. And ambition. And desire…” Shifu would lecture him for hours on that alone. I don’t have that kind of patience.
“Technically, some desires come from older parts of our brain,” Simon says, “yet, for some modern kinds of those, you’re right. That was exactly what I told him. See? We already think alike.”
Nope.
He paints the argument of what he calls the trap paradox, and I do my best to follow. Our brains connect. We all get high on elation, mesmerized by the feeling of being an all-knowing god. So happy and so loving, we don’t notice someone abusing the system. Maybe even against us. “Think about students in a classroom, openly sharing thoughts and knowledge. All it takes is for one of them to be infected, and we would all be infected too. Digital viruses, in our organic brains. Nothing in our evolutionary path has prepared us for that.”
These things in my head, I want to rip them out right now. Maybe they should have never started this.
“Then the machines would win,” he pushes back.
“But this virus situation, isn’t it why the military should have it?”
“Those dumb fucks architected the internet too. See what happened?”
Yes, Simon says dumb fucks too. My brain has left some deep impressions on his. But I still don’t know why he needs the Shadow Leap. I mean, I do know: to escape this clusterfuck. But he wanted it before this. Is he thinking of doing something stupid, like trying to go back in time to kill Dr. L or the general?
“Funding,” he explains. “Teleporting and time traveling can raise a lot of money. And to achieve that we would need to get the bots to work. So we hit all the goals at once.”
I get it. Simon is a smart guy with big ambitions. But I’m not sure I want to share my family’s secrets with anyone yet.
That’s when the bell rings.
We both run to the door. I peek behind the curtain. He opens the door. “Mrs. Lee!” I hug her so tight she has to push me back to breathe again. Like a security guard, Simon asks to see her purse. She complies, not the happiest of campers, but she does.
“Sorry,” I say, “Simon is terrified of patchouli.”
“Electronics,” he explains. “Can’t have them. Especially phones.” She didn’t bring one. I had been clear about it. Simon inspects the handbag nonetheless. Boxes and tubes of the most varied shapes and sizes. “I didn’t have time. So I brought a little of everything,” she explains, and asks for a bed where I can lie. We gotta improvise. So a thicker shelf will do. The woman takes a box of needles from her box. “I still don’t get this,” he says.
“Ok, so you believe we can teleport, jump in time, but just because you don’t understand the needles…” I hadn’t even finished and he had already stopped resisting. And as Mrs. Lee started poking me, Simon started to add some wires of his own. Some on my skin, some on the needles. “Just for data,” he says. “It won’t interfere with the magic, I promise, just—”
She cuts him off. “Do you mind?”
Immediately I feel her hurried pokes spreading all over my body. All meridians. Rushed and harsh. Heavier than usual. I must look like porcupine being offered to the gods. Then, the sound of the lighter and all at once the fragrance of burning herbs take over the place. “It’s not the best time to get high, you know,” Simon complains. I tell her to ignore his comment. Though it does smell like weed. Mrs. Lee? She promises it’s not.
On the monitors, Simon plays with dials, wires and buttons. Says he’s testing a few frequencies and sensibilities to track any activity, but it’s hard when nobody seems to know the nature of the magic being operated. Thus, his questions. So many of them. Mrs. Lee shushes him again and checks my pulse. “What is that thing you say?” She asks.
“The Dao is the nothing. In me, infinity it will be,” I respond. She nods and not a second later, Simon’s instruments start beeping. “Vibrations,” he whispers. Something is happening. He tries to show Mrs. Lee the data on his device, but she ignores him once again. She closes her eyes instead, joins my mantra. “The Dao is the nothing. In her, infinity it will be.”
Inside my head, I am back at the Anamnodome. Poor little Simon is being beaten by those kids. Why would a man who works so hard to convey confidence pick such a vulnerable moment? I watch him for a while. Then, something taps the space between my eyebrows and the stinging resumes. This time, outward.
“That should do. Now you, sir, take care of my girl. Or I’m coming to kill you.”
Beneath my skin, wrapping every inch of my body, a layer of dull pain. It’s hard to move, but I follow her to the door. “Please take care, Mrs. Lee.” Give her another hug. She’s the closest I have to family in this country. Though Simon isn’t keen on our goodbye. “We are running out of time,” he yells from a distance. “We need to do it. Now.”
Not yet. “Why did you pick that day, in the Anamnodome? When you were being bullied by those other kids?” At first, he protests. But realizing that I won’t budge, he says we both chose it. “I mean, our subconscious levels picked that moment as a bridge.”
“You think that’s part of that entanglement thing too?” I ask.
“Maybe. Either that or your backdoor people are really trying to fuck with my mind, ‘cause I hadn’t thought about that day for the longest time.” His eyes feel distant, as if he were lost in the memory again. Put together, it’s a lot to process. The bullies, the older girl intervening, us, sex…then he lunges at me, his closed fist coming straight onto my nose. I try to teleport. Nothing. So I step to my side and let him crash into the wall. Then on the floor. He moans, the idiot.
“I don’t buy it,” I say. His memory, too vivid to be a rescue.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he says. “Did you pick that day to tease me? To tell me I could go back to the shadows of my mind and…”
Shadows?
Flash.
The sun is setting behind a mountain, painting the sky all sorts of colors. The shadow of the temple creeps fast in our direction. Shifu’s and mine.
This is it. This is when I die.
“Real kung fu is in the shadows of temple,” he says. “Not inside, where tourists come to see. That’s for funding. Here, beyond the eyes, with no sashes, no degrees, no rules to obey, we can let our technique be transferred…and evolve.” I remember that day now. In my childhood, I used to play there. Spent my days living tales of warriors, emperors and magical creatures. Playing among the infinite rows of Daoist tea where I chased imaginary baby phoenixes and foxes with nine tails. Yesterday I tamed fire lions. Now I ride rhinos, made of bronze and a horn of lightning. Feels good to be back here, where I learned to fight like the heroes from the past, carried by Shifu’s adventures from when he and his buddies brought balance back to the world. I can see them around me, as Shifu tells me the stories of his mighty comrades. The man with an iron body that no sword could pierce. The master who could send his enemies flying with blast rays of qi. The one who could absorb any blow and return the energy to the source.48
I’m in my teens now, and it all makes sense, finally. Qi bombs explain how to align muscles and breathing to make it feel like my strength was shooting beyond my body. I try it and wow, it works so well. Bouncing qi reminds us relaxation can transfer the impact of the hits you eat. Shifu kicks me and my body contorts around the blow and I slap his shoulder much harder than I thought I would. Impenetrable bodies in fact explain how to use breathing and internal pressure to protect your organs from impact. And finally, teleportation stories are a reminder that footwork is what allows you to move around the opponent’s sight. Real applications, no fantasy. I am mesmerized. All the technique in the world, preserved in my childhood stories. “Banality is how stories die,” Shifu tells me. “Beauty is what allows them to survive. And then, evolve.”
Survive and evolve. I am just where I needed to be. When I open my eyes again, Simon is still waiting for an answer.
“I couldn’t give two fucks about your childhood, Simon.”
Then we hear the long screech of tires outside. And a scream of terror.
They are here already.
48. In his book The Wisdom of The Tao, Deng Ming-Dao talks about how he wasn’t educated with lessons, but with stories. He mentions how his grandmother would always explain or justify things with tales of The Yellow Emperor or other tales that are more than a thousand years old. In this book, I tried to include some of these ancient stories. But I also made some up. Not only because I wanted to have something new, but because Shifu always felt like an imaginative man who would easily make his own stories just so the points he wanted to make sounded older and more credible.