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My head dives into Shifu’s box. Mine, now. My treasure chest. His old paper characters are all there just like I remember. A rooster. A boat. A tigress. A little girl. Colored paper, sticks, and glue, so full of details and pride. A monkey. A tree. A mountain. The running waters of Wudang. The fog. I keep discarding them. Until I find the one. That’s it. I take the paper figure and run back to the Shadow Monkey.
But before we can resume our journey, from the skies and everywhere else, a thunderous voice lands upon us. A woman, powerful and lived. I know it so well.
Mrs. Lee’s ghostly words echo from above. “When she moved here, Claudia wanted to find the knowledge her master didn’t have time to teach.”
The shadow puppet I found, I give it to my simian host. A pig. He takes it and holds it in a particular kind of silence that makes my heart warm. Are we one now? We keep walking toward the sun. Although he looks smaller now. Or I am taller, who knows. My legs are long and bony, small breasts threaten to break out. I remember that age, too. Shadow Monkey doesn’t care about me. Just the new toy I gave him. The voice keeps dropping from the sky. Mrs. Lee’s.
“She worked so hard, practiced with diligence, taught her talentless students, putting herself to the test in situations that didn’t seem very healthy.”
Inside, I laugh—if there is such a thing in that world of computer simulations. Not that healthy, indeed. We are back at the watering hole, where in my memories of Shifu’s stories, Tigress and bees have dueled to death. I am fully grown now. Tats and everything. Still holding hands with the monkey. He brings me to the boulder where he waited in the old tales, leaps a few feet away from me, turns back, and puts his hands together in front of his chest. A prayer? Perhaps he wants me to meditate on the meaning of death. He tells me no, and moves his hands apart.
At first, I think what I was seeing is a ray of energy. His qi, possibly. But as his hands move farther and farther apart, the burst of light grows bigger, forming images in colors so bright they feel as if they’re taken directly from my memories. In the flashes, moments, from childhood in China to my fights in the Bay Area, growing until they become a wall reaching to the sky and the horizon. They play like videos uploaded to the internet—interlinked, connected back and forth through time. Some recent, explained by old ones, connected by logic, not time. Some early teachings proven by late experiences. Some mistakes I avoid the second time…Everything so vivid, it’s like I’m there again. Because I am. China and America, fights, philosophy, and science, all merged in the story my spirit remembers. In flashes. Images from my own eyes, and those I collected from Simon and Dr. Lambrechts, seen from their eyes with their brains and filtered by their feelings—at least, what they allowed me to see. Plus, some from the mechanical eyes of the world. Cameras everywhere. So many it overwhelms.
Curious, I ask them to stop on one. A self-driving car on a corner, charging at another, only to hit the truck right behind. “Why did you attack me?” I asked. He waves his head sideways. “Us, not,” he says, and opens another screen with an image of my apartment, empty, with just the image of a computer pig on the screen. “Us, yes. Gift,” he says.
“So when you attacked me in the Anamnodome…”
“Us, not.”
Even dead, Simon still manages to surprise me. I go back to my own stream of images. A web of visions from the beginning of my time all the way to…now. Inside the screen, I watch it from the other side. Like a mirror, but not exactly. “Reality too,” Monkey tells me. Reality and memories, converged. I understand now. This story, the flashes, my death. “I have gone through all this before, right?”
Mrs. Lee’s voice continues from everywhere. “But she was never afraid. Of men, of science, of death. Claudia, our Tigress, didn’t know fear.”
“This is my third time?” I know, he knows. The real life, a first recollection when I saw the memories, a third to link everything together into a web of…flashes to make sense of it all. Monkey raises a finger, and the video on the screen pauses. He beckons me to proceed and I know what to do—let it roll, my friend.
The voice continues as the paused mirror fades into the image of a funeral: “I’m unsure if she ever found her answers. But I’m glad she finally learned to let go.”