墓碑
Imagine a tombstone. The entire mass of it is black, towering high enough to pierce clouds, like an old scar on the city’s skyline. Imagine when the clouds roll in dense and dark, and this tombstone is plugged into the cloud layer like a syringe, pouring the heroin of human souls into the tear glands of nature. Imagine when the sky is clear and boundless. The tombstone’s shadow sweeps across half of New Anchorage, turning this vast, ash-gray city into a great sundial.
As if to demonstrate the human soul’s immortality, the depth of time measured is hard to fathom: from ancient, cannibalistic times, when primitive humans devoured raw meat, to the modern burning of floral and faunal remains interred for hundreds of millions of years, to yesterday’s destruction of homelands by the mysterious power of the atom. And now, gazing up at that tower, we believe we’ve arrived at last: life without bloodshed, a guarantee of longevity, like that promised to Heaven and Earth.
But now you know that tower only measures the infinite void of death. It is just a tombstone, towering over the piled skeletons of humanity.
A tombstone towering over civilization.
“They won’t let me see his body.”
She lowers her eyes as she speaks, straightening the gold pendant hanging from her neck. After a moment, she adds, “But I can imagine.”
She leans forward, putting a striped straw in her mouth. She grinds her teeth, preoccupied, the straw bending, like acute pain escaping her mouth.
I grip her ice-cold hand.
The deceased was her respected teacher Lloyd Hariri, a paragon who worked with her on the Minos Field. Officially it’s being called a suicide, but the rumor is Hariri used his masterful abilities and preeminent imagination to achieve a death of great spectacle and ceremony.
Milling machine. Lathe. Homemade gunpowder. Molten steel sprayed everywhere. Hariri’s corpse lies in a small-scale weapons workshop that produced a large-caliber, homemade pistol with no rifling.
The bullet entered his temple at close range.
I can also imagine, but I can’t reconcile that tableau with my impressions of Hariri: the bald head, the deep-set, heavily lidded eyes, the dimples when he smiled. And yet he staged a lavish fireworks show on his skull.
He isn’t the only scientist to die recently, but he’s certainly the most attention grabbing. His story stands out from the madly swarming forum posts of Augmented Vision. I’m at a loss amid the diverse and muddled death scene reconstruction sims. This excessive witnessing of death limits my imagination, rather than aiding it.
She gazes out the window. “He chose true death.” She seems to be staring at something far off and blurred. “Why?”
I follow her gaze, as if she might have found an answer out there. In a gray curtain of rain, the vehicle lights are a blood red river. Looming over that is the black tower.
No answers there. Just finality, true death.
Don’t be foolish, I chide myself. Roi asked why but didn’t expect an answer. No one can give her the answer she seeks.
She turns to face me. “The first time I saw you it was raining just like this. I still remember . . . ” She notes my skeptical look.
“Remember what?”
She shakes her head, her smile dispelled. Softly shouted classic rock fills the pub.
I look around at the curling smoke and the few human shapes, dubiously lit, quietly chatting. Cluck cluck, coo coo. I reckon that in such times, the mere existence of a pub like this, a place that allows people to get together, is a kind of miracle. How did Roi find it? My gaze meets that of the waiter behind the bar. He’s cleaning cups. A cold shiver runs through me. I don’t like his expression, a familiar one. He’s seen my black and purple uniform.
“Xiaofan,” Roi says, “did you know Hariri often came here?”
I shake my head.
Biting her straw, she continues to gaze at the rain.
“We . . . ” She closes her mouth on the next syllable, as if her thoughts are locked in struggle with her speech. She stands. “Let’s go.”
We rent a small flat, one of those standard modules with no Seismic Cancelation System. It’s compact but has everything we need: living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. There’s seldom much sunlight to speak of in our bustling, out-of-the-way alley, so the white walls maximally reflect artificial light, allowing several clusters of sickly green plants to persist like invalids. When we turn off the artificial windows, we can always see that immense black tower floating on the mist of New Anchorage, like a mast in the ocean.
Roi and I go to that mast, and return from it, every day. We follow the same route, but for different occupations.
“Xiaofan.” Roi is curled up on our double bed, which nearly fills the bedroom. “I think I’ve got a cold.”
I go in and feel her forehead. “What was it? Yesterday’s downpour?”
She smiles tenderly. “Babe, it’s just a cold, not a fever.”
That’s my love, through and through. Her logic pathways are always unobstructed. She’ll correct your mistakes without a sense of superiority.
“I’ve requested a day off from my supervisor. Be careful out there.”
I hesitate in the doorway.
“Relax, okay?” She blows me a kiss. “I have Ann to keep me company.”
On the tram to Osiris Tower, people’s expressions are blank. They’re lost in retinal implant communications and entertainment. Outside my porthole, high-speed motion smooths out the details of buildings, making for a vague, ashen scene. Only Osiris Tower, sufficiently distant, sufficiently tall, remains distinct to my eyes. It is steady, sharp edged. As the tram gets closer, its obsidian-like form occludes more and more of the sky.
I watch it but think of Roi. We are both in the service of death. Other than that, we have nothing in common.
I remember moving through the staff canteen toward her. It felt like such a long distance at the time. The adventure began with a bet and getting to her wasn’t easy. I felt those looks on my back, gazes awaiting my humiliation. Every step broke the record for the shortest distance between us. I could see her in profile: brown skin, pointy nose, black frame glasses, curly hair bundled at the back of her head. My knee hit a stainless steel bench en route. The pain was excruciating. Cold sweat oozed from my pores. Okay, relax, I told myself. At least she’s alone at her dining table. I came around it to sit opposite her. My weak legs surrendered precipitously to gravity. I crashed into the seat.
She looked up, light flashing on her glasses.
“Eh, hello. I’m Li Xiaofan. I . . . I’m in Area Two.”
Area Two. A blunt opener, to say the least. Blunt and not a little momentous, an Area Two guy making conversation with a scientist. If Roi had left at that moment, I would’ve felt relieved of a great burden.
But she didn’t. She stayed, just like a certain someone had guaranteed she would.
“Well hello, and how are you?” Her smile revealed perfect canines. “Roi Lei.”
Roi Lei. The name rolled off the tip of her tongue. Thinking of it now conjures sensations, dim mental associations, her pliant yet tough voice, the mild shampoo fragrance that suffused her. She wore an orange uniform and struck me as a lovely tulip. I remember being in love with her from the moment she opened her mouth. It was a compelling directive, implanted deep within my logic layers. Being without her wasn’t an option. I had to keep going.
Whoever is lonely at this moment, is lonely forever.
“Hi. I, uh, wanted to consult you.” My voice trembled. There was an immense question in my heart, a questioned fanned to burning by a lack of detailed explanation from official sources, and I flung this question at her, nearly forgetting my true purpose.
“Well,” she said, wrinkling her delicate nose.
That’s it, Li Xiaofan, your good luck has come to an end, as has this dialogue.
I felt dizzy under bright white lights, in danger of floating away. I struggled to focus. Then came her voice: “The answer is complex. Let’s take it slow, shall we?”
Shall we? I bit my lip. Those two words would’ve been enough to make that group of guys piss themselves in terror, but I didn’t think this at the time.
I nodded.
“So,” she said, gathering up her hair. “This work of ours . . . we change a human consciousness into Osiris particles. You know that much, I think? Osiris particles can perfectly imitate a neural network, in structure and function. An Osiris particle network as a whole is decoherent. It can interact with the domain of larger-scale physics, while its individual particles, by means of their spin states, can act as neurons doing impulse-suppression. Then, via Hermes messenger particles, states can be propagated. Of course, this is an extremely simplified explanation.” She paused. “Did I go too fast?”
I shook my head. I was quite stupid, hence Area Two material, one of numerous Charons on the River Styx. As far as a Charon was concerned, prying into the secrets of death was a sin.
“We give people souls,” I summarized, with not a little affectation.
“Souls.” She closed her eyes. “Material ones.”
“But if Osiris particles duplicate a consciousness, doesn’t the original self die with its brain?”
“Good question.” She gave a mischievous wink. “‘Duplicate’ isn’t the best word. Let’s call it ‘peeling away.’ That’s a better way to understand it. You’ve heard the story of the Ship of Theseus? The principle’s the same. The ‘peeling away’ process involves repeated substitution: neurons are replaced by Osiris particles one by one. You’re still you as it happens. After about thirty billion replacements, your consciousness has been peeled away from your mortal body. Continuity of self is preserved. You’re still you.”
I listened, only partly understanding. There was a kind of assurance in her eyes and bearing. “I” would not perish. We Charons were not executioners.
I stood up. “Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome.” She extended her hand. “It was so nice to meet you, Li Xiaofan.”
I took her hand, and there were trains screaming through my blood vessels, and Roi was their only passenger.
“Nice to meet you too.”
The tram arrives. Passing beneath the underground station’s vast transparent dome, you can see the honeycomb-like interior structure covered by Osiris Tower’s black polycarbon façade. The occasional blue flash illuminates these cells. Roi said they have something to do with electrical capacity and energy storage. You could perhaps gaze up along the tower’s commanding height, but I wouldn’t suggest it. So close to the base, even if you didn’t injure your cervical vertebra, you couldn’t possibly see all the way up to the summit.
Thus, in a kind of autohypnosis, I see Osiris Tower descending from the heavens. It’s a great ladder to God’s paradise. And soon I will enter it, and change into my black and purple uniform, and go to the River Styx.
Before that, I must do something for my love.
Roi has been acting a bit strange for the past two days. I think it has to do with Hariri’s death.
I send a silent message into the void.
The fried steak is burned. There’s too much dressing on the salad. For dessert there’s mousse and a small cake, passable, because we got them from a Western-style pastry shop a few days before and kept them in the fridge. Roi watches me apologetically. “I had time today, so I just . . . didn’t ask for Ann’s help.”
Ann is our AI. She’s currently projected against the far wall of the living room, playing her zither. This simulated young lady’s hair is done up in a bun, and she wears a traditional Han Chinese dress. Roi customized her thusly.
“Roi was quite diligent and careful. I can attest to that.” Ann’s voice emanates down from the ceiling. The two of them seem like sisters sometimes, speaking in whispers, keeping secrets. I put down my fork and knife and caress Roi’s hand. “Babe, when I was little, a spread like this would’ve been a sumptuous feast.”
Her brows knit. When I was little. I said it. If you’re always detouring around certain words and phrases, like avoiding open sewage, then you’ve likely got taboo vocab on your hands.
Roi knows, of course.
But today I went ahead and said, “When I was little.” In passing, to be sure, but the despair and humiliation is here now, regardless. It’s a kind of conditioned reflex that can run through a lifetime. Every time I say it, it’s like my heart pumps salt into my blood vessels. This time I grit my teeth and forge ahead. I tell her of a time before the Great Scattering, when my family was destitute. Of running a maritime blockade and how the boat capsized. Of my father and little sister freezing to death in the Arctic Ocean. Of my mother trading her body for food, and early one dismal morning, opening her wrists.
“Babe, I’m so . . . ” Roi’s eyes redden. “I’m so sorry.”
My throat burns. “If it wasn’t for the Tower, it would be everyone’s fate.”
The muscles at the corners of her mouth tighten.
Those painful memories were just foreshadowing. What I really want to say is next:
“Roi, I know some scientists are skeptical of Osiris Tower’s operations. After all, the way it gets energy is so clean, so efficient. For post-Scattering humanity, it seems like cheating. But you know how I see it? The Tower . . . ” I watch her eyes intently. “ . . . the Tower gave me dignity. The dignity people have when their bellies are full. When they’re warm. When they don’t have to fear the long night. Human dignity.”
She can’t meet my gaze. “Xiaofan, why did you bring this up?”
I sigh heavily. “That place we went yesterday, Roi . . . do you know what it is?”
Some people say New Anchorage is human civilization’s last redoubt. You can see where they’re coming from, what with the city’s population and organization, its advanced and flourishing society.
And in view of its inexhaustible fountainhead.
Open up a ninth grade history text, and you’ll see how the city’s technocratic government uses natural science to model history: cities germinating on grain surpluses and the need for division of labor, cities gathering population (with the negative side of things, like the resultant plagues, omitted), population spurring demand, demand spurring innovation, writing, the wheel, metal smelting, and probably taxation, and the nation state, the progress of science and technology and organization and the resultant manufacturing surplus, and population growth in turn, and so on.
This is human civilization’s fundamental model—of course, this is an extremely simplified explanation—with production surplus as its beginning, and population as its inner motive force.
In the eyes of New Anchoragers, surplus and population alone have made the city outstanding, and unrivaled. But I must add a third element: the Great Scattering.
The mid-twenty-second century’s Great Scattering was an apocalypse for human civilization. Many elements in superposition, strengthening each other, brought it about:
This was the so-called Great Scattering.
Forgive some presumptuous conjecture, but those lucky enough to scatter to Alaska, to New Anchorage, must have marveled, fresh off the boat and thinking they’d arrived in paradise. The climate was pleasant. The people were genteel, courteous, well fed, and clothed. The streets overflowed with an optimistic mood unrivaled in this era. The city had the feel of a super-metropolis. It would have been shocking to stumble upon a place so rich, secure, and healthy in these times of energy shortage. How did it exist? If you put this question to a citizen of New Anchorage, they might respond with a tolerant laugh, then raise their hand and point toward the black scar on the heavens.
Osiris Tower.
Roi and I haven’t been getting along for the past couple days. I wonder if it has something to do with Hariri’s death.
Death itself means nothing. The profound meaning lies behind death, in what it can bring about. In what it ends, and what it leads to.
I don’t understand.
Let me put it this way: death ended Hariri’s service to us. And death led to doubt.
I understand the first part. But doubt? What doubt?
Think about Hariri and Lei’s work. If they don’t think they’re “helping the souls of the dead transcend suffering,” if they believe they’re committing murder . . .
But that’s preposterous!
Calm down, Li Xiaofan. Answer me this . . . yesterday afternoon, before going home, where did you and Lei go?
A pub on Liberty Street.
The Blackbird Pub, right?
Right.
Did you notice anything . . . peculiar?
Like what?
Never mind. All you need to know is that the Blackbird Pub is a meeting place for dissident elements. For you and I, and of course still for Lei, it’s a dangerous place.
Dissident elements?
From a mathematical perspective, if a group is big enough, there will almost certainly be some “heterogeneity.” This paradise of ours is no exception. There will always be people dissatisfied with the status quo. There will always be those who take subversion as their duty. There are people like this, now, harboring a stubborn prejudice against the Tower, a prejudice handed down from barbarous times of scarcity, and they’re preparing to turn this prejudice into action. There are indications that Hariri was a dissident element. His suicide was a kind of statement.
But Roi is no dissident! I vouch for her. Chief Executive, I—
Guarantees can’t change anything. Li Xiaofan, don’t forget why you’re at Lei’s side.
I . . . won’t forget.
Very good.
Here is the River Styx, the intermediate zone between birth and death. My place of work. If you get the chance to enter it (I guarantee the chance is minimal), you will find “River Styx” to be quite a romantic formulation.
It is an immense, transparent, ring-shaped tunnel divided into thirty-six areas, enclosing the Tower’s core, the Minos Field, like gelatin encasing meat. Due to an unceasing influx of souls, the Minos Field fluoresces blue. Washed in this light, and pure white lamplight, and console light reflected off white floor tiles and white airlocks, we Charon workers seem lost in a strange, hazy world.
Like being under water.
An Area Two worker conversant in classical myth noted the connection between our work space and river of life and death. We naturally became Charon from that legend, the ferryman between life and death. We place the dead on transfer platforms. We handle bodies with brain tissue not yet completely inactive. I press a button and the near-side of an airlock opens. It closes, and the other side opens, and the deceased is reborn. Behind me, outside the tunnel, friends and family of the deceased bid farewell. Through layered plexiglass they see a steel-blue mist clear. It is the deceased’s consciousness, transformed into Osiris particles. A soul made corporeal, in other words. A soul has no inherent color. You see it because of the Minos Field.
Life and liberty. But life’s liberty comes at a cost. As a soul, you must be seized by the Minos Field.
You must serve.
People hate us—not our work, but what we represent. It’s a taboo of the inauspicious, a taboo from the age of barbarism. That’s what Roi told me. I didn’t really understand what she meant. I merely serve. I perform my role, and that service is practically built on the despoiling of my own life. There’s no hard evidence but being near those transformations day in and day out is sufficient to hasten you toward doom: among thirty-six Charons in their primes, three or four must be replaced every year. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, aphasia, amnesia, cerebral cancer . . . There’s a tacit understanding among us regarding the Minos Field’s effect on the brain.
Aken, Slim, Friedrich—of these so-called friends who bet Roi wouldn’t say more than three sentences to me, only one remains.
People take our misfortune for a curse. Even we think so. So, the fate or chance that brought Roi and I together was inconceivable. I took it for God opening a new door for me, even though my colleagues never got so lucky.
“Theoretically speaking,” Roi once said, “I’m a Brahmin. Priests, clerics, these are my ancestors, servants of death. In this way, you and I are no different.”
Then we kissed for the first time. I remember how she passed her breath into my mouth, like God pouring spirit into a pottery figurine.
Ah, Roi.
Facing today’s deceased, I think of that first kiss. It’s a kind of blasphemy. I size up the dead person before me:
Male. Caucasian. About twenty years old. Face serene. My Augmented Vision gives me the maximum conversion time of fifteen minutes. I close my eyes. Breathe deep. Open my eyes. Lightly touch the button. Then comes the electrical machine buzz. Forty-five seconds later, my “ferry passenger” enters the Land of the Dead. A dizzying, nauseating, low-frequency sound announces him. The Osiris particle transformation begins. First, the blue fog seeps from the top of the head like fast-growing hair. Slowly, the quivering blue miasma begins to disengage. It still maintains the self’s soft tissue form. A few seconds later, the blue vapor breaks away from the head and rises tentatively into the air, as if it can’t believe its sudden liberty. After this brief hesitation, its volume suddenly expands, and it rises heavenward like a Daoist Immortal, rapidly leaving my field of view.
At this stage, transformation is complete.
The corpse comes back out, seemingly no different from minutes before, pallid and shriveled like a wax figure. Behind me in the “leave-taking” room, some of the deceased’s loved ones cry. Others smile, and still others move awkwardly between both.
This is quite normal for people facing death and this fixed, final settling place.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I stand in silent recollection. The mortal flesh will leave for Area Three, where those colleagues will handle it. One more transformation, resulting in nothingness. But none of this merits grief. As you know, the young soul, humanity’s most precious resource, bringer of material wealth, will enter the Tower’s Honeycomb and begin its service.
A modest toll that must be paid on the road to eternal life.
“Li,” Aken says, his tray clattering on the table. “How many have you processed today?”
I strike an exaggerated thinking pose to express my distaste for the word “processed,” a distaste I’ve communicated to Aken many times.
He seems unconcerned. “Five for me.” He sips his drink. We occupy a four-person table in this bustling canteen, sitting diagonally opposite each other. The empty seats belonged to Slim and Friedrich. Like anyone who’s been working in the system long term, we observe certain rituals. For instance, the seating arrangements at this table have never changed: Slim, Aken, Friedrich, and myself, counterclockwise. Previously full of complaints, longings, harmless bets, and dirty jokes, now those two empty seats are like circuit breakers, cutting off the cheer, cold and desolate. Perhaps eating in melancholy silence has Aken feeling out of sorts. “Let’s talk about something else,” he suggests. “Just now I processed someone who’d been hit by a car.”
That gets my attention, and I look up from my lunch. “A car?”
Immensely pleased with himself, Aken goes on: “The impact lacerated a coronary artery. Extreme blood loss was the cause of death. But guess what? No one came to say goodbye to this character.”
“Huh . . . ”
He chews a brown protein stick, his jaw working vigorously. “That gang of freak scientists from the Transportation Department did the calculation, didn’t they? If the driverless dispatch and pedestrian discrimination and evasion systems haven’t frozen over a large area, then the probability of an accident like this is equivalent to standing somewhere random in the Sahara Desert and getting struck by a meteorite within twenty-four hours.”
I lick my lips. “But it could still be a coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” Aken shakes his head. What’s that in his gray eyes? Pity? Ridicule? I don’t know. When everyone close to you goes away in the end, your frame of reference in this world can become indistinct. Sometimes I can’t even tell if it’s me who’s crazily spinning, or the whole world around me. In my muddled skull, everyone is complex, difficult to fathom. Everyone is without reason. Like Aken. Even Roi.
Ah, Roi.
“Stop lying to yourself,” Aken says.
My fist hammers the table. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Aken remains calm, seeming to enjoy my anger. “Death by vehicle. Nobody saying goodbye. Either the deceased had no loved ones, or they didn’t know he was being processed. If your brain isn’t broken, you know what I’m saying.”
I watch him through a daze, teeth grinding. “Suicides aren’t transformed.”
Everyone knows this, but I feel it needs deploying against Aken’s crafty logic. I recall a middle school teacher taking the time to carefully explain this provision: “New Anchorage’s prosperity comes from ingenuity spurred by vigorous need. The foundation of all this is population. There are actually many people with a death wish.” Her gaze swept over the classroom, finally settling on me. “Past trauma, deformity, psychological illness, and so on, all of these can lead to suicide. Now add a promised afterlife, and that can make people even more apt to rashly abandon life. Meaningless expenditure of life would damage the foundation of our success. So, in order restrain this type of behavior, suicides are disqualified from transformation.”
Why was she looking at me as she said this? Was it some kind of hint? Did she perceive something hidden in my heart, like a cancer cell, that would sooner or later devour me? Under her gaze my heart ached. I felt sick. Like the first time I saw the corpse of a city smashed and scattered by revolution.
She was compelling me to gaze into the heart of that corpse.
Many years later, that middle school teacher’s prophecy came true, to some degree: at twenty-two, I chose a vocation that could rapidly consume my life force. I didn’t know if she’d be gratified or regretful that her words turned out prophetic.
“Suicides aren’t transformed,” Aken repeats. “But when you need a piece of firewood for the furnace, do you really care where the wood comes from?”
I grip my fork. The teeth reflect ice-cold light.
“Of course, my analysis hasn’t been rigorous enough. There is another possibility.” The provocateur eyes me. “The driverless dispatch system was undermined by human action. The guy was murdered.”
“You . . . ”
“Li,” he says, leaning over to put a hand on my shoulder. “Come on. You’ve never had your doubts?”
I shrug out of his grasp, glaring.
“You know they didn’t transform Slim.” Aken’s voice is knife-edge cold. “But do you know the reason? Insufficient neuron connection pattern recognition. Fucking insufficient recognition! We’ve been doing their dirty work a long time, Li. You and I both know how high the compatibility rate is with transformation. Or are you still unclear on that? Here’s why they didn’t transform Slim . . . because Slim had Alzheimer’s. Because a senile Slim couldn’t work for them in the afterlife! That’s how it goes, I guess. Those who deserve transformation don’t get it, and the undeserving do. This is a bit different from the story we’ve always been told.”
I gape at him, thousands of refutations going through my mind. I can’t give them voice. His malicious, fanatical gaze oppresses me, somehow ending the argument. I grab my tray and stand.
Aken follows suit. “You should listen to other versions of the story, now and then. Go ask your genius girlfriend, or poke around in AugViz.” He taps his temple. “How do I put this? Form your own opinion.”
Osiris Tower is one thousand three hundred and thirty-one meters tall. Packed into those meters are a hundred thousand heat differential electrical generators, the so-called Honeycomb. This development toward high elevation comes down to two things: first of all, “souls” have a tendency to rise, like heat, and the Minos Field needs layer upon layer of capturing capacity to maximize the harvest; secondly, the Tower is an open declaration of this city’s wild ambition.
Reaching heavenward, an obelisk of human civilization.
That’s not cheap, of course. To attain such unprecedented height, Osiris Tower is filled with Seismic Cancelation Systems. Setting aside the construction cost of these, there are transport and maintenance costs. The massive energy requirement of the computing units, master control units, and fine-tuning units is almost too much for a postmodern city-state to bear.
Only New Anchorage can afford such extravagant waste, and it is entirely dependent on its efficient energy source. The output of Osiris Tower’s hundred-thousand Honeycomb cells meets the needs of the tower itself, and to spare. Transportation, communications, lighting, farming, entertainment, comfortable rooms neglected after human civilization’s total collapse, have been refurbished thanks to the diligent souls in the Honeycomb.
Of course, Xiaofan, we all understand that one day we will be those souls. Their duty will be ours. As our New Anchorage educators take great pains to inculcate in us, that duty can be described with just two words:
To serve.
I hear her footsteps, soft, halting. I send a tracks-covering order to Ann, quickly returning to a public channel of AugViz. The lock pops, the door is pushed open.
“Babe,” Roi says distractedly. “Why are you back so early today?”
“I think it’s you who’s late.” I throw up a flashing exclamation clock. “Work was busy?”
“Mm hm.” Head bowed, her gaze lingers on the man in the holograph display. “What’s he on about?”
“The state of public security.” I dial up the volume. “The Chief Executive says New Anchorage is in crisis. Illegal assembly. Subversive activity. Strange deaths . . . ”
She snorts. “So the Chief Exec is starting to pay attention to strange deaths? I think all he cares about in the end is getting fuel to the furnace.”
My pulse quickens. “What do you mean? What fuel? What furnace? I don’t understand.”
Roi waves a hand, smiling exhaustedly. “Never mind, Xiaofan. Let me ask you something. Do you really believe him?”
Him. She can only mean the figure in the hologram, the apex personage in this city of ours.
“I believe,” I reply, after less than a second’s hesitation.
Karl Schlich—discoverer of the Osiris particle, father of transformation theory, the Chief Executive—is not just an abstract idea to me, like he is to most people.
I met him in person.
At that time, I was still just an admirer of Roi. I was sipping coffee in the Tower entrance hall when a high-level text intruded upon my AugViz:
Go to Area Zero, Room 11104. The route will show in your AugViz. Don’t say anything, and don’t ask anyone about this. K.S.
I took it for a practical joke at first. Area Zero is the Tower’s administrative space. Among the Tower’s thirty-five thousand staff members, about three hundred have access privileges to Area Zero. A thirteen-person committee is elected from these three hundred. These thirteen scientists are called consuls. They’re in charge of Osiris Tower, and thus in charge of the whole city.
It’s as well to think of Osiris Tower as Mount Olympus, and Area Zero as the abode of gods and demigods on the summit.
So, at that time, a petty and low-ranking Charon stood up, and was guided by AugViz to that place. He’d hesitated only briefly. The message was so terse, brooking no dispute. It didn’t feel like a practical joke. He passed through corridor after white-lit corridor, growing mesmerized. At first, his soles dragged on the white floor tiles, screeching like a vigorously worked two-handed saw. Gradually his pace quickened as he consumed the distance between himself and this mystery. Everyone turned a blind eye to his transgressive passage: busy scientists in orange uniforms, admins in blue, logistics officers in green. Doors opened silently before him, as if they’d been awaiting his arrival, and he was able to follow this path beyond the usual limits of his privilege. He entered a lift and soared upward, hovered briefly, then continued ascending. There were no transfers as the lift made slight course corrections. Ten minutes later, he gently decelerated to his destination. Trying to guess how far he’d come, he reckoned he was near the top of the Tower.
Area Zero, Room 11104.
The door opened. Before him there was only sky. Below, the lively, bustling city. Quaking with fear, he advanced a step. The electrochromic glass went from transparent to white before his foot. He was quietly grateful to whatever conjurers had been put to such good use.
A wheelchair floated silently toward him.
“Li Xiaofan.” It was he of the outstanding talents, hoary-bearded, old but alert. “Welcome.”
K.S. Karl Schlich. “Karl—” I was dripping with cold sweat. “Chief Executive, Your Excellency . . . ”
In textbooks he’d been just a portrait. We’d never been told the father of New Anchorage needed a wheelchair, nor that his head leaned like an old tree branch to connect with a brain wave translator for voice synthesis.
The wheelchair’s loudspeaker commanded me to sit.
I eased into a floating chair. The old man drifted off a few meters. Against the light, the white-uniformed figure of K.S. became a black silhouette. The glass under him remained transparent. From my angle, he seemed a mountain looming over New Anchorage.
A bent, narrow mountain.
“You work in Area Two.”
I swallowed saliva. “Yes, Chief Executive.”
The silhouette seemed to nod its head. “Well done, lad.”
I had gained an audience with the King of the Gods. I’d obtained his praise. I should have had many ideas at that moment, and in fact I did, too many, a thunderous roar in my mind, from which I couldn’t distinguish any one thought. So, I had to fall back on instinct to respond. I fabricated an ugly smile.
The silhouette was silent a while. I thought this happy encounter was coming to an end, but then came that wizened, synthetic voice: “Roi Lei. Do you know this person?”
After a dazed moment, I nodded.
“Do you want to be her boyfriend?”
My legs were shaking. Someone once told me Osiris Tower is a tree climbing toward the kingdom of heaven. In the eyes of its leaders, every branch and every leaf has its place. We who depend on the tree can only keep from publicly breaking with the order of things.
“I do,” I said.
“Very good.” The old man moved out of the backlit area, and there seemed to be a silver halo on his bald pate. “Approach her. Get close to her. Comply with my instructions as they come, and you will have what you desire.”
I was silent a moment. “But, Chief Executive, why—”
“Don’t ask that.” He floated toward me. “I need something done, and you are a suitable candidate. Scientists are New Anchorage’s most precious assets, especially those involved in the theory and mathematics of Minos Field efficacy improvement. Roi is one of these. Scientists are very intelligent, of course, but they are certainly not invulnerable. Sometimes sensitive, sometimes weak, sometimes immoderate or stubborn.” His synthetic voice was like flowing mercury. “They can be used by people with ulterior motives. They can be troubled by inner voices. They can prophecy great things from the slightest signs or fail to see the forest for the trees. I need you to watch over this girl, Li Xiaofan. Don’t think of it as monitoring, but as protecting.”
He didn’t have to spell it out. It was obvious he meant my inherent traits—loyalty, unconditional belief, even stupidity—to counteract Roi’s dangerous tendencies.
I felt overwhelmed by this great man’s favor, and in awe of his majesty.
“As you know, the scientists have drawn up a stringent anti-surveillance and control bill, in order to protect their small psychic domain. But there are always ways to bypass unnecessary and overelaborate formalities. Li Xiaofan, I need you to report to me regularly on her activities. If something out of the ordinary happens, it should be reported to me in a timely manner. Remember, this is for her own good. You’ll be protecting her and protecting this city.”
That’s what I’ve been doing for the past three years: monitoring my love, ostensibly in the name of love.
Just before I turned to leave, the Chief Executive said, “Li Xiaofan, why did you choose to work in the Tower?”
“New Anchorage saved me,” I said, gravely serious. “I want to serve it.”
“Very good.” The old one smiled drily. “And in return I’ll give you Roi. She will be your well-deserved recompense.”
The foundation of New Anchorage’s success is clearly its population and source of energy. These two elements are not locked in a zero-sum game, but in a positive feedback loop that drives the city’s development and maturation.
People flock to New Anchorage for what the city promises: a secure life, and an afterlife, both guaranteed by science. On average, two hundred and forty-one people die every day in this city of twenty million, for this or that reason. Subtracting those deceased who can’t be transformed—due to serious brain trauma, late delivery, or violation of Committee regulations—about seventy percent of citizens end up in Osiris Tower.
In other words, Osiris Tower ingests one hundred and sixty-eight souls per day on average, or sixty-one thousand three hundred and twenty per year. One hundred thousand Honeycomb cells provide electricity to the city and maintain a full load state, so each soul’s service term is 1.63 years on average. That’s quite brief in the context of eternal life. During its tenure, a soul, free of all manner of macroscopic limits once imposed by the brain, can perceive the high-speed, chaotic microscopic world, and interact with it. The soul is required to do what Maxwell’s Demon did. In its Honeycomb cell, it divides fast-moving atmospheric molecules from slow-moving ones. With the system’s total energy unchanging, a heat differential is manufactured. This differential is converted into electrical energy.
This is the most efficient way to generate power. As the textbooks taught us, the process’ economy is astounding. Apart from what the Minos Field and transformation process consumes—an insignificant amount—the wastage of heat differential generation can practically be disregarded. A megacity gets power, and the dead get souls. In less than two years, they are released from service, and off they go. Where? To paradise? The afterlife? Somewhere in the ocean of stars? Death has been a mystery throughout the ages. New Anchorage’s scientists have decided to leave this ultimate question to our imaginations.
They merely promise liberation from mortality. This is why twenty million people crawl and strive in the Tower’s shadow. Osiris Tower is their religion, and the Chief Executive, far removed from the masses and reality, is thus the high pontiff.
It seems religion has finally prevailed in its centuries-long struggle with science. It resorted to a trick most shrewd, most deadly: it used science for its own ends. Even a lowly Charon’s basic science literacy is sufficient to think it through:
Hundreds of years after humanity demonstrated the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine, after the vanguards of civilization retreated in disarray, have we really defeated the laws of physics? Are we really exploiting an inexhaustible energy source? Have we really replaced God, even become God itself?
Xiaofan, do you really believe?
Li Xiaofan, are you suspicious of Roi?
Chief Executive . . . what do you mean?
I mean Dissident Element L. I think you’ve heard the moniker?
I . . .
You needn’t be circumspect. Dissident Element L’s subversive views are a kind of treacherous virus . . . efficiently disseminated, highly infectious, impossible to completely eradicate. With such political views going around, I needn’t remind you, dissident organizations are beginning to exhibit unusual behavior. I believe this is very dangerous.
Chief Executive, you can’t think—
From the few clues we have, we know Dissident Element L understands Tower operations very well, though they distort this knowledge. We believe they’re a member of the scientist core. Dissident Element L is quite cunning. They have concealed themselves for a long time. But my hunting dogs picked up traces, and I can tell you, as a result of the tech department’s tracking, this person’s access point is near your residence.
But it doesn’t mean for certain that—
Not for certain, no. AugViz is a muddled, confusing space. Anything’s possible in there. That L could stand for Roi Lei, or Li Xiaofan, or even Lloyd Hariri. Cleaving to the principle of scientific rigor, we mustn’t lightly decide someone is a saboteur. So, I need your help.
If . . . I do mean if, Roi really is Dissident Element L . . .
We treasure every scientist. This is why we haven’t launched a formal investigation. When it comes to subversive activity, we like to carry out rectification measures. Li Xiaofan, I believe you are devoted to New Anchorage. Remember, the fate of twenty million might rest on your choices.
May I presume to ask a question? What did you mean by rectification measures?
That question is beyond the scope of your authority.
The journey home has never seemed so long. My heart feels hung and suspended, like the tram I ride. Black clouds swarm on the horizon, dousing everything in gloom—glass curtain walls, streets, alleys, ant-like streams of people—as if meaning to seize all the world in darkness and silence.
Only the Tower stands tall and upright.
The tram passes over Liberty Street, decelerates, stops at the station. I see a steepled, three-story, redbrick structure amid a motley and precipitous cluster of buildings. There is a kind of bustling liveliness among the people passing in and out of the place, different from before. I remember that indescribable afternoon, Roi and I sitting amid the anonymous crowd.
The Blackbird Pub. Dissident elements. Subversive activity. Lloyd Hariri.
Roi.
I think the answer is already there, in my heart. I just don’t want to face it. I return home. Roi’s not there. My burning, chapped lips open as I call out for Ann. She appears, a fine gauze in the air.
“Ann, tell me everything Roi did that day I wasn’t here.”
That day, after I left, she got out of bed and opened an encrypted email Lloyd Hariri sent before he committed suicide. The message left her silent and perplexed. She was in a trance all day, until she realized I was about to get off work. She rushed into the kitchen.
A few days later, she took up the mantle of Hariri’s Dissident Element L identity. She published essay after essay in AugViz. Soon afterward, she accepted two invitations to the Blackbird Pub. The essays are just there for me to find. Her tracks aren’t hidden. She could have set up high-level privacy privileges, but she didn’t. She’s been waiting for me to discover her. Me, her fool.
“Roi . . . ”
She stands in the doorway, and I fix my eyes on hers. Deep wells, so innocent, innocence to make your heart burst with love. “Roi, what did he say in that message?”
“The truth.” She returns my gaze. “A truth we have chosen to overlook.”
“A truth that you choose to believe!” I roar, my desperation igniting. “Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re cleverer than the greats?”
She closes her eyes and slowly shakes her head. She seems resigned, as if to execution. “Why did Lloyd want the atonement of true death? Why does Schlich remain consigned to his frail human body? Could it be he’d rather endure humiliation and agonizing medical treatments than the next life, supposedly so gentle and attractive? Xiaofan, think about it. Have you ever in your trade transformed someone from Area Zero? Why are the higher-ups so afraid of the political views on AugViz? Surely you’ve heard this one . . . ‘Your staunchest opponent is whoever most believes you’re right.’”
Oh Roi. Now I’m your staunchest opponent.
I take her hand, not too light, fearing that she might slip away here and now, and not too tightly, fearing she might become a dream, a mist, and dissipate between my fingers. “Roi, I—”
“Hush.” She puts a finger to my lips, takes hold of my face. There’s a resolution in her I’ve never seen before, as if one word from the talk we’re postponing could tear open the space-time between us. I shiver, drawn to her lips. She kisses me deeply. She blows her breath into my mouth, like God pouring spirit into a funereal pottery figure.
My broken heart is again glued together, bringing a distant pain.
Tonight, we again become one. We are cautious and solemn, like we’re sacrificing ourselves. From darkness we charge into the light, from bliss we rush toward extreme loss. In love, we charge toward death. After what seems years of gasping for breath in silence, Roi gently bites my earlobe.
“My favorite part of you.”
I force a laugh. A tear sits poised in the corner of my eye. I’m back on guard, at the ready. “Roi, let’s leave this place.”
She gets up on an elbow, fixing me with those eyes again, those deep wells shining. “Leave?”
I nod. I want to tell her I could abandon a stable and worry-free life. I could throw myself into the unknown, into an opaque future. I could peel off the safe gauze of security, ignorance, blind faith, confront the old black scar on my heart. I could do all that if we are together. But I just nod, because I know she already knows.
Roi lies her head on my chest, and we’re quiet again. Her breath is regular and moist. I’m starting to think she’s asleep when she says against my skin, “I just have one last thing to do, tomorrow.”
My neck hairs go erect. “At the Blackbird Pub?”
She says nothing.
Something dark and viscous stirs in my heart. I pull her closer. “Roi, please don’t go there. I have a bad feeling about it.”
She covers my mouth. “That’s bad luck.”
That’s my Roi through and through. She knows when to deploy logic and when to leave it behind. This spontaneous end of the conversation is her vow, her determination. She’s a Brahmin who means to challenge her god. She cannot be dissuaded. What can I do but hold her in my arms?
As the rain patters out there in the night.
I spend the day in great agitation. I send four people to rebirth, taking longer than usual with each of them. My hand shakes en route to the Execute button. The closer it gets, the more violently it shakes. I try to convince myself it’s not the secret I keep, but the beginnings of Parkinson’s.
Li Xiaofan, please confirm the identity of Dissident Element L.
I say nothing.
Li Xiaofan, please confirm the identity of Dissident Element L.
I choose silence in the face of the Chief Executive’s demand, just as my conscience has always done in the face of knowledge. I should warn Roi, but she’s not in the canteen. I text her, but she doesn’t reply. For the rest of the workday, I’m a pot of soup coming slowly to boil.
The tram glides through a fine rain, Heaven and Earth overcast.
This is your city.
In the gloom and wake of swaying vehicles, light converges into a red, turbid stream.
How many dirty secrets hide under this city’s abundance? These people, facing life’s sunset, take solace in the afterlife to come. They follow blindly. They are selectively blind and deaf. Including you, Li Xiaofan.
I close my eyes. It’s Roi’s voice in my ears now, saying to me what she never could before.
You can turn a blind eye to the darkness. That’s your choice. You can even choose to become part of it, the darkness. Or you can draw your sword. Or climb up to a high place and scream your loathing of past, present, and future to the bustling masses.
I have to admit that compared with Roi, I’m a coward.
A sudden change comes over the tram car. People are whispering. I open my eyes and immediately I’m staring, gaping. An intangible hand clutches my heart. Blackbird. The tram pulls into the station. I rush out of the car and stagger into a stream of people, and then it’s like I’m drowning, desperate for oxygen. Dissident elements. I’m running along Liberty Street. The gentle rain has become something insidious, harboring evil designs, like insect stings on my face. Wailing. Cursing. The clamor of an ambulance. Dilapidated, ruined walls shelter fire from the rain. Smoke billows upward, waving in the wind. I stop amid the scattering crowd, and there it is before me, the charred corpse of the redbrick structure.
A fire blossoming in the rain.
Rectification measures.
I feel nauseous, short of breath. It seems there’s not enough oxygen. I’m gulping air, the smell of burning, that almost sweet smell of incineration, redolent of the countless times I smelled burned bodies. The smell of my last bit of faith going up in flames.
I kneel and vomit.
Xiaofan.
My ears buzz. It’s a voice message from Roi.
Xiaofan, I’m behind you.
I turn. On the other side of the street, there stands my love, like an orange tulip in the gray downpour. I get up and pass through the rain and tears enveloping the world. She’s coming toward me.
“Roi—”
My shout is engulfed by shrieking, the cacophony of impact and destruction. The orange tulip in the rain, swept away by a cruel black mass. Where she stood, a break light’s red contrail dissipates and descends in the curtain of rain.
Roi.
It all seems like a dream:
The Blackbird conflagration, the out of control truck on Liberty Street. Accompanying Roi’s dying mortal flesh to Osiris Tower. Replacing the Charon on shift (he understands clearly this is a violation, but he doesn’t hesitate). At her side, watching the countdown to rebirth, second by second toward zero. Locking the electric door. Canceling the transformation. Commands, threats, insults from the guards outside. Laser cutters burning through the door. Pointed boots ferociously kicking my ribs, police truncheons splitting my scalp. Being thrown into a stinking, ice-cold cell.
But it’s not a dream. It’s all real. And the pain is real and deserved. Roi, I gave you true death. It’s all I could give you.
When it’s time to say goodbye, Aken is red-eyed. His beard makes him seem ten years older. We don’t speak. We just embrace in silence. Then he returns to the River Styx. I am tainted, forever banished.
Banished by the Tower.
I curl up fetal on Roi’s love seat, where our hands and feet would entwine. I shiver with something like a fever. My tears won’t come. A hollow cooing issues from my throat.
“Xiaofan.” It’s Ann’s voice, as if having crossed gulfs of time. “Roi set some things aside for you.”
I rise, hugging myself.
“Roi . . . for me?”
“An encrypted email, offline. Shall I read it for you?”
I nod.
My Darling Fan:
When you read this message, I will be dead. I want you to know this isn’t the outcome I hoped for. I wanted to go far with you, Xiaofan. I wanted us to throw ourselves into a more difficult life, free of hypocrisy. I wanted to be with you that way, Xiaofan. I really did.
But I have a responsibility to this world, an unfinished task. Tomorrow I will publish my discoveries, along with Lloyd’s message. I have a connection at Blackbird Pub . . . I know this will be the most dangerous and difficult journey of my life. The Chief Exec has already begun to suspect me, via your eyes. Do I guess right, Xiaofan?
Suddenly I’m choking on tears, trembling, like it’s possible to shake off all the blotches on my conscience.
Xiaofan, I know you love this city with all your heart. I know you love the Tower, and I understand your love. But sometimes intense love is like sunlight. It can cast shadows over everything. You’ve chosen to turn a blind eye to what’s in the shadows. All those willing victims serving some grand cause, a righteous goal concealing despicable methods. You and I are well aware of this city’s unspeakable matter. It is not my place to criticize you, because I was once a monitor like you. I monitored Lloyd, and there’s no denying I’m to blame for his suicide. But you need not blame yourself, my love. In the end, we all find our own way to atonement, don’t we?
I stare dazedly at the sequence of words on the display.
I have a secret. It’s not a dark secret. On the contrary, it’s beautiful. Once upon a time it sustained me through a gloomy life.
You asked me how I could possibly like you. Admittedly, our situation is an uncommon one. With our status gap, the probability of us as a couple ought to be vanishingly low. When you asked me that time, I said your work was not essentially different from mine. Maybe that was even true, but I had a more important reason I didn’t share.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw you. It was a misty evening, there was a gentle rain. It was on Liberty Street, on the sidewalk, in the evening crowd. An old man fell down. I wanted to help, but somebody beat me to it, a figure in purple and black. He knelt over the old man and searched for a pulse. He attempted CPR and did mouth-to-mouth. The crowd was indifferent, detouring around the whole scene, like water flowing around a stone. I don’t know how long you tried, but you finally gave up. You stood. Your head was bowed. You were like a grim statue, soaking wet, standing guard over the body.
I was under the eaves of a shop, watching you. I remember your face.
The ambulance was slow to arrive. The old man’s death was confirmed. They loaded him up and sped off toward the Tower. You turned around and left. I saw your face. I saw loneliness there, and pain, and something rare in these times of ours . . . you respected death. You respected people.
I remember your face. I had been thinking long and hard about how to approach you, and then you came to me.
Whoever is lonely at this moment, is lonely forever.
My consciousness is like stagnant, lifeless water for a long time. Finally, there are a few ripples. I understand now. I understand what brought Roi and I together: death. Respect for death. Maybe there was a ubiquitous pair of eyes, and it saw me, and it saw Roi, and saw how I looked at Roi, and how she looked at me. And it knew how to exploit such gazes.
And so it summoned a petty and low Charon. It promised him the sweet fruit of romantic love.
I wipe away my tears and keep reading.
Three days later, Dissident Element L reappears in AugViz. The committee does its best to quash things, but doubt in the afterlife, and in the Tower, is spreading like a wildfire.
And I will stand here, in the flaming remnants of Roi’s life, burning hotter, until I’m a white-hot incandescent lamp wick, using my light and my pain to scatter that once insufferably arrogant darkness around me.
I will turn the words you set aside for me into a declaration of war. I’m sure this is what you meant for me to do.
Roi.
A tirelessly working demon reducing the entropy of a system, without doing work, thus achieving the function of a perpetual motion machine. Xiaofan, do you really believe the cosmos would allow it? An open violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Over two hundred years ago, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard showed that Maxwell’s Demon wouldn’t actually violate physics with its molecular observations. It would need energy for its work, and so would by necessity produce entropy, no less than that lost to the ordering of the molecules.
In brief, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The demon would spend the order of its own consciousness to get that “heat differential.”
This is the predicament of every soul in the Honeycomb. A human consciousness is the most highly ordered system in the known universe. For negligible energy input, this system gives you a stable, orderly output. Quite the worthwhile transaction for such an energy-dependent megacity!
Xiaofan, why not imagine your inevitable future? You die, you enter the Honeycomb. You begin your work. Over and over, you sort molecules by velocity. Your consciousness is in a high-speed world, and you repeat your work hundreds of millions of times. And yet, no end is in sight. You gradually forget your term of service wasn’t supposed to exceed two years. In your subjective reference frame, perhaps two thousand years have already passed. Perhaps twenty thousand. Your consciousness is consumed and exhausted, bit by bit. At last your ego disintegrates. You burn down to a tiny ember. You become an automaton, going through mechanical motions.
In this purgatory of prolonged time, your consciousness is finally defeated. You’ve functioned as a unit of fuel. You’ve contributed something precious to this city, the most valuable thing a person possesses.
Your soul.
This is the coldly logical answer. I wouldn’t be so sure about this truth if it weren’t for the ruling municipal gods’ persistent suppression, slander, and even annihilation of dissident scientists.
We—and I hope this “we” includes you—need to bring about change.
Change begins with accepting the truth.
Now, imagine a tombstone . . .
First Prize: 6th Lightyear Award for Best Short Story (2017).
Originally published in Chinese in Double Helix: A Selection of Yang Wanqing’s Science Fiction Short Stories, 2021.