Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

A fiction writer, screenwriter, and columnist—and recently, founder of Thelma Mundi Studio, a multimedia SFF IP incubator—Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) has published fiction in venues such as Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!, and ZUI Found. His futurism writing may be found at places like Slate and XPRIZE.

Liu Cixin, China’s most prominent science fiction author, praised Chen’s debut novel, Waste Tide (Chinese edition 2013; English edition scheduled for 2018), as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.”

He has garnered numerous literary awards, including Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award and China’s Yinhe and Xingyun Awards. In English translation, he has been featured in markets such as Clarkesworld, Pathlight, Lightspeed, Interzone, and F&SF. “The Fish of Lijiang” won a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2012, and “The Year of the Rat” was selected by Laird Barron for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One. More of his fiction may be found in Invisible Planets.

“Coming of the Light” is one of my favorite stories by Chen, and it captures the anxiety, dynamism, and absurdity of life in contemporary Beijing as a member of the techno-social elite. “A History of Future Illnesses,” on the other hand, is far darker and more caustic. Its Hieronymus Bosch–like visions of the future are dominated not so much by an all-powerful, know-nothing brutish state, but an apathetic, amoral, ahistorical populace for whom the end of history is both a blessing and curse. As always, even in the darkest passages of his tales, Chen injects flashes of humor that I can’t be sure should be properly read as hope or despair.

COMING OF THE LIGHT

My mother told me about a Buddhist monk she and I met while shopping on my first birthday.

The monk caressed my head—back then as bald as his—and chanted a few lines that sounded like poetry.

After we returned home, my mom recited a few fragments to my father. Dad, who had had a few more years of schooling than my mom and completed middle school, told her that the lines weren’t poetry, but from a Buddhist koan. Only by consulting the village schoolmaster did he finally discover the origin of those fragments, words which would come to determine my life.

They thought these lines must contain some deep meaning, and so they renamed me Zhou Chongbo, which means “Repeat-Cypress.”

I’m sitting in a steamer. I’m a dumpling being steamed.

Everyone keeps on inhaling and exhaling and then staring at the white smoke coming out of everyone else’s mouths, like cartoon characters with thought bubbles drifting over their heads containing logical musings, naked women, or frozen obscenicons. Then the smoke dissipates, revealing coarse, swollen faces. The air purifier screams as though it’s gone mad, and the young women sitting in chairs along the wall silently put on their face masks, slide their fingers across the screens of their phones, and frown.

I don’t need to look at the time to know it’s past midnight. My wife won’t even respond to my WeChat messages anymore.

I was dragged here at the last minute. My wife and I were on our way home after taking a stroll when we encountered a man dressed in an army coat on the pedestrian overpass. With a booming voice that startled both of us, he said, “The Quadrantid meteor shower will come on January 4. Don’t miss it—”

I waited for him to finish with what is known to us marketing professionals as the “call to action”—e.g., “Join the Haidian Astrology Club,” “Call this number now!,” or even pulling out a portable telescope from his pocket and telling me “Now for only eighty-eight yuan”—which would have made this a reasonably well-executed bit of street peddling.

But like a stuck answering machine, he started again from the beginning: “The Quadrantid meteor shower will come on January 4….”

Mission failed.

Disappointed, we left him. That was when my phone rang.

It was Lao Xu. I glanced apologetically at my wife, who gave me her usual unhappy look when my work intruded on our time together—this was certainly not the first time. I answered the call, and that was how I ended up here, sitting in this room.

The last thing my wife said to me was, “Tell your mother to quit pestering me about a grandchild. Her son is such a pushover he might as well be a baby.”

“Chongbo!” Lao Xu’s voice drags me back to this room filled with cancer-inducing smoke. “You’re in charge of strategy. Contribute!”

Peering through the obscure haze, I struggle to make sense of the confusing notes on the whiteboard: user insights, key selling points, market research…. Dry erase marker lines in various colors connect the words like the trails left by the finger on some mobile picture-matching game: triangle, pentagon, hexagram, the seven Dragon Balls….

It’s all bullshit. Meaningless bullshit.

The pressure in the steamer is rising. Beads of sweat form on my forehead, slide down my face, drip.

“Is it too hot in here?” Lao Xu hands me a wrinkled paper napkin whose color is rather suspect. “Wipe yourself!”

I obey, too terrified to object.

“Mr. Wan wasn’t happy with the marketing plan last time and wanted to switch agencies. I begged and pleaded to get him to stay. If we don’t succeed this time, I think you all understand what that means.”

The cheap napkin comes apart in my hand, and bits of paper are stuck to my sweaty face.

Mr. Wan is our god, the CEO of an Internet company. Out of any ten random people who accost strangers in the streets of Zhongguancun—“China’s Silicon Valley”—one would be engaged in “network marketing,” two would be trying to hook you on pyramid schemes, three would be trying to talk to you about Jesus, and the rest would all be founders or C-whatever-Os of some startup.

But if you got these individuals to engage in one-on-one conversion bouts—time limited to three minutes—I’m sure the last group would achieve complete victory. They’re not interested in selling you a mere product, but an idea that would change the world. They’re not there to speak for some deity; they’re gods already.

Mr. Wan is just such a god.

Due to Lao Xu’s persistence and luck, our little agency managed to land Mr. Wan as a client. We are supposed to spend the euros, dollars, yen, and yuan flowing in from angel investors, from private equity funds, from rounds A-B-C-D, and help Mr. Wan’s company expand the market for their mobile app, raise product awareness, and improve daily engagement levels so that Mr. Wan could then use the new numbers to attract even more investment.

The flywheel goes round and round.

So where is the sticking point?

“Where is the sticking point?” Lao Xu’s dry and thin voice screeches like a subway train shrieking through a tunnel, and an invisible force presses against me until I’m about to black out. Trembling, I stand up, avoiding the gazes of others on purpose. I’m like some two-dimensional inhabitant of a mathematical plane: my body is made up of points, but I can’t see any.

“It’s… a problem with the product.” I lower my head shamefully, prepared for an angry tirade from Lao Xu.

“This is your fucking insight?”

I hold my tongue.

Mr. Wan’s cofounder—let’s call him Y—is a former classmate from USTC who had worked in America for many years. Mr. Wan convinced him to return to China, bringing with him valuable key patent rights to build a business. Y’s patent covers a digital watermarking technology, which, because it involves information theory and complex mathematics, is a bit hard to explain.

I’ll use a simple example. Let’s say you take a picture and use the patented technology to add a watermark invisible to the naked eye; then, no matter how this photograph is subsequently modified or edited—even if eighty percent of the image were cropped—you would still be able to apply a special algorithm to recover the original image. The secret is that the invisible watermark itself carries all the information in the photo at the time it’s applied.

This is, of course, only the most basic application for the technology. It could become an authentication/antitampering mechanism with many uses in fields such as media, finance, forensics, military security, and medicine—the possibilities are endless.

However, after Y returned to China, the two cofounders discovered that all the core industries they were interested in had barriers to entry—the difficulty wasn’t so much that the fences were high, but that they couldn’t even tell where they were. After bumping into walls multiple times, they decided that they had to make an end run around the difficulties by starting with entertainment, hoping to popularize the technology first through grassroots consumer acceptance before gradually infiltrating enterprise business-use cases.

Mr. Wan is always emphasizing the word “sexy,” as though this is the only yardstick by which everything should be judged. But their product rather resembles a punctured, crumpled blowup doll left to dry in the shade.

“Why don’t you use our client’s product?” Lao Xu screams at the young women sitting along the wall. Blood drains from their faces as they pretend to be busy taking notes.

Mr. Wan’s mobile app is called “Truthgram,” and it automatically applies the special digital watermark to every picture the user takes. No matter how many times the image is transmitted, photoshopped, or otherwise altered beyond recognition, a simple button press would restore the original image. At first, the marketing angle focused on safety: As long as you stick to Truthgram, Mom will never have to worry about your face showing up in some photoshopped pornographic image.

Besides priming the sales channels, we also planned a web marketing event called “The Big Reveal.” We recruited a hundred women and helped them take selfies with Truthgram, which we then retouched until everyone looked like a supermodel. We posted the photos on the web along with an animated GIF explaining how to use Mr. Wan’s app to reveal the truth: “Turn Beauty to Beast in less than one second!”

Male users—maybe losers would be more accurate—responded to the gimmick with extraordinary exuberance, recommending the app to each other and coming up with a veritable flood of variations that fulfilled the promise of user-generated content. Women, on the other hand, detested the marketing trick. They filled the forums with negative commentary about the company, arguing that the app vilified and insulted women by playing up the hoary trope of treating a woman’s right to pursue beauty as a twisted form of narcissistic deceit. The marketing event became a PR crisis.

If it were up to me, I would have declared victory. Developing a market is all about pressing the key point, like plunging a sharp needle into the hypothalamus, the emotional center of the brain. If you don’t see some blood spill, it probably means your needle is too dull or maybe you haven’t stabbed at the right spot.

But Mr. Wan thought our little exercise could only grab some eyeballs temporarily at the cost of damaging the long-term brand value. As it turned out, the data proved him right. After a brief spike, the number of downloads went down and stayed down, and the losers we managed to attract eventually stopped using the app because we couldn’t keep them stimulated with a constant stream of new content.

“I’m more interested in whether others see me from the most beautiful angle than in the security of my photos,” a perfectly ordinary girl stated in an interview we conducted with our customers. Her phone’s photo album was filled with selfies that showed signs of excessive retouching, all of them similar and none resembling her. Still, every half hour or so, she would hold her phone overhead at a 45-degree angle, pout her lips like a duck, and snap a shot.

If a tower’s foundations are built on the shifting sands of a beach, how can you expect it to stay standing until the tides come in?

Lao Xu stares at me; I stare at the whiteboard; the whiteboard stares at everyone; everyone stares at their phone. We are like a flock of birds lost in fog, constantly drawn to flashing screens until we’ve forgotten the direction we were headed in. Yet, cold night has fallen, and hungry predators are approaching in the dark.

My phone beeps, indicating that it’s nearly out of battery. My instinctive reaction is not to conserve, but to rush to look through WeChat Moments posted in my network. Every last drop of juice must be used to its fullest extent and not be wasted with invisible background processes. Now you get a glimpse of my values, my philosophy.

I see the latest posts by Mr. Wan. All of a sudden, the dumpling skin has burst, and the fillings spill out.

“I’ve got it!” I slam my hand down on the table. Everyone jerks awake from their somnambulant state.

I hold my phone under Lao Xu’s nose.

Under Mr. Wan’s profile, he has posted a new photo, accompanied by the following caption:

“Err—I hadn’t realized that they were running so low on funds.” Lao Xu’s eyes are wide as teacups. “They haven’t paid us our last invoice yet!”

“Keep on reading,” I say. I continue to slide my finger up the screen. Mr. Wan’s dynamic timeline is woven from high-tech news and pop-Buddhism, a mixture of concentrated caffeine pills and chicken soup for the soul. “I think we’ve discovered his other passion.”

“So what?”

“Let’s think about why, every day, so many people share and forward these posts about how to do good deeds to build up merit and gain the Buddha’s protection. Are they really that faithful? I doubt it. Maybe preventing their photographs from being tempered with isn’t a core need for people, but the anxious contemporary Chinese are obsessed with personal security, especially the psychological sense of being safe. We have to connect Mr. Wan’s product with this psychological need.”

“Be specific!”

“Everyone, what kind of posts would you share to feel more secure?” I ask.

“Powerful mantras!” “Pictures of Buddhas!” “The Birthday of the Buddha, and other festival birthdays!” “Wise sayings by famous master monks!”

“What sort of posts would make you believe and willingly hand over money?”

There’s a pause as everyone in the room ponders my question. Then, one of the girls timidly speaks up. “Something that’s been con-consecrated… um, you know, when the light has been—”

“Bingo!”

The room falls silent. Lao Xu gets up and, poker-faced, walks behind me. I hear a loud slam, and a chill wind pours into the back of my shirt as though a bucket of ice has been emptied into it. The haze in the room instantly dissipates.

“Awake now?” Lao Xu closes the window. “Explain what you mean again, but stop being so damned mystical.”

I hold his gaze and speak slowly. “Let’s find a famous and respected monk to consecrate this app—‘bring light into it’—so that every picture it takes becomes a charm to ward off evil. We’ll create a sharing economy of blessings.”

Everyone shifts their gaze from the phone screen to me; I gaze at Lao Xu; Lao Xu says nothing but gazes at the phone.

After a while, he lets out a held breath. “You know, all those Rinpoches in Chaoyang District are going to get you for this.”

I have no idea what’s in store for me.

My wife is a Neo-Luddite.

Once, she had been a heavy gamer. She spent so much time on the computer that her parents sent her to a summer camp that specialized in curing Internet addiction. The experience caused her attitude toward technology to turn a hundred and eighty degrees.

Many times I asked her, what really happened in that campground located on Phoenix Mountain called “The Nirvana Plan”?

She never answered me directly.

This was the biggest philosophical difference between us. She believed that despite the appearance of unprecedented novelty, the high-tech industry was ultimately no different from another ancient trade: they both took advantage of the weaknesses of ordinary men and women, and, under the guise of words like “progress,” “uplift,” and “salvation,” manipulated their emotions. Whether you put your hand on a Bible or an iPad, in the end you were praying to the same god.

We only give the people what they want. They desire comfort, joy, a sense of security. They want to improve themselves, to see themselves stand out in the crowd. We can’t take such desires away from them. That was how I always argued back at her.

Oh, please! Don’t give me that. You’re just playing a game to satisfy your own yearning for control, she said.

Come on; give people a little credit! I said. Everyone’s got a brain. How can anyone “control” anyone else?

There are always NPCs.

What are you talking about?

Non-Player Characters. What if everything is controlled from behind the scenes by some invisible background process? Then every action you take will affect the game logic. The system will react with NPCs and they will carry out their predetermined programming.

I stared at her face as though I’d never really known her. I even wondered whether she had just joined some new cult.

You don’t really believe that, do you?

I’m going to walk the dog. There shouldn’t be much dog poop in the streets this early in the morning.

Every day, as the temple bell tolls five, I have to get up to sweep the grounds. I sweep the wooden floor of the gallery from the new library to the stone steps, and thence to the temple gates, where the ancient pagoda tree grows, its gnarled branches spread like the talons of a rampant beast.

As for whether I will be quietly reciting the Surangama Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra as I sweep, that depends on the day’s PM2.5 air quality index. My throat hurts when I breathe the polluted air; I don’t need the distraction.

Any of the faithful coming to the temple to make offerings can see that I haven’t been truly called by the Buddha. Just like all the other “disciples” flocking here on weekends to study Buddhist doctrine, I’m here to hide from the real world.

In a way, I’m not too different from the throngs of shoppers at the Buddhist shop outside Yonghe Lamasery vying to buy electronic “Buddha boxes.” They bring the box home, push a button, and the box starts chanting sutras. On the hour (or at designated times), the box will even emit a tranquil, meditative duannnnng, like the ringing of the bell in a temple. The purchasers apparently think this will bring them blessings and cleanse bad karma. I often imagine all the passengers squeezed like canned sardines into the number 2 subway train leaving from the lamasery station, all of their Buddha boxes ringing harmoniously together on the hour. Perhaps the so-called Chan state of mind refers to the detachment of such a moment from real life.

And now that I have to commit to a Buddhist vegetarian diet, I miss the restaurant at Beixinqiao where they serve chitterlings soup made from ancient stock that has supposedly been accumulating flavor for years.

I’ve canceled my mobile number and deleted all my accounts on social media; my wife has left me and returned to her hometown; I’ve even been given a Dharma name: “Chenwu”—“Free of Worldly Dust.” All I want is for those crazy people to never find me again.

I’ve had enough.

Everything began that night with the crazy marketing scheme that seemed to make no sense.

Mr. Wan bought my idea. Overnight he summoned the engineers to develop the new product. Lao Xu laid out the marketing plan and strategy. The most important piece of the project, of course, was assigned to me, the originator.

I had to go find a respected master monk willing to consecrate our app, to bring it light.

Lao Xu demanded that the entire process be filmed and turned loose online to go viral. I ran through every excuse I could think of: My family have been Christians for three generations; my wife is pregnant and can’t come in contact with raw foods, animal fur, or anything having to do with spirits….

Lao Xu responded with only one line: This is your baby. If you don’t want to see it through, get out and don’t come back, you get me?

I visited every temple in Beijing, begging and pleading with the master monks, and I sought out every lama secluded in spiritual solitude in the city’s various nooks and crannies. Each time, however, even after having come to an agreement on the price, as soon as I brought out my camera, the monks’ faces turned stony, and after a few “Amitabha,” they would cover their faces and escape my presence.

We tried using hidden cameras a few times, but the combination of incense haze and camera shake made the results unwatchable.

As the deadline approached, I could no longer sleep, but tossed and turned all night. My wife asked me what I was doing.

“Rolling dough for pancakes,” I said.

She kicked me. “If you want to do that, get on the floor. Don’t pretend you’re a rolling pin in bed. I’m trying to sleep.”

The kick managed to free my clogged neural pathways. Instantly, I was inspired.

Mr. Wan’s new app went on sale on time. Lao Xu, energized like his Land Rover, shifted into high gear and whipped us into a frenzy. Videos, new concepts, and new campaigns were released one after another. Soon, a video depicting a master monk consecrating a mobile phone went viral, and Buddhagrams began to conquer Weibo and WeChat. The number of downloads and daily engagement level rose exponentially like rockets heading for the clouds at escape velocity.

Don’t ask me the impact of such growth on the long-term brand value; don’t ask me what this meant for the subsequent development and application of the digital watermark technology. Those are problems Mr. Wan had to solve. I was only a strategist for a third-rate marketing company who had some crazy ideas. I could only work on problems that I was capable of solving with my own methods.

In the end, we underestimated the creativity of users. It turned out that Buddhagram pictures, due to the presence of the watermark, could be recovered from even low-resolution copies or cropped fragments. This meant they could be shared and forwarded without taking up much bandwidth or time. Trying to take advantage of the situation, we released a series of new ads touting this newly discovered advantage.

Downloads spiked again, but no one anticipated what happened next.

It started with a picture of an apple taken with Buddhagram. A week later, the poster shared a second picture of the same apple: it was apparently rotting at a much slower rate than other apples.

Next came the various pictures of pets that miraculously recovered their health after having had their pictures taken with Buddhagram.

Then, an old lady claimed that after she had taken a Buddhaselfie, she managed to survive a deadly car accident.

Rumors multiplied. Taken individually, each seemed some preposterous April Fool’s joke, but behind every story stood a witness who swore it was true, and the number of believers snowballed.

The posts grew stranger. Patients with terminal cancer posted selfies showing their tumors diminishing daily; couples who had trouble conceiving took nude selfies and became pregnant; migrant laborers took group selfies and won the lottery. The kind of news that one would normally expect to find only on tabloids on the subway filled every social media platform. All the pictures had the Buddhagram watermark, and all of us thought they were from astroturfers hired by the company.

We thought wrong.

Supposedly, Mr. Wan’s phone was ringing nonstop with calls from interested investors. Other than asking about a chance to invest, the next most popular question was: Who is the master monk who brought light to the app?

The logic was simple: if a consecrated mobile app could have such magical effects, then asking the monk himself to perform some rite would surely result in earthshaking miracles. The investors thought of this, and so did millions and millions of users.

In this age, truth was as rare as virtue. Even more tragic, when faced with the truth, most people preferred to doubt its veracity because they would rather believe the truthy mirage created by their own minds.

Soon, my contact details were leaked. Email, phone, text…. Everyone screamed the same question at me: Who is the master monk???

I refused to answer. I knew they would figure it out sooner or later.

Crowdsourcing the search, they finally managed to locate the master monk and the disciples in the viral video—a bunch of actors my friend had found for me among the crowd of extras congregated at Hengdian World Studios, hoping to get a role. They were supposed to portray commoners during the Qing Dynasty, which meant they were already shaved bald—just like Buddhist monks. This made negotiations rather easy. The extras who harbored dreams of making it big in the movies were especially diligent, and the lead even argued with the makeup artist over the correct placement of the burn marks over his head to indicate his ordained status. Watching the scene, I grew concerned.

They were all good people. The fault was entirely mine.

The poor actors who had been located by the “human flesh search engine” could no longer live in peace. The enraged netizens hounded them and their families using the vilest language, forcing them to acknowledge what was obviously true: they were mere extras hired by the company to portray the master monk and his disciples.

Except that the crowd still wasn’t quite on the same page as me: they continued to believe that my company—or more precisely, I—was hiding the real master monk. Out of greed or selfishness, I was refusing to disclose his identity to the public so that everyone could benefit from the master’s powers.

I really wasn’t.

Lao Xu closed the company temporarily. Every day, groups of middle-aged women congregated at the foot of the building, holding up protest banners. Even if we could endure the pressure, the building’s property manager couldn’t. Lao Xu put us all on paid leave, hoping that the storm would quickly blow over. Kindly, he told me that it was best for me to leave the city and return to my parents’ home for a few days. It was just a matter of time before one of the netizens who was terminally ill might arrive at my door with his family, pleading with me to give up the master monk’s WeChat ID.

I realized that Lao Xu was right. I couldn’t put my family at risk.

And so, after I settled my affairs, I came to this ancient temple to become a grounds sweeper.

The bell tolls nine times, indicating the end of morning lessons. The staff of the temple, including me, assume our positions. The temple is open to the public today, and the abbot, Master Deta, will be greeting a group of VIP faithful from the Internet industry and conducting a salon to discuss the connections between Buddhist doctrine and the web.

My assigned job is to hand out the visitor’s badges. On the list of VIPs, I see more than a few familiar names, including Mr. Wan.

Though it’s thirty-eight degrees Celsius, I put on my cotton medical face mask. Sweat pours off me as though I’m drenched by rain.

The faithful, now dressed in the yellow robes and yellow shoes normally reserved for monks, stream in one after another, their colorful badges swaying on lanyards before their chests. For a moment I suffer the illusion of having returned to my old life from a few months ago: the China National Convention Center, JW Marriott Beijing, 798 D Park…. I was either at meetings or on my way to meetings, handing out my business card, adding people’s WeChat IDs, puffing up our clients, sketching incredible visions, peppering my speech with “Internet thinking” buzzwords—like some updated version of a Red Guard clutching his Little Red Book.

The faces before me are still the same, but now their badges have been stripped of the eye-catching titles. “CXO,” “Cofounder,” and “VP of Investment” have been replaced by “Householder,” “Believer,” and “Benefactor.” At least for the moment, they’ve retracted their typical arrogance and protruding bellies. Mumbling mantras, they take their seats and piously hand their phones, iPads, Google Glasses, smart wristbands, and so on to the waiting novice monks in exchange for a numbered ticket.

I see Mr. Wan. His face looks pallid and thin, but his gaze is steady and his steps airy. Placidly, he places the palms of his hands together and bows to the guests on either side of him, showing no trace of his former domineering air. As he passes me, I lower my head, and he lowers his in turn to acknowledge my greeting.

Many things must have happened in the intervening months.

Supposedly, Master Deta had once been a promising student at the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University. However, as a result of his enlightenment, he gave up offers for graduate study at Stanford, Yale, UC Berkley, and other ivy-clad campuses, took up vows, and became ordained as a monk. With him as an example, a group of other graduates of elite colleges also joined our temple and began to spread the teachings of Buddhism online, bringing relief to all mortal beings with methods adapted to the Internet age.

The master’s lecture today roams over many subjects—so many that I barely remember any of them. I do see Mr. Wan holding a pious pose and nodding frequently. When the master discusses how big data techniques could be used to help locate the young reincarnations of tulkus, his eyes even grow tearful.

I’m trying to hide from him, but I also can’t suppress the urge to go up to him and ask if the storm has finally blown over. I don’t miss my old life, but I miss my family.

Here, only monks who have achieved a certain status have the right to use the Internet. The layered green branches of the ancient cypress grove, like a firewall, separate us from the noise and dust of the secular world. My daily life, however, is not boring at all: sweeping, working, chanting, debating, and copying. Uncluttered by material possessions, I’ve been sleeping without trouble for the first time in years, and no longer live in constant dread of sudden vibrations from my phone—though occasionally my right quadriceps still suffers phantom pulses. But my teacher tells me that if I count my prayer beads—all one thousand and eight hundred of them—every day for a hundred eighty days, I shall be fully cured.

I think it’s because we want too much, more than what our bodies and minds are designed to withstand.

My old job was all about creating need, encouraging people to pursue things that didn’t matter for their lives, and then I used the money they gave in exchange to purchase illusions others had created for me. Round after round, we never seemed to tire of the game.

I think about my wife’s words: Her son is such a pushover he might as well be a baby. Fuck, I’m even more useless than a baby.

This is my sin, my bad karma, the blockage I need to clear for my progress.

I’m starting to understand Mr. Wan.

After the lecture, Mr. Wan and a few others surround Master Deta, apparently because they have many questions that need his insight. Master Deta beckons to me. I gird myself and walk over.

“Would you bring these honored guests to meditation room three? I’ll be over in a moment.”

I nod, and lead the group to the room in the back reserved for VIPs.

I ask them to sit, and I pour tea for everyone. They nod and smile at each other, but their conversation is restricted to small talk. I’m guessing that they are competitors outside the temple.

Mr. Wan doesn’t look at me directly. He sips his tea and closes his eyes, meditating. His lips move as he silently recites some mantra, and his hands are busy with a string of rosewood prayer beads. After the forty-ninth time through the beads, I can’t hold myself back any longer. I walk up to him, bend down, and whisper next to his ear, “Do you remember me?”

Mr. Wan opens his eyes and scrutinizes me for half a minute. “You are Zhou….”

“Zhou Chongbo. You have an excellent memory, sir.”

Mr. Wan grimaces and lunges at me, wrapping the string of prayer beads about my neck and pushing me to the floor.

“You fucking idiot!” He curses and strikes me. The two guests next to him stand up, startled, but they don’t dare to intervene. “Amitabha. Amitabha,” they murmur.

I protect my face with my hands, but I don’t know what to say. “Mercy!” I cry. “Mercy!”

“Stop!” Master Deta’s voice booms. “This is a sanctified place! Such violence has no place here.”

Mr. Wan’s fist, suspended in midair, stops. He stares at me, and tears suddenly spill from his eyes and fall onto my face, as though he’s the one wronged.

“All gone…. I’ve lost everything… ,” he murmurs. Then he falls back into his seat.

I get up. I guess someone who’s lost everything can’t even strike very hard. My body isn’t hurting at all.

“Amitabha.” I put my palms together and bow to him. I know he’s not feeling much better compared to me. Just as I’m about to leave the meditation room, the abbot stops me, and strikes me with his ferule: twice on the left shoulder, once on the right.

“Don’t discuss what happened today with others. You still have too much worldly arrogance about you and cannot handle important tasks. You must study harder and reflect on your actions.”

I’m about to argue the point, but then remember that I once tolerated much worse from Lao Xu and Mr. Wan. Master Deta is basically the temple’s CEO. I have to swallow my pride.

I bow to him and back out.

I lean against the wall of the gallery and watch the woods in the setting sun. Smog glistens above the city like the piled layers of a sari. The bell tolls on the hour, and startled birds take to the air.

A thought flashes through my mind. I am reminded of how Master Subhuti once struck Monkey three times on the head with a ferule and then walked away with his hands held behind him, which was a message for Monkey to come to the back door of the master’s bedroom at the hour of the third watch for special lessons.

But how am I supposed to interpret two strikes on the left shoulder and one on the right?

At around nine o’clock at night—that’s when first watch turns to second watch under the ancient time system—I head for the abbot’s chambers via backwoods trails. My journey through the dark woods is accompanied only by the gentle susurration of pines, with not even a chirp from a bird.

I knock twice on the door, and then once. Someone seems to be stirring inside. I knock again. The door opens automatically.

Abbot Deta is sitting with his back to the door. Before him is a giant screen, completely dark. I seem to hear the low-frequency buzzing of electronics. He sighs loudly.

“Teacher! Your student is here!” I fall to my knees and prepare to kowtow.

“I think you’ve read Journey to the West too many times.” The abbot gets up, and I can see that his expression isn’t one of joy. “I told you to come at one minute past ten o’clock.”

I’m stumped for words. Apparently the master was using binary notation.

I hurry to hide my embarrassment. “Um… this afternoon—”

“It wasn’t your fault; I know what happened. As soon as you stepped into this temple, I learned everything about you.”

“… Then why did you accept me?”

“Though your heart wasn’t directed toward the Buddha, you have within you the root of wisdom. If I didn’t take you in, I’m afraid you might have sought refuge in suicide.”

“Master is indeed merciful.” I’m still completely as a loss.

“I know you don’t understand.” Master Deta isn’t actually that old. He’s barely in his forties. As he laughs with his glasses perched on his nose, he resembles a college professor.

“Forgive your foolish student, master. Please enlighten me.”

Master Deta waves his hand. The giant screen, apparently controlled by body motion, lights up. The image on the screen is difficult to describe: a gigantic, compressed oval whose background is various shades of blue, studded with irregular patches of orange-red dots. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I think the image resembles the false-color version of some planet’s topographic map, or maybe a slide full of multiplying mold seen through a microscope.

“What is this?”

“The universe. Or more precisely, the cosmic microwave background. This is the image of the universe about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. You’re looking at the most precise photograph of it so far.” His enthusiastic admiration contrasts sharply with his humble monk’s garb.

“Um…”

“This was made by computation based on the data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck space observatory. Look here, and here—do you see how the pattern is a bit odd?”

Other than patches of orange-red or cobalt mold, I can’t see what’s so special.

“Are you saying that… um… the Buddha doesn’t exist?” I ask tentatively.

“The Buddha teaches that the great trichiliocosm consists of a billion worlds.” He glares at me, as though forcing me to retract my words. “This picture proves that multiple universes once existed. After so many years of effort, humanity finally proved, through technology, the Buddhist cosmology.”

I should have realized this would happen. The abbot is just like the pyramid schemers in Zhongguancun—anything, no matter how unrelated, could be seen by them as powerful proof for their point of view. I try to imagine how a Christian might interpret this picture.

“Amitabha.” I put my palms together to show piety.

“The question is: why has the Buddha chosen now to reveal the truth to all of humanity?” He speaks slowly and forcefully. “I pondered this question for a long time, but then I saw your scheme.”

“Buddhagram?”

Master Deta nods. “I can’t say I approve of your methods. However, since you ended up coming here, that proves that my guesses were correct.”

Cold sweat seeps onto the skin at my back, not unlike that night so long ago that it seems unreal.

“This world is no longer the same as its original form. Put it another way: its creator, the Buddha, God, Deity—no matter what name you give it—has changed the rules by which the world operates. Do you really believe that the consecration was what allowed Buddhagram to perform miracles?”

I hold my breath.

“Suppose the universe is a program. Everything that we can observe is the result of the machine-executable code. But the cosmic microwave background can be understood as the record of some earlier version of the source code. We can invoke this code via computation, which means that we can also use algorithmic processing to change the version of the code that’s currently running.”

“You’re saying that Mr. Wan’s algorithm really caused all of this?”

“I dare not jump to conclusions. But if you forced me to guess, that would be it.”

“I’m pretty science-illiterate, master. Please don’t joke with me.”

“Amitabha. I am a Technologist-Buddhist. I believe in the words of Arthur C. Clarke: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable at first glance from Buddhist magic.’”

I know there’s something not quite right here, but I don’t know how to debate him. “But… but that project failed. Look at what a sad state Mr. Wan is in. I don’t think I have anything more to do with this.”

“Master, please allow me to leave the temple and return to the secular world. I miss my wife.” A nameless fear suddenly seizes me like a bottomless pit rising out of the screen on the wall, trying to pull me in.

Master Deta sighs and smiles wryly, as though he has long since predicted all this.

“I was hoping that by studying Buddhist doctrine with me, you would be sufficiently calmed to stay here and wait out the catastrophe. But… you and I are both caught in the wheel of samsara, so how can we escape our destinies? All right. Take this as a memento of our time together.”

He hands over a gold-colored Buddha card. On the back is a toll-free number as well as a VIP account number and security code.

“Teacher, what is this?”

“Don’t lose it! The resale value of this card is 8,888 yuan. If anything happens, you can give me a call.”

Master Deta turns and waves his hand, and the moldy image on the screen is replaced by regular TV programming. An American quantum physicist has been killed by gunshot. Bizarrely, the shooter claims that it was an accident because he thought the victim was someone else.

Half a year passes. I meet Lao Xu at Guanji Chiba, a popular barbecue restaurant in Zhongguancun.

Lao Xu hasn’t changed much. He’s still pathologically in love with barbecued lamb kidneys. Like a stereotypical Northeasterner, after a few bottles of beer, his face glowing with grease and jittering with emotion, Lao Xu begins to say what’s really on his mind.

“Chongbo, why don’t you come and join me again? You know I’ll take care of you.”

Animatedly, Lao Xu tells me what’s been going on with him, spewing flecks of spittle through the smoky haze. After he hid and rested for a while at home, another phone call drew him back into the IT world. This time, he didn’t start a marketing company with no future, but became an “angel investor.” With all the contacts he made among entrepreneurs, now he gets to spend other people’s money—the faster the better.

He thinks I have potential.

“What’s going on with Mr. Wan?” I change the subject. My wife has just found out that she’s pregnant. Although my current job is boring, it’s stable. Lao Xu, on the other hand, isn’t.

“I haven’t heard from him for a while…” Lao Xu’s eyes dim, and he takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Fortune is so fickle. Back when Buddhagram was on fire, a whole bunch of companies wanted to invest. An American company even wanted to talk about purchasing the whole company. But at the last minute, an American man showed up claiming that Y’s core algorithm was stolen from one of his graduate school research labmates. The American sued, and he just wouldn’t let it go. So the patent rights had to be temporarily frozen. All the investors scattered to the wind, and Lao Wan had to sell everything he owned… but in the end, it still wasn’t enough.”

I drain my cup.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Lao Xu says. “Honestly, if you hadn’t come up with that idea, I bet Lao Wan would have failed even earlier.”

“But if they hadn’t made Buddhagram, maybe the Americans wouldn’t have found out about the stolen algorithm.”

“I’ve finally got it figured out. If what happened hadn’t happened, something else would have. That’s what fate means. Later, I heard that the labmate Y stole from was shot and killed in America. So now the patent case is in limbo.”

Lao Xu’s voice seems to drone on while time stands frozen. My gaze penetrates the slight crack between his cigarette-holding fingers, and the background of noisy, smoky, shouting, drinking patrons of the restaurant fades into the distance. I remember something, something so important that I’ve managed to forget it completely until now.

I thought everything was over, but it’s only starting.

After saying goodbye to Lao Xu, I return home and begin to search, turning everything in the house upside down. My wife, her belly protruding, asks me if I’ve had too much to drink.

“Have you seen a golden card with a picture of the Buddha on there?” I ask her. “There’s a toll-free number on the back.”

She looks at me pitifully, as though gazing at an abandoned Siberian husky, a breed known for its stupidity and difficulty in being trained. She turns away to continue her pregnancy yoga exercises.

In the end, I find it tucked away inside a fashion magazine in the bathroom. The page I open to happens to be the picture of a Vaseline-covered, nude starlet lounging among a pile of electronics. Each screen in the image reflects a part of her glistening body.

I dial the number and enter the VIP account number and security code. A familiar voice, sounding slightly tired, answers.

“Master Deta, it’s me! Chenwu!”

“Who?”

“Chenwu! Secular name Zhou Chongbo! Remember how you struck my shoulders three times and told me to go to your room at ten-oh-one to view the picture of the cosmic microwave background?”

“Er… you make it sound so odd. Yes, I do remember you. How’ve you been?”

“You were right! The problem is with the algorithm!” I take a deep breath and quickly recount the story as well as give him my guess. Someone is working really hard to prevent this algorithm from being put into wide application, even to the point of killing people.

The earpiece of the phone is silent for a long while, and then I hear another long sigh.

“You still don’t get it. Do you play games?”

“A long time ago. Do you mean arcade, handheld, or consoles?”

“Whatever. If your character attacks a big boss, the game’s algorithms usually summon all available forces to its defense, right?”

“You mean the NPCs?”

“That’s right.”

“But I didn’t do anything! All I did was to suggest a stupid fucking marketing plan!”

“You misunderstand.” Master Deta’s voice becomes low and somber, as though he’s about to lose his patience. “You’re not the player who’s attacking the boss. You’re just an NPC.”

“Wait a second! You are saying…” Suddenly my thoughts turn jumbled and slow, like a bowl of sticky rice porridge.

“I know it’s hard to accept, but it’s the truth. Someone, or maybe some group, has done things that threaten the entire program—the stability of our universe. And so the system, following designated routines, has invoked the NPCs to carry out its order to eliminate the threat and maintain the consistency of the universe.”

“But I did everything on my own! I just wanted to do my job and earn a living. I thought I was helping him.”

“All NPCs think like that.”

“So what should I do? Lao Xu wants me to go work for him. How do I know if this is… Are you there?”

Strange noises are coming out of the earpiece, as though a thousand insect legs are scrabbling against the microphone.

“When you are confused… hiss… the teacher helps… Enlightened… hiss… help yourself. All you have to do… hiss… and that’s it… hiss… Sorry, your VIP account balance is insufficient. Please refill your account and dial again. Sorry…”

“Fuck!” I hang up angrily.

“What’s wrong with you, screaming like that? If you frighten me and cause me to miscarry, are you going to assume the responsibility?” My wife’s voice drifts to me slowly from the bedroom.

In three seconds, I sort through my thoughts and decide to tell her everything. Of course, I do have to limit it to the parts she can understand.

“Tell Lao Xu that your wife is worried about earning good karma for the baby. She doesn’t want you to follow him and continue to do unethical work.”

I’m just about to argue with her when the phone rings again. Lao Xu.

“Have you made up your mind? USTC’s quantum lab is making rapid progress! Their machine is tackling the NP-completeness problem now. Once they’ve proved that P equals NP, do you realize what that means?”

I look at my wife. She places the edge of her palm against her throat and makes a slicing motion, and then she sticks her tongue out.

“Hello? You there? Do you know what that means—?” I hang up, and Lao Xu’s voice lingers in my ear.

Every program has bugs. In this universe, I’m pretty sure that my wife is one of them. Possibly the most fatal one.

I still remember the day when Lailai was born: rose-colored skin, his whole body smelling of milk. He’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen.

My wife, still weak from labor, asked me to come up with a good name. I agreed. But really, I was thinking: It makes no difference what he’s named.

I’m no hero. I’m just an NPC. To tell the truth, I’ve never believed that all this was my fault. I didn’t join Lao Xu; I didn’t come up with some outrageous idea that would have caused the whole project to fail; I didn’t prevent that stupid quantum computer from proving that P equals NP—even now I still don’t know what that fucking means.

If this is the reason that the universe is collapsing, then all I can say is that the Programmer is incompetent. Why regret destroying such a shitty world?

But I’m holding my baby son, his tiny fist enclosed in my hand, and all I want is for time to stop forever, right now.

I regret everything I’ve done, or maybe everything I haven’t done.

In these last few minutes, a scene from long ago appears in my mind: that guy wearing the army coat on the pedestrian overpass.

He’s staring at me and my wife, and like some stuck answering machine, he says, “The Quadrantid meteor shower will come on January 4. Don’t miss it….”

No one is going to miss this grand ceremony for going offline.

I play with my son, trying to make him laugh, or make any sort of expression. Suddenly, I see a reflection in his eyes, rapidly growing in size.

It’s the light coming from behind me.

A HISTORY OF FUTURE ILLNESSES

Call me Stanley. I come from your future.

Let me begin with what’s already familiar to you, and by following the flow of the river of time, explore the diseases, both physical and mental, that have plagued the humanity of tomorrow, until the end of history.

It began with the iPad 3, with its Retina Display whose subpixel rendering technology achieved a resolution in excess of 300 PPI, higher than conventional print. The display quality of electronic books could finally compete with paper. Pundits hailed it as another Gutenberg revolution and predicted the death of the traditional print industry. Humanity was about to enter a new era of reading.

As usual, the pundits were as myopic as bats hanging in a dark cave.

Apple first pushed for a revolution in education. They gave every child an iPad, and invested vast resources in making textbooks that were electronic, multimedia-enhanced, and integrated with social media. Schoolchildren, especially those in East Asia, said goodbye to their heavy backpacks. Their spines straightened; their shoulder and neck muscles relaxed; the deformation fatigue of the lenses in their eyes slowed due to broader viewing angles, sharper, more detailed images, and light sensors that automatically adjusted screen brightness.

The future seemed bright, until parents began handing the magic tablets to even younger children.

The youngest recorded iPad user was aged four months and thirteen days. The iPad’s direct manipulation interaction model allowed even babies to slip into fingertip adventures and become seamlessly immersed in them. Many uploaded YouTube clips of babies playing with iPads, and their pure, undisguised delight garnered millions of hits and likes. The amused audience did not quite realize the danger hidden behind the joyous scenes.

The first confirmed case came out of South Korea. Six-year-old Park Sung-hwan was diagnosed with autism, though fMRI and PET scans revealed no unusual neural variations. His symptoms included flat affect, language impairment, and lack of muscular coordination. He did not respond to the emotional states of his parents in an age-appropriate manner and showed a lack of interest in the world. In fact, the only thing he was interested in was the iPad. But all he did was repeatedly open and close apps, unable to actually browse the web, play a game, or otherwise engage with the functionality of those apps.

It seemed that the world, for him, consisted solely of the force feedback vibrations generated by fingers sliding across the screen.

An astute clinical child psychologist observed Park and compared him against other similar cases before announcing the shocking concept of “iPad syndrome.” The discovery struck a chord around the world, and soon tens of thousands were diagnosed with it.

The academic consensus was that this special type of perceptual dysfunction occurred because babies were exposed to the intense visual and tactile feedback of the iPad before their sensory neural connections were fully developed. Aimless hand movements led to an overabundance of concentrated visual and tactile sensory information, which had to be adequately integrated and coordinated with the rest of the body to form a solid foundation for the development of bodily self-image. This was precisely the key step missing in the development of those afflicted with iPad syndrome.

To them, the regular world was dim, blurry, low-resolution, unresponsive to the sliding finger and utterly devoid of wonder. Trained by early and long exposure to the iPad, their vestibular systems developed a special sensory signal filter that only permitted the intense signals of the iPad to enter the cortex and stimulate the neurons. Other signal sources, on the other hand, were simply shut out.

Parents of children with iPad syndrome filed a class-action lawsuit demanding tens of billions in compensation since Apple had not disclosed the serious side effects of iPad use on young children with prominent labeling. The case slowly wound through the courts until the two sides finally settled. Besides an undisclosed amount paid to the plaintiffs, Apple also agreed to invest significant resources into researching rehabilitation for the disorder.

As the impacted children grew up, they learned, through therapy, a unique way of life. iPads became extensions of their bodies. Through the tablets, they spoke, expressed emotions, and exchanged thoughts. Besides text and voice, they also transmitted information via vibrations as though they were sharks in the abyss or worms deep underground, by holding fingers or palms against one another’s iPads, experiencing sensations that outsiders could never know.

They were like extraterrestrials concealed in human society and, other than the minimal exchanges required to survive in a human economy, refused to interact with regular humans at all.

They formed family-like structures. Following rules and rituals unknown to others, they found each other, copulated, had children. After offers of large sums of money failed to produce results, some journalists tried to surreptitiously film the family lives of those with iPad syndrome. The result? The offending journalists disappeared.

Don’t worry; the worst was still to come.

There was a one-in-eight chance that their children would also inherit this more-than-pathological love for the iPad.

As changing beauty standards gradually decentered the straight male gaze, plastic surgery reached a peak of inventiveness in the mid-twenty-first century. But modification of the body’s external characteristics was no longer sufficient to satisfy the shifting tastes of a diverse population. A new—or more accurately, ancient—aesthetic trend came back into fashion spectacularly.

It was possible to trace this trend all the way back to the Three Kingdoms and Jin Dynasty period (220 to 420 CE). He Yan, the founder of the Xuanxue school of Daoism, developed a new medicinal formula called “Five Minerals Powder,” which was based on the famed Eastern Han Dynasty doctor Zhang Zhongjing’s cure for typhoid fever and made from a mixture of stalactite, sulfur, quartz, fluorite, and red bole clay.

He Yan himself had this to say of his invention: “Not only does it cure disease, but it also opens up and enlivens the mind.” Consuming Five Minerals Powder for its psychoactive properties became the fashion among scholar-officials. After ingesting the powder, the typical user became restless, anxious, flushed, and had to walk about in loose clothing to cool down as their mind wandered a different plane. Habitual use led to irritability, explosive temper, and a proclivity for trances—not unlike the man of legend who reacted to a nettlesome fly by chasing after the insect with an unsheathed sword.

The fashion for taking Five Minerals Powder in China lasted for almost six centuries, until the Tang Dynasty. “Rambling Powder” became a poetic marker for those of an elevated social class—a metonymic process similar to the social signals attached to marijuana or LSD use later.

Similarly, in order to satisfy the pursuit of morbid beauty standards, Medieval European nobles contracted tuberculosis or even consumed arsenic to give their skins that unique, white glow. The elevation of the symptoms of illness to signs of beauty was certainly not limited to any one time or place.

And now, technology could help.

Ligament tightening agents temporarily reduced the joints’ range of motion; combined with trace amounts of tetrodotoxin injected into facial muscles, the result was a simulation of the stiff poses and expressions associated with classical East Asian beauty standards. In the Roppongi district of Tokyo, one might often encounter tall Caucasian women whose hair had been dyed pure black, shuffling along with rigid smiles that carefully concealed their teeth. In fact, they were the executive assistants of multinationals who had decided to undergo periodic cosmetic treatments to induce partial paralysis in the face and a constrained gait in order to satisfy the demands of “cultural integration,” the morbid fashion of the social elite, as well as the fetishistic needs of their Asian bosses.

And then there were the Blinkers, whose name came from a neurological tic that caused them to blink irregularly as their orbicularis oculi and levator palpebrae superioris muscles twitched. People suffering from social anxiety disorder implanted under their eyes chips that could control muscle movement by stimulating the nerves. They formed a complicated, intricate read-decipher-feedback system, capable of communicating by blinking their eyes alone, without any need for spoken language or facial expressions. At Blinker gatherings, one could see a group of silent, blank-faced individuals gazing into one another’s eyes like lighthouses broadcasting Morse code at high frequency. Indeed, some could communicate with two interlocutors at the same time, blinking with each eye separately.

Aesthetics has always been inseparable from politics. Against the fractured background of a multipolar world, humanity could not come to a consensus regarding the definition of “beauty.” In the seams and amid struggles, those who imitated sickness flourished.

At the mass parade in Saigon to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the “Agent Orange Phalanx” gathered in Ho Chi Minh Square put on a show based on the aesthetics of illnesses, an event that attracted the attention of media from around the globe.

During the Vietnam War, the Americans dispatched low-flying aircraft to spray seventy-six million liters of dioxin-containing defoliant over ten percent of the forests, rivers, and soil of South Vietnam in order to eliminate the hideouts of the Viet Cong. Agent Orange—named after the orange-striped barrels in which the poisonous brew was shipped—contained extremely toxic 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid and was very stable chemically. Once released into the environment, it took more than nine years for fifty percent of the compounds to break down, and they persisted for more than fourteen years in the human body. The chemicals also could cycle through the food chain without being destroyed.

The marchers who made up the phalanx came from all over the world and were well prepared. In the front were what appeared to be a group of deformed children. Some were curled up in electric wheelchairs, their limbs flopping uselessly as though made of rubber—indeed, a few had no limbs at all; some showed smooth skin where eyes should be; some had swollen heads with bulges that resembled the lobes of a heart; some had legs fused together like the lower body of a mermaid.

In fact, they were not really people at all, but genetically modified pets who wore synthetic human skin. Speakers on their bodies played loops of prerecorded political slogans chanted in eerie voices.

Behind them stood the “festering detachment”: Hodgkin’s lymphoma, chloracne, scarlet warriors who looked as if their skin had been stripped off. As the marchers moved, the sarcomas and swellings covering their bodies quivered, and fluids of various colors seeped from bursting boils and sacs to paint symbols of peace on the ground. They embraced each other, kissed each other, spat and smeared and sprayed bodily fluids at the camera, and shouted in indistinct voices. The time and resources they must have invested to pull off such a stunt were unimaginable.

Then came the “crawlers,” who had to march very slowly because they had lost the use of arms or legs. Most of them were truly physically disabled, but enhanced their deformity through prosthetics connected to their bodies with loose flaps of synthetic skin, or by exaggerating the unnatural angles at which their limbs were twisted. They resembled creeping creatures with segmented bodies and limbs from horror movies, and the more they exposed their bodies, the more they attracted the gaze of the cameras.

The climax of their performance was a re-creation of V-J Day in Times Square, except that Ho Chi Minh Square replaced Times Square, and a deformed child and a patient covered in tumors kissed instead of the nurse and the sailor. Magnesium bulbs flashed, satellites beamed the scene live, and billions witnessed the juicy Kiss of Agent Orange.

Who was to say it wasn’t beautiful?

If you could choose to become a different self, would you?

Don’t mistake this for some self-help platitude, a sip of chicken soup for the soul. I mean literally a different self.

Jung, the disciple who rebelled against his master Freud, once said, “I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.” The quote might appear as an attempt at footnoting his concept of archetypes, but in reality it came about after Jung was struck by the ideas of the I Ching, as introduced by Richard Wilhelm, a German sinologist.

Together, Wilhelm and Jung were responsible for The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, which had been described as a practical guide for using ancient Daoist philosophy to integrate personality. The 1962 publication turned out to be a visionary prediction of humanity’s increasingly fractured lifestyle.

Sociologists speak of the “role set” as a competitive strategy humans developed over the course of their evolution. A role set refers to the collection of roles and behaviors associated with one’s social status, an adaptation for social interactions under specific environmental conditions. Still, the role set is about controlled role shifts because it is limited to the Freudian ego and does not influence the unconscious id.

Technology accelerated evolution.

Many early Internet users seemed to experience a mild form of dissociative identity disorder which allowed them to easily switch personalities between different windows. One second and an Alt-Tab were all it took to change from a hardworking single career woman to a seductive sex-starved minx. As time spent on the net became fragmented, pervasive, and nonlinear, many surplus personalities were created without being handled appropriately. Like fragments of an operating system, these personalities accumulated in the subconscious, where they silently eroded the foundation of all personalities and erupted from time to time in the form of harrowing news stories about murderous rampages committed by the mentally ill.

At the beginning of the twenty-second century, the brain-computer interface became a viable commercial product. Developers created many brain-network apps that allowed users to consciously operate datalinks. As parallel programming proliferated, an operating system called “Sliding Windows” was developed, which gave users the ability to smoothly switch between cognitive processes. Predictably, the Far East fundamentalist terrorist organization SHAJI released a trojan called the Window-Breaker, engineered specifically to attack Sliding Windows. The malware spread through social networks and embedded itself in the innermost part of the user’s installation of Sliding Windows, where it proceeded to sow complete chaos in the operating system’s process-switching mechanism.

When an infected user flirted with her lover, the personality for dealing with the boss came to the front; when she endured a tongue-lashing by the boss, the personality for caressing a pet became active; and when the puppy rubbed itself against her legs, begging to play, the user instead panted with sexual desire.

Over three billion were infected with multiple-personalities switching disorder (MPSD), the great plague of the cyberpunk age.

To halt the spread of the malware, social networks were partitioned into quarantine zones. A twenty-second-century version of medieval witch hunts played out on the net as AI network officers, disguised as random programs, interacted with users on social networks to evaluate whether they had been infected by the trojan. And if the answer was yes, the user was forcibly cut off from the network and placed into off-grid rehabilitation. After completing the treatment process, patients were evaluated on their ability to control multiple personalities, which determined whether they would be allowed to return to the beautiful new digital world.

Overnight, the valuation of the brain-computer industry fell to a low not seen in twenty years.

Amazingly, mainland China was scarcely affected by this network storm. On the map tracking the malware’s progress across the globe, China remained the only patch of healthy dark green, a fact that attracted worldwide interest. After extensive analysis, experts came to the conclusion that China was spared because of three reasons: one, the highly regulated nature of China’s Internet industry; two, the latest version of China’s Great Firewall; and three, a surprising discovery made after a detailed comparison of the fMRI and ECoG data from Chinese users and a control group, which showed that Chinese users’ subconscious was already fundamentally fragmented and could seamlessly switch between different egos. Most important, each fragmentary personality was absolutely and sincerely convinced that it was the true self.

The discovery shocked the world. People dug up Wilhelm’s forgotten dusty tome, hoping to find inspiration within. They discovered the secret of personality management from the mysterious ancient East, and by integrating the newest neural language programming (NLP) techniques, they hoped to rescue a world on the verge of total breakdown.

Several schools of Eastern mystical philosophy became trendy, including traditional Tantric Buddhist techniques for integrating mudras and poses to indicate the anchoring of personalities, I Ching–derived methods for using military-grade software to stimulate the cortex in order to integrate yin-yang neural patterns, and so on and so forth. But the most influential school of philosophy was without a doubt spread by the Chinese government’s army of retired government cadres, who went overseas to set up “Lao Tzu Institutes.”

The Lao Tzu Institutes taught a whole systematic curriculum that helped MPSD-sufferers find the way back by the Daoist Path, utilizing techniques such as traditional mystical exercises and Chan Buddhist–style meditation to help the practitioner achieve enlightenment on the nature of life, until the spiritual universe had been rearranged to the harmonious, yin-yang-balanced state of the primeval Innocent Babe.

I’m not going to tell you the result of this effort—the known Path is not the True Path, as Lao Tzu would say.

But suffice it to say that the Chinese nation, for the first time since the thirteenth-century Il Milione composed by Marco Polo, had once again managed to export its wondrous values to the world.

It all began with the discovery of a woody perennial in the Amazon called Duoliquotica. Native legends claimed that the plant was made of the blood and essence of an ancient god, who appeared as a single head atop two bodies. This was reflected in the biology of the plant, which was dioecious. The male and female plants grew side by side, and entwined around each other as they reached maturity. After fertilization, large fruits grew atop pairs of plants, not unlike an outsized head on top of two slender bodies.

Scientists extracted from the plant a previously unknown compound with mysterious properties, also named “duoliquotica.” After accidental exposure to the compound during a trial, a pregnant subject, Julia Kristeva, found herself the mother of a pair of identical twins. Thus did the mystery of the compound begin to be unveiled. In subsequent trials, twenty-three more pairs of identical twins were born. Later, researchers would refer to them as the “Duo 24,” though the media preferred the more sensational B-movie moniker “Twinning God’s 24.”

The first pair of twins, Adam and Eva, were famous around the world even before they had learned to talk. The babies’ laughter and cries were completely in sync. No matter how far apart they were placed from each other, their expressions mirrored each other’s within 0.3 seconds. As their vocabulary grew, their strange talent developed into an intolerably eerie performance.

They seemed to always speak simultaneously, and stopped and started again in perfect sync. At first, an observer might think they were just speaking their own thoughts, but recording the twins’ speech and playing it back showed that it was a highly efficient dialog. There was no delay introduced by the need to comprehend the other; the two sentences, overlaying the same segment of time, were statement and response.

Indeed, electroencephalograms showed that they could understand each other without any speech. The simultaneous speech was nothing more than a parlor trick for showing off.

Scientists were excited by this first verifiable example of telepathy in history. Shortly, the other twins also displayed various degrees of psychic connection. Bafflingly, the connections did not seem to depend on any kind of detectable signal exchange: electromagnetic waves, biochemical signals, vibrations through the air…. Even when each member of a pair was enclosed in a separate full-isolation chamber, they still could sense the other’s emotions and thoughts.

Everything indicated the power of the ancient god, similar to quantum entanglement. No matter how far the particles were separated, as soon as one member of an entangled pair changed state, the other changed the same way.

Back then, humanity’s understanding of basic theory had not yet advanced to the point where this phenomenon was seen as innate to nature. Thus, after the initial explosive media coverage died down, the research project, unable to make any real progress, became classified. All the research subjects were drafted into military service to act as long-distance communication devices, far more sensitive and secure than any cryptographic equipment.

The American military relied on the twins to gather a great deal of intelligence. Russia, the Middle East, East Asia, the EU—in each area the Americans first relied on bribes to open key doors, and then deployed the twins to transmit intelligence without fear of detection. This method worked well until a rather unexpected romance exposed the whole plot.

The ninth pair of twins, David and Peter, fell in love with the same Japanese woman—more precisely, it was Peter who, through long-distance entanglement with David, fell in love with Minako Noda, a Self-Defense Forces officer. Unfortunately, Peter could only experience this love secondhand through his brother. Peter requested David swap places with him multiple times, but David refused. Driven by jealousy, Peter sought revenge in a manner befitting a member of Duo 24.

Night and day, Peter transmitted paranoid delusions to David without cease, even when they were asleep. David was powerless to resist the torrent and sank into delirium, at which point Peter directed him to kill his lover, turn himself in, and confess his role in the American plot.

After recovering his senses, David committed suicide. At the moment that he stopped breathing, the smiling Peter, three thousand kilometers away, tumbled from a park bench and lay motionless in the fallen leaves, as though he had expected this fate for himself.

The tragedy sent shock waves through the remaining members of Duo 24. All their lives, they had lived as the mirror of each other’s souls, but never faced the fact that each of them was also an individual, with his or her own desires, fears, and death. Some, in despair, saw their gift as a divine curse, a genetic defect in the guise of a benefit. The twins were tragic puppets entangled in one life, powerless to dissolve the invisible bonds of fate and doomed to die at any moment to accompany the other.

Five pairs of twins chose to commit suicide. Their bodies were buried in double coffins, sunken deep in cement graves.

The military offered the rest of the twins a way out: they could choose to enter long-term cryogenic storage and await a solution for their curse in the far future.

Six pairs chose to continue to live in the world and support each other; another six pairs chose to enter the cryogenic chamber, placing their faith in the future; and the remaining six pairs were mired in conflict: one member of each pair wanted to be frozen to escape their unknown fate, while the other member would not let go of the life they already had. If only one twin were frozen, he or she was very likely to die in hibernation when the other one expired.

In the end, the conflict-riven pairs reached a compromise: they would swap places once every ten years. As each entered cryogenic sleep, they placed their life in the hands of their identical twin, trusting they would treat their twin with benevolence. It was like the words of the Gospel of John: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another.”

Scientists told us that 4.4 billion years ago, a body about the size of Mars slammed into the Earth, and the resulting fragments coalesced into the moon. Sixty-five million years ago, a large asteroid impacted the Earth, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Twelve thousand and nine hundred years ago, fragments from a comet breaking apart fell on the frozen tundra of North America, leading to the deaths of the mammoths and other mammalian megafauna as well as the collapse of the ancient Clovis civilization. Thereafter, an extremely frigid climate reigned for a thousand years.

Archaeologists told us that the cataclysmic end of the world prophesied by the ancient Maya to occur in 2012 would be brought about by Planet X, the legendary Nibiru—meaning “ferry boat” in Sumerian—which would cross the orbit of the Earth once every 3,630 years as it careened along its long elliptical journey around the sun. Its intense gravity would lead to shifting tectonic plates, deviation in the Earth’s magnetic poles, earthquakes and tsunamis, climate change, and volcanic eruptions. Humanity would thus be ferried into a new era.

The Little Astrology Prince of Hong Kong told us, in his dulcet voice, that Venus retrograde was over. The key thing to understand about Venus retrograde was that it was always going to be over. It gave you a chance to think about relationships that no longer had meaning, and to stop maintaining them out of habit.

Of course, humanity did not enter a new era in 2012—at least not on my timeline. Instead, the human race experienced a transformative event in the twenty-third century. A large asteroid nicknamed “the Wanderer” (about the size of Shanghai), after a long journey through the vastness of space, was captured by the gravity well of the Earth-Moon system and eventually stabilized itself at one of the Lagrange points. The Earth, from then on, had a second moon, which was called the New Moon.

Humans, a species prone to romanticism, began to contemplate subtle changes in themselves once they had become habituated to new tidal patterns and new heavenly sights. Women’s monthly cycles grew chaotic, and moods swung to extremes. Tens of thousands of fetuses stopped developing due to hormonal imbalances induced by the New Moon—a phenomenon described as “the dark side effects of the New Moon.” An invisible force began to influence the development of the human race.

Some people exhibited strange allergic reactions on nights when the New Moon was full. Eerie patterns appeared on their skin, muscle fibers tensed, pupils dilated, and their minds became confused and extremely aggressive. They would tear off their clothes, and run naked on all fours through city streets or the wilderness, as though returning to primitive worship of totemic animals. Subsequent examination of these individuals revealed that branches of their Y chromosomes still retained vestiges from the earliest stages of human evolution. After filtering for such signs in the DNA profiles of the population, a classified marker was added to the files of individuals with such genes.

Due to antidiscrimination legislation, their identities were kept secret; however, they were required to take suppressant medication and to wear special light-filtering contact lenses to counter the awakening effects of the New Moon. Some urban youths saw this as a new trend, and held transformation parties on full New Moon nights, where they turned into beasts with the aid of drugs and machinery and engaged in mass orgies.

The growth cycles of crops and livestock also changed, and astronomers had to work hard to devise new months, solar terms, and calendars. They became so complicated that it was impossible for anyone to understand or to derive based on simple astronomical observations; instead, farmers and farming machines had to rely on constant official updates.

The truly shocking new phenomenon involved those who were conceived during the full New Moon, known as the “New Mooners.”

Scientists never could explain the specific role played by the light of the New Moon at the moment when the sperm fertilized the egg or during cell division. No satisfying explanation emerged through analysis of the light spectrum, gravity, magnetic field, or any other possible factor. The only thing scientists knew was that the fetuses in the womb were developing into a new population distinct from all known human populations. A terrified humanity came to the conclusion that the normal fetuses whose development had been halted by the New Moon previously had perhaps been the victims of evolutionary competition against this new race.

Still, over 97.52 percent of the parents of such fetuses chose to carry them to full term, regardless of whether they would turn out to be angels or demons.

The New Mooners were not too different from normal humans in physical appearance, other than a change in the refractive index of the epidermis that gave their skin the sheen of plastic or thin membranes. Their metabolism, however, was three to five times slower than normal humans, which meant that they were also exceptionally long-lived. Most suffered mild depression, which caused many parents to worry that they would commit suicide. But after long observation and understanding, people came to realize that the depression-like symptoms were really the effects of a mental barrier that allowed them to filter out the information overload of the external world and to reduce cognitive load and mental stress. The New Mooners needed to focus their attention on a far more important problem, a problem that would require the efforts of thousands of generations.

The problem was this: the New Moon, which they viewed as a creation god, was going to be inexorably worn down by the passage of time. As the stability of the gravitational system decayed, the New Moon would depart from the Lagrange point and, pulled by gravity, fall onto the surface of the Earth, slowly and poetically destroying everything.

They wanted to save the New Moon.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, people thought of it as a mental illness, and specialists called it “Peter Pan syndrome.” Though these individuals were in their thirties and forties, they refused to grow up, instead speaking and behaving immaturely as though they were living the fantasy of Neverland. They were terrified of reality, shied away from competition, avoided responsibility and duty, fled from commitment by constantly changing partners, and sought refuge in the illusory joys of drugs and alcohol.

They attributed all these symptoms to overly protective families, and some even resented their parents for how much they’d indulged them in childhood.

Like our age-old pursuit of beauty and eternal youth, this development was but another tiny step on the ladder to the next stage.

In the middle of the twenty-second century, a developmental disorder that slowed down growth began to spread. Patients’ biological clocks seemed to tick at a pace many times slower than normal, and secondary sexual characteristics did not develop until they were in their thirties. Menopause and andropause were correspondingly delayed. Scientists came up with the explanation that since human lifespans had been extended by various technical measures to exceed 150 years, it was not surprising that youth would also last longer. Numerous literary and multimedia works celebrated the long youth, and patients with the developmental disorder became models for the future direction of human evolution. Many sociologists and anthropologists offered arguments as to why the disorder had the potential to reshape culture and redefine what was “normal,” and the “normals” of the past would be abandoned by Darwinian progress.

But they saw only a part of the problem.

Compared to other animals, humans remain in their juvenile state for a proportionally much longer time period. Among primates, the juvenile stages of lemurs, rhesus monkeys, gorillas, and humans last 2.5 years, 7.5 years, 10 years, and 20 years, respectively. The sexual maturation of humans comes five years later than chimpanzees, and similarly with the replacement of baby teeth. Why do we need such a disproportionately long childhood?

As early as the mid-twentieth century, scientists had discovered physiological correspondences between human children and young chimpanzees, such as small jaws, flat faces, and sparse body hair. Humans and chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of their genes, but almost 40 percent of the genes whose expression changed over time activated far later in humans than in chimpanzees, especially those responsible for growth of the gray matter in the brain responsible for higher thinking.

Most child development authorities informed parents that brains in the process of maturation, while synapses were still in their formative stages, were most receptive to new information and held enormous potential for future capacity.

Homo sapiens, with its long juvenile stage, pulled ahead in the primate evolutionary race and achieved first place. We retain our juvenile features, such as the lack of body hair and a disproportionately large head, into adulthood. Similarly, we hold on to childish cognitive characteristics such as curiosity and a desire to learn throughout our lives. Some people even have a genetic mutation that allows them to keep generating all through adulthood the lactase necessary to digest milk, an ability generally lost once children are weaned—indeed, they call other humans without the mutation the “lactose-intolerant,” as though they have a disorder.

Neoteny was critical to our species; was it time for a second wave?

The scientific world wished to take advantage of this opportunity to push human evolution forward, but they were faced with a legal problem. Patients affected by the developmental disorder were legally adults, but their physiology and psychology remained childish. Controversy erupted over whether the patients had the capacity to agree to be experimental subjects on their own, or whether it was necessary to secure the permission of guardians. As the issue dragged out in the courts, online mobs exposed the personal information of the patients’ relatives and derisively criticized them as “selfish monkeys.” The online mobs argued that those who, out of concern for their own security, ignored the far greater mission of advancing the human race did not deserve to be called sapiens. Historically, of course, such arguments had been raised again and again, like recurring waves in the river of time.

In the end, logic won over emotion. States assumed responsibility as guardians of the patients. After signing human experimentation agreements on behalf of their wards, the governments purchased expensive insurance and named the patients’ relatives as beneficiaries, by way of compensation. Everyone shut up, and the experiments could finally proceed.

Like an upgraded version of the therapists in A Clockwork Orange, scientists prodded and poked and stimulated the patients in various ways, injecting them with torrents of information. They couldn’t wait to expose the experimental subjects to the entirety of human knowledge and history during their long-but-still-all-too-brief periods of plasticity, hoping to stimulate the formation of more complex synaptic connections in the human brain, which had not evolved in ages, and thereby push back the frontiers of knowledge and derive solutions for the many complicated problems plaguing humanity. Subconsciously, the researchers thought of themselves as God, hoping to create a new race of Man on the sixth day.

They ended up with bedlamites, imbeciles, depressives, sex addicts, and vegetables.

The arrogant researchers didn’t even know where they had gone wrong. They did not understand the secret of the genetic switches; they were not the ones who had set the trap.

Humans had once tamed wolves into dogs. They tried to breed canid adults to retain juvenile features such as floppy ears, short snouts, large eyes, playfulness, the desire to please people, and to eliminate the bloodthirst and ferocity of the mature wolf. Humans did this not because they wanted to help wolves evolve into Canis sapiens; they simply wanted to bend the wolves to human aesthetics.

It was a misunderstanding over a subtle—if rather sick—preference for cuteness.

You walk a long way to the newsstand and ask for the magazine; you pay for it, put it in your bag, and after a long journey involving various forms of transportation, return to a secluded space; you turn on the light, orange or pale white, and rip open the nonbiodegradable plastic wrap; you pour yourself a cup of tea, or open a can of diet soda; you caress the pattern in the paper and, deliberately or randomly, open the magazine to this page.

You start to read. When you’re done, you’re thoughtful or weary; you tell others to read or not read this story.

You have completed one insignificant ritual out of the millions in your life.

Humans are ritualistic animals. From the ancient past to the present, from cradle to grave. Rituals solidify in our minds, glue together groups and cultures, chase away the terror of death, help us find our places, define the meaning of existence. The powerful in every culture have used rituals to assemble multitudes, to extract wealth, to form parties and factions, to consolidate rule. Rituals give endless labels to people, in addition to their names, telling them where they belong, but in the end there was no label for the self.

In my era, technology allows ritual to become an indivisible part of everyday life. It’s implanted into you and becomes part of your genetic heritage to be passed on to your children and their children, multiplying and mutating, more vigorous than its host.

Maybe it’s true in your age as well?

You cannot control the impulse to refresh the page. Information explosion brings anxiety, but can fill your husk of a soul. Every fifteen seconds, you move the mouse, open up your social networking profile, browse the comments, retweet and reblog, close the page, and do it all over again fifteen seconds later. You can’t stop.

You can no longer talk to people in real life. Air has lost its role as the medium for transmitting voice. You sit in a ring, your eyes glued to the latest mobile device in your hand as though worshiping the talisman of some ancient god. Your thoughts flow into virtual platforms through the tips of your fingers. You’re arguing, laughing, flirting, joking. But reality around you is a silent desert.

You cannot free yourself from the control of artificial environments. Ritual is omnipresent. It is no longer restricted to sacrifice, sermon, mass, concert, or game—performed on a central stage where the classical unities hold. Ritual itself is evolving, turning into distributed cloud computing, evenly spread out into every nook and cranny of your daily life. Sensors know everything and regulate the temperature, humidity, air currents, and light around you; adjust your heart rate, hormonal balance, sexual arousal, mood. Artificial intelligence is a god: you think it’s there for your welfare, bringing you new opportunities, but you’ve become the egg in the incubator, the marionette attached to wires. Every second of every minute of every day, you are the sacrifice that completes this unending, grand ritual.

You are the ritual.

Radical thinkers obsess over how to withdraw from all this. The power of ritual comes from repetition, not its content. Day after day, the repetition of poses and movements gradually seeps into the depth of consciousness, like a hard drive’s read-write head repeatedly tracing the pattern of an idea, until the idea becomes indistinguishable from free will itself. It’s like that sci-fi flick from the beginning of the twenty-first century. Romantic love is ritual’s most loyal consumer, along with patriotism.

The radicals try to imitate the Luddites of old: destroy the machines, hack into systems, awaken the people, exhort everyone to abandon technology and return to the wilderness, where everyone can sharpen their character against the grindstone of severe nature and hope to recover a primitive, pure simplicity. The media, rather mercilessly, point out that what they are advocating is a good fit for the ritualistic habits practiced by Zen Buddhists of seventh-century Japan.

The only thing that can be done is to do nothing.

Like marionettes with their strings cut, the radicals fall wherever they are: bedrooms, subways, airports, public squares, offices, beaches, assembly lines, cafeterias, streets, restrooms…. They do nothing, say nothing, only lying still and quietly, waiting for their bodies to waste away, waiting for their lives to be exhausted. They wield nothingness in their war against meaning, use the lack of will to dissolve freedom, employ the loss of the self to construct the self.

Sensors detect the fading of their vital signs, and artificial intelligences activate robotic helpers to take the withdrawing bodies to medical facilities via the transportation network. Like skiffs floating over the river of normal people, the bodies are gathered into clean, white, therapeutic rooms where various life-support systems and cables are plugged into them. They are now caught in a dilemma: a new paradox rises from nothingness. They will use their bodies to complete this unmoving struggle in human history’s first instance of mass suicide committed in imitation of natural death.

They have completed one of the greatest rituals.

Time is a human illusion, said a Jewish scientist in Europe in 1915. From then on, the smooth and unchanging steel plate that was time melted, like the soft clocks draping from tree branches under Dalí’s paintbrush.

Scientists attempted to control time via multiple paths: speed, gravity, entropy, quantum entanglement… but had to concede defeat in the end. Humanity tried everything to conquer this shapeless and colorless but omnipresent specter. It was there at the start of life, but even at the doorstep of death, the cleverest mind could not understand its secrets. Time’s arrow is bound up with all human civilization’s fears: it has a single direction, and once loosed it never stops, never turns back, all the way to the heat death of the universe.

Since it was impossible to change the world, the only choice was to change the self.

Researchers then focused on the sense of time in the human brain. Every day, fragments of memory surfaced in the neurochemical webs of billions of heads—wasn’t this phenomenon a form of time travel? Experiments showed that by stimulating specific areas of the hippocampus, it was possible to induce the feeling of déjà vu in test subjects and cause them to treat the scenes they were experiencing in their lives as though they had already been previewed in childhood. It was as if a marvelous editor had cut a life into segments and then pasted them back together in a new order to create the sensation of traveling through time.

With mastery of this secret, time turned into putty in the magician’s hand, capable of being stretched and sculpted into any shape. It was a fascinating paradox wherein speeding up brain activity slowed the passage of external time, and vice versa—it was the theory of relativity applied to the world of consciousness. Those truly skilled in the art could even implant a closed loop in the subject’s brain so that the poor fool lived out a real-life version of Groundhog Day, repeating the same day over and over again, even though it was just an illusion created by manipulating memory.

Chronosense, Ltd., was formed in response to this opportunity. Based on the needs of the individual customer, they offered different levels of adjustment to their time sense and charged a fortune for such services. Of course, the fee was calculated precisely based on the passage of time in the physical world.

In East Asia, students trapped in a culture based on tests needed to make the most of the little time they had. The night before big exams, with Chronosense’s help, they could stay up and swallow a semester’s worth of knowledge and examination-fu, like the memory bread from Doraemon. There was a 0.5 percent probability that this technique would lead to a stroke, and so a drug that counteracted the effects became a popular purchase for the students as well.

Those seeking the thrill of psychoactive substances, on the other hand, wanted the exact opposite effect, which was for the subjective experience of time to slow down until it seemed to stop. They wanted to make the drug-induced high gradually expand like an explosion frozen in a glacier, each blooming firework as Zen-like as an unmoving mountain. They sat in the dark, waiting to submerge in the chemical ecstasy, until the mushroom cloud devoured the last trace of their consciousness, leaving the flesh on life-maintenance. For them, time ceased to exist, and only hallucination was reality.

The aged were the most fervent fans of memory, and they made the most meticulous demands of Chronosense, careless of what the offerings cost. After locating the most joyful days of their lives, they edited them together into a highlight reel that they looped over and over in what little time they had left. It was the best way to squeeze the most out of the end of life, so they could die with smiles on their faces.

Human ingenuity would never go to waste. Always, evil genius knew exactly what to do with it.

Authoritarian regimes soon discovered the vast potential of this technology. By employing a special edition of the tech, they enslaved their people and managed to squeeze twelve hours’ worth of physical and mental labor from the population in every legally mandated eight-hour shift. While the ordinary people teetered on the edge of exhaustion and collapse, GDP rose and rose. In order to release some of the dangerous pressure of overwork, governments opened resorts specifically for vacationing workers where their overwound sense of time could be adjusted via technical measures to achieve some semblance of balance.

The laboring masses, kept in the dark about the truth, worked even harder to earn the right to vacation, where all they recovered was the time that had been stolen from them.

Their children, on the other hand, seemed to be born with their sense of time out of balance. As they also entered the labor force, and their sense of time was further twisted, things began to spin out of control. The next generation learned to forget, an instinctual strategy for bringing relief to the overburdened brain. Periodically—the exact length of time differed from individual to individual—the memories of these people reset themselves, and they woke up as newborns with blank slates. As those with reformatted brains imitated each other, a primitive savagery began to spread like a plague, and violence and lust broke through the barriers set up by civilization and technology.

The wild people took over the streets and cities and destroyed every machine and institution that tried to change their raw nature.

They truly possessed time. They no longer needed time.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Or, as a structural linguist would put it: language constructed thought; thought understood and transformed the world; and so language was the world’s prime mover, was God.

Wherever God was, so was the Devil, just as light could not be separated from darkness.

It was language, not tools, that separated humans from apes. The bridge between the signifier and the signified connected the world of subjectivity with the physical world. Meaning was like the water of the Ganges, a wide-flowing torrent. Humans extracted drops of sensory experience, saved them, classified them, generalized them, and sublimated them until the border between the self and objective reality was defined. Then they learned to exchange thoughts between different individuals, to communicate intent, and society began to form: division of labor, work, family, power, state, war—everything was built on this foundation. Language was the measure of understanding, and every debate among humanity was based on our shared linguistic system.

The gaps and seams persisted in the places that could not be encompassed by words.

Religion, music, painting, love, pain, joy, loneliness—these words are like the tips of icebergs, concealing the unfathomable, vast, complicated feelings beneath the surface. They accompanied humanity’s cultural genes from ancient times, and like the sedimentary strata of geology, folded and overlapped one another, interpenetrating and merging, evolving until today.

When you discuss these topics, you know not what you’re discussing.

All societies wish to promulgate an effective set of linguistic regulations in order to rectify the thoughts of the masses. From Qin Shihuang’s edict for all China to write the same way, to the Newspeak of 1984, words have vanished and new idioms have been invented. Some expressions were usable only by certain classes in certain places, while the masses were required to avoid these formulations reserved to the noble and highborn, and so they invented slang that required the overactive associative brain to smoothly wield its store of homonyms, puns, metonyms and rhymes, a celebration of the tongue and the vocal cords.

In a certain age, even revelry was a disciplined ideological tool, realized through technology.

The government installed firewalls in the language center of the brain of every newborn, thus achieving for the first time in history a real-time language surveillance network. When what an individual wished to say triggered the filters in their firewall—which were constantly kept up to date—the firewall cut off the person’s speech and punished them with an appropriate level of pain. On the other hand, when the person spoke the words that satisfied the desires of those in power, the firewall rewarded them with a pleasure similar to drugs.

A brave new world of reward and punishment.

The system worked so well that people, of their own initiative, devised a way to integrate the filters into their genes so that they could be passed on to their children, allowing them to meld with the firewall even more seamlessly. Eventually, even the merest hint of an undesirable thought would be eliminated before it could take root, maximally reducing the potential for being punished. The mechanism gradually became a part of the unconscious, assimilated into the part of the cortex that we inherited from our amphibious, piscine, reptilian ancestors, meshed with the most primitive part of human language.

Then things took a different turn.

Humanity never fully understood what happened next, not even now in the time I’m from. One theory is that humanity was indeed the creation of some higher intelligence, who implanted into the human mind a highly designed language system. The system evolved as civilization developed, but when a foreign invader threatened its fundamental principles, it would reset the system to factory defaults and return everything to the origin. The system was also highly infectious.

Can you imagine it? A world without language. Everything collapsed.

The problem wasn’t that it was impossible to talk; rather, humanity lost the very tool necessary to understand the world and the self. The universe returned to primeval chaos.

I am the product of a second system. Very few individuals showed symptoms of it—maybe in your time, it would be called “divine inspiration.”

It was no longer I who spoke words, but words that spoke me.

It was as if the divine intelligence had lost patience with foolish humans. The chosen ones who brought with them a brand-new linguistic logic had to direct the unenlightened primitives to reunderstand the world and rebuild civilization. The new world did seem to be more peaceful, more enlightened, more perfect. Scientists invented time machines and discovered the theory of timelines. They dispatched envoys to parallel universes along different timelines to spread the gospel so that the humans in these other worlds could avoid their mistakes. Many of these envoys did not meet happy fates.

This is why I, Stanley, have come from the future to speak to you. For reasons that I cannot reveal, I will terminate my sojourn here shortly and leave your timeline to leap into another unknown world.

In your universe, the number nine is special, symbolizing permanence, rebirth, the supreme. I hope the nine chapters of my gospel can accompany the lost souls of this world through the door at the end of time, to achieve eternal recurrence.