Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  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?

  CONTROLLED PERSONALITY SHATTERING

  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.

  TWIN ELEGIES

  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.”

  THE NEW MOON

  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 As
trology 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.