by Ken Liu
The Man
Who Ended History:
A Documentary
Ken Liu
[Dr. Kirino is in her early forties. She has the kind of beauty that doesn't
require much makeup . If you look closely, you can see bits of white in her
otherwise black hair.]
Akemi Kirino, Chief Scientist, Feynman Laboratories:
Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you
are bathing in time as well as light .
For example, when you look at this star in the constellation Libra
called Gliese 581, you are really seeing it as it was just over two decades
ago because it's about twenty light years from us. And conversely, if
someone around Gliese 581 had a powerful enough telescope pointed
to around here right now, they'd be able to see Evan and me walking
around Harvard Yard, back when we were graduate students.
[She points to Massachusetts on the globe on her desk, as the camera pans
to zoom in on it. She pauses, thinking over her words . The camera pulls
back, moving us further and further away from the globe, as though we
were flying away from it.]
The best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about 13
billion years ago. If you strap one of those to a rocket moving away
from the Earth at a speed that's faster than light —a detail that I'll get
to in a minute —and point the telescope back at the Earth, you'll see
the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse . The view of
everything that has happened on Earth leaves here in an ever -expanding sphere of light . And you only have to control how far away
you travel in space to determine how far back you'll go in time.
[The camera keeps on pulling back, through the door of her office, down the
hall, as the globe and Dr. Kirino become smaller and smaller in our view .
The long hallway we are backing down is dark, and in that sea of darkness,
the open door of the office becomes a rectangle of bright light framing the
globe and the woman.]
Somewhere about here you'll wit ness Prince Charles's sad face as
Hong Kong is finally returned to China. Somewhere about here you'll
see Japan's surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Somewhere about here
you'll see Hideyoshi's troops set foot on the soil of Korea for the first
time. And so mewhere about here you'll see Lady Murasaki completing
the first chapter of the Tale of Genji . If you keep on going, you can go
back to the beginning of civilization and beyond.
But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the
lens, and f rom there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or
a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead
in their paths. If you look but don't pay attention and miss a moment,
you cannot travel further out to catch it again . That moment is erased
from the universe, forever.
[From the shadows next to the door to the office an arm reaches out to slam
the door shut. Darkness swallows Dr. Kirino, the globe, and the bright
rectangle of light. The screen stays black for a few seconds before the
opening credits roll.]
Remembrance Films HK Ltd.
in association with
Yurushi Studios
presents
a Heraclitus Twice Production
THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY
This film has been banned by the Ministry of
Culture of the People's Republic of China and is
released under strong protest from the government
of Japan
[We are back in the warm glow of her office.]
Akemi Kirino:
Because we have not yet solved the problem of how to travel faster
than light, there is no real way for us to actually get a telescope out
there to see the past . But we've found a way to cheat.
Theorists long suspected that at each moment, the world around
us is literally exploding with newly created subatomic particles of a
certain type, now known as Bohm - Kirino particles. My modest
contribution to physics was to confirm their existence and to discover
that these particles always come in pairs . One member of the pair
shoots away from the Earth, riding the photon that gave it birth and
traveling at the speed of light. The other remains behind, oscillating in
the vicinity of its creation.
The pairs of Bohm-Kirino particles are under quantum
entanglement. This means that they are bound together in such a way
that no matter how far apart they are from each other physically, their
propert ies are linked together as though they are but aspects of a single
system . If you take a measurement on one member of the pair, thereby
collapsing the wave function, you would immediately know the state of
the other member of the pair, even if it is light years away.
Since the energy levels of Bohm- Kirino particles decay at a known
rate, by tuning the sensitivity of the detection field, we can attempt to
capture and measure Bohm - Kirino particles of a precise age created in
a specific place.
When a measurement is taken on the local Bohm-Kirino particle
in an entangled pair, it is equivalent to taking a measurement on that
particle's entangled twin, which, along with its host photon, may be
trillions of miles away, and thus, decades in the past . Through some
complex but standard mathematics, the measurement allows us to
calculate and infer the state of the host photon . But, like any
measurement performed on entangled pairs, the measurement can be
taken only once, and the information is then gone foreve r.
In other words, it is as though we have found a way to place a
telescope as far away from the Earth, and as far back in time, as we
like . If you want, you can look back on the day you were married, your
first kiss, the moment you were born. But for each moment in the past,
we get only one chance to look.
[The camera shows an idle factory on the outskirts of the city of Harbin,
Heilongjiang Province, China. It looks just like any other factory in the
industrial heartland of China in the grip of another downturn in the
country's merciless boom- and- bust cycles: ramshackle, silent, dusty, the
windows and doors shuttered and boarded up. Samantha Paine, the
correspondent, wears a wool cap and scarf . Her cheeks are bright red with
the cold, and her eyes are tired. As she speaks in her calm voice, the
condensation from her breath curls and lingers before her face.]
Archival Footage: September 18, 20XX. Courtesy of APAC Broadcasting
Corporation
Samantha
We are in Pingfang District, on the outskirts of Harbin. Although
: On this day, back in 1931, the first shots in the Second
Sino- Japanese War were fired near Shenyang, here in Manchuria. For
the Chinese, that was the beginning of World War Two, more than a
decade before the United States
would be involved.
the name “ Pingfang” means nothing to most people in the West, some
have called Pingfang the Asian Auschwitz. Here, Unit 731 of the
Japanese Imperial Army performed gruesome experiments on
thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners throughout the war as part
of Japan's effort to develop biological weapons and to conduct research
into the limits of human endurance .
On these premises, Japanese army doctors directly killed
thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners through medical and
weapons experiments, vivisections, amputations, and other systematic
methods of torture. At the end of the War, the retreating Japanese
army killed all remaining prisoners and burned the complex to the
ground, leaving behind only the shell of the administrative building
and some pits used to breed disease - carrying rats. There were no
survivors.
Historians estimate that between 200,000 and half a million
Chinese persons, almost all civilians, were killed by the biological and
chemical weapons researched and developed in this place and other
satellite labs: anthrax, cholera, the bubonic plague . At the end of the
War, General MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces,
granted all members of Unit 731 immunity from war crimes
prosecution in order to get the data from their experiments and to
keep the data away from the Soviet Union.
Today, except for a small museum nearby with few visitors, little
evidence of those atrocities is visible . Over there, at the edge of an
empty field, a pile of rubble stands where the incinerator for destroy ing
the bodies of the victims used to be . This factory behind me is built on
the foundation of a storage depot used by Unit 731 for germ - breeding
supplies. Until the recent economic downturn, which shuttered its
doors, the factory built moped engines for a Sino - Japanese joint
venture in Harbin . And in a gruesome echo of the past, several
pharmaceutical companies have quietly settled in around the site of
Unit 731's former headquarters.
Perhaps the Chinese are content to leave behind this part of their
past and move on. And if they do, the rest of the world will probably
move on as well.
But not if Evan Wei has anything to say about it.
[Samantha speaks over a montage of images of Evan Wei lecturing in front
of a classroom and posing before complex machiner y with Dr. Kirino . In
the photographs they look to be in their twenties.]
Dr. Evan Wei, a Chinese- American historian specializing in
Classical Japan, is determined to make the world focus on the suffering
of the victims of Unit 731 . He and his wife, Dr. Akemi Kirino, a noted
Japanese- American experimental physicist, have developed a
controversial technique that they claim will allow people to travel back
in time and experience history as it occurred . Today, he will publicly
demonstrate his technique by traveling back to the year 1940, at the
height of Unit 731's activities, and personally bear witness to the
atrocities of Unit 731.
The Japanese government claims that China is engaged in a
propaganda stunt, and it has filed a strongly- worded protest with
Beijing for allowing this demonstration . Citing principles of
international law, Japan argues that China does not have the right to
sponsor an expedition into World War Two - era Harbin because
Harbin was then under the control of Manchukuo, a puppet regime of
t he Japanese Empire. China has rejected the Japanese claim, and
responded by declaring Dr. Wei's demonstration an “ excavation of
national heritage” and now claims ownership rights over any visual or
audio record of Dr. Wei's proposed journey to the past under Chinese
antiquities-export laws.
Dr. Wei has insisted that he and his wife are conducting this
experiment in their capacities as individual American citizens, with no
connection to any government . They have asked the American Consul
General in nearby Shenyang, as well as representatives of the United
Nations, to intervene and protect their effort from any governmental
interference . It's unclear how this legal mess will be resolved.
Meanwhile, numerous groups from China and overseas, some in
support of Dr. Wei, some against, have gathered to hold protests .
China has mobilized thousands of riot police to keep these
demonstrators from approaching Pingfang.
Stay tuned, and we will bring you up - to - date reports on this
historical occasion. This is Samantha Paine, for APAC.
To truly travel back in time, we still had to jump over one more
hurdle.
Akemi Kirino:
The Bohm- Kirino particles allow us to reconstruct, in detail, all
types of information about the moment of their creation: sight, sound,
microwaves, ultrasound, the smell of antiseptic and blood, and the
sting of cordite and gunpowder in the back of the nose.
But this is a staggering amount of information, even for a single
second . We had no realistic way to store it, let alone process it in real
tim e. The amount of data gathered for a few minutes would have
overwhelmed all the storage servers at Harvard. We could open up a
door to the past, but would see nothing in the tsunami of bits that
flooded forth.
[Behind Dr. Kirino is a machine that looks like a large clinical MRI
scanner. She steps to the side so that the camera can zoom slowly inside the
tube of the scanner where the volunteer's body would go during the process .
As the camera moves through the tube, continuing towards the light at the
end of the tunnel, her voice continues off camera.]
Perhaps given enough time, we could have come up with a solution
that would have allowed the data to be recorded. But Evan believed
that we could not afford to wait . The surviving relatives of the victims
were aging, dying, and the War was about to fade out of living
memory. There was a duty, he felt, to offer the surviving relatives
whatever answers we could get.
So I came up with the idea of using the human brain to process the
information gathered by the B ohm -Kirino detectors. The brain's
massively parallel processing capabilities, the bedrock of consciousness,
proved quite effective at filtering and making sense of the torrent of
data from the detectors. The brain could be given the raw electrical
signals, throw 99.999% of it away, and turn the rest into sight, sound,
smell, and make sense of it all and record them as memories .
This really shouldn't surprise us. After all, this is what our brains
do, every second of our lives . The raw signals from our eyes, ears, skin
and tongue would overwhelm any supercomputer, but from second to
second, our brain manages to construct the consciousness of our
existence from all that noise.
“ For our volunteer subjects, the process creates the illusion of
experiencing the p ast, as though they were in that place, at that time,” I
wrote in Nature.
How I regret using the word “ illusion ” now . So much weight
ended up being
placed on my poor word choice . History is like that:
the truly important decisions never seemed important at the time.
Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but
there's nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now.
[Ezary has a placid face that is belied by the intensity of his gaze . He enjoys
giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he
thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]
Archibald Ezary, Radhabinod Pal Professor of Law, Co - Director of East
Asian Studies, Harvard Law School:
The legal debate between China and Japan about Wei's work,
almost twenty years ago, was not really new . Who should have control
over the past is a question that has troubled all of us, in various forms,
for many years . But the invention of the Kirino Process made this
struggle to control the past a literal, rather than merely a metaphorical,
issue.
A state has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one . It grows
and shrinks over time, subjugating new peoples and sometimes freeing
their descendants . Japan today may be thought of as just the home
islands, but back in 1942, at its height, the Japanese Empire ruled
Korea, most of China, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Philippines, Vietnam,
Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia and large parts of Indonesia, as well
as large swaths of the islands in the Pacific. The legacy of that time
shapes Asia to this day.
One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and
unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this:
as control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which
sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory's past?
Before Evan Wei's demonstration, the most that the issue of
jurisdiction over the past intruded on real life was an argument over
whether Spain or America would have the right to the sovereign's
share of treasure from sunken 16th - century Spanish galleons
recovered in contemporary American waters, or whether Greece or
England should keep the Elgin Marbles. But now the stakes are much
higher.
So, is Harbin during the years between 1931 and 1945 Japanese
territory, as the Japanese government contends? Or is it Chinese, as