by Chen Qiufan
Kaizong stared at the computer-simulated, dark blue jungle of axons, in which the metal particles hovered like silent monoliths out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, forming an endless matrix that extended to the end of the universe. Through his mind flashed the images of Mimi abjectly sniffing at the burnt plastic; Xialong Village’s hellish, thick, sticky, dirty air; junked electronic toys; abandoned fields; burning trash; children smiling like blossoms in the toxic soil.
God comes with leaden feet, but strikes with iron hands, he thought. History’s retribution was always imbued with uncertainty: sometimes vengeance was visited upon an entire race, but occasionally, it could be as precise as a bolt of lightning striking a single dead tree in the middle of a wasteland, setting it alight like a blazing torch at night, illuminating the inky sky.
Mimi was the unlucky girl singled out from billions, touched by history.
“Is her life in danger?” Kaizong asked anxiously.
“I really don’t know. Nothing in my experience is even remotely similar. The metal particles embedded in her cerebral cortex form a complex lattice that seems to be working synergistically with her neural network—don’t ask me how. Mimi’s head shows signs of injury from electric shock, so maybe that provided some kind of activation energy. All I know is that modern neurosurgical techniques are incapable of implanting the particles with such precision, and we certainly don’t know how to extract the structure.
“It’s as if her brain has been turned into a minefield. You’ll never know when an impulse may come off some nerve ending”—the doctor snapped his fingers, looking solemn—“and trigger a chain reaction.”
Kaizong kept quiet. He had been harboring the hope that after this episode, he might finally be able to protect Mimi from further threats. Deep in his heart, he had always attributed Mimi’s tragedy to his own tardiness to their date. He had replayed that day compulsively in his mind countless times—what if time could flow backward, what if he had ended his talk with the head of the Chen clan earlier, what if he had arrived at Mimi’s shack on time … perhaps everything would have turned out differently.
But he knew that history never had room for what-ifs.
Kaizong couldn’t deny that, at some level, he had imagined himself as a kind of emissary returning home, bearing treasures from a distant land. As soon as he opened his treasure chest, all the problems of Silicon Isle would be gone in a puff of smoke. Only now did he understand how wrong he had been. He couldn’t save Silicon Isle, couldn’t save Mimi, and he especially couldn’t save himself. His laughable sense of superiority had been pulverized by hard reality: the faster he ran, the farther his original goal receded.
“If Mimi had gone to the periodic screenings, perhaps we could have found this earlier…” The doctor’s tone was full of regret.
“She wasn’t working for the Chen clan before; she belonged to the Luo clan.”
A face floated before Kaizong’s eyes, a smooth, pale, bloated face full of malice and deceit, like some dead tissue floating in a jar of formaldehyde. Luo Jincheng.
The doctor’s face shifted. Ah, that explains it.
* * *
The website was clearly not some authorized production—it more closely resembled a wiki built up by obsessive fans. Text, pictures, chronologies, and videos were strewn about randomly, with little attention to organization. Scott browsed through the pages quickly—many of the articles made wild leaps of logic and were composed in the tone of the conspiracy theorists that he was familiar with, the products of brains filled with pathologically twisted imaginings about human history.
Though the site hadn’t been updated in a while, Scott managed to find what he was looking for.
A fifteen-minute-long summary video.
The opening section was an excerpt from a black-and-white documentary: a warship burning over the sea, then the gray flaming wreckage gradually sinking beneath the surface. Text on the screen read:
On March 3, 1943, an American B-25C Mitchell bomber, nicknamed “Chatter Box,” damaged the rudder of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Arashio, which caused the destroyer to collide with another ship. The destroyer ultimately sank about 55 nautical miles southeast of Finschhafen, New Guinea. The ship’s 176 survivors were all rescued, except the captain, Lieutenant Commander Hideo Kuboki.
A photograph of Kuboki in military uniform appeared onscreen. Then the scene shifted to a laboratory on some school campus. An elegant East Asian woman concentrated on her instruments while conversing mutely with the cameraman.
After the Japanese defeat, Kuboki’s fiancée, Seisen Suzuki, left for the United States to pursue graduate studies and eventually became an American citizen. She received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and in 1952, under the direction of the U.S. military, initiated and led the top secret Project Waste Tide. The name is a nod toward the ship on which her fiancé had died.
Scott finally learned the origin of the mysterious foundation among TerraGreen Recycling’s shareholders.
The next segment of the video was marked as “U.S. Military, Top Secret.” The view seemed to be from a fixed camera, and the flashing numbers in the bottom right indicated that the video had been sped up multiples of tens of times. The background was the interior of a sealed room; the lens faced a one-way glass window in the opposite wall, which reflected the wall under the camera, chillingly blank.
Between 1955 and 1972, Project Waste Tide performed experiments in Maryland on human subjects drawn from inmates on death row and serving life sentences. The goal was to research hallucinogenic weapons capable of mass deployment so that victories may be won on the battlefield without having to fire a shot. The researchers conducted trials with multiple natural and synthetic drugs, and finally settled on 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, or QNB, which can be absorbed through the skin or respiratory system in aerosol form.
A prisoner was led into the room and sat down in front of the one-way observation window. The video played at several times normal speed, and the prisoner’s figure shook as if seized by uncontrollable convulsions. He couldn’t remain still—the empty room seemed to contain invisible monsters that disturbed his mind and threatened his safety. He screamed noiselessly and rammed his head against the walls, tore out his hair, rolled on the floor, and rent his clothes into shreds. Waves of white noise rolled across the camera image, distorting the view.
Abruptly, the video slowed down to normal speed. The naked man stood facing the camera and caressed his face with his hands. Without warning, he dug out his eyeballs with his fingers, as calmly as one might pull out the rubber plug in the bathtub drain. The eyeballs, trailing blood vessels and nerve bundles, fell from his palms, and dark liquid spilled out of his empty sockets. He sat down, relieved, and collapsed to the ground softly as if his spine had been abruptly extracted.
QNB functions as a competitive inhibitor of acetylcholine (ACh), a neurotransmitter that increases responsiveness to sensory stimuli and plays an important role in learning memory, spatial working memory, attention, muscle contraction, exploratory behavior, and other cognitive functions. QNB acts on the muscarinic receptors found in the synapses of smooth muscles, exocrine glands, autonomic ganglia, the cerebrum, and other parts, effectively lowering the concentration of ACh reaching receptors and leading to dilated pupils, lowered heart rate, flushed skin, and other symptoms. In severe cases, the effects include coma, ataxia, loss of spatial and time sense, memory impairment, inability to distinguish reality from illusions, irrational fears, and uncontrolled semi-autonomic behaviors such as undressing, talking to oneself, picking, scratching, and other similar actions.
The video went through a series of jump cuts: a crowd dancing bizarrely in a square; a primitive tribe conducting a mysterious ceremony in the jungle; young men and women at a wild party; a military parade with goose-stepping soldiers … The selection of footage differed in palette and quality, and, accompanied by retro German electronica, had a powerful effect on the viewer’s mood. Scott was
n’t sure what the scenes were intended to show. Many times he thought he had caught glimpses of genocide and cannibalism, perhaps just individual frames: crimson red, shaking, firelight. He felt a growing unease.
More astonishingly, QNB could cause multiple subjects to fall under the sway of a shared hallucinatory experience. For instance, two subjects might pass an invisible cigarette back and forth or even play a game of tennis with invisible rackets and an invisible ball. When the number of affected people rose above a certain threshold, a spontaneous mass religious experience might be triggered. Sometimes these invoked existing deities—Jehovah, Allah, Shakyamuni—but sometimes entirely new gods were created. The results often led to panic and disaster.
War began: the green trails of shells and bullets above a desert seen through night-vision goggles; mechanized troops shuttling through the ruins of a city; the face of a soldier full of exhaustion and despair; some politician gesticulating through a righteous speech; bombers skimming over their targets; an exploding armored personnel carrier; a collapsing building; bodies being blown apart; children play ing and running through streets strewn with corpses—turning into survivors with missing limbs a second later. None of this was new to Scott.
The American defeat in Vietnam and the heavy losses indirectly led to the introduction of QNB as a military tool after 1975. It helped the United States win numerous regional wars and greatly reduced American casualties: Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Sarajevo, Ethiopia … Internal classified documents indicate that the military viewed QNB as a nonlethal chemical weapon with no long-term negative effects, and continued to assure the civilian leadership that such use was consistent with the public image of an America “fighting for peace.”
The truth, of course, was otherwise.
A middle-aged man appeared onscreen. His face was blurred out and his voice altered to disguise his identity. The subtitle indicated that he was an American sergeant, a veteran of one of the Gulf Wars. Due to damage to his gas mask, he had breathed in a substantial amount of QNB. He had been discharged more than ten years ago and now worked in the logistics industry.
Interviewer [off camera]: How did you feel when it happened?
Man:… I don’t remember [shaking his head slowly]. I’m sorry, I can’t recall clearly … It was terrible. [silence] I’m really sorry. I don’t want to relive it.
Interviewer: According to an internal report, you believe that your hallucination was connected with the hallucination experienced by the enemy?
Man: [confused] … I can’t be certain. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. All I felt was terror, rage, anger directed at my brothers, as though they … they were the truly evil side. I even wanted to kill them, all of them.
Interviewer: Did you?
Man: No! Of course not! Never … [uncertain again] Maybe while I was dreaming.
The other men in his unit reported him for erratic behavior and he was forcefully taken away from the front and sent to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation followed by medical discharge.
Interviewer: Do you feel free from the effects?
Man: [silence, heavy breathing] … I still suffer nightmares, sometimes. The doctors tell me it’s PTSD … but I know it’s not. Have you read anything by Lovecraft? Cthulhu? My dreams are like that. [quickened breathing, louder] Darkness, chaos, filth—it’s as if something wants to rip you apart in your brain. Look, I’m not talking about physical suffering; I’m not. You wake up and see the boundless sky full of stars outside your window: that’s the opening in its iris. It’s staring at me all the time. Do you know how that feels? Do you fucking know?
[The camera zooms in: the arteries in his neck are pulsing wildly. Fade to black.]
Three weeks after this interview, David M. Friedman (Sgt. USA) was found dead in his apartment, having shot himself through the mouth. He was 38.
Scott had to pause the video until his gut settled down. The short video contained far more information than he had anticipated.
* * *
Mimi was gone. The ICU was empty.
Kaizong hounded the guards at the door like a madman but all he got were shrugs and ambivalent answers. He rushed down the stairs, his chest tight, an uneasy premonition overtaking him, just as it had the day of their missed date: if he lost Mimi again, it would be forever. There was no trace of her in front of the hospital. Early-rising patients and their visitors walked about, their pallor glowing brightly in the dawn light.
In despair, Kaizong searched desperately through his mind for any information that might help him get in touch with Mimi. He regretted following the fundamentalist faith of his parents and not having access to prosthetic implants for augmented reality. Then he saw Mimi devouring her breakfast in the cafeteria on the ground floor. She wasn’t alone; a man sat across from her, his back to Kaizong’s gaze.
That powerful frame was so familiar to Kaizong that his heart began to beat wildly; the cruel grin on Luo Jincheng’s face flashed before his eyes.
He went up to their table and stood between Mimi and Luo. Placing his hands on the table, he leaned down and glared at Luo, making sure that the man knew he no longer cared about the consequences.
“Kaizong! Why don’t you sit down and have some breakfast, too? I mentioned that I was hungry, and Uncle Luo here offered to take me to breakfast.” Mimi stared at him innocently. Bits of rice were stuck to the corners of her mouth and moved up and down as she chewed.
“Uncle Luo, thank you. I think you might want to say goodbye if you’re finished. Mimi needs her rest.” Kaizong struggled to keep his tone even.
“No need to be so polite! We’re all friends.” Luo Jincheng smiled. “Mimi has agreed to come and visit Him-ri with me after eating. Today is a propitious day; good luck for everything.”
Kaizong looked at Mimi, surprised. She picked up a fried dough stick with her chopsticks casually—the locals called them “ghosts-in-oil.”
“Unless the doctor releases her or she wants to leave, Mimi isn’t going anywhere.”
“Young man, you should come with us. There will be other people there you already know.” Luo Jincheng glanced around and lifted his chin slightly, indicating to Kaizong that he should not act rashly. Kaizong noticed that a few other men were sitting in the far corner of the cafeteria—although they looked like regular customers, they glanced over at Mimi’s table from time to time with considering expressions, as though coveting the fried dough sticks, soy milk, and porridge with salted vegetables.
Luo gestured for Kaizong to sit and switched to the Silicon Isle topolect. “You’re just like your father: stubborn, perverse, don’t know what’s good for you.”
Kaizong suppressed his anger and displeasure and sat down slowly.
“Back when your father and I were both young men—not much older than you, in fact—I called him Elder Brother Xianzhe. He had ambition and wanted to build Silicon Isle into a major cargo port in eastern Guangdong Province. But that required money, a great deal of money, as well as time.” Luo Jincheng half lifted his face, and his gaze seemed to penetrate history’s layers of curtains, ending on the distant past. “The government couldn’t wait that long. They wanted results, tangible, visible results that could move the GDP so that they could write up a pretty report and get promotions and make money. Silicon Isle chose a different path, and that’s how we ended up here.”
Kaizong was about to object when Luo silenced him with another look. “Don’t jump to conclusions so quickly, youngster. History is the way it is because it follows certain patterns, otherwise you and I would not be conversing here today. I have to say that your father saw further than most and he’s daring and bold. He gave up the easy riches he could have made and left the country, arriving in America as a stranger with nothing to his name. His struggles gave you the good environment you grew up in. You can say that I’m selfish, that I’m complicit in injustice—I don’t care. My belief is simple: an animal has to be strong enough to prevent its offspring from being hunted or
enslaved; it’s the same with mankind.
“And so, your father and I are the same; we differ only in the way we express our love.”
If he hadn’t witnessed too many examples of the Luo clan’s abuse of the waste people, Chen Kaizong would have been ready to applaud and cheer this heartfelt speech. He thought of his own father, of the memories in fading color of the years they spent wandering, trying to survive in a foreign land—and he experienced a biological revulsion, like a conditioned reflex.
He could never associate that kind of drifting, uprooted life with a father’s love, no matter what the logic.
He couldn’t understand why his father had decided on that course of action, not even after so many years. Rationally, he could cite all kinds of hard evidence to justify his father’s choice, but emotionally, he could never accept it. For a man to take those who depended on him and depart from the land of his birth, to leave behind the foundation of their culture and existence in search of the feeling of security elsewhere—that was something that occurred only in historical times of famine or war, not in a so-called time of prosperity and peace.
Mimi found some chili paste and mixed it with her rice porridge: a vortex of red and white, barbed intensity the companion of mild delicacy, a mixture that awakened the taste buds. Kaizong looked at Mimi and seemed to finally understand the subtle contours of his own feelings for her: they were more than an ordinary couple, a man and a woman; in fact, they were like a pair of prisoners in sympathy, captives of this land that did not belong to them; they were strangers in Silicon Isle, and yet, they could not deny the complex web of feelings that tied them to the place.