by Chen Qiufan
SBT developed a revolutionary substance for mediating between the biological and the electronic worlds. Extracted from the gladii of squids, this modified chitosan complex could convert the biological ion flow that carried brain signals into electric currents that could be deciphered by machines, thereby seamlessly forming a feedback loop between the nervous system and the prosthesis. The invention had expanded the definition of the boundary of the body beyond imagination.
* * *
Chen Kaizong once watched his roommate Ted swap limbs with other people at a weekend party so that they could experience the wild bash through each other’s senses. Kaizong had been stunned like some Texas farm boy setting foot in Times Square for the first time, not sure even where to look. For him, drinking was drinking, doing drugs was doing drugs, and casual sex was casual sex: he had never imagined that there could be big differences between individuals’ sensitivity thresholds and sensory receptors.
Ted, barely able to stand straight, held on to his new girlfriend and explained that it was like holding a red-hot lead ball against your forehead and sticking a creamy, cold, gelatinous tentacle through every orifice in your head and flicking it back and forth. Yeah, the difference is that huge.
Kaizong shook his head, unable to comprehend.
He became an outsider. Standing apart from fashion, he hid among the dusty library stacks and conversed across time with philosophers and wise men who had been dead for hundreds or thousands of years until he finished his obscure thesis—read by him and his advisor and no one else. This was the only way for him to feel safe, to shield himself from the crazy world around him. He was terrified that he might start to dance to the industrial breakbeat and join in this bacchanalia dedicated to the senses until he was lost in the depths of the flesh.
One night, Ted knocked on his door. A strange expression on his face, he asked, Caesar, I need your help.
Kaizong closed the book he was reading and listened to his roommate recount the story in a hoarse voice.
Ted’s girlfriend Rebecca had been in the middle of a vacation in Ecuador when an accidental fire killed her as well as the friends who were traveling with her. Little of their bodies remained except a pile of fire-resistant prostheses. Ted and Rebecca had gotten together after a summer party, and one of the ways they liked to please each other was to frequently update their prostheses to maintain a sense of freshness. That was also the source of the problem.
Due to the severity of the fire, DNA identification was ineffective; the prostheses were so damaged that no data could be recovered. The coroner, faced with a pile of intricate polymer composites, had no choice but to pack everything into one box and ship it back to the United States. Rebecca’s grief-stricken parents, like other American parents of children that age, were limited in the knowledge of their daughter’s life to the extent of a weekly phone call and had no way to know what she had done to her body. They hoped that Ted could help them identify the parts that belonged to their daughter so that they could bury her. May God help guide her lost soul.
Unfortunately, as Ted faced four pairs of eyes, five half-melted silicone breasts, one right hand and two left legs, his mind was a blank. Rebecca went through prostheses so quickly that he could not remember the small differences between various editions.
However, Ted finally recalled a conversation between Kaizong and Rebecca the last time they all saw each other.
Your right eye is very special, Kaizong had said to her. The Chinese have an expression for it: míng móu shàn lài.
What does it mean? Rebecca asked, a smile lifting the corners of her mouth.
It means that your eye is so limpid that it seems able to speak. Kaizong blushed.
Listen to you! Ted punched Kaizong playfully in the arm. Who knew you could be so smooth? Ted turned and gazed at Rebecca lovingly. How come this eye is so quiet toward me?
It’s new. It’ll warm up to you soon enough. Rebecca lifted her face for a kiss.
Ted now gazed at Kaizong with sunken eyes. He was scruffy, unkempt, disheveled. Holding on to Kaizong’s arms, he begged, Please. Please help me find the eye that could speak.
But … Awkwardly, Kaizong tried to explain. That was when Rebecca was still alive …
You’re Chinese! You told me the Chinese don’t believe in God anyway. What difference does it make whether she’s alive or dead? Ted shouted.
And so Kaizong walked into a morgue for the first time. The stainless-steel drawer was open, revealing plastic bags filled with oddly shaped prosthetic organs and limbs. The attendant took out one of the bags: like fresh transgenic lemons found at supermarkets, the contents were an unnatural, frosted white. Eight prosthetic eyes that had belonged to the dead.
Suppressing nausea, Kaizong carefully examined each one. The layer of clear polymer film around each eye had half melted, loosely enclosing the delicate mechanisms within like a ball of multiflavored ice cream someone had taken a bite from. They had once all been embedded into beautiful faces, and one of them had even given Kaizong an enchanting smile.
But now they all looked equally ugly, devoid of life.
Kaizong turned around and was about to admit defeat, but the despair in Ted’s eyes stopped him. He hesitated for a moment and picked out two eyes at random and nodded.
The two electronic prosthetic eyes were placed inside an elaborately carved cremation urn. The priest read from the Gospel while Rebecca’s loved ones sobbed and crossed themselves. The electronic hymns began to play, and sunlight, refracted through the stained-glass windows, fell against the picture of Rebecca’s perfect face, the product of many operations.
Kaizong finally accepted the fact that for the fashionable new generation living in the developed West, prostheses were no longer merely aids for the handicapped or even decorations or components of the body, to be exchanged and upgraded at will; rather, prostheses had already become a part of the definition of human life: they were the repositories for our joys, sorrows, terrors, and passions, our class, our social status, our memories.
Your prostheses are you.
* * *
Luo Jincheng was in need of a slow archer.
The waste people were planning something; he could feel it but knew nothing about the details. They demanded that Luo Jincheng produce the men responsible for the attempted murder of Mimi; otherwise, they’d refuse to return to work. Luo understood that the demand was but a cover for something far more painful.
In the Web of the unrestricted-bitrate world, even an ordinary person had access to various tools to track down fleeting targets. Take the analogy of a hunt: a hunter armed with bow and arrows looking for prey in the forest could choose to upgrade his weapon to a high-precision automatic rifle augmented with a night-vision scope, infrared detectors, or a sonar positioning system; he could also choose to ride in a bipedal exoskeleton armor instead of being on foot to increase mobility; he could also use a shotgun and lure the target into moving, thereby exposing itself for the killing shot.
But Silicon Isle was a restricted-bitrate zone. That meant everything was slowed down. Any data stream that exceeded the threshold rate would set off alarms and draw the attention of the public security agency. The hunter might think himself a praying mantis after a cicada, but a far more powerful hunter, a siskin, was watching him. Here, only bows and arrows were safe to use as weapons. However, this didn’t even touch upon the real difficulties. Imagine if the speed of light were reduced a hundred million times: by the time the image of the prey three meters away struck your retina, activating the nerve impulses that would result in vision, the information was already a full second out of date. Even if your prey were subject to the same laws and had to move slowly, the effectiveness of any positioning system you might call upon would be diminished geometrically. Hunting in such a world was not much better than a blind man looking for a needle that had fallen into the sea.
The professional slow archer came into existence in response to the difficulty of tracking data in
a restricted-bitrate zone. Like most bounty hunters, they handled jobs that were risky, of dubious legality, and could not be dealt with through official channels. This was the chief competitive advantage of the slow archer.
The slow archers described the secret of their success as “spreading the net by slow arrows.” Conceptually, this was analogous to shooting tens of thousands of arrows simultaneously in every direction, but the arrows were connected to each other by invisible links of information. Through the gaps between the trees of this restricted-bitrate forest, the arrows passed slowly, so slowly that they were almost standing still, until they wove an airtight web with their dense trails. All the hunter had to do then was to wait until the prey ran into the web. One touch was enough: all the linked arrows nearby would concentrate on the spot and slowly, but forcefully, tear the prey apart and nail it to the tree.
Metaphors provided visual clarity: shadows flashing through the woods like the wavering lines produced by high-speed schlieren photography; dust and falling leaves disturbed by the flight of the arrows, twirling, tumbling, twinkling in the sunlight; the mixture of the somber scent of humus in the soil and the fragrance of flowers, fruits, and green leaves, stimulating the most sensitive olfactory receptors; even the expectation of the warm liquid spewing from wounds in the prey and its salty, rusty tang.
None of this, of course, existed in the digital world. In their place were highly abstract algorithms and programs that turned the complicated, messy real world into a set of mathematical models and topological spaces. Like a real spiderweb, the web would be deformed by any insect that got caught in it, and the rate at which such deformation progressed exceeded the rate at which information might be transmitted under the restricted-bitrate regulations. In this world, the shortest path between two points was no longer a straight line. Although the technique seemed to defy human intuition and logic, it had proven to be effective.
Just like the upgraded version of the computer virus that had resulted in the bitrate lockdown that ruined Silicon Isle.
Luo Jincheng walked into a hardware store with the name Zhenchang. Inside, it was as dark as the inside of a coal mine. After his eyes had adjusted to the dimness, he was stunned by the rows of preindustrial implements hanging on the walls. The inefficient tools of another age glinted with a metallic light, the culmination of hundreds or even thousands of hours of manual labor and technique, exuding a primitive but sturdy beauty. Each tool was handmade and thus endowed with a unique shape, including blemishes, as though imbued with fragments of the maker’s soul. This was a quality that the perfect molds of modern mass production could not match.
Luo took down a strangely shaped short machete. A tiger-face insignia was engraved on the hilt, near the throat of the scabbard. The blade itself reflected a matte light, rough and cold.
“A fine weapon,” exclaimed Luo. “Except it’s a bit too fast.”
“Too fast?” The young store attendant wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “Do you mean it’s too sharp? Are you interested in decorative blades without a cutting edge, perhaps?”
“I want something slower.”
The young man looked thoughtful for a moment. “How slow exactly?”
“As slow as the water in Dual Tides Reflecting the Moon.”
“Follow me.” The young man stepped aside to reveal an even darker passageway, indicating that Luo should enter.
Luo Jincheng felt that at first he was ascending, and then descending. Several times, he was worried that his head was going to bump into a wall, but the passage was far more spacious than he imagined, though the humid, hot air was difficult to bear. After walking for a while, they saw light in the distance, filled with watery mist. It was a door, and the powerful chill of air-conditioning seeped through the cracks.
“Elder Brother Tiger, someone’s looking for you.” The young man brought Luo Jincheng through the door and then respectfully backed out.
This might have been the dirtiest and messiest room Luo Jincheng had ever seen in his life, barely better than the waste people’s scrap-storage sheds, filled with buzzing flies. Countless coils of wire lay on the floor like intestines, and the wires climbed onto various pieces of machinery so that there was almost no room to stand. A set of high-powered air conditioners droned, spewing white mist and cooling the computers on floor-to-ceiling racks, where green lights flickered and the ceaseless humming of all the machines called to mind a busy beehive.
“Hard Tiger,” a slow archer of some renown, hunched over a tiny desk in the corner, draped in a black hoodie. The multiple hi-def displays in front of him were divided into numerous subscreens, some showing scrolling numbers, some flashing through webpages, some compiling code, and a few exhibiting nude bodies trembling and moaning.
The man was absorbed by a bowl of hot kway teow rice noodles with meatballs, slurping and chewing loudly. Luo Jincheng stood behind him, waiting patiently.
Finally, Hard Tiger lifted his head and let out a satisfied burp. “To what do I owe the pleasure of Boss Luo’s company?”
In the corner of one of the screens, Luo Jincheng saw the live feed from the closed-circuit cameras in the hardware store, as well as the data retrieved by the computer based on recognizing his face.
“Brother Hard Tiger’s eyes are indeed as keen as the legends about them. Since you’re no doubt well informed concerning recent events, I won’t waste your time. I’d like you to keep an eye on the digital activities of a few individuals for me.”
“A few? Surely Boss Luo is being modest! I think the waste people under your control number at least in the four digits.” Hard Tiger turned around, revealing a sleep-deprived, scruffy face under the hood. “Even the strikers alone are in the hundreds.”
“These are details—”
“The price depends on details.”
“Are you worried that I won’t be good for it?”
“I’m worried that no one would dare to collect a debt from you.”
“Fine, I’ll pay half up front.” Luo Jincheng’s eyes roamed unpleasantly as he estimated the damage. “The other half will be paid when you finish.”
“You’ll pay seventy percent up front. Moreover, Boss Luo”—Hard Tiger smiled confidently; in the Silicon Isle topolect, his nickname, Ngên Houn18, meant “absolutely, certainly”—“I need you to agree to something.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d like you to move the shopping lane you’re planning one street over to the east. I don’t want to move, and my neighbors don’t want to relocate to the new district either, where we’d be next to the waste people. This street is an insignificant piece of your portfolio; you’d hardly miss it, but as long as Silicon Isle is stuck in a restricted-bitrate zone, you’ll need a slow archer.”
Luo Jincheng quirked an eyebrow and felt a stab of pain in the palm of his hand—he had, without realizing it, been holding on to the machete with the tiger insignia. He unsheathed the machete, and the blade reflected Hard Tiger’s shocked, twisted expression. In a single, swift motion, he swung the weapon at Hard Tiger, and just as the edge was about to come into contact with flesh, his wrist twisted and the machete stabbed into the desk forcefully, spilling wood splinters everywhere.
“Deal,” Luo Jincheng answered with an easy smile, as though he had just convinced himself.
* * *
Taking advantage of the darkening twilight, Li Wen returned to the village with dozens of waste people who had been released for “having committed only minor offenses.” So many had been involved in the mass incident that the limited Silicon Isle police force was overwhelmed, and prolonged detention and formal charges for everyone were out of the question. Besides, they really hadn’t done that much; so, after their roles were recorded in their permanent digital records, they were let go with only a verbal warning. The unlucky soul who had wounded Chen Kaizong, on the other hand, had been beaten to within an inch of his life and was in prison, awaiting trial.
“You really know how to pic
k your target,” the officer entering records into the computer had joked with them. “Of all the people there, you managed to injure the only American and thus escalated a civil dispute into an international incident.”
“How could a kidnapping resulting in such severe injuries be dismissed as a ‘civil dispute’?” asked Li Wen. “Mimi is barely an adult!”
“We’re investigating.” The officer shifted to bureaucratese. “We will endeavor to make a full and complete report.”
“We don’t want a report! We want justice!”
“If you keep this up, I’m happy to invite you to wait for justice in these cells.”
Li Wen clenched his teeth and said no more. He sorted out his thoughts: as soon as he was free, he would order his most trusted lieutenants to carry out his plan. The scene of Mimi’s collapse at the Luo mansion replayed in his mind constantly, interrupting his brooding like a cold claw climbing down from his spinal column, grabbing hold of his innards and shaking them about. He knew that it was a manifestation of his guilt.
Finally, he was back at his own shack: dim, dirty, smelly, messy, but it put him at peace. Home, sweet home.
“Listen, your job is to modify the decision logic programming for all the chipped dogs. As soon as anyone from the Luo clan approaches, make them bark.” The film on the chest of the young man Li Wen was addressing lit up with the purple character for “war,” and he jogged away from the shack to carry out his instructions.
“You, over there, take a few people and bring back the mecha from Tide Gazing Beach.”
“You, head over to the territories of the Chen and Lin clans and assess the situation; tell our brothers there to be ready for new orders.”
Like a general who has finished issuing orders, Li Wen sighed. Al most immediately, however, something he had been most worried about pulled his nerves taut again.