by Chen Qiufan
“Where’s Mimi? Take me to her immediately.”
Since the hospital’s security personnel could no longer be trusted, the unconscious Mimi had been brought to the home of a back-alley doctor who had dedicated himself to helping the waste people. Although the conditions were primitive, the place did have all the necessary medical equipment. Dr. Jin—that’s what everyone called him—attached the diagnostic terminals to Mimi’s body and frowned at the chaotic numbers and figures dancing across the monitors. Her blood sugar level was dropping precipitously and was now lower than the critical threshold necessary to provide sufficient energy for regular cardiopulmonary functions.
“She’s … hungry,” Dr. Jin proclaimed his diagnosis.
This was only the first step, of course. Further analysis showed that 83 percent of Mimi’s energy was being consumed by her brain activities. Such brain metabolic levels were unheard of in any mammal, or any creature on Earth with a brain. Similarly, no regular food-intake methods could sustain such astonishing levels of energy consumption.
However, every back-alley doctor had his own secret cures.
Dr. Jin attached an auto-injector to the inside of Mimi’s elbow; then, he retrieved six bright red sealed vials from a hidden storage area in the semibasement.
“These are all I have left: high-energy fructose mixtures reserved for military use. Each dose is capable of maintaining a supply of ATP for twelve hours. The Special Forces rely on this to remain alert for hours without the need to eat or sleep. However, once these vials are used up, you’ll have to find your own solutions.”
Thus, by the time Li Wen saw Mimi, she no longer looked exhausted; in fact, she looked overenergized. The corners of Mimi’s mouth were slightly lifted and her eyes wide open, gazing at Li Wen curiously as though she had no memory of anything that had passed. After searching in her brain for a while, she calmly pronounced Li Wen’s full name—instead of the familiar “Brother Wen.”
“Mimi? Is it really you?” Li Wen blurted out, and immediately regretted the rash question.
“Who else?” Mimi rewarded him with her familiar smile.
Li Wen tried to get rid of the strange suspicion floating at the back of his mind. Of course. Who else could she be? A powerful joy replaced the anxiety that had been plaguing him, and relief flooded through his body. He turned on the recording feature of his augmented-reality glasses, and a green light came on.
“Say hi! We should spread this good news to our people.”
Mimi appeared in his vision, but for some reason, her image began to blur, flicker, as though some invisible outside light source were illuminating her from infinitely far away: warm, serene, and resplendent. Although he was looking at her straight on, Li Wen had the impression that Mimi had grown much taller and acquired an awe-inducing aura that made it impossible to stare at her. A barely audible chant seemed to hover over the scene, and he couldn’t tell if it was the result of synesthesia caused by what he was seeing or if there really was enhanced audio from some decoded stream. Mimi’s smile seemed to possess a kind of magic that made his heart swell and feel moved without knowing why—he even felt the impulse to cry. For a moment, he almost thought he saw someone else: the mysterious face of a Western woman was superimposed over Mimi’s. He thought he had seen that face before.
Li Wen tried to rationally analyze the situation, but his efforts were crushed by the whirling, colorful halos emanating from Mimi’s figure. All that was left in his heart was a pure sense of worshipful devotion, colored by a trace of fear.
“I’m back,” the revived goddess declared to the world.
The revelation spread among the waste people like a nuclear chain reaction.
14
For some reason, Scott could not drive the story from his mind.
Since the FDA strictly regulated clinical trials conducted in the United States, many high-risk drug trials had been moved to developing countries: Iaşi, Romania; New Delhi, India; Mégrine, Tunisia; Santiago del Estero, Argentina—in these corruption-ridden, mismanaged regions of the world, hundreds, even thousands, volunteered to be trial subjects for pennies. Most of the money went to the hospitals, the doctors, and the recruiters of the trial subjects, while the pharmaceutical companies obtained the data they needed to secure FDA approval and then made billions with the new drugs.
Many of the subjects were underage and had to lie to be in the trials. Poverty meant that they couldn’t afford expensive modern medical care, and their bodies were thus highly sensitive to the active ingredients of trial drugs—like pristine laboratory mice. For their troubles, they received a few wrinkled dollar bills, a free breakfast, unknown side effects, the risk of a lengthy incubation period, and a high probability of dying from complications.
This was the price of progress: winners take all.
However, SBT wouldn’t take this particular path for outsourcing. Their project, having to do with the brain-machine interface, required too much secrecy and involved too many risks. SBT managed to find another safe haven: chimpanzees, who share 99.4 percent of their genes with humans and whose intelligence levels are comparable to children five to seven years old.
The SBT engineers surgically replaced parts of the skulls of the test subjects with prostheses to make it easy to stimulate the brain with various electric signals and observe the reactions and changes in neuronal clusters in specific regions of the brain. This was a semi-invasive procedure that avoided the damage that could be caused by probes and guaranteed the precision and strength of the stimuli.
The engineers devised a set of reward/punishment mechanisms akin to Skinner boxes. Based on accumulated experimental data, they built a simple mapping model for motor nerves so that the chimpanzees could, after sufficient training, mentally direct robot arms to grasp food out of the reach of their physical limbs. Experimenters could also input specific signals to stimulate the fear or reward regions in the chimpanzee brain to direct the animals’ movements and accomplish simple tasks.
Some genius on the team installed virus batteries in the prosthetic skull, and the result was a warm-blooded, furry, remote-controlled female chimpanzee. The engineers voted to name her “Eva” in memory of a female robot from an old animated film.
Eva demonstrated unusual learning abilities. She could even solve a game of the Tower of Hanoi on her own without any hints. A star of the experimental team, she received special treatment not given to the other chimpanzees: her own room, an unlimited daily supply of tropical fruits, and her favorite, Korean gulbi, the salted and dried yellow croaker. Some even bought her ballet shoes until management put a stop to the escalating silliness.
A bold proposal was put forward to inject Eva with drugs that would enhance the strength of her synaptic connections to increase her intelligence. No one seriously objected, because the project team had already spent a great deal of money while they were still far from achieving the goal of a working prototype for the brain-machine interface.
Unexpectedly, the “enlightened” Eva regressed in all her test scores. The chimp seemed anxious, frightened, depressed. Surveillance recordings showed that when Eva was alone, she would manipulate her lips and nose in various ways while blowing air out in an attempt to cause the soft tissues to vibrate. The researchers concluded that she was trying to imitate the human ability to make sounds by modulating the air expelled from the lungs. She was trying to talk like people.
Ultimately, Eva failed. Millions of years of evolution could not be bridged in a single night.
The experimenters designed a special touch keyboard for her and taught her some simple concepts via a combination of electrical stimulation and pattern recognition: “banana,” “person,” “happy,” “afraid,” “eat,” and so forth. But they encountered great difficulties when teaching Eva to distinguish “Eva” from “other chimps.” Eva just couldn’t seem to separate herself from the other members of her species. The linguists tried to teach her the concept of self, but she responded with anger, howls
, and a terror that she showed by covering her eyes with her hands.
Finally, Eva expressed her wish using a long, long sentence. Her dark eyes full of layered sorrow like the folds of an agate, she pursed her soft lips repeatedly and caressed her belly. Eva was lonely. Eva wanted to return to the other chimps, even though she was no longer the original Eva.
The experimental team threw a big going-home party for Eva. They dressed Eva in a custom-made evening gown, presented her with a cake, had her blow out the candles, and treated her just like a real human being. Then they helped her undress and took her to the large enclosure where the other chimpanzees were housed.
The humans did not understand the looks in the eyes of the other chimpanzees in that moment. They waited outside the enclosure, expecting to see some warm reunion scene out of a soap opera. Stupid human chauvinists.
Almost simultaneously, all the chimpanzees curled up in the corners of the enclosure leapt at Eva as if they had gone mad. Howling, they bit her with their canines. Hatred and rage spilled out of their eyes, as if an alien soul were hiding in the chimpanzee body in front of them, deceiving them like a skilled charlatan. But now, now they were going to reveal the truth about her.
The stupefied experimenters finally recovered from their shock, retrieved tasers and tranquilizer guns, and dispersed the out-of-control chimpanzees with great effort. What remained of Eva was only a mangled corpse. Eva’s sorrowful, bleeding eyes stared lifelessly up at the ceiling, and her expression was one of utter puzzlement. Her prosthetic skull had been pried open, showing the pink brain underneath, already half eaten.
The prosthesis lay next to the body like an exquisite bowl with a milk-white pool of brain matter at the bottom, bearing silent testimony to another failure of civilization.
It was sealed and kept in frozen storage as a piece of evidence. Serial number: SBT-VBPII32503439.
* * *
Kaizong couldn’t help wanting to compare the differences between the worlds seen through his two eyes.
Alternately covering one eye or the other with his hand, he slowly swept his gaze across the room. The pure white sheets on the bed glowed softly; the beige wall next to the beige curtains demonstrated minute gradations of hue and fine textures; the composite table and chairs were accurately represented in perspective; each small object on the table cast a blurry shadow, sketching out its spatial position in a manner indistinguishable from normal vision. If he had to find something to complain about, it was that when he moved his right eye too quickly, objects remained unusually clear instead of blurring slightly as he was used to.
The user manual explained that this was because the prosthetic eye’s moving-image processing algorithms still needed to be improved; the customer was urged to wait for the next patch.
Focused by a highly integrated, complex optical system, the light of the world landed on a flexible polyimide-based artificial retina whose area was only sixteen square millimeters and whose thickness was only one hundred microns. Specialized chips then converted the light into coded pulses emitted by millions of nanometer-scale microelectrodes. The signals traveled through the retinal ganglia, the optic tract, and the lateral geniculate complex to finally end up inside the primary visual cortex, where they were interpreted as vision.
The prosthetic eye allowed the user to recover 99.95 percent of normal vision; indeed, it replaced the most exquisite, most mysterious product of billions of years of evolution—the eye—and might even have improved on it in some ways.
A layer of capillaries covers the human retina; light has to pass through the blood vessels and nerves to reach the light-sensitive rods and cones. The shadows of the blood vessels reduce the quality of the light, and the optic nerve head is the cause for the anatomical blind spot. Our eyes must constantly jitter in saccadic movements to scan the visual field so that the brain can synthesize the faulty images, eliminate the shadows, and combine them into a whole picture.
These structural flaws add to the brain’s processing load and make our eyes especially fragile—any bleeding or bruising would result in shadows that affect vision. More seriously, the photoreceptor layer is only loosely attached to the retinal pigment epithelium, so that even slight trauma may cause retinal detachment, leading to permanent loss of vision.
The prosthetic eye, on the other hand, could completely remedy all these flaws with technical advances.
If you are only using one prosthetic eye, we will simulate the flaws of the unimproved human eye algorithmically to maintain balance between the two eyes, said the user manual.
Kaizong pushed open the door and stepped onto the balcony. The sun was too bright. He squinted his left eye while his right eye had already reacted by sharply constricting the aperture, softening his view of the scene. He hadn’t just changed one eye; the entire world had changed.
I need time to adjust to this. Kaizong felt a growing sense of unease.
From the balcony he could see a beautiful garden with trees, winding paths, pavilions, an artificial lake, and rock formations. Many patients accompanied by their visitors were strolling through the garden to regain strength.
A little boy dressed in a hospital gown was running through the flower garden, followed by a few older kids in some kind of game. Kaizong tried to focus on the object moving rapidly at their feet. Theoretically, the prosthetic eye’s focal range could exceed the human eye’s ten times over, but the default factory setting was equal to regular vision. Customers all over the world loved to install augmented-reality software in prosthetic eyes to enhance their functions, although in restricted-bitrate zones, the data delay could impede vision. This meant that the preinstalled network module in Kaizong’s Cyclops VII was practically useless.
The object at the children’s feet was a ball, but not a common ball. The ball seemed to move on its own, tracing out a patternless path while flashing in different colors. Each time the ball changed its color, they tried to kick it using different techniques to alter its path, and then erupted into cheers or shouts of frustration. Kaizong was not familiar with this new game at all.
The little boy was undoubtedly the best player. His gait was swift and agile, like that of a gazelle leaping across the prairie. He seemed to casually land each time at the precise spot where he could easily extend his foot before everyone else to tap the ball lightly, causing it to change color. It was as if he were manipulating the ball with his hands rather than feet.
The game was over. The others lifted the boy up to celebrate his victory. The legs of his pants rolled up, revealing two silvery-gray structures incongruously planted in his sneakers, skinless, muscleless, glinting coldly in the sun. The other kids gazed at his prosthetic limbs with envy and touched them gingerly, as if coveting some Christmas present. They yearned to possess limbs like these someday, even if they had to give up their flesh-and-blood limbs in exchange.
Strangely, ever since Kaizong’s surgery, the scene with the witch and Mimi replayed in his dreams repeatedly. Everything he had once believed in—science, logic, philosophical materialism—had crumbled in this farce. He could no longer tell which parts were mere fraudu lent stage magic and which parts real. At the same time, his growing uncertainty was accompanied by a developing sense of empathy with the people of Silicon Isle: they belonged here. This sea, this air, this patch of land formed everything they believed in. They lived in accordance with their faith, no different from anyone else in the world.
Kaizong did not hate the waste person who had blinded him in the right eye; to the contrary, he felt ashamed of his old prejudices. The moral principles or faith of the waste people were no less worthy than those held by the intellectual elites of Boston University and were no farther from civilization. Their choices were in fact closer to the essence of life, an essence that had not changed in the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
Kaizong looked up at the distant sea. Its surface was like a sheet of paper being wrinkled constantly. Thin, long waves appeared like tea
rs, flickering like bits of mica; a page turned over, then another page, disappearing at the edge of the sandy beach. Clouds roiled in the sky, slowly swallowing the light from the sun. The world was no longer the world held on to by his father’s generation, and God was no longer the God they believed in. People now worshiped power far more than honesty, kindness, virtue. He wasn’t sure which was closer to truth.
He knew only that he was closer to Mimi, at least a little.
* * *
Scott forced his thoughts back to the present. The Ducati roared as it advanced through the bright sunlight. He felt sorrow for Eva, who could find no home, no world where she belonged, and for himself.
He had grown used to calling across oceans at midnight after much hesitation so that he could exchange a few meaningless words of greeting with Susan, his ex-wife, and then try to converse with his daughter. Tracy was popular at school; busy with parties, busy with dates, busy with rehearsals for her rock musical, Orange Blood. After a perfunctory “Love you, Daddy,” she would hang up before Scott could reply, leaving him alone in the silent darkness.
Home had already become a distant and abstract concept, in both space and time.
You can’t blame them; you really can’t.
From the day Scott had stubbornly tucked that old photograph into his wallet, he knew that the shadow would always follow him, perhaps until the day he died. But the consequences were still unanticipated. That shadow devoured the love, hope, and courage in his heart, and then spread to his wife and daughter and everyone around him like cancer.
Tracy told him, I don’t want you to always think of me as a three-year-old.
Susan told him, You’re no longer the man I knew. You’re like a bottomless pit; no matter how much patience and care we give you, your heart remains dark. I’m sorry, but I can’t live a life like that.
If Nancy were still alive, she would be about Mimi’s age now. Ever since he had met the waste girl in the ICU, Scott couldn’t help being reminded of his own daughter.