The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin

by Cixin Liu

  This was how the Curse 1.0 was rediscovered. Its finder upgraded the entire code of the virus, making it compatible with modern operating system and so guaranteed its survival.

  It had become the Curse 2.0. The original creator of the Curse 1.0 now became known as “Curse Progenitor” and the IT-Archaeologist who updated the code was tagged as “Curse Upgrader”.

  The moment the Curse 2.0 appeared on the web found Cixin and Haitian standing around a trash can by the Taiyuan Train Station. They were squabbling over a half a pack of instant noodles that they had just liberated from the can. The last five years had been a valley of trials and tribulations for the two. Each had devoted himself to his part of their three million character, 10-volume science fiction and fantasy epic. They had titled their works Three Thousand Bodies and The Infinite Odyssey, respectively. Both totally and fully believed in the project, but as yet had been unable to find a publisher. So they had sold off everything, including their homes, and drawn an advance on their pensions to self-publish the works. In the end, Three Thousand Bodies sold 15 copies and The Infinite Odyssey 27 copies. After all their works had found a grand total of 42 readers, and every science fiction fan knew that that was a lucky number. After hosting a grand – and of course self-financed – book signing, they had begun their life on the streets.

  Luckily, there were few places that were more inviting to the homeless than Taiyuan. The trash cans in the extravagant and luxurious metropolis offered an abundant supply of food. Recently a few abandoned On-the-Go-Pills had even made their appearance in Taiyuan's trash. Finding a place to stay was not much of a problem either. Another way Taiyuan had emulated Dubai was in its installation of air-conditioned bus-stops. Also, if they ever got tired of life on the streets, they could always stay in a relief station for a few days. There they would not only receive food and shelter but other benefits as well. Taiyuan's long-thriving sex industry had responded to the government's appeals and established Sunday as a sex relief day for disadvantaged groups. The relief stations were one of the areas where volunteers from the red-light districts provided their services. In the city's Social Happiness Indicator Survey, homeless beggars ranked first and so the two authors could only regret not having devoted themselves to this lifestyle even sooner.

  The time they relished most of all, however, was their weekly invitation to dinner by the editorial department of the Science Fiction King, usually at a high-end restaurant. Taiyuan's Science Fiction King was the quintessential sci-fi magazine, and was fully cognizant that the soul of this form of literature was the sense of wonder and alienation it engendered. Nowadays, high-tech fantasies had lost their ability to evoke these feelings. Technological marvels had become entirely prosaic events of everyday life. Low-tech fantasies, on the other hand, had become perfect vehicles for wonder and alienation. This led them to develop a retro-future style known as Counter-Wave Science Fiction. It enjoyed great success, heralding a second golden age of science fiction.

  Fully embracing the spirit of Counter-Wave Science Fiction, the editorial department of the Science Fiction King absolutely refused to make use of the internet or even computers. They only accepted handwritten documents and used movable-type printing presses to publish their magazine. They had gone so far as to build a luxurious stable next to their editorial offices and to acquire several dozen Mongolian horses, all easily in the same price range as a BMW. The magazine's employees used no other form of transportation, riding their absolutely off-line horses through the city. The inhabitants of Taiyuan had learned that the clip-clop of a horse's hooves was a sure signal that someone from SFK was passing by.

  The editorial departments frequent dinners with Cixin and Haitian were not only in acknowledgement of the science fiction stories they had written in the past; the invitations came because, even though the science fiction they were writing was now no longer really science fiction at all, the two of them lived and embodied the ideals of Counter-Wave Science Fiction. They were, after all, completely off-line, living a very low-tech life indeed.

  Neither the SFK team, nor Cixin or Haitian, could have ever guessed that this mutual lifestyle would come to determine their fate.

  The Curse 2.0 had spread for seven years. Then one day a woman, who would later be known as the “Curse Weaponizer”, found the virus. After meticulously studying the code of the Curse 2.0, she again upgraded it. The Curse Weaponizer keenly felt the 17-year-old hate and resentment the Curse Progenitor had poured into her creation. The Weaponizer, too, had felt that most painful betrayal and she, too, had found herself consumed by a burning hate and an endless litany of unspoken curses. But the two women were not entirely alike: The Weaponizer thought that the other girl 17 years ago had been rather pathetic and silly: Just what had she really achieved? Had she harmed even a single hair on Sa Bi's head? Her curse could have just as well been the act of some peasant angrily sticking needles into a voodoo doll. The only thing she had achieved was to deepen her own depression. Now, the Weaponizer thought, let your elder sister help you. (This was a rather silly way for the Weaponizer to put it; the Curse Progenitor was almost certainly still alive and much older than her). But in essence, it was effective.

  Seventeen years had passed to the day since the Curse was born and a new era, unlike anything before it, had arrived. It was the dawn of a world completely caught in the web. Seventeen years ago, only computers had been online. Now, the web had become something akin to an immense Christmas tree, with almost every imaginable object another blinking light, hanging from the web's innumerable branches. In the home, for example, every single electric appliance was connected and controlled via the web. Even nail clippers and bottle openers were no exception. The former could analyze the cut nail matter and recommend a calcium deficiency via text or email. The latter could determine if the spirits in the bottle were the genuine article and send a notification if the bottle had won a sweepstakes. The bottle openers were even able force breaks in drinking if its user had become excessively intoxicated.

  It all gave the Curse the opportunity to assume direct control of hardware.

  The Curse Weaponizer added a new function to the Curse 2.0: If Sa Bi is riding a taxi, kill him in a car crash!

  In fact, this was a rather simple operation for the AI-programmers of this age. These days, cars were already completely autonomous, piloted solely through the web. When a passenger swiped his credit card as he hired a taxi, the new Curse could identify him via the information on the card. Once Sa Bi had been identified as the patron of a taxi, the ways in which he could be killed were virtually limitless. The simplest and most direct was to simply crash him into a building or to send his taxi of a bridge. After having given it some thought, the Curse Weaponizer changed her mind, deciding against a simple car crash. She instead developed a far more romantic method of killing, worthy of her younger sister of 17 years ago (like everyone else, the Curse Weaponizer was in fact wholly unaware what Sa Bi had done to the Progenitor, and she may well have been fundamentally wrong about the man).

  Once the fully upgraded Curse learned that its target had boarded the vehicle, it would completely ignore the requested destination. Instead the taxi would set off on a crazy ride up north, right into a stretch of land that in recent years had become a desert. The car would stop in this wasteland, cutting off all communication systems (by then the Curse would have already taken up residence in the car's computer and no longer needed a connection to the web). This ensured that the taxi would become almost impossible to find. If someone should approach by pure chance, the taxi would just hide itself in another corner of the desert. All the while, the car's doors would remain firmly shut. Sa Bi would be doomed: In winter, he would freeze to death; in summer, he would die of heat exposure. And in any other season, he would die of dehydration and hunger.

  And so the Curse 3.0 was born, and it was a real curse.

  The Curse Weaponizer was an AI-artist and a member of a new generation on its way to the post-human. They made a
n art out of controlling the web, not for practical purposes, but to fulfill their sense aesthetics. Of course, aesthetics had become a markedly different concept from what they had been almost two decades ago. These artists might, for instance, make all the taxis of the city honk their horns at precisely timed moments to produce a kind of melody or they might let the brightly lit windows of large restaurants form a picture. The options were limitless.

  The Curse 3.0 took its place amongst these works; it had, regardless of its very real world implications, become an outlandish piece of AI-art. On the occasion of the 2026 Shanghai Biennale of Modern Art, it received high critical praise, even though it was declared illegal due to its potential to cause bodily harm. This ruling did not stop it from spreading across the web however and soon a multitude of AI-artists began to expand and modify this piece of now collective art. The Curse quickly evolved, receiving an ever-expanding portfolio of functions:

  > If Sa Bi is at home, choke the life out of him with gas fumes! This was comparatively simple, as every family's kitchen was controlled via the web. This connectivity allowed the heads of a household to remotely prepare meals, even from outside the house. This of course included the option of turning on the gas. The Curse 3.0 could and would obviously deactivate the kitchen's gas alarm as it went to work.

  > If Sa Bi is at home, kill him with fire! Also, very simple; there were many things in houses, including the gas, that could be set alight. Hair mousse, for example. It, like all things, was controlled through the web (this allowed hairstylists to remotely do one's hair at home). The fire alarm and fire extinguishers, of course, could also be disabled.

  > If Sa Bi is taking a bath, kill him with boiling water! Much like the above and extremely simple.

  > If Sa Bi is sick in the hospital, kill him with a toxic prescription! This one was slightly more complicated. Getting the target to receive a specific prescription was easy enough as the pharmacies of modern hospitals dispensed all their prescriptions autonomously and their systems were of course all connected to the web. The crux of the issue was the packaging of the medication. Sa Bi, despite his unfortunate name, was no idiot and he would have to take the medication of his own volition. To achieve this end, the Curse 3.0 had to track the medicine back to the factory where it was produced and packaged and then follow it down the sales-chain. Ensuring that the box of deadly medicine was sold to the target was somewhat complicated, but quite achievable. And in the eyes of an AI-artist, the more complicated it was, the more enjoyable the finished work would be.

  > If Sa Bi is in the air, kill him in the plane! This one was far from simple and significantly more complicated than taking control of a taxi. The problem was that the Curse 3.0 was not to kill others. It was almost certain that Sa Bi would not be traveling on a private plane and so crashing the plane was out of the question. The solution was the following plan: First, suddenly decompress the cabin in which Sa Bi was sitting (by opening a cabin door or by some other method). Then, when all passengers put on their oxygen masks, prevent Sa Bi's mask from providing oxygen.

  > If Sa Bi is eating, choke him to death! While this may sound absurd, it was quite easily achieved. The super-accelerated modern life had led to super-accelerated fast food. This food, known as On-the-Go-Pills, looked, as the name suggested, like small pills. The On-the-Go-Pills were incredibly dense, heavy as a bullet in the hand. Once ingested, they expanded in the belly, much like hardtack used to work. The key for the Curse was to tamper with the manufacturing process, producing a super-rapidly expanding On-the-Go-Pill and then controlling the sales process to ensure that Sa Bi was the one who bought it. Then, when he popped the pill at some time during his work day and washed it down with some water, it would basically explode in his throat.

  Driven by the boundless creativity of the AI-artists, the list went on and on

  But the Curse 3.0 never found its target and never killed anyone. Back in the days of the Curse 1.0, Sa Bi had been seriously harassed and hounded by reporters. It left him with no other option than to change his name. The cursed even changed his family name. There were few people named Sa to begin with, and Sa Bis – due to the name's unfortunate connotations – were rarer still. In short, there was no other Sa Bi in Taiyuan who might have suffered the curse in place of its original target.

  Furthermore, the data stored in the virus had not been changed in 17 years. As far as the Curse was concerned, Sa Bi was still enrolled at the university and living in a dorm. This made finding the real Sa Bi almost impossible. One version of the Curse was outfitted with a function to track its target by infiltrating the records of the Public Security Department, but the virus failed in this endeavor.

  In the following four years, the Curse 3.0 remained nothing but a piece of AI-art.

  Then, it fell into the hands of the Curse Wildcarders: Cixin and Haitian.

  Wildcards were an ancient concept, originating from the time of our mentors (this was what the age of the ancient operating systems, the DOS, was now called). The most commonly used wildcards were “*” and “?”. These two characters could stand in for other characters in a string of characters. “?” referred to a single character, while “*” referred to any number of characters and was the most frequently used wildcard. For instance, “Liu *” referred to every person with the family name “Liu”; “Shanxi*” referred to every string of characters starting with “Shanxi”. A single “*” referred to any and all possible combinations of characters.

  Because of this, the “del *.*” was a particularly nasty little command from the time of our mentors (“del” being short for “delete” and all file names in DOS being composed of a name and an extension separated by a “dot”). As operating systems evolved, the wildcards continued to exist, but due to the convenience of graphical user interfaces, later generations almost never resorted to command line inputs. Normal users gradually forgot about wildcards altogether. Even so, they could still be used in software and that included the software running the Curse 3.0.

  It was the Mid-Autumn Festival, one of China's most important public holidays. The Moon hung low over the glittering lights of Taiyuan like a vaguely moldy wheel of cheese, shining down on Cixin and Haitian who were sitting on a bench in May Day Square. They were just laying out their trash-loot from that afternoon: They had found five half-full (or empty) bottles of spirits, two opened bags of Pingyao Beef slices, an almost full bag of Jinci Donkey Meat and three On-the-Go-Pills. Night had recently fallen and the two were ready to celebrate.

  Cixin had also retrieved a broken notebook computer from one of the trash cans, professing that he would be able to repair it if his entire lifetime of working with computers was not to be for naught. He was squatting at the side of the bench, intently fiddling with the machine. All the while, Haitian was still not finished reminiscing about the sexual assistance he had received at the Relief Station that afternoon. As he worked, Cixin turned to Haitian and enthusiastically encouraged him to eat all three of the On-the-Go-Pills. His plan was simple; he wanted more of the actual meat and booze. Haitian would not be fooled, however, and refused them altogether.

  The computer was soon back in working order, its screen emitting a faint blue glow as it started up. The moment Haitian saw that, to his considerable surprise, the notebook had a functioning wireless internet connection, he snatched the computer from Cixin's hands. He quickly opened the QQ chat client, but his User-Id had long since expired. He clicked on to the Odyssey of China Fantasy web-page, SkyCity, Douban, the Shuimu Tsinghua BBS, but over and over again he found nothing; the links had all long-since disappeared. Finally, he put the computer down.

  “Oh…” He heaved a heavy sigh. “‘Long ago a man rode off on a yellow crane,’” he quoted the almost 13-centuries-old Chinese poetry.

  Cixin, who had been combining bottles of spirits, looked at the screen and continued the poem. “‘Once the yellow crane left, it never returned...’”

  He took back the notebook and began to study its
contents. He found a large number of hacker tools and virus samples installed on it. Most probably he had just repaired a hacker's computer. Maybe the AI-police had been in hot pursuit and the hacker had quickly ditched it in the trash can. Imaging the possibilities, he opened a file on the desktop. It was an already decompiled C-program.

  Cixin recognized it: He was looking at the Curse 3.0. Casually perusing the code, he recalled his years as an e-poet. Driven more by alcohol than reason, he began scanning the targeting section of the code,

  At his side, Haitian was yammering on about the incredible science fiction of those long gone years and before long Cixin, too, was caught up in nostalgia. Pushing the notebook away, he joined Haitian in reminiscing.

  He remembered those years and his stories written from an omniscient perspective, so full of virility. His epics of destruction had elicited such a strong response from men, letting their hearts overflow with ardent militaristic and fanatical fervor. But now, only 15 books…he had sold only 15 books! Fuck it! He took another large gulp. He began by channeling his hate toward the male readers and then on to all men.

  And has he did he stared right at the target parameters of the Curse 3.0. “Modhern men are allll bashtardhs,” he slurred as he changed the target name from “Sa Bi” to “*”. Then, he deftly altered his occupation and address from “enrolled in Department XXX”, “majoring in XXX”, “in class XXX”, “residing in dorm XXX”, “room XXX” to “*”, “*”, “*”, “*”, “*”. He only left the gender parameter keyed to “male”.