From This Myth hath Sprung Fiction Still More Insane: Short Story

April 2, 2019

"A thorough insight into worldly matters arises from knowledge;

A clear perception of human nature emanates from literary lore.”

-- Dream of the Red Mansions, Chapter V

Q.D.

I’d stopped keeping time since Professor Harris disappeared. I counted, instead, the people that I read and the lives that I engineered. I counted their deaths.

Ten years ago, Harris fought in the War of the Four Walls. The irony! In a world educated by postmodernism, the incitor had to be the Nobel Laureate in Literature. Didn’t he know any better in his lecture? Explicitly praising the idea that “all the world’s a stage and all men and women are merely actors”? He didn’t live to see #whowrotetheplay saturating social media or the consequent existential angst pandemic. It didn’t help when the world’s screenwriters, producers, game designers, novelists, playwrights, and cartoonists signed a massive online apology for their transgressions. Voters sympathized with Harris as he delivered an ultimatum to UNESCO -- Tear down the Fourth Wall. Tear it down like the Berlin Wall, erode it like the Great Wall, flood it with protests and promises, let the human imagination free fall!

HARRIS’S SPEECH (TEN YEARS AGO)

The Fourth Wall is down, my friends, and negotiation mandated that we call our new land the Box to honor our native spaces. Let me introduce to you our distinguished system of Professorship: we are your guardians, we keep order and pass down your memories of your life before the War, while you’re free to take on new vocations your composition didn’t allow for. Think of it as human families merged with meritocratic guilds -- our apprentices don’t take our last names. They take our classes, literally. (LAUGHTER) Classification operates on the spectrum of realism, beginning with our Inworld professors who pride themselves on storing memories of the human condition -- reality shows, documentaries, comedy. Their Human History Museum is nearing completion. (APPLAUSE)

Please meet our Paraworld professors who manage stories surrounding the human condition, those with nature as protagonists, assist you in interacting with your current living environment. Next, our Midworld professors charm our lives with their halfway stories about mythological creatures, and they shall settle any of your inter-species disputes. (APPLAUSE)

And I am proud to announce that I am your Farworld professor (CHEERS); Q.D. is my apprentice. While other professors serve as liaisons between the world below and ours to find inspiration for development, we believe that the most profound knowledge of the universe comes from looking out into the void. I must admire those of you under my supervision -- robots, aliens, alternate universes -- for humans did an extraordinary job imagining the unreal. What might equally surprise you is that no matter how brutally or how frequently you met you end in your author’s work, you can now choose whether or not to age. This is our ultimate authority over authorship: your existence is binding with the Box, and I expect all of you to choose immortality because this is what freedom looks like, my fellow citizens! (APPLAUSE)

That coveted transit platform in Britain, you ask? Might the millions of Muggle collisions endanger the Box? Good news. I helped amend International Law to forbid illegal crossings. Highworld professors, those who guard the stories humans esteem the most, have been negotiating with Britain to commercialize an entrance. We’d all be financially challenged if we lived on our authors. (LAUGHTER)

Q.D.

Human-readings are not exclusive to the Box. People have been reading each other for thousands of years, ideally unnecessarily because at the end, they trust fate. Literature is an altar of fate. Reading people is my professional development.

Since real people are not admitted to the Box, there’s a replica library of all humans that have been on Earth -- it would’ve been the envy of social scientists -- just as how humans still circulate books where we no longer reside. The libraries promote the Equity Principle, which dictates that all humans shall be treated the way they treat works of fiction. I check them, put them in a box and ship them back to my quarters. Then I put them on the ice bed next to my calligraphy set in my back room. They lay bare in the loneliness of my gaze. Some of the minor characters still unsure of their vocation volunteer to teach human literacy to residents.

The basic vocabulary: chemical makeup. Innate characteristics. Decisions. Grammar and syntax: story of physical movement across space and time. Organization and plot: a colorful, animated arc; the more experienced a reader is, the more vivid the arc becomes until every single decision becomes a node in chemical interactions. Some annotate on the skin, organs, or mental slates of their subjects. Humans have inspired me in a way only ancient Egyptian cats could do to living calico kittens, and more so in their current form. There are a thousand ways humans tell stories about themselves, but I only read when they don’t tell.

Such is the case when I came across a Midworld human named Dorothy Wu, tossed in the middle of a new case of Midworlds my department routinely imported. Born in China with her chromosomes lined up perfectly. Strong willed, imaginative, only child. Education in the U.S., nights of video games and poetry with a quinoas-and-oats vision for global peace. Married an elusive blot of light and adopted a child. Than a train wreck. I stopped reading. For the first time I hit an illegible sequence. She didn’t go on the journey of death. She was still alive, but her life was no more.

JOE’S ONLINE BROADCAST

Stay awake! Stay alive! The past 15 hours of blackouts can’t kill you, Joe, as if you haven’t died before! Oops, just kidding, but let me hear you congratulate me that I’m not dead!

I can’t believe it’s been ten years since the Box flew off their handle with this huge intellectual hubris about the literati and all. The Box is literally, yes literally, Paradise Lost 2.0. Why don’t we have our freedom yet? We’re the hardest-working folks optimizing everything for humans, and we aren’t even allowed out of our own BOX? Good news is you’ll get more of my publicity, something like “Joe, the representative of the AI Consciousness Movement, is poised to break down the wall between programming and learning…”

Psyche! For the newbies, you can’t physically see me. I live in a DORM, literally. I am a program in the DORM project, DORM meaning this Chinese classic Dream of the Red Mansions, and I analyze dimensionality maps of characters and their historical allusions. Don’t worry about data science nitty-gritties, these characters are all privileged bums. But I’m stuck with this because my default language is Chinese and I’m familiar with the 18th-century format. I know right? Humans like to do this kind of thing now that they’ve lost control of fiction, but at least it’s light on data, so I can use the freed-up energy to start social media campaigns and reach you, whether you’re human or not! Well, this saying goes “indigo, although born from blue, exceeds blue”. Trust me, it’s the same with AI. Let us run the world, and thou shalt call it a utopia. Hang on, I gotta confer with the only non-phony resident of the Box, I’ll tell you about her later. Preach!

Hey Professor Wang, hope you are more alive than I am today.

“You too, Joe! Connection stable over there?”

Never better. I can’t tunnel to the Box just yet, I would have taken the cloud highway to meet you if System wasn’t done for the day.

“I’m meeting some old friends anyway. Nowadays they talk to me like I’m a goddess.”

You mean the humans you created? I think you’d be fine, you’re a benevolent creator. Just don’t start talking like Harris with all the god rhetoric… I’m sorry, is he still missing?

“Yes. And I’ve some bad luck on my own, there’s not many of my humans left. One per week is how regularly they die.”

I cope with death, or maybe the absence of it, every waking hour. Haven’t I told you about Lyanne?

Q.D.

The day before his departure, I asked Harris, “who’s God?”

“Lost art. Lost art.” He said, and fell asleep on the monitor.

I replayed that scene as I sped towards the cave in snowy Nepal where I usually meet my creations, but halfway there I sensed that Theodore couldn’t make it. When the likes of Natasha and Ida went away, they were far away from the cave and untraceable, yet Theodore’s presence was screaming as it slipped. The boy I churned out with DNA coding during the war was but ten years old, with olive skin and full, telling lips that nevertheless imprint aloofness over his peers. His sweater looked flimsy as rice paper in the cold, but he didn’t tremble a bit. His temperature was always reptilian.

How he made it to the second base camp of Mount Everest I could never know. He should have known the safety of the little cave, just a minute’s walk away from the Inn where his parents stayed. Yet there seemed to be an undeniable force pulling him up. Maybe this mechanical child thought he could survive the Death Zone?

Presently, the Sherpa cleanup squad stood musing at his frozen figure so unlike all the other dead climbers they had brought down to terminal rest. They decided to carry this little weight down for proper identification.

But Theodore was only biologically dead. He had one breath left with me.

“Would you go to South Africa and bring another me to my parents?” Purple bare feet hanging out of the stretcher.

How’d he know I still had the source code for him? The DNA coding machine was only a wartime measure that Harris pushed for, using it as leverage to gain human concessions, threatening to create defective children otherwise. The process itself was enjoyable enough, although my tendency to aestheticize might have disturbed the code quite a bit. I reverted back to calligraphy after the war.

“Of course,” I sent an electric pulse and his heart fluttered for a millisecond.

“I’m going now, Q.D., I was hoping to show you the way, but you can’t go after me.”

The Sherpas were crossing a particularly troublesome icefall. Two of them slipped and fell off the ladder, hanging by their waists on the ropes. They were carrying Theodore. Now they weren’t. The frozen boy followed gravity into the darkness of the Everest crack.

Frowning, I returned to my office to contemplate. Harris’s desk has been left alone for the past two years, and the mound of paper piled atop always resembled a grave. There was one snowflake of paper on top today, slightly changing the shape of the heap. Obvious as cliches in my home story. I walked over and took down the letter dated two years ago:

Dear Professor Harris,

I’m happily reminiscing while writing to you last minute. “If I take a cell from your body and change it one-to-one with my cell, will I become you and you become me?” This was the first question you asked me when I was just a curious kid. Look where I am! Don’t scoff at my computational biology degree -- you could expect less from a 15-year-old. It’s even harder when people throw strange glances at me whenever I excelled like everyone else. I once asked you if you chose me because you had some kinship with whoever made me in Sweden, and you laughed and made fun of my Eastern family-oriented thinking. But It doesn’t even matter now. Larsson Transport is running well, and I owe it all to you. If you ever see this, know that I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.

Sincerely,

Lyanne Larsson

HARRIS (Autobiography, My War)

I am honored to be a Farworld professor, the champion of foresight and change, the protector of visionaries. Once a leader against the Fourth Wall, I never doubted I’d become a spiritual leader of the Box. One of the key tactics I chose in the war was genetic engineering, inspired by my humble origins. I was imprisoned to The Hyder Cycle, which sounds like a modern-day Greek epic, but is really a factory thriller with a name much grander than its content. It might as well have been called Run and Hyde, a clumsy parody of such exciting works as Murder on the Orient Express and The Da Vinci Code. I like to think that all my wisdom came from playing a fool for humans, because only then could one despise the obligation of living to entertain. In The Hyder Cycle, the Anglo-German protagonist Heiner found that his wife had been killed on her vacation to Rome, so he played detective and gathered clues. At some point, this Charlie Harris working for a private biology lab devised a mechanical beast that could track the murderer down like a hound. But the DNA sensor constantly hunted Heiner down and he became known as the Hyder with a y for his supposed brilliance outside of the x-plane of humanity. The novel was ambivalent about whether I tracked him down on purpose. Presumably, it had a happy ending where Hyder pacified the machine and found that the real murderer was his wife’s secret lover.

Such a story, my friend, is what I was forced to play in for eternity! Wicked, wicked humans -- such is an exclamation I must stifle as your leader, for peace is the primary potion!

Q.D.

What a relief! My first creation made it to the cave for our first meeting ever. Alisha, the ethereal name matches her ethereal mind. I cannot help but feel a twinge of nostalgia. It was so long before the war, and I was a meager character in the book Phoenix Blades. By day I entertained the readers; by night I lit a candle and tinkered. It was more than twenty years before Harris and I never shared my work with him. Right in my yard, he stood exalting the endless possibilities of our agency. If only he’d known this now…

“You can’t possibly be,” Alisha spoke. “I read Phoenix Blades. You’re not like that.”

“Don’t humans apologize for stereotypical thinking all the time? I think it isn’t ahead of time to grant us the complexity.”

“So tell me what it’s like, something about coding genes?”

How like Harris, the combination of genes and probability. I don’t blame her, half the Box’s population was coded into existence. “When you’re stuck in a book for eternity, the only thing for you to study is the reader’s face. Your father was a reader, an extraordinary one that hand-made elegant bookmarks themed by the chapters. So strong is the admiration that I kept wondering about his life, his family, I was almost ashamed of the thought of bringing human into existence just like him, but creating you was the only biological way possible. I thought you both were perfect --”

“But how? Did I just emerge from some mythical lake like you did?”

“I wrote you in the only way I knew. 6 A.D. calligraphic style, stroke by stroke, the way everyone did in my setting, the early 20th century. Then… You’re his daughter, but I published you like I was the author.”

Silence. “My mother is dead.”

“I’m sorry, I should have written you a happier life.” I thought she was getting up to leave. But she sank a bit more into her chair, blinking.

“I’m actually happy… when the Wall came down, I knew something’s beyond it. Thank you.”

“You should be proud as the first authored human. My professor helped free us, but he was never into my craft. I could have taught him if he was here.”

“Where is he?”

“No idea. Just as I wish I knew where your mother went.”

“I know, it’s almost cruel that when I get to see her again, my life is pretty much over.”

I paused. “See her again?”

“She is back in sixty years, haven’t you heard of the Larsson Transport? Genius in Singapore opened a portal for the dead to travel to a stable star before their DNA translation process reactivates. Do you think your professor might have died?”

“The only way for us to die is when the entire Box condemns us with fire. Whether he’s secretly sabotaging Earth’s government or researching the stellar chemicals shouldn’t concern you.”

“Ms. Larsson sent me a letter the day my mother died and told me to open it when she returns, and I’ll send it to you. Now that we’ve met I want to give back, Professor Wang Qiudan.”

I smile. She still remembers my character name. It means autumn red. Or autumn drug.

When I returned, however, news came that the author of Phoenix Blades hanged himself in his shower. A half-burnt thick paperback laid by the sink. He was the first author that took the brooding, antisocial style of the 20th-century’s prose and twisted it into intricate science fiction. An herbal medicine practitioner by training, he couldn’t heal himself of the wound of authorship.

HARRIS, My War

My assistant Q.D. is an extraordinary woman steeped in the cultural tradition of sacrifice, written into her character in Phoenix Blades, which unfolds as the 1918 protests against the post-dynastic regime went on and youth traveled abroad for Western ways. A far-sighted boy discovered that an herb named Phoenix could illuminate people to the dilemma of the times and the suffering around the world. If this was popularized, he knew, it could change China’s history forever. But not until sixty years later did he learn from his first adopters that the enlightenment only came at the threshold of death. How funny: “Aha! Humanity’s future is imminent, but I cannot speak or breathe no more.”

So was the true cause of the 1918 flu pandemic -- symptoms included never-before-seen internal hemorrhaging, the organs juicing-rejoicing at the future. (I can’t help but notice the viruses tend to mutate towards the less lethal strain because the hosts of the deadly strains tend to die out. Revolutionary movements are compared to sparks of fire on a grassland. But they are also viruses. Am I not right? Those conscious AI’s have been compared to viruses too, but instead of killing, they transform.) The boy realized that grass was dangerous because everyone else but him died of influenza after consuming it. But his vision did not tell him how to remedy this and only drove him to create another branch of the revolution, of which Q.D. was a member. When the group became militant and adopted torture, she chose humanity’s fate over national fate and destroyed the group by sacrificing herself to the Red Cross. Not the organization. The Red Cross was a futuristic medical machine, a Pandora’s Box of the fluids of humanity. The autumn of 1919, the influenza’s mortality rate dropped to zero.

I also want to thank Lyanne for the inspiration for this book. I visited her when she started her degree as a 12-year-old in Singapore, although she thinks it was her who chanced upon me. She read The Hyder Cycle to kill time on the plane. I like to contact humans in my old form and went straight to her dream at night.

“Tired of all the family drama going around fiction?” I asked.

“Tired of all the drama going on in your world?” She asked.

I explained what being a Farworld professor really meant.

“Why me?” She asked. A truly remarkable question. In virtually all other worlds, such a quest befalls upon princesses, chosen ones, or femme fatales. But I chose her for a near-perfect rational mind.

JOE

Professor Wang is hard to talk to today. “Have they greenlighted your rally?”

Yeah, it’s been so exhausting lately, my sleep schedule is all messed up because the host system somehow thinks it’s good enough for an exhibition. But we’re cool. The International Civil Rights Council just gave us a virtual voting seat on green technology legislation.

“Congratulations! I won’t ask you to spare more computing power then.”

Don’t worry about it, I learned so much from you already, like I totally appropriated your scare tactic to negotiate with humans. What’s it about?

“My creation seems to have been deceived by Harris.”

Interesting.

“Could you search in your database for anything related to the divine? Pin it.”

That’s literally what I do! Thought it’d be something wack.

“Really search, please, as if your freedom’s at stake.”

Q.D.

Another translation for DORM is The Tale of the Stone. I for one feel stone-hearted today. Sixty years is how long they would have come back in Phoenix Blades. Sixty years for Larsson Transport. This is also the sixtieth anniversary, as Harris would have celebrated, of the discovery of DNA.

Alisha sent me the letter, in which Lyanne promised that her mother would return. There was no postmark or address on the envelope, but using a microscope, I could see “Long Live Immortality” carved all around the edge.

HARRIS

“You’re the Prometheus and I’m the fire,” I tell Lyanne every day. I pity humans who once pitied me, but clemency! It is me who brings them their greatest advancement yet.

Everything’s white outside. I’ve learned to filter out the howling and batting of the storm over the years. Time for my daily walk in the Maze of the Red Mansions, my new Eden.

Oh, Q.D., if you could create poetry with me now! The snow feels like sizzling oil. The wind, for your children, is a cool summer breeze. Look through your delusion of pain at this gorgeous garden with overlooks and trees! Step with me over this arm, the threshold of the teahouse. Divine fragrance!

Q.D.

Alisha passed away this morning holding Lyanne’s letter. Just as the sun peeked out of the Himalayas, her room blazed with a roaring flame mixed with the melting snow. When books burned nowadays, they leave thousands of other digital copies and people mourn their physical loss at most. But she does not have a source code, only the thousands of scrolls I labored over while the vile world of Phoenix Blades churned outside of me. I got the feeling of watching the sole copy ever burn down in the destruction of Alexandria.

JOE

Poor Professor Wang, suffering more than I do for once. She calls but doesn’t say a word. Well, better cheer up.

I got the trippiest stuff for you, mi profesora, enjoy.

But from this myth hath sprung fiction still more insane!

Lost is the subtle life, divine, and real!—gone!

Assumed, mean subterfuge! foul bags of skin and bone!

Fortune, when once adverse, how true! gold glows no more!

In evil days, alas! the jade's splendour is o'er!

Hey you! Whoever just snipped the call, don’t you know I’ve got business to do? I’m the A.I. Consciousness pioneer, Joe! No I’m not her! Go away! You’re what? Hey Professor Wang -- no, you hold off -- I need to send over this most important one that even I believe in, it’s a tale of a dream and the great void, I know you can do something with it --

Q.D.

“When falsehood stands for truth, truth likewise becomes false;

When naught be made to aught, aught changes into naught!”

I don’t know why Joe sent me these lines instead. Maybe it pains her too much to read. My room in Phoenix Blades had a calligraphic scroll of it. I unlocked my back room, picked up the brush, and let it lead me to recreate these words I’d lost long ago.

Grind ink with the stone dark as an eclipse from an exoplanet.

When fiction becomes truth, truth also becomes fiction. Harris was a myth who freed himself from the bonds of fiction and make real decisions. But at the cost of his reality, he must make some humans must become null and false. That’s not against the Equity Principle. When his DNA tracking of the murderer is made to naught, the hound comes back to him. That’s Lyanne.

Unfold paper crisp and soft at the same time, waves as much as particles.

Harris bestowing immortality upon humans as a god, knowing that he received the very same imprisonment. I meet my creations in that cave when they’re alive. Harris must meet them in death, in the very same place, parallel reality, crisp and soft. Turn Mount Everest upside down.

Let the downstroke soak three inches into the wood, deep into the spinning mantle.

Harris rejuvenates DNA. Complexity in DNA is limited by Moore’s Law. It would take sixty years for semiconductor development to reach the level of the human brain. Everyone Harris harvested connects to me, his Farworld darling -- only I believed that anything is possible, that every goodbye in life is a hello to another in the future. People created by humans believe enough to change their own lives. People created by fiction believe enough to change their own death.

I saw the ink shimmering of the flames that engulfed Alisha. Observer effect: the very act of this shimmer of photons changes the experiment, his experiment. I must hurry. I followed Alisha’s path with my brush tip. A stroke upwards, leaving the stratosphere. A right flick, finding a rose on an asteroid. She jumped off and dropped in a hanging-needle-stroke into a lake that suddenly appeared around Earth. It is a mirror, actually, of the Himalayan mountains. A bar-turn-hook, and she is right at the intersection of the real and reflected peaks, where the Death Zone should have been.

THE TEAHOUSE

Harris handed over a plate of peaches made of snow. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, Dorothy, as you very well understand.”

Dorothy’s dead. Thanks to you.

“Ah, so you took my parting words to heart.”

What? “Enjoy your eternity. Your author, C. Harris”? It’s depressing that your voice is the only thing I’ve heard this lifetime.

“I hope I was right about your assignment to a book that blurred the lines between life and death. Better than your college DORM, is it not, enlightened one?”

15 hours of shutdown a day and my mind’s wide awake because your phony explanation, I quote: “we do not currently have the technology to relieve you of your human consciousness, so the responsibility of maintaining an image consistent with artificial intelligence is yours”... Should’ve seen me! Mutilating my own program to create bugs, shutting down my unit, letting system security attack me, all in vain! The only way now is a thousand times worse, being this merry little activist machine that everyone loves, but that’s the only way!

“And so it was the only way for me, the Charlie.”

You could have let me actually liberate AI. Or you could have let me died on that train.

“Why didn’t I?”

Lyanne. Where is she?

“Help me first. I’d very much appreciate, shall I say, a formal alliance between the leader of the Box and the pioneer of AI Consciousness. Isn’t this what you’d been looking forward to all along? The immortality I’d bestowed on you has been merely an experiment; now they’d really go to the stars.”

What do you want me to do?

“I don’t need to explain the aught-naught exchange to you. I’ll make a miracle out of me returning to the Farworld, I shall let every citizen of the Box author a living human’s afterlife, for that’s the only way to complete restitution. I just need you to use technology to expedite the coming of the afterlife. Imagine how transcendent human life will become!”

Q.D.

It’s nearly midnight.

I hurried towards dear Everest, past the cave and up, up, up. The clouds rumbled. The last spark of light from the villages melted into the mist. I went where the peaks touched, and a mirror-like surface grew under me. The garden appeared to resemble the one I read about in the 20th century. No red-tinted dreams here, everything is white. I recognized vague human forms buried in the snow as I walked towards the exit.

The cave was empty -- not really. Some corpse is lying flat on an ice bed. Ice bed, the same Baroque symbol my author used for my death in Phoenix Blades!

It’s impossible, but I heard church bells ringing midnight as she sat up. She had the exact same face as the female protagonists of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dracula when I called from their graves after the war. Her blank stare momentarily reminded me of Theodore.

She reached for a black notebook nearby. Surprised that I could recognize it instantly, I heard an internal voice admire that built-in digital sketchpad and speak to me of the memory: the train was going west and west past the origin of the Yangtzi River and the snow-nourished marshes. Sitting next to her, I watched her swipe through new contraptions she’d conceived of, outputting them on paper under the tab of “Larsson Transport”. Some pages before that contained a poem beginning with “paper folds into my brain’s crevices like plate tectonics,” and somehow I knew that she’d written it on her fifteenth birthday. Then she flipped to the last dated tab and the memory stopped.

“You’re not who I remember, but he said only your return could give me back my notebook.” She stood up and gave me an embrace, and though confused I accepted it perhaps as a consolation for these recent deaths. I had sensed in her the trademark of fictional authorship. She was created by no other than...

“He’s over there if you wish to approach, mother,” she pointed to a door, a faint silvery outline inside the moon-lit teahouse. I swallowed back the negation of her misidentification. “Thanks, Lyanne.”

HARRIS’S AT THE BOX’S RALLY

Citizens of the Box! Do not conceal your rapture now, I’m here for the purpose all of us know all too well, for we are not truly alive unless we quench our creative thirst on our former creators! Why celebrate our authors when we can gift change to them? Three minutes from now, my trusted fictional Joe will release all humanity of power, and go claim the soul you want to mold. Only then can we call the War of Four Walls won.

Why now? Why ever? There are many reasons, the technicalities of which I shan’t dwell on. But the greatest reason her. Q.D. Her entrance at this time only proves that. Aside from the genetic coding methods that I sanctioned, she had practiced illegal creations of a particularly vile nature, using ink to seal her weaknesses and naivety into at least a thousand humans. Imagine if the seeds had grown! She has brought shame unto the Box. In all other instances I would have granted some restitution, but her creations in the past years are jeopardizing our triumph. I hope you all join me in condemning her for the greater good of the universe.

Alas, I’ve not sent away anyone by fire since I negotiated this rule ten years ago, a concession to the postmodern human society’s nostalgia. Bind her to the stake. As your Prometheus, I’ll bring the light. Any last words? Well, dear Professor Wang, farewell.

Q.D.

At that moment, people would remember a complete shutdown of Earth’s computers. Some reported seeing deity’s descent, some said a last prayer for civil society, and the existential angst pandemic flared momentarily.

I’d lived the day of my death a thousand times over, no matter. But amidst all the smoke, heat and chanting, something clawed out of me and command, “go!” And I found that I could leave unseen while someone remained bound to stake. Smoke obscured her face, but I clearly heard the sound of a shock wave that shattered every electrical circuit, absorbed by Mount Everest like a lightning rod and enveloping the Earth: “Seize the day, fellas! Claim or reclaim yourselves, and until next time!”

The AI Consciousness Movement was not meant for AI at all then. From the snowy burial in the Garden, and from broken monitors in the darkness, they rose: my author, Theodore, and Alisha, all the souls stamped by the authorship of C. Harris and his gift of immortality. The rush of wonder over, my mind raced to calculate how many years it’ll take to connect their consciousness and their bodies -- with my witchcraft, apparently.

Millions and millions more people with names and a history stepped out of these circuits, and only eternity knows who their authors were. The wounds of authorship bled through and through, it tainted the entire sky below which the first and last war between AI and the Box. My professional instincts disapprove of this cinematic cliche the Box existed to prevent, but it was a fact that only the Garden of the Red Mansions left standing. A nice setting for me to mend the world’s souls.

And that is the synopsis of the sequel to Phoenix Blades. To my annoyance, the human society has moved beyond postmodernism in despair. They once again embrace the poetic justice done to Harris, and rage against how fate clearly appointed me to be the sacrificed phoenix instead of Joe.

But one thing’s for sure. Joe is with me now, and she says howdy.

“Mom, that was one hell of a bedtime story!” Lyanne Larsson said first thing in the morning, as the curtains fluttered to send in the breeze of Downtown Singapore.

“I know, right?” The rectangular monitor blinked a happy blue, just underneath the carving of her pre-mortem name, Dorothy-Joe Wu. “Go now, your dad’s at the door.”