The ambassador took out the quantum chip from the Lobby Age, and held that sum total of human knowledge up for everyone to see. Then, she froze as her eyes were drawn to a tiny black dot flying swiftly over the crowd. As it drew near, she saw the black hair she’d glimpsed countless times in her dreams, and the eyes that had turned to dust a hundred centuries ago. Hua had not remained eleven thousand years in the past, but had come after her in the end, crossing the ceaseless desert of time in her wake. When they embraced, sky, earth, and human became one.

“Long live the new life!” someone shouted.

“Long live the new life!” resounded the plain. A flock of birds flew overhead, singing joyously.

At the close of everything, everything began.

1 Verse translated by Witter Bynner (1881–1968).

2 A quotation from “Seeing Off Yuan Er on a Mission to Anxi” by Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei (699–759).

2018-04-01

TRANSLATED BY JOHN CHU

It’s yet another day when I can’t make up my mind. I’ve been dragging my feet for a couple of months already, as though I were walking through a pool of thick, heavy sludge. I feel my life being used up dozens of times faster than before—where “before” is before the Gene Extension program was commercialized. And before I came up with my plan.

I gaze into the distance from a window on the top floor of an office building. The city spreads below me like an exposed silicon die, and me no more than an electron running along its dense nanometer-thick routes. In the scheme of things, that’s how small I am. The decisions I make are no big deal. If I could only make a decision … But as so many times before, I can’t decide. The waffling continues.

Hadron shows up late, again, bringing a gust of wind with him into the office. He has a bruise on his face. A bandage is stuck on his forehead, but he seems very self-possessed. He holds his head high, as though a medal were stuck there. His desk is opposite mine. He sits down, turns on his computer, then stares at me, clearly waiting for me to ask a question. However, I’m not interested.

“Did you see it on TV last night?” Hadron finally asks.

He’s talking about the “Fair Life” attack on a hospital downtown, also the biggest Gene Extension Center in the country. Two long, black burn scars mar the hospital’s snow-white exterior as though dirty hands had fondled the face of a jade-like beauty. Frightening. “Fair Life” is the largest and also most extreme of the many groups opposed to Gene Extension. Hadron is a member, but I didn’t see him on TV. The crowd outside the hospital had roiled like the tide.