Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  5.

  REFLECTION

  My eyes stared at the last page, frozen.

  The page turned into a massive stone tied to my feet, dragging me into the murky depths where I couldn’t breathe.

  I remembered that familiar building. The apartment at the top was always filled with the fragrance of spicy chai and pumpkin soup.

  I was eight.

  I told Mom and Dad, Don’t go!

  I knew about the accident. I knew they were going to die.

  I cried, begged, screamed, threw things on the floor. I tried to cut myself.

  They thought I was throwing a tantrum.

  They locked me in my room. Their footsteps faded, and never returned.

  I knew what had happened. They were dead.

  I gazed at myself in the mirror. This is your fault.

  The reflection gradually changed. It turned into a little baby with wriggling arms and legs.

  She was the clairvoyant. She could see the future, but she was unable to alter it. She had once been me, but she would be me no longer.

  I told her, They died because of you. I hate you.

  Although she looked like a baby, she could talk. She reached out, trying to grab my hand.

  Ed!

  I smashed the mirror. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

  I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to hear her.

  I knew that tomorrow everything would be better.

  Everything would be better.

  REGINA KANYU WANG

  Regina Kanyu Wang, a science fiction writer from Shanghai, China, has won multiple Chinese Nebula Awards for her writing as well as for her contributions to fandom. She is the cofounder of SF AppleCore and a council member of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association (WCSFA).

  Regina has traveled widely in Europe and the US, introducing Chinese SF to international fans and pioneering links between Chinese fan groups and counterparts in other parts of the world. She has been a key member of multiple conventions across the globe (in fact, she has been officially adopted by Finnish SF fandom).

  Her short story “Back to Myan” won the SF Comet competition in 2015. Of Cloud and Mist, a novella, won the Silver Xingyun Award for Best Novella in 2016.

  Besides her fiction, which may be found in venues like Science Fiction World, Mengya, Bund-pic, Numéro, and Elleman, she is also the author of a book on traditional Shanghainese cuisine. Occasionally, she blogs in English about Chinese SF fandom and other topics at Amazing Stories Magazine.

  Currently, Regina is the international PR manager for Storycom, a Chinese company focused on turning speculative fiction stories into movies, games, comics, and other media.

  “The Brain Box” is a short, sharp examination of the way we construct the narratives of our lives that end up constricting us.

  THE BRAIN BOX

  1.

  “Mr. Fang, let’s just go over the consent form one last time, all right? With the understanding that the technology involved is still experimental; that—”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fang, but please wait until I’ve finished reading the whole statement before answering ‘Yes, I consent’ or ‘No, I do not.’ The protocol requires it be done this way. Now, where were we … oh, right—that we cannot ascertain the full range of potential effects of imprinting into another brain the brain patterns of a person on the verge of death; that possible effects could include, but are not limited to, damage to the target brain, disorientation due to conflicting mental patterns, rejection of imprinted thoughts by the target brain….

  “Do you still, after understanding the above risks, voluntarily consent to be imprinted with the data retrieved from Ms. Zhao Lin’s brain box, to bear all consequences of the experiment, and to cooperate with the investigative team in preparing a report?”

  “Yes, I consent.”

  “Great. We’ve authenticated your voice signature. Please lie down here, and place your neck right on the notch at the head of the bed…. Perfect, exactly so. We’re ready to begin.”

  Fang Rui closed his eyes. Zhao Lin’s face appeared in his mind, and his heart spasmed with pain as he recalled the funeral. No, not now. He opened his eyes resolutely, taking in the white walls, white lab coats, and bright white lights of the room. They were taping electrodes to his body, and any abnormal physiological reactions would show up in the waveforms sweeping across the screens. He had to stay calm and let the experiment proceed.

  This was his last chance to be close to Zhao Lin, his beloved. She was his everything, the light of his life. He wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if he missed the final five minutes of her life.

  The technicians inserted his left ring finger into the pulse oximeter, planted the oxygen mask over his face, secured the blood pressure monitor against his left arm, and finally placed the metal helmet over his head.

  The implantation process began.

  2.

  Free fall.

  Burning odor.

  Smoke and fire sweeping forward from the tail of the plane. Screams punctuated with muttered prayers.

  I’m so calm as I grab the dangling oxygen mask and secure it over my nose and mouth that I surprise myself. I’m going to die. Now that I’ve accepted this undeniable reality, terror and anxiety recede. There’s nothing I can do to change my fate.

  It’s time to let go.

  How many minutes do I have left? The capacity of the brain pattern recorder is only five minutes, and it functions as a ring buffer, overwriting old data with new. In the same way that a plane’s black box preserves the flight parameters, instrument readings, and cockpit conversation before a crash, the brain box preserves my brain activities before death.

  Only another human brain can decode the patterns in the recorder. Theoretically, it will be possible to reproduce my final thoughts. No brain box has been successfully decoded so far—but that’s because everyone with such an implant is still alive. I’ll be the first to die.

  Most people who’ve agreed to have brain boxes implanted are young and healthy, still luxuriating in their sense of an unbounded future. Seems illogical, doesn’t it? The ideal experimental subject ought to be someone who can already feel the chill of death so that useful data can be quickly retrieved. But for the dying, the pitiful monthly stipend for participating in the trial holds little attraction. And in any event, the desire to disguise our thoughts, to appear better than we really are, hounds most of us. Only the young can be reckless enough to accept the prospect of revealing to the world the nakedness of their thoughts, secure in the belief that the moment of reckoning will not come until decades in the future.

  I admit it: I only agreed to be part of the experiment for the money. Fang Rui and I were making too little to satisfy the yawning maw of our mortgage and other expenses, and I thought every little bit helped. But I never could have anticipated that the brain box would lead me to doubt.

  Did other subjects experience the same thing? Did the presence of the brain box force them also to start lying to themselves? On the brink of death, does the fear of exposure outweigh the fear of death itself? Such tangled thoughts! If these are truly the last five minutes of my life, whoever ends up having to decode my box will surely have a headache.

  “A rationalist to the last,” they might say.

  Fang Rui said the same thing. After the initial ardor of our romance had cooled, I quickly returned to my analytical approach to life, but he seemed to continue to be driven by sentiment more than sense. After dating for three years, we moved in together, bought a new apartment in the suburbs as an investment, and rented a smaller place to live in the city—he made most of these decisions, and I went along with them. I stayed with him mostly out of habit: I was used to having a warm body to cling to when I woke up from a nightmare, used to buying just enough groceries to cook for two without worrying about leftovers, used to going out without my keys because he would always be home to open the door for me. But none of these
habits was unchangeable, and there was nothing in my life that I wasn’t ready to handle alone. There wasn’t any reason that we had to be together—though that also meant there wasn’t any reason to break up, either.

  We lived like that, unperturbed, unexciting, until I got the implant.

  I began to ask myself whether I really loved him. It became impossible to make myself believe that I was living the life I wanted. I had become inured to my uneventful life, but with the brain box in me, I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene after my death. What would happen after the data in the brain box was decoded and Fang Rui found out that I didn’t love him as much as he thought, or perhaps didn’t love him at all? The more I imagined that future, the more it terrified me.

  The day he proposed to me, I ran. Turning the proposal into a big, public spectacle was just the sort of sentimental gesture he delighted in. Overwhelmed by the roses spilling from his arms and the joyful cheers of our friends, I ran. I escaped the heart-shaped cage he had constructed from candles and flew away from the city. I told him that he had shocked me and I needed time to think, and he apologized, telling me that he had only wanted to give me a romantic surprise.

  “You live such a regular life,” he said. “Aren’t you tired? I wanted to see you let go.”

  A week living by myself next to the sea gave me plenty of time to think, but I can’t remember any specific thoughts—except the looming presence of the brain box, like a sword suspended above my head. I couldn’t eat and didn’t sleep well. I didn’t know how to explain myself to Fang Rui.

  On the last day of my sojourn, the owner of the B&B took me hiking up a hill to see the blooming azaleas. Red, yellow, pink, purple—the flowers were so romantic, so wild. Suddenly, my fear was gone. I was ready to go back to face Fang Rui and tell him the truth.

  I’m going to die. Maybe Fang Rui is at the airport right now, waiting with the ring. I’ll never get to tell him my true feelings. Everyone’s instinct is to shape the presentation of the self so as to maintain a consistent mirage in front of others. His romanticism and my rationalism are both masks that we fear to take off. Maybe he wasn’t even aware of it, but his public, melodramatic proposal had been an act designed to cement his reputation as a romantic. My escape wasn’t part of his script, but he must have expected it on some level. To maintain his self-image, he has to wait for me, and even come to the airport to put on another show, hoping to change my mind. But fundamentally, he loves himself far more than he loves me—he doesn’t actually care what I want.

  It’s human nature to deceive others through actions and words, but the brain box forces the implanted to be subjected to constant self-reflection: Are my thoughts really my thoughts? Will others discover the unvarnished monologue going through my mind? Is the image others have of me consistent with my real self? Even though the brain box is capable of preserving only the last five minutes, the sensation of being monitored is ever-present, inescapable.

  I was naive when I agreed to the experiment. Like the other youthful fools careless of the remote prospect of minds unmasked after death, we didn’t realize that we would have to face a life of endless self-reflection and be shackled by such heavy chains of self-doubt.

  The plane’s dive is accelerating. My ears ache. An intensifying drone fills my head. How many minutes are left? Will these thoughts be recorded over? Will my brain box be recovered? Who will decode it? Will he know Fang Rui and tell him everything?

  It’s no longer about love. The very existence of the brain box changes everything.

  3.

  “Mr. Fang! Are you all right? We had to stop the experiment due to irregularities in your pulse and blood pressure.”

  Fang Rui opened his eyes. His awareness returned to his body from its remote journey. Whiteness everywhere: white walls, white lab coats, and bright white lights. He wasn’t on the plane. He had awakened from his nightmare.

  “Here, drink some water. You need to take a break and recover. We won’t continue the experiment unless you insist.”

  “No,” Fang Rui said, his lips trembling. “Shut it down…. I’ve … I’ve learned everything. Zhao Lin … she was ready to accept my proposal as soon as she returned. Her final thoughts were devoted to my well-being, to how to minimize my sorrow. Oh, she’s always been so foolishly logical. I miss her so much, so much….”

  His voice faded as hot tears overflowed his eyes. But he knew his heart would never ache again.

  CHEN QIUFAN

  A fiction writer, screenwriter, and columnist—and recently, founder of Thelma Mundi Studio, a multimedia SFF IP incubator—Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) has published fiction in venues such as Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!, and ZUI Found. His futurism writing may be found at places like Slate and XPRIZE.

  Liu Cixin, China’s most prominent science fiction author, praised Chen’s debut novel, Waste Tide (Chinese edition 2013; English edition scheduled for 2018), as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.”

  He has garnered numerous literary awards, including Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award and China’s Yinhe and Xingyun Awards. In English translation, he has been featured in markets such as Clarkesworld, Pathlight, Lightspeed, Interzone, and F&SF. “The Fish of Lijiang” won a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2012, and “The Year of the Rat” was selected by Laird Barron for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One. More of his fiction may be found in Invisible Planets.

  “Coming of the Light” is one of my favorite stories by Chen, and it captures the anxiety, dynamism, and absurdity of life in contemporary Beijing as a member of the techno-social elite. “A History of Future Illnesses,” on the other hand, is far darker and more caustic. Its Hieronymus Bosch–like visions of the future are dominated not so much by an all-powerful, know-nothing brutish state, but an apathetic, amoral, ahistorical populace for whom the end of history is both a blessing and curse. As always, even in the darkest passages of his tales, Chen injects flashes of humor that I can’t be sure should be properly read as hope or despair.

  COMING OF THE LIGHT

  0.

  My mother told me about a Buddhist monk she and I met while shopping on my first birthday.

  The monk caressed my head—back then as bald as his—and chanted a few lines that sounded like poetry.

  After we returned home, my mom recited a few fragments to my father. Dad, who had had a few more years of schooling than my mom and completed middle school, told her that the lines weren’t poetry, but from a Buddhist koan. Only by consulting the village schoolmaster did he finally discover the origin of those fragments, words which would come to determine my life.

  As clouds drift across the sky, so Master in the Void is seen.

  Dust clings to everything but what is true.

  Over and over the monk queries: “What does your visit mean?”

  Master points to cypress which in courtyard has taken root.22

  They thought these lines must contain some deep meaning, and so they renamed me Zhou Chongbo, which means “Repeat-Cypress.”

  1.

  I’m sitting in a steamer. I’m a dumpling being steamed.

  Everyone keeps on inhaling and exhaling and then staring at the white smoke coming out of everyone else’s mouths, like cartoon characters with thought bubbles drifting over their heads containing logical musings, naked women, or frozen obscenicons. Then the smoke dissipates, revealing coarse, swollen faces. The air purifier screams as though it’s gone mad, and the young women sitting in chairs along the wall silently put on their face masks, slide their fingers across the screens of their phones, and frown.

  I don’t need to look at the time to know it’s past midnight. My wife won’t even respond to my WeChat messages anymore.

  I was dragged here at the last minute. My wife and I were on our way home after taking a stroll when we encountered a man dressed in an army coat on the pedestrian overpass. With a booming voice that startled both of us, he said, “The Quadrantid meteor shower w
ill come on January 4. Don’t miss it—”

  I waited for him to finish with what is known to us marketing professionals as the “call to action”—e.g., “Join the Haidian Astrology Club,” “Call this number now!,” or even pulling out a portable telescope from his pocket and telling me “Now for only eighty-eight yuan”—which would have made this a reasonably well-executed bit of street peddling.

  But like a stuck answering machine, he started again from the beginning: “The Quadrantid meteor shower will come on January 4….”

  Mission failed.

  Disappointed, we left him. That was when my phone rang.

  It was Lao Xu. I glanced apologetically at my wife, who gave me her usual unhappy look when my work intruded on our time together—this was certainly not the first time. I answered the call, and that was how I ended up here, sitting in this room.

  The last thing my wife said to me was, “Tell your mother to quit pestering me about a grandchild. Her son is such a pushover he might as well be a baby.”

  “Chongbo!” Lao Xu’s voice drags me back to this room filled with cancer-inducing smoke. “You’re in charge of strategy. Contribute!”

  Peering through the obscure haze, I struggle to make sense of the confusing notes on the whiteboard: user insights, key selling points, market research…. Dry erase marker lines in various colors connect the words like the trails left by the finger on some mobile picture-matching game: triangle, pentagon, hexagram, the seven Dragon Balls….