by Jerry
We finish dinner quickly and get into bed. In the middle of the night my wife wakes up abruptly and says, “Louis, we shouldn’t be together anymore.”
It has been a long time since we’ve really talked. I understand that she’s disappointed in my weakness, my lack of courage. For twenty years I haven’t been able to bring her a single, true, unaltered gift. Because the objects that connect us have grown more and more unfamiliar, the two of us have been drifting ever further apart.
Hoping against hope, I say, “A colleague mentioned that someone managed to bypass the security check and get into the subway. I want to try it, too.”
She looks at me as though I’m a stranger, her eyes full of tears. She doesn’t know that I’ve already tried—and failed to carry through—many times.
The next day, I’m arrested. My wife reported me by calling 911, telling them that I was about to try to break through a checkpoint. She said she suspected that I was a terrorist in disguise.
Three years later, I’m released from prison.
The world remains the same, except that my wife has divorced me. I find Hoffman. Like before, he tries to comfort me. “It’s not a big deal. I’ve figured something out during the last few years: life is a long security check, and not everyone passes. You just have bad luck.”
I ask him whether he’s found that mysterious woman. He shakes his head. Then he suggests that I leave the country.
“What? Leave America?” Surprise made my voice louder than normal. Very few people ever think of leaving America.
He shrugs. “If you can’t get through security check, you might as well leave. I’ve heard that some countries don’t require so much security on their subways.”
I find the very concept absurd. Deep down, I’ve never thought of leaving America—it’s not that I’m very patriotic, just that I’ve grown used to my country. Life is just surviving one day after the other.
“You’re divorced and you’ve been to prison,” says Hoffman. “Even if you try to break through security check again it will be a meaningless gesture.”
“What about you? Will you leave as well?” I ask helplessly, having lost my goal in life.
“No, I’m going to stick it out. Maybe a day will come when I can bypass security check and win freedom in my own country through my own efforts.” He sounds like a stubborn child.
I lack Hoffman’s courage and tenacity, and my body and spirit are on the verge of collapse. So I start the paperwork for leaving the country. Though I fear that it will be difficult, it turns out to be simple. They actually really like it when you leave, and it’s best if you never return. Of course, they want the departure to be voluntary. They’ve never forcefully exiled an American citizen.
I choose to go to the People’s Republic of China.
Judging by official statistics, this is the world’s most secure country. I obtain a temporary residence permit in Shanghai and live on government subsidies. The Chinese subway does not require security checks; they really are that confident. But I’ve lost all interest in the subway. When I’m bored, I go to an Internet cafe and browse for news about America. In China, anyone is free to use the Internet. China is the freest country in the world.
There’s lots of news about America on the Web. I find out that my motherland, though it still appears familiar, is in fact changing every day. It isn’t just the goods carried by the passengers that are being replaced. To ensure security to the greatest extent possible, each day the entire United States is remade. The Chinese observe and analyze America with great interest. They’ve discovered that the entire territory of the United States is filled with nanomachines: from the rural countryside to the big cities, from the broad rivers to the majestic mountains, everything is renewed daily. Harmful things have no safe harbor in that land.
But this phenomenon can only be observed from the outside and at a distance because no outsiders are allowed to enter the United States. Theoretically, no one can pass through the American border security check system. Americans who are inside its borders cannot detect the changes because they think every day is the same as the day before.
Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese are observing and analyzing this because they are worried that America might one day deploy this technology to replace another country, or even the whole world.
But my worries are unfounded. America is focusing its security checks inwards, replacing itself. The effort has occupied all of its energy, with nothing left for other countries.
Gazing back from the other shore of the Pacific, I see a truly wondrous sight. The self-substituting America churns in constant transformation: one moment it’s like a wild flower—blossoming with a pop, collapsing, wilting, changing color from red to black, from yellow to white—and the next moment its like a dying star. Caught up in the changes are my compatriots. They are replaced and remade daily: from blood to muscle, from life to thought, becoming new people without knowing it themselves. From inside America, nothing is seen to change—every day people ride the subway to work like rats. But from China, the changes cannot be more obvious. I suppose this is a difference in frames of reference.
Also transforming is the wildlife, including the brown bear and the bald eagle, the sequoia and other plants, the fungi and bacteria, and every bit of soil, every drop of water. Sometimes the country displays the layered appearance of a tropical forest, and sometimes it looks like an ice crystal. Murky blood flows in the northeast, and the western deserts glow with a ghostly blue light. Sometimes the whole country is silent, save for the powerful rumbling of the subway system, the strangest sound on the planet. America has become distinct from all other countries in the world.
From China, I can see all these changes clearly, and after shock and astonishment, I’m left with sorrow, my face drenched by tears.
New research indicates that as the security system itself evolves, America has developed even more advanced technology. Now the security system not only consists of nanorobots and 3D printers, not only big-data-based distributed reassembly devices, but also self-organizing technologies and artificial world collage machines. Countless cellular automata toil away with the aid of quantum teleportation, engaging in mass-scale atomic exchange from second to second. The White House has been rebuilt into a gigantic machine to take over from the millions of engineers who oversee and control every aspect of the process. The United States has become a giant, intelligent, churning vat.
But then, one day, the self-transformation of America suddenly halts. Instead of constantly replacing itself, the country vanishes completely. The Chinese manage to record the phenomenon, and their analysis concludes that Americas security check technology has achieved a major breakthrough. The time when something is completely secure is not when it has been replaced, but when it no longer exists. No one can find it, ever. This is not only science, but also a kind of profound philosophy capable of being understood only by a few elite individuals on the whole planet. Thus, in this sense, America has finally returned to being the mightiest of nations.
I remember my ex-wife. Has she disappeared along with America? I hope she’s in another world, a happily-ever-after one. She will not have any mental baggage, and she won’t hate me.
I’ve left my country, never able to return. I wish her freedom and happiness in a powerful United States of America.
One day, as I stroll through the People’s Square, I meet a beautiful Caucasian girl. She had also left America and came to China. Sitting down on a lawn together, we begin to chat. This is the first conversation I’ve had in twenty years where I feel no pressure.
“You’re the first American I’ve seen overseas,” I say.
The girl, whose name is Lisa, says, “There aren’t many Americans left in the world. The nation of America has long been substituted away.”
“What about you?” I ask, suddenly remembering the story Hoffman told me about the mysterious young woman who got into the subway station without going through security check.
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br /> “I’m not like the rest of you,” she says. “I’m a real American. I’ve never been replaced. From the very start, I bypassed security checks.”
“How were you able to do it?” My heartbeat speeds up.
“I don’t have an invisibility cloak or an anti-electromagnetic-wave device. All I had to do was to walk calmly past the security agents. If you don’t acknowledge their existence, they don’t exist.”
“But didn’t you say that everyone has been replaced? The entire country has been replaced!”
“That’s right. At first, I was confused as well, but it’s the truth. Anyone who dared to defy the security checks, however, was not replaced. We were sent to a protected area, which was somewhere near the coast of Florida, about three hundred meters under the sea.”
“It sounds like you were chosen by God—”
“—not God. The Chinese.”
The girl tells me that there were about a thousand people like her from all over America. Before the disappearance of America, the Chinese helped with their evacuation.
“The Chinese?” I ask.
“They’ve been part of this business all along, including the security machines. Without the support of the Chinese, America couldn’t have produced those machines by itself. Chinese technicians even helped the American government to design and plan all those terrorist attacks from twenty years ago. If those events hadn’t shifted public opinion and increased the cohesiveness of the population, America might have collapsed a long time ago. Have you heard of the Huawei-Alibaba-ICBC Conglomerate and the Tencent-Baidu-Xiaomi-ZTE Corporation? They had the worlds best scientists and engineers. The White House and Zhongnanhai were extremely close partners, though superficially they pretended not to like each other—it was just a show to fool regular folks. If you look behind the scenes, China helped America design the neo-crony-capitalism of the twenty-first century so that America could act as a reference system . . .”
Impossible! I can’t believe any of this. I stop thinking. Lisa takes me to Xintiandi district to enjoy myself. The Museum of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was turned, some time ago, into a national laboratory. Many young women from America, like Lisa, now live here as volunteer subjects for experiments. A middle-aged Chinese man in a white lab coat welcomes us. The Chinese are trying to confirm an amazing discovery: they’ve discovered that the Earth is passing through a security checkpoint in space, which has something to do with the ultimate secret of the universe. The galaxy, it turns out, is a super security check machine.
“Is the universe . . . not safe?” I ask, astonished.
“That’s right. It’s not safe at all. We’ve only figured this out now. The purpose for life developing on Earth and evolving intelligence is to maintain the security of the universe.” As he explains, he leans into the eyepiece of a giant telescope and makes careful observations.
Later, I find out that as the sole surviving major socialist nation, China is the only country concerned with the security of the universe. America, in fact, was nothing more than an experiment set up by China to help with this mission of protecting the universe’s security. The experiment that China carried out in America is about to be promoted across the whole globe, although there are still many mysteries related to this endeavor that I don’t fully understand, and the Chinese won’t explain the details to us.
Impulsively, I tell Lisa, “I want to be a volunteer subject for the experiments, too!”
She looks at me with pity. “I’m sorry. The Chinese don’t want you for now. You and I are different. You asked to come to China, seeking asylum. You had already been replaced in America during earlier experiments. You’re no longer a standard American—to be more precise, you are no longer an American, or even a person. What you really are and what you can do are matters that the Chinese haven’t decided yet. You’ll have to wait.”
When the security of the universe is the most urgent question, what role will the thousand or so real Americans like Lisa preserved by the Chinese play? That is the greater mystery.
Ashamed and confused, I lower my head.
Was Lisa designed by the Chinese? Who designed China then? I’ve heard that a long time ago, China was also torn by terrible disasters, both natural and man-made—how did they happen? If the rumor I heard was real, then China was once the most insecure country in the whole world. What conclusions can I draw? Oh, the universe is too mysterious. Who designed it?
“It doesn’t matter,” Lisa says to comfort me. “You don’t need to go through security checks anymore. At least superficially, you could pass for a Chinese. You even get government welfare checks, right?”
“But had the Chinese already experienced what we experienced?” I blurt out. “How do you know they’re still Chinese?” Sweat soaks the back of my shirt. Sadly, I think of my ex-wife again. Yes, many countries in the world have survived, and they’re about to pass through the universes security check. But my country and family are gone. And Lisa and I aren’t even the same kind of human beings.
Lisa smiles awkwardly. Holding my hand, she takes me away from Xintiandi. We get on the subway. The Shanghai subway is far more crowded than the subway in New York. Squeezed in among the throng, she and I are temporarily pressed against each other as though we’re trying to fuse into one. The subway car is filled with every race from every continent. The multitude of passengers presses against and flows over our bodies like an underground river, directionless but melding into one another with every fresh encounter.
AS GOOD AS NEW
Charlie Jane Anders
Marisol got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life, to the point where Tootie and Mrs. Garrett became her imaginary best friends and she shared every last thought with them. She told Tootie about the rash she got from wearing the same bra every day for two years, and she had a long talk with Mrs. Garrett about her regrets that she hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her best friend Julie and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Rod, before they died along with everybody else.
The panic room had pretty much every TV show ever made on its massive hard drive, with multiple backup systems and a fail-proof generator, so there was nothing stopping Marisol from marathoning The Facts of Life for sixteen hours a day, starting over again with season one when she got to the end of the bedraggled final season. She also watched Mad Men and The West Wing. The media server had tons of video of live theatre, but Marisol didn’t watch that because it made her feel guilty. Not survivor’s guilt; failed playwright guilt.
Her last proper conversation with a living human had been an argument with Julie about Marisol’s decision to go to medical school instead of trying to write more plays. (“Fuck doctors, man,” Julie had spat.”People are going to die no matter what you do. Theatre is important.”) Marisol had hung up on Julie and gone back to the pre-med books, staring at the exposed musculature and blood vessels as if they were costume designs for a skeleton theatre troupe.
The quakes always happened at the worst moment, just when Jo or Blair was about to reveal something heartfelt and serious. The whole panic room would shake, throwing Marisol against the padded walls or ceiling over and over again. A reminder that the rest of the world was probably dead. At first, these quakes were constant, then they happened a few times a day. Then once a day, then a few times a week. Then a few times a month. Marisol knew that once a month or two passed without the world going sideways, she would have to go out and investigate. She would have to leave her friends at the Eastland School, and venture into a bleak world.
Sometimes, Marisol thought she had a duty to stay in the panic room, since she was personally keeping the human race alive. But then she thought: what if there was someone else living, and they needed help? Marisol was pre-med, she might be able to do something. What if there was a man, and Marisol could help him repopulate the species?
The panic room had nice blue leather walls and a carpeted floor that felt nice to walk on, and enough
gourmet frozen dinners to last Marisol a few lifetimes. She only had the pair of shoes she’d brought in there with her, and it would seem weird to wear shoes after two barefoot years. The real world was in here, in the panic room—out there was nothing but an afterimage of a bad trip.
Marisol was an award-winning playwright, but that hadn’t saved her from the end of the world. She was taking pre-med classes and trying to get a scholarship to med school so she could give cancer screenings to poor women in her native Taos, but that didn’t save her either. Nor did the fact that she believed in God every other day.
What actually saved Marisol from the end of the world was the fact that she took a job cleaning Burton Henstridge’s mansion to help her through school, and she’d happened to be scrubbing his fancy Japanese toilet when the quakes had started—within easy reach of Burton’s state-of-the-art panic room. (She had found the hidden opening mechanism some weeks earlier, while cleaning the porcelain cat figurines.) Burton himself was in Bulgaria scouting a new location for a nano-fabrication facility, and had died instantly.
When Marisol let herself think about all the people she could never talk to again, she got so choked up she wanted to punch someone in the eye until they were blinded for life. She experienced grief in the form of freak-outs that left her unable to breathe or think, and then she popped in another Facts of Life. As she watched, she chewed her nails until she was in danger of gnawing off her fingertips.
The door to the panic room wouldn’t actually open when Marisol finally decided it had been a couple months since the last quake and it was time to go the hell out there. She had to kick the door a few dozen times, until she dislodged enough of the debris blocking it to stagger out into the wasteland. The cold slapped her in the face and extremities, extra bitter after two years at room temperature. Burton’s house was gone; the panic room was just a cube half-buried in the ruins, covered in some yellowy insulation that looked like it would burn your fingers.
