FRAGMENT 110
Words of Farewell
Fragment: “Hundreds of Sneezes a Day” | The Audio Clone Suddenly Activates
Time & Location: Spring 2025 · Beijing
From the airport, I took a taxi directly to see Orchid.
She had told me not to come.
I arrived anyway.
Her apartment complex stood beyond Beijing's Fifth Ring Road.
When she came downstairs, a little child was beside her.
Her face was wrapped tightly in a scarf, leaving only her willow-shaped eyes visible.
“This is my son,” she said softly, lowering her head. “Call him Uncle.”
The boy stared at me with faint suspicion.
“You should go back upstairs now.”
She stepped aside and gently tugged at his arm.
Four years earlier, she had married an engineer who worked in big-data analytics.
Beyond that, I knew almost nothing about her life.
She removed the scarf and smiled bitterly.
“Do I look like a pig?”
It was a severe juniper pollen allergy.
Originally, I had planned to take her to Compound No. 7 and tell her stories from my childhood.
But that place was filled with cypress trees.
“It's unbearable. I sneeze hundreds of times a day.”
She kept wiping her nose with tissues.
Whether intentionally or not, she began talking about the problems in her marriage.
The subject drifted toward divorce.
“Marriage goes against human nature,” I said before I could stop myself.
Then I quickly added,
“Divorce isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a bond simply reaches its end.”
“So I should hire a lawyer?”
Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.
“I think you should.”
Before I left, I said,
“Wait for my message. Don't go wandering off.”
“Okay.”
She hugged me tightly, burying her face against my chest.
Her body trembled.
That heartbeat of hers—normally so steady—struck against me like a drum.
“Do I look terrible?”
She still hadn't lifted her head.
“You look beautiful.”
I stroked her back.
“Just as you always have.”
The gesture felt less like a lover's and more like a father’s.
Then the sound of an erhu drifted through the air.
A solo performance of The Butterfly Lovers.
The mood shattered.
Next, I visited my former wife.
We talked for a while.
I held my grandson for the first time.
It was a pleasant afternoon.
Mother and daughter made dumplings for me.
There was no longer any bitterness in their voices.
Only a trace of family affection.
Then I handed my daughter a security token and a black bank card.
“Citibank Hong Kong.”
“There are ten million U.S. dollars in the account.”
“Really?”
Her eyes widened—the same eyes her grandfather once had.
“Thank you, Dad.”
“Spend it carefully.”
“Take good care of your mother.”
The moment the words left my mouth, my nose stung.
I turned away and left.
Holding Sha Dao felt strange.
Like sand trying to surround a living island, imagining it could protect the shore from the sea.
I sensed none of the crow frequencies within him.
“Dad.”
He spoke quietly.
For a moment, a pixelated image flashed before my eyes.
A Mongol warrior stood alone on the grasslands, facing the wind, waving at me.
I raised a hand toward him.
Then reality returned.
I patted my son's arm.
“You're doing great, son.”
Sha Qingqing rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Don't you find him unfamiliar?”
“Only ten years ago he was less than forty centimeters long.”
“Now he's one meter sixty.”
“He almost weighs as much as you.”
She laughed.
Sha Dao smiled shyly and returned to his room.
His footsteps sounded remarkably like my father's.
Yet nothing about my son's growth felt unfamiliar to me.
Every few weeks, Sha Qingqing would video-call me.
She loved cooking for him.
Every conversation eventually became a report on his enormous appetite.
We spent three days together.
We joked.
Played cards.
Took turns cooking.
On the last day, we celebrated her fiftieth birthday.
Human warmth.
Simple and irreplaceable.
At night we lay side by side.
We talked about work.
Then talked about work some more.
Eventually, like the two sides of an equals sign, we drifted into separate dreams.
The next morning, I quietly placed a gold paper envelope on her dressing table.
Inside was the deed to a villa at Peking House.
I knew that house had always been her dream—and her mother's as well.
“I'll be traveling.”
“Trying a few things I've always wanted to do.”
“You must take care of yourself.”
“This time, seeing you again…”
She paused.
“You seem tired in a way I can't explain.”
She opened a Louis Vuitton suitcase and packed a large supply of medicine.
“Your son and I will always be waiting for your video calls.”
In front of my eyes there were only pixels.
And sounds.
And a thin layer of red mist.
In the end, I lacked the courage to tell her the truth:
that I was a monster.
I sat in the back of a taxi.
Then, suddenly, the audio clone activated.
From somewhere deep in my throat came Sha Dao's voice—
perfectly identical to his own.
FRAGMENT 111
A Voice Like Stone Scraping Across Wood
Fragment: A Fist Striking the Air | A Deep-Throated Khoomei Bursts Forth | A Slightly Showy Change of Voice
Time & Location: Spring 2025 · Houhai, Beijing｜Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
I rode a bicycle around Houhai.
I didn't stop.
I couldn't remember beneath which tree that young man and older woman had once kissed.
The gate of the little courtyard in Pocket Alley was locked.
The old locust tree was still there.
Its trunk, branches, and leaves all carried the scent of chemical treatment.
I didn't see the Hanging Ghost.
The bicycle seat hurt my backside.
Before boarding my flight, I sent Orchid a message.
I had already booked first-class tickets to Sanya for her, her son, and her mother.
I had also reserved a thirty-night executive suite at Atlantis.
Her son loved water.
The resort's water park was famous.
Stay away from the junipers, I wrote.
Okay, she replied instantly.
A moment later another message arrived.
Take care of yourself.
The code of intimacy had been written, line by line.
My heart, however, had already flown back to Singapore.
I could hardly wait to uncover the face of KP-3.
Jason looked pleased with himself.
He sat in the swivel chair in front of my desk, shaking one leg.
I could hear a trace of nervousness beneath the confidence.
“Perfect.”
I knew they were waiting for that word.
“Thank you,” Jason replied.
“Now please tell us what you don't like.”
The other six sat silently on the sofa.
Crow vocalizations extend far beyond the upper limits of human hearing.
The tool created by the seven geniuses could now capture those ultrasonic signals in real time, lower them into the human range, and translate them into binary logic.
“Perfect.”
“Unquestionably perfect.”
I clenched my fist and punched the air.
Jason stopped shaking his leg.
Then he lunged across the desk and burst into tears.
The other six jumped up as well.
One by one they came over and hugged me.
None of these gifted minds knew they were embracing a monster.
They knew even less that their intelligence and vitality had just granted this crow-human hybrid something approaching divine computational power.
Soon enough, it would stir the world.
The red mist clouded my vision.
A deep-throated khoomei escaped my mouth without warning.
Glassware throughout the room shattered.
A chandelier crashed from the ceiling.
The programmers scattered in panic, laughing nervously as they fled.
When I appeared before them again, they behaved like soldiers.
Every movement expressed submission.
They no longer joked with me.
They no longer challenged my ideas.
They no longer questioned my decisions.
They became obedient.
So obedient that I began to feel like a Mongol Khan.
In dreams, I could no longer distinguish between playing Go with Orchid and arguing with her.
She picked up a black stone.
Then placed a white one.
I wrote several lines of code.
Then several more.
Khan's Pumice performed calculations at incredible speed.
Yet it could not capture Orchid's frequencies.
Much less deconstruct her emotions.
I woke suddenly.
Darkness.
Silence.
Two days later, Orchid told me that she and four other professional Go players had just been blacklisted by a casino in Seoul.
Their offense:
Winning too often.
She described the details excitedly.
I barely responded.
Instead, I stared at the slot machine screen in front of me.
How strange.
A woman who had once wielded the computational power of a battlefield deity across a Go board had finally reduced herself to probability like everyone else.
“Come to Singapore.”
My voice sounded weak.
“No.”
“I'll go back to Beijing and take care of my son.”
Through the phone, her voice sounded like stone scraping across wood.
I tossed the phone aside.
Once again, I fed a hundred-dollar bill into a slot machine.
My palm covered the glossy black betting button.
I pressed it.
Then pressed it again.
And again.
Pretending it was the pumice stone Grandma Yang once used to scrape the calluses from her feet.
I kept pressing.
Until every last bill in my pocket was gone.
