FRAGMENT 65
Recitation Beneath the Monument
Fragment: Countless “Hanged Ghosts” Falling into a Stomach | The Frequency of Lies | A Cadenced Recitation
Time & Location: Spring 2005 · Chegongzhuang Campus of the Beijing Municipal Party School, Monument to the People's Heroes, Beijing
Tong always timed his calls perfectly. They came from Compound No. 7.
“Vice Minister Tong. What instructions do you have for me today?”
He asked whether I had any important internal reports. I told him I was working on them.
It was Tong who announced my appointment as Editor-in-Chief of Xiyuan magazine.
He had once been my father's most promising protégé. Since our unexpected reunion around the turn of the millennium, he had looked after me with unusual care.
The monthly publication specialized in interpreting national security policy. It belonged to that small category of privileged media capable of sending material directly to the center of power.
Our offices occupied a row of old buildings with a distinctly yin atmosphere inside the Chegongzhuang campus of the Beijing Municipal Party School.
Grey bricks. Grey tiles.
Elegant on the surface.
Nearby stood many graves, including those of Matteo Ricci, Johann Adam Schall von Bell, and Ferdinand Verbiest.
I liked bringing visitors there.
We would sit directly on the ground beside the tombstones, smoking, drinking tea, and talking about whatever came to mind.
The smoke drifted across the Latin inscriptions carved into marble. The frequencies it produced carried the delicate sensation of something slowly flaking away.
“Editor Bai, my name is Tian Xiaoning. Tian as in farmland. Xiao as in dawn. Ning as in Lang Shining.”
He wore an old camouflage jacket that clashed badly with a reddish-brown sweater beneath it. Both garments looked worn, but spotlessly clean.
His belly bulged outward as though stuffed with flour.
He smoked even more than I did. His mouth functioned like a perpetual-motion machine.
Words poured out endlessly.
Yet this senior editor had a notoriously bad temper. He swore constantly and remained isolated within the editorial office.
Whenever my room was empty, Tian would slip inside and start talking.
History.
The future.
Politics.
Civilization.
And occasionally, a little flattery.
He never praised me directly.
Instead, he spoke of historical figures—the upright officials, the incorruptible gentlemen, the scholars of conscience.
Whenever emotion overtook him, the dopamine surging through his system felt like countless hanged ghosts dropping into his stomach.
Then he would suddenly change direction.
“You probably know much more about them than I do.”
He lit another cigarette.
His language remained scholarly.
His eyes belonged to a gangster.
“My knowledge of history is quite limited.”
I lit one as well.
“No. Impossible.”
He shook his head.
“Because you resemble them.”
The frequency of a lie.
Hours passed.
Darkness settled outside.
The room filled with floating droplets of his saliva.
I arranged stones on a Go board while watching him perform that uniquely Chinese martial art of indirectness—circling, probing, advancing, retreating.
His objective was obvious.
He wanted to bribe me.
Money was impossible; he lacked it.
Women were impossible; he had none.
That left only the thing most cherished by intellectuals:
Scholarship.
One day, after observing me for quite a while and determining that I was free, he hailed a car and dragged me to Tiananmen Square.
He practically pulled me all the way to the Monument to the People's Heroes.
Only after we were seated together on the stone steps did he finally release my arm.
A strange solemnity appeared on his face.
From his pocket, he removed a copy of the China Youth Daily, published in late May of 1989.
Then he began reading aloud.
At full volume.
The article on the front page.
Its analysis.
Its arguments.
Every word.
Not a single sentence omitted.
My article.
The rise and fall of his voice gave it the cadence of a public recitation.
There were no police nearby.
No pedestrians.
Only us.
When he finished, he stood there breathing heavily and shouted:
“A masterpiece for the ages! A masterpiece for the ages!”
I had no response.
I did not tell him about the punishment that article had cost me.
Nor did I tell him how I had lost something far more important than a bright red marriage certificate—
the little green journalist's credential.
The truly formidable characters waited much longer before revealing themselves.
Deliberately. Patiently.
FRAGMENT 66
First Experiment with Voice Cloning
Fragments: A Silent Dialogue of Physical Frequencies | Complete Vocal Theft
Time & Location: Autumn 2006 · Xiyuan Magazine Office, Chegongzhuang, Beijing
Ge Da, one of our internal-reference editors, always hid in the corner during meetings.
One day I called him into my office and began by teasing him about his jacket.
“Old Ge, how long has it been since that jacket was washed?”
“Hello, Chief Editor Bai. If I wash it, it won't stay authentic.”
He quietly swallowed a mouthful of self-satisfaction.
I laughed.
In his profession, authenticity really was everything.
For more than twenty years, he had worked in the ancient trade of confidential intelligence reports, climbing step by step onto the rooftop occupied by the best in the field.
By now, caution had become second nature.
He stood in front of my old elmwood desk.
Neither straight nor crooked.
Like a withered willow.
“Please, have a seat.”
Only after I rose from my chair did he sit down.
During the next forty-five minutes, he spoke exactly nineteen sentences.
It was almost as if he were deliberately competing with me in the art of silence.
What he did not know was that I enjoyed these wordless exchanges of physical frequencies.
Nor did he know that the psychological wall of a veteran operative—the rhythms, fluctuations, and subtle abnormalities hidden even from himself—appeared paper-thin before the listening probe of the White Crow.
I smoked one cigarette after another.
He drank tea.
One sip.
A long pause.
Then another sip.
On my Apple computer, two browser windows remained open.
One was Google.
The other was Baidu.
Together they searched the world.
Meanwhile, Ge Da stared out the window, trying to measure the depth of a well hidden inside another man's mind.
“Chief Editor Bai, did I say something wrong?”
There was a slight displacement in his throat bone.
I offered no answer.
Nor did I change my posture.
He stood up like a soldier.
Turned.
And left.
I remained where I was.
The setting sun created not only halos of light but also shadows.
As Ge Da walked away, his silhouette merged perfectly with the shadow of the curtain in my office.
Then something strange happened.
An elastic spasm passed through my throat.
It felt like a biological factory reset.
I opened my mouth.
And Ge Da's voice emerged.
“Chief Editor Bai. If I wash it, it won't stay authentic.”
No one else was in the room.
It was not a clumsy imitation.
It was complete vocal theft.
Like a crow stealing a shiny object, I had somehow seized his vocal fingerprint, deciphered it, and reproduced it perfectly through the altered muscles of my own throat.
The voice sounded exactly like his.
When I finally switched on a recorder and prepared to capture the phenomenon, it was already gone.
I never found that voice again.
FRAGMENT 67
The Bricks in the Wall
Fragments: Repetitive and Inefficient Data Redundancy | The Heavy Friction of Wood
Time & Location: Autumn 2006 · Xiyuan Magazine Office, Beijing
​
I looked back out the window, retracing Ge Da's line of sight.
Beyond a dead ancient scholar tree stood rows of poplars.
Beyond the poplars stood the compound wall.
The gray bricks embedded in that wall resembled the heads of my editors, fixed inside an aging structure that had long since fallen into disrepair.
I was chairing an editorial meeting.
Dozens of orderly minds gathered around the conference table.
The air became thick with the smell of cheap tea and the bad breath produced by anxiety.
I closed my notebook and made a slight adjustment to my hearing.
Instantly, their arguments, citations, and strategic insights dissolved into liquid.
Tian Xiaoning's profanity became a string of chaotic high-frequency sawteeth.
Ge Da's restraint resembled a fishing line on the verge of snapping.
The young female editor's presentation flattened into a weary sine wave.
On my internal spectrogram, the wisdom they valued so highly amounted to little more than repetitive and inefficient data redundancy.
They were no longer representatives of intelligence.
They were language ants struggling inside a signal pool designed by publishers before them.
I rose to my feet and pushed back my chair.
The heavy scrape of wood across the floor sounded like a slap across the face of a congregation chanting its scriptures.
I intended to say a few routine remarks and bring the meeting to an end.
Instead, the words that emerged from my mouth were:
“Comrades, let's all think about it a little more.”
It was Old Tong's favorite phrase.
Everyone from Compound No. 7 knew it well.
The room froze.
The female editor stood up first and broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Chief Editor Bai, were you imitating Vice Minister Tong just now?”
“Yes,” another editor immediately agreed.
“It sounded exactly like him. As if Minister Tong himself were sitting in your chair.”
I had no explanation.
Only a few days earlier, I had involuntarily reproduced Ge Da's voice.
That had been my first experience with voice cloning.
I waved my hand and deliberately adopted several of Old Tong's mannerisms, allowing everyone to assume I had been performing an imitation all along.
The editors exchanged suspicious glances.
One by one, they left the room.
Then they returned to their places—
back to their own bricks in the wall.
FRAGMENT 68
The Sound Game
Fragments: The Order to Exterminate the Crows | Activation of Full-Spectrum Voice Cloning | The Cry of a Crow
Time & Location: Spring 2007 · Administrative Bureau of Compound No. 7, Beijing; Xiyuan Magazine Office, Beijing
Director Wu of the Administrative Bureau at Compound No. 7 had just issued an extermination order.
All crows within the compound were to be eliminated.
I obtained a copy of the approved Crow Elimination Plan.
The document listed only two real reasons for attacking the birds.
First, crows were too noisy.
Second, crows were considered inauspicious.
The public explanation, however, was "eliminating sanitation hazards.”
He hired contractors and authorized the purchase of hunting rifles, capture nets, and poisoned bait.
I turned my attention to an office more than ten kilometers away.
The sound of rifle bolts being pulled back.
The unnatural friction of synthetic nets.
The tiny bouncing noises made by poison pellets as they were packed into cardboard boxes.
All of it irritated me.
To most people, this was called environmental management.
To me, it was nothing but a chaotic wave of interference.
Compound No. 7 belonged to people.
But it also belonged to the crows.
I decided to interfere with Director Wu's cruelty.
After all, crows could not say:
"Are you really trying to mess with me?”
My intervention was not motivated by justice.
Justice is a word invented by human beings.
It carries a cheap, greasy smell.
The very idea nauseated me—
rather like the dog-meat hotpot that once made Orchid uneasy.
I still did not fully trust my new ability.
But I had to try.
Earlier, I had secretly sampled recordings of Director Wu's private conversations and obtained enough evidence to cost him his position.
Then I connected to a secure line.
Carefully controlling the muscles of my throat, I retrieved Old Tong's vocal characteristics from memory.
The voice carried the stale authority of an aging bureaucracy.
The call connected.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Director Wu?”
“Minister Tong?”
Silence.
“What exactly have the crows done to offend you?”
Click.
The line went dead.
I immediately hung up and closed my eyes.
For days, the air had been too quiet.
So quiet that my ears had begun to itch.
I did not need to witness the outcome.
The hurried orders to retreat.
The confusion spreading through the compound.
The trembling of Director Wu's hands.
None of that mattered.
All I needed was to capture the precise instant when order collapsed.
In this ordinary world of flesh and blood, that moment was my only biological itch-reliever.
Orchid's arrival switched off all that boredom.
“Who's coming today?” I asked.
“The original guest was Director Wu from the Ministry's Administrative Bureau,” she replied.
“His secretary called a little while ago. Something urgent came up. He won't be coming.”
“Oh.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“No reason.”
Orchid lowered her head and began arranging stones on the Go board.
I watched the game.
Outside the window, several crows landed among the branches.
Perfectly spaced.
They called once.
Then again.
And then they fell silent.
