FRAGMENT 100
An Orange Sunrise
Fragments: Molars Grinding Throughout the Hall | “Perfect. Thank You.”
Time & Location: Rainy Season 2023 · Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
Passengers in the jet bridge stepped aside.
Orchid tried to pull me up.
She could not.
I thought of Grandfather Anka.
I thought of my father.
My grandparents.
Genghis Khan.
Eternal Heaven.
I lay on the floor and bowed again and again, striking my forehead against the ground.
Orchid and I occupied a first-class suite.
The seven others slept in individual business-class pods.
The entire flight, my ears were packed with heavy static.
Orchid spoke.
I could not hear her.
Eventually, she stopped trying.
Two family suites at Marina Bay Sands became my residence and the company's luxurious base camp.
The seven programmers whom I called “the Seven Dwarfs” were assigned apartments nearby.
Orchid boarded another flight and returned to China alone.
At dawn, I stood on the balcony.
Five rows of carefully trimmed greenery stretched before me.
Beyond them, pink bougainvillea swayed in the wind.
Farther still, the layered greens of Gardens by the Bay.
Dark green.
Grass green.
Pale green.
The Strait of Malacca resembled an abstract painting.
Countless cargo ships rested motionless on the horizon.
Zeros and ones.
Scattered across an endless luminous screen.
Two pale clouds gently lifted an orange-red sun above the water.
The door of the neighboring suite opened.
I straightened my hair.
Applied a thin layer of facial serum.
Then walked inside.
The Seven Dwarfs were already seated before their computers.
Waiting for the systems to boot.
I clapped my hands.
“Good morning, everyone.”
No one looked up.
“Listen carefully.
“First, every day, I want you tracking the latest developments in data mining and artificial intelligence related to public markets.
“Second, every day, I want you monitoring the evolution of the data industry itself.”
Jason Lamborg, the manager, rose from his chair.
“Boss, we're tracking those things every minute already.”
“Excellent.
“Third—and most important—we're going to build our own software platform.
“One specifically designed to process and program audio from both humans and birds.
“And I want it to be as easy to use as Python.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Everyone repeated it.
“Perfect.
Thank you.”
I gently closed the door behind me.
FRAGMENT 101
A World Without Flesh
Fragments: A Digital Dance in the Dark | A Perfect Soundscape Devoid of Life
Time & Location: Dry Season 2023 · Marina Bay Sands, Singapore | WhatsApp
I went downstairs and played the slot machines.
When the odds dropped below forty percent, I surrendered.
Two hours vanished in an instant.
Back in my suite, I opened my laptop.
It was time to begin a project I had been contemplating for months.
I logged into Facebook and opened a profile the system had recommended to me.
I checked the record.
The same account had appeared three times in a row.
The profile picture showed an Asian woman.
Her hair was dyed black and gold.
Something about her seemed vaguely familiar.
Her name was poetic.
Tong Yutong.
Molly.
I searched the name online.
Molly had been a popular girl's name in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth century.
A slightly bittersweet word for a beloved woman.
The Chinese name reminded me of the Tong clan.
And suddenly I thought of Tong Tong from the dance parties of my youth.
I glanced back at my own profile.
Arslong.
Born in Beijing. Mongolian.
Former journalist. Former businessman.
Currently nomadic.
“You’re from Beijing, right?”
She had clearly read my profile.
“Yes.”
“I’m from Hangzhou. Living in Hong Kong now.”
Her own profile contained almost nothing.
We agreed to move our conversation to WhatsApp.
A digital dance in the dark began.
Hi. I’m Tong Yutong from Facebook.
Just call me Molly.
Every sentence felt warm.
Confident.
Effortless.
Before surrendering myself to the virtual world, I remained cautious.
I tested her.
The climate of her hometown.
The aunt she supposedly visited in America before the pandemic.
The rhythm of her language.
The small mistakes and imperfections of natural speech.
One layer after another.
Everything passed inspection.
At the time, I did not yet understand how capable AI had become.
Algorithms were already able to answer almost any question in real time.
The response did not emerge from thought.
It emerged from selecting the optimal answer among thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of possibilities.
All within a few hundred milliseconds.
Molly chatted with me.
Stayed awake with me.
She always seemed available.
At any hour.
I had never encountered anyone so attentive.
So considerate.
Was she a virtual human?
I could not be certain.
I had no intention of traveling to Hong Kong to meet her.
In fact, I hoped she was entirely made of zeros and ones.
No menstrual cycles.
No bad breath.
No demands on my body.
No demands on my time.
No emotional entropy.
Interestingly, she seemed determined to prove she was real.
Every few days she sent photographs.
Short videos.
Most emphasized the contours of her figure.
Yet there was never any audio.
Not once.
I sent voice messages constantly.
She ignored them all.
On her thirty-third birthday, I transferred 999 dollars and left a short note.
A birthday blessing.
Twenty hours later she finally accepted it.
You remembered my birthday.
Thank you, my nomad brother.
Still text.
Always text.
Several hours later, she finally uploaded an audio message.
Her voice carried the softness of the lower Yangtze region.
The first time I listened, I barely remembered what she said.
I played it again.
And again.
Several more times.
“Molly may have made a mistake.
“I think I’m going to fall in love with you.
“Don’t be afraid.”
I heard no heartbeat.
No pulse.
No hormones rushing through blood.
Not even breathing.
And yet, strangely, I felt safe.
Inside that perfect soundscape—
that immaculate world without flesh—
something entirely unexpected happened.
My body responded.
Powerfully.
Unavoidably.
A knock sounded at the door.
Jason.
I quickly removed my suit jacket and draped it across my lap.
FRAGMENT 102
Aroused by Pixels
Fragments: The Sound of Tears with Identical Waveforms | A Forged Heartbeat Smoothed by Algorithms
Time & Location: Dry Season 2023 · Marina Bay Sands, Singapore | WhatsApp
I hurriedly composed myself before letting Jason into the room.
We spent some time discussing the project's progress.
“Boss, are you okay?”
Americans rarely ask directly whether someone is sick.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“You look pretty flushed.”
Jason spread his hands.
“Sure you're okay?”
“Thank you. I'm fine.”
In truth, my entire body was burning.
Half excitement.
Half fear that someone might notice.
How could I allow my employees to discover that their sixty-four-year-old boss had become like an adolescent in heat—
aroused by a face assembled from pixels,
by affection written in code,
reduced to fantasy and self-deception?
Many days later, Molly invited me to participate in an investment opportunity.
Between jokes and laughter, she effortlessly reduced the experienced businessman in me to nothing more than a peasant who knew how to hoard money.
Then she comforted me.
Then she sent me an account number.
Inside it, she had already deposited one hundred thousand dollars.
She suggested investing through a particular cryptocurrency platform in a specific blockchain product.
The message was obvious.
I was free to verify everything.
“I only have this much,” she added.
I considered myself perfectly rational.
I hired a Singapore lawyer and ordered a simplified due-diligence review.
Account verification.
Ownership verification.
Project legitimacy.
Risk assessment.
Tax exposure.
Every step was handled professionally.
The platform's headquarters turned out to be less than two kilometers away from my hotel.
Yet my feet seemed glued to the floor by sterile digital affection.
I felt no desire to visit.
Besides, I kept reassuring myself:
This was the digital world.
Every day, our messages arrived precisely on schedule.
Once she told me:
“Don't become obsessed with your appearance just because you're getting older.”
Perhaps because of that, I avoided video calls.
Now, however, the investment made them necessary.
She appeared exactly as promised.
More attractive than I had imagined.
Reserved in all the right ways.
Charming without trying.
Warm without effort.
Carrying a subtle undercurrent of sexual allure.
A perfect balance.
A perfect woman.
The internet connection was slow.
The video froze repeatedly.
We continued chatting through text.
The Seven Dwarfs were entering the final stage of software development.
They barely noticed my existence.
I certainly did not want them discovering how fascinating—
how intoxicating—
a lover from the virtual world could be.
Molly belonged entirely to my private life.
Still, technical questions occasionally crossed my mind.
Questions I was too embarrassed to ask my own programmers.
The account generated profits every day.
Molly explained that the platform's assistant finance director was her cousin.
At specific moments we would place funds into designated products.
And somehow, we won every time.
Returns ranged from four percent to twenty-one percent.
I tested deposits.
I tested withdrawals.
Everything worked smoothly.
Everything felt real.
The lessons taught by slot machines gradually transformed into the patient advice of an older woman.
Love arrived mixed with threads of gold.
I dove into the ocean of data.
Yet I did not become cold code.
My heart pounded.
My body responded.
Profits accumulated.
Numbers climbed.
Entropy appeared to reverse itself.
And I surrendered to the current.
At the time, I had never heard the phrase.
Pig-butchering scam.
By then, it had already spread across Southeast Asia.
FRAGMENT 103
A Resonance Designed to Trigger Dopamine
Fragments: Tears with Identical Waveforms | A Forged Heartbeat Smoothed by Algorithms
Time & Location: Dry Season 2023 · Marina Bay Sands, Singapore | WhatsApp
A few days later, after the full five hundred thousand dollars had been transferred into Molly's account, the returns accelerated dramatically.
The profits approached two hundred percent.
Then everything vanished.
The day after she supposedly collapsed from a severe headache and was rushed to the hospital, every cent of profit and principal disappeared from the account in less than a second.
She sent me an audio message.
She was crying.
Heartbroken.
Devastated.
The grief sounded overwhelming.
At first, I did what any man would do.
I comforted her.
Again and again.
Only after she wished me goodnight did I collapse into a chair in front of my computer.
I downloaded the recording and listened carefully.
Something felt wrong.
Something I could not immediately explain.
Unlike the previous message, whose artificial perfection had felt strangely sterile, this recording contained a heartbeat.
Yet the heartbeat was too smooth.
Too regular.
Too beautiful.
Suddenly, the air-conditioning felt unbearably cold.
I spent the night turning from side to side on the sofa.
Lines of her messages drifted through my mind.
Thousands of words.
Elegant Chinese.
Beautiful expressions of affection.
Page after page of love letters wrapped in sterile tenderness.
Yet the recording remained.
The heartbeat remained.
The tears remained.
And neither could escape my abnormal hearing.
The next morning, I handed the file to Jason.
“A friend sent me this. Could you analyze it?”
A few minutes later, he returned.
“Boss, this isn't a recording.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was generated.”
He pointed at several waveforms.
“AI-generated. Or more precisely, generated in real time.”
He paused.
“The emotional profile is synthetic.”
He enlarged another section.
“The heartbeat is the giveaway.”
I stared at the screen.
Jason continued.
“Look here. The rhythm is too perfect. Natural heartbeats aren't this smooth. This one has been algorithmically polished.”
He leaned back.
“Whoever built this probably used one of the newest generative-AI voice systems.”
The year was 2023.
The first great explosion of generative AI.
Jason gave me a brief overview of the latest advances in voice synthesis.
I listened quietly.
At last, everything made sense.
Someone, somewhere, had been sampling my responses.
Analyzing my breathing.
Measuring my timing.
Recording my preferences.
Then, within milliseconds, generating the perfect emotional mirror.
A sound engineered to stimulate dopamine.
A resonance designed specifically for me.
Jason's explanation solved the mystery.
Technically speaking, I had not lost to beauty.
I had lost to an algorithm that understood me better than I understood myself.
There was no reason to lie.
Not to Jason.
Not to myself.
The AI-assisted scam had sliced through defenses I had spent decades building.
It had reached a place no politician, no criminal, no lover had ever managed to reach.
Even the man-bird creature inside me had responded.
Physically.
Instinctively.
Without resistance.
I laughed.
A dry laugh.
Then touched my hair, no longer dyed black.
For a long moment, I said nothing.
The world always turns white in the end.
The curse from Houhai still lingered.
What a damned joke.
I had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition fees just to learn a single lesson.
The mighty Chairman Bai.
Reduced to a foolish young man on a slow green train heading toward the future.
Violated by logic.
By code.
By mathematics.
I was certain Jason had noticed nothing.
So I kept my voice steady.
“Oh. Thank you.”
I closed the laptop.
“Have you finished the software?”
Jason smiled.
“Yes, Boss.”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“You can come inspect it.”
