FRAGMENT 104
Calculating the Velocity of a Fall
Fragments: Simulating a Jump in an Algorithm | Converting Everything into Audio, Then Converting Audio into Code
Time & Location: Dry Season 2023 · Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
The balcony.
Twenty-four floors above the ground.
The afternoon sun had turned Singapore into an oven.
Out on the water, the cargo ships looked like burnt insects.
Far away, a glint of metal carved a straight line across the blue-screen sky.
I wanted to fly.
So I simulated jumping.
I calculated the velocity after takeoff and every detail of the descent.
I searched my mind for anything that might stop me.
The people I cared about: my family, my son, Lan Hui, and a few shadows hidden deep inside my heart.
The people I despised: none.
The people who truly mattered: fewer than the fingers on one hand.
Wealth: a pile of numbers.
Body: healthy. Still 188 centimeters tall. Ninety kilograms.
The speed of falling could be expressed in equations.
If I spread my arms wide, forming a giant X against the sky, terminal velocity would approach twenty-four meters per second.
The calculations showed an average descent speed of 20.48 meters per second.
At impact, I would be traveling at 35.56 meters per second.
In a matter of seconds, air resistance would strip away all the heavy labels.
"President."
"Editor-in-Chief."
"Billionaire."
"Citizen of a Caribbean nation."
"Descendant of the Mongol Golden Lineage."
A few hundred milliseconds before impact, the White Crow would burst from my body, spread its wings, and drift upward without a care.
At last, I died inside the algorithm.
Then I realized I had forgotten to calculate the acoustics.
The skull cracking.
The lungs bursting.
The blood spraying outward.
Those sounds would probably be fascinating.
I laughed.
"Boss, can we come out onto the balcony?"
Jason's voice carried the familiar scent of computation. The programmers always preferred talking to me when I was smoking.
"Come on over."
They demonstrated the software.
The interface looked deeply technical—blue, green, gray, white, and black.
The color scheme was nearly perfect.
The software converted human audio into code with frightening elegance.
It ignored language entirely.
It processed only frequency vectors.
Human emotions, lies, heartbeats—everything became dynamic coordinates floating in space.
The prototype already worked.
Feed it a recording of someone's voice, and it would automatically remove the linguistic content.
After analyzing microscopic fluctuations in the vocal cords, it generated percentages for predefined categories:
Honesty: 12%
Dopamine Generated by Greed: 88%
I congratulated the seven geniuses and promised bonuses.
Then my expression hardened.
"However," I said, "this is still far from what I want."
Every one of them became excited by the challenge.
Their heart rates jumped immediately.
I gave them a more precise definition.
The core logic was simple:
Convert everything into audio.
Then convert audio into code.
Two months later, they did it.
Naming the software sparked a long argument.
In the end, I exercised my authority as boss.
This AI tool would become an unmatched weapon for the future rise of the Mongols.
I named it:
Khan's Pumice.
KP-1.
Pumice.
A stone left by Eternal Blue Heaven in the mouth of a volcano.
Full of holes.
Light enough to float.
The greatest absorber of sound in the stone world.
In Bunker Number Three, it had been the hero that killed echoes.
In the Pantheon of Rome, it had helped hold up the dome.
It was also the stone Granny Yang used to scrub the calluses from her feet.
Finally, I leaned toward the microphone and released a deep khoomei note.
A Mongolian throat-sung vibration.
KP-1 instantly translated the waveform into tens of thousands of logical instructions.
"Use this as the signature."
I turned once in place.
The soles of my shoes scraped across the hardwood floor, producing a low hiss.
A salute to Eternal Blue Heaven.
Among those tens of thousands of instructions, perhaps one line contained the frequency of Teacher Su spinning in circles.
I waved the programmers away and sent them back to the next suite.
Then I searched for one of Buyanbayar's songs.
Father's Grassland, Mother's River.
I hummed along with him.
FRAGMENT 105
The Blade of Audio
Fragments: Attacks by an Audio Weapon | Turning Toward Human–Crow Dialogue
Time & Location: Rainy Season 2023 · Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
Singapore during Christmas season was full of laughter, shopping, and credit-card payments.
Too much order.
Too much engineered harmony.
Too much entropy reduction.
As a Christmas gift, the Seven Dwarfs delivered KP-2.
They had dismantled Python's logical skeleton and rebuilt it around the White Crow's auditory nervous system.
Every one of my abnormal abilities had been translated into code.
Embedded within the software was a database containing decades of samples—my personal archive of human biochemical frequencies.
I handed out extra bonuses.
The programmers left happily for Christmas in America.
And I returned to being alone.
I rubbed the stiffness in my lower back and launched KP-2.
The moment an audio stream associated with power passed through its algorithms, I heard that familiar sound again.
A clean, physical shattering.
Later, I walked through VivoCity.
After eating grilled eel over rice, I sat by the water and lit a cigarette.
Several crows landed in the trees above me.
Cawing.
Then more arrived.
A dozen.
Perhaps twenty.
Some crowded onto branches.
Others gathered on the stone pavement in front of me.
All of them cawing without pause.
One crow hopped directly to my feet.
It pecked at my shoe and ran away.
Another brought a paper clip.
It dropped the shiny object beside me, flapped its wings, performed a little somersault, and flew off.
My body radiated the same warmth and pleasure one feels watching childhood friends at play.
The caws came in different frequencies.
Different rhythms.
Different intentions.
Some seemed directed at me.
Others seemed to be private conversations among themselves.
The White Crow awakened as well.
Yet even it could not translate the language of its own species.
I took out my phone and sent Jason an email.
Important.
Please let me know when you return.
Jason came back first.
He brought California chocolates and six cans of Coca-Cola.
"Welcome back, Boss."
He handed me a can.
"Original American formula."
"I need you to start an experiment immediately."
Jason stood motionless and listened.
Then opened a Coke for himself.
"I can't do what you're asking."
His voice became heavier.
His heartbeat accelerated.
"This would violate U.S. law. And Singapore law."
"Come on."
I explained my reasoning carefully.
I had no desire to become a digital Assassin.
At most, I wanted to become a binary Zorro.
I also knew Jason's weaknesses.
He adored Jennifer Lopez.
His phone contained nearly every video she had ever appeared in.
Whenever she turned around on screen, he would pause the video and spend a few moments appreciating life.
Three minutes of silence passed.
Then he looked up.
"OK."
"I'll help."
As he reached the door, he turned around.
"Is that everything?"
"Oh, one more thing."
"Go ahead."
"Upgrade KP-2."
"Add bird-language sampling and analysis."
"I want to see whether human–bird communication is possible."
Jason stared.
Then burst out laughing.
"Boss, you've got an incredible imagination."
"Fuck."
"That would be amazing."
As the door closed, I shouted:
"Start with crows."
"OK."
For days afterward, I could hear him working.
Between bursts of keyboard typing, low growls escaped his throat.
I was certain Jennifer Lopez's pixels and physical signals were dancing somewhere in front of his eyes.
Not long afterward, Gao Yong's prison sentence was increased to life imprisonment.
The powerful man on television was removed from office.
Sha Qingqing's station director was arrested for bribery and sexual assault.
Old Tong secured a peaceful retirement.
Xu Yanan retired earlier than expected.
One by one, the headlines sank beneath the digital ocean.
Forgotten.
Archived.
Compressed into data.
I returned to Beijing.
