FRAGMENT 115
The Underground Vault
Fragment: Audio Hard Drives Beneath the Earth
Time & Location: Autumn 2032 · Underground Chamber of Temple of Listening Wind, Kazakh Steppe
On the Autumn Equinox.
In the afternoon, I launched my private aircraft and landed beside the Ili River.
The wealthy no longer used automobiles, whether powered by gasoline or electricity.
Like me, they spent more than a million dollars on personal vertical-takeoff aircraft.
These machines could lift directly from specially designed balconies or fold their wings and outrun any vehicle on a highway.
I never liked the metallic imitation birds.
By now, I could understand crow language completely.
Yet I still possessed no wings.
Today was also the anniversary of my former wife's death.
She had received every available COVID vaccine.
Then, without warning, multiple organs failed.
She died this time last year.
I did not return to Beijing.
My daughter was unhappy about that.
It changed nothing.
Sha Qingqing—
the voice goddess I had once loved—
had married a professor of philosophy, a profession she had once mocked with particular enthusiasm.
Honoring a joke I had made many years earlier, I transferred my remaining ten million dollars to her as a wedding gift.
Orchid's son had just entered middle school.
I was told he spent most of his time wandering through virtual worlds, much like his mother.
He already earned tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Soon, two hundred crows arrived.
They descended around me and settled into the grass.
Robots had cared for them for years.
They felt like my children.
I squatted there.
The thick prairie grass brushed lightly against my ankles.
Driven by the wind, the stalks produced faint cries of alarm.
Before me, the waters of the Ili River flowed steadily toward Lake Balkhash.
Seen from orbit, astronauts called it the blue tear of Earth.
Behind me stood an ancient petroglyph site, perhaps more than two thousand years old.
The hard stone carried elegant images carved by living flesh.
Their biology had long vanished.
Only inorganic logic remained.
Little White and the other crows sat quietly.
Watching everything I did.
I put on my cold-weather gear.
Then I opened the electrically controlled steel hatch hidden beneath the grass.
A hundred meters below lay my personal data vault.
I had named it:
Temple of Listening Wind.
A wave of cold air rose upward.
It felt as though it had traveled all the way from the ravines behind Tanzhe Temple.
Dark.
Ancient.
And familiar.
FRAGMENT 116
The Data Catacomb
Fragment: Audio Hard Drives Beneath the Earth
Time & Location: Autumn 2032 · Underground Chamber of Temple of Listening Wind, Kazakh Steppe
I descended into the underground chamber by elevator.
The lighting was dim.
Deliberately so.
One by one, I ran my fingers across the hard drives.
They had been manufactured from the most durable materials available.
Each titanium casing bore a marker fashioned from gold.
My father.
His audio archive contained none of the sounds of daily life.
Only recordings of his work.
Samples.
Fragments.
Encoded traces.
Those recordings had cost me a fortune.
I had my team process them through KP-8, refining and reconstructing them until the logic became internally consistent, until a living voice could be rebuilt from the remnants.
Simulated.
Or perhaps programmed.
The single word—
"Son."
The first time I heard it, I lost control.
Teacher Su.
General Zhou.
I had personally recorded both of them.
Both mentors were long dead.
My former wife's voice had been edited into perfection.
No matter how many years passed, it remained the purest expression of the traditional Chinese wife and mother.
Not a trace of noise remained.
She had accompanied me.
Endured me.
For twenty years.
And I had lied to her for more than nineteen of them.
The drives arranged in the foremost row contained every form of human love I had ever known.
Not ambition.
Not lust.
Only love.
Most of the women I had loved, along with my children, were stored there.
Many of the recordings had been gathered remotely by professional teams.
The storage space allocated to each of them was vastly larger than that devoted to anyone else.
The living remained there.
Sha Qingqing.
Dawa Yangzong.
Baorigé.
My daughter.
My son.
All present.
Rowan Lee was there as well.
Though she had spent her life as Gao Yong's living widow.
For her archive, I had instructed the editors to weave in a passage from Dvořák's Bohemian Symphony as a permanent background motif.
Behind them stretched an ocean of additional drives.
The voices of ordinary Chinese people.
Men and women.
Officials and clerks.
Billionaires and laborers.
No classifications.
No saints.
No villains.
I knew too well that your good man might be another person's monster.
And today's monster might someday become a good man.
There were no drives for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other men and women I had known.
I had no interest in preserving history.
Nor in leaving a legacy for future generations.
I simply wanted enough humanity inside this sacred hall to serve as a backdrop for the people I had loved.
Sha Qingqing.
Her archive contained everything.
Broadcast recordings.
Work materials.
Conversations from ordinary life.
The recordings I had preserved since the day her voice first entered my world.
And later, after the KP systems were born, samples of her breathing, heartbeat, and the countless biological harmonics hidden within her body.
For her alone, the processes of collection, classification, editing, encoding, and even the creation of a short video reconstructed entirely from audio data—
a proprietary technology developed by Jason's company after he became CEO—
had cost more than four million dollars.
Dawa's archive was simpler.
So were the others.
Yet each personal audio vault still cost more than a million dollars to produce.
Every byte was protected by 256-bit encryption.
In a dark corner stood another group of drives.
On each was engraved a name:
Yehenara Orchid
The highest level of encryption.
The recordings inside remained untouched.
Raw.
Original.
I had never intended to use any version of KP to deconstruct her.
Nor to purify her.
In the darkness, I noticed the faintest flicker of digital gold.
A tiny status light glimmered across the surface of Yehenara Orchid's archive.
I rested my hand upon it.
For a very long time.
For many years now,
I had stopped following her life.
FRAGMENT 117
Butter Lamps Beneath the Howls of “Long Life”
Fragment: A Chorus of Crows, a Chorus of Longevity
Time & Location: Autumn 2032 · Temple of Listening Wind, Tengri Dream World
When I returned to the surface, night had already fallen.
The crows were waiting for me.
I placed a butter lamp atop the steel hatch.
Patiently.
Carefully.
Like a woman embroidering silk.
I adjusted it millimeter by millimeter until it sat perfectly straight.
The tiny flame trembled in the wind pushing through the grass.
The flock released a low, synchronized murmur.
They were saying:
"You should eat."
I rose and waved to them.
"Come home with me."
The words sounded strangely familiar.
My father had once spoken them to me.
Tengri Dream World overflowed with celebration.
Human footsteps seemed unusually light.
Laughter carried only high frequencies.
One week later, Google's Song of Longevity would be sung across the world.
Its telomere-repair and lifespan-extension technology was about to enter the market.
Every hotel reported record occupancy.
Executive suites and presidential suites were sold out.
The visitors arriving from every corner of the globe were not here for scenery.
Not for food.
Not for massages.
Not for gambling tables.
Not even for the slot machines.
They had come for a single purpose:
To celebrate the possibility of living to one hundred and fifty.
My company's production teams were preparing a global electronic spectacle.
The stars of the show were not human.
They were the newest generation of humanoid robots.
Their synthetic biochemical systems could stimulate adrenaline and dopamine more effectively than flesh-and-blood performers.
The theme was simple:
Longevity.
The performance would begin on the very day Google released the technology.
The cheapest ticket cost nine thousand dollars.
For longevity, humanity was willing to wager heavily.
Smartphones had become antiques.
Most people now communicated through AI terminals.
The wealthy used something even more extravagant.
Four-dimensional display systems.
A finger passed through empty air.
A floating screen appeared.
Everywhere, strange points of light drifted through the darkness.
Not reflections from human eyes.
Reflections from intelligent contact lenses.
Often, people seemed to be drawing invisible circles in the air.
Abstract.
Every day, I visited the Temple of Listening Wind.
From dawn until noon.
Each visit was devoted to only one person.
I stood silently before a single hard drive.
Then I returned to the surface.
Lit a butter lamp.
Lay upon the cold sand.
And listened to the deep trembling of the earth.
Wind.
Water.
Dry grass brushing against itself.
Not even the thunderous drums.
Not even the fireworks.
Not even the ever-rising chorus of voices screaming
"Long life!"
"Long life!"
"Long life!"
could move my feet.
Years earlier, Google's visionaries had predicted that humanity's age of radical life extension would begin in 2032.
They had been correct.
For many years, I had used the same wallpaper on every computer.
Later, it became the startup screen of my personal digital terminal.
Four drifting Chinese characters:
"May Die At Any Moment.”
I was not cursing myself.
Nor mocking Chinese superstition.
I simply found it amusing.
I walked to the crows' quarters.
Ran my hands through their feathers.
Listened to them discussing food.
Discussing reproduction.
Discussing life.
Discussing death.
Crows could not speak human languages.
They could not say:
"Life is merely zeros and ones."
Instead they cawed.
And croaked.
And muttered.
Yet their meaning was simple:
"We will stay with you all your life."
A crow might live twenty years.
Thirty if fortunate.
No human wished to extend their lifespan.
No corporation would spend billions on them.
No celebration would be held in their honor.
So I stayed with them.
And they stayed with me.
