Fragment: Earthquake | The Resonance of Thousands of Racing Hearts | One Last Weary Scrape

Time & Location: Winter 2032 · Tengri Conrad Hotel, Kazakh Steppe

 

 

The balcony garden was vast.

Under the soft light of the nearly full moon, it was more moving than any Impressionist masterpiece.

 

I remembered the calculation of that fall.

Remembered the foolishness and vanity of being human.

 

My eyes began to sting.

Pink snowflakes filled the sky.

All zeros and ones.

Dry.

Cold.

 

Then beneath my feet, too, the ground became soft layers of data.

Zeros and ones writhing like maggots.

Layer after layer.

Bottomless.

Endless.

There was nowhere to escape.

 

Earthquake.

 

The shaking continued for more than an hour.

Eternal Heaven had come to claim the life of Temüjin's descendant.

 

I had never accepted expensive drugs or injections for the sake of longevity.

Nor would I allow doctors to tear open my skin.

But if this was Heaven's arrangement, I accepted it willingly.

 

Decay surrounded my body, like a python of data coiling tighter and tighter around me.

I could not breathe.

My eyes and ears bled.

Blood flowed.

Blood sprayed.

Pain.

 

Humanity was celebrating.

The sounds of lips touching.

Mucus shifting in throats.

The resonance of thousands of hearts beating wildly.

Skin rubbing against skin.

Bones cracking.

And inside every flesh-and-bone creature fantasizing about longevity, that wet, sticky life-noise.

 

Khan's Pumice continued operating with perfect order.

Hiss.

Hiss.

It transformed the human noise bursting through the roof into code in real time.

From the lowest layers of the world, the code rose.

Layer after layer.

Filling time and space.

Zeros and ones.

Dark-red code splashed everywhere.

Once human beings became code without warmth, color, or scent,

code itself became unbearably boring.

The world turned dead white.

 

No reincarnation.

 

Three days later.

Because KP-8 had received no response from its master within the preset 108 hours, it initiated self-destruction.

January 8.

Orchid's birthday.

Deep inside the Temple of Listening Wind, the hard drive containing her audio data released one last weary scrape.

Then every micro-motor in every drive beneath the earth stopped spinning.

No one knew.

No one could restart them.

 

Little White separated from the flock.

 

Alone, it stood on the terrace.

Alone, it called.

Human beings could not understand what it was saying.

It flew into the familiar room and landed on the digital control console.

 

Gently, it stepped on the round button.

Paused.

Then pecked hard at the Spin button.

The giant screen lit up.

It opened the folders one by one.

Its master's traces appeared in sequence.

 

The Revision folder.

Dense with files.

Orchid: revised 120 times.

Sister Nan: 57 times.

Granny Yang: 9 times.

Teacher Spinning: 3 times.

 

The Father folder.

Only seven files.

But more than a hundred images.

All of the same man.

Young.

Middle-aged.

Old.

 

The Discussions with AI folder contained the most material.

But Little White could not understand it.

 

There were too many symbols it had never learned.

On the website, the number under Views had already reached seven digits.

Under Contributors, the number exceeded one hundred thousand.

Before its eyes appeared the old man's smug face.

 

There was another folder.

Its title was:

Thinking Too Much

Little White did not understand.

Its master had never taught it that phrase.

 

At the lower right corner of the screen was a green icon.

Looking closely, it resembled a Hanging Ghost.

 

Little White stepped on it.

Nothing happened.

It stepped again.

A line of text appeared:

Empty Folder

It stepped once more.

Still nothing.

 

Then it remembered things its master had often said:

"Clear out the garbage around you."

"I'm going to empty these files."

And also:

"Clean."

"Neat."

Little White stepped on the Hanging Ghost again.

Still nothing.

So it used its beak.

The way it would crack open a nut.

 

Whoosh.

Every folder on the desktop vanished.

 

A violent wind rose, roaring as it collided with every physical obstacle in its path.

The terrace door blew open.

The white crow lifted into the air.

 

Then plunged headfirst into the wind.

 

 

 

The End