FRAGMENT 96
Numbers Have No Names
Fragments: A Quiet Meditation of the Mind | Crossing into the Silent World of Binary
Time & Location: Spring 2020 · Chegongzhuang, Beijing
The pandemic arrived.
On the day before China closed its borders, Lan Hui and I returned to Beijing.
She went home to care for her disabled mother.
I did not return to Sha Qingqing and Sha Dao. I was afraid of bringing the virus back from overseas.
Instead, I stayed in Chegongzhuang and spent an entire week cleaning my small compound.
No workers.
Just water, cloth, and a broom.
It felt strangely peaceful.
Like meditation.
Near midnight, a story surged to the top of the news.
A doctor in Wuhan, Li Wenliang, had died.
He was thirty-five.
One of the first people to warn others about the outbreak, he had been punished for speaking out and assigned to one of the most dangerous emergency wards. Eventually, he became infected himself.
Public anger exploded online.
People condemned the lies and cruelty of officials.
The writer Fang Fang began publishing her diaries, revealing another corner of the catastrophe each day.
Sha Dao had just turned five.
Almost every day, I spoke with him by video.
A minute.
Sometimes two.
My family was close.
Yet my attention drifted toward people far away.
I retreated into a shelter built from numbers.
I did not debate politics.
I did not wander through social media.
I rarely visited Twitter or YouTube.
Instead, I watched the pandemic maps published each day by the World Health Organization.
The lesson was simple.
After death, people became numbers.
Anonymous numbers.
A programming language called Python was becoming popular across the world.
The higher the death toll climbed, the more interested I became.
Outside China, scientists with little traditional programming background were already using it to track infections, model viral spread, and accelerate vaccine research.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Orchid had gone back to calling me the way she used to.
“I’m playing with Python.”
“What’s that?”
“A programming language. Easy to learn. Very interesting.”
“Oh. Then have fun.”
I put down the phone.
Moved my fingers across the trackpad.
And stepped into the silent world of binary.
I asked Python to translate three Chinese characters into UTF-8:
Life.
Death.
Me.
Immediately, it returned:
Life
11100110 10110100 10111011
Death
11100110 10101101 10111011
Me
11100110 10001000 10010001
What fascinated me was that the encodings for life and death were nearly identical.
The first and last groups matched perfectly.
Only the middle eight bits differed.
I stared at the screen for a long time.
Life and death.
Separated by only eight bits.
A virus.
An error.
A mutation.
A number.
Human life was no more complicated than that.
At dusk, I sat beside the gravestones.
Tapping the stone above ground and the bones beneath it.
Feeding binary code into my mind.
Life.
Or death.
The sparks from my cigarette carried the same message.
Life.
Or death.
In the Chinese-speaking world, the most important logic of a human life could be reduced to twenty-four digits.
Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall von Bell still had gravestones.
They still possessed a little data preserved in humanity’s collective memory.
As for me?
I was only another sequence among billions:
11100110 10001000 10010001
Human voices always possess more viscosity than numbers.
My former wife and daughter wanted me home.
They wanted us to shelter together.
Sha Qingqing wanted the same.
She and Sha Dao missed me deeply.
Life was not binary.
It was a series of impossible choices.
After several days of hesitation, I chose my son.
Family life was warm.
But unlike data, it could never remain stable.
Sha Qingqing was having her period.
For days, everything seemed to move toward disorder.
Emotions.
Language.
Arguments.
Entropy.
Eventually I retreated into my study.
I opened the computer and asked Python for the machine language of another word.
Entropy.
11100111 10000110 10110101
Without reading glasses, it almost looked like the codes for life and death.
The house filled with the static noise of living.
One evening I became irritated and returned to Chegongzhuang.
Sha Dao’s crying lingered in my ears for a long time.
Sha Qingqing was furious.
Her face changed.
Her voice changed.
She demanded a separation.
I ignored her.
The digital world was quieter than a cemetery.
The screen glowed like incense burning before an altar.
The faint hum of tiny electric motors sounded almost like chanting in a temple.
I sat there, entering line after line of numbers.
As though I were writing a scripture that nobody had ever read.
FRAGMENT 97
Probes Behind Every Smile
Fragments: Six Pinhole Cameras | Tightening Throats Behind a Hidden Wall | An Electronic Ecstasy Rolling in Like the Tide
Time & Location: Autumn 2020 · Former Prince's Residence Inside Fuchengmen, beijing
An Audi A6 stopped outside the bamboo grove.
A man with the measured gait of a secretary arrived carrying a message.
He claimed there was “important official business.”
“Identification?”
I stood in the courtyard and held out my hand.
“This is my credential. And this is the introduction letter.”
I climbed into the Audi.
After a short drive, we entered an old princely residence inside Fuchengmen.
I knew the place.
Lao Lin had once handled private matters here.
A senior official whose face appeared regularly on television was waiting outside the building.
“Mr. Bai, please come in.”
His hand was larger, thicker, and softer than that of any official I had ever met.
Yet it carried none of the obvious weight of authority.
“You met Lao Lin here before, didn't you?”
That was his opening move.
Lao Lin had long since been imprisoned in Qincheng.
Everyone knew it.
The matter was important.
I awakened the White Crow.
“Yes. We had some lively conversations.”
I deliberately admitted my acquaintance with Lao Lin.
In truth, he had done only one thing for me.
He had reminded Lao Tong to let me see Gao Yong's father's Archives.
The official laughed.
“Mr. Bai is a remarkable man. Very straightforward.”
“You are a busy man. Why did you ask me here?”
I watched his pupils carefully.
No avoidance.
No hesitation.
Steady heartbeat.
No disorder within.
He began talking about fortune-telling.
Every word carried a probe.
I pretended to be dull.
An old street magician performing cheap mind-reading tricks.
Meanwhile, I was already aware of six pinhole cameras recording from different angles.
Behind a wall, there was a hidden room.
A recorder hissed softly.
Several men and women were listening.
Their throats tightened whenever I spoke.
We exchanged riddles disguised as conversation.
Neither of us touched the real subject.
Eventually he escorted me out with impeccable courtesy.
The testing continued.
Again and again.
Different methods.
Different approaches.
Until finally he stopped pretending.
The final conversation took place in my office.
The moment he entered, he noticed the Go board on the tea table.
“Mr. Bai is also a Go player?”
“You flatter me. Please sit.”
He glanced around.
“Shall we take a walk? Johann Adam Schall's grave is nearby, isn't it?”
So we sat beside the stone monument.
Smoking.
Several men in black stood motionless among the bamboo.
After an hour, we reached an agreement I could not refuse.
As he prepared to leave, he pointed toward the crystal photo frame on my desk.
Inside was a picture of Sha Dao.
“Your son is exceptionally handsome. One day he will become a great military man.”
Men like him never spoke directly.
They simply demonstrated that they already knew where your weakness lay.
A secretary entered at his signal.
A canvas bag stuffed with cash was placed on top of the Go board.
The muffled thud instantly connected itself to a distant memory—
the sound of a button being unfastened in Gao Yong's house,
and Rowan's chest beneath my hand.
“Yes. I am honored by your generosity.”
I stood outside the bamboo grove and watched the Audis disappear into the distance.
FRAGMENT 98
A Clap of Thunder
Fragments: Six Pinhole Cameras | Tightening Throats Behind a Hidden Room | Electronic Ecstasy Rolling in Like Ocean Waves
Time & Location: Autumn 2020 · Former Prince's Residence Inside Fuchengmen, Beijing | Summer 2022 · Chegongzhuang, Beijing and the China–Laos Border
I copied the audio files onto my computer and began searching.
I heard the pathways of enormous financial transfers.
I heard key witnesses being physically eliminated.
I heard the ruthless machinery of power tightening its grip.
Then I encrypted everything I found, archived the data, rewrote and backed it up using Python, and erased every visible trace.
Two days later, I was brought back to the former prince's residence.
I handed the data package to him personally.
He poured tea for me.
His mannerisms reminded me of Teacher Su.
As I sat there, I calculated the timing.
His people had almost certainly searched my study already.
I stood and took my leave.
Back in my office, I opened my computer.
Every file was gone.
Completely erased.
I immediately drove to Sha Qingqing's apartment.
I picked up my son and kissed him.
Then I held her.
Spoke a few quiet words.
Patted gently the woman whose voice had once restored life to me.
“I’m going to America,” I told them.
“I’ll contact you when I land.”
At the airport, the immigration officer remained perfectly polite.
“Mr. Bai, you are currently restricted from leaving the country. Please return home.”
A clap of thunder.
I had no choice but to go back to Chegongzhuang.
The probes hidden in people's mouths were replaced by real people.
Visitors arrived regularly.
Some wore uniforms.
Others belonged to the underworld.
Threats.
Warnings.
Intimidation.
The men in uniform would leave.
The gangsters would leave as well.
None of them could withstand being examined from the inside out.
None wanted a second encounter with the crimson gaze above my mask.
Or the terrifying throat-song rumble behind it.
The pandemic health code became humanity's numerical designation.
For the first time in history, an entire population experienced large-scale digital management.
The experiment advanced flawlessly.
To keep my code from turning red, I dutifully lined up for tests every day.
Yet I knew the code was not the true prison.
Behind it stretched the invisible net cast by the prince's residence.
A net that left me nowhere to go.
During my lowest moments, I would collapse onto the floor.
My fingers traced the long scar on my leg.
Bitcoin.
Big Data.
Hackers.
Blockchain.
The Metaverse.
These inorganic beauties possessed none of the fragrance of wood or earth.
Yet they stayed beside me every day.
At the masquerade ball of zeros and ones, they danced.
Sometimes a waltz.
Sometimes a blues rhythm.
And sometimes they delivered wave after wave of electronic ecstasy.
Eventually, the lockdowns ended.
I packed my MacBook Pro and several portable hard drives into a backpack.
Then I flew to Xishuangbanna.
Determined to leave helplessness and boredom behind.
Several hours later, I was lying on a rock deep in the mountains of Laos.
The sound of leeches burrowing into my flesh woke me from sleep.
