Hold Up the Sky

2018-04-01

It’s yet another day when I can’t make up my mind. I’ve been dragging my feet for a couple of months already, as though I were walking through a pool of thick, heavy sludge. I feel my life being used up dozens of times faster than before—where “before” is before the Gene Extension program was commercialized. And before I came up with my plan.

I gaze into the distance from a window on the top floor of an office building. The city spreads below me like an exposed silicon die, and me no more than an electron running along its dense nanometer-thick routes. In the scheme of things, that’s how small I am. The decisions I make are no big deal. If I could only make a decision… But as so many times before, I can’t decide. The waffling continues.

Hadron shows up late, again, bringing a gust of wind with him into the office. He has a bruise on his face. A bandage is stuck on his forehead, but he seems very self-possessed. He holds his head high, as though a medal were stuck there. His desk is opposite mine. He sits down, turns on his computer, then stares at me, clearly waiting for me to ask a question. However, I’m not interested.

“Did you see it on TV last night?” Hadron finally asks.

He’s talking about the “Fair Life” attack on a hospital downtown, also the biggest Gene Extension Center in the country. Two long, black burn scars mar the hospital’s snow-white exterior as though dirty hands had fondled the face of a jade-like beauty. Frightening. “Fair Life” is the largest and also most extreme of the many groups opposed to Gene Extension. Hadron is a member, but I didn’t see him on TV. The crowd outside the hospital had roiled like the tide.

“We just had an all-hands,” I say in response. “You know the company policy. Keep this up and you won’t have a way to feed yourself.”

Gene Extension is short for Gene Reforming Life-Extension Technology. By removing those gene segments that produce the aging clock, humanity’s typical life span can be extended to as long as three hundred years. This technology was first commercialized five years ago, and it quickly became a disaster that’s spread to every society and government in the world. Though it’s widely coveted, almost no one can afford it. Gene Extension for one person costs as much as a mansion, and the already widening gap between the rich and the poor suddenly feels even more insurmountable.

“I don’t care,” Hadron says. “I’m not going to live even a hundred years. What do I have to care about?”

Smoking is strictly prohibited in the office, but Hadron lights a cigarette now. Like he’s trying to show just how little he cares.

“Envy. Envy is hazardous to your health.” I wave away the smoke from my eyes. “The past also had lots of people who died too early because they couldn’t afford to pay the medical bills.”

“That’s not the same thing. Practically everyone can afford health care. Now, though, the ninety-nine percent look helplessly at the one percent who have all the money and will live to be three hundred. I’m not afraid to admit I’m envious. It’s envy that’s keeping society fair.” He leans in toward me from the table. “Are you so sure you’re not envious? Join us.”

Hadron’s gaze makes me shiver. For a moment, I wonder if he’s looking through me. Yes, I want to become who he envies. I want to become a Gene Extended person.

But the fact is, I don’t have much money. I’m in my thirties and still have an entry-level job. It’s in the finance department, though. Plenty of opportunities to embezzle funds. After years of planning, it’s all done. Now, I only have to click my mouse, and the five million I need for Gene Extension will go into my secret bank account. From there, it’ll be transferred to the Gene Extension Center’s account. I’ve installed layers upon layers of camouflage into the labyrinthian financial system. It’ll be at least half a year before they discover the money is missing. When they do, I’ll lose my job, I’ll be sentenced, I’ll lose everything I own, I’ll suffer the disapproving gazes of countless people…

But, by then, I’ll be someone who can live for three hundred years.

And yet I’m still hesitating.

I’ve researched the statutes carefully. The penalties for corruption are five million yuan and at most twenty years. After twenty years, I’ll still have over two hundred years of useful life ahead of me. The question now is, given that the math is so simple, can I really be the only one planning something like that? In fact, besides crimes that get the death penalty, once you’ve become one of Gene Extended, they’re all worth committing. So, how many people are there like me, who’ve planned it but are hesitating? This thought makes me want to act right now and, at the same time, makes me flinch.

What makes me waver the most, though, is Jian Jian. Before I met her, I didn’t believe there was any love in the world. After I met her, I didn’t believe that there was anything but love in the world. If I leave her, what would be the point in living even two thousand years? On the scales of life, two and a half centuries sits on one side and the pain of leaving Jian Jian sits on the other. The scales are practically balanced.

The head of our department calls a meeting, and I can guess from the look on his face that it isn’t to discuss work. Rather, it’s directed at a specific person. Sure enough, the chief says, today, he wants to talk about the “intolerable” conduct of some of the staff. I don’t look at Hadron, but I know he’s in trouble. The chief, however, says someone else’s name.

“Liu Wei, according to reliable sources, you joined the IT Republic?”

Liu Wei nods, as self-assured as Louis XVI walking to the guillotine. “This has nothing to do with work. I don’t want work interfering with my personal freedoms.”

The chief sternly shakes his head. He thrusts a finger at Liu Wei. “Very few things have nothing to do with work. Don’t bring your cherished university ideals into the workplace. If a country can condemn its president on Main Street, that’s called democracy. However, if everyone disobeys their boss, then this country will collapse.”

“The virtual nation is about to be recognized.”

“Recognized by whom? The United Nations? Or a world power? Stop dreaming.”

The chief doesn’t seem to have much faith in his last utterance. The territory human society owns is divided into two parts. One part is every continent and island on Earth. The other part is cyberspace.

The latter recapitulated human history at a hundred times the speed. In cyberspace, after tens of years of a disorganized Stone Age, nations emerged as a matter of course. Virtual nations chiefly stem from two sources. The first is every sort of bulletin-board system aggregated together. The second is massively multiplayer online games. Virtual nations have heads of state and legislatures similar to those of physical nations. They even have online armed forces. Their borders and citizenships are not like those of physical nations. Virtual nations chiefly take belief, virtue, and occupation as their organizing principles. Citizens of every virtual nation are spread all over the world. Virtual nations, with a combined population of over two billion, established a virtual United Nations comparable to the physical one. It’s a huge political entity that overlaps the traditional nations.

The IT Republic is a superpower in the virtual world. Its population is eighty million and still rapidly growing. The country is composed mostly of IT professionals, and makes aggressive political demands. It also has formidable power against the physical world. I don’t know what Liu Wei’s citizenship is. They say that the head of the IT Republic is an ordinary employee of some IT company. Conversely, more than one head of a physical nation has been exposed as an ordinary citizen of a virtual nation.

The chief gives everyone on our team a stern warning. No one can have a second nationality. He allows Liu Wei to go to the president’s office, then he ends the meeting. We haven’t even risen from our seats when Zheng Lili, who had stayed at her desk during the meeting, lets out a head-splitting scream. Something horrible has happened. We rush to turn on the news.

Back at my desk I pull up a news site. A broadcast is streaming on the homepage; the newsreader is in a daze. He announces that the United Nations has voted down Resolution 3617. That was the IT Republic’s request for diplomatic recognition. It had passed the Security Council. In response, the IT Republic has declared war against the physical world. It began attacking the world’s financial systems half an hour ago.

I look at Liu Wei. This seems to have surprised him, too.

The picture changes to that of a large city, a bird’s-eye view of a street of tall buildings, and a traffic jam. People stream out of cars and buildings. It’s like the aftermath of an earthquake. The shot cuts to a large supermarket. A crowd pushes in like the tide. Madly, they scramble for cans and packages of food. Row after row of shelves shake and crash into each other, like sandbars broken up by a tidal wave….

“What’s happening?” I ask, terrified.

“You still don’t understand?” Zheng Lili asks. “There’s no rich or poor anymore. Everyone is penniless. Steal or you won’t eat!”

Of course, I understand, but I don’t dare to believe this nightmare is real. Coins and paper money stopped circulating three years ago. Even buying a pack of cigarettes from a kiosk on the side of the street requires a card reader. In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage. As far as this grand office building is concerned, if the electronic records in relevant departments are deleted, even though a company holds title deeds, no one will recognize its property rights. What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash. As far as the IT Republic is concerned, close to half the IT workers in the physical world are its citizens. Erasing those marks is extremely easy.

Programmers, network engineers, and database managers form the main body of the IT Republic. They are a twenty-first-century revival of the nineteenth-century industrial army, except physical labor is now mental labor, and gets more and more difficult. They work with code as indistinct as thick fog and labyrinthine network hardware and software. Like dockworkers from two hundred years ago, they bear a heavy load on their backs.

Information technology advances in great strides. Except for those lucky enough to climb into management, everyone’s knowledge and skills grow obsolete quickly. New IT graduates pour in like hungry termites. The old workers (not actually old, most are just over thirty) are forced to the side, replaced and abandoned. The newcomers, though, don’t last long either. The vast majority of them don’t have long-term prospects…. This class is known as the technology proletariat.

Do not say that we own not a thing. We’re about to reformat the world! This is a corrupt version of “The Internationale.”

A thought strikes me like lightning. Oh, no. My money, which doesn’t belong to me but will buy me over two hundred years of life, will it be deleted? But if everything will be reformatted, won’t the result be the same? My money, my Gene Extension, my dreams… It grows dark before my eyes. My chest grows tight and I stumble away from my desk.

Zheng Lili laughs then, and I stop. She stands near me.

“Happy April Fool’s Day,” a sober Liu Wei says, glancing at the network switch at a corner of the office.

The office network isn’t connected to the outside world. Zheng Lili’s laptop is sitting on the switch, acting as a server. That bitch! She must have gone to a lot of trouble to pull off this April Fool’s joke, most of it to produce that news footage. An in-house designer, though, could have used 3-D software to produce that footage. It wouldn’t have been that hard.

Others obviously don’t think Zheng Lili’s joke went too far. “Oh, come on,” Hadron says to me. “Practical jokes are supposed to raise the hair on your neck if they’re being done right. What’s there to be afraid of?” He points at the executives upstairs.

I break into a cold sweat, wondering whether he suspects anything because of my reaction to Zheng Lili’s prank. Can he see through me? But even that’s not my biggest worry.

Reformatting the world, is that really just the mad ravings of IT Republic extremists? Is this really just an April Fool’s joke? How long can the hair that suspends the sword last?

In an instant, like a bright light driving away the dark, my doubt is gone. I have decided.

I ask Jian Jian to meet me this evening. When I see her against the backdrop of a sea of the city’s streetlamps, my hard heart softens again. She seems so delicate, like a candle flame that can be snuffed out by the slightest breeze. How can I hurt her? As she comes closer and I can see her eyes, the scales in my heart have already tilted completely to the other side. Without her, what do I even want those two-hundred-plus years for? Will time truly heal all wounds? It could simply be two centuries of nonstop punishment. Love elevates me, an extremely selfish man, to lofty heights.

Jian Jian speaks first, though. Unexpectedly, she says what I prepared to say to her, word for word: “I’ve been turning this over in my head for a long time now. I think we should break up.”

Lost, I ask her why.

“Many years from now, I’ll still be young. You’ll already be old.”

It takes a long moment for me to understand what she’s saying. Then I realize what the look on her face as she was walking toward me meant. I mistook her solemn expression as her having guessed what I was about to do. Laughter bubbles through me. It grows until it is loud and pitched at the sky. I am such an idiot. I never considered what era this is, what temptations appear before us. When I stop laughing, I feel relieved. My body is so light, I might float away. At the same time, though, I’m genuinely happy for Jian Jian.

“Where did you get so much money?” I ask her.

“It’s just enough for me.” Her voice is low. She avoids my gaze.

“I know. It doesn’t matter. I mean, it takes a lot of money for just you, too.”

“My dad gave me some. One hundred years is enough. I saved some money. By then, the interest ought to be sizable.”

I guessed wrong. She doesn’t want Gene Extension. She wants hibernation, another achievement of life science that’s been commercialized. At about fifty degrees below zero, drugs and an extracorporeal circulation system reduce the metabolism down to 1 percent of normal. Someone hibernating for one hundred years will only age one.

“Life is tiring, and tedious. I just want to escape,” Jian Jian says.

“Can you escape after a century? By then, no one will recognize your academic credentials. You won’t be used to what society will have become. Will you be able to cope?”

“The times always get better, don’t they? In the future, maybe I can do Gene Extension. By then, it will surely be more affordable.”

Jian Jian and I leave without saying anything else. Perhaps, one century later, we can meet again, but I didn’t promise her anything. Then, she will still be her, but I’ll be someone who has experienced another hundred years of change.

Once she is gone, I don’t hesitate. I take out my cell phone, log into the online banking system, and transfer five million into the Gene Extension Center’s bank account. Although it’s close to midnight, I still receive a call from the center’s director right away. He says that the manipulations to improve my genes can start tomorrow. If all goes smoothly, it will be over in a week. He earnestly repeats the center’s promise of secrecy. Out of the Gene Extended whose identities have been revealed, three have already been murdered.

“You’ll be happy with your decision,” the director says. “Because you will receive not just over two centuries but possibly eternal life.”

I understand what he’s getting at. Who knows what technologies may arise over the next two centuries? Perhaps, by then, it’ll be possible to copy consciousness and memory, create permanent backups that can be poured into a new body whenever we want. Perhaps we won’t even need bodies. Our consciousnesses will drift on the network like gods, passing through countless sensors to experience the world and the universe. This truly is eternal life.

The director continues: “In fact, if you have time, you have everything. Given enough time, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter can type out the complete works of Shakespeare. And what you have is time.”

“Me? Not us?”

“I didn’t go under Gene Extension.”

“Why?”

After a long silence, he says, “This world changes too quickly. Too many opportunities, too many temptations, too many desires, too many dangers. I get dizzy thinking about it. When all is said and done, you’re still old. But don’t worry.” He then says the same thing Jian Jian says. “The times always get better.”

Now, I’m sitting in my cramped apartment writing in this diary. This is the first diary I’ve ever kept. I’ll keep diaries from now on because I should leave something behind. Time also allows someone to lose everything. I know. I’m not just a long lifetime. The me of two centuries from now will surely be a stranger. In fact, considering it carefully, what I thought at first is very dubious. The union of my body, memory, and consciousness is always changing. The me before I broke up with Jian Jian, the me before I paid the embezzled money, the me before I spoke with the director, even up to the me before I typed out “even,” they are all already different people. Having realized this, I’m relieved.

But I should leave something behind.

In the dark sky outside the window, predawn stars send out their last, pallid light. Compared to the brilliant sea of streetlamps in the city, the stars are dim. I can just make them out. They are, however, symbols of the eternal. Just tonight, I don’t know how many are like me, a new generation setting off on a journey. No matter good or bad, we will be the first generation to truly touch eternity.