Chapter 13

Chapter 13 Absurdity, Failure, Grandeur

Before Diao Chan could decide whether to smash the piano, play a requiem, or jump out the window, someone knocked. The visitor called to him: “Young Master Diao Chan.”

It was his father’s butler, not the old steward of the residence. His father’s butler served only the head of the house; from family affairs to the inner household, he handled a great many things.

“My apologies for disturbing you at this hour.” His tone was as unhurried as ever. “Could we speak in private?”

They sat in the tea room. His father’s butler would never pour him tea. Diao Chan twisted open a bottle of water. “What is it?”

The butler studied him and, after a moment, said, “You truly resemble the master.”

“Do I?” Diao Chan’s hand paused. “I always thought I didn’t look much like my father.”

“No need to be modest,” the butler said. “You and the master have identical genes.”

The words slid past his ears like running water. At first Diao Chan took it for the usual courtesies before the real conversation began, but then he realized the butler had no need for that. As his father’s right hand, he was the one Diao Chan ought to be currying favor with—so why use a phrase as vague and loaded as “identical genes”?

The butler’s tone was cool and deferential, like a footman lifting the silver cloche from a dessert at table, unveiling the answer for him: “Or rather, you are the master himself.”

…

Diao Chan had heard of such things.

Megalopolis locked away many of the twenty-second century’s pinnacle technologies; the creation of artificial humans was one of them. Fragments of these technologies circulated in secret among the ruling class, put to covert use in all sorts of places. For instance, the matter of heirs in noble houses: blood ties might stabilize a clan, but they couldn’t guarantee the quality of its offspring.

Genetic duplication, a variant of early cloning: place freeze-dried cells in an incubation pod for eight months and you’ll get an identical self; then replicate the same upbringing, and you can guarantee an heir of absolute perfection.

At least, that was the logic of human narcissism. Luckily for the practice, most heads of house were arrogant.

“The master’s physical prime was between thirty and forty-five,” the butler said. “During that span, we cultivate the next generation. You belong to the sixth generation of heir candidates.”

Belong—because to secure the finest final selection, the pool of alternates is a very large population of copies.

“Each young master has his own development plan. While we broadly reproduce the original’s path, we also run a variety of trials; sometimes an outlier yields unbelievable results.” The butler lifted his eyes. “For example, you.”

“According to the script, after your mother died you were to be brought formally into the core business. Instead, you did what a standard copy does not: you scaled the wall and ran. Usually, copies that break script are terminated at once, but the master is very interested in you. It’s been a long time since a runaway copy appeared. Only the original ever had a spell of life on the road.”

“We know you’re doing some work for the government. The family won’t interfere. We’re offering you two choices.”

“First, forget all of this. The family will send people to perform the erasure. We’ll assign you peripheral company business. You’ll have a new identity and a life free from want—serving the family for life, and yet a life of your own. We’ll list you as the last-resort alternate for heir; if something happens to the chosen heir, we’ll restore these memories.”

“Second, you keep your memories. But the family will set a new trial.”

Diao Chan listened to his own heartbeat, and, oddly, he went very calm. “What trial?”

The butler slid an envelope across the tea table.

He opened it. Inside was a knife.

The family would like you to kill your own mother.

The butler’s tone was calm and steady: This was the First’s personal experience—he killed his biological mother with his own hands. When we designed the heirs’ development program we discarded that scenario because there were too many uncontrollable variables. But you have already proved uncontrollable enough, so the family would like to see further results.

Please prove that you and the First are sufficiently alike.

It took Diao Chan a long time to speak: “I have an actual mother?”

“No. You were born in a gestation tank,” the butler replied. “Every young master has a manor. The program template for “Mother” is modeled on the First’s birth mother, with adjustments in the details.”

As he spoke, the butler took a key from his inner pocket and pressed the button at its tip.

The entire tearoom—antique furniture and wooden floorboards, costly paintings and porcelain—dissolved. The two of them sat facing each other in a field of pure white.

Every manor comes with an integrated holographic system, the butler said. Your mother is more like a manifest program.

Diao Chan remembered: his mother seemed never to have left the manor—at least, never with him. He had always assumed it was for health reasons.

“So you want me to kill this manifest program?” Diao Chan heard himself ask.

An artificial human ordered to kill a holographic program—it was like something out of an absurdist play. Real humans don’t need to “kill” a program; they just shut down the mainframe.

No—strictly speaking, he didn’t even count as an artificial human.

He was nothing but a replicated sequence of genes.

...

In the butcher’s, Diao Chan finished his story. Zhao Meiyou had chain-smoked until the floor was littered with butts. He took out a fresh one and held it under the other’s nose. “Really not having one?”

“No.” Diao Chan looked down at him. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“Nothing new under the sun. Trust me, the things that happen in the Lower District are far more outlandish than you can imagine.” Zhao Meiyou sat up and ruffled his hair, the way you’d pet a dog. “But if that’s the case I can relax. I thought you still didn’t know what your mom actually is.”

Diao Chan: “What do you mean?”

“The way she ‘dies’ feels very real, but once you’ve killed someone, you can tell—that’s not a living person at all.” Zhao Meiyou held out his palm, closing and opening his fingers. “I’ve killed her several times, but she must be keyed to some kind of matching system—if it isn’t your hand, it won’t take. The last time I went in, she just cut the power.”

Diao Chan froze for a beat.

“Oh, right—your mother asked me to pass along a message,” Zhao Meiyou added. “She says, come home when you have time.”

They returned to the manor once more.

On the ground floor a huge atrium opened to the sky. The servants had all vanished, leaving it lavish yet bare, like a stage set and waiting for The Libation Bearers—a play of matricide—to begin.

As soon as they stepped inside they heard music: a piano, a Requiem. Beneath the atrium stood a massive grand piano; a woman sat at the keyboard, fingers flying, dressed in black mourning.

Zhao Meiyou had to admit, Diao Chan’s electronic mother was a beauty. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen this sight; a few days earlier, when he slipped into the manor, the woman had been at the piano under the atrium, the tempo shifting from fast to slow, until in the dark he realized each measure’s beat had synced with his heartbeat.

She had spotted him from the start.

But she still finished the piece before she spoke: Please bring my son home.

On this point Zhao Meiyou lied to Diao Chan: he had not been able to kill his mother, but he knew there was something wrong with this woman; she seemed to have neither heartbeat nor breath.

After hearing Diao Chan’s history, Zhao Meiyou thought perhaps the programmers in charge of the staging saw no need to fabricate a flawless holographic mother. Even if they had assigned Diao Chan a script of matricide, whether the mother was “alive” seemed beside the point.

This woman wasn’t like a living person at all, more like a corpse controlled by machinery—the big shots who arranged the script seemed to think such an entity was better suited to be Diao Chan’s mother, better suited to be killed.

It certainly wasn’t out of pity, so what was it for?

For a replicated son, a mother shouldn’t be warm, living flesh; the people running things had ethics only in the electronic sense, so to match the son’s “inhuman” feel, the mother too had to be closer to a “doll”—is that it?

Humans with humans, beasts with beasts; let an object have an object for its mother.

How very clever, Zhao Meiyou thought, not without sarcasm. They could all go write a twenty-fifth-century version of the Gospels.

When the piece ended, Diao Chan stepped forward. The room was bitterly cold; white vapor curled from his lips. “Mother.”

“My son.” The woman’s bearing was stately; she regarded him with a gentleness that did not lose its gravity. “Your father has already given you an order.”

“Which father do you mean?” Diao Chan asked. “The holographic projection in the manor, or the fifth-generation head of the family?”

The woman smoothed the hair at her temple and said evenly, “He himself came once—on the night of your tenth birthday.”

“I’m not interested, Mother. Why did you call me here?” Diao Chan said. He drew a deep breath; his tone was like rain dousing a swamp, the reek splashing everywhere. “I can’t kill you. I’ve tried my utmost, but I can’t do it.”

The woman gazed at him for a long time, then asked, “Why?”

“You are my mother,” Diao Chan repeated. “You are my mother.”

“Even if I don’t actually exist?”

“I believe you truly exist.”

“This will only make your father think you’re too cowardly, unfit to inherit.”

“Then let him kill me,” Diao Chan said. “He can kill me, but he cannot command me.”

A long silence.

In the manor, deep and cold, a mother built out of code and a son manufactured from genes faced each other from afar. The place was likely riddled with hidden cameras; the air cut like knives, coming at them from every direction. They did not belong to each other; they did not even belong to themselves. Like flowery and empty words, they were made up of memories of uncertain truth, and pedigrees that were precious yet useless.

And piano songs.

Perhaps the only thing that could prove any continuity between mother and son was the piano he had learned from her.

Moonlight shifted in; the white night burned like a bonfire.

Suddenly the woman lifted her head to look at him. The movement was so large the image seemed to break for an instant, like a soul bursting from its cocoon. She looked at Diao Chan and said, abruptly, “My factory settings did not include a performance program.”

“You’re absolutely right—he can kill you, but he cannot command you.” The woman pressed the fifty-second white key. “We can make our own choices.”

The note fell like a switch being thrown. The scene around them dissolved like snow, exposing the whiteboard beneath the hologram. Diao Chan and Zhao Meiyou caught the same acrid scent—the burning of cables. Sparks caught in some unknown corner, and the woman’s image began to fizzle and hiss.

Fire snakes devoured the cables. She was vanishing.

“Mom!”

“He insisted I stay alive long enough for you to kill me. But I can also choose my own death.” The woman began to play. “My son, my suicide isn’t only what humans call ‘motherly love.’ I’m also searching for myself in this self-willed destruction.”

The black-and-white keys turned to blades; her body was sliced into 753 tissue sections, and in each thin neural cross-section a note lay frozen.

Her fingers trekked across the keys, over black-and-white mountain ridges—like a dream, like a steed. The ice began to melt; color bled through the melody. It was the dawning of will.

“Going to look up piano lessons on my own was the first time—purely of my own will—that I wanted to do something for you.”

“And now, I can finally do something for myself.”

“My son.” She struck the last eighth note before the climax, and her electromagnetically projected figure dissolved in a blaze of sparks. “Don’t let the melody die.”

The next second, someone slammed Zhao Meiyou aside. Diao Chan lunged forward and caught his mother’s lingering notes.

In the dense staccato of sixteenth notes, his brief sixteen years flashed past: at sixteen he died during an escape; at fifteen he tasted velvet beneath the covers; at fourteen he counted every naked-eye star in Cygnus; at thirteen he dreamed for the first time—silver downpour in the dream, his tears dissolving in the rain.*

Zhao Meiyou was shaken. It was brief, but it was the first time he had truly felt what people mean by being “shaken to the core”.

This wasn’t just a piece of music. Mother and son were delivering a child in melody.

Diao Chan’s mother began in calm—like deep amniotic waters: cold, pain, sleep; within the anesthesia, wet waves of contraction. Then the blade opened flesh. A baby, eyes sealed, floated in the womb. With blood and a scream she shocked him awake, and the newborn’s first cry broke like thunder.

Then came the downpour, the melody like a galloping horse; iron hooves smashed the remains, flesh and blood flew. One life’s birth exacted another life’s death. The high notes blazed with celebration, the low notes tolled for mourning. Struggle tore the mother’s body apart, and he came howling, roaring, screaming into the world.

The final scale, a heavy clang of emphasis—that was the cord being cut, her outstretched, struggling hand finally dropping to the floor, the aftersound spreading like blood across the ground.

She was dead.

She died in childbirth—went into that good night in the most violent way.

Her self-destruction seemed to eat into the mansion’s holographic programs. Every illusion fell away: a white room, a white floor, and in the empty hall only a piano remained. The piano, astonishingly, was real—no projection.

A realization hit Zhao Meiyou.

She wasn’t in mourning clothes but in the black formal gown of an orchestral performance.

She had greeted death as if it were a holiday.

...

It was an absurd homicide, a failed murder, a grand suicide.

For a time, Zhao Meiyou couldn’t tell whether he was an accomplice or a witness. The Diao clan, unexpectedly, made no response to the outcome, even tacitly allowed Diao Chan to move to the lower district; his privileged status remained in force. He stumbled through seventeen, and one day Diao Chan suddenly asked him if he wanted to go to college.

"Give me a reason," Zhao Meiyou said.

"You once dragged me to the wet market." Diao Chan was talking about something from a year ago, when his mental state had gone a bit off. Therapy hadn’t helped; in the end, Zhao Meiyou couldn’t stand watching him go through those polished regimens and swallow obscenely priced pills. He hauled the man to the wet market and made him work a month as unpaid help at the busiest stall. Haggling, the din, the smell of spices, the vendors’ crude, blunt curses—there was a raw, feral energy there. After a month, Diao Chan finally snapped and got into a shouting match with an auntie who stole produce every day. He lost, but it was the first time in ages he’d raised his voice; his blood pounded, and anger poured life back into him.

He was so mad he put away a pile of cucumber sandwiches; just when he was about to throw up, Zhao Meiyou finally cut him off, tossed the rest into the fridge, and said, "Congratulations on your recovery."

After that, Zhao Meiyou formed a theory: the way to treat mental troubles is to go to the wet market.

"You said before that mental problems should be treated at the wet market. A butcher’s stall counts as an extension of the wet market," Diao Chan said. "We could go to university for medicine—build a systematic theoretical foundation and pair it with practice…"

"Got it," Zhao Meiyou cottoned on fast. "Then I can be a shrink in the wet market. Fuck, we’re stacking buffs here—this is badass as hell."

And so school was decided. Diao Chan had the connections; the college town was in the Upper District. They went to the Upper District and stayed seven years—two of those spent on having Zhao Meiyou repeat a year.

...

"Zhao Meiyou." Someone was calling him. "Zhao Meiyou."

In the train car, Qian Duoduo’s voice yanked Zhao Meiyou back. The man was looking at him. "Why do you call this a ‘metaphor’?"

"That gets into private matters; I can’t say," Zhao Meiyou said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "But I can tell you some of the symbolic imagery in Ruin S45."

It’s a gorgeous ruin built from the shadows of the past; everything in it leaves a trail.

The live human test subject who escaped is “Mother.”

The ambitious ones who began like-minded but later ran alongside in opposition—the Paradise faction that launched the war—are “Father.”

"...And I’m the friend from afar," Zhao Meiyou said. "So you take us for friends sent from Mars."

"As for you—the Ark faction leader who wants to run—you’re sinking deeper into old business, even on the verge of dissolving into a world your own subconscious made." Zhao Meiyou gave a short laugh. "The distance between adults really has its downsides. I never realized you were hiding this much."

He finished, raised his gun, and pulled the trigger. The mirror shattered with the shot.

Zhao Meiyou looked at the person behind the mirror. The old man’s image vanished, revealing a young and very familiar face.

"You owe me a New Year’s Eve dinner this year," Zhao Meiyou said the man’s name: "Diao Chan."

---

Author’s note:

*Just like tears dissolving in the rain—line from Blade Runner