Ken Liu - Broken Stars

The discovery shocked the world. People dug up Wilhelm’s forgotten dusty tome, hoping to find inspiration within. They discovered the secret of personality management from the mysterious ancient East, and by integrating the newest neural language programming (NLP) techniques, they hoped to rescue a world on the verge of total breakdown.

Several schools of Eastern mystical philosophy became trendy, including traditional Tantric Buddhist techniques for integrating mudras and poses to indicate the anchoring of personalities, I Ching –derived methods for using military-grade software to stimulate the cortex in order to integrate yin-yang neural patterns, and so on and so forth. But the most influential school of philosophy was without a doubt spread by the Chinese government’s army of retired government cadres, who went overseas to set up “Lao Tzu Institutes.”

The Lao Tzu Institutes taught a whole systematic curriculum that helped MPSD-sufferers find the way back by the Daoist Path, utilizing techniques such as traditional mystical exercises and Chan Buddhist–style meditation to help the practitioner achieve enlightenment on the nature of life, until the spiritual universe had been rearranged to the harmonious, yin-yang-balanced state of the primeval Innocent Babe.

I’m not going to tell you the result of this effort—the known Path is not the True Path, as Lao Tzu would say.

But suffice it to say that the Chinese nation, for the first time since the thirteenth-century Il Milione composed by Marco Polo, had once again managed to export its wondrous values to the world.

It all began with the discovery of a woody perennial in the Amazon called Duoliquotica . Native legends claimed that the plant was made of the blood and essence of an ancient god, who appeared as a single head atop two bodies. This was reflected in the biology of the plant, which was dioecious. The male and female plants grew side by side, and entwined around each other as they reached maturity. After fertilization, large fruits grew atop pairs of plants, not unlike an outsized head on top of two slender bodies.

Scientists extracted from the plant a previously unknown compound with mysterious properties, also named “duoliquotica.” After accidental exposure to the compound during a trial, a pregnant subject, Julia Kristeva, found herself the mother of a pair of identical twins. Thus did the mystery of the compound begin to be unveiled. In subsequent trials, twenty-three more pairs of identical twins were born. Later, researchers would refer to them as the “Duo 24,” though the media preferred the more sensational B-movie moniker “Twinning God’s 24.”

The first pair of twins, Adam and Eva, were famous around the world even before they had learned to talk. The babies’ laughter and cries were completely in sync. No matter how far apart they were placed from each other, their expressions mirrored each other’s within 0.3 seconds. As their vocabulary grew, their strange talent developed into an intolerably eerie performance.

They seemed to always speak simultaneously, and stopped and started again in perfect sync. At first, an observer might think they were just speaking their own thoughts, but recording the twins’ speech and playing it back showed that it was a highly efficient dialog. There was no delay introduced by the need to comprehend the other; the two sentences, overlaying the same segment of time, were statement and response.

Indeed, electroencephalograms showed that they could understand each other without any speech. The simultaneous speech was nothing more than a parlor trick for showing off.

Scientists were excited by this first verifiable example of telepathy in history. Shortly, the other twins also displayed various degrees of psychic connection. Bafflingly, the connections did not seem to depend on any kind of detectable signal exchange: electromagnetic waves, biochemical signals, vibrations through the air…. Even when each member of a pair was enclosed in a separate full-isolation chamber, they still could sense the other’s emotions and thoughts.

Everything indicated the power of the ancient god, similar to quantum entanglement. No matter how far the particles were separated, as soon as one member of an entangled pair changed state, the other changed the same way.

Back then, humanity’s understanding of basic theory had not yet advanced to the point where this phenomenon was seen as innate to nature. Thus, after the initial explosive media coverage died down, the research project, unable to make any real progress, became classified. All the research subjects were drafted into military service to act as long-distance communication devices, far more sensitive and secure than any cryptographic equipment.

The American military relied on the twins to gather a great deal of intelligence. Russia, the Middle East, East Asia, the EU—in each area the Americans first relied on bribes to open key doors, and then deployed the twins to transmit intelligence without fear of detection. This method worked well until a rather unexpected romance exposed the whole plot.

The ninth pair of twins, David and Peter, fell in love with the same Japanese woman—more precisely, it was Peter who, through long-distance entanglement with David, fell in love with Minako Noda, a Self-Defense Forces officer. Unfortunately, Peter could only experience this love secondhand through his brother. Peter requested David swap places with him multiple times, but David refused. Driven by jealousy, Peter sought revenge in a manner befitting a member of Duo 24.

Night and day, Peter transmitted paranoid delusions to David without cease, even when they were asleep. David was powerless to resist the torrent and sank into delirium, at which point Peter directed him to kill his lover, turn himself in, and confess his role in the American plot.

After recovering his senses, David committed suicide. At the moment that he stopped breathing, the smiling Peter, three thousand kilometers away, tumbled from a park bench and lay motionless in the fallen leaves, as though he had expected this fate for himself.

The tragedy sent shock waves through the remaining members of Duo 24. All their lives, they had lived as the mirror of each other’s souls, but never faced the fact that each of them was also an individual, with his or her own desires, fears, and death. Some, in despair, saw their gift as a divine curse, a genetic defect in the guise of a benefit. The twins were tragic puppets entangled in one life, powerless to dissolve the invisible bonds of fate and doomed to die at any moment to accompany the other.

Five pairs of twins chose to commit suicide. Their bodies were buried in double coffins, sunken deep in cement graves.

The military offered the rest of the twins a way out: they could choose to enter long-term cryogenic storage and await a solution for their curse in the far future.

Six pairs chose to continue to live in the world and support each other; another six pairs chose to enter the cryogenic chamber, placing their faith in the future; and the remaining six pairs were mired in conflict: one member of each pair wanted to be frozen to escape their unknown fate, while the other member would not let go of the life they already had. If only one twin were frozen, he or she was very likely to die in hibernation when the other one expired.

In the end, the conflict-riven pairs reached a compromise: they would swap places once every ten years. As each entered cryogenic sleep, they placed their life in the hands of their identical twin, trusting they would treat their twin with benevolence. It was like the words of the Gospel of John: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another.”

Scientists told us that 4.4 billion years ago, a body about the size of Mars slammed into the Earth, and the resulting fragments coalesced into the moon. Sixty-five million years ago, a large asteroid impacted the Earth, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Twelve thousand and nine hundred years ago, fragments from a comet breaking apart fell on the frozen tundra of North America, leading to the deaths of the mammoths and other mammalian megafauna as well as the collapse of the ancient Clovis civilization. Thereafter, an extremely frigid climate reigned for a thousand years.