Ken Liu - Broken Stars

Like marionettes with their strings cut, the radicals fall wherever they are: bedrooms, subways, airports, public squares, offices, beaches, assembly lines, cafeterias, streets, restrooms…. They do nothing, say nothing, only lying still and quietly, waiting for their bodies to waste away, waiting for their lives to be exhausted. They wield nothingness in their war against meaning, use the lack of will to dissolve freedom, employ the loss of the self to construct the self.

Sensors detect the fading of their vital signs, and artificial intelligences activate robotic helpers to take the withdrawing bodies to medical facilities via the transportation network. Like skiffs floating over the river of normal people, the bodies are gathered into clean, white, therapeutic rooms where various life-support systems and cables are plugged into them. They are now caught in a dilemma: a new paradox rises from nothingness. They will use their bodies to complete this unmoving struggle in human history’s first instance of mass suicide committed in imitation of natural death.

They have completed one of the greatest rituals.

Time is a human illusion, said a Jewish scientist in Europe in 1915. From then on, the smooth and unchanging steel plate that was time melted, like the soft clocks draping from tree branches under Dalí’s paintbrush.

Scientists attempted to control time via multiple paths: speed, gravity, entropy, quantum entanglement… but had to concede defeat in the end. Humanity tried everything to conquer this shapeless and colorless but omnipresent specter. It was there at the start of life, but even at the doorstep of death, the cleverest mind could not understand its secrets. Time’s arrow is bound up with all human civilization’s fears: it has a single direction, and once loosed it never stops, never turns back, all the way to the heat death of the universe.

Since it was impossible to change the world, the only choice was to change the self.

Researchers then focused on the sense of time in the human brain. Every day, fragments of memory surfaced in the neurochemical webs of billions of heads—wasn’t this phenomenon a form of time travel? Experiments showed that by stimulating specific areas of the hippocampus, it was possible to induce the feeling of déjà vu in test subjects and cause them to treat the scenes they were experiencing in their lives as though they had already been previewed in childhood. It was as if a marvelous editor had cut a life into segments and then pasted them back together in a new order to create the sensation of traveling through time.

With mastery of this secret, time turned into putty in the magician’s hand, capable of being stretched and sculpted into any shape. It was a fascinating paradox wherein speeding up brain activity slowed the passage of external time, and vice versa—it was the theory of relativity applied to the world of consciousness. Those truly skilled in the art could even implant a closed loop in the subject’s brain so that the poor fool lived out a real-life version of Groundhog Day , repeating the same day over and over again, even though it was just an illusion created by manipulating memory.

Chronosense, Ltd., was formed in response to this opportunity. Based on the needs of the individual customer, they offered different levels of adjustment to their time sense and charged a fortune for such services. Of course, the fee was calculated precisely based on the passage of time in the physical world.

In East Asia, students trapped in a culture based on tests needed to make the most of the little time they had. The night before big exams, with Chronosense’s help, they could stay up and swallow a semester’s worth of knowledge and examination-fu, like the memory bread from Doraemon . There was a 0.5 percent probability that this technique would lead to a stroke, and so a drug that counteracted the effects became a popular purchase for the students as well.

Those seeking the thrill of psychoactive substances, on the other hand, wanted the exact opposite effect, which was for the subjective experience of time to slow down until it seemed to stop. They wanted to make the drug-induced high gradually expand like an explosion frozen in a glacier, each blooming firework as Zen-like as an unmoving mountain. They sat in the dark, waiting to submerge in the chemical ecstasy, until the mushroom cloud devoured the last trace of their consciousness, leaving the flesh on life-maintenance. For them, time ceased to exist, and only hallucination was reality.

The aged were the most fervent fans of memory, and they made the most meticulous demands of Chronosense, careless of what the offerings cost. After locating the most joyful days of their lives, they edited them together into a highlight reel that they looped over and over in what little time they had left. It was the best way to squeeze the most out of the end of life, so they could die with smiles on their faces.

Human ingenuity would never go to waste. Always, evil genius knew exactly what to do with it.

Authoritarian regimes soon discovered the vast potential of this technology. By employing a special edition of the tech, they enslaved their people and managed to squeeze twelve hours’ worth of physical and mental labor from the population in every legally mandated eight-hour shift. While the ordinary people teetered on the edge of exhaustion and collapse, GDP rose and rose. In order to release some of the dangerous pressure of overwork, governments opened resorts specifically for vacationing workers where their overwound sense of time could be adjusted via technical measures to achieve some semblance of balance.

The laboring masses, kept in the dark about the truth, worked even harder to earn the right to vacation, where all they recovered was the time that had been stolen from them.

Their children, on the other hand, seemed to be born with their sense of time out of balance. As they also entered the labor force, and their sense of time was further twisted, things began to spin out of control. The next generation learned to forget, an instinctual strategy for bringing relief to the overburdened brain. Periodically—the exact length of time differed from individual to individual—the memories of these people reset themselves, and they woke up as newborns with blank slates. As those with reformatted brains imitated each other, a primitive savagery began to spread like a plague, and violence and lust broke through the barriers set up by civilization and technology.

The wild people took over the streets and cities and destroyed every machine and institution that tried to change their raw nature.

They truly possessed time. They no longer needed time.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Or, as a structural linguist would put it: language constructed thought; thought understood and transformed the world; and so language was the world’s prime mover, was God.

Wherever God was, so was the Devil, just as light could not be separated from darkness.

It was language, not tools, that separated humans from apes. The bridge between the signifier and the signified connected the world of subjectivity with the physical world. Meaning was like the water of the Ganges, a wide-flowing torrent. Humans extracted drops of sensory experience, saved them, classified them, generalized them, and sublimated them until the border between the self and objective reality was defined. Then they learned to exchange thoughts between different individuals, to communicate intent, and society began to form: division of labor, work, family, power, state, war—everything was built on this foundation. Language was the measure of understanding, and every debate among humanity was based on our shared linguistic system.