The hippo accepted my phone and clumsily extended its arm. I seemed to see a drowning person in the bottomless abyss, slowly, bit by bit, lift a heavy arm with their last ounce of strength.
Come on! Come on! I cried silently. Don’t give up!
The screen of the phone showed four faces squeezed together. A soft click. The picture froze.
“Thank you.” I took back the phone. “Would you leave me your contact info? I’ll send a copy to you.”
After another few seconds of silence, the hippo slowly typed an address on my phone.
“Nocko and Lindy, would you like to give Hippo a hug?”
The two little ones opened their arms and each hugged one of the hippo’s arms. The hippo looked down to the left and then to the right, and then slowly squeezed its arms to hug them back tight.
Yes, I know you crave to be hugged by this world, too.
It was late by the time we got back to the hotel. After showering, I lay on the bed, exhausted. Both my heels were rubbed raw by the new shoes, and the pain was excruciating. Tomorrow I still had a long way to go.
The laughter of the children and the image of the blue hippo lingered in my mind.
I searched on the hotel room’s iWall until I found the web address I wanted and clicked on it. Accompanied by a mournful tune played by a violin, white lines of text slowly appeared against a black background:
This morning I thought about the first time I had been to Disney. Such bright sunlight, music, colors, and the smiling faces of children. I had stood in the crowd then and cried. I told myself that if one day I should lose the courage to continue to live, I would come to Disney one last time and plunge myself into that joyful, festive spirit. Perhaps the heat of the crowd would allow me to hold on for a few days longer. But I’m too exhausted now. I can’t get out of the door; even getting out of the bed is a struggle. I know perfectly well that if only I could find the courage to take a step forward, I would find another ray of hope. But all my strength must be used to struggle with the irresistible weight that pulls me down, down. I’m like a broken wind-up machine that has been stranded, with hope ever receding. I’m tired. I want it all to end.
Goodbye. I’m sorry, everyone. I hope heaven looks like Disney.
The date stamp on the post was three years ago. Even now, new comments are being posted, mourning the loss of another young life, confessing their own anxiety, despair, and struggle. The woman who had written this note would never be back to see that her final message to the world had garnered more than a million replies.
That note was the reason Disney added the blue hippos to its parks. Anyone around the world could, just by launching an app on their phone, connect to a blue hippo, and, through its cameras and microphones, see and hear everything the hippo could see and hear.
Behind every blue hippo was a person in a dark room, unable to leave.
I sent the picture from today to the address left me by the hippo, along with the contact information for a suicide-prevention organization staffed by therapists. I hoped that this would help. I hoped that everything would be better.
Late night. Everything was so quiet.
I found the first-aid kit and bandaged my feet. I crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over me, and turned off the light. Moonlight washed over the room, filling every inch.
One time, as a little girl, I was playing outside when I stepped on a piece of broken glass. The bleeding would not stop, and there was no one around to help me. Terrified, I felt abandoned by the whole world. I lay down in the grass, thinking I would die after all the blood had drained out of me. But after a while, I found the bleeding stanched. So I picked up my sandals and hopped back home on one foot.
In the morning, Lindy would leave me. The therapist said that I no longer needed her—at least not for a long while.
I hoped she would never be back.
But maybe I would miss her, from time to time.
Goodnight, Nocko. Goodnight, Lindy.
Goodnight, melancholy.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most of the incidents and quotes from Alan Turing’s life are based on Andrew Hodges’s biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). Besides the papers cited in the text, I also consulted the following sources on artificial intelligence:
Gary Marcus. “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me?” The New Yorker, August 14, 2013 (accessible at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/why-cant-my-computer-understand-me).
Matthias Englert, Sandra Siebert, and Martin Ziegler. “Logical limitations to machine ethics with consequences to lethal autonomous weapons.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2842 (2014) (accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2842).
Some details about depression are based on the following articles:
«抑郁时代，抑郁病人» http://www.360doc.cn/article/2369606_459361744.html
«午安忧郁» http://www.douban.com/group/topic/12541503/#!/i
In the preface to his Turing biography, Andrew Hodges wrote: “[T]he remaining secrets behind his last days are probably stranger than any science fiction writer could concoct.” This was the inspiration for this story. The conversation program “Christopher” is entirely fictional, but some of the details in the conversations with Turing are real. I’m afraid it’s up to the careful reader to screen out the fiction and nonfiction woven together in this tale.
As I drafted this story, I sent the sections on Turing’s life to friends without telling them that these came from a piece of fiction. Many friends believed the stories, including some science fiction authors and programmers. After taking delight in the fact that I had successfully won the imitation game, I asked myself what were the criteria for telling truth and lies apart? Where was the boundary between reality and fiction? Perhaps the decision process had nothing to do with logic and rationality. Perhaps my friends simply chose to believe me, as Alan chose to believe Christopher.
I hereby sincerely apologize to friends who were deceived. To those who weren’t, I’m very curious how you discovered the lies.
I believe that cognition relies on quantum effects, like tossing dice. I believe that before machines have learned to write poetry, each word written by an author is still meaningful. I believe that above the abyss, we can hold tightly onto each other and stride from the long winter into bright summer.
LIU CIXIN
Liu Cixin is widely recognized as the leading voice in Chinese science fiction. He won the Yinhe Award for eight consecutive years, from 1999 to 2006, and again in 2010. He received the Xingyun Award in both 2010 and 2011.
An engineer by profession—until 2014, he worked for the China Power Investment Corporation at a power plant in Niangziguan, Shanxi Province—Liu began writing science fiction short stories as a hobby. However, his popularity soared with the publication of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series of novels (the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006 and then published as a standalone book in 2008). An epic story of alien invasion and humanity’s journey to the stars, the series begins with a secret, Mao-era military effort at establishing communications with extraterrestrial intelligence, and ends (literally) with the end of the universe. Tor Books published the English edition of the series from 2014 to 2016 (The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu; The Dark Forest, translated by Joel Martinsen; Death’s End, translated by Ken Liu). The Three-Body Problem was the first translated book to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and President Barack Obama praised it as “wildly imaginative, really interesting.”