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.
FIRE IN THE EARTH
Father had reached the end of his life. He breathed with difficulty, using far more effort than when he used to hoist hundred-kilo iron struts in the mine. His face was pale, his eyes bulged, and his lips were purple from lack of oxygen. An invisible rope seemed to be slowly tightening around his neck, drowning all of the simple hopes and dreams of his hard life in the all-consuming desire for air. But his father’s lungs, like those of all miners with stage-three silicosis, were a tangle of dusty black chunks; reticular fibers that could no longer pull oxygen from the air he inhaled into his bloodstream. Bit by bit, through twenty-five years in the mine, his father had inhaled the coal dust that made up those chunks, a tiny part of a lifetime’s worth of coal.
Liu Xin knelt by the bed, his heart torn by his father’s labored breaths. Suddenly, he sensed another sound in the rasping, and realized his father was trying to speak.
“What is it, Dad? Are you trying to say something?”
His father’s eyes locked on him. The noise came again, indecipherable through his father’s scratchy gasps, but even more urgent-sounding this time.
Liu Xin repeated his question again, desperate to understand what his father was trying to say.
The noise stopped, and his father’s breathing became a light wheeze, then halted altogether. Lifeless eyes stared back at Liu Xin, as if pleading with him to heed his father’s last words.
Liu Xin felt frozen; he couldn’t look away from his father’s eyes. He didn’t see his mother fainting at the bedside or the nurse removing the oxygen tube from his father’s nose. All he heard, echoing in his brain, was that noise, every syllable engraved on his memory as if etched on a record. He remained in that trance for months, the noise tormenting him day after day, until at last it began to strangle him, too. If he wanted to breathe, to keep on living, he had to figure out what it meant. Then one day, his mother, in the midst of her own long illness, said to him, “You’re grown up. You need to support the family. Drop out of high school and take over your father’s job at the mine.” Liu Xin absently picked up his father’s lunch box and headed out through the winter of 1979 toward the mine—Shaft No. 2, where his father had been. The black opening of the pit gazed at him like an eye, its pupil the row of explosion-proof lights that stretched off into the depths. It was his father’s eye. The noise replayed in his head, urgently, and in a flash he understood his father’s dying words: