Only the Chinese did not.
Against their five thousand years of tradition, the Chinese showed amazing courage and candour this time.
They named this world—“The Tomb”.
I’ve lived in The Tomb for ten years, twenty, or perhaps longer?
The sliding fingers were stopped by a bulge on the wall. He came back to his senses, stopped and showed a pleasant smile.
“Sir, this is our Room 1, the magic hut of Mrs Shi.” His hand was poised to knock, but he thought it over, put his hand down and pulled out a key. “Shhhh… I think we’d better just take a peek instead of frightening her.”
“You know, the people here on the outskirts of section V have all been assigned here because the old level could no longer hold so many…” Hmm, what’s the word? The critically ill? The diseased? But Mrs Shi never considered herself ill. She’s just living in a spiritual world.
How fantastic that experience is: the teapot tilts to pour not water but an arc of whiteness; everyone’s playing the puppet game; all she can see are mechanical poses and expressions, then it all disappears, or else the eye sees through walls, furniture or bodies and pauses at another corner. The world is like a badly degraded copy with too many dropped frames, its beauty only glimpsed in jerky, broken bursts. Chen licked his lips.
“Multiple regions in Mrs Shi’s lateral cortex were “filtered”, so she can’t perceive moving objects. Bodies and objects flit into her vision like ghosts. It was very difficult at first; her screams almost became our time piece. Heh-heh.”
Wheresoever is physical phenomenon, there is delusion; but whosoever perceives that all phenomena are in fact no-characteristics, perceives the Tathagata.
“She considered this her sin and kept praying to the Buddha for relief.”
When all phenomena became no-characteristics all of a sudden, the human race wasn’t ready. When the Tathagata was perceived, thus came one. How ironic.
He sighed. When was it? Ten years ago, Twenty, or longer? Was it war? An unidentified virus? Or divine retribution? Forgotten, all forgotten.
All we knew was that the visual cortex regions of the brain were severely damaged, a phenomenon known as “Filtration”. In the post-Filtration world, one-third of the population died of brain damage; one-third became insane and committed suicide; only less than one-third survived and eked out a living on the ground, immersed in toxins and radiation. To protect themselves, the survivors built huge burrows and lived off underground water and food reserves. Several small wars followed as people competed for resources before the synthesiser was invented. Thereafter, the burrows were expanded, networked together, until even the continental networks were connected. Social and economic systems were re-established, and the Cult of Satan spread and extended into the arts.
Chen closed the door quietly. “She’s searching for peace in the darkness, like everyone else.” His fingers resumed the progress to the next door. He looked at the visitor, Hmmm, an ordinary grey suit, an ordinary pale face, what kind of filter does he have?
Each victim had his own filter. No-one realised this frightening fact until five years after the Filtration. It was discovered at the end of 20th century that “vision” is a brain process involving the active interpretation of stimuli from the environment. There was no noticeable gap in our visual field despite the existence of the scotoma on the retina, a region with no photoreceptors. The visual system interpolated and filled up the blind spot through a precise and complicated process, and created the illusion of “reality”. In other words, what you see is not what you get. Filtration selectively destroyed the brain regions responsible for the formation of vision such that the world through filtered eyes was significantly altered, not unlike the filters used in photography, and thus the symptoms were named “filters” as well.
Room Two. “Mr Wei’s luckier than the others.” He knocked, but the door creaked and swung itself open. “Wei, this is our new neighbour. Come on, shake hands with him. Right, you’ll take care of each other.”
He waved and closed the door with a click.
“Wei is a blindsighter. Large areas of his V1 visual cortex were destroyed. The prevalence of that is 0.03 percent. Did you notice that he gripped your hand immediately when I told him to shake hands with you, and that his blink reflex was intact when I waved? But he thinks he’s blind. People with these symptoms can perceive light, shape and simple movements and react accordingly, but they resolutely deny that they can see.”
Useless trash gets special privileges, what a world…
He let out a sly grin. “Aren’t the blind luckier than the seeing, here?”
“Why doI know so much? Ho-ho, didn’t they tell you where this is?” Chen stopped at another door. “Not your fault. It was a long time ago.”
“Mr Wang must be sleeping. He usually stays up all night working. But you can check out his works.” He opened the door softly. A rotten stench filled the air. “Oh, the sun is gone, but time continues.”
In the dim light, broken chunks of plaster were scattered around the room, their phosphorescence like bones in a graveyard. Inspected closely, these were fragments of female bodies, plump breasts next to slim calves, chubby hips connected directly to pretty heads. Quite a terrifying sight. The only thing the pieces had in common was a lack of proportion and symmetry, like failed genetic experiments that had been abandoned.
“Mr Wang used to be a sculptor, you know, before. His filter is “planarity”. The world is two-dimensional in his eyes. Even an elephant looks like a piece of paper. And objects can only be identified from certain specific angles; that is, he can’t distinguish a disc and a sphere from above.”
Chen stepped on the white splinters. The snaps and crackles, like breaking bones, haunted this room day in and day out. Mr Wang’s hope, modelled with those distorted Venuses and Aphrodites, was smashed along with them, as well. A lone easel stood in the corner. Chen touched the panel and wiped away the thick layer of dust, revealing a sketch of the face of a middle-aged man. The proportion and expression were both surprisingly accurate, despite empty spaces where the irises and pupils should have been. Like a soulless stone face.
“The beauty in his eyes has already been filtered. This sketch was a requiem for himself.”
Chen stared at the sketch thoughtfully. When he discussed the painting, Mr Wang’s tone, like that of a deserted wife, gave him a headache, but that face… The fingers ran over the high forehead, along the brow bone, across the tall nose ridge, and fell into the deep philtrum and the pair of bow-shaped lips, and then held the full chin. He sighed. It had been almost unbearable.
He rubbed his fingers, and looked at the visitor again. Hmmm, an ordinary black suit, an ordinary yellow face, what kind of filter did he have?
“This is the home of the obsessed. They were either infatuated with the filtered world, or denied the existence of the Filtration. While others re-adapted to the world with the assistance of rectifiers, they were sent to this, ho-ho, Shangri-La, for the peace of their heart.”
Chen flung his head back towards the rocky ceiling as if he could look through the layers of infinitely dark rock to see the vast underground world, complex like neural networks. On those prosperous new floors, humankind was attempting to modify itself. Fresh flowers would bloom on the summit of the evolutionary tree, to wither or to fruit?
What about us? Are we left to ourselves, in this crack of Hell, to live or die in due course?
No. “I am their watcher. I will lead them back to light.” He sounded resolute, full of sanctity and pride.