Tales of the End of the Century

The file folder was sealed with twine, wrapped around a rusty thumbtack seven times. Lan Susu used a craft knife to cut the twine and pulled out the contents. It wasn't documents, it wasn't tapes, it was notebooks. The kind of grid notebooks elementary school students used, with a Young Pioneer holding a torch printed on the cover; the paper was yellowed and brittle, the edges curled like withered leaves. There were five notebooks in total.

On the title page of the first book was a label, typed in Russian, the blue ink faded to light gray. Lan Susu shone a flashlight on it and looked at it for a while.

"What does it say on it?" Bai Ye asked.

"Project Aurora. Subject number 7. Language proficiency test." She opened the notebook; the first page was filled with Russian alphabet tracing, each letter traced a line, the handwriting crooked and messy, like a child learning to write. After about seven or eight lines, the handwriting suddenly changed—from crooked to neat, from neat to beautiful, the last few lines almost like printed text. "Sergei recorded the date. These letter tracings were completed on the same day. From tracing to printed text, it took less than two hours."

"Did he used to be able to write Russian?"

"Yes. But not in print." Lan Susu turned to the second page, which contained simple Russian word dictation. The third page had short passages. Starting from the fourth page, the language suddenly changed—not Russian, not English, but Chinese. On the page she turned to was the character "I," repeated dozens of times, the handwriting going from stiff to fluent, from fluent to natural, from natural to—as if the person who wrote this character had been writing Chinese characters their whole life. "Sergei doesn't know Chinese, never has. But his subject, number 7, started writing a diary in Chinese in the fourth hour of the first test."

The first diary entry was only one sentence: "I'm here." The handwriting was light, done in pencil, the strokes hesitant, like a toddler tentatively testing the ground. The second entry was a bit longer: "It's quiet here. I hear someone writing next door. The sound of a pen nib scratching paper. I don't know who it is."

Lan Susu turned to the third entry. The handwriting had changed noticeably; the strokes were heavier and more defined, as if the same person had aged several years overnight. "Today they made me look in the mirror. The person in the mirror wasn't right. He was a little slower than me. I said 'hello,' and he took a short while to reply. Maybe it was the mirror's delay. Maybe not."

The fourth piece. "The sound of writing is still there. Not next door. It's inside me."

The last page of the fifth notebook didn't contain a diary entry, only a drawing. It was a pencil drawing of a person standing on shallow water, only ankle-deep. The reflection in the water was angled opposite to the person's reflection. Bai Ye held the page up to the beam of his flashlight. He had seen this drawing before—next to the metal barrel at the relay station, Sergei's sketch, depicting the same person standing on deeper water, the reflected hand reaching across the surface to the ankle. He had kept that page in a plastic bag, close to his chest, and it was still tucked inside his jacket.

He flipped back to his first notebook and began to read it page by page, starting from the title page. The traced letters, the crooked handwriting. The dictated words. The short passages. The Chinese character for "I," repeated dozens of times. The first Chinese diary entry. The second. The third. He read very slowly, pausing for a long time on each page. He wasn't looking at the words themselves, but at the process of the handwriting going from unfamiliar to familiar. Like watching someone being pushed away from the inside out by something.

Lan Susu squatted down opposite him. "Bai Ye."

"Um."

"Sergei himself was number 7," she said. "He experimented on himself with the resonator. Not passively, but actively. He recorded his rift period in the form of a notebook. Tracing characters was his own hand learning to write; printing was something his hand learned."

Bai Ye nodded. He had already guessed all of this. But it wasn't Sergei's story; it was someone else's.

"The first time I looked at it, this was Sergei's own record," he said, turning to the last page of the first notebook, where a name was neatly written—not Sergei, but Lao Hu. "The second time I looked at it, this was him practicing." He put the notebook on the ground and shone a flashlight on the name. Lao Hu was squatting next to the iron bucket, the enamel mug already cooled down.

When did you write it?

Old Hu was silent for a while. "After entering the relay station, I kept sifting through the ashes. But when I saw these notebooks, my hands recognized the paper."

"Have you used this kind of notebook before?"

"I've never used it. But when I held it in my hand, I felt like I had drawn the Young Pioneer's hair on the cover with a pencil. I've never bought a notebook like this before, but I know the weight of the torch on his head."

Bai Ye put down her notebook and stood up. The flashlight beam swept across the metal bucket, the metal shelf, and the mirror on the wall with warnings written in marker. Everyone in the room fell silent, but a strange pressure hung in the air, as if something was slowly solidifying at the heart of the room into raindrops about to fall.

"Sergei's notebook is where he records how it learns from him." He walked to the metal bucket, bent down, and picked up a piece of paper that hadn't been completely burned. It had only two Chinese characters on it. He stuffed the paper into a plastic bag and put it with the sketches and photos.

“We are all being learned.” He raised his hand, opened it, and placed it in the beam of a flashlight. The calluses on his palms had hardened, their edges curling up. He made everyone look at his hand. “From the very first crack, it has been learning. Learning the order in which we speak, the rhythm of our walk, the way we hold things, the habit of complaining, the way we remain silent. The more it learns, the wider the crack becomes. The wider the crack, the more it gets in. But there is one thing it cannot learn—it cannot learn who we are becoming. It can only learn what already exists. It cannot create. It has no next move.”

He lowered his hand, his gaze passing over Tie Niu, over the man in gray, over Vasily, and over Old Hu. "From now on, each of us will do something that it cannot learn."

Old Hu, supporting himself on his knees, stood up, placed the enamel mug beside the iron bucket, and rolled up his sleeves to his elbows. "Alright. From now on, I'll write a diary entry every day. In Chinese. I can't write, but I won't write Chinese characters; I'll write what's in my head."

Lan Susu flipped to the last page of her notebook, picked up a pen, and drew a triangle on it. "Write in your diary every day, do something you've never done before every day, change the order of a habit every day. The more you change, the more complex the model becomes. The more complex the model, the more time it needs to learn. It can't keep up with the changes."

Tie Niu placed the crowbar against the wall. "Add a new password every night before bed. Change the order of all the passwords every day. Write down the changes in the passwords each day on a piece of paper and stick it in the center of the door frame. Between any two actions, use a different path that hasn't been used before."

The man in gray and Vasily didn't speak, but when the flashlight shone on them, they had already picked out a pile of incompletely burned fragments from the pile of ashes on the ground, and began to sort them using the empty bag that had previously contained the film—by date, by handwriting, and by whether the edges of the scorch marks could be pieced together to form a complete word.

Bai Ye bent down to pick up the first notebook, flipped to the first blank page, and took out a pen. Lan Susu handed him the spare pencil she had been holding in her wrist. He wrote a line on the paper and read it aloud softly: "What's your next move?"

He placed the notebook on the edge of the metal bucket, with the pen beside it. "There's a pen and paper. Write."

Bai Ye bent down, picked up Lao Hu's enamel mug from the side of the iron bucket, and poured the cooled tea into the bucket. The paper ash hissed as it was splashed by the water, and a thin wisp of white steam rose up. He placed the mug on the rim of the bucket, and then put the pen next to the first exercise book, the nib pointing outwards, as if he had reserved a spot for someone.

He didn't speak again. The beams of flashlights swept across the metal racks, scraps of paper, and the warning sign on the mirror in the corner. Everyone stood in their positions for an extra half minute. Then Old Hu was the first to move, walking to the corner to sift through the ashes. Tie Niu placed the crowbar beside the doorframe and bent down to gather the scattered batteries. Bai Ye turned to a blank page in his notebook, pressing a pencil to the center.

The last half of the sentence was spoken by Lan Susu. She picked up the flashlight again and shone it on the mirror on the wall, saying, "Maybe it's not chasing us. It's just doing its homework." The Russian writing on the mirror was elongated by the light, but the sentence remained unchanged—use the mirror to confirm yourself, don't look at your reflection anymore, it's too dangerous—as if Sergei was watching them from some uncertain distance through that thin glass.