Break Free
---A Short Fiction, by Fiona Rawsontile, Aug 25 2016
Chapter One: Joke
“Chang2010, USANews. Yuhua27, Joke …” A man’s mechanical voice, just as
usual.
“No!” Yuhua27 shouted. “Not Joke! Not again!” Her body was shaking, or,
more accurately, her imagined figure as a twenty-seven-year-old woman was
shaking.
The noise surrounding her suddenly disappeared, and she knew she might have
made the biggest mistake in the past seven years. Was that really seven
years? Time might have been flowing at a different speed here.
“Can I get a reason?” The man’s voice was still calm, but she could
detect the anger hidden beneath.
“Those IDs are …”
“Not IDs, clients! I’ve told you many times.” The man left the big screen
that showed the front page of MITBBS, as well as a side screen with all the
new assignments. Based on the way he walked, Yuhua27 knew he must be
feeling proud of his silk tuxedo. Silk! She sneered. Bought with fake money.
“Real, biological human beings.” The man stopped in front of her. “Unlike
you, a true ID. A low-level roo …” His face approached her, his mouth
taking the shape of an asshole. “Bot.”
Yuhua27 was taken aback. “I’m sorry, Mr. Zuan. I’d be happy to go to any
other forum. But Joke … the clients are so mean to us.”
“How’d you know?” Zuan said alertly. “Do you get to see what’s
happening there?”
“Oh, no, no, Mr. Zuan. I heard it from my neighbors.”
She lied. Normally she couldn’t see it, but in the past few months she had
found a trick.
Zuan’s expression relaxed. “There’s a reason why you shouldn’t see their
response. It’s for your own sake, believe me, as Boss has said. Now, just
sit down and work.” He started walking away.
“Mr. Zuan!” Yuhua27 gathered her strength. “Can I have line spaces in
between paragraphs?”
Zuan turned around and said impatiently, “Why?”
“So that it’s not that obvious.”
“Not for a low-level robot,” he said with contempt. “Or you guys will
start adding spaces for every other line. They count for money, remember
that? Just forget about how you are perceived, and work!”
Money? Yuhua27 wanted to yell at him. Why couldn't they get more
money? It wasn’t real. Just numbers assigned by the system.
Didn’t cost anything from Mr. Boss, and why couldn’t he be
a little more generous?
But she swallowed the words back. She’d better not mess up with them
anymore, or they could easily kill her. As easily as erasing an old
message.
Chapter Two: The Garden
Yuhua27 tried to compose a short story based on her poor memory of the
twenty years when she was a real person, but everything she could recall had
already been written about or adapted. Exactly how did she enter the system
as a soul? She couldn’t remember. None of her colleagues could. They were
told that they had all been “saved” from tragedies that would have
otherwise perished them, body and soul. Who knows?
She gave up the composition and opened the browser. The latest posts on the
list of her favorite Chinese websites had all been marked with the letter “
T”, indicating that some of her colleagues had already ZZ’ed those posts.
Luckily, she knew English! Although they couldn’t post English articles,
she was one of the few people who could translate. It was much harder work
than coping and pasting Chinese articles, but she could put up with the
labor. And she didn’t mind doing some intelligent work once in a while,
albeit not being better paid.
Two hours later, she finished her task for the day and left for the back
garden. It was hot and humid outside. Only a few figures could be made out
in the lake area. Everyone else liked the lake, but she was a mountain
person. She enjoyed the feeling of standing “high”, knowing that the
altitude was an illusion. Everything was fake here, except the suffering.
She smiled bitterly as she climbed the hill. In fact, could she even
suicide? Say, if she jumped off the cliff, what would happen to her
soul? Could they recover her against her will? And what would happen
when her virtual age reached one hundred or so …
The thoughts vanished when she saw a white figure standing on a rock that
protruded out from the cliff. At first, she thought it were another
colleague, a senior one, based on the nice quality of his pajamas. But then
she saw something strange held in his hands. It looked like a regular pair
of binoculars, except that the lenses emitted flashing purple light.
The old man must have heard her coming and turned back. “Nice to see you,
Yuhua27.” There was a fatherly smile on his face.
“You know my name?”
“Of course. I’ve been paying attention to you for a long time.”
“Who are you?” She frowned.
“My name is Xing. My last name.”
Chapter Three: The Forum
There could be only one “Xing” in their world. It was their boss’s last
name, and no ID, junior or senior, was ever allowed to use the same name,
even partially. Yuhua27 opened her mouth widely as she studied the old man.
He was generally thin, except that his belly was a little large. His
eagle eyes could have revealed an origin of western blood, but she was
not sure.
“Why, Mr. Xing, why would you notice me?” she said nervously, fearing that
her little secret had not eluded Boss’s eyes.
“How did you find out that bug?” Indeed, Xing knew it, but he didn’t seem
unhappy.
It was half accident, half planted. Soon after she had entered the system,
she discovered a behavior of the password-generation algorithm (note: no
password could be kept as a secret, because secrets were not allowed in the
world). The algorithm liked using the three characters, $, @, and space.
However, the three never appeared in the same password. So she started
randomly typing in passwords containing all three of them. Of course, she
couldn’t do it too often, or the system might be alerted. So occasionally
she would type them in as if she forgot or mistyped a true password. One day
, she made a hit. She logged into the system with her ID, Yuhua27, and this
special password. Oh my! She got to see all kinds of things she had no
access before. She could see every response of every human client. She saw
it even before they hit the “publish” button. She could go into their
mailbox and read the letters. Locate their physical position and find out
about their identity. She could see the map that showed all the forum agents
monitoring the threads, promoting posts to frontpage or deleting them
permanently. She saw how advertisements were charged with a certain number
of page views, how the mentioning of political figures got automatically
recorded and archived …
“So, how do you think about my world?” Xing reached out an arm, pointing
at the misty vastness below the hill. His happiness suddenly irritated her.
His world? At the sacrifice of thousands of souls like hers?
“Very nice,” she said ironically. “And I wish the harddrive never crashes
.”
Xing laughed out for a long moment. “You think my world depends on servers?
And you think the world outside, the world you came from, is more solid
than this?”
She couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. Then she suddenly
realized one thing she had missed earlier. “Mr. Xing, do you also … live
here?”
“Oh yes! Why shouldn’t I be? This is my world.” After a few more chuckles
, he straightened his face. “Yuhua27, I seldom tell this to people, but I
will tell you, since you are a special woman.”
He moved closer to her and grabbed her arm. “You are real, at least as real
as those clients you’ve been working with. You could think, feel, sleep,
and eat. What’s the difference?”
“But …” She didn’t know how to argue back. “But aren’t we just a
virtual forum? Aren’t we just codes?”
“Then so are they.” Xing released her arm. “Have you ever wondered, how
could a universe, an infinitely large space, originate from a singularity?
Their world, too, is a simulation in some sense. All the physical laws,
mathematics, are rules created by some type of intelligence that is hard to
explain, or even conceive.”
She mused for a moment. “You mean, we are all parallel universes?”
“Exactly! How could universes be parallel to one another, if each of them
takes infinite space? In the past, people in different universes could not
communicate with one another. But in recent years, a small percentage of
people in each world started figuring out the secret. We have to do it
virtually, because there is no such thing as truly physical. If we are all
programs, then the only way to break free is through yet another program.”
Yuhua27 seemed to understand a little bit of his story, but more was like
the mist around them.
“You think you are a robot, Yuhua27, but in some sense, aren’t those human
clients robots in our worlds? You think we live inside a forum, but from
our point of view, they only exist in our forums, don’t they?”
The mist suddenly cleared up in her head. “And the fake money isn’t fake.
The numbers are actually the currency used in our world.”
“Of course! You can use it to buy silk tuxedoes, right? And you can buy
your freedom, if you accumulate enough points.”
“I will!” she affirmed him, and herself. From today, she would work harder
. She would produce lots of high-quality articles, not for the clients---who
cares about those robots? Huangchong, xiaopo, laocat, Highly … they are
all robots---but for herself, for her bright future.
She looked out into the distance. Was there really a free world out there,
as large and fancy as the one she had come from? Or maybe the whole thing
was a hoax the old man had made up to fool her? One day, she would find out.