The Reincarnated Giant: Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction Read online

  There were others with less-ordinary identities, who had different intentions in buying regenerated brick. For instance, scholars of regenerated brick bought bricks and took them to their laboratories for research purposes. There were also volunteers who had participated in the disaster-relief efforts, who had shed blood and tears here and who, it is said, bought the bricks so as to reflect on the past. There were yet others whose identities were not clear.

  Once I was in a downtown bar chatting with my girlfriend when I was suddenly seized by a sense of wanting to break into tears; the surroundings were suffused with an otherworldly air, the spectral shadows of the fancily dressed young men and women flickering about. This fascinated me, and I slowly stood up. Under the startled gaze of my girlfriend, I floated back and forth through the bar, as if in search of something. I eventually espied a dozen or so regenerated bricks mixed in among the ordinary brick in a strip of wall by the orchestra pit. I called the bartender over.

  “I know these, they’re produced by my family,” I exclaimed, “they have a special stamp on them. You know, each house’s brick has its own hallmark.”

  As I said this, I pointed to an icon on the bricks. It resembled my mother’s red and indistinct, yet excited, eyes. The bartender was quite surprised and looked at me with grave respect. And my girlfriend’s expression showed a new esteem for me.

  The bartender sat down and had a drink with me. He said that he had once been through the disaster zone and when he saw these bricks he thought that they had certainly been works of art at one time, and that they would be most suitable to decorate his bar, so he had bought some. And, as he had expected, after he installed them there was even an increase in regular customers.

  There was nothing I could say in response. Even as people were drinking their cocktails, my mother’s husband and child, whom I had never met, were sequestered deeply within these regenerated bricks, in an unfamiliar city they had never been to, in a bar that was completely incompatible with their customary lives; they emitted wave after wave of gentle songlike echoes that intoxicated the customers. This was not, however, merely a result of the urban pursuit of stimulation and the new, but that people seemed to gain an account of the unknown they had longed for for some time, which they could use to explain why they were there that evening.

  In this way bars with walls of regenerated brick began to pop up in the city like bamboo shoots after a spring rain; and not just in bars, but they gradually spread to all sorts of trendy buildings. If, owing to limitations in building materials, regenerated brick could not be used throughout, then at the least it would be used at key points, and certainly in the foundation. This was not just a standard for construction but also became a fashion, something particularly esteemed by young people. At the most obvious level, people thought this represented the notion of green. It can be said that the appearance of regenerated brick rescued an urban housing industry that was on the verge of collapse. As for luxurious single-family homes, they used regenerated brick extensively, driving up prices and attracting more and more of the rich to live in them.

  By the time that everyone had encountered regenerated brick—it was a sort of practical experience, and also an ordeal, ruins rapidly became a resource even scarcer than petroleum, with its price shooting up and demand exceeding supply. It was often necessary to work behind the scenes or through connections to secure a supply of broken bricks and tiles. Not a few brick factories in the villages converted from producing regenerated brick to merely reselling rubble that they had stored away. By then quite a few people hoped there would be another disaster so as to produce more ruins. In fact, desire for a disaster became an overwhelming social sentiment. It reached the point that if a quite ordinary mishap took place in a certain locality, architects, businessmen, and tourists … they would all descend en masse. When scientists later invented disaster detectors and predictors, efforts were made to find the sources of disaster not just on dry land but in the deep ocean, in the air, outside the atmosphere, and in the molten core of stars. This caused our nation to stride proudly ahead on the road to regeneration, thereby stimulating a movement of magnificent scale, characterized by an unprecedented greatness of force. Material about this is so plentiful that everyone understands it quite well, and there is no need for me to dwell upon it here … In short, everyone rushed to dispose of their most beloved objects by crushing them up, completely smashing them, allowing them to perish, and then, on this basis, to create new things.

  After going to the bar that time, my girlfriend left me; she became infatuated with exploring disasters, and I didn’t want to go along. We had a difference of opinion.

  “This thought occurred to me while jogging: early every morning when I see you, standing tall as a birch tree in complete silence on top of the classroom building, seeming as if you are about to jump off it, it’s a wonderful sensation for me—also just as sexy as can be. I think you will just melt into the air and that we are very close.” She spoke in a self-serving manner, as if she were sipping on a whiskey, which made me think that her whole body was probably as red as a lobster. But I knew there would be no sleeping with her. When she spoke of “sexy” it was a general concept that was even a bit dangerous, but it had no specific referent.

  A year later she died on an exploration venture in the north. According to eyewitness accounts, the group of young men and women she was with obliterated themselves. For the sake of being cool, they used a type of low-tech equipment, a machine made from an air mixer, run by hand with two curved cranks, along with an old motor, which from the effects of electric vibration, after three and half hours of shaking caused the body to disintegrate into air.

  This process no doubt caused more than a little agony. Compared with those who were buried under the ruins back then, however, and who were able to hold out in great suffering for a hundred or more hours, then to be pulled out, only to die right after seeing the light, the mood would be somewhat more bearable.

  I remember what my girlfriend said: the world’s greatest catastrophe is the atmosphere. It is silently everywhere yet can at any time produce violent explosions, creating longitudinal and transverse waves that annihilate everything. This is, however, the real power of life, and, in exploration, one wants to go to places like this. If you can’t avoid it, then embrace it.

  “This is the way to solve our intellectual crisis.” The girl eyed me as she murmured, the sides of her nose showing a bit of juvenile heroic spirit.

  —But, what is our intellectual crisis? I will never understand this until the day I die. Perhaps I’m just a person without any ideas.

  I endeavored to get close to the things she and her friends had left behind, including the air mixer. It had a crude blade and gear structure, with a number of bluish metallic and plastic pipes sticking out of its brown cylindrical form. The whole thing resembled a partially dissected womb, and someone could sit in it like a fetus, awaiting the final judgment of fate. In addition, this group of young people had collected other machines having to do with the atmosphere, consisting of such things as spray guns, air cleaners, filters, wind tunnels, and the like. They were all bright and shiny, full of the charm unique to metallic objects. These playthings elicited both envy and regret in me.

  I went to the place where she had disintegrated and collected some of the air there using a discarded Coca-Cola bottle. It had a pale purple color that reminded one of a new perfume from Christian Dior.

  I took this bottle of air, which was just another form of ruin, back to my old home. The village had not changed much in appearance, just my mother had aged a good deal and my father had passed away. I threw myself into my mother’s embrace and had a good cry. To her I would always be a child. She did not shed any tears, just lightly stroked my shoulders while saying, “Good boy, don’t cry, there’s really nothing to cry about. Everything will be fine now that you’ve returned to Mother. And you’re much luckier than your older brother.”

  Mother still lived in the
brick house, and she seemed to have had a premonition of my return, since even my bed had been made up and the quilt washed very clean.

  In the middle of the night, the walls yet again gave forth their familiar sounds, making it hard for me to sleep. I listened carefully to what the people inside them were saying but just could not make it out.

  The next day, I stuffed some rubble and wheat straw into the bottle, mixed it up thoroughly, and handcrafted a regenerated brick, which I placed in a corner of our home, not far from where I slept. My mother sat on a little stool, silently watching me do all this through hooded eyes, making no protest of any sort but also not coming to my assistance. She was by now an authority on making brick.

  There were even more unsettling noises coming from the room at night, some sounding as if they were fighting, others as if they were playing mahjong; I couldn’t be sure. I opened my eyes and saw Mother with an arched and trembling body—like that of an aged cat—with an ear bent to the brick wall, as fascinated as a child. When our eyes met, we both laughed in embarrassment.

  It needs to be told that my girlfriend just happened to be the daughter of the architect. We met when she was sixteen and came to the disaster area to look for traces of the father whom she so venerated, and we later went to the same university. This really was a fortunate coincidence, as if the result of some obscure plan. I was very grateful to the architect, for without him Mother would not have regenerated, and there would have been no me. And if not for him there would have been no daughter, and my life would have been for nothing. But for some inexplicable reason, in my heart of hearts I harbored a latent resentment against him, as if he were my rival in love. As a result, I projected all these complex feelings onto his daughter. She, however, unexpectedly took her leave. I was thus at a loss, feeling in despair about the future and thereby able to comprehend my mother’s frame of mind in the time after the catastrophe. After that, however, with the passage of time I came gradually to feel guilty about the architect, because, as a man, I had not taken care of his only child. But I had never said a word to the architect in person, somehow never having found the opportunity.

  At the time, the architect stood at the apogee of his professional life, having attainted the status of national treasure or grand master. His daughter’s death, however, brought him down: he got very sick, after which he retreated from the front ranks of his profession. Perhaps he had had a vision of the crisis of regeneration. He no longer appeared in public places and was thus soon forgotten both by people and the times. Whenever someone would think of him, regenerated brick had already become a glorious metaphysical concept, which much diminished its creator. It controlled every element of social movement and evolution, governed both the spiritual and material lives of human beings, and had cut itself off from the architect himself.

  I then could not help but hazarding a guess: could it have been that the architect had foreseen the future death of his daughter while he was still young and thus given birth to the notion of regenerated brick? So this was no doubt the function of regenerated brick but also its greatest dysfunction.

  With the boom in space travel, regenerated brick was gradually introduced in the development of outer space. Astronauts took regenerated brick to space stations, and when the first permanent bases were set up on the moon and on Mars, regenerated brick was used in the foundation. Such was the custom of the new age, and no one knows how future archaeologists will regard it.

  There were some installation artists who used a space ship to shoot a great quantity of regenerated brick at a specific weight between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn to create a new asteroid belt.

  Some astronauts said that in the near vacuum of space, they could hear unusual noises, something that commonsense would deem impossible. There were those who explained, however, that perhaps the vacuum recuperated death, thereby forming a continuous ruin, and it was only where there were ruins that there could certainly also be regenerated brick, although they would not all appear in a form familiar to us and could very possibly exist as an alternative physical form.

  The philosophers said, If the mind is the master of the universe, then we will be able to hear its trilling.

  Scientists thought, If the universe will one day collapse, the omnipresent regenerated brick will play a very significant role. Perhaps in certain autonomous worlds regenerated brick is a form of life. The basic human conception of life needs to be revised, and we need a new understanding of the essence of life and death.

  The theologians expressed themselves thusly: there is nothing in a regenerated brick, it is empty.

  On earth, people began to use regenerated brick to build another Tower of Babel. The site chosen was at the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. At the request of the new Iraqi government, China organized a group of technicians and laborers to assist in the construction. There were not, however, only Chinese, since participating in this unprecedented work was an international army of one hundred thousand, which included Americans, Britons, Russians, Japanese, Indians, Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians, Australians, Brazilians … who transcended ideological and national divisions to come together. As for the material from the ruins for the main structure, it was brought from southwestern China, so a major transportation artery was constructed from China to the Middle East, which was called the new Silk Road of the ruins.” Of course, because the Tower of Babel was of such a huge scale, relying upon only Chinese raw material was vastly insufficient, so ruins left over from the Iraq War were also used. It was the first time that humans had directly lifted construction material more than three kilometers into the air, so the new Tower of Babel became the world’s tallest building, surpassing such famous structures as the skyscraper in Dubai.

  Later, and in the same fashion, people rebuilt the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. In the course of construction, scientists discovered a technique of cloning the ruins, which was also known as the technique of restructuring similar materials, which took the molecules making up the tiles and used microengineering to reproduce them individually, thus creating the needed raw material.

  After this, it was the turn of Pompeii and Ani … in order to get better results, seven small planets were dismantled even as human-engineered life-forms—more than thirty types of microorganism—distributed on them were intentionally destroyed. The ruins of the planets were towed to earth by a huge fleet of spaceships and used to make the regenerated brick used in the construction.

  There were some problems encountered in the reconstruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since people marched in protest. Just then, however, scientists came up with a new scientific breakthrough, discovering that time itself was a kind of ruin. So matters became manageable. With the aid of the Yang-Guderian conversion equation, scientists united the ruins with time and used the result as the raw material for regenerated brick, thereby calming those who had been agitated. It was also discovered that, like alloys of memory, in respect to the disaster time in fact had the capacity for memory.

  It must be incidentally mentioned that some of the Chinese workers brought back some waste material from the new type of regenerated brick and used it to construct Qin Shihuang’s Epang Palace, which is said to have been undertaken somewhat playfully.

  These buildings from different civilizations in different parts of the world were all able to produce their own particular sounds from within and were also able to transcend the basic level of language and use ionization to open up dialogue among themselves. They constructed a net that covered the world, another communication network in addition to the internet, and on the new net all the departed souls from the past three million years were in constant touch. To perform an in-depth exploration of this world, however, was virtually impossible. Once it had been constructed it had its own autonomous existence.

  The first group of extraterrestrials to visit earth was a corps of construction engineers. They had worked in each major galaxy with the goal of repairing this
worn-out universe, so as to allow the dead to have a place to go. The extraterrestrials had come to earth by chance and became quite interested in regenerated brick. They actually used a similar construction material, but it was still quite different from that used by humans. So the first interstellar civilizational dialogue and opportunity for cooperation used the language of construction as its common tongue.

  A delegation of extraterrestrials once came to the disaster zone in my hometown to visit a large-scale brick factory. They intended to regenerate some new galaxies in the Ophiuchus constellation to create a base to link the future with the past. They hoped to choose a number of technicians from among the people of earth to assist them in the work. It was then suddenly discovered that one of the members of the delegation much resembled the architect from earth who had invented regenerated brick, although it was impossible to be completely certain. How could he have subsisted with an extraterrestrial?

  But just then the brick factory collapsed for some unknown reason, crushing to death quite a few earth people as well as extraterrestrials. It proved impossible to dig out some of the corpses, including that of the one who resembled the architect.

  The local government was embarrassed and angry, punishing the people responsible. The news media reported the event in a low-key fashion.

  Mother later bought a segment of the ruins at auction and used it to make brick. At the head of the village she built a small house, which seemed like neither residence, nor factory, nor hotel and would not allow anyone to live in it.

  “After so many years have gone by, I seem to have returned to the past,” she muttered.

  I once asked Mother whether or not she knew who the dead people were who were mixed in the pile of regenerated brick. Mother looked back at me with a peculiar expression, as if to say, Do you even need to ask? I think, however, that Mother was not completely sure. Her behavior in her later years was governed by a subconscious effect of deep memory.