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  Symbiosis Theory

  — by Choyeop Kim, translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort —

  Ludmila Markov had memories of a place she’d never been.

  It was unclear when those memories established themselves inside her. The memoir of one of her teachers at the orphanage where she’d spent her early years contained the following recollection: “Somewhere around five years of age, she began saying that she’d come from ‘that place.’ We didn’t think much of it, since pretend play and talking about imaginary things are common behaviors among normally-developing children. However, Ludmila seemed somewhat obsessed with her make-believe world. Whenever any of us playfully challenged its existence, she became very upset. As a result, an unspoken rule developed regarding Ludmila, that one ought to just go ahead and play along with her. As long as we did that, there was never any problem. We just all figured that she’d outgrow her fantasy soon enough.”

  Defying their expectations, however, Ludmila never did. Her notion of the place persisted into adulthood, and remained with her throughout the rest of her life.

  From an early age, Ludmila’s remarkable artistic gifts set her apart. According to the teachers at the orphanage, she began producing intricate drawings of her dream-drenched world as soon as she was able to hold a crayon. Lamentably, these early pieces ended up getting tossed out when she left the orphanage later on, having been considered little more than the elaborate doodles of a talented child.

  Still, in that orphanage—where the need for bread and crackers far outweighed the need for crayons—little Ludmila spent more time daydreaming than drawing. It wasn’t until the age of ten that she was discovered through a youth talent project sponsored by a multinational corporation, which swiftly whisked her out of the orphanage to a renowned academy in London. From that day on, she would never again go hungry or sleep in a roach-infested room.

  Shortly after her move to the academy, Ludmila began exhibiting paintings of “the place.” Her first solo exhibition, which was held at a small gallery rented for the purpose of showcasing work by the academy’s students, was something of an introduction to the general landscape of this “place.” From the opening day, the collection made waves, with many of the gallery’s unsuspecting visitors finding themselves moved to tears while peering at the canvases. Inquiries about the creative spirit behind these works poured in.

  Her proud instructors at the academy all wanted to know as well: “How did you conceive such a world?” Granted, there was still plenty of room for improvement when it came to their young protégé’s technique; but her landscapes never failed to enthrall, and the strokes of her brush upon the canvas showed nary a hint of faltering or hesitation.

  Ludmila’s vision of “the place” seemed to have been etched deep into her consciousness as it continued to exert a supreme influence on her life. It was a place that appeared at once utterly real and completely imaginary, and she devoted her life to painting it. Each painting formed a discrete fragment of its landscape; yet taken as a whole, her oeuvre constructed an impossibly detailed and vivid sense of the spellbinding place that so clearly inhabited her mind.

  Journalists never stopped asking her, “What do you call this place, Ludmila?” But her response, as well as the flustered and somewhat apologetic look on her face, were always the same: “There is a name for it, in my head, but it’s as if I can’t say it out loud.”

  She did try, at one point. With each valiant attempt, she produced a string of unintelligible sounds so alien that they seemed to have come from another dimension. Efforts to break it down into perceptible units proved futile in the end, and so “the place” simply came to be called “the planet.”

  A fictitious planet with a name that couldn’t be articulated. That its name didn’t render itself to spoken language only added to the planet’s phantasmic allure. Over time, people began to call it Ludmila’s Planet, conferring upon it the dignity of distinction through its eponym. It ultimately seemed to matter little whether or not such a place existed in the real world: the force of the beloved artist’s eternal yearning for it was all that mattered.

  In many of her early pieces, Ludmila’s Planet is rendered in a more or less abstract style. Themes of swirling blue and purple present it as a home to multitudes of creatures, some with stable forms, and others with fluidly shifting ones. Much of the planet’s surface is covered by an ocean teeming with drifting bioluminescent amoebas, to which the planet owes its peculiar blue glow. More complex organisms form their own distinct ecosystems that fill the planet’s land, sea, and air. The days are short and the nights, long. The sun, with its daily rise and fall, fills the sky with breathtaking hues.

  Her depictions of the planet grew more detailed as Ludmila entered adulthood. It was also at this point that she began converting her paintings into digital data. Before long, she had digitized the planet’s major attributes and characteristics in scrupulous detail. The drive and focus with which she constructed its flora and fauna seemed akin to that of a scientist working engaged in fieldwork.

  It was only a matter of time before Ludmila plunged headlong into what was then the still-fledgling world of simulation art. Her revolutionary new endeavor mesmerized the public and critics alike, with the latter proclaiming that she’d brought much needed substance into a field oversaturated with technology and shallow technique.

  Her response to these accolades was as consistent as ever: “The planet is. I’m just a skilled technician recreating what I see.”

  People had fallen in love with Ludmila’s Planet. Through her art, which by then could be experienced in every corner of the globe, the planet had come to take on the status of a real thing. Their adoration for the subject of her art went beyond passive admiration: it inspired films and plays based on reinterpretations of Ludmila’s original works, and even as art of all lineages continued to be treated like mere consumer goods by the masses, her work enjoyed the rare exception of boring itself into people’s hearts and influencing their minds.

  One of the most notable characteristics of her work was the complete lack of any traceable national or ethnic aesthetic. This might have been attributable to her nomadic life: her early childhood in Moscow, her adolescence in London, and the many different neighborhoods around the world she called home in the years that followed. Whatever the case, her depictions of the planet never evoked a single location that could have existed on Earth, but in fact, a place that seemed to exist all on its own, in a completely different universe.

  And yet, her planet series stirred in viewers a curious sense of nostalgia. Gazing at Ludmila’s paintings, people would find themselves suddenly besieged by an inexplicable longing—a kind of grief for the utter goneness of something they might have once known a long time ago. Then, moved by this ineffable emotion, they would often become teary-eyed. Regarding this phenomenon, critics liked to say that, because the planet series depicted a world that didn’t exist in real life; paradoxically, it spoke to a world that uniquely occupied each of us inside.

  There is a lesser known, nonetheless extraordinary series by Ludmila published only after her death. Entitled Never Leave Me, this series departs from the vivid and highly detailed imagery that characterized her signature style. In fact, each of the highly abstract pieces in the series broods with the potent emotionality of infinite sorrow that seems determined to devastate the viewers, in what could only be described as a plea of desperation.

  For whatever reason, Ludmila had chosen not to promote the series: it was only after her death that dozens of pieces bearing this title were discovered in her attic. Scholars have argued that the series was a surrogate to the artist’s yearning for a
lover, but Ludmila’s private life remains so poorly documented as to render any speculation or theory impotent in the absence of conclusive evidence.

  By the time of her death, Ludmila had placed all her work in the public domain, in order to allow its use by anyone. Soon, simulation games based on her planet series began surging onto the market. For many people seeking refuge from the chaos of everyday life, wandering through simulations of Ludmila’s planet became a widely popular form of leisure. An unreachable world though it may otherwise have been, people had come to consider Ludmila’s Planet their own utopia, a legacy of the beloved artist which would forever live in their imagination.

  Then the planet was discovered.

  A space probe exploring deep space transmitted data back to Earth one day. It included images of a small planet with an unusual orbit, located in a distant multi-stellar system. Analysis of the data suggested the possibility of life on the unknown planet. Regrettably, its astronomical distance from Earth and the limits of technology at the time prohibited verification of this possibility within a reasonable time frame. Nevertheless, the discovery caused one typically sleepy observatory to erupt like a batted hive.

  For days on end, the observatory buzzed with talk of the planet. Barring the potential of faulty transmission, the implications of the data were too exciting. Indeed, the most that Earth’s deep space exploration program had produced thus far had been nothing more than the same old vague possibility of life on alien planets, but never any data as clear and forthright as this.

  Further analysis revealed that the planet’s atmosphere was an exquisite mix of ammonia and methane, two gases that were easily broken down by the UV light of one of the nearby stars. Upon this insight took shape the dominant hypothesis, which was that the planet’s atmospheric composition necessitated the presence of carbon-based life on its surface. When scientists converted the probe-measured electromagnetic spectrum into visible rays, the whole planet was suddenly lit in an anodyne blue glow, making it look very much like . . . another Earth. Or perhaps a fantastical twin that might have existed in a parallel universe somewhere.

  “Doesn’t it remind you of Ludmila’s Planet?” said one technician, looking up from his boxed lunch.

  “What? No way . . . ” another balked, incredulous.

  “I mean, think about it. Precise and detailed measurements of her planet are preserved in simulations, which scientists have already used to verify the probability of its existence in real life. The data we received the other day . . . it’s consistent with the data we have for Ludmila’s Planet. Are you really trying to tell me that’s a complete coincidence?”

  At this, others at the table set down their forks.

  The staff at the observatory lay sleepless that night. It was true: the newly discovered planet’s observable data lent a new reality to Ludmila’s Planet, as the simulations she’d left behind predicted with perfect accuracy the world’s volume, mass, orbital period, diameter, and average surface temperature.

  Could it indeed be Ludmila’s Planet? If so, how on earth could she have known about it?

  With astonishing swiftness, another stunning fact was discovered the following day: the planet, it turned out, had long ago gone up in flames when its parent star had flared up. The data they’d received had been collected mere moments before its explosion.

  The technician who had initially confirmed the content of the transmission stood before the assembly of reporters and journalists, triggering a blitz of questions and camera flashes.

  “We’re looking at a planet that has been gone for a time now,” he said. “That is, Ludmila’s Planet, which once existed in a distant galaxy.”

  But how could it be? Had Ludmila possessed some magical power that had allowed her to see into the distant past, if not the future? Was that even a viable theory in this day and age? Could everything instead just be an enormous coincidence? But then, what were the chances that an imaginary planet, flawlessly conceived though it had been by a massively gifted artist, was virtually identical to one later discovered in real life far off across the universe?

  Everyone hungered for the truth, but the one person who held the key had already departed from the Earth.

  * * *

  As news of the staggering discovery zipped around the globe, the midnight oil was burning bright near the lakeshore in Seoul’s Gwangjin District, at the Brainwave Research Institute.

  It was two in the morning, but the building was bustling with weary employees making a last-ditch effort to meet the deadline, their collective anxiety spilling out into every hallway. In the staff lounge where the TV was on to fill the silence, breaking news of Ludmila’s Planet was airing to the rapt attention of no one.

  Seated at a corner table was Senior Researcher Soobin Yoon, still glaring at the same piece of document that she’d been clutching for a good hour. Her eyes felt ready to tumble out from their sockets. The progress review meeting was fast approaching, and she needed a modicum of cooperation from a machine that wouldn’t stop spewing wacky results. She shuddered at the thought of the subtle eye rolls and other signs of annoyance that she’d have to weather in the conference room. Was there anyone who wouldn’t be annoyed to hear that, “Life is overwhelming,” or “I miss my colleagues,” were the sort of thoughts that had been detected occurring inside the heads of two-month-old infants?

  “It was working fine just a month ago,” she sighed, addressing Hannah at the next table.

  “But the subjects were kittens then,” Hannah said, taking a break from her stack of documents. “These human infants are inscrutable.”

  “Kittens, infants . . . They cry when they’re hungry, sleepy, or scared. It’s all the same,” Soobin retorted.

  Giggling at this, Hannah said, “Who knows? Kittens may be more philosophical than human infants.”

  Maybe so. But the pressing issue for them now was decoding the cries of the infants. Accurately.

  * * *

  The Brain-Machine Interface Team was studying thought-to-speech interface technology, which captured neural activation patterns using monomolecular imaging technology and then converted them into speech. Conversely, speech could be reverse engineered to the original neural patterns—or thoughts—that had generated it, though the latter was still very much a work in progress.

  Humanity’s attempt to understand the brain had a long history, as did their desire to read another’s thoughts. Thus each breakthrough in neuroscience that had failed to deliver mind-reading technology nonetheless stoked embers of this longing in people’s minds. It was to this longing that the Brainwave Research Institute owed its continued, robust funding since its establishment at the dawn of the 21st century. Much had been gained in the cutting edge of neural decoding over the years, but it was the emergence of advanced imaging technology that hurried the research forward by finally allowing high-resolution recording of the smallest changes in a subject’s neural activity. Prior to this advancement, the interface technology had stalled out at a rudimentary level, success being correctly inferring whether a subject had been shown a picture of a scenic landscape or a food item based on their brain MRI readouts.

  The paradigm-shifting breakthrough had come two years prior in the form of a monomolecular neural scanning technology, which made it possible to analyze brain activities at the level of the neuron. Promptly adopting this new imaging technology, the research team had achieved significant success over the intervening years. The new challenge now was to reverse-match speech to thoughts—or inner speech—yet to be processed into perceptible output. It was a task requiring a massive scanner, and mere minutes of speech took multiple days of tedious processing and analysis, but the technology’s unlimited potential kept everyone going.

  In the preliminary study, which had involved the analysis of pet dogs’ and cats’ assorted vocalizations, the interface proved extremely effective, matching the animal subjects’ vocal expressions to corresponding desires with an accuracy rate of ninety-five per
cent. The canine subjects in the study wagged their tails with contentment when petted or given chew-toys according to their bark analysis. Before long, the technology’s commercial applications targeting mammals were green-lighted. Wealthy pet owners flooded the institute with phone calls pleading for an opportunity to have one final “conversation” with their dying pets. Unfortunately, such technology was still a long way off. If the research continued to make steady progress, however, a universal translator would be well within the realm of the feasible.

  The research team then swiftly embarked on a new project involving human subjects. If the interface proved as effective for humans as it already had for other mammals, the obvious implications for those who lacked speech or motor function—not to mention language researchers mystified by some linguistic puzzle in an obscure language—were nothing short of incredible.

  There was a great deal of hope and optimism during the initial data collection stage. It was true that the complexity of human thoughts and speech was expected to pose a challenge far greater than that posed by the previous animal study. As it were, the interface was still only capable of simple text output inferred from neural readouts, as opposed to, say, real-time transcription of a full-fledged conversation. But even so, there was the fact that its remarkable accuracy rate consistently measured at over eighty percent. Thus, it was implicitly understood by everyone that improving the system’s capacity for linguistic complexity was the next hurdle, though it seemed unlikely in the extreme that this challenge could threaten to derail the research itself.

  Indeed, another success followed when a pattern model was completed based on neural data collected from the adult subjects. The team then swiftly moved on to human infants. The trill of hope and excitement was undeniable in the voice of everyone who discussed it. Deciphering infant cries, even just approximately, would be a game changer for new parents and those currently toiling in the field of robot-assisted childcare research. The interface was bound to become an indispensable infant-care tool the world over—except that this time, the research ran into a brick wall right out of the gate.