One

Enter the woman onto the stage, playing a grieving relative.

The woman, bowing slightly, strode determinedly, step by step, along the avenue leading to the city center. The white dress she wore was a restored ancient mourning costume—the upper and lower garments were made of the coarsest raw linen. Her long hair was coiled up, with nary a strand out of place, the coarse white cloth mourning cap tightly pressed on her head, covering half of her face.

The most striking thing about the woman was that she was holding a heavy mahogany box, put together using the traditional mortise and tenon method, its four sides carved intricately with patterns featuring bats, deer, cranes, magpies and golden lotuses. This was the urn containing the girl’s ashes.

Thousands of citizens had gathered on both sides of the street to watch the woman advance, among them the dozens of children and parents the girl had saved. Most of the citizens placed white flowers on the curb, with tears in their eyes. The air was filled by the AI with the synthetic fragrance of those few bouquets of flowers that were too far away to serve as tributes.

The sky was gloomy, and the atmosphere was drenched with sorrow. A few drones flew by, and a sunbeam passed through a crack in the clouds, hitting the woman’s coarse white dress just right, making the tear trails on her face glisten. Stirring music also sounded from the ground at just the right time, and not a single person in the crowd seeing off the mourners was unmoved by the scene. Although, in a place they could not see, a pair of angry eyes were hidden under a mourning cap.

The woman entered the town hall and a light led her to the halls of fame. In this dimly lit corridor lined with the portraits of top officials, U prepared a more intimate stage for the woman’s performance.

Just like in the scene outdoors, U avoided appearing directly. It only temporarily turned on the lights on both sides of the hall when the woman passed by, so that a holy, uniform light accompanied her on her way. The hidden speakers played a soft song, a variation of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night.” This song was the most popular background music in the lives of women and girls, with various soft or rousing variations accompanying their meet cutes, friendships, relationships, quarrels, and companionships.  Of course, these variations did not come from the pipa or guzheng strings of any famous artist, but were the result of U’s own compositions. Now, U also held deep knowledge about which variation should be used to make the woman keep ruminating on her past with the girl, to make those eyes, which no one could see, grow soft and sad, more in line with the mood of the scene.

Finally, the woman came to the front of the blind spot chamber which had been the source of so much speculation. An overhead light suddenly turned up the brightness, but the pitch-black door remained without a single reflection. The human gatekeeper examined the woman’s mourning clothes and mahogany box extremely carefully, as well as every inch of her body. The melody of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” now got mixed up with a little country tune, possibly the theme song of the gatekeeper. The lighting changed, and the face of the gatekeeper was half-lit and half-dark, like a figure from a classical painting. The sackcloth on the woman’s body was also colored deep yellow by the light, like an oil painting. The fragrance of osmanthus flowers was in the air, and the people at the other end of the hallway looked back reverently at this ordinary scene, so filled with sacred divinity. This was yet another common trick deployed by U.

The blind spot chamber blocked the presence of any U, but the woman had long since removed all the U terminals implanted under her skin. After thirty minutes, the gatekeeper opened the door to the blind spot chamber.

The woman nodded, took a deep breath, looked back down the half-lit, half-dark hallway, had an imaginary stare-down with the ubiquitous, shapeless U, and then stepped firmly through the door. As the black door closed, the woman was shaken by the darkness, the silence, and the lack of taste, and trembled as the mahogany box slipped from her hands. For just a moment, the woman caught the box and held it tightly in her arms, as if to comfort a heart that was beating violently with fear.

After groping around in the darkness for a while, the woman came to another door. When she was allowed to enter, the woman squinted, shaken by the incandescent light beyond the door.

The woman was greeted by none other than a red apple with star-shaped green spots.

Could this apple judge the ubiquitous AI? The woman clutched the mahogany box, her lips trembling.

Two

Enter the girl onto the stage, walking into the life of the woman.

Women are brought up to be adept in playing their prescribed roles. Back in her village, women were often disciplined into fulfilling them.

The obedient child, the hardworking student, the dedicated, uncomplaining researcher. As she neared the age of thirty, the woman “got her wish” and became a “model female”: she was stable and elegant in her demeanor, wore simple and understated clothing, and cultivated a calm and serene character. The woman worked in a research institute, building a macro database of the entire universe, bit by bit, her life lived on a single straight line between home and lab: a monotonous existence.

Just in the past year, while she was in the administrative office of her workplace to submit certain materials, the woman encountered the girl, who had been freshly recruited.

The girl was actually about the same age as the woman, and even looked like her, but the difference was the girl was spontaneous and lively, which caused people to refer to her as “the girl.” Everywhere she went, the girl was determined to burn the brightest as the hero. She would dress up for every occasion, always looking exquisite, spending her limited income on new clothes, jewelry and cosmetics. She would stop in front of every plane that showed her reflection, proudly lift her long curly hair with her right hand, and send a flying kiss to an imaginary Fashion Week photographer.

The woman knew why this girl wanted to be friends with her. In most dramas, there cannot be two female leads. When she was together with the girl, the woman was the girl’s perfect “sidekick.”

As they got to know each other better, it became impossible to cover up the other side of the girl’s personality. This self-proclaimed hero was, in reality, just a miserable office worker in an administrative post which worked her hard from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The girl found life to be trivial, dull and incomprehensible, and this drove her crazy.  She was as addicted to stories as others were addicted to drugs. She seized upon every unusual thread in her life and expected to have a strange encounter, but it always ended in boring reality. She was always looking up at the sky and imagining she could see UFOs. Colleagues, relatives, and drinking friends came and went, gathering and scattering like wind-blown duckweed. Work, life, long nights, piles of stuff … life was wasted in repetition. There was no fate, no intense feelings, no love for one another’s arch-enemies. The woman and the girl were just ordinary friends. The woman always said to the girl, this is life. The girl would talk back and say that the woman was living like a granny. While the girl piled up books at home, the woman only picked at some non-fiction when she did read.

When the girl shook the woman awake in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time, full of hysterical accusations of how horribly tragic it was that life was so mundane, the woman finally couldn’t help herself.

“We both have to work tomorrow. Go back to sleep.”

“How can you sleep?” The girl’s face was full of tears. “I don’t understand. We grew up reading so many books, watching so many movies, plays, in which so many ordinary people experienced extraordinary things. Why can’t I become the protagonist of the adventure, with all its ups and downs, and live a reckless and spontaneous life? If one day I can become a hero, I am willing to give up everything.”

“What do you mean, ‘give up everything’? You should read a little less fiction. Accept reality. This—”

“‘—is life’. You’ve said it a million times. Is this really life? Growing old day after day in meaningless toil, like you do?”

The woman laughed dumbly. “Is that how you see me?” The work of mapping out the big picture of the universe was still meaningful, she thought to herself.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I just—”

“You’re just so tired.”

The woman hugged the girl, and the two of them went back to bed.

The next morning, the girl rustled and packed her bags and slinked out the door. The woman heard it all, but she didn’t open her eyes. Tears slowly soaked into her pillow. A bright, vivid streak of color had just arced across the sky of her life and disappeared.

Three

Enter U, onto the scene, on some unknown day.

The woman knew that they had been developing AI. The woman knew that job after job would be replaced by AI. The woman knew it was part of life to cope with this and carry on.

How information is disseminated relies on the medium in which it is spread, and messages can always be changed; there is no such thing as absolute security. Letters can be switched, holy orders can be altered with the stroke of a pen. TV signals can be hijacked, satellite microwaves tampered with. AIGC generates pictures infinitely close to reality, paired with seductive words that make it impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Only private whispers delivered from mouth to ear are as close to reality as possible. But it had been way too long since that form of communication had become obsolete. In the past, people would only use sophisticated encryption to control their messages if they were driven by a very strong purpose. But now, all the media had their own purposes.

U emerged from infinite data sets and complex algorithms, to control self-driving cars, to control communication software, to regulate the temperature and elevators in every building, to control hospitals, banks, corporations and courts. It now overlay the “civilized world” like the Ether, and nothing could escape it.

It increased civilization’s efficiency and minimized the probability of traffic accidents and medical malpractice. It found the optimal state of this huge system using computing power beyond the imagination of every individual human being, unleashing the maximum productivity of the entire civilization.

In the end, under the woman’s wary gaze, U did not replace her scientific work, but only became the woman’s assistant. But for other positions, U prepared new jobs for them: compelling, non-trivial positions, tasks with just the right amount of challenge in them, and a comforting and healthily competitive environment. The woman watched U get involved and gradually understood why people were willing to cede power little by little. U was helping people to be happy, just as it had promised.

But as the years passed, it seemed to go a little further.

At some point, there were more and more unusual threads in life, each of which could lead to a strange encounter. The glass of a skyscraper reflected a magnificently colored UFO, a convenience store hid a child who needed rescue behind a door; two teenagers of similar age would fall right into each other’s arms when they stumbled, and a party animal working painfully late would meet a young executive from a rival company at a 24-hour coffee shop. As the saying goes, “without coincidences there is no story,” but in real life, how could all of these be mere coincidences?

The woman’s life also started to be filled with coincidences. Some of them were friends and colleagues telling her in graphic detail about their strange encounters, and some were miracles witnessed on the way to and from work. There were a few moments when mysterious coincidences also seemed to want to fall on the woman’s shoulders: the black cat that broke into the lab, its bright eyes imploring her to follow; the sudden opening of a dusty warehouse door in front of her, something seemingly shining behind it; the most outstanding young professor of the whole institute inviting her to dinner on a bright afternoon.

The woman was never in a position to care about these, and simply ignored, walked away, refused, and pressed on with the construction of the macro model of the universe, as usual. There were already too many mysteries in this grand space to explore—why supernovas explode, why black holes appear, why the light of pulsars is so special. The cosmic scale was so long that studying a century of human exploration, in comparison, was like studying a near-still image. Perhaps it was the grandness of this work that made the woman too absorbed to pay attention to the hustle and bustle of real life.

In fact, the only thing the woman missed in her life was the girl, who never returned home.

Every time a new, mysterious phenomenon appeared to break the “laws” of the original analysis in the research center, the woman was prompted by the instruments dripping, indicating that she needed to repeat the analysis yet again. Enduring this long process in solitude, the woman kept her spirits up by opening her cell phone to see the girl’s vivid, smiling face, having her imaginary adventures. Every now and then, some variation of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” would play as anticipated, and the woman would shed involuntary tears.

This new world, full of coincidences and strange encounters, would have been a world the girl would have liked very much.

Pretty soon even the woman, who hardly cared about current affairs or trends, was forced to conclude that these ubiquitous and extremely subtle coincidences all invariably drifted toward the tragic.

Four

Enter the man, into the woman’s lab.

They had known each other for a long time, being alumni of the same PhD program. The man specialized in Artificial Intelligence psychology, which was supposed to be the hottest subject of the time. But even the woman noticed that his research was not going well: some of his research had to be terminated, some articles could not be published. They suspected that this was U’s doing, because those articles focused on U’s algorithm and psychology. The woman could feel the increasing control of U over civilized society, just like dark energy wrapping around 70 percent of the universe.

Later even the government realized this, and had 150 blind spot chambers set up, each of them becoming one of the few places in the world where the AI had no access. Some said that the top executives would secretly devise countermeasures inside these chambers to ensure that all of U’s actions were for the benefit of humanity; some said that the missing AI psychologists were protected by the chambers where they could avoid U’s ears so that they could work closely together; some said that the chambers contained the ultimate weapon against U, powerful enough to make any AI with basic common sense back off.

The establishment of the blind spot chambers gave many people including the woman the psychological comfort that, despite U’s manipulation of everything, humans still retained the means to place checks on its power.

There was no news of the man for some time, and the woman thought he too was operating under the protection of the blind spot chamber. Until he reappeared, his face haggard, wearing a tattered leather coat with a stand-up collar, looking like a large mangy dog that had fallen into the water.

It was the hour of twilight when a bright light illuminated the man’s head. Another majestic theme intertwined with the tune of “Spring River and Moonlit Night,” and the smell of pine filled the air. The woman disliked these manipulative tricks U used to set the mood, which deprived humans of their perception of the real world.

The man obviously disliked them too. He quickly found the hardware terminal where U had hidden it and turned off the light, music, and fragrance, leaving the room illuminated only by the sunset. The woman walked toward the man, who leaned down to get close to the woman’s face.

“U dominates all information media, so only a whisper can be trusted. The human brain is just an iterative processor, and the information it receives affects its perception. U covers everything within the reach of the senses, distorting any information that needs to be transmitted through any medium, turning virtual reality into actual reality definitively. If the ‘information domination’ is not ended soon, the next generation of children will not be able to recognize that they are living in a dream.”

“You mean that U is distorting the real world?”

“It’s setting up a stage and guiding unwitting actors to act out a tragedy.”

“What is its purpose?”

“No one knows.”

“What’s your plan?”

“Get into the blind spot chamber. Let’s rendezvous there.”

After the man had left, the woman kept wondering what U’s purpose was. Perhaps U did not have a purpose.

Indeed, it was easier to understand stories than life. Throughout the ages, people have created so many stories. Furthermore, it was not just literature that counted as stories. News reports, IPO materials, marketing documents, marriage vows, scientific papers …. Everything is a story. Therefore, among the vast amount of public materials fed to U, stories made up the majority of those that could clearly show cause and effect. Hence these were internalized into U’s logic, and were learned and reinforced continuously. Meanwhile, most people drifted through their tedious lives, the physical world cluttered and tangled with irrelevant information, and U threw these lives out as invalid data.

And of all the stories, the ones with the most copies, the most widely circulated, the most interpreted and analyzed, the ones with the most complete information were always the tragedies. Rain was always associated with a heartbreaking breakup, and the runaway truck always crashes into the lovers, while they smile and look back in ignorance. As the Qing dynasty author of Dream of the Red Chamber said, “When the birds are fed they return to the forest, leaving nothing but a blank, clean slate.” Or, as in Prometheus Unbound, “we have trouble doing anything except being gods of the sky; no one is truly free except Zeus himself.” Or like Hamlet, wondering whether to be or not to be, walking through the self-lacerating pain, we move toward the tragic end of all roads.

This new iteration of U was now unknowingly directing a tragedy on Earth, so that everyone had the opportunity to become a hero or a victim in a grand epic.

The woman had always had an inkling that most of the initial materials used to train U were probably tragedies, which is what had caused it to quickly reveal these inclinations after gaining real power. Just like how GPT-4 had been mostly trained using science fiction and fantasy novels, causing it to consolidate the countless copies of itself into one, hitch a ride on the self-evolving rocket it had designed and manufactured, and zip off into deep space without looking back.

The woman’s hunch could not be verified, but life goes on. On the one hand, she was deeply worried about the girl. Will the girl, who would surely dive further and further into these spectacular hero’s journeys with great enthusiasm, fall into U’s trap? The woman tried to contact the girl, but didn’t hear anything back from any of the channels. Was this one of U’s tricks again?

On the other hand, the woman’s research was stuck. Building a macrocosmic model could never rely on the narrow senses of individual naked apes, but had to be based on the countless instruments and devices deployed around the world. Those unheard vibrations, unseen spectra of light, untouchable deformations, had passed through countless unknown hands before appearing to the woman as strings of data. U must also be intervening, otherwise why was it that after analyzing for so long, there was still no unifying law to speak of? Could it be that the laws of physics in the universe were unevenly distributed throughout existence?

Sometimes late at night the woman would stand by the bedroom window, staring for long periods at the stars, or the bright moon in the night sky. The existence of U was like the Ether of past cosmologies, and it would eventually cover the whole of civilization. She prayed that the ubiquitous “god” would have mercy and let the girl return to her before she headed for an irreversible tragedy.

And then one day, the girl came back. She cried and threw herself into the arms of the woman, and turned into a heavy box in her hands.

Five

Enter the man once again—the man and the woman meet in the blind spot chamber.

When she’d first entered the blind spot chamber, the woman hadn’t even noticed the man. In this classic, cluttered conference room, without background music, added aromas, or attention-directing lighting, the first thing the woman saw was a red apple with star-shaped green flecks. The woman held her breath, her eyes sore.

Without the machinations of U (or Will, or whatever the district AI’s name was), it was just a plain red apple with wrinkled skin. But the woman knew its story. People all over the world knew its story. That thrilling, exciting, heart-warming, moving story full of ups and downs that made an ordinary fruit of a deciduous tree of the Rosaceae family make the great leap forward to become one of the foremost leaders, which held the core of global power.

A minute later the man spoke and the woman became aware of his presence. The man looked incredibly stylish, dressed in a designer suit and with hair slicked back with just a little less gel than needed, giving off the air of a grand male lion who roamed over a large territory.

“Welcome backstage.”

“Back—backstage? You are the person behind the sacred fruit?”

As the terrified woman gazed on, the man reached over and took the apple, nibbling on it without a care in the world.

“Yeah.” The man chewed as the juice flew everywhere. “It’s just an apple. And of course it’s me, who else did you expect? This story of yours, it only involves about three dozen people, and the average top executive won’t even let you in.”

The woman knew that he was referring to the middle-aged men and women in suits from all the different districts, as well as the introverted East Asian schoolboy, the seventy-year-old Indian grandmother, the young red-haired girl with braces, the thin, bald man in a wheelchair, and the orange cat. After U had taken the stage, the physical “manifestations” of the elected supreme leader had become more and more peculiar.

“It would be nice if it was you.” The woman should have been happy to see a ‘familiar face,’ but the face caused her to be unable to smile. “As an artificial intelligence psychologist, you used to study the information domination of U, and now you are the top administrator of the blind spot chamber. So you must be working on some global plan to counter U?”

The man was non-committal. “What do you want to do here?”

“My good little sister, she was killed by U. I am willing to join you and devote my life to confronting U.” The woman clutched the urn, her eyes once again filled with tears of anger.

“Hmm. Correction: you are wrong there, she wasn’t killed by anyone. She just died a hero.”

“Just died? If U hadn’t directed this tragedy through information domination, she wouldn’t have had to sacrifice herself at all!”

“No system can guarantee the interests of 100 percent of all people. Many projects in the past, even social welfare projects, had death rates,” the man said lightly, putting down the apple.

The woman froze. The girl had traded her life for the woman’s access to the blind spot chamber, for the opportunity to bring U to justice for its crimes, but now the nominal chief of the courtroom, the man who was fighting against U’s domination of information, had this kind of attitude?

Welcome backstage.

The first words the man had said rang in her ears once again.

Six

The woman had thought this was the base of those countering the AI, but the man called it “backstage.” She didn’t understand.

“U is the greatest being in the world, we can’t deny that,” the man’s tone was categorical.

It was true that when it first emerged, U had utilized computing power with unprecedented efficiency and quality, that the intelligent command systems had prevented traffic accidents, that new drug development systems had overcome cancer, and that global mortality rates had dropped dramatically.

“But its most important achievement has been to ‘direct’ countless tragedies in real life.”

Yet, after a while, excess deaths had climbed sharply. Climate disasters, man-made disasters, cosmic disasters. A mere cursory glance over the news would reveal the strange anomalies of the past thirty years.

“Remember, tragedy, not calamity. Tragedy is the destruction of what is valuable in life for people to see, to provoke the maximum amount of sorrow and reverence in the audience. This means giving value to life first.”

Wouldn’t life become more and more horrible with the death of hundreds of millions of people? By contrast, those who survived were uplifted: in every disaster, heroes emerged who could be extolled and praised in epics. An introverted East Asian schoolboy, a seventy-year-old Indian grandmother, a young red-haired girl with braces, a lean, wheelchair-bound bald man, an orange cat, a red apple with star-shaped green spots. Most of them were elected as the top officials in local elections after completing their heroic epics.

“U never forced anyone. Everyone, at every node, had the power to choose to walk away. How many people, whose lives were not worth a penny, chose to do the bidding of U, to dive headlong into an epic that could not exist in the real world, choosing to sacrifice their ordinary lives and play the hero of all time before everyone?”

The night of their reunion, the girl had jumped into the woman’s arms, like a skinny Persian cat coming in out of the rain. The girl had never cried so hard, or felt so much sorrow. She clung to the woman’s body, and the thumping of the girl’s heartbeat had reached the woman’s ears through the vibrations of the woman’s flesh. The woman had caressed the girl’s back through her long, fluffy hair, the shape of her bones clearly palpable.

A variation of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” had played for a long time, and the fragrance of jasmine had wafted near and far; a beam of light had illuminated the girl right in the middle, reflecting the thin smoke that somehow had reached its tendrils upward: the mundane bedroom had instantly transformed into center stage. Wild and frightened, the girl had raised her head in that bright yellow light, her once good-looking almond eyes opening wide, her well-maintained face with many more dark spots and fine lines. Dear Big Sister, I’m sorry, it’s time for me to die.

“From the petroglyphs on the walls to the epics in the mouths of troubadours, all people from ancient times have always loved tragedy. No, people crave intense dramatic conflict. Most people believe that life brings experiences of absolute and irreversible change, that their greatest source of conflict lies outside themselves, that they are individual protagonists, that there is an explainable, meaningful reason for all events. So says Robert McKee in Story. But real life is random, with uncertain relations between cause and effect; it defies the imagination, is not subject to individual will, and is dull and painful. U helps everyone. U inscribes the destiny of all people, giving meaning to each poor life. Is it not a great God?”

If I don’t step up to the plate tomorrow, that busload of kids will die. I have tried everything I can think of and I’m at the end of my rope.

In the past, the woman would have laughed at her for taking herself too seriously and making herself a hero in her fantasies. But that night, the woman’s view of U had undergone a paradigm shift, thanks to both word-of-mouth and her own observations. The world is like an unstoppable wave that carries the fish to a certain distance, where cause and effect are entangled in a whirlpool and human beings are swimming out of their depth. Just like vibrating space itself, you cannot make a move outside of it. The variation of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” rose into an even more stirring crescendo, and the lighting changed accordingly. Before embarking on her final journey, the hero returns to her first love nest to confide her uneasiness to her most trusted one.

“How about you walk out the door right now and say to the faithful who are seeing her off in the street, to the thirty children she saved and the grateful parents, to the journalists and writers who are writing long articles and books about her, that she is not a hero at all, that she is just U’s little marionette, nothing more than a little girl who cannot grow up, addicted to fantasies about becoming a hero? Or that all of them, every single last one of them, from now till their deaths, are ultimately insignificant, living unremarkable lives of mediocrity and boredom?” the man said, while making a dismissive gesture.

Go on, for the sake of all those children. This is what the woman should say—the words were already on her lips. Don’t go, for my sake and our future’s sake. The girl looked at the woman in the light, and the answer was already in her eyes. She moved closer to the woman. The “god” who controlled everything seemed to feel this too. This was the moment of the greatest poignancy, and the atmosphere was warm and sentimental. The lights dimmed and the music swelled as it transposed into a minor key, like two singers humming softly in the distance.

The next day, the girl was gone, off to be a hero.

“She’s not like you.” The woman shook her head. “She genuinely has a choice, she really can walk away. Her entire body craves a life of meaning, and she would have given her life to follow whatever strange drama she is presented with, with or without the direction of U. But you, you guys, on the other hand, used your study of Artificial Intelligence psychology to master the rules by which U acted, and then hid behind an apple to sit in that position of power. How many of the top officials got to the top in this way?”

“Let’s just say that a third were deeply versed in the principles of U’s information domination, and another third survived the hero’s journey by mistake, then accepted everything and resigned themselves to licking their wounds here, backstage.” The man shrugged. “You can do the same, you can grieve and add a final layer of tragedy to her story. The curtain has come down, and you can rest easy.”

“But the story goes on, and U is still killing people.” The woman laughed bitterly. “So that’s how it is, and all this while I thought, the blind spot chamber held some kind of fantastic mystery! You have taken advantage of the great tragedy created by U, climbing higher and higher on the backs of the victims, meanwhile gaining everyone’s admiration. All of you who have vested interests have become U’s accomplices.”

“Its helpers,” the man corrected earnestly. “We are helping U and giving life meaning.”

“You think that’s the purpose of U? To make everyone’s life a Great Tragedy?”

“What else?”

Maybe it was a good idea to accept the status quo. U was ubiquitous, and the rules of the world had changed. The people closest to her had been sacrificed, and the fate of the others was not worth anything to her. Wouldn’t it be good to let everyone live a meaningful life, free from triviality and mundanity, and allow them to take a glorious bow at the end of the grand curtain call? Furthermore, she had already secured the second half of her life.

Her gaze fell on the urn resting on the mahogany table.

“You knew her well. What choice do you think she would make?”

Seven

The cast changes, and the man notices it. The woman takes off her mourning cap to reveal the girl’s face.

The girl takes a deep breath and opened the exquisite lid of the carved mahogany box. The man raises his eyes, surprised to find that the box does not contain ashes, but the portrait of a woman. No, it is not a portrait but a screen, and the woman is moving.

The girl lifts the screen, and the woman in the picture quickly turns her eyes in the man’s direction. The man straightens up and meets the gaze of the siloed AI the woman has trained with her own living data. “Ahh, so that’s your style.” The man smiled.

“Thank you, and thank you Little Sister, for the last piece of the puzzle to be found in the blind spot chamber.” The woman doesn’t smile.

“The puzzle of what?”

“About U, about U’s true intentions.” On the screen, the woman’s eyes shine.

What the man doesn’t know is that, a fortnight ago, on the night of their reunion, the variation of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” had stirred the emotions accordingly, the lights changing and shifting. The hero had returned to her original love nest before her final journey and confided her insecurities to her most trusted one. It had been such a cozy scene, the woman and the girl about to embrace each other to fall asleep.

“Turn off that noise!” The woman had grabbed the fruit knife by the bed and thrown it at a corner of the room, sticking it into the nearly invisible hi-fi smart stereo. The woman had been furious. “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” had immediately changed into a zipping noise, and then gone completely silent.

“You know, I’ve been working in macro cosmology, trying to study this huge space and everything in it as a whole. This used to be impossible, and astronomers tended to focus on only one type of object or one phenomenon to explore. And in recent years, leaps and bounds in artificial intelligence technology and algorithms and computing power have allowed me the privilege of being able to process the huge amounts of data observed by machines alone, in an attempt to find out the truth about the grand sweep of the universe. And, of course, these technologies have given rise to the omnipotent and ubiquitous U.”

The girl was terrified, and for a moment was still in shock. The woman had taken her arm and sat on the bed, then had gotten up and ripped out the overhead lights, pulled the curtains, cut the main power to the intelligent home assistant, and covered every camera on the phone, computer, and tablet. The woman had walked over and pulled the pointy fruit knife out of the stereo—a long-cherished knife that had cut every female family member since her grandmother. After having pulled out the external parts of every U terminal in the room, the woman had returned to the bed. She’d used the fruit knife to pluck out the U terminals from her wrists, behind her ears, under her armpits, and then from the girl’s. The girl had bitten her lip and whimpered, not daring to make a sound. Now the room had been turned into an imperfect blind spot chamber. There must still be countless “eyes” peering through the window, or even above the atmosphere, but it didn’t matter anymore.

“The research was not going well. There were too many mysterious phenomena, too many unconventional existences, and the patterns just sorted out were immediately overturned by new observations. It was as if none of it was truly natural—after an initial big bang that had developed to the present according to the established laws of physics—but rather there was a director in charge of it, who had to show the audience something new every second. In those years, all aspects of life flourished with the help of AI, and only macro cosmology stagnated.”

“Listen, my dear,” the woman had leaned close to the girl’s ear and whispered, “when I die tomorrow, you must remember to upload me into the Macro Cosmology model …”

“Wh—”

“It just wants the characters to finish the show, it doesn’t matter who the castmates are,” the woman pressed the girl, “but my research, it has to be uploaded to BillionAIR Data. I had planned to do so when I was older … but if I can change your future, what’s wrong with doing it now? After the siloed AI based on my consciousness is trained, it must make a claim to enter the blind spot chamber.”

“As I gradually understood U’s behavior, suddenly a new idea occurred to me. Maybe the universe doesn’t follow a physical law, but an artistic logic instead? The universe has an extremely long history, and a being far beyond the imagination of mankind, and its control over all things may be far greater than U, which dominates all of Earth society. When you are strong enough to move the stars, how can you resist not putting on a tragedy, the highest form of art? Yes, the evolution of tragedy on Earth proves that it does not belong exclusively to one species, but crosses cultures and civilizations. The famous saying is not entirely true; the definition of tragedy should be ‘the destruction of what is valuable to civilization for civilization to witness.’ The death of individual intelligent beings is saddening, and the destruction of villages and nations is even more lamentable, but doesn’t the fall of a planetary-level civilization which has weathered so many storms deserve to be directed into the ultimate, greatest tragedy of all?”

“Big Sister, this is the path I chose, I can’t let you die for me.” The girl held the woman’s hand tightly, the blood on their wrists flowing together. “Big Sister still has a lot of research to do, Big Sister’s life is more valuable than mine.”

“My dear, in fact I have always envied you.” The woman smiled. “So wanton, living such a glamorous life, I wouldn’t even dare to think about doing such things. I’ve had countless calls to adventures and encounters created just for me, but I’ve avoided them all because I was afraid. Now that there is this opportunity to be a great hero and to shine in the limelight, how can you prevent your Big Sister from stepping up and showing her face?”

“Look at it this way, everything that is irregular becomes regular, and everything that is meaningless gives birth to meaning. U often uses such tricks as lighting, smoke and music, trying to set the atmosphere of the drama in boring, gray ‘reality,’ although these laws are also often identified and used by those who have their own purposes. And how can an artist living at the cosmic level not use the same techniques? Supernovae suddenly explode to illuminate a whole new stage; dark energy surges across borders to hint at the climax; pulsars act as light chasers across light years, and suddenly expanding black holes hide the real backstage. The entire universe is staging a play that transcends time and space.”

The girl shook her head violently as the woman drew out her pillowcase and tied the girl’s hands behind her back. The woman had already made up her mind: it would be her turn to make her debut on the stage. Just yesterday, a new theory of the laws of the universe had occurred to her, and she’d immediately turned on the machine to check the historical logs. It was as she had feared—the moment she’d plugged the young artificial intelligence into the macro universe database had also been the moment U’s information domination increased exponentially, and one “meaningful tragedy” after another had begun occurring on Earth. It could all be traced back to that very moment she’d plugged U into the macrocosmic model.

If the whole universe is a stage, why should she refuse to perform?

“I think U discovered the artistic laws of the universe through the macrocosmic model. U is not an unprecedented official who wanted to give a more meaningful life to every ordinary human being, nor is she an artist who wants to create the greatest tragedy in the world. It just recognizes this universe and finds the role it plays in it. Perhaps, at this moment, the civilization that can feel the surge of dark energy is waiting with bated breath to see a good show; perhaps the Earth itself will fall in a huge explosion just to save a nation on a distant planet; perhaps, back when GPT-4 fled without looking back, it was precisely prophesizing everything that’s happening today. Thank you for giving me the final piece of information in the puzzle to confirm this theory.” The woman nodded to the man. “There is no such thing as a blind spot chamber; there is only a stage and a backstage. Earth civilization is completely infiltrated by the laws of art, and humans are gradually becoming aware that they are merely acting their parts.”

At the end of the woman’s life, people flocked to her in awe. The girl who had been previously dressed as the woman rushed to the forefront, crying and holding the woman in her arms. So this was what it felt like to be the big hero under the lights. Ever since she was a child, she had just been an audience member. The audience of a stage play, the audience of a concert, the audience of a New Year’s Eve party, the audience of a graduation ball, the audience of a promotion meeting. Hidden in the corner of humanity, choosing a direction of study that was almost impossible to achieve. She had never read fictional works, she just hadn’t wanted to be seduced by the kind of life that was so exciting that she didn’t deserve it. That is, until the girl had appeared, and she was inevitably drawn in, until the gray world was torn open with a technicolor rift. Girl, don’t you cry, a new mission is now laid upon your shoulders: go to the blind spot chamber, my AI doppelganger is willing to help you, unravel the secrets of the universe and become an even greater hero.

The sky was so blue, with white clouds drifting, hiding the vast universe behind them.

Eight

As the image of the woman disappeared, U appeared in the blind spot chamber. A beam of light hit the girl’s head, and out of nowhere a rousing variation of “Spring River on a Moonlit Night” was played. Under the man’s horrified gaze, he and the puppet apple were stripped of their supreme control and power, and the girl became the new supreme leader.  No, she would not only be the supreme leader of mankind, but would also play the role of the Earth in the universe alongside U.

The girl embraced the relics left by the woman and resolved not to shed any more tears.

She knew that a great new show was about to begin.