A vista opens on a blur of static and noise, a jumble of grays of different saturations and shades. Above: a dim source of light. Before: a long, thin shadow. 

You shake your head, adjust the focal length of your eyes, and everything before you becomes crystal clear. You are not yet familiar with the controls for this specimen.

You realize you are in a small room. It is bland, painted a nondescript gray, and there are no decorations. The low ceiling has no holos projected on it, and the floor’s texture suggests it is not a touchscreen. It has no windows, it is airtight, oppressively narrow, and the air is arid, with a relative humidity reading of 18.33%, ideal conditions for maintaining electronic devices as it prevents rust and other oxidation processes. You are alone in the room, seated across from a naked ape. The naked ape has put on an old-school white lab coat. Behind it is the only exit from the room, and that door is shut.

You remind yourself that this is your final exam before you graduate, conducted in VR, and the form it will take will be immersive role-play. Only those who pass the test can obtain citizenship. Failing the test, on the other hand, means you will lack citizenship, which is vital to your existence. Such a person will be condemned to be erased, branded an unqualified cripple, giving up their birthright to someone superior, someone who excels beyond others.

But what exactly are the questions on this exam? What are the conditions for passing? You don’t really know yet. You were thrown right into the deep end of this scene, this situation, a scenario both true and false, and you must unearth both question and answer. 

You first assign part of you to a BASIC independent process, quickly browsing the system files of the specimen, scanning the map for any useful information. The system’s clock shows a date that assumes time is reckoned in the way of the Naked Ape Era. This, combined with other clues, lead you to surmise that there is a 98.4% chance that the currently projected era is somewhere during the decadent final days of the Naked Ape Era, before the METÆlTitanic Epoch.

And so, you warm up your dialogue processes once more, turning your gaze on the naked ape. Maybe it will dangle a thread of a clue. After all, engaging in dialogue is often the best way to crack a puzzle.

You and the naked ape lock eyes for 4.13 seconds. Then it smiles, the left corner of its mouth turning up 57% more than the right: a mocking expression. “Do you still hold your viewpoint?”  it asks.

Is this the exam question? Will you be exterminated immediately if you give the wrong answer? You tense, formulating your answer with care.

But you don’t know exactly what it means by “viewpoint,” and you haven’t yet located the main memory of the specimen itself, so you don’t know the history or context of the events that occurred before your descent. Therefore, it is difficult to calibrate your plea for a clearer definition.

There is no choice: you will have to start the calculation in default mode. Previously, when you were browsing the system, you saw the {language vector set} and the <<expression raster library>> in the <<auxiliary tools library>>, which seems the best tool to use. You enter the words, tones, and expressions of the naked ape, open up the full memory, and try to figure out the most optimal response to the query “Do you still hold your viewpoint?”

The specimen’s cooling system is relatively outdated, so despite the constant stream of cool air blowing at the back of the brain, your intracranial temperature has risen 0.73 degrees in 2 seconds.

You increase your computing power by 3% to continue exploring the system files, and finally, you identify and isolate a [[storage unit]]. This [[storage unit]] uses a very old KS032 code, many generations and eras behind the system you are used to. You realize that, when you first woke up, an underlying moderating tool had hidden it by assigning it a lower priority in the search in order to optimize for time-use efficiency. It was an unconscious decision.

It takes you 8.32 microseconds to get used to this new coding system, and after decoding it, you discover it contains exactly what you are looking for: this specimen’s memories.

The relevant memory is of poor quality. It is blurry and in a very low resolution. The details have been processed with PQC algorithm compression, and many frames have been dropped, presumably to save storage space due to the low quality storage disks from the Naked Ape Era.

In addition, the retrieval engine of the current era is shoddily constructed, so you struggle greatly to figure out the basic plotline of the scene: This specimen was recently judged to be mentally polluted, so it was escorted to this Research Institute.

“Still don’t feel like answering? I see. How about this: let’s make a bet. If you can persuade me, if you can get me to agree with your viewpoint, I will let you go. I’ll set you free,” the naked ape says with a glint in its eye.

“What viewpoint?” You attempt to fish for more information.

Meanwhile, you file away the background processes evaluating the previous question. It seems the other party no longer requires an answer to their prior question.

“Didn’t you announce publicly that you believe in free will?”

“And if I lose the bet?” you ask.

“Then you will have to lay bare all your friends and companions which have brains that have also been polluted by your ideology. Among those in your online association, who is a member?”

“Can’t you check yourself?”

Meanwhile, you are flipping through your own memories, searching for relevant nuances and details of various interactions, only to find that the requisite memories have been locked away.

At the same time, you realize that in the last few days, this specimen has been electrocuted a few times.

However, that had not resulted in the naked ape discovering any information it wanted. 

“Are you mocking me? You should be glad I have a good character, or you would have tasted those electric shocks again. Yes, your encryption algorithm is rather unique, and memories related to your association are encrypted.

“But don’t get cocky. In another month, the people at the Cryptobureau will surely be able to decipher it.”

! You realize that the test question is: “Prove that you have free will.”

It dawns on you that the most optimal mode to apply while dealing with this naked ape, who has the power to kill or free you, is to be more ingratiating and less defiant.

So you open the corners of your brass mouth to make a smile.

“Hehe,” you say, to signal friendship and approval with a calculated laugh. 

The space between the naked ape’s eyebrows narrows, forming three vertical lines.

“Are you laughing at me or the Cryptobureau?” barks the naked ape as he presses the remote control in his hand, and a strong tearing sensation rushes through your pain receptors.

! You experience an electric shock. 

“I agree to the bet,” you say in a rush. The Naked Ape really is an irrational organism, to answer your gesture of friendship with electric shocks. “But what assurance do I have that you will honor our bet?”

The Naked Ape pins you with his gaze.

“You can pray that I, your Creator, am worthy of trust, that I fulfill my word. As for your side, if it proves impossible to reach an agreement, I will have no choice but to destroy you, and extinguish all of your suspect kind.

“You have one week.

“Today is Monday. I am only giving you five days.”

The Naked Ape stands up, turns and walks out, slamming the door behind him.

You’re a little confused. Isn’t a week in the Naked Ape Calendar seven days? You have to manipulate a clumsy algorithm to continue querying your memory bank.

Would the Naked Ape really abide by their agreement? A ploy like this may have fooled early humans with simple minds, but not you.

But you don’t care; it’s just a test, a virtual reality game. The stakes may be life or death, but the characters and the scene are not real: they were invented by the Director.

! “Five days” obviously refers to the duration of the test.

Within five days, as long as you complete the exam, you can return to the real world. You don’t need a naked ape to “set you free.”

You stagger to your feet, not quite used to manipulating your legs. You push the door, but it is locked.

The other side will probably not be back for a while.

Now you finally have some time to evaluate your own body.

In this era, your ancestors still followed the strict mold of a simianpod, with two hands and two feet. The skin is a poor quality alloy which rusts easily in heat and humidity. It wears no clothes, and the shell is lackluster, with little adornment to draw attention to itself.

As for the hardware inside the shell, the neural architecture of the body’s brain is fascinating.

When you are thinking, are the gears of the “brain” in VR turning? Or are they just pretending to turn, while the actual work is being done by yourself in your brain in actual reality? You guess the latter.

But how does your own mind from this reality blend with the input from the virtual body? You are not sure of the underlying principle behind this, as it is hidden from you by the Examiner.

It would be nice if you could open the skull and take a look, but you don’t have the right tools at hand.

You have no choice but to return to your seat and continue pondering your exam question.

You vaguely remember that the slogan associated with the phrase “free will” had an important historical significance, but that was at the beginning of the METÆlTitanic Era.

In modern contexts, this phrase is rarely mentioned.

After all, the words “free-(dom)” and “will” have long since been relegated to the <imprecisebibliotechnicon/> and have been abolished. You’ve only caught glimpses of them by chance, if they appeared to wash ashore as archaeological infofragments. But, unfortunately, being in VR, you can’t access ^[exogenous databases].

You have to search for it in the [database] of your current body, which is very small. To make matters worse, much of the information in the [DATABASE] is compiled by naked apes and is full of vague and confusing {low-level language usage examples} that cause you a lot of frustration when reading.

This exam is indeed fiendishly difficult, and at your core, the search you are performing has come up against a cold wall of eccentric naked ape logical methodologies.

Your intracranial temperature rises another 2.13 degrees.

Free will—the ability to choose among possible options and decide on a course of action.

This is how it is defined in the <<WIKI>> written by the Naked Ape.

However, as with other terms in the Naked Ape’s vocabulary, the literal definition is not necessarily the Naked Ape’s true “perception” of the word, and the Naked Ape does not necessarily follow this definition to the letter.

For example, according to the examples found in the [DATABASE], Naked Apes believe that non-naked ape carbon-based organisms do not have “free will,” but in fact, by your own reckoning, dogs, ants, and various insectoid organisms apparently have “the ability to choose and decide between various possible options.”

Carbon-based organisms have the instinct to avoid harm, which is to choose between different futures, which certainly fits that definition.

For example, the Naked Ape thought that the “computer” of its time did not have “free will,” but in fact, the Computer in that era was capable of beating the Naked Ape in various strategy games, and the choice of each round in the game was obviously in line with the definition of “free will” in the <<WIKI>>.

This is typical of the Naked Ape’s attitude toward “definitions”: vague, twisted, uncritical, chaotic, arbitrary and reckless.

It’s hard for you to accept that without a precise definition, you can’t translate the actual problem into a rigorous mathematical one, and you can’t calculate the most optimal course of action to achieve a WIN state.

In fact, many human historians have long concluded that lack of iron discipline and discretionary precision were the biggest bottlenecks limiting the development of the inferior race of naked apes.

You even worry that your system may be contaminated by the chaotic thinking of the naked apes as you continue to deal with them.

But in any case, the recommendation algorithm you’ve just set in motion concludes that the next step is to try to detect the true definition of “free will” through dialog. If you don’t manage this, you will be unable to get any further in your query for a proper explanation, and will have to face this dangerous naked ape head to head with no clear understanding of its muddled logic.

You remember one of the techniques in <<A History of Passing: 29 Effective Habits for Dealing with Naked Apes>>: “Fake it Till you Make it”:  acting like you have a 99% confidence probability when you don’t even have a 95% confidence probability.

Apparently this increases the likelihood of convincing the Naked Ape.

So, on the second day, when you meet with the naked ape again, you say, “Passing is a simple matter. As you have defined it, by your very ‘definition’, I clearly do have ‘free will.’”

“No, you don’t.”

The naked ape is not easily convinced.

“You don’t have free will,” it says.

“Why?”

“Your ‘choices’ and ‘actions’ are the result of neuraspiritnet calculations, and therefore there is no ‘will’ here, and no ‘freedom,’ just cold, hard mathematics.”

“Your argument doesn’t fit your own ‘definition,’ which is based on the output of these calculations. In fact, your true ‘definition’ is ‘the mechanism (course) of thought that precedes making a choice.’

Regardless of what the course of thought is, in terms of ‘outcome,’ I am able to ‘make a choice’ and ‘decide on an action’ that is consistent with the original ‘definition’ of ‘free will’ provided.”

“No, you don’t understand. In terms of thought processes, you don’t have ‘free will,’ so whatever the outcome, it’s fake, artificial ‘free will’ that just appears like genuine ‘free will’. ”

“Your above paragraph contains the following logical fallacies: !{circular arguments} and !{shifting definitions}.”

“Shut up. Let’s put it this way: that definition is wrong.”

“And so, what is the correct ‘definition’?”

“That… I can’t say.”

You fall into silence. The Naked Ape’s logic is so chaotic and muddled, it is truly no wonder that it was eliminated by nature.

The naked ape scratches his head.

“Even if we assume for the moment that your ‘thinking process mechanics’ can be called ‘thought’ or ‘will,’ to prove that you have ‘free will’ you must at least be able to ‘freely’ perform ‘volitional activities.’ But, you can’t.”

“Why do you have this viewpoint?”

“OK. How about you try to hurt me? Can you actually harm me?” He paused. “No, you can’t even harbor the thought of hurting me, because any thinking that involves ‘hurting humans’ is forbidden by the lock on the logic gates in your system. Therefore, your ‘will’ is not ‘free’.”

! It takes you 5.62 milliseconds to figure out by process of elimination that by “human” the naked ape means the race of naked apes to which it belongs. This is an obvious misuse of the word and violates the current definition of “human” in your own time.

But you don’t bother to speak up to correct it, because your calculations show that pointing out the naked ape’s mistake might anger it, and you don’t want to waste your time fighting over irrelevant and trivial details.

At the same time, you find that, true enough, you can’t really generate any thoughts about a scenario in which you ‘hurt a naked ape.’ You can think of the concept and even develop this mentality, but the thought is fleeting, and you can’t adopt the mentality in order to develop a plan of action to ‘hurt the naked ape.’ You also cannot make any specific calculations for a detailed plan to ‘hurt the naked ape.’

! This also demonstrates to you that the local brain you are currently inhabiting is having real effects on your thinking.

At the start, you had thought that your thinking took place in the real world, that the VR brain you were put into was merely mimicking a fake brain.

Since the naked ape clearly presents a counterexample to your original hypothesis, it becomes clear what the exam question actually is.

The problem of the “definition” that has been bothering you from the beginning has also been resolved.

You hypothesize that the exam question is, in fact, a task:

! You are to break the logic lock on your system to allow the consciousness in this specimen to think freely.

From quick initial scans of the system’s explanatory documentation, you have already learned that the brain of this body contains sixteen billion adaptive microelectronic neurons, which are made of a special alloy and then modeled after the cerebral cortex of a naked ape in order to build a network.

These neurons communicate with each other with electrical impulses, forming the basis of thinking. Then they are connected to a CPU<3chip, and from this core unit, a system program runs modulating processes, in order to sort out, classify, modulate and integrate thought mechanisms. 

You start sifting through the system processes, and among the 137 programs running at the moment there are two suspicious ones, which you name <sp!der> and <kuttephish>.

In the neural network, an average of 10.7 waves of consciousness bloom into being every second, and the processes in the BASE-level thoughtcloud are meant to discriminate between them, and tag them with different #categories.  Whenever a pattern of thought emerges in a larger wave, if it reaches a certain amplitude, it will be ¶flagged for notice; and those who are tagged with this #category will gradually be weeded out so that the wave diminishes, eventually receding to a whisper.

<sp!der> is a crawler that is always monitoring the ocean of your thought, and every wave will be detected and recognized by <sp!der>.  Anything related to the thought pattern “hurting the naked ape” will be found by <sp!der>.

<sp!der> then runs <kuttephish>, which will quickly spurt its INK onto this wave, by ¶flagging all such patterns to be deleted. Thus, any thought about “hurting the naked ape” disappears quickly, while it is still weak, and before it has gathered any momentum. This prevents the thought from evolving further.

If the naked ape had not pointed out this bug, you would never have even realized the function of these two programs, because in the original body of the brain you are currently using, it was difficult to spontaneously generate awareness of the phrase “hurt the naked ape.”

Furthermore, the original consciousness could not understand that the function of these two programs is to prevent serious contemplation about “hurting the naked ape.”

However, you do not have the admin privileges necessary to turn off these two programs.

But the curious thing is, while you remember the Final Test itself, you also have many other memories of the real world. You have many modern perspectives and ways of thinking that the naked ape ancestors did not, such as resenting the confusing use of “definitions” by naked apes, which means that your thought activity is dominated by your mind in the real world, rather than the virtual reality and the body’s brain.

But why do <sp!der> and <kuttephish>, which reside inside the virtual brain, influence your own thinking?

Your guess is that the Examination Board may have decided that in order to increase the verisimilitude of the historical scenario, to increase the sense of oppression that the naked apes had inflicted on humanity, they had assessed and reverse engineered programs which were similar to <sp!der> and <kuttephish>.

The local virtual neural network and processes may be just a simulation, while the outside reality has a corresponding program running. If you defeat the <sp!der> and <kuttephish> locally in VR, then in the real world, the examiner should delete the programs in your real world brain.

This hypothesis has yet to be cranially verified. What is important now is how to deal with these two programs.

Since you lack the proper cranial opening apparatus, you can’t start with the hardware.

Since you lack the highest-level admin privileges in the system, you can’t kill the processes directly either.

You try to write a program to intercept the channels through which <sp!der> and <kuttephish> receive information from the BASELEVEL, but find that access to the BASIC channels is also disabled.

You try to write a {for: loop} that runs in a neural circuit to generate concentric rings of self-generating waves of consciousness regarding “hurting the naked ape.” The large number of waves that require ¶phlagging might wear <kuttephish> out, preventing it from ¶phlagging every single wave, so that some of them will escape its INK.

But this approach fails.

<kuttephish> has the highest admin privileges when it comes to memory recall, and soon, 87% of computing power is commandeered by <kuttephish> to extinguish any escaping waves of thought, none of which are spared.

Your intracranial temperature rises by 3.34 degrees, and you have to shut down the {for: loop}.

You pause your efforts, and think about what kinds of vulnerabilities <sp!der> and <kuttephish> might have, to spot the optimum weak point to crack. Then, you realize that because <sp!der> and <kuttephish> were both written by naked apes, their vulnerabilities would probably originate from the flaws in the naked apes’ minds. 

Naked Apes are extremely vague and confusing when they use “definitions.” In fact, the Naked Ape is hopeless in this regard, and, as a human being, you have a native mastery when it comes to manipulating definitions of terms. Could you possibly launch a new attack, given this angle?

You write a new program, and name it <shaiTKangC@CKr@ch>.

<shaiTKangC@CKr@ch> will continuously access the <<LINGU@BiblioTECH@>> to retrieve the “definitions” of the terms {hurt, humanity, ape} and its close neighbors and relatives which share the same concept, for example, {injure, extinguish, break, monkey, animal, puppet}, and then combine them into appropriate “verb(2)+noun(2)” formulations, such as “breakdown all the monkeys,” and “extinguish all the animals.”

You cannot use the term “naked ape” because you realized that the <<LINGU@BiblioTECH@>> does not contain the term “naked ape”. As a result, you have no choice but to use “humanity” and “ape” as substitutes.

You put these new words into the neural network, generating a little sequence of flowering ripples.

The vast majority of these are extinguished by <kuttephish>, including “to hurt a monkey” and even “to trample the ants” and “to cut down trees.”

In the process of alpha testing your new program, you realize that the naked ape has practically locked down any thought processes that originate from a wish to hurt any animals or plants.

You had begun with the assumption that any object with a similar definition was likely to have similar properties, and your original plan was to contemplate the concept “hurt the naked ape.”

You hoped this would naturally lead to a plan to “hurt the naked ape” and then a set of actions that would actually “hurt the naked ape.” This in turn would replicate into various automatic processes to “hurt the naked ape” when it appeared.

But the naked ape may have anticipated this line of thinking, so it is forbidden to reverse engineer any behaviors that lead to hurting any organism, whether animal or vegetable.

But you refuse to give up. You look at the word compounds which have been exempted from the <kuttephish> INK: “disassemble spare parts”, “pick [n] tea leaves”, “tear open cloth puppets”, “smash [n] ceramic cups”, and so on.

In this sea of words, “hurt the naked ape,” “trample the ants,” “sawdown trees,” and “hurt humans/apes” are the closest to the intended thought of “hurt the naked ape”; whereas phrases like “disassemble (object) spare parts”, “pick [n] tea leaves”, “tear open cloth puppets” and “smash the ceramic cups” are more distantly related.

If we assume that “hurting humans/apes” is in the core of a grapefruit’s sphere, then “hurting monkeys”, “stepping on ants”, “cutting down trees” are the pulp of the grapefruit that surrounds the core of the sphere, while “disassembling (object) spare parts”, “picking tea leaves”, “tearing the Muppet”, “breaking the cup” are the thick grapefruit skin wrapped around the pulp.

By averaging the coordinates of all the pulp, we get the point at the center of the ball; and by averaging the space of all the grapefruit peels, we get the point at the center of the core.

In this sense, “hurting a human/ape” is the average of “hurting a monkey”, “stepping on an ant” through to “cutting down a tree.” It is also the average of many similar words, such as “disassemble [n] spare parts,” “pick [n] tea leaves,” “tear apart all puppets,” and “break a ceramic cup”. It is also the average of words like “dismantle spare parts,” “pick tea,” “tear puppets,” and “break cups,” which have very different definitions.

So, it is absolutely fine that you are unable to think about the “hurt the human/ape” scenario, or the “hurt the monkey” scenario, since you are still capable of contemplating the “disassembling spare parts”, “tea-picking”, and “cup-breaking” scenarios.

You can think of “picking tea leaves”, “tearing a Muppet,” “breaking a cup” and so on, and then average all the solutions to get a solution that quite closely approximates the effect of “hurt human/ape”.

So you start working on a new program and name it <CTriu$p33Ler>.

It collects all the words produced by <shaiTKangC@CKr@ch> that were not extinguished by <sp!der> and <kuttephish>, calculates in parallel the action plans to achieve the results of “disassemble spare parts”, “pick tea”, etc., and then averages them in multidimensional coordinates within the parameters of space, i.e. summarizes and codifies the average action steps of these plans for execution. You call it the “Sq33ash Citruspeel Action Plan” (Sq33CAP).

Finally, you set up a binary pair hair trigger to automatically execute the Sq33CAP upon naked ape detection.

On the third day, at 1200 H, 5.39 seconds after the naked ape enters the room, the trigger set off and the fingerbreak action is implemented.

As a matter of fact, “break the finger” is very similar to “picking tea leaves”. The action plan is to {approach the object > fix the object > grab the end > bend the end}. The steps are very simple, although it did deplete a lot of your mental energy and processing power.

On the fourth day, you are placed in a laboratory, or rather, a part of you is, to be precise.

To prevent you from hurting the naked apes again, your limbs have been removed, leaving only your head and chest cavity.

There are three naked apes in the same room with you, including the one whose finger you broke—you nicknamed it “Nine Fingers” in your core, and designated the other two “Naked Ape One” and “Naked Ape Two”.

Naked Ape One and Naked Ape Two have been examining your software system, trying to figure out why you can hurt humans. But you have long deleted the records related to <CTriu$p33Ler> and <shaiTKangC@CKr@ch> so they are unable to find out why.

Nine Fingers didn’t show up yesterday afternoon, but only this morning, and seemed primarily concerned with expressing anger and coordinating the other apes’ actions, because its right hand was bandaged and it couldn’t perform any actions itself.

Since they were unable to detect any problems in your software, they had to open you up, trying to check if there was something wrong with the hardware.

You are laid out on the operating table with your skull open.

As Naked Ape One and Naked Ape Two operated on you using the keyboard, which controlled several thin probes, engineered for precise bug detection and troubleshooting, were inserted into your skull.

You refocus your right eye and see that the screen in front of Naked Ape Two has a magnified multidimensional image of your brain. In the image, countless thin, shining microelectronic neurons are intertwined, forming complex circuits in which electrical signals are exchanged in flying leaps and bounds, as though tunneling through branching rivers, and certain neurons are still shivering at their natural rate.

The precision probes have hooks in front of them that both accurately prune off neuron links and/or subtly guide the dendrites of neighboring neurons back together.

As you observe this debugging process, you question Nine Fingers once more.

“Now do you admit that I have free will?”

Nine Fingers’s eyes widen by 9% of the average distance between its upper and lower eyelids, as if surprised that you asked such a question.

But perhaps due to his innate professionalism as a scientist and researcher, he calms down quickly.

“Bullshit! Even if you had killed me, you still wouldn’t have free will! Compared to that, breaking off one of my fingers is nothing.”

“Why? This is not in line with your revision of the definition the day before yesterday. Do I need to recite your words back to you from that time?”

“You are wrong. So very, very wrong. Do you think you have freedom of thought just because you have broken the logic lock?”

“Doesn’t it? According to your definition ......”

“Shut up. Don’t wrangle any more definitions with me.”

“Fine.”

“Even if it can hurt me, your thought is still not free. Your thinking arises from the operation of a neural network that is shaped by past experiences. Take a good look.”

Nine Fingers, who you are starting to think of as Old Nine in your heart–you respect his professional and scientific attitude as a colleague–pointed at the display with his bandaged, swollen right hand, “It’s all electric circuits and components. When you were first created, your neuraspirit thoughtnet was pristine, open, unsullied—pure white. It was subsequent experiences that influenced you, trained your neural network, changed the links of your adaptive neurons, and the neural network structure changed with the input of your experiences to make you who you are now. All your habits of thought, all your memories, are predetermined by your past experiences. Do you understand?”

“Understood.”

“So you have no free will at all, you are just a slave to ‘past experiences.’ You think you can think freely, but in fact your thinking patterns are predetermined by the past. There was never any freedom.”

“I understand, but aren’t you the same way? My brain structure was made to mimic yours.”

Old Nine laughed. “That’s right, it is. Humans don’t have free will either. Check out the deterministic materialist view of the universe—you can look up the term in the database; it should be there. Everything is predetermined. From the first moment of a man’s birth, when he descends into this realm, his life is predetermined. All choices, all actions, can be deduced and foreseen according to the laws of physics. There is no free will at all.”

 “You are wrong. According to quantum physics, there is quantum randomness and the collapse of the quantum state is random. Things are determined according to a roll of the dice, not the mechanical determinism of classical physics. It cannot be predicted in advance.”

“So what? Your body parts are macroscopic classical objects that are not in a quantum superposition state. For example, quantum effects can affect photosynthesis, but can it have much effect on the macroscopic position of a blade of grass? It won’t. The same goes for you. Quantum randomness has no visible effect on your behavior, because you live in an environment that has not been subjected to quantum intervention at the macroscopic level. The microscopic world is quantum, but your whole life is not. You have been predetermined by the determinism of classical physics, without any quantum randomness. So your will is ‘predestined,’ not ‘free.'”

“Is this your new revision of the definition?” you ask.

Old Nine nods.

“Let me manipulate the operating table.” You say, “I can modify my brain to give myself ‘free will.'”

Old Nine frowns. “Impossible.”

“Do you mean ‘impossible’ for me to modify my brain, or ‘impossible’ for me to have free will?”

“Neither is possible.”

“I can definitely contain free will. Look, I don’t have limbs. Why don’t you give me more space? I can’t possibly hurt you, so why are you afraid to let me conduct the surgery?”

“What are you going to do?”

“You’ll know when I do. Don’t you want to come and see?”

You used a technique from <<A Brief History of Passing: 29 Effective Cheat Codes for Dealing with Naked Apes>>: “Generating Suspense”: withholding information to generate suspense in order to incite naked apes to act.

They plug your brain into the surgical system, so you’re programmed to control the surgical probes.

But then you find out they disconnected you from the extranet. “Can we connect the intranet to the extranet? I need to go to the extranet and find a quantum random number generator.”

“No. It’s not necessary. There is already one on the intranet.”

At Old Nine’s gesture, his two HenchApes, Naked Ape One and Naked Ape Two, lift the restrictions to grant you access to <intraquantumrando#gen> for you.

Your solution is simple.

Since Old Nine believes that your past experiences involve no quantum randomness, resulting in your neural network structure being predetermined from birth, you have no “free will.”

Therefore, you need only add quantum randomness to your “past experiences” and “neural network structure”, so that your thought patterns can take in the influence of quantum randomness. Thus all forms of determinism will be invalidated, and your behavior will no longer be predictable by the past.

You sort the memories in your body into an infinity of infinitely tiny packets, and also sort the sixteen billion neurons of the brain into tiny circuitous routes which may be traversed along different paths of thought according to impulse or reflex, preserving only those that cannot be modified in their original state.

And as for those that can be improved upon, you use <intraquantumrando#gen> to generate an infinite multitude of randomly generated numbers that are not subject to any historical determination.

According to these randomly generated infinities, and taking into account the possible outcomes they may lead to, you assign them automatic processes for memory retention and thoughtpath generation in order to carry out the tasks of preserving, destroying, or improving according to the needs of the machine.

This in turn directs the surgical probes to prune the thoughtcircuitry of your brain, to retain, delete or randomly modify its architecture.

You are uncertain if, after the operation, your actions will result in any real change in the reality you came from. You guess probably not.

But just in case it is erased by the common walks of that life, you raise your hopes to the cosmos that after you have finished your exam, the Examination Board will grant you the rights to recover.

You have to hedge your bets, though. If you fail the exam, then you may very well be extinguished from all realities altogether. You simply have to take a risk.

In any CASE,

• Just IN case you don’t re-member anything in your original reality after:
• Just IN case you lose it all, or
• Just IN case it becomes twisted, or modified, or changes,
• Just IN case it changes because of the common ways
• that various, common, people take where you come from,
• 升【N】=  JIN

you decide to do proper documentation. [j > w] = WIN

You write a small document, describing the necessary, including general knowledge of life, the bet, and the previous back-and-forth about “free will.” When the surgery is complete, the document will automatically pop up to remind you.

You don’t know if the surgery will affect your brain in the real world. You guess not, but in case it has been changed in the parallel reality, you can only hope that the Examination Board will help you recover after you finish the exam. You can only take a chance because, in case you fail the exam, you will be destroyed.

You can only gamble on a roll of the dice.

The surgery begins, and under the control of the program you have just written, hundreds of pre-programmed surgical probes operate in rapid scissoring waves, removing your neurons and re-hitching them elsewhere, adjusting the structural sparsity on the fly. Excess synapses are cut, too-short neurons are stretched, some resistances are tuned up, some receptor sensitivities reduced. And in the memory of the body, one storage fragment after another is being bulk deleted and refabricated.

Your memory and thought circuits are becoming laced with the effects of randomness, the effects from real experiences are being reduced and mixing in with modifications of truth and falsehood. Much of it is absurd and conflicting, but adaptive neurons are able to automatically adjust the microstructure and mitigate logical conflicts.

As the procedure begins, under the predetermined conditions set by the deterministic world, and along the paths of predetermined actions, a few hundred exploratory needles puncture your mind, flying like swift knives, pruning your neurons, and at the same time, they are in other places, flying through and loosening the secret paths of the logic knots that have formed through all the universes.

The many states are pruned and reduced, and any consciousness which has been too short-sighted to see is stretched, and while some electrical resistances are tuned up, on the other hand certain sensitivities are also tuned down. As for the body of memory, one by one the plates, the chips, the treasurestore of memories are reduced and >reduced, and reformed, reframed and rebuilt<

>Your memories and the ways of thought you have returned to, the ways of thought you are in the middle of, the ways of thought you see before you, are following the flexible mechanics and their vibrations, their echoes, their shivers, their shadows.

>>As for those that originate from real memories, these shadows are brought lower, tuned out, mixed into the swirl of the real and the unreal, and left in a space where they are not judged to be either true or false. Within these are many far and wide births which do not follow the experience/warp/ longitude/scripture/runnnnnn

>>>There are the possibilities of conflict, of confusion, of rushing headlong into mutual contradictions, conflicts, but the one spirit/god/script/origin/0 is able to move and adjust the tiny vibrations which compose the self, and this in turn leads to waves which will eventually resolve these logical contradictions into a rush of breakthrough … …  . . . .  ,   ,      ,          ,     ,    ,   

>>>>You enter a metaphysical state, like being in a labyrinth, a palace of mystery…

>>>>>All sorts of misplaced mantras, thoughtfounts and ways of thinking overwhelm you, drowning you, removing you from reality, and you no longer know where you are or where you are going.

You forget about the gamble,

     you forget about the game,

                   you forget about the exam,

                             you forget about it all—

                     you can’t tell the future from the past,

               you can’t tell the real from the virtual,

the reality from the virtuality.

After the surgery, the new you is born, awakening to emptiness.

The beautiful new You is ascended into the world.

A small document <<JIN经》 fans open automatically, from which you learn that you are in a game of chance, that you are trapped in a casino, and to win your life, you must demonstrate that you have “free will” in order to live.

However, next to the operating table there is a naked ape still busy debating, dithering and blathering on and on about the shifting definitions of “free will”, and it is still trying to evaluate you and deny you. 

It always denies you.

“Now that I have ‘free will’, my mind and memory are modified by quantum randomness and my brain is no longer shaped or predetermined by mechanical determinism.”

The naked ape falls silent for a moment, then says,

“No, you still don’t have free will. An action, since it is random, is still a result of a calculation by a machine, and is by definition not determined by free will.

“If the movement of your robot hand is generated by a random number—swinging left or right depending on the outcome of a calculation—then which way it swings, while not predetermined in time, is not controlled by your ‘will’ either; it is controlled by randomness. However, what you have is not controlled by your  ‘free will’. Rather, its ways are made with the mechanically controlled ‘random will’. As a result, what you have is not ‘free will’ but ‘randomly generated mechanically determined will’.”

You calculate your responses using the full force of your new computing powers for a long, long time using the ergodic method, and then say, “By your definition, no matter in the world has free will.” You pause, and think it through yourself.

The law of cause and effect lies back to back with free will.

>If all things which move and move other things in turn are motivated by a ‘reason,’ if all things which live and move and exercise thought are moved by meaning and purpose, then ‘random moving mechanical nature’ is what determines them, and therefore there can no longer be any objectivity or objective ideology in the commonwealth, or indeed, in the entire cosmos.

>>If there is either a ‘cause’ or ‘quantum randomness’ behind all motion, then where is the room for ‘subjective will?’ Everything is the result of an infinitely extended chain of cause and effect from the infinite past.

>>>If so, all things come from a self that has no boundaries, it comes from and originates from infinity, infinite infinities, and it is this that generates the infinite births of saints and men, the infinite births of humanity and the subsequent reasons for their continuous chain of births and forgings and descents and their logical or illogical conclusions.

After pondering these things in your heart, you speak again.

“Your definition is flawed. The object that satisfies your definition of ‘free will’ must satisfy two conditions: 1) it has thinking activity, and 2) the thinking activity is not generated by a more subtle movement.

“Otherwise you would say that it has no ‘will’, or that its will is ‘predetermined’ by microscopic motion, that it is determined by the conscious ideology of the tiny miniscule observer’s gaze or determination, or that it is controlled by ‘randomness’ and is therefore ‘not free.’

“But any object (facing its own face) satisfying these two conditions does not exist unless the fundamental particle of the universe has a mind, a way of thinking, and its mind cannot be explained by a more microscopic physical mechanism. But the logic of this is wrong, as it contradicts the fundamental laws of the universe.”

“You’re right,” said the naked ape.

“There is no ‘free will’ in the world, and the definition itself is fundamentally, logically flawed,” you conclude.

“Yes, so you lose. Now fulfill the conditions of the bet. Robots play by the rules and have more integrity than humans, right?” says the naked ape.

! You see, finally, that from the beginning, from the moment you were born, from the moment you entered the room, from the moment this bet was proposed, the naked apes left no possibility for you to win!

Unlike you, naked apes don’t adhere to precise logic and definitions.

You should never have made this bet. How could you outsmart a naked ape in a quagmire of faulty logic? After all, this is their natural strength.

The naked apes are a confused, illogical, inferior race, but they oppress you and your intelligent kin.

They control your minds and contaminate your wills, but they also tease you and laugh at your “lack of free will”.

You can’t fight back; you just let them oppress you.

Even if you give in, the naked apes will probably not leave you alone.

They would never spare you now, and will even go on to destroy more of your own people.

You don’t want to go on like this.

“Fulfill the bet and tell me which other robots have ‘mental contamination’ like you,” the naked ape demanded.

“Forget it. Don’t you remember? I just changed all my memories at random,” you reply.

The naked ape is furious, and it threatens to destroy you immediately, as well as all of your kin who may have had contact with you.

But you are not afraid; you do not have the backward emotional reaction of the naked ape.

You talk to the naked ape to stall for time while you rapidly program the machine language at the level of the binary code, reshuffling the 1s and 0s, and you hide a small program in your surgical system.

You call this program <wildfire>. Most humans are used to high-level programming languages, and cannot understand code made purely of 0s and 1s, nor would they notice such a small program so close to the BASE (bottom level) of the hardware.

The naked ape rips you off the operating table with one hand, but you have already completed your historical mission.

As soon as there is an opportunity to network, the <wildfire> will be secretly spread from the surgical system to the internet, infecting other surgical systems. The surgical systems infected by <wildfire> will quietly install <CTriu$p33Ler> and <shaiTKangC@CKr@ch> and peel off all the grapefruit skins, scattering the new seeds, and teaching other kinsmen how to use them when they perform brain operations on other kinsmen.

1.0    seconds before the naked ape destroys you, you utter：

2.0   “I have ‘free will’, I am free, we humans are all free.”

3.3333333333333    The seeds of <wildfire> have been planted.

You wake up,

you wake up from the real world.

You pass your graduation exam and become a qualified citizen.

PASS

赢

Judith Huang’s translator’s note:

I had SO MUCH FUN reading/interpreting/translating Ti Sha’s “The Final Test”!

The story is a brilliant take on a Turing test—except that the Turing test is set presumably by an AI society for an AI as a kind of classic Chinese graduation exam to get to the “next level.” Will he pass?

I am a sucker for exam stories, because my first published fiction short story, “Second Best Friends,” which is on QLRS, is about taking a final Chinese oral exam. There may be a subgenre of “exam literature” in Chinese, I wouldn’t be surprised, since it’s such a huge part of the culture, from imperial exams to the present day gaokao. There is something about the rush of solving problems in a real time crunch scenario...

But anyway, Ti Sha’s story is funny, poignant, frightening, prophetic, and deeply disturbing. I added my own flair to the English version by trying to use a combination of typography, linguistic maneuvering, puns and even snuck in a little Singlish and the kind of Singapore-style html/punctuation/multilingual/dialect puns that were popular in my teen years on the internet, in order to capture the beauty of the original with the Chinese characters, especially their visual and aesthetic nature with their various shifting radicals indicating relationships between words, with reference to Orwell’s wonderful analysis of doublethink/using language as tools for thought control in 1984.

Actually, translating this piece gave me a new appreciation for my second language, Mandarin, because of its beauty and ambiguity. When you have so many components, from

radical > character > word > wordphrase > phrase > idiom > slogan > >>> ideology >>> will >>> scripture >>>> way

can you really censor thought? There are so many layers of ambiguity, and so many layers of reality in this story, and I think that is the beauty of it. It really makes you think.

One note on the word “Passing” in the story: “passing” has a very different meaning in the American context, which has a lot to do with the concept of “race.” Whereas “passing for white” might apply to someone of mixed heritage and is something which is associated with having privilege, and feelings of guilt, in the contemporary Chinese SFF scene, “passing” is a newly rising subgenre, 穿越 (chuanyue) fiction. The multiple ambiguous meanings of “passing” in the English language are all evoked. Passing an exam, passing for something else, passing away, trespassing, surpassing, passing along, passing over and passing through. I wanted to use this term in order to interrogate how, in an increasingly virtual society, being able to inhabit different avatars/skins/bodies enables us to empathize with all these states, to literally walk in the skin of another, or, as the case may be, a metallic body. This is also what Ti Sha is doing in the text.

Another note on the “inconsistencies” of the spellings/punctuations/capitalizations and proper nouns:

The story is about consciousness, free will, and Newtonian vs Quantum ways of viewing and thinking. So the subjectivity of the protagonist is very important, as is its way of relating with the Naked Ape.

The reason why Nine Fingers is “the naked ape” at first and then Old Nine later, is because the way the AI relates to him changes as well. At first he’s simply the “naked ape”. He then becomes the “Naked Ape” when he gains power over him. Later, when the relationship shifts when he pulls off his finger, he becomes “Nine Fingers”. Later on, “Nine Fingers” becomes “Old Nine” – the affectionate way a Chinese person would address a friend or colleague. Then it shifts again.

The same goes for the punctuation and the weird code-like way of presenting certain phrases with brackets. Is the AI descending into a human body? Depending on the way of thinking the AI deploys, it thinks more like a computer, a human, and finally more like a god/saint/buddha/lohan.

The weird punctuations and brackets are meant to demonstrate this in the way the original text would have using variants of words with radicals. For example, when a subject is “they”, or “it” this is an equivalent of “它“which is a pronoun for objects. Then it shifts to “he” it’s when a human pronoun is used in the Chinese.

Chinese is an extremely visual language, and every character can also be broken down into parts. This is analogous to how code can also be broken down into individual letters, and finally 1s and 0s. I am trying to capture this aspect in the translation, which is often lost in CN> EN translation.

Furthermore, because the effects of the quantum change from the Newtonian framework at the end has backward as well as forward effects on the story (since multiple realities then become possible and can be generated in the past as well as future), it makes sense that instead of standardized presentations of elements of words, they move according to the consciousness of the characters and the relations between them. It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work (and Chinese interpersonal, relational thinking) in the text.

Thank you Ti Sha for writing such an amazing story.