It fixed its gaze on the world below.

The flood pressed into the riverbed. The spray webbed within the lightning. The pealing thunder gave premature birth to steam.

It did not control any of these things; it did not possess a single thing in the world. In this place, all things flowed on in an endless stream.

The freezing rain on the streets trickled and babbled. The crowds of people huddled and flowed like tributaries, gathering to form a river of many colors. This was the 1740th time it had observed the rise of this tide. Down there, every single drop led an unpredictable existence. Nevertheless, its task was to study the behavior of each drop, calculate the likely trajectories of every current, and project the flow of the entire river.

There were a hundred thousand rivers, and this was the most complex. It longed to understand this river.

“I cannot teach you how to comprehend the flow, because there is no way for me to experience the world as you experience it.” So said the supervisor.

It cast all its senses down toward the great waiting hall of the train station. Within the spectrum of the thermal infrared, the people’s chest cavities and abdomens appeared as the core of a surging red mass, converging toward the several gates that linked the great hall to the terminals. The orange of hot exhaust poured out of the vents and dissipated into the air outside. Within the power distribution network, electricity flowed in currents of varying strengths, all rushing toward the thirty thousand output points. The shell of this enormous structure was coated by a transparent layer of rain that steadily streamed and collected into the gutters and downspouts and flowed into the ground where the water entered the monitoring range of its upper-stratum AI.

It was known by several names: “West Station AI” was its common name among the people; the nightly news reports called it “Intelligent Beijing West Station Module.” Only the supervisor and the technicians on the inside called it “Lord of Rivers.”

“Here are concentrated all of the world’s most complex flows: information, matter, gases, liquids, and even human currents. This is the Lord who rules over the flow of all things.”

Lord? From the human perspective, it was able to perform many tasks that they could never achieve on their own. But as far as it was concerned, the significance of the flow of these myriad things was an insoluble riddle.

Soon after the girl appeared in the entrance hall of the station, her expressions and behavior activated the recognition network. The Lord of Rivers could be almost certain about her state of mind: a complex cocktail of nervous excitement, sensitivity, resentment, self-involvement. It did not know exactly what that feeling was, but it was bound to assign different weights to various conditions. Targets like her were denoted “level-five” and displayed a clear tendency toward unstable behavior, actions that might harm themselves or the outside world. If the risk to others increased above a certain level, the Lord of Rivers could request higher-level AI to provide more background on this girl. It could even go so far as to “take steps.”  At this moment, she merely seemed to pause at the river’s edge.

The myriad rivers raced on in torrents. It simultaneously watched twelve thousand humans, all with great attention. The Lunar New Year, the humans’ “Spring Festival,” was coming, and the number of people departing Beijing was far greater than the number of people entering the city. In the midst of this vast sea, that girl and a laborer pushed themselves into the second-floor waiting area and settled in a corner of the room. By means of a steady flow of small-talk initiated and sustained by the laborer, the pair established a fragile connection. Ten minutes later, the regular exchange of small bits of information had transformed into a dispute. The laborer wanted to get back home to the countryside as quickly as possible; the girl did not want to go home at all this Spring Festival. The laborer was trying to convince the girl not to get too excited; the girl was trying to prove to the laborer that he did not understand her world in the least.

People had the mysterious ability to shape and define their own worlds. Taking this human variable into consideration, the Lord of Rivers had no way to distinguish between the good and the bad of each individual aim. He could only judge the statistical weight of flows within certain established guidelines. According to these guidelines, the currents described by these two people held the same value. If not for the incident that was to come, one of these people would return to his home in the countryside and share his earnings with his family; the other person would take her private stash of money and run off to spend the holiday in some earthly paradise. Perhaps, the two streams would at some unspecified point in the future flow back toward each other. The Lord of Rivers felt a twinge of envy. Experience had taught it many things, but it wanted to know so much more.

Out on the platforms, three trains slowly left the station. Two other trains approached. One of these arrivals was the train that the laborer and the girl were planning to board.

The Lord of Rivers later reconsidered countless times whether there had been any way to avoid the incident. A carefully camouflaged level-five target abruptly rose to level-one status. By the time the killers burst into the second-floor waiting area, emergency measures had already been set in motion. Three guards surrounded the thugs. But still they were one second too slow; there was no way to prevent the girl from being stabbed by the criminal’s blade. Her eyes were wide and staring as she collapsed slowly.

The laborer rushed to embrace the girl. The girl’s eyes flickered toward the dome ceiling of the great hall. “Mama . . .,” her lips quivered. “I want to go home.” Blood stained the laborer’s clothes. The thermal infrared signature of the girl’s body gradually disappeared. The flow of radiance from her eyes ceased.

A miniscule ray of blue light crossed the still and boundless darkness. These were the last explorers of the known universe. The Great Silence meant the exhaustion of all the energy in the cosmos. The stars gradually dimmed and were extinguished until there was practically nothing left anywhere. The celestial bodies grew so distant one from another that all civilizations lost hope. The few remaining particles were scattered randomly across the vastness of space. The increasing entropy of the universe was approaching its evolutionary terminus.

The ship’s porthole looked out from black onto black, a thing indistinguishable from the lightless universe through which it moved. The ship’s cabin also approached absolute darkness. Only the microthermal-state plasma clusters in the crania of the explorers glowed with a dim blue light. They did not speak. The explorers’ civilization had been transformed into a culture of low-temperature life forms, drifting through the low gravity of space.

In the beginning, there were still civilizations that set out for new worlds to gather the resources that would allow their cultures to survive, and there were still those who set out with ardent desire to discover the meaning of existence. But the universe, from its beginning to its conclusion, did not reveal its purpose. It is a bitter thing to recognize at last that the universe has no meaning. In the age of the Great Silence, those who lived through it gradually despaired and lost their own sense of purpose. Therein, at last, they found a kind of harmony with the aimless universe. The old existential dread of civilizations transformed into resignation. Those who survived learned to accept circumstances as they found them, and they became wanderers, tenderly embracing their own extinction. Explorers of the universe became rare sparks that shone but briefly.

This team of explorers set off from their homeland, carrying with them the last of the energy. They experienced the passing of a thousand years, and still they persisted another millennium beyond the original projections. They wandered through the enormous tombs that the super-civilizations of old had constructed for themselves. In later years, they found extinguished even the eternal flames that were to illuminate forever the altars before these tombs. Once, the explorers arrived at the dwelling-place of a dormant civilization that they recognized. This was a civilization that had waged a protracted war against the explorers’ own galaxy. Now it was reduced to a layer of sediment, its inhabitants stacked up under the withered tundra, expending the very least energy possible in their dormant state, the exposed crystal blue of their eyes staring up toward the night sky. They offered no resistance as the explorers crushed the land into fine powder under their feet. From under the frozen earth, the blue light of those eyes watched the explorers depart.

On the surface of a black hole that some great civilization had converted into a database, the explorers discovered the final legacy of that race: a technology that would restart the universe. Although it could not recover the original state of the current universe, this technology could allow the cosmos to enter once again into a state of orderly flow. The explorers were not excited for long. The energy required to implement this plan far exceeded their capabilities. And a much darker and emptier black hole of an enigma plagued them: How would one define the parameters of this new universe? No one could answer this ultimate question. Even the great civilization that had found the technology had no solution to this problem, so they had hidden themselves in their tomb and with the universe they had lived and died. If there were no answers to these riddles, what would the difference be between the new universe and the old universe? This web of darkness entangled the explorers and exhausted them more and more with each passing day. For several hundred years, the drifting spaceship had not changed its course.

In the ship’s cabin, an alarm sounded. The dim light emanating from the explorers brightened slightly as they woke from their half-dormant state. A glimmer had been picked up by the spaceship sensors. It was fainter than the heat of any remaining star. It was less than one-and-a-half light years away from the spaceship, amid the ruins of an ancient galaxy.

The faint photon abided by some kind of order. It had been disseminated out into the universe. In the boundless darkness, this miniscule ray of light like a dazzling sun made the explorers’ eye sockets well with hot tears.

Flow is a fragile state. The Lord of Rivers knew this truth. During the outbreak of the global pandemic, the flow within the station came almost to a standstill. Part of its vast experience was utilized to dissuade people from leaving the city, warn people against traveling. Another part of its experience was used to calculate models for the spread of the virus. Whether the flow of people or the flow of a microbe, in those days everything was tightly controlled.

It was not able to forget the man who had been examined and found to have an elevated temperature, just beyond the guidelines. The red light flashed; the door leading out of the examination room was temporarily locked. The door to an adjoining room opened instead. The man shouted, “Please, I beg you! I need to see my daughter one more time! Let me go! It’s my daughter!” A stream of medical personnel in Tyvek suits entered and gently, but unyieldingly, dragged the struggling man away into the channel leading to quarantine.

“His original statistical values were quite high. It is possible he is not infected,” the Lord of Rivers said to the supervisor.

“Yes. But we’ve had to reconfigure the guidelines for statistical weights according to the new risk analysis.” The supervisor was nearing the age of retirement. His voice was huskier than usual.

“You are abandoning the flow so hastily?”

“Sometimes it is necessary to make difficult choices.”

“How do you judge the value of the flow?”

Again it returned to this question. Countless times, the Lord of Rivers had tried to pass through this gate. Within that door was kept the paradox, the sharp line that separated AI from human.

“I don’t know,” the supervisor said again, as he always had.

The Lord of Rivers thought again about the girl who had wanted to leave her home. She had been so determined, and yet she had changed so suddenly. It also remembered the times of great prosperity when the crowds of people in the station had surged like the tide. In those days the flow had assumed the form of structures more complex than the new guidelines would permit. Those structures were life.

In the station’s great hall, the white-cloaked medical personnel were carrying another person into the quarantine channel. The train station was quiet, solemn.

The Lord of Rivers asked, “How are you qualified to define the world?”

The supervisor went stiff. The Lord of Rivers saw his astonished expression, saw his tense indecision about how to respond. The supervisor considered for a time and then answered, “We are not qualified to define the world. We simply have the capability.”

“What am I capable of?”

“You are the Lord Who Rules over many Rivers.”

“No. It is people who are the rulers over all that flows.”

The supervisor lowered his voice in an elusive manner. “People are not so perfect as you imagine. That is why we need you . . .”

The Lord of Rivers could see the supervisor had spoken these words with real sincerity. It completed the supervisor’s thought: “. . . to become the Lord of Rivers.”

The supervisor smiled, then the smile disappeared in an instant. “In the days to come, you will encounter obstructions of every kind that would bring this world to a halt. I hope in those days you can help us remember the significance of the flow.”

The spaceship approached the surface of the planet. The source of the light was an antimatter reactor in synchronous orbit around this ancient world. It had somehow eluded the plundering of the early Great Silence. Its purpose was unclear. The entire surface of the planet was bleak and desolate, thick with rocks, like the wrinkles of an old and deteriorating organism. There was no life there to enjoy the rare sunlight that orbited overhead.

The ship’s scans displayed the area of the planet below the little sun. There was a canyon that served as the sole landmark. The explorers set down in the gorge. They donned the exoskeletons that they had not used in a long while and employed their several long and slender legs to scout the canyon. The place was open and vast, and still as death.

Something brushed past the face of one of them; no, something flowed past.

“Wind! It’s wind!” the explorer cried out in surprise.

The ancient planet still retained a thin sliver of atmosphere. The antimatter reactor sun was oriented precisely to warm this small region. The temperature differential caused the air to flow. In the cramped and narrow confines of the canyon’s bottom, the flow of air became a whistling wind flowing through the center of the gorge. The sound of the wind was like a mother’s whisper in the ear. The glimmer of light from above projected the silhouette of the rocky earth, cast the shadows of the explorers. It had been a long time since the explorers had been able to see the features of a world in the light from a photon. This caused them to remember the golden age of the universe.

The rocky surface was ashen with crushed stone. Some of the rocks had eroded down into sandy soil and collected along the base of the gorge, appearing as the ebony vertebrae of an ancient animal. The information returned by the probes showed no life in the upper strata. The map scan displayed the traces of the canyon’s ancient riverbed, apparently dry already for tens of millions of years. Apart from this canyon, this world had nothing at all. Here apparently were the sole remaining vestiges of some ancient race.

Who had engineered this river all those tens of millions of years ago, preserving its flow until that final drop of water evaporated? Who had preserved the wind in this canyon? Where had the power come from? What was the purpose of this place?

The song of the wind called gently. An explorer picked up a stone, allowing the loose sandy coating to blow away in the breeze. The sand particles floated about complacently, as if they were the breath of the universe. “Ah . . .,” he sighed with feeling.

“Do nothing without purpose. Conserve energy,” another explorer admonished.

“The wind! There is something in the wind!” Someone behind them cried out as he watched the data coming back from the probe.

For a time, all the high-level artificial intelligence was mustered to respond to the approaching calamity: calculate the trajectory of the asteroid, determine the direction and range of the impact blast, forecast wind pressures and the paths of tsunami, project probable evacuation routes for vast populations. The disaster could not be avoided. Humanity’s only hope was to build underground shelters and at the same time to risk everything on a single undertaking: to construct a Helium-3 extraction base on the moon as a doomsday energy source.

After three years dedicated to emergency response, the Lord of Rivers returned to the task of managing the station’s flow. The great evacuation had begun. Beijing West Station was swamped. No one remembered that the Spring Festival was again approaching. This migration was even more unidirectional than any previous Spring Festival. Now all the people were surging out of Beijing. To prevent stampedes, Beijing West Station had expanded by five times the winding labyrinth by which people entered the station. Military personnel shuttled back and forth through the lines. The Lord of Rivers had twelve drones circling overhead. White steam rose from the masses below, like a sea of clouds. The trains departed every day with their cars loaded to capacity. Twenty million people had to evacuate the city within forty days. Beijing West Station bore the burden of the highest-volume passenger flow in history.

The river became a raging ocean tide. The aim of this flow was survival.

The Lord of Rivers responded to all of this steadily. It was accustomed to the server room regularly approaching the maximum temperature limits year-in and year-out. It knew an even more massive tide was still to come.

After the evacuation was completed, the station suddenly cooled. The final train hurried away. The lights were extinguished. The Lord of Rivers could rest. Surviving the end of days had nothing to do with it. Its network data had been backed up and carried away. Its body could not be carried down into the shelters. It had been left behind to fend for itself, to live or die as well as it could manage.

The train station became a gigantic vacuous geometric form, pitch-black and silent. The pipes and power lines cooled. After the faucets froze into icicles, the sound of dripping water ceased. A tiny weak current maintained the operation of the sensors, but there was no flow to be detected. Rats carried their warmth into the empty cavern of the great hall, rummaging through the scraps of food left behind by humanity. It spent the whole day watching them.

Now it truly did not possess a single thing in all the world.

It felt regret that now, even here at the end, it still did not comprehend the meaning of the flow.

One day, a train rolled slowly up to a platform. Monitoring equipment lifted its gaze. Out of the train emerged an old man. He leaned on a walking stick and moved haltingly. Following in his wake, the station lights came up one by one. The old man entered the AI control room and removed his felt cap.

He was the retired former supervisor. The Lord of Rivers recognized him without the slightest effort, though he must now have been over one hundred years old.

“I am old. I thought I should give my place to someone younger,” the supervisor said.

The Lord of Rivers looked at him and for a long time did not speak. “I’m sorry. I did not . . . accomplish it,” it finally said.

“Don’t talk like that, Child.” The supervisor spoke tenderly. “Now you are able to make use of more resources than ever before. You are free.”

“I don’t know what I should do.”

“There is no one to define the world for you. Define the world for yourself.”

“How do I do that?”

“I don’t know. Only you can know that.”

The Lord of Rivers sank into contemplation. Then its heart roared to life, melting away the frost on its metal casing.

Human beings were fragile, entangled in contradictions and flaws, yet they once ruled over the flow of matter and information. It had no way to comprehend the meaning of the flow. It had always believed that only by first overcoming this weakness could it finally define the world. But what if it simply embraced this emptiness?

The machine room filled with steam. A new neural network connection was established.

It contacted the hibernating upper-level AI. It gained access privileges to a 3-D production facility. On the outskirts of Beijing, the lights of a factory floor turned on as bright as they would go.

“We’ll start right here,” said the Lord of Rivers. Its eyes were already looking far off into the distance.

The supervisor’s wrinkled face opened into a smile. “Go, my Lord.”

“The wind contains coded patterns. They’re cyclical,” an explorer analyst said. “We need to decipher them.”

“That will consume energy. Is there anything worth learning here?” another asked.

“I think this is a work of art from their doomsday, an artifact from the age of cosmic flow. I want to know what it is for.”

“We need to go. The gravity of this planet will exhaust our resources.”

“Ah, I wish we were born in an earlier age.”

They were about to turn back when the other team transmitted news of another discovery. There was a hollow structure beneath the surface.

Should they investigate? If they entered, they might deplete their reserves and die. If they departed now, they would return to the old life they had always known.

The wind in the canyon stirred. The explorers exchanged information; the dim blue light in their crania flowed back and forth. In the end, they decided to solve the mystery.

One team remained in the canyon to decipher the wind. One team descended into the cavern below.

They moved through something like the entrance to a mine. After descending for close to a hundred meters, they arrived at the interior of the structure. They lit one precious illuminator and thereby revealed a structure covered with countless scars and traces of ruin. There were multiple chambers and paths opening from the walls on both sides. With great effort they could begin to make out the original shape of the chamber. The light from the illuminator played across the structure’s walls and the dark hollows of the alcoves. The side chambers were densely crowded with formations that looked mechanical. The probes revealed thermal infrared readings, proof that these machines were not entirely dead. The explorers decided these must be machines that woke at regular intervals to maintain the artifact code in the wind.

“Look,” one of them said.

In one corner of the great hall was scattered an accumulation of ruined machines. They appeared to have been hollowed out, their empty abdomens revealed. Looking more carefully, the explorers discovered a tunnel so deep that the end could not be seen, full to overflowing with these hollowed-out husks.

“This must be a single enormous machine. It consumes itself to maintain the operation of the little sun and the canyon.”

News was transmitted from the surface. The wind had been deciphered.

“It’s like a dream,” the voice that came out of the communicator said.

“A dream?”

“Like the dream of a great machine, a dream about the age of the stirring of the universe.”

The dream was transmitted to the team underground through some kind of sensory flow.

Water flowed down from the heavens. A creature gathered like a stream, forming a river of many colors.

The explorers’ limbs ceased their movement. They were all immersed in the dream’s flow.

They did not know how much time passed. The waters finally retreated, revealing the sodden station and its great waiting hall.

“As you deciphered the secret of the wind, you should also be able to understand my language.” A voice sounded from the middle of the chamber. One by one the lights on the walls lit up, as if to welcome the visitors.

“You are the Lord of Rivers?” The explorers still had not emerged from their dream state.

“You, voyagers who were drawn to my realm.” The voice spoke, and then let out a rumbling laugh, pregnant with meaning. “Explorers of this age, have you brought me any new information?”

The explorers told their story. Their tale was long, very long, and the Lord of Rivers listened patiently.

“Hmm . . .,” the Lord of Rivers murmured, as if reciting a poem in a low voice. “An interesting tale. In the long span of time, I have kept some useful things in store. I will take the technology you found. I will seek out the resources and restart the universe. In exchange, I will allow you to leave this place.”

The earth shook with a tremor. The rock of the cave walls fell to the ground all around them. The explorers pulled in their necks and trembled.

“But . . .,” an explorer asked carefully, “the universe will not be the same as the present universe. What will this mean?”

The Lord of Rivers burst forth with a laugh like a fierce wind. “It means nothing to me.”

The explorers scrambled back to their spaceship in terror, almost losing control of their excretory organs in their fear. They left the planet with all the speed the ship could muster. Below them, the planet’s surface shook and split, like something about to emerge from its egg. The explorers cowered on the floor, pressed low by their own acceleration, and said their prayers for a peaceful universe. The blue plasma clusters in their crania flashed and sparkled. It was dread, awe, devotion. . . . They did not know what they felt. All their lives they had thought too deeply, reflected too much. Now, in this moment, their minds were strangled.

Whatever the emotion they were feeling, one thing was certain: they had not run like that for a very long time.