I am bathing in a black backdrop speckled with stars. The weightlessness of outer space insists that I am completely relieved of any worldly responsibilities. At the same time, something pulses heavily in a distant realm. I know that all of space is connected to itself; space inhabits itself. But something with equal entirety seems to be seeking me out, as if it’s aware that I am unbound to my place here in space. I cannot discern the energy of this new power that pulls me, only that it pulls me gently and understandingly at first. It could be like steel- colored waves lapping at a shore on an easy day, wanting nothing and expecting even less. But they still push and pull, softening the shore all the same. You are not aware how the power exists for you. Everything that it senses, becomes it. Even light, the fastest and freest energy, cannot outrun its force. Before I can relinquish its hold on me to let my soul travel to the sun or the earth, I am plummeting through space and time, my body clutching for stillness. It will swallow me. I will become the infinite density of its body. I watch as the stars swirl around the deep pit of darkness that is calling me in. They swirl merrily, like on the final spin of a merry- go- round. It spits light gamma rays out its mouth, like embers from a crackling fire; I am looking its ferocity in the face, and it gapes hungrily back. I cannot tell its size- whether it calls itself stellar or supermassive. The only difference I know is that the stellar stretches your body apart as it consumes you. It’s young and has a vicious appetite; it doesn’t have the patience to go one piece at a time. If it’s supermassive, that means I may have drifted 165 quadrillion miles away from our milky way, and for a moment that makes me feel much more alone. I close my eyes, and momentarily existed as someone observing this from a distance would, watching my body freeze in place, while a dimming red guise would melt me into oblivion. I was reaching the event horizon, the point of no return. Here, space and time switch roles in their dance with my fate, as I feel the atoms of my body surrender and unravel to the dark. I become we, by virtue of gravitational singularity. We are heavy and hungry and complete in our velvet darkness. And then I am sitting at my kitchen table, staring silently in my saturated cereal bowl.

“COVID-19，COVID-19。 我们都知道它是由美国植入的。 我们都知道那是要毁了中国经济。”

My brother’s computer sat on the living room table, one of his favorite artists rapping along to a thick base. I listened closer to the lyrics, past the obnoxious pop music beats.

COVID-19, COVID-19. We all know it was implanted by the USA. Uh! We all know it was meant to ruin the Chinese economy. Uh!

I stole a glance at my brother, who was in the kitchen looking over a science textbook absent-mindedly.

“Who is this artist?” Junjie smirked at me- an expression that translated almost precisely to you’re such an old bore.

“DJ Didilong. He’s Taiwanese. He’s going viral right now for this COVID- 19 song.” I tried to laugh in a way that said you and your ‘viral’ Taiwanese rappers are so silly. Junjie shrugged and went back to staring at his textbook. I didn’t want to make it seem like I was more interested in the song than he was, but something about the lyrics were very unsettling. Although we all know that the virus started in Wuhan, originally from a bat, the song induced paranoia in my mind. Maybe it was the fact that I had been in quarantine for too long- after all, if we went outside we may be arrested and thrown in jail. Just yesterday my father had been reading me a news story about a woman who had left her apartment in Beijing to go running, and was locked out of her building and later thrown out of the country. This is serious, my dad told me. I can’t even imagine what they might do to me, a skinny 19- year old in a suburb of Chengdu. 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

“COVID-19，COVID-19。 我们都知道它是由美国植入的。 我们都知道那是要毁了中国经济。” 

“What the fuck am I supposed to get from this. Do you think I speak fucking Chinese, you idiot?” The golden drapes that outfitted the office were drawn, and  a man with a deeply offended look on his face sat at the varnished wooden desk. He was wearing a perfectly- ironed black suit and a tie that he insisted was red even though others silently believed it was burnt orange. No one outwardly disagreed with him to his face, including his often bored-looking young Russian wife. Behind his back, the entire educated population of the United States of America and the world vehemently disagreed with him. He did not appreciate this at all, and often displayed this frustration by yelling at journalists, calling them ‘nasty’.

“Oh, sorry President Trump. I forgot to put the subtitles on.” He let out an exasperated sigh and clasped his rather small orange- colored hands together. The song played again, with the subtitles.

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” The blood seemed to drain from his orange face. His pupils shrunk and a small bead of sweat escaped his platinum blonde toupee. 

“Who the fuck wrote this song? They’re going down. There’s no way I’ll let this slide”-

“The song is going viral in China right now, sir.”-

“Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone? I’ve got to Tweet against this song right away- get ahead of the press.”

“I think your phone is in your coat pocket sir. At least, that’s where you normally keep it.” A brief moment passed where the president looked like he may kill his advisor. You could see the thought holding up his enraged blonde eyebrows, until it appeared that his cell phone had been in his coat pocket, and the urgency of this Tweet took priority. He tapped his fat thumbs vigorously on his phone, saying Damn! Every time he’d make a typo. Finally, he turned his phone to his advisor:

 

DJ Didilong- more like DJ DidiLONG gone! You’re new song is a complete attack on America during this VERY hard time in our nation!! If anything, it’s prob CHINA who planted the virus to ruin the AMERICAN ECONOMY. 

 

“Good?” This was a rhetorical question, Trump’s advisor knew. Even though he wanted to point out the wrong ‘you’re’ he knew that his advice would be ineffectual. Suddenly the advisor felt a profound sense of loss, realizing that his entire identity as an advisor was to advise, but his advice was completely useless. The advisor busied his mind with dreams of retiring to coastal Maine, where he spent his boyhood summers catching hermit crabs and learning to sail with his grandfather. Soon his life would have meaning in it once again.

 

“Should I tell Mikey first?” The way that President Trump referred to his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sounded suggestively like an Italian mob boss. Mike Pompeo had been at the forefront of COVID-19 diplomacy. Though the UN called off all global sanctions, Pompeo refused to release sanctions from Iran and North Korea. He did offer them aid at first, but revoked this statement later on. His efforts additionally cut off aid to Afghanistan. All the while, Pompeo’s time had been spent vilifying China for delivering assistance to other countries ‘out of guilt because the virus came from China’. The UN has yet to name this crisis, because Pompeo demanded that it be termed ‘The Wuhan Crisis’.

“Given the fact that the rappers accusations are true, would Tweeting seem too defensive?” Trump took a moment to ponder this, trying not to cackle maliciously at the global destruction he had created by sending officials to the Wuhan war game strategies with a vial of COVID-19 in tow. 

“You know, there is always the possibility that Taiwan is exposing us to create friction between the US and China, so we will ultimately be on their team if they attempt emancipation from China?” Trump had not been listening to his advisor, but was instead scrolling through the Breitbart twitter page murmuring about which post to re-Tweet. 

The advisor gazed out the window at the pale pink cherry blossoms puckering innocently at him. These trees that attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists in the spring were gifts from Japan to Washington DC, long before the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. The advisor silently mourned the state of US foreign policy over the years, and the truly devastating atrocities that the nation he called his own had committed.

“What’d you say?” Trump had finally finished up on Twitter. The advisor decided not to repeat himself. Why should he even help someone who had created a global catastrophe so great that he couldn’t even comprehend its magnitude? Did he realize how many people were dying?  Did he really want this many people to die on his watch? Why had he not barred all foreign and domestic travel long before any of this began? Were there underlying motives? Was he just a completely deluded blithering idiot? 

“I want more military power down in the… South America. These drug cartels are not taking advantage of America’s weakness during this pandemic. Also… the wall! The Wall! Perfect time to put people to work on the border wall down along Mexico.”

______________________________________________________________________________

“We had specifically been told by the Secretary of Defense to disobey the president’s orders.” The man who sat across from me was clad in camo pants and a tight fitting sand- colored T- shirt. His muscular arms gave him a degree of bulkiness and preparedness. He had mousy colored hair that was buzzed off, which matched his hauntingly innocent grey eyes. A mug of coffee sat in front of him, which he gripped with a big hand to take a slow sip from.

“What was your gut saying?” I was interviewing John on his recent trip to Wuhan China, allegedly to carry out a top secret mission under presidential orders. John was an army special forces agent.

“My gut? My gut said that what I was doing was really important.” He slowly lowered his mug back to the exact spot from where he picked it up. “You gotta understand, I voted for President Trump. I was just as brainwashed as the rest of the Trump supporters. Did I fully realize what that meant? I don’t really know.”

“When did it dawn on you? That you were taking part in something like this?” I pushed back my glasses and ran my hands through my course, curly hair. I had been trying to suppress my pure amazement with the story I had gotten my hands on, but John’s brute masculinity had already thwarted my attempts at coolness. 

“Oh… Let’s see. It was when our jet landed in Wuhan, if I remember correctly.” He nodded, ascertaining himself. “Yeah. The entire flight over we were being reassured that the Chinese facilities were totally capable of handling this virus- given the nature of their system. After all, it hadn’t been that long since they dealt with the SARs virus- which was considerably more deadly. We were ensured that this mission would lead to economic prosperity for America, and only briefly impair China.” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of John’s mouth were actually mine to record. The entire situation seemed so impossible to believe- like some horrible nightmare for our nation, but a dream come true for my journalism career. I cleared my throat.

“But the Secretary of Defense- sorry was it Shanahan at that time or”-

“Esper.”

“He instructed you not to carry out the president’s orders?” I asked him pointedly, and John paused for a moment before letting out a hearty chuckle, as if recalling some fond memory.

“Sorry,” John noticed my dumbfounded expression and realized how his laughing may have been inappropriate given the gravity of the situation. “It was when we were landing actually- we got this urgent email alert from Secretary Esper pleading for us to call off the mission.”

“Wow. As you’re landing.” I remarked. 

“I know.” John raised his eyebrows and smiled good- naturedly. “So, we listened to him. That was that.” No… I thought, privately. I could tell from the tone of his statement that this is where the story ended. John would not indulge me any further than ‘that was that’ and I knew this inherently. I felt my attitude worsen with the realization that I would have to keep digging, that John was only the beginning of this twisted, tangled story. 

“So, there you and your team were- with COVID- 19 in a vial in your pockets, with specific instruction by President Trump to plant this virus in Wuhan China where your cover was attending the war game conference. But, all this was abandoned because of some last- minute email from the Secretary of Defense?”

“Truth be told, many of us were uneasy about it to begin with.”

“I thought your gut was telling you what you were doing was important?” I asked, spitefully and rhetorically. John’s expression was conciliatory and I appreciated that; I hated taking on the role of the slimy reporter who got on people’s nerves. In an effort to smooth over the conversation I stuck my hand out and offered to pay for John’s coffee before I left. It was my style. It was civilized.

Now, all there was to do was find out which one on John’s mission disobeyed the Secretary of Defense’s orders and stuck to the president’s mission. John was never going to relinquish that kind of information, so I needed to find someone with more spite and less to lose. So far, the story went that Trump was to blame for the existence of COVID- 19. But what difference would that make if there was no evidence of America planting the virus in China. Did Trump even know that the mission failed? I hated to admit this to myself, but my story still had so many missing pieces that it still only sounded like make- believe. I had to follow this through to the end. I couldn’t get ahead of myself.

______________________________________________________________________________

 

DJ Didilong- more like DJ DidiLONG gone! You’re new song is a complete attack on America during this VERY hard time in our nation!! If anything, it’s prob CHINA who planted the virus to ruin the AMERICAN ECONOMY. 

“You’ve done a very good job, Yinghung.” Tsai Ing-Wen had both of her small pale hands on Yinghung’s shoulders. She took them off, very suddenly. “Sorry about that. Social distancing- I forgot.” She blushed and hastily straightened her thinly wired glasses. Her navy blue blazer matched her knee- length skirt; Tsai Ing- Wen dressed smartly and conservatively, in Yinghung’s opinion, which was probably the only way that the Taiwanese president could be taken seriously. 

“Thank you, madame president.”

“I mean, the American government was really doing the work for us, but now that we have the Chinese population paranoid, I think we’re even more on track. Wait until the Kuomintang Party gets ahold of this.” President Tsai Ing-Wen tried to suppress her sense of satisfaction with how everything had played out. She felt briefly like a puppeteer, orchestrating the dramas of global superpowers like she was. 

“You see, Yinghung- do you prefer DJ Didilong?” He shrugged. “You see, the more China and America fight, the more America wants to oppose the Chinese. What is the most effective way to oppose Xi Jinping? By supporting the liberation of Taiwan from China.” Yinghung seemed only vaguely interested in the president’s masterminding. 

“If I get to be the one to oversee the long- awaited liberation of Taiwan, I can rest easily. If this is my legacy, I can die fulfilled, knowing that I did everything I could for my country.” Tsai Ing- Wen gazed out the window at Elephant Mountain, the hunk of green that loomed over the city majestically. To herself, Tsai Ing- Wen began humming the COVID- 19 rap, as if it were her own national anthem.

______________________________________________________________________________

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The virus never got planted? What do you mean?” President Trump couldn’t tell how he was supposed to be feeling. Overtly, he was furious. He couldn’t understand, then, how the virus was spread. Hadn’t their team engineered the virus? Who else had gotten their hands on the US’s COVID-19. Trump fretted briefly about national security.

“What the fuck do you mean? COVID-19 was created by the US. What are you even suggesting?” The advisor, at this point, was at a loss for words. The mission’s details had just been made clear to him and he didn’t know whether to feel relieved or more disturbed. 

“Perhaps the virus was transmitted accidentally, anyway?” He offered/

“I’m still taking credit!” The advisor did not understand why President Trump wanted credit for this unprecedented crisis. “But just to be sure, can you check in with the special agent team? Also check up on the security of our weapons lab, while you’re at it.” 

______________________________________________________________________________

In a 11 square foot apartment, on a minorly broken office chair Aleksei’s shoulders were slouched and his elbows were tucked in against his body. He was peering at his small computer monitor with furrowed eyebrows. When I got back from the bathroom it took a few seconds for Aleksei to register that I was in the room. His attention was glued to his screen, in proper hacker form. 

I settled into the armchair against the wall and wished the lighting was less grim. Out of his small window I took in the unfamiliar cityscape of Moscow, Russia; it seemed a grey hue overlaid the city, which Aleksei later reported was due to the air pollution.

“So, you’re claiming to have hacked into the United States’ Weapons Lab data server?” Aleksei nodded blankly, seeming to have no opinion on this particular issue.

“…And”-

“You don’t have to believe me, but I have files on the development of the COVID-19 virus, as well as classified emails about the use of COVID-19 for biological warfare against China.” Aleksei was matter- of- fact, which may have been a factor of cultural difference.

“Do you work for the Russian government?”

Aleksei answered with a noncommittal ‘so- so’ hand gesture and then concluded: “I’m more of a free-lancer.”

“So, basically, you can confirm that the US started COVID-19 in China, to advance their own agenda.” Aleksei seemed pleasantly surprised at my summary of the story at hand.

“I can give you more than just that, actually.” Aleksei seemed to be weighing the decision to hand over the extent of his role in the story. 

“Aleksei, my only agenda here is to expose the US government. I have a lot of evidence against them so far, but the story I know only goes so far as the president’s failed special agent mission. If you can fill in the story for me, your name can stay out of it.” I hated to concede like that, but I couldn’t help bargaining- I was so close to the answer I needed.

“Well, the US was incredibly close to planting the virus in Wuhan, China. We knew all about this mission- the Russian government. We knew it wasn’t going to go over well, and we prepared our population to take the proper virus spreading precautions. You’ve seen the news. There’s only been 34 deaths from this illness in Russia. In the US, there’s been already upwards of 5,000.” I nodded, feeling my face grow hot in embarrassment from the way our country handled the epidemic.

“The US was so so close to planting the virus- but then they backed out last minute. We know that they didn’t realize the implications of this virus, because- in a very complex way, this would benefit Russia immensely.  So, we decided to take COVID- 19 into our own hands, and follow through on the US’s plan. We knew that Putin’s personal relationship with Donald Trump would only be strengthened by this move, and ultimately, it would get Russia closer to being the greatest superpower in the world, with China and the US so debilitated by this.”

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3899362?fbclid=IwAR0kn68Dz9uAXD7WFSQEuIz_6VIkcHqKTDuDM0IR4ApcocFC6txEK1xrSVc

https://medium.com/dog-eared-drops/vonnegut-takes-on-science-and-religion-in-cat-s-cradle-149091da29d1

With my recent re- read of one of my favorite books of all time, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, I became very interested in Vonnegut’s ability to talk about the faults of science and of religion He does this without offending anyone, because of how endearing and innocuous his characters seem to be.

Acronia was written in 1966 by Pablo Capanna, a Florentine- born Argentinian who dominated the Spanish science fiction scene. This story depicts a universe called Acronia that we come to understand is dominated by robots who control every moment of human lives. Evaluator P. is our protagonist, and we follow his struggle with ‘attacks’ of doubt that work against the system he is living in. This story explores concepts of time, the relationship we have to work culture and the direction technology is taking humanity, paired with subtle discussion of philosophies. Written as a critique of the mechanization of an online workplace, this text can be applied well to modern day. What we see from Acronia is a beautiful visualization of a terrifying possibility that humans will lose the capacity for free will and imagination.

 Concurrently, Acronia brings up philosophies of time, such as eternalism with its discussion on non- objective flowing of time and theories of 4- dimensional time. There are computer programs that balance mental factors and machines that remove doubts. There are robots with consciousnesses. Though this story is outfitted with science, it has a deeper focus on philosophical concepts; Acronia is supposed to be a Utopia- a society that has become so technologically advanced that human labor becomes obsolete. With this world, there are a host of new problems as unoccupied humans become unhappy with their idleness. As the world adapted to these new futuristic problems, a utopia is created by the robots themselves, who have humans in their best interest as they construct the perfect world. However, in the process of the robots managing to create a perfect world for humans, there are certain points where things go wrong. Acronia’s protagonist P. makes these problems evident, with his condition of doubt. 

At first this doubt presents itself to P. as a ‘symptom’, as if he is being infected with a mental illness. As the story progresses, P. calls these moments of doubt a host of different names, such as ‘attacks’, ‘oneiromancy’ and ‘the absurd’. All of these are symptoms of Acronia’s disease. The Coordinator and Planner are aware of these flaws in the system, as they confess to P., but it isn’t left clear what that means for the fate of Acronia. Is doubt what the robots will decide is inevitable for the human condition? Do humans need to experience the passage of time, as indicated by the numerous ‘outbreaks’ of the disease? Are these benevolent or malevolent robots? The robots are not clear villains or heroes in this story and I believe that is very intentional. In our lives we experience conflict with technology but in general technology seems to improve our lives- at least on the surface. The robot’s omnipotence can definitely be compared to a godliness, especially with its final lines of the story being Mene Tekel Upharsin which is Old Testament Bible speak for ‘God has doomed the Kingdom’. We fear the robot’s power and knowledge, and even though he is not their god, the Planner becomes their god. We can therefore think of P.’s doubts being doubts of god, which are often signs that the person must go to church- the Autoanalysis Machine, or prey- watch the television. There is also an instance when P. refers to his true self (one that is separate from the Programmer) as He, which is normally used to signify god. With that, we must question if P. is undergoing a transition of religious proportions- believing that the Planner is God, to believing that his own free will is God. 

The way that this story looks at time is also very interesting. Time is blamed for human discontent, and is blamed for the problems of the ‘ancients’. The Planner wants all of its people to live according to the moment, and not dream of the past or the future. This is an interesting perspective as being present is often thought to be a virtue. However, the lack of freedom the humans are allotted in Acronia is a fundamentally un- human thing. Even relationships are structured and informed; P. must follow protocol when first interacting with his wife and feels no amount of love for her until he wakes up from a traumatizing dream. “He realized he was falling in love with his wife again” shows us that human beings don’t experience love when in Acronia because their minds and lives are too formulated. P. also questions whether “maybe women had the secret” in a way that startles the reader, because it challenges the reader to confront gender differences in individualism and inherent rebellion. When P. elaborates on his question he brings up women’s ‘tacit understanding of the natural forces’ as a potential explanation for why they’d better be able to adapt to this system. He does criticize the state of their relationship in Acronia and P. is reminded often that what’s best for the greater good is for him to remove his doubts and continue living in the system- but he is unable to shake his doubt. A symbol for this doubt is the image of the clock that keeps reappearing in his mind. Clocks suggest another way of life to P., where you could ‘kill time’ because time existed. 

Acronia’s messages are incredibly blended together; philosophies and future threats from technology make this piece incredibly relevant. Where will society be when every single job is automated? We will have to think outside the box to keep working towards a Utopia. When there are flaws within the system, we account for those and adjust the system accordingly. What this story highlights for me is the inherent human necessity to do work, but to also dream and be creative. It is a human trait to doubt the system in which you are living, as we see from history.