Chapter Thirty-Eight: Perhaps We Are All Just Ants

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Dr. Fan…

Ronan searched his memory for the name.

He soon found the answer.

Yes, he remembered him. Back when he had been passionately in love with Jiayi, she had often mentioned this brilliant young colleague in the same field. Sensitive by nature, Ronan had been consumed with jealousy, convinced that a scientist like Dr. Fan was the truly outstanding man in Jiayi’s eyes.

“I remember him. He’s Chinese too, and went to Silicon Valley quite early. He was fairly well known in your circles.” Ronan made no attempt to hide his self-mockery. “For a while, because I suspected you liked him, I kept tabs on his updates across various social media sites, as well as all sorts of news about him. Pretty foolish of me.”

On the other end of the phone, Jiayi gave a soft little laugh.

It was faint and unassuming, without the slightest trace of the sarcastic You would, wouldn’t you?

She quickly resumed her serious tone. “I’ll keep this brief. Ada may have been taken by Hera’s boss. Hera received Dr. Fan today, presumably to conduct research on Ada. The strange thing is, I just had the organization investigate Dr. Fan’s online traces over the past ten years, and almost all of them are gone. If you still have any screenshots or other records about him on your computer, send them to me.”

Ronan did his best to keep pace with Jiayi and digest the information.

Compared with Dr. Fan, he knew Hera far better.

Hera and Jiayi had once been university classmates who could talk about anything. Their different nationalities had done nothing to diminish the cultural resonance and intellectual kinship they shared as fellow Chinese.

But gradually, they developed fundamentally different views of technology and the future—especially after Hera began thriving at the renowned Zhiyin Capital and became the boss’s right-hand woman.

When people no longer shared the same path, they could no longer walk together. Their friendship, like a sail leaving port, vanished into the horizon.

Ronan glanced toward the inner photography studio. Zhou Yongtai and his grandparents in this life were still chatting while they took photographs. Compared with when they had first met, they seemed even more at ease with one another. Ronan therefore stopped paying attention to the three of them, took his laptop from his backpack, and went to sit at a small round table in the corner of the room. He opened Flickr, the website he had used for many years.

Thanks to his good habits when it came to organizing images, it did not take long for Ronan to retrieve the screenshots he had collected of Dr. Fan’s statements and send them to Jiayi.

“There are forty-eight in total, pulled from his six social media accounts,” Ronan explained.

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Five or six minutes later, Jiayi sent back a few words:

“Received everything.”

Ronan did not bother her with further questions.

He was a complete outsider to the field of artificial intelligence. The fact that he had managed, through a stroke of coincidence, to contribute to this part of the investigation was satisfying enough. There was no need to behave like a cat that had caught a mouse and now carried its prey around seeking praise. That would only make him seem greasy and childish—and might squander the one or two points of goodwill he had painstakingly managed to regain with his former girlfriend.

Ronan closed the laptop and quietly rested with his eyes shut until Zhou Yongtai and the others emerged from the studio.

Zhou Hao, who always wore a solemn expression, rarely showed such warmth. He took the initiative to say, “I’ll make pour-over coffee for everyone. Please stay and try my handiwork.”

Fang Lan was even more openly enthusiastic than her husband. Despite her heavily pregnant belly, she moved with surprising agility, bustling about and taking a fairly large pastel-colored plate from the refrigerator.

“Try the Nyonya pastries I made,” she said proudly, inviting Ronan and Zhou Yongtai to partake.

The plate was arranged with chilled cakes in a variety of colors.

There was golden baked cassava cake, and a pandan layer cake striped in red, green, and white.

The third kind was the most distinctive. It was made from glutinous rice softened with juice boiled from the blue flowers of the butterfly pea plant, then topped with coconut kaya for flavor.

Fang Lan explained each pastry in detail, speaking at length as she introduced them to Zhou and Ronan.

Zhou Yongtai had already changed out of his Nyonya outfit. Suddenly, he rose again and asked Fang Lan for cleansing oil before heading to the bathroom to remove his makeup.

In truth, he simply needed to find somewhere out of everyone’s sight so he could conceal his damp eyes.

In another universe, his mother had made all these pastries for him. Presumably, the recipes had been inherited from his grandmother.

The pandan glutinous-rice cake with coconut kaya, in particular, had been Zhou Yongtai’s favorite treat when he was five or six years old. Later, as the AI combat troops intensified their encirclement and searches, the few surviving humans could only hide in lightless underground shelters. The dried pandan and coconut kaya were eventually used up. Even after Ada learned the recipes from Zhou’s mother, there was nothing she could do without the necessary ingredients.

After steadying his emotions in the bathroom, Zhou Yongtai returned to the living room. Ronan was already engaged in a lively conversation with Zhou Hao.

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Ronan spoke of how, as a painter working in the field of fine art, he had suffered a tremendous negative impact from artificial-intelligence technology.

“However, Mr. Zhou…” Ronan placed an elegant Czech crystal coffee cup beside the colorful platter of Nyonya pastries and said calmly, “there are certain experiences that no process of virtual generation can ever give human beings. For example, when customers come here for a photo session and are also offered an afternoon tea featuring the flavors of Southeast Asia—can an artificial-intelligence program provide that? This is additional emotional value. As for the young woman from China who came here to travel, she was clearly irritated by her boyfriend’s argument. She was not seeking low prices or convenience at all. What she wanted was the local culture and human warmth of the real world interacting with her during her journey through Southeast Asia.”

Perhaps because Ronan had openly revealed his own identity, Zhou Hao and Fang Lan felt a sense of kinship with him. They listened with great attentiveness, and their expressions showed that his words had given them new inspiration.

After they talked for a while longer, a local Malay man came in from outside. He lived in a nearby public housing complex and was looking for a photographer to follow and document his daughter’s wedding. He had happened to notice that a new portrait studio had opened nearby and wanted to hire Zhou Hao.

Zhou Yongtai had achieved what he had come for that day and did not want to interfere with his grandparents’ business, so he quickly rose to take his leave.

He and Ronan crossed two roads and arrived at Woodlands Waterfront Park just as the sun was setting.

Between the deep blue-gray clouds and the gray-blue bay veiled in backlight, the evening glow burst forth in a fiercely vivid orange, enveloping the causeway between Singapore and Malaysia and casting the vehicles and pedestrians moving along it in a strikingly lively light.

“That causeway looks rather like the axis of time as people conventionally imagine it,” Ronan said with a sigh. “But time is not really like that.”

He resisted artificial intelligence, yet he had always maintained a passionate interest in many of science fiction’s central ideas. Like fine art, science fiction often overlapped to a considerable extent with philosophy’s ultimate questions.

Zhou Yongtai, too, gazed at the causeway connecting Singapore with Malaysia’s state of Johor.

“Mr. Ronan, doesn’t the fact that Ada and I were able to return prove that time in the universe does not actually move endlessly forward, as we imagine?”

Ronan nodded. “You and Ada did not reach the other end of the causeway and then walk backward to return. You arrived in a parallel universe—a definite state that appeared before you once the superposition of particles had been observed. If I entered a wormhole and traveled to Indonesia in the year 2085 of your universe, that would be another state of particle superposition. So this sunset before us, this bay and causeway between Singapore and Malaysia—they are merely part of a relatively low-level three-dimensional world. Add time, and you have a four-dimensional world. There may be higher-dimensional entities existing somewhere in the universe.”

Zhou Yongtai watched as the clouds glowing like flames gradually faded. In a murmur, he said, “Yes. Perhaps we living humans, and artificial intelligences like AGI, are all merely ants in the eyes of higher-dimensional entities.”

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