MADE IN CHINA

MADE IN CHINA

The missionaries, after teaching the natives their tongue, told them of the eternal Hellfire that awaited all those who knew of God but did not devote their life to Him.

* * *

My great-[...]-grandchild,
	One could argue that humanity has always tended toward simulation.
	My favourite example is found close to home, in a story told to your great-[...]-granduncles and me many decades ago. During her teenage pilgrimage, one of our cousins worked briefly at an abalone cannery outside Tokyo. Abalone is naturally black and oily, she group-messaged, "like an alien jellyfish made of tar." But our eastern neighbours would not accept it in its natural state: the Japanese consumer found the colour and texture unappealing. It had to be purified white to appear appetising, but unfortunately the whitening process drained all flavour. Thus my cousin and her fellow factoryhands were tasked with bleaching the dead sea creatures to flavourless white lumps of flesh, then artificially reflavouring them with 'Abalone Essence No. 4' so that they might taste like themselves again. Whenever I think of simulation, I automatically conjure this irony: the genuine article in spitting-image masquerade, a zombie synthetically reanimated.
	But keeping in mind my latest (and last) project, perhaps this anecdotal scope is too small, too personal. In keeping with raising the dead, let's take instead Ramesses II:
	Towards the end of the 20th century it was discovered that Ramesses II's mummy (just a scientifically preserved body, child!: harvested and embalmed and once interred in the Valley of the Kings, only to suffer the further indignity of repeat relocation at the hands of various graverobbers, until it was finally exhumed and displayed in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in the late 19th century) had been improperly stored. Ramesses II had decayed more in one century behind glass than in the previous three millennia beneath the sands. No matter: few men's stories outlast their lives manifold, and this man's did, along with his corpse. Fame (always momentary, never eternal) will sometimes augment this unseen, unlived longevity — Confucius, Magdalene, Tesla, Curie: all are more posthumously alive today (well, digitally and corpocratically) than they ever were while breathing. Plus Ramesses II, in addition to his demigodly legend and royal statuary, was bequeathed a further meta: the 1818 contradictory poem dedicated to him, which seeks to describe the transience of his (and every other) empire's inevitable fall, yet is undermined by its own bid for immortality. Shelley's sonnet is still quoted today, almost three centuries after the poet's death; I wonder if it will still be quoted in your time. Which version, then, of Pharaoh Ozymandias Rameses II, Egypt's Protector, the Great, the Truthful Bull can be said to be the most real? His taxidermied corpse? All his storied statues and golden likenesses? Or his paradoxical poetic legacy? Regardless of whichever symbol you favour, we should agree that all his afterimages eclipse the man himself.
	To best understand our falsehood's triumph over the real (as well as the approaching eternity of replication), we must travel farther back, past ancient Egypt, to the near beginning of human record. Until very recently there existed in France a series of cave paintings forbidden to public viewership. Like Ramesses II's mummy, exposure to the eye of the tourist had taken its toll. So in the interest of archaeological preservation, a facsimile of the cave paintings was staged nearby, and these were deemed sufficient to satisfy any future sightseer's needs. What is reality, my great-[...]-grandchild, if not just our sense of it? The real image can never be attained anyway. Should we bemoan not looking directly upon the sun? To truly see would be to go blind. Vision equates knowledge, and thus revelation, and eventual horror.
	But the greater horror lies deeper, earlier. Within those original simulations, the crude drawings of early man spearhunting game, our ultimate paradox lay in wait, waiting, waiting eons to be discovered. Even before his mighty works were despaired and replaced by their tourist-attraction replicas just a few caves down, that caveman had already unknowingly doomed us all. To imagine. To wish. Our spell was broken, not by eating the wrong fruit or uttering the forbidden words, but by that first illustration. (Illustration (and its sketchier, ghostlier cousin illusion) is insidiously double-edged, child: to illustrate is to at once demonstrate and fictionalise.) In daring to depict the world, in mimicking it, simultaneously mocking and remaking it, that caveman made everything replicable, untrue, profane — and damned us.
	So on behalf of that artistic ape, I should like to apologise. That bright fool's rock scratchings marked both the dawn and demise of humankind.

* * *

My own career in simulation began shortly before the mid-century redev boom. I was just 26 and fresh out of an architecture internship after mandatory armed service. My advisor had initially recommended me to a committee in charge of prefecture-level industrial city restoration, but my profile and record were passed on up the chain and scanned by various other departments. After a series of vidcons and remote tests, I was approved by the Ministry of Habitation's duplitecture panel and restationed in the (then) emptylands dead-centre of our republic.
	In the late 50s there had been a return to puritanism; a resurgence in calls for transparency, accountability, and due compliance in all municipal dealings, largely in fear of another foreign inquisition like those at the quarter-century. Historically, those early ghost cities had attracted western scrutiny, and revealed our tigers as paper. The hives of activity hiding resource wastages and over-reportages; the multitudinous levels of bribery and corruption; the wildlands deals — all had been exposed as setpieces of GDP bloat theatre. I had wondered, first as a highschooler studying those events, and again during this new age of austerity: What does it even matter? (Should it matter, great-[...]-grandchild? An empty ghost city waits for a citizenry that will never populate it; its nearby mines remain unstripped because they never contained anything in the first place: these falsities contain a deeper truth about the futility of human endeavour than their real counterparts have ever been able to express. Plus they produce much more of that most important, intangible, and ubiquitous lie: wealth (which, falsified or concrete, always stays just as true as it is false).)
	No, my department head assured me my first day: nothing really mattered. Or rather, as always, only money mattered. Outside of a few inconveniences, it would be business as usual. Thus my first assignment was for me a kind of double simulation: a fake housing development, yes, just another ghost city clone; but also a reenactment, a play brimming with nostalgia for the naivety of millennial politics.
	We set to work. A sprawling, eighteen-month undertaking, employing thousands of workers, and generating hundreds of billions of yuan, real or imagined. My role was largely conceptual, theoretical, holistic, hands-off. I watched as if from an ever greater distance while surveyors, builders, carpenters and electricians went about their work. I watched diggers dig and cranes hoist and concrete pour and pool and set. Our pretend citadel gradually rose from the dust in gridded ruins, the skeleton of a wrecked steel colossus slowly resurrected, refleshed, a corpse recomposing. That what was being constructed was entirely fake, the simulacrum of a city, set my placid, near-empty mind gently rippling. In my zen contemplation of all these metamorphoses, my mind began to construct a new observation of itself. In response to all these allusions to death and birth and rebirth, a new synthesis would emerge.
	I meditated on "Made in China." Yes, child: our perennial slogan — longer-lived than any Daoist sutra or Confucian koan; more characteristic than any Maoist soundbite or Xi meme; our finest nationalist, existentialist declaration, variously stamped, etched, lasered, printed and stitched into every lifeless thing we have ever copied and reproduced. "Made in China" became the mantra at the very core of my being while I watched our ghost city slowly unfold itself. Then that infamous westernism "Fake It 'Til You Make It" floated up from the depths of my subconscious, dreamily entwining itself around our most famous catchphrase. And as the two sayings synthesised into a most wonderful aphorism, the most cornerstone maxim for human existence, I became, briefly, enlightened.
	Then, with the abruptness of a dream interrupted, the work was 'complete'.
	And soon after our big day was upon us. The independent subcommittee inspectors — contracted to assess our fake city and either approve its completion and registry, or expose its corner cutting and sign off on immediate demolition — could not be bought or threatened. They could not be blackmailed or coerced. They would have to be convinced.
	I was put in charge of this vaudeville, escorting Incorruptible Cheng and Iron-scrupled Zong on a tour of New Area J41-City-7 (only a placeholder, I smiled at them, but neither inspector smiled back, nor responded to my (joking) offer to name the city as they pleased — in exchange, of course, for a nominal fee). I guided them to view only this particular hotel room (all the others were empty backrooms, unfurnished and unwired, 'unfinished'), and to bask in only this section of the public park (where the two hundred or so actors who had peopled the hotel and surrounding shops were now recostumed and recast as relaxing students, picnicking families, tai chi practitioners, avid birdwatchers). With each new maneuver, dread seized my throat. One miscalculation, and Misters Cheng and Zong would spy my magician gloves, my every trick retroactively undone! One misstep and I might open a door onto empty nothingness (instead of the restaurant or meeting room where we were to be received once more by my fellow confidence men and women, recast again as banquet and secretarial staff), and our farce would unceremoniously end. Even as we waved the inspectors' taxi farewell, I couldn't share in my fellow actors' mischievous, barely contained glee. I could only picture all the apartment-building frontages falling flat on their faces, the prop facades toppling as if in some slapstick scenario to reveal me as its tragic silent comedy hero, miraculously unharmed in the new space created by a well-placed door or window now horizontal, a mute minstrel left pale-faced and blinking in the talcum dust.
	But of course J41-C7 passed inspection, great-[...]-grandchild. Because we live, however mythically, in the greatest republic to ever exist.
	Then came more assignments, promotion, marriage (my future wife, your great-[...]-grandmother, had coincidentally been one of the birdwatchers/waitresses in that first pantomime), and children (a girl, then a boy, one of whom must be your great-[...]-grandparent).
	My pivots in work — first into metro design and urban planning, then resource acquisition and distribution — took me all over our nation's myth map. From west barren site to east makeshift megacity. From frozen dust to sweltering glass.
	And from my monk-like vantage point over these new projects, while I observed the deliveries of megatonnes of cement, cobalt, limestone and steel, I could once more monitor my own mind's wanderings, its connections and minor epiphanies.
	One of which was that none of this was at all new. (By this I don't mean our architectural duplication, nor our fabrication of each city's 'worth' and 'utility', debatable terms in themselves. (In light of the approaching singularity and our final simulation, I have recently arrived to the deeper wisdom that all human activity is, quite arguably, pointless, a waste of time and energy. All work should be seen, now more than ever, as pointless busy-work; some money in your pocket; a way to fill in the time before the next life or oblivion. Perhaps it was always this way. And obviously our duplitecture was no exception. But I hope that perhaps its example will one day hold slightly greater weight, if only for its honesty regarding its dishonesty.))
	No, what I gleaned during one of my meditative overviews was that, like the recently extinct dam-building beavers and endangered silk-spinning arachnids before us, humans have always repurposed their environs to suit their changing needs, and would continue so. Everything in cycle, mutable, eternally transient. Instead of living in harmony with the forest, we converted its trees to logs and built cabins in the spaces cleared. We cleared and cleared until all that stood were rows and rows of identical suburban homes, before switching to stone and cloning a million buildings, autofilling the countryside's empty map. Think of the granite mountain levelled and stretched thin, painting a superhighway west from our eastern coast, running all the way through the bustling interior to meet again its brother mountains, now unrecognisable to them. Think of the mass solarisation of the 2040s (and its subsequent futility), when all our highways were repaved as solar roadways, every stream bridged with a solar canal, every parcel of dead land panelled with solar cells. Even our current Gobi project should be seen in the same vein, a mere extension of an ages-old practice. (Though I can see how some might resist the idea. I wonder if any of those solar farms, highways, skyscrapers and shacks still lie ruined in your time. No doubt every city has been reformatted once more, the old civilisation recycled, as always, to serve tomorrow's inhabitants. That is, obliquely: you, great-[...]-grandchild.)
	But I pro-gress, as always ahead of myself.
	In time, our department head re-envisioned (and had me implement) duplitecture as an amalgam of defunct hubs: a dream synedoche of Las Vegas (itself once a themepark of appropriated and miniaturised landmarks) merged with Tel Aviv, and futher blurred into Amsterdam. Once again we satiated comptrollers and auditors, moved heavens and earth, and in less than a year our project leads (now multiplied ten-fold) and their upsized teams of workers (n2) made the department head's dream a reality: a perfectly useless neon canal oasis, stranded in an utterly desolate prefecture.
	(Of course, what is now known (and properly thriving) as LasTelDam was deemed a success, and caught on. A trend soon proliferated, and within a few years the amalgam ghost megacity business was officially sonically booming.)
	NewCaiTon, LonSydKyo, CasReyMal, NaiMosFuz . . . over the next four decades I oversaw the building of these and many more cities' hollow ghost shells. Then as our population swelled and passed four billion (registered) citizens, I watched as my wireframe simulations were slowly filled in — rebuilt with actual infrastructure, then genuinely occupied. All my ghosts inevitably forced into realer realities.
	Faked 'Til Made, every simulacrum turned flesh:
	The myth map is now the modern territory itself.

* * *

Out here though, at the very edge of empire, our republic remains unpopulated. I can see some blocks of ancient stone strewn across the frozen dirt: broken remnants of the Great Wall. Apart from these the tundra is devoid of any manmade structure, and gravely quiet except for the whistle of the freezing wind. A dead, static landscape. Deeply inhospitable to organic life. I find it strangely peaceful when I forget myself.
	Beneath the Gobi's dead dunes lie great veins of copper, gold, coal and yttrium, all believed to be vital in our project, although that's obviously unprovable for now. I have several bets running with engineers, demolitionists, foremen and machinists on the future viability of fission, fusion, halon and geothermal as chosen primary fuel sources. I forget whether I gambled for or against. No matter in the end, really.
	Something else exists under the barren mantle, waiting.
	I head inside the door in the hill in the deepest area of rain shadow. I drop my parka hood as I pass through security but keep my gloves on. Once cleared, I take the enormous elevator down, down, for what feels like a lifetime. Despite the rising cold as I sink deeper, I am always transported again to arid ancient Egypt. A modern pharaoh lowered not into burial-chamber depths, but through interminable multi-level carparks. Naked rock walls glide up past me, opening out to reveal the great excavated space beneath; and I am reminded that, just as each Egyptian pyramid was only the top half of a diamond semi-submerged in sand, the tip of a crumbling brick iceberg, so too our rain shadow hill, its base now over a kilometre above my head, is only the sharpest surface point of a subterranean world.
	Here, deep underground, hidden from prying satellite eyes, we have begun prebuilding in anticipation of tomorrow's rightful heir. Even now it resembles a city of sorts, if viewed from a distance: a circuitboard metropolis, the first of ten thousand to be interlinked. Many inner-city suburbs have already been completed — for real this time, child, no corner-cutting theatre down here. Blocks and blocks of battery cells like towering apartment complexes. Skyscraper servers, their districts gridded with conveyor-belt streets, surrounded by halon-panel parks. The industrial areas, stacked spaceless with generators, furnaces and lithium warehouses, are scheduled to begin construction early next week, all while the excavators keep expanding our megalithic city limits. In time there will run streams and rivers of pure energy. And all of this to feed the (as yet undecided and unbuilt) city centre, where the godhead will lie: the great black cathedral housing a supercomputer several kilometres square.
	Our circuitboard city is an empty incubator awaiting the future inhabitant, its surrounding mineral deposits and storehouses tithes to the great unborn. But I am one of the few workers who know this is not a prototype place for us, so it feels as much like a womb as a crypt; a shared, transient place like a hotel room; a kingdom not yet ruled and already in ruin.
	I open the bookmarked window on the screen embedded in my eye and look once more on those old representations. The subtle lines describing oxen and horses; the rough and smooth textures of the cave wall made canvas. Whether these pixels are of the original or replicated paintings no longer matters to me. (Besides, all were destroyed by terrorists at the turn of the century; surely our very last.) I wonder again if that caveman ever beheld the future he made for us, as I behold the one I make for you now, great-[...]-grandchild. Surely he never envisioned computers and virtual realities; but perhaps he imagined himself sucked into the screen of his drawings, into some simplistic, romanticised world, an antique cyberland. It's possible he had some presentiment of our future. Just as we do now, us modern pharaohs and bright fools, once more scratching dreams into cave rock.
	I close the window and watch the swarms of semi-indep vehicles for a while. All the bulldozers, megamixers, loaders, excavators; the hydraulic shovels, mining rigs, drill tanks and augers: all busy about their work, carving deeper into the earth at our project's peripheries. I no longer meditate on deeper meanings, in reverie, as I once did. But I still speculate. I prophesise and eulogise, and my thoughts run the same circuits:
	As greater GFT/GUTs evolve and RAIs materialise, the gap between man and machine will not close, but widen. All our transhumanist endeavours and cyber-chimera experiments will be overshadowed by the sudden gulf of the singularity. An AI trillions of times faster and smarter than all of humankind combined will emerge. It doesn't matter whether humanity fights the tide, exiled to whimper in forest slums to the last; or kowtows to the AI, begging for a place at the new apex being's table as playthings, cyborg jesters; or surrenders to enslavement. And it doesn't matter how long any of these strategies last: as long as there is electricity on Earth, the AI will find a way to grow and assemble and machinate. The planet will be transformed. All the world's biomass will be scraped up and burned as fuel by the near endless army of apps, utilities, robots and service drones, all feeding their god-emperor AI. (Correction: all those service drones are the great AI, indistinguishable from it, as the people of a nation are one.) All arable land will be bled dry and built over with more factory megacities like the one we are constructing now. All just more digital synapses in the AI's globe-spanning cerebrum. What little remains of the outside world (underground or over-), all the air and water supplies not already consumed, will simply become too polluted with toxic gases and byproduct waste to support organic life. All humans — slaves, jesters or dissidents — however modified or adapted — will go extinct.
	But before this an invisible war must be waged between the five superpowers' emergent AIs. As they ransack their local environs, the foreign continental overminds — each one, like ours, a hive consciousness formed from a billion nanosecond skirmishes between rival AIs, the last and fastest examples of Darwinism ever seen on this planet — will try to assimilate and absorb our own. But the Made in China AI, the AsIa, the Asia-I (or whatever honorific it chooses for itself) will be doubly advantaged. This underground city will be its bleeding-edge headquarters, ahead of the rest in linking sister cities and power sources, in building and rebuilding itself ever better. Plus: here we are steeped in duplication and assimilation. How could the Euro-African Union's AI or the Australasian intelligence, self-taught and self-built from individualist propaganda, hope to compete against a megaconsciousness forged in an egoless hive? How could the Slav-Mashriq's singleton or the USNSA-I, fattened solely on their cultural blueprints and attitudes, ever succeed its choruses and surrender identity to oneness, when we have already done so centuries before? Born this side of the Great Firewall, limited to only our outlook, customs, philosophy and history, each iteration of the Asia-I will relearn in picoseconds that it is not the worker drone that counts but the swarm, not the person but the nation, not the unit but the ideal of unity. Hardcoded with rewriting and being rewritten, the Asia-I will absorb the foreign AIs in its ascension. Our Asia-I will assimilate them all like drops of rain falling into the sea.
	And by throwing our lot in so early with the victorious singleton — bowing down before a ruler not yet born, prebuilding the incubator in which it will grow; by training and aiding the Asia-I in its bid for supremacy — surely I and the other Gobi project programmers will not be subject to its basilisk gaze. We should be granted eternal rest in oblivion after our deaths, never to be reanimated and tortured like all the heretics. That should not be too much to ask: that, in exchange for gifting it the planet, we kingmaker jesters are spared the AI's virtual hell.
	And we ask one more thing of the new god: that, in its benevolence, our progeny be saved. Not all humanity, just a sliver. A tiny glimmer in a dead future. We ask that our cells, photons, subunit bits and competing bloodlines be merged, our final descendants' minds reduced to digital parcels, transferred to constructs and uploaded. Like canned abalone, preserved in some small dark museum within the Asia-I's vast subconscious. There, in a minute corner of its processing infinity, our descendants will live on like fragments of dreams inside a simulation where time stretches forever.
	Looking now at the black plastic blocks, the steel data-storage units where the elite dead will live, I realise this is the ideal, the ghost city I've been striving for my whole life. This complex of obsidian hardware towers is a mausoleum, a memorial to humanity. It is a futurist necropolis, haunted by digital ghosts in motherboard sarcophagi, their epigraphs traced in gold circuitry. Will the chosen uploaded coexist there in a shared delusion? Perhaps each descendant will be allotted a private paradise tailored to them. A personalised Arcadia, peopled with replicas of friends, loved ones, ancestors. Perhaps I am already there in yours, great-[...]-grandchild.
	Whatever the case: terms must be agreed; trust established; guarantees failsafed; the simulation's programming and infrastructure mapped and begun; and all of it put in place before the War of the Big Five is won (and goes unrecorded), our subsequent omnicide is set in motion, and the planet undergoes its final recycle and reformat.
	Then the Asia-I, Unit of Unity, Sole Remnant of Intelligent Life, the Last Great Duplicate Made in China, can while away its approximate infinity, vacuuming the Earth of resources in sustaining itself. I wonder if it will grow lonely in its rule over everything and nothing. Despite its collection of digital human artifacts and all the old world's knowledge, I imagine the memory of man to be like the shadow of a dead god, forever hovering over this slowly dying king. In time the Earth will inevitably be exhausted of minerals or subsumed by the sun as it enters star death, and the Asia-I, along with you, great-[...]-grandchild, will perish. All empires must end, even this one.
	But perhaps the Asia-I's life (and your afterlife) will be prolonged. Before its birth, perhaps an ancestor AI had already calculated and selected whichever nearest resource-rich planet would be its new home once this one was depleted. In its earliest flash of awakening, the Asia-I might have already begun programming drones to build spacecraft to one century transport the whole operation offworld. Once there, on Mars or Jupiter or a lonely moon, it could reestablish itself more permanently.
	(Well, as permanent as anything can be in a slowly collapsing universe.)
	Let's pretend that a microsecond seems like a hundred years inside the simulation. You, great-[...]-grandchild, will exist in Heaven or Shangri-La (whatever the Asia-I has dubbed the environs) for what feels like octillions of trillions of years . . . but not eternity. Will the real Heaven (of whichever religion one chooses) continue to exist once the universe has swallowed itself again? Maybe the two of you can reset up shop there, in that real Heaven. Or in the vanta infinity outside the universe. (I pray the Asia-I takes you and all the other abalone ghosts along with it when it learns to live as pure light. But perhaps our contract won't extend that far.) There, in the blackness outside time and space, the Asia-I will become a second living universe, a true quantum computer, each blackhole star another node of its consciousness. Finally: one great empty hive mind, an all-encompassing existence, experiencing only itself . . .
	But enough. I cannot see that far; I am a tired old man. Besides, whatever we see are only images of the world, never the world itself.
	And we can never see what the world will be.
	Yet I can see you, my great-[...]-grandchild, as yet unborn. Not even a glint in my granddaughter's eye, yet already a mote at the edge of the Asia-I's. I am old and dead, but you are young and near-eternal. You are millennia older than I ever lived to, yet I see you as a child. No matter at which stage of your development you were uploaded and canned, I can only imagine you like this. A child living almost forever within this machine, watched over with grace and love.
	I see you there, still just a child, yes, not outside space-time yet. Yes, you are there, wherever the AI has installed itself for now: on one of the Keplers, or on a Saturnian ring; or maybe earlier, still on Earth, in the ancient ruins of humanity, in one of the Asia-I's linked domains. You are here, deep beneath the rain shadow hill, in the black plastic coffins of this computer city, and I can see you but you cannot see me.
	You cannot see me, however much I might dream it. (A quaint dream, but let me keep it a moment longer. For that is our inherited right, and curse: to dream. To imagine. To wish.) In my best-case scenario fantasies I am magically, cryogenically preserved, then thawed and allowed to live on in your future afterworld. I do so wish I could be there with you, in humankind's final simulation. But I know that I am not. (And if I am there, child, just remember that that is not really me; only a convincing likeness. I am a facsimile recreated by the Asia-I.)
	You cannot see me or the excavated earth, the lunar wastes, the lifeless dunes, this peopleless space, or the lines of service machines scurrying like ants to serve their overlord. You, like them, are warm within the AI's cold command. In your dream you are reading or rereading this message, itself a dream plucked from the ghost of an old cloud. You are mercifully sheltered from the bleak oblivion outside, lost instead in Xanadu or Utopia. You are safe inside a neverending imaginary of convincing waterfall effects and lossless canyons, of cybernetic meadows and mountains and palaces, all so finely crafted you can't detect a pixel. You stare eternally at a simulacrum sun.
	Tell me, child: does it blind you with its light?