L'agent insensé

Chapitre 7

Just as I put down my phone, intending to check how many belongings I had left, a shrill ringtone sounded—I glanced at the caller ID, and it was from my home. Who would be calling me from my house at this hour? Suspicious, I pressed the answer button, immediately stunned by a strange female voice: "Where have you been? Your phone's off! Tell me, when are you coming back from your interview? Have you bought your ticket yet?"

I paused for a moment, then asked, "Excuse me, who are you...?"

The voice on the other end immediately rose eight octaves, "Are you out of your mind! I'm your wife! You..."

With lightning speed, I pressed the interrupt button, then shut down the phone. I stuffed it into the innermost part of my bag, covered it tightly, and zipped it up. Only after doing all this did I exhale, letting out a curse: "Damn it!"

I have a wife?!

It seems the reality is not as wonderful as I imagined. Everything in this world is the same as my original one, except for one thing: I have a wife now!

I think no one could withstand such a blow.

There is no room for maneuver.

Even if I could live on in this world pretending nothing happened, even if I could painfully give up my life as a 27-year-old bachelor and spend the rest of my life with a woman I've never met, I would still be beaten and scolded by her for not remembering her birthday (Gregorian calendar), her lunar calendar birthday, her wedding anniversary, and the anniversary of how we met. I didn't get a clear answer on the phone just now; maybe I already have a child with her, maybe she's pregnant with my child, and then I'd be a father!

Even if I can get away with all of this, I definitely don't know her family, at the very least I don't know my mother-in-law!

This is terrible! I immediately felt dizzy; there is no more tragic thing in the world than this.

Do you remember how you passed out?

"...That's strange, it seems like the water hadn't even reached me yet...and I'm a pretty good swimmer, I shouldn't have passed out as soon as I got submerged..."

"Tie Niu, it must be Tie Niu—what did you do before you fell into the water?"

"I grabbed one of Tie Niu's horns. And I also grabbed you."

"Me too!" Lin Cui said excitedly. "It seems we need to grab both of Tie Niu's horns at the same time, and there also needs to be a flood. How does it feel in your hand?"

"...slight fever, and a little shivering."

"That's right, that must be it! Let's go back and check on Tie Niu again. If Tie Niu could bring me back, he can bring you back too."

“That makes sense… but it seems like just having an iron ox isn’t enough; we also need a flood… Do you know how often the Minjiang River floods under natural conditions?”

Lin Cui's expression immediately told me that asking this question was foolish.

I suddenly felt incredibly suffocated and wanted to scream, but what came out of my mouth was this sentence: "Then...then I might as well go and cause another breach!"

Lin Cui quickly said, "It's impossible. That's simply not something that can be done by human power. And if you go, you'll definitely get caught. That's endangering public safety, a serious crime, and you might get executed on the spot..."

I fully understood the feeling of utter despair that Lin Cui had experienced before. No matter how Lin Cui tried to comfort me, I remained deaf to her words and didn't utter a single one.

The idea of sabotaging the dam was just a momentary impulse; I could never actually do it. Floods are no joke; innocent people could be injured or even killed. Thinking of this, I at least regained some confidence in myself: at least I still know what not to do.

"Your mom's coming soon, I'm leaving." I stood up wearily.

"No, don't go. Let's think of a solution together."

I refused Lin Cui's offer, saying, "Don't worry, I'm fine. I just want to be alone for a while."

Perhaps because I had indeed shown the strength a man who had suffered a setback should have, Lin Cui didn't insist any further. She simply saw me to the door, then I pushed her back into the room.

Leaving Lin Cui's residential compound, I strolled through the streets, feeling a profound sense of emptiness, as if "the world is vast, yet there is nowhere for me to belong." My clothes weren't completely dry, and the wind was quite chilly. Walking on the street, my legs felt a little weak.

I thought about the car several times, but I didn't know where to go. I considered going back to the hotel, rummaging through my luggage to see if there was anything that could help me, but I immediately suppressed that absurd idea.

There was an internet cafe by the roadside, so I went inside.

After my second year of university, I rarely went to internet cafes anymore. After that, computers and broadband were installed in my dorm, and it became an internet cafe. Even though the accents of the people around me were unfamiliar, the feeling of sitting in a row and operating the machines was familiar. People in internet cafes are people who want to forget reality, and perhaps that's what attracted me.

I was alone, and there didn't seem to be any games to play. So when I turned on my computer, I still habitually opened my browser and typed in the search engine address.

This series of reflexive actions made me chuckle; even at this moment, I still maintained this habit of a journalist.

But since I've already opened it, I might as well search for something—the internet uses this psychology to attract people—I typed in "Tie Niu" using the pinyin input method and clicked "search".

I flipped through the search results page by page, each one a familiar news article, with one or two even being ones I had written. Knowing full well the outcome was inevitable, I mechanically continued flipping through the pages—the internet truly makes it easy to lose your mind.

On the second-to-last page, a new result caught my eye—"Tie Niu Literature Website." Perhaps it wasn't new; I just hadn't noticed it before. I suddenly found myself laughing at my own actions: experiencing a world-changing event, yet hoping to find an explanation for it online. I'm truly a hopeless modern person.

Having figured this out, I clicked on the link with a self-deprecating smile to see what kind of place the site named "Iron Bull" really was.

The site only has one forum, which is very basic, with a black and gray background, looking rather desolate and seemingly not visited by many people. The number of registered users and the number of posts updated today at the top of the forum also confirm this.

I casually clicked on today's updates and found an article called "Slideshow". The text read as follows:

I took the hot dog out of the microwave, took a bite, and went to pour myself some milk. My appetite isn't very good at this time of day; I only eat about half of what I usually eat.

The slides are arranged in numbers from 1 to 10. Between 1 and 10 is ∞. We use an ∞-base system for the numbers on the slides, just like any other system—when a number is 1 greater than ∞, we call it 10.

Each slide contains a finite number of lives, existing only within a single "point" of time represented by that slide. On the next slide, a group of lives very similar to them, except possessing a "point" more of memory, exist. This slow, gradual progression constitutes the sequence of time. Within this sequence, there also exists another kind of life, unable to recognize that they exist only for a fleeting moment, yet believing they have a vast past to recall and a promising future to await. In reality, they are merely illusions created by the slideshow's progression; no evidence of their material existence can be found on any of the slides.

My job is to keep the slides moving forward, from 1 to 10. It's tedious work, and there's almost no end in sight. Staring at a single slide becomes my only pastime, where I can see a football player kicking the ball, a mathematician having the idea to prove a theorem, a penis reaching its maximum erection; and on another slide, whose number is unknown, I can see the ball flying into the goal, the proof written on the blackboard, and semen spraying out—these are separated by ∞ slides, the same distance between 1 and 10.

If I wore glasses, I could see the nerves controlling my thigh muscles receiving the first oxygenated red blood cell, the logic-governing brain cells generating the first electrical impulse, and the hormones issuing the first preparatory command. However, that would make me too focused, which might cause the slides to malfunction… slides are delicate machines, prone to error.

Just like this time, when I discovered the "glitch," the ball had already bounced back and forth across the goal line at least a hundred times, the chalk had shattered and then remained intact, and the man had experienced a hundred orgasms—that's quite rare. The beings in the slideshow should be completely unaware of this "glitch"; they were simply being mechanically arranged. As for what the beings in the sequence might think, what complaints they might have when they learned their panic stemmed from my operational error, I didn't care at all—after all, they didn't actually exist.

The microwave made a "ding" sound, and I left the workbench to get a hot dog.

After reading this text, I immediately had a very strange feeling. I originally thought that reading it again would make this feeling clearer, but in fact, this inexplicable feeling only intensified.

"Slides arranged chronologically up to infinity," "People living inside these slides exist for only a moment, yet believe they've lived a lifetime," "A single mistake by the person presenting the slides throws the world they create into chaos," "The person presenting the slides also lives within a set of slides; everyone is like that"... These strange thoughts made me realize things I wouldn't see in ordinary forum posts. Just then, I saw the author's name—"X"—flashing in the forum's online member section. For some reason, I immediately registered as a member on this "Iron Bull" forum and sent a greeting to member "X" via "short message": "What do you know about the world?"

A minute later, a sweet female voice came through the earpiece, "You have a new text message." Opening the inbox, I found a reply from "X": "Very few. Fewer than anyone else in the world."

Perhaps it was the word "world" that provoked me, because I immediately sent another text message: "I don't care how much. I want to know."

This time, after nearly five minutes, the reply was even simpler: "Okay. My QQ number is: xxxxxxxxx".

Just as I had hoped, X listened quietly to my account of Lin Cui and my recent troubles, only asking questions about the details without any suspicion or perfunctory response. It was only while recounting all that I realized: many normally normal people become erratic and unreasonable online, lacking restraint. For example, fabricating strange events and making them sound plausible. Would I be considered one of those people? Fortunately, X's attitude, as if listening to something as ordinary as life itself, dispelled my doubts.

Looking back, maybe I was serious when I spoke, and he was serious with me. As for whether what I said was true, it wasn't really on his mind.

“What you said is very interesting,” he said finally. “Are you telling me all this to ask for advice?”

After thinking for a moment, I typed the following: "No. I know that if I want to go back now, talking to anyone and hoping they can help me is just wishful thinking. I just want to figure out the whole thing. Maybe this way... even if I can't find a way back, at least I'll live with more clarity. 'Life is only once for me, and I don't want it to be anything but unclear!' That's what that girl said, and that's what I want to say now."

X typed a smiley face, seemingly amused by something, "'Don't want any ambiguity in life,' right? I don't quite agree with her. But since you brought it up, I'll share my thoughts."

"You saw my new post, right?"

"Hmm. It's very well written."

Do you think this is one way to explain what happened to you?

"How should I put it? I feel...it gave me quite a few feelings."

"Maybe. If we don't follow your friend's reasoning, the slideshow explanation seems plausible. Her experience with you was simply that the slideshow was inserted incorrectly and has now been corrected. For you, it's a different kind of mistake. However, to be honest, I don't believe this theory." He typed quickly.

"?"

“I wrote this story merely as a novel experiment, not because I truly believed in such a possibility. Or rather, even if I did believe in such a possibility, I would only confine it to literary works. From a perspective outside of literature, I would rather think it is untenable.”

“O.” I was slightly disappointed with X’s answer.

"Have you read any of Borges's books?" he suddenly asked me, changing the subject.

I have read some of his poems.

Have you read the short story called "The Circular Ruins"?

"I don't remember very clearly, what was it about?"

"It's roughly about how a magician in a circular temple creates a living person through thought and imagination. After being created, this person has no idea that he is just a product of someone else's imagination. In order to prevent him from being saddened by the discovery, the magician warns the created person never to go near fire, because fire will make him realize that he does not exist."

"Oh, I remember now. The ending is that the temple was struck by lightning one day and caught fire. Only then did the magician realize that he himself was nothing more than a product of someone else's imagination."

"Yes, that's right. What are your thoughts on this story?"

I had actually been thinking about this, and at this point I typed out my thoughts: "You mean, for Lin Cui, the external world, including all people, things, and events, is nothing more than a product derived from her imagination. And I am also something she imagined. Is that right?"

X didn't directly say yes or no, but just kept typing: "This statement is very close to the Buddhist Yogacara school. In essence, Yogacara is an extreme form of idealism, believing that there is no matter in this world, and everything is merely a product of consciousness; everything we can perceive must be done through consciousness, therefore, there is no way to prove whether something exists outside of consciousness."

"Now that we're chatting on QQ, I don't know if you're a product of my consciousness, just as you don't know if I'm a product of yours. Maybe this world is just derived from one person's dream, and that lucky one isn't necessarily you or me. Maybe we each have our own dreams, existing in solitude, like being trapped in an online game."

"Your story is very interesting. I was just thinking that maybe it could be explained using this idealistic approach. But it's not that simple. Because in this story, I can neither deprive the girl of her protagonist status, nor can I ignore the importance of your role as the 'observer,' especially now that you've become the protagonist."

“If only this girl had come to talk to me, I would have told her that she might have just experienced a period of mental confusion, and that the world created by her consciousness had changed slightly before returning to normal. Now, there is a character in her consciousness, which is me, who is here to inform her of this restoration.”

"But now that there's you, I can't do that anymore. Although I'm willing to admit that I'm a product of someone's consciousness, I can't hope to convince you to believe that too, because that would be almost shameless. Similarly, I can't say that all of this is a product of your confused consciousness, and that the girl was probably just acting out a script from your dream. Because you probably wouldn't be that arrogant."

"So I came up with a completely new idea, and I'll tell you about it now. I'm not sure if it will be 'reasonable,' I just hope you'll like it."

"First of all, everyone is unique. In any world, in any universe, in any space and event, you are you, there is only one, just as I am me, there is only one me. We all truly exist, not some clone or anyone's dream."

"However, we are far more complex than we realize. Everything you know about yourself right now—age, gender, identity, habits…—does not encompass who you are. The real 'you' is a much larger being than that."

"If we take a person, say you, as a central point, we can draw countless radial lines. Each line represents a cognitive possibility. In cognition a, you have a series of perceptions about yourself and the things around you, such as you are a lawyer and have a three-and-a-half-year-old son; while in cognition b, you have a completely different perception, such as you are a doctor and have a daughter who is already married."

"I think after going through the thought process just now, your mind should be open to the point that it is logically possible to acknowledge that a person has so many cognitive abilities."

"Similarly, you can draw similar radial lines for other people, such as me. Since everyone is a real entity and a subject of cognition, everyone can have their own radial lines."

"And what is the so-called 'real world' like? The 'real world' is the intersection of these radiating lines."

"When one of your rays intersects with one of mine at a point, it means that your perception and mine have reached a consensus. When one of everyone's rays intersects at a point, it means that everyone's perception has reached a consensus. And everyone's consensus is what we call 'reality'."

“You see a color and call it ‘blue.’ But I see it and insist on calling it ‘red.’ If we can’t reach a consensus, this color won’t have a name that we all agree on. The reality is that everyone agrees to call this color ‘blue,’ and that’s when it has the meaning of ‘blue’ in reality. If everyone agreed to call it ‘red,’ it would become ‘red.’ So what’s important isn’t what it is in itself—no one can know what it is in itself—what’s important is reaching a consensus.”

"This is how a 'reality' is constructed. When everyone's line of reasoning converges, it means that everyone's perception at that point is the same, or rather, everyone confines their perception to a range of 'being the same as others.' This range constitutes the 'you' and 'me' within this direct perception. Unlike the real 'you' and 'me,' the 'you' and 'me' in this world are merely effective cognitive concepts within this 'reality,' not objective existences. In other 'reality,' other concepts of 'you' and 'me' will manifest. These concepts are not separate entities, but rather different parts of a subject's perception."

Other "reality" forms in the same way. Since everyone has many lines of cognition that radiate outwards, there will be more than one point of intersection. Each point of intersection represents a "consensus among the people," which constitutes a "real world."

"The situation your friend encountered is that her original line 'a' in reality A, that is, her entire set of cognition, was transferred to reality B. In this way, her line of cognition did not fall on the 'consensus point' of everyone, so she became incompatible with this reality."

"Originally, in reality B, there should be a cognitive line b responsible for coordinating with others, but in fact, it has been replaced by cognitive line a. I think the Iron Ox you mentioned is such a tool for transporting cognitive lines. And the way to activate this tool, as you said, is a flood. Here, the Iron Ox becomes an existence that transcends all cognition; it can even manipulate human cognition, so it is more qualified than any of us to say that it is the subject."

I remained completely focused on watching X finish his long post, even though there were considerable gaps between QQ messages; my attention never wavered. As a result, I understood almost everything he said. Only when he made that concluding remark did I finally breathe a sigh of relief.

A brilliant idea, isn't it?

Although it doesn't help me much, it's still a reasonable explanation. And the thought that there's another "self" objectively existing besides this "real" self, who oversees everything and remains largely unaffected, is somewhat comforting.

"X, thank you."

"You're welcome. By the way, I really don't agree with what your friend said, such as 'I only have one life, and I don't want it to be anything unclear or ambiguous.'"

As I left the internet cafe, I was no longer as downcast as before. I even felt a little hungry, so I took a taxi back to the hotel.

After having dinner at the hotel, I went back to my room and dialed up to go online. I downloaded X's article and our chat history from the internet cafe to my email, stored them on my hard drive, and backed them up on the USB drive I was carrying.

At this point, I had decided that whether I wanted to stay in this reality or leave this place, I should first go to the riverbank to see the iron ox.

It was dusk, and the sky was gradually darkening. I walked out of the hotel and onto the bustling street, and following the method Lin Cui used in the other world, I hailed a taxi that was willing to go to Dujiangyan.