Chapter Text
Reality and illusion, cybernetic and virtual. Many have heard such a hypothesis: that a person could inject their own consciousness into the cybernetic network, and live forever in a fabricated world. But does a person truly have “consciousness”? Or rather, is there such a thing that can be quantified, cut apart, and still be called “consciousness”?
Many spiritual practitioners and lovers of mysticism believe in the hypothesis of the soul, in the story of reincarnation after death. And many who call themselves believers in science consider all of this to be nothing more than the product of cells and neural activity. Yet no matter how one puts it, “consciousness” exists, and it has become us.
[Zone A], countless people, countless sexes. In dim videos, people have sex—masked, thrusting, ejaculating, then moaning and gasping. Among them is such a man, one of the millions like him. He is probably a university student, or perhaps a young adult newly stepping into the world of work. He noticed a girl in the forum, one who looked easy to deceive, so he added her contact, asked her age, and urged her to send him nude photos. After much silence, she told him she was ten. Yet he did not care, instead pressing her even more insistently. After many failed attempts, he calmly began to tell her the story of him and his former girlfriend—or more precisely, his casual sex partner.
She paid him little attention. Perhaps he too felt bored, and withdrew. Later, she would take many, many men to be him, but that is another story.
Afterwards she came to another place, a forbidden zone called [——]. There was a man A, a girl, and a half-dead man B.
A was about twenty-one, an ordinary man with, at most, a faint sense of morality. The girl was sixteen, a dark and dangerous figure. She already had a real boyfriend, but sometimes she would meet other men outside school, sleep with them. Once she quarreled with A; the cause was her wish to get a nipple piercing, and his scolding her for lacking self-respect, mocking her ignorance. She felt furious, and naked, knife-like humiliation.
“I’ve already read Lacan, Jung, Schopenhauer—” she retorted.
A said nothing, sinking into silence. She thought: she had long regarded him as a brother, as her second hidden lover, but perhaps this could not be continued.
A and B were close, but B would never be with A, nor allow anything resembling intimacy. He had a virtuous wife, a real family. Yet just as the girl treated A as both brother and secret lover, so too did B and A exist in that same hidden relation. After long labor, B would speak to A of his years in the army, of his experiences, and then vanish again for half a year, or a full year. Sometimes A thought this bond might end before long, yet still he wished for their fragile household of three to go on.
In the meantime there was also a passerby, D. He was a man, one who longed for so-called true love, yet was disillusioned with real women. He met a woman who thought marriage was only a transaction—that it would be better to find a suitable partner, man or woman, without love, marry, and then preserve each other’s interests while living separately. He only laughed at her naïveté.
Many years later, she desperately wanted to marry another woman. As for him, his story could no longer be known.