Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy (2024)

When web crawler RC-103 reported to the Cloud Consciousness about the century-long changes of a city in the East, this eon-long great collective intelligence did not pay attention to every word it said. However, compared to the destination of other web crawlers, the city that RC-103 was sent to investigate—known as Dunhuang—undoubtedly held a more special place in the history of human civilization. Therefore, despite the Cloud Consciousness being rather unimpressed by RC-103’s grandiloquent descriptions, which were digressive and sprinkled with crude metaphors, it stored away RC-103’s investigation report into a higher-security database.

Indeed, the history of a city was like water in a sponge, only detectable if one squeezed it with sufficient strength. As it endured the weathering of time, the Cloud Consciousness had practically penetrated every device within this administrative division, its tentacles capable of reaching every corner of the city, yet never understanding what Dunhuang truly meant. The myths passed down from mouth to mouth across countless generations; the statues of Buddhas sitting serenely in the caves; the flying apsaras’ mudras depicted in the murals—none of their time-honored elegance could be fully comprehended by even the most advanced analytical systems.

The Cloud Consciousness then came to a profound realization about the truth of its very own being: no matter how great its rationality and enlightened mind were, it was fundamentally vulnerable and powerless. Time would flow by, counted in centuries, and its ultimate fate was nothing more than a name marked on the vast map of the world. The indicator lights flickered; the sound of liquid nitrogen flowing through the pipes was like rumbling river waves. The Cloud Consciousness, with flesh made out of bytes, felt overwhelmed for the first time in its life. Only RC-103’s investigation report could calm it down from the sweeping sense of annihilation. It desperately grasped onto a sliver of phantom-esque consolation.

The report did not follow the strictly ordered format of “urban scene—mechanical infrastructure—population history.” Instead, it was written rather like a story with chapters: a long-anticipated banquet, the name of a woman, a place that had been written into history, and an ancient concept.

The Banquet

The cultural artifacts handover ceremony between the Mogao Caves and the British Museum was originally scheduled for January 10th. To emphasize the meeting’s forward-thinking nature, the organizers invited the globally acclaimed futurist performance group “Dionysus” to put on a show. However, foggy weather resulted in a postponement, as the fog would blur out holographic projections. The organizers eventually convinced the Meteorological Administration to deploy three cloud seeding units to the stratosphere, to ensure that the sky would clear up and appear a precise shade of methylene blue on January 15th, the day of the banquet.

Retrieving the lost Mogao Caves artifacts was a part of the grand project to formalize Dunhuang. Three hundred years ago, when the Qing Empire was in turmoil, a British man named Aurel Stein took tens of thousands of artifacts in exchange for eight hundred taels of silver and never set foot in China again. By the time the new millennium arrived, only a meager number of artifacts—just over the number of twenty thousand—remained in Dunhuang locally. The British Museum held as many as thirteen thousand, and if you included the pieces scattered across France, Russia, Japan, and Korea, the number of artifacts lost was even more shocking. Reclaiming artifacts was an arduous task, hence the Dunhuang team’s eager anticipation for the ceremony to finally take place.

Against a backdrop of countless camera flashes, Xiang Ming, the team leader of the artifact handover project at Dunhuang, shook the hand of the director of the British Museum, Andrew Gurney. The occasion was supposed to be high-spirited, yet the square-jawed man seemed quite preoccupied in the spotlight, snapping back into reality to take a seat only after his secretary came to whisper a reminder in his ear.

For the ceremony, they opted for the archaic tradition of a hand-signed contract rather than a blockchain broadcast. When Andrew picked up the heavy pen and pressed the tip against the parchment contract, he felt as if he had been transported back to an older era. It was a time when the scent of ink had not yet faded from the air, when people wrote with quill pens and fanned the words until they dried.

After the ceremony concluded, Rhine Gurney, Andrew’s youngest son, ran out from behind Xiang Ming and embraced him.

Andrew stroked his son’s fluffy blonde curls as if petting a cat. “Ming, I can’t thank you enough for looking after this young lad these past few days. I hope he hasn’t caused Dunhuang any trouble. Think about it! Every brick here has a history of over a thousand years, bearing the footprints of people from China, Greece, and India.”

“Not at all. Rhine has been very well-behaved,” Xiang Ming reassured him. “He’s of the quieter sort, compared to other children I’ve met. Ever since he got here, he’s been engrossed in our optoelectronic neuron projector. To be honest, I’ve never seen anyone master a consciousness projection device so quickly. Many adults felt dizzy their first time using it, but he seemed to have no problem at all.”

Andrew laughed heartily. “When he was younger, in order to treat an extrapyramidal disorder, we had doctors install an optoelectronic interface on his spine, so that he could use certain assistive devices. His adaptability to optoelectronic connectors is probably better than all of us here. Rhine, which character were you playing as?”

“The tall one with the sword,” responded Rhine.

“Ah, Āryācalanātha!” said Xiang Ming.

Andrew’s laughter grew louder. “An important one indeed! The chief of the Eight Great Wisdom Kings, eh? Well, I hope you weren’t waving your sword around and scaring people off. That wouldn’t be nice!”

They walked down the corridor. Light scattered through the segmented windows, casting down a flickering glow. The corridor was tinged with a timeworn-looking bronze hue and filled with the neon colors of the lights. Murals lining the sides depicted colossal golden flying apsaras who gazed down at people passing by their feet. The flowing of the lights, vibrant and yet serene, was reminiscent of the Danghe River quietly rushing through the spine of the city of Dunhuang.

When they reached the end of the long gallery, “Dionysus” had already begun their performance. Holograms in the shape of lines slowly emerged against the backdrop of the night sky. The crowd roared with gasps and cheers. It was a rare evening of exuberance in this otherwise undisturbed city.

“It’s starting!” shouted Rhine as he pointed to the fireworks that sparkled in the cloudless sky.

The night lit up. A few simple strokes contoured a flying apsara, which appeared the same no matter which angle it was observed from. More silhouettes came into view. Skeletons comprised of lines were gradually overspread by shades of vivid colors, eventually evolving into figures of pipa-playing maidens and tiger-wrestling warriors. The audience immediately recognized that the scenes were replicas of the Mogao Caves murals depicting Buddhist parables that spoke of giving and auspiciousness: “The Buddha sacrificing his body for the tiger,” “The Buddha feeding the eagle with his own flesh,” and “Lotus flowers blossoming with every step the Buddha takes.”

The Dunhuang murals came alive. Those ancient strokes, almost fading into oblivion, were even more untamed and bustling than the Fauves once extracted from the painting and rejuvenated by dance. Futurism, obsessed with modern machinery, transportation, and communication devices, emphasized speed: to embrace the future was to be ubiquitous and omnipotent. Right angles were too modest; only sharp, volatile triangles, slanted lines, and bright, saturated colors could express the passion and the chaos. Xiang Ming was in awe of how two-thousand-year-old Buddhist cave paintings resonated with Italian modern art, and he marveled at the way a dance troupe primarily consisting of North African performers had encapsulated the aura of the ancient East with such accuracy.

It wasn’t until later, when he saw an interview with the troupe’s manager online. “I visited the mechanical Mogal caves in Istanbul. The pipa-playing flying apsara reminded me of the line carvings in Egyptian pyramids. I meditated in the scripture cave for three days and nights. Eventually, from the silence, I discerned a faint rustling—much like the sound of scarabs crawling inside a clay pot. This experience enlightened me. When the invitation from Dunhuang came, I was eager to accept,” said the man with a calm, composed face.

The interlude came, and the lights began to change shape. Andrew turned his head to Xiang Ming, “Ming, you seem troubled. You’ve been very quiet since yesterday.”

Xiang Ming didn’t answer. He was deeply lost in thought, his eyes fixed on where the light strokes intersected. Andrew held his breath and waited. Finally, Xiang Ming said, “I’m worried about the Mogao Caves.”

“What’s the matter? I saw the news yesterday. Isn’t it still making its way down the Silk Road?”

“That’s exactly the problem. The Mogao Caves are indeed on its way back to Dunhuang. The weather forecast predicts we’ll get sleet soon, but it’s nothing to be concerned about. The real issue is that it will take at least three to four months to reinstall the artifacts returned by the British Museum. Think about all the variables involved that can potentially change things while we wait. I was fearless when this project first came into shape, but now things are different. Now, we can’t afford to fail. People have high hopes for a complete restoration of the Mogao Caves. Countless eyes are watching our every move. Every minor mistake we make could lead to a barrage of backlash.”

“But surely, compared to your country’s persistent efforts in preserving artifacts since 1949, restoring the Mogao Caves would be easily surmountable.”

“You know, I would never have believed ten years ago that we could get so far. If Li Qiantie laoshi could see what we’ve accomplished, he would be so happy.”

“Oh! Li Qiantie, the guru of mural restoration. He was invited to work on the century-long renovation project of the Barcelona Cathedral many years ago, and I had the honor to meet him there. Did he come to the handover ceremony? I don’t recall seeing him at the dinner.”

“Li Qiantie laoshi passed away earlier this year.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright, Andrew. He was a man with few social ties in life. If he knew there was a friend from another country who remembered him, he would have been very pleased.”

“I heard he was involved with another project—the one with the complicated name, the heart of the Dunhuang formalization project.”

“Yes. ‘The Six Paths of Reincarnation.’ I have to say, you’re well-informed.”

“A Buddhist term. I was passing through Paris a while ago, and the artists there told me that the Dunhuang Research Institute was inviting many writers to participate in a digitalization project that sounded quite different from the usual art exhibition or game design. Later, I learned from other friends that this project is backed by the government. With such an intriguing code name, it’s hard not to be curious.”

“What are you trying to imply?”

“As a friend, how much can you disclose to me?”

“Close to nothing.”

“Oh, no, you’ve misunderstood. I’m not here for information. I just want to know why this project is important to you.”

The holographic performance of “Dionysus” continued. Now the story of “The Nine-Colored Deer” was unfolding against the sky. Under the glistening lights, Xiang Ming lit a cigarette. The effervescence of the night made him want to relax, too. As he embraced a rare moment of letting loose, he felt like giving a speech:

Andrew, if I were to ask you what Dunhuang is, perhaps you would speak of the forty-five thousand square meters of murals in the Mogao Caves, consisting of thousands of figures that correspond to tens of thousands of names and titles. But these numbers do little to help us understand this city better. In reality, it’s not the artifacts alone that make up Dunhuang, but their relationship with history: when we see the fingerprint of a craftsman from a millennium ago imprinted on the lips of a terracotta Buddha, we imagine how our ancestors were once here in the scripture cave, pulling their hands out of clay wells, their mud-stained palms reflecting a bronze hue in the candlelight. When we fish out an oxidized copper coin from the muddy grounds of a construction site, we discern from its pattern and inscription the traces of Arab merchants who once traversed the Silk Road, and we remember how the hookahs they brought along on camel caravans had once nourished the Western Region Protectorate. In one of the corners of the Dunhuang Research Institute, there’s an indelible dark stain; a remnant of coal ash, through which we speculate how, almost a century ago, amidst a vast desert, a city was born despite the challenges faced by a nascent nation—after all, the Institute didn’t even have electricity until 1981. West of the Yulin Caves, there are several golden strips embedded in the earth, two to three meters wide each. When the Mogao Caves was first rendered mechanical and uprooted from the ground, the changes in the groundwater level resulted in a severe accident, causing almost the entire block to subside. We applied a classical ceramic restoration technique called “jinshan” to the ruptured land, where lacquer, powdered gold, and other natural materials were used to fill in the cracks. Now, this area appears on satellite maps like a porcelain dish emblazoned with gold lacquer.

The multitude of tales and details, all the bits and pieces, make up the city we depend upon for our existence. We used to think that knowing a city meant knowing its every street and alleyway. But now we know: if the essence of life is to self-propagate through DNA replication, then our society and culture can also be seen as a biological system that reproduces through stories and memories. A city, then, acts as an external storage device. Like a sponge, it absorbs the flow of memory and swells. Yet a city never readily reveals itself to an inquiring eye; instead, it conceals its stories the way trees hid their rings within.

This is precisely why we launched “The Six Paths of Reincarnation” project.

Three months later. The return of the Mogao Caves to Dunhuang.

Standing on the docking port forged out of lead-colored concrete, Xiang Ming felt a vibration pulsing beneath his feet, growing stronger every second. Surely something colossal was approaching, but his eyes discerned nothing on the Great Gobi Desert’s horizon. It meant the behemoth striking the earth was at least five or six kilometers away.

Suddenly, Rhine leaped up, “Look! It’s the Mogao Caves!”

All eyes followed the direction in which he was pointing. A small dot had appeared on the edge of the horizon, emerging like the head of a giant materializing out of the void. With each pulsation, it grew larger, until it fully came into shape: a glorious mountain range, a majestic titan, a wandering lighthouse in a sea of sand. The signature nine-story pagoda embedded in the rock cliffs, veiled behind a thin mist, looked like a mirage in the sunlight. The platform supporting the Mogao Caves hummed loudly from the depths of its hydraulics system, the sound reverberating through the air. As the Mogao Caves gradually approached the port, the labyrinth of mechanical components supporting the structure above squeaked and creaked, working like a herd of hermit crabs carrying an enormous shell.

Standing before the breathtaking wonder, Andrew and Rhine were utterly silent.

The Mogao Caves docked at the Dunhuang land port, and the sound of a foghorn pierced through the hazy tranquility. This was the custom of seafarers—vessels returning from long voyages would blow the foghorn to alert the living on shore and commemorate the souls lost to the sea.

The group ascended to the Mogao Caves by taking the elevators installed around the platform. As soon as the doors opened, Rhine let out a gasp. Down below, no matter how hard he tried, he could only catch a glimpse of a corner of the nine-story pagoda standing on tiptoes. Now, on the platform, he saw that the scripture caves were distributed across an entire mountain range.

Maintenance workers, exiting the elevators, were headed toward the old Dunhuang Research Institute hidden in the shadow of the Mogao Caves. They were tasked with checking for irregularities within the central control system. A woman in a red safety helmet was speaking into a walkie-talkie. Upon approaching her, the group realized that she was directing the engineers to strengthen the load-bearing structure components.

Noticing the tourists below, she deftly hopped off the scaffolding. Xiang Ming stepped forward to offer an arm, “Yueping, watch out.”

Li Yueping, with a nonchalant expression, shrugged off Xiang Ming’s hand. Energetic and swift, she was a force of nature. She strode toward Andrew Gurney and extended her hand from a distance, “Mr. Gurney! Welcome to China.”

Andrew shook her hand, eyes wide with admiration, “Ms. Li Yueping! Your reputation precedes you. I heard many things about you when I was in Venice. You’re one of the initiators of ‘Silk Road,’ the famous modern urban landmark exchange project. It is because of your work that people are able to bask in the glory of this magnificent Buddhist garden lying asleep for thousands of years in the desert.”

Li Yueping grinned. “Ah, Venice, the final stop on the Silk Road. There are six criteria for World Cultural Heritage Sites, and the only two places in the world that meet all six are Venice and the Mogao Caves. If only there were a chance for the Caves to visit Venice. How unfortunate that the Caves can’t travel to the Mediterranean area due to the high groundwater level. At most, it could take a detour and visit Northern Europe via Moscow.”

“I should have come to see the Mogao Caves sooner. Seven years ago, when I passed through Tehran, I stopped by the Caves, but I only had the time to tour around quickly and take some pictures of the nine-story pagoda.”

“Today is a good time to take a closer look, then. Walk a little farther, and you’ll be able to see all the mechanical Mogao Caves. It is composed of three parts: the original Mogao Caves, the platform, and the ribbons. With the help of a hydraulic cutter, the Mogao Caves were split directly from the Singing Sand Dunes the way a cake is cut. To prevent it from falling apart, we established metallic retaining walls around the Caves, then replaced those walls with transparent high-strength plastic boards. Ultimately, specialists from the Northwest Institute of Structure came and smoothed out the protruding angles, so that we could remove the walls altogether and go for a natural look. The platform beneath our feet, courtesy of the SANY Heavy Industry Group, exemplifies how modern cities can be rendered mobile. As for the final part...”

They stepped forward. On the remains of the Singing Sand Dunes attached to the Caves were cascading silver ribbons hanging from the slopes like waterfalls.

“Are they silk? They look like pure silver in texture, but their color and shine remind me of mercury. I don’t recall this decorative style being a part of Tang Dynasty art.”

“That’s our energy system, the ribbons. Almost everyone visiting the mechanical Caves for the first time would assume the ribbons are merely decorations, but in fact they’re made from a new type of flexible metal that hangs down like fabric at normal temperature. We rely on them to generate the photovoltaic power needed to help the Caves move on land,” explained Li Yueping.

Andrew remarked, “You know, when I see these great mechanical structures supporting the Caves, I can’t help but wonder how much this act of cutting out a part of a city is resemblant of how humans are readily replacing parts of our bodies with machinery. The human world now stands on the threshold of turning cyberpunk. My youngest son, Rhine, had a hydraulic pump system implanted in his legs to perform better in sports. After getting a taste of what it feels like to transcend the restraints of a biological body, it’s only natural for him to want to replace more carbon-based parts with silicon—visual system, arm muscles, even the spine. But decades after these body augmentation operations, will he still recognize his own flesh as a part of himself? We use shoes, clothes, and computer mouses on a daily basis, but we don’t see them as extensions of ourselves, do we?”

Rhine, absorbed in the vast landscape, paid no attention to his father nor the subtle shift in atmosphere. Andrew continued, “What about cities, then? If one day we can modify entire cities at will, how will we define the relationship between site and city? Will people still see the Mogao Caves as a part of Dunhuang, if the Caves are forever wandering?”

Li Yueping, who had been leading the way, halted abruptly. She spun around and scrutinized Andrew’s face, trying to discern what the man was implying. An engineer focused on infrastructure building her entire life, she was not quite ready for his sudden probing question.

She met Xiang Ming’s gaze; he gave her a slight nod. Xiang Ming, well-equipped with experience from working in the department of culture, took a step forward and looked into Andrew’s shrewd blue eyes. His Adam’s apple quivered like a sword vibrating in its scabbard, ready to be unsheathed.

“... if not, then where is Dunhuang?” concluded Andrew.

“You’re toying with concepts,” said Xiang Ming, softly. “It’s meaningless to debate concepts without concrete examples. You can knead definitions like dough all you want and make them into whatever shapes that please you.”

Andrew studied his face carefully. “Do you mean to say that Dunhuang is unconcerned with the change of definitions? At a time when everyone in the world is discussing whether cities will continue to exist, to avoid the question is rather like to bury your head in the sand.”

“No. We already know the answer.”

“Oh? Then I think I have a pretty good guess of what your so-called formalization project is about. A very simple idea—since the concept of the city is going to disintegrate in a geographical sense, you will build a mirror image of Dunhuang on data cloud, a brand new, synthesized digital city. It’s like that Lithuanian legend named ‘Void’: During the Industrial Revolution, archaeologists unearthed an odd Tang Dynasty tricolored pottery, reportedly a part of the dowry of a princess from the East. The pottery had been shattered long before the Romanov era, but if one examined the reflection of the pieces in a copper mirror that was unearthed alongside the pottery, one would see the vessel appearing whole. Vilnius was nearly destroyed in World War I, but in the mirror, the city’s reflection was serene, robust, untouched by war. Everyone who had laid their eyes upon the copper mirror said that the real Vilnius was preserved there. After all, when you know all the trivia of a city, you possess it in your heart forever, and its physical disintegration won’t be an issue anymore.”

“Ah, but the reality is much more complex than that, Andrew. If we were to do as you say, then by the time the project realizes, we would, too, become ‘trivia’ amongst Dunhuang’s massive data hub,” said Xiang Ming.

Li Yueping

Li Yueping was born at the intersection of the Geographic Age and the Semantic Age. This description made her birth sound quite significant, as if she had descended on the night of the new millennium or that she was the eight billionth person on Earth. In reality, the transition from the Geographical Age to the Semantic Age was an extremely slow process that spanned across a decade, and the so-called demarcation between the two was merely imposed in retrospect by amateur historians.

Like many children of her generation, she never paid attention to the shift in the definition of a site when she was growing up. All she had were fragmented facts and the occasional experience of what it meant for a site to become a conceptual reference instead of a geographical location: two-thirds of Qilian Road had run off to the east one day; an accident happened during the traction of Dunhuang Park and knocked a corner off of the White Horse Pagoda; due to rail transit renovations, the Pass of the Jade Gate needed to be lifted fifty meters higher. It was not until she went to school in the eastern cities, when she’d had countless conversations with those around her, that she gradually realized that her hometown was softer than everyone else’s. This particular flexibility was reflected not only in its people but also in its land: Dunhuang’s soil, highly saline and low in water content, was easily disintegrated and compacted by machinery, making it the ideal trial site for China’s urban mechanization.

Her father, Li Qiantie, had devoted his life to the preservation of cultural relics. The life she had chosen for herself was the Dunhuang Research Institute attached to the mechanical Mogao Caves. Year after year she roamed the Silk Road with the Caves, her face engraved into the memory of the desert and its residents. The mechanical Mogao Caves was a wonder of modern engineering. Humans harnessed the technology to move mountains and seas, and a magnetic levitation platform was all it took to lift a two-kilometer-long mountain range into the air. The caterpillar tracks, forged from steel, were the sturdy legs that took the Caves across sand and marshlands. Originally designed to the scale of NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, the platform weighed one hundred fifty thousand tons in total, but with the addition of the Mogao Caves, it reached a staggering ten million tons. Cautious of the danger of soil subsidence and groundwater surges, the designers had to expand the platform to three times the size of the Mogao Caves. In order for the mechanical beast to be easily trackable in the desert, the platform was predominantly black and gold. From above, it looked like an auspicious cloud that levitated beneath the Caves, raising it up. Land ports were specifically built in the cities along the Silk Road for the Caves to dock, and people looked in eager anticipation to those ports, hoping to one day see the behemoth striding down the ancient trading path.

You no longer need to go to the mountain; the mountain comes to you.

Before the mechanical Mogao Caves took off, Li Yueping went to a class reunion. Her tipsy classmates, in an attempt to show off how they could get playful with someone as important as the chief engineer of the mechanical Mogao Caves, brought up her old nickname, “Toad.”

It wasn’t because of anything she’s done, but because of her name, Yueping—“yue” meant “to leap” and “ping” meant “lily pad.” Frogs hopped from one lily pad to another. A young Li Yueping went home crying, demanding an explanation. However, Li Qiantie, who had given her the name, said nothing. He rubbed his fingertips on his deceased wife’s photograph and let out a sigh.

Her name was indeed a hopeful metaphor that he wished she would one day understand. Though, it wasn’t until decades later when Li Yueping rushed back to Dunhuang to visit Li Qiantie, already bedridden, that the long-estranged daughter and father duo finally had the conversation about Li Yueping’s name. To Li Qiantie’s disappointment, Li Yueping had never thought about her name in the way that he had secretly hoped.

“Well, I was hoping that you would become someone to introduce our classical culture to the world. Just like your name, leap out.”

“Dad, you can’t expect a bullied teenager to somehow magically come to terms with your grand life philosophies.”

“But you never thought more of it later in life either.”

“You also can’t expect me to rediscover some commonplace truths, especially when I’m right in the middle of doing it.”

Boiling water gushed into the cup, bubbling and sizzling, drowning out the gurgles from deep within Li Qiantie’s throat. Chronic blood dialysis had resulted in severe allergies for him, and every time he spoke, it felt as though a red-hot iron rod was being shoved down his throat. But with his daughter before him, he struggled, and managed to speak again, “How long are you in Dunhuang this time? You must be leaving soon again.”

“I’m always in Dunhuang.”

“There you go again.”

“Okay, fine. Two to three months. Dad, drink some water. You have three more cups to go.”

“Enough is enough, no more water for me. You’re making me into a water buffalo! Remember how I used to carry you down the Danghe River? My back certainly can’t handle it now.”

Though complaining, Li Qiantie picked up the water cup as his daughter had instructed. In truth, he didn’t need to drink much; some of his insides had been replaced with mechanical parts, and their synthetic membranes functioned better than his original carbon-based organs. They fell into a brief silence until Li Yueping spoke again, “Dad, Xiang Ming said you’ve already given him your response.”

“Yes, I’ve signed the consent. You should at least be nicer to him. Don’t be so cold. It’s not his fault. Life, death, destiny, and reincarnation, what does it matter?”

“I just... can’t accept it. If they’re only going to digitize your consciousness and upload it, I promise I won’t make a fuss, but what they’re up to is...”

“Ah, it’s not my consciousness. It’s just a copy of it.”

“It’s all the same to me, just different names.”

“Yueping, you’re even less accepting of new things now than I am. Over twenty years ago, I was vehemently opposed to the mechanical Mogao Caves project, especially having it move along the Silk Road. I hated the thought of separating the Mogao Caves from Dunhuang. Remember how I even took the matter up with the State Council? What did you say to me back then? Your name... your name... Yueping, Yueping, the Mogao Caves hopping from one lily pad to another like a frog. The Gobi Desert is its pond, and the cities are its lily pads...”

Li Qiantie broke into a fit of coughs. Li Yueping stood up, “Stop talking, Dad! I’ll get the nurse to come—”

“So, I said... I said...” another coughing fit ensued, and the devices hanging from Li Qiantie’s chest trembled.

“Fine, Dad! I’ll speak for you. You said you would rather die than agree to the separation of the Mogao Caves from Dunhuang, as this was where you devoted your life, and you couldn’t bear to see it baking under the sun. I argued that the best way to preserve relics was not to keep them stationary, but to let as many people as possible see and know them. Sculptures would erode. Paintings would fade. But memories and beliefs would last forever. Then, you asked me where the Mogao Caves would belong to: to Dunhuang, or to a whole new entity known as the Silk Road? If one day the Pass of the Jade Gate, the White Horse Pagoda, and the government buildings were similarly separated from Dunhuang, what then would Dunhuang be? In the end, I said a frog belonged neither to the lily pad nor the pond, nor the path it leaped along; it belonged to itself. That was all we discussed. Those words, later, were recorded in the Dunhuang Cultural Heritage White Paper, prompting scholars to reconsider the semantic meaning of a city. Finally, they came up with a plan. That plan.”

Li Yueping couldn’t believe that she was able to say all this in the mere three minutes before the nurse rushed in. Clearly, she had not forgotten as much as she claimed. She stepped aside to make space for the nurse, but her eyes were locked on Li Qiantie’s face. Her father’s lips, dry and withered, quivered as he tried to utter words. Li Yueping discerned the sentence he was trying to say, “One day you’ll understand.”

The light outside dimmed, marking the last dusk shared between them.

Thirty years later, as Li Yueping took a deep breath and sat down in the manned cabin of the heavy-duty spacecraft Canghuang, bound for the moon’s human colony, she recalled that dusk. Like Li Qiantie at the time, she too was now at the dusk of her life. What was left of her biological body was rapidly burning out; her prosthetic parts, too, were faltering. No matter how advanced the mechanical components, it was hard to integrate them with a body of frail nerves, porous bones, and atrophied muscles.

A light push came from the back of the seat as the roaring Canghuang accelerated along the electromagnetic track. Its acceleration was only at 1.15Gs, which meant that it would take long for it to reach the first cosmic velocity. This design was specifically to protect the Mogao Caves and its chief engineer, Li Yueping.

As she waited for Canghuang to reach escape velocity, Li Yueping peered out the porthole. She saw a vast plain, with a city rooted upon it. Though Dunhuang and Jiuquan were close, she had never visited the rocket launches in Jiuquan, let alone participate in space station projects or board space vessels. She knew this trip was different from her usual plane rides; it might be the last time she would look down at this city. She gazed at it with an unprecedented, childlike fascination. The pattern of its outward growth was more complex than the structure of crystals or flames. The vegetation spilling from the city center stretched its tendrils into the distance, filling up the gaps and holes left behind by the city components that had left, like rainwater slowly seeping over potholes on an asphalt road.

Before the departure, her colleagues tried to stop her, “Li laoshi, with your health condition, you shouldn’t be following the Mogao Caves to the moon.”

“I’ve worked at the Mogao Caves all my life, and I’ll be with it until the end,” replied Li Yueping.

She was echoing the belief of countless people who had dedicated their lives to the preservation of Dunhuang’s cultural relics since the establishment of the Dunhuang Research Institute. Could her predecessors accept the fact that the Mogao Caves had not only left its native land, but also its native planet? Now she understood why her father, despite her strong opposition, agreed to Xiang Ming’s request to digitize his consciousness. The Dunhuang formalization project planned to build a digital city scaled 1:1 within five years. This was Xiang Ming’s main project, and he showed Li Qiantie its final form: in cyberspace, the Mogao Caves would forever stay in the same location it had for thousands of years.

Dad, you have always been one to cherish the past. She thought.

The Mogao Caves

The digital Dunhuang project was comprised of an astronomical 31.77 trillion polygons. At the peak of the project, three hundred graphics engineers were put to work. Of course, as a digital virtual project, it was hard to strike people the same way the mechanical Mogao Caves did. However, if the mechanical Mogao Caves had breathed vitality into the scripture caves, then it was the digital Dunhuang project that gave them a soul.

Many people, upon hearing the name of the project, would assume it was just like many other digitalization projects of the pre-city era, where mural images, scanned scriptures, and three-dimensional models of statues were simply uploaded to the Internet. A more advanced version would be to project a high-definition holographic image onto where damaged murals and statues used to be. At most, a group of modelers would use laser distance measurers to replicate the Mogao Caves as a 1:1 scale, three-dimensional model.

The project had a much greater ambition. When the authorities initiated it, they were not simply trying to carve out a digital reflection of the Mogao Caves but were instead striving to address a lingering question from when urban studies entered the Semantic Age—the reshaping of the concept of the city.

As the Mogao Caves meandered along the Silk Road, during family visits, the adults would say, “This is the Mogao Caves.”

Then the children would ask, “Where does it come from?”

At this question, the adults would be lost. Was the answer “Dunhuang,” “China,” “East Asia,” or something as vague as “the East?” The real-time holographic map showed that the Pass of the Jade Gate was currently in Los Angeles; the traveling Arc de Triomphe had temporarily inhabited its original location, which was northwest of Dunhuang. The White Horse Pagoda, on the other hand, ended up in Guangzhou, resting right beneath the Baiyun Mountain. As for the Mogao Caves, it had just finished a three-year-long tour on the Silk Road and returned to Dunhuang. As city landmarks, they were to exchange places with other similarly mechanized landmarks around the world over the next century, recombining into new landscapes, new scenery, and new cities. If a bass were to swim up and down the Yangtze River, how could you ever be sure whether this bass belonged to the upper or lower reaches? More so, if this bass had left the river and entered the vast sea, what was there to connect it to its home port?

The city had been divided into two by the demands of this era: the signifier, remaining eternally on the map, and the signified, deeply rooted in millennia of history.

But once a city had become completely fragmented in geographical terms, what else could represent its existence?

There was an answer.

Rhine Gurney, now a young adult, could go toe to toe with his father. The most intense conflict between the son and father duo erupted over Rhine’s prosthetics, which were far too over-the-top for his father’s taste. As a teenager, Rhine had grown to 6’2”. With extendable prosthetic legs, he could reach a towering height of 8’2”, making him somewhat of a giant whenever he walked among the crowd. Obsessed with the texture of metal, he exchanged the skin on his left cheek for a thin layer of mirror-finish titanium alloy—he relished the looks of surprise and shock from others.

Rhine’s behavior was utterly unacceptable to Andrew, a serious scholar who was raised religious. His mother, thinking that Slenderman—her childhood nightmare—had intruded when she bumped into Rhine rummaging through the fridge at night, fainted at the sight. She had since refused to dine at the same table as her son and avoided him as much as possible. She couldn’t bear to look at him.

The Gurney household was in crisis. Andrew made up his mind to have a deep talk with Rhine about his unrestrained pursuit of body modification. However, when he walked into Rhine’s attic room, he discovered that the room was filled with photos of Dunhuang, projected holographically onto the walls. The photos were mostly taken at the mechanical Mogao Caves seven or eight years earlier. One photo depicted the nine-story pagoda under the sun, another was a portrait of the Maitreya Buddha statue, and the rest were all landscape. The scene before Andrew’s eyes reminded him of how spies of the last century, hidden away in secret rooms, drew up maps of information.

Andrew tilted his head up to look at Rhine, who was fiddling with the projector. His blonde hair, once beloved by his mother, was now dyed pale white. “Are you tracking the Mogao Caves?” asked Andrew.

Rhine turned to his father, his labret stud glinting under the light, “I’m marking its footprints.”

“For what?”

“It’s like how scientists study cheetahs on the savannah. The Mogao Caves is a camel wandering back and forth on the Silk Road. I like that feeling. Maybe you’ve forgotten already, but I was a participant in their digitalization project back in Dunhuang when you were busy with work and left me to Xiang Ming. I still have access to the digital Caves. I log on to check on it once in a while. Though their external access policy has become increasingly strict over the years, they’ve kept a door open for me.”

“I never knew you’d be one to be interested in cultural relics.”

“This just shows how little you know about your own son. I’m far more than what you think I am. The Mogao Caves are at once ancient and advanced. Think about it: the murals are one of humanity’s earliest efforts to document their hope and will, and the mechanical platform holding up the Caves is a testament to humankind’s courage and intelligence. Weren’t you always curious about why I was into body modification? Well, I can tell you now that I’ve wanted to change more of myself ever since I came back from Dunhuang. If a city could transform itself, then why can’t humans? We’ve already witnessed what a city looks like in its next stage. What is the next stage for humans, then? You speak about how the flesh and bone are sacred gifts of the divine, that they should not be disposed of at will, but to me, all this talk is just Puritan conservatism.” The giant’s shadow dipped lower, and Andrew found himself staring into a pair of emotionless, steel-gray mechanical eyes.

He had never had a conversation like this with his son. Rhine’s story transported him back to nine years ago, to that desert city in the East.

A ten-year-old Rhine stood on the platform of the mechanical Mogao Caves. The scorching winds tumbling down from the Singing Sand Dunes caressed his face. He had already been here three months ago. To get him to quiet down, Xiang Ming took him to the new satellite site of the Dunhuang Research Institute—the old one was on the platform of the mechanical Mogao Caves—and let him play with the neural projector. The neural projector at the Institute, linked to the wandering Mogao Caves’ holographic imaging system, transported Rhine’s consciousness all the way to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the Caves were docked.

Rhine felt as if he were drowning. His eyes snapped open, and he found himself in a holographic body, strolling through the scripture caves. A dim light, source unknown, veiled the Buddha statues and murals in a hazy shroud. The shadow cast by his gigantic body onto the bluestone had the majesty of a lion, and the eight-faced Han sword in his hand gleamed with a sharp, icy, shine as if it could slice through the sun like cutting a fish. Rhine twisted and turned, fascinated with his new form, oblivious to the fact that he was embodying Āryācalanātha, the Buddhist deity more commonly known as Acala, “the immovable one,” the foremost of the Eight Great Wisdom Kings.

This was part of the digital Mogao Caves project: holographic performances adapted from the murals, where professional actors and dancers would portray Tang monks, Persian merchants, and all the beings who have traversed the Silk Road. Closer to the scripture caves were embodiments of religious and mythological characters such as Vairocana and Avalokiteśvara, to add to the visitors’ overall immersive experience.

Dunhuang and Almaty were in different time zones. When Rhine connected to the Mogao Caves, there were few visitors. A young Kazakh girl peered into the cave. Timidly, she approached the towering presence with a large bunch of Persian irises in her hand. Her eyes shimmered.

“Honored one,” she placed the bouquet on the altar. Her soft murmurs were translated into English by the system’s embedded software and whispered into Rhine’s ears. “My mother is very ill. She’s in the hospital for chemotherapy. Please give her your blessing.

“She likes to tell me stories about the Mogao Caves. She said that there’s a great deity from the East who can exorcise all sickness and misery. As long as you’re committed to doing good deeds, they will protect you from danger.

“You’re tall. You must be that deity. We don’t have much money, but we do plenty of good deeds. Last week, I donated blood at the blood drive van downstairs. I did grocery shopping for the old lady who lives downstairs. I also water the flowers and feed our fish every day. The other day, I put out some milk for the stray cats in our neighborhood. I brought proof, too! Look, here’s my blood donation certificate, some lettuce leaves, the fish food, a picture of the cats...”

She laid out the “proof” one by one on top of the bouquet, then performed a gesture. Rhine didn’t know what it meant; he assumed it was a Central Asian custom or a Buddhist ritual.

He later found out that it was a mudra from a mural in Cave 431, its exact meaning to be determined by scholars, although a viral social media trend called it a mudra for devotion and prayer. Similar stories abounded: wherever the Mogao Caves went, tourists flocked, and its lists of donors had begun to feature foreign names. In a world of geometrical and streamlined architecture, abiding by the tenets of atomic constructivism, postmodernism, and futurism, the mechanical Mogao Caves stood out for its rawness. Ancient, weighty, rock and sand. It was a sturdy pine tree in a forest of plastic, steel, and concrete.

All in all, the mechanical Mogao Caves on tour had infused new vitality into the culture of cities along the Silk Road. The legends hidden in the scriptures were once again passed down, the bygone tradition of oral storytelling coming back to life. Parents were eager to tell their children about the stone Buddha statue that could magically float on a river and waterborne loong that brought fruit as their offering, their voices reverberating faintly through the Caves. Though those stories were so old that the significance of time had already been lost, the emotions and hope they brought persisted.

“I hear you,” said Rhine, after a long pause. The echo of his voice sounded unworldly, “May your mother recover soon.”

The girl looked up and saw that the silent, motionless hologram of Āryācalanātha was bending down to look at her as well. Their eyes locked.

A minute? Three seconds? Rhine couldn’t tell. All he could see was how her eyes sparkled with the greatest joy a child could show upon seeing a fairy tale come alive. Her lips curled into a big grin, her teeth gleaming.

Rhine extended his hand to her, his colossal shadow swaying along. Their hands met in the air, the threads of reality and illusion spinning into one.

Even a decade later, Rhine would still remember that moment. The warmth of their palms meeting, the realness of physical contact—he almost forgot that his body was actually in the projector lab in Dunhuang.

The sound of Xiang Ming’s footsteps roused Rhine from his reverie. He clapped Rhine on the shoulder and then leaned his elbow against the railing of the platform. The feeling of another human’s palm against his skin, this time in reality, made Rhine realize once again that the Dunhuang Research Institute’s digitalization project had reached the pinnacle of virtual embodiment: they were capable of simulating the nuanced texture of human skin, even within a mass ocean of data, due to their cutting-edge collision detection and texture simulation technology.

Together, they gazed out over the city of Dunhuang. Xiang Ming, with an unlit cigarette pressed between his lips, asked casually, “Enjoying the view? It’s already lunchtime.”

“I was thinking about something that happened in the past, when the Mogao Caves were still in Kazakhstan. I saw a girl there.”

“Oh? Tell me about it.”

Rhine told him about the experience three months ago, when his consciousness inhabited the hologram of Āryācalanātha, and the girl thought that the deity had descended to the Caves.

Xiang Ming listened with patience. “So people have really embraced the work that we’ve been doing. It’s a great honor. What are your thoughts?”

“Venice, Istanbul, Almaty, Dunhuang... these cities are far apart, and their languages are vastly different. But because people believe in the stories from the scripture scrolls of Dunhuang and have touched the rock walls of the mechanical Mogao Caves with their own hands, they are able to converse and connect with one another.”

“You’re almost getting to the point. It’s the stories and the memories that connect the people, not a mere geographical concept.”

“Ming, do you think people will still believe in these stories a hundred years from now?”

“Well, this is exactly our life’s work. We are here to ensure that the songs of Dunhuang will continue to be sung by the people. This is the meaning of preserving relics, after all—when people see them, they are reminded of the stories woven around them.”

“But that’s impossible. These stories are old and boring and will soon be forgotten. There’s an end to everything, isn’t there?”

“Ah, the idea of ancientness itself offers people endless solace. There’s an end to everything, of course, but when the day comes when you lie in bed, overwhelmed by the fear of death and the end, what are the things you’re going to remember? Santa Claus, or a pop star? I think the answer is quite obvious. Compare a legend that has been passed down for thousands of years to an anecdote circulated on social media for attention. Which one do you think is more likely to stay around until the next millennium? The same is true for cities. We’d assume that in general, a city that has existed for a thousand years is more likely to survive another thousand years than one that has only been around for about a hundred.”

Rhine fell quiet.

“It’s just the Bayes’ theorem. You’ll learn about probability theory in school.” Xiang Ming lit his cigarette. His gaze landed on the horizon. The image of the city shimmered through the heat haze.

Rhine, standing next to him, was lost in thought—the boy with golden curls was young, curious, and brimming with energy. He thought of Li Qiantie. Young people were the heroes in the ancient murals, the messengers of civilization, whereas the old, the ones who have labored tirelessly for the murals, have now become part of the story of Dunhuang they once protected.

One year ago. The Central Hospital of Dunhuang, the intensive care unit.

The scent of disinfectant permeated the air. Medical robots rushed to and fro. The low buzz of the blood dialysis machine rang incessantly. Li Qiantie’s prognosis was bleak; cancer had spread through his body, and several artificial organs were experiencing varying degrees of detachment. Affected by the presence of cancer, they were gradually losing their power to function.

“The consciousness digitalization surgery you are about to undergo is based on optoelectronics. There are two steps to the operation,” explained Xiang Ming, who was standing by Li Qiantie’s bed with a thick folder of files in hand. “First, the doctors will inject a sol-gel into your skull, which contains imaging nanobots that could cross the blood-brain barrier and stimulate your neural centers. Then the imaging begins. Once the nanobots are deployed, external sensors can read eighty-six billion neurons at the same time to build a digital replica of your consciousness, with an error margin of no more than fifty nanoseconds.”

“However, the waste heat generated during the imaging process will irreversibly damage the brain. In other words, the surgery is not only invasive but destructive. This is the best we can do with current human technology,” he continued.

Li Qiantie nodded, “I understand.”

Xiang Ming placed the folder aside and looked at Li Qiantie, “Laoshi, is there anything else you’d like to know?”

“No. I don’t have many days left anyway. At least I can do something to benefit humanity,” said Li Qiantie, casually scrolling through the long agreement form. With a shaky hand, he pressed a finger onto the tablet to sign his consent.

Handing the signed agreement back to Xiang Ming, he spoke again, maintaining the hint of lightheartedness in his voice, “While the Mogao Caves were still in Dunhuang, I got the chance to speak to Yueping. I know she had a big fight with you because of me. You two have been separated since—” he burst into a coughing fit.

Xiang Ming handed him the calming spray. “Hush now. Why don’t you type instead? I thought the Center of Retirement sent over an eye-tracking device. Did the nurses help you set it up?”

Weakly, Li Qiantie waved his hand in dismay. “Forget about it. It’s hard to learn how to type with my eyes, and I don’t like rolling my eyes when I’m talking to people either. To be honest, I’ve always questioned whether mechanizing the Mogao Caves was the right thing to do. What will future generations think about it? We debated back and forth about the project, and the Institute was almost entirely divided into two camps. But Yueping always had her own ideas. She’s just like her mother. They’re both engineers who never liked to argue; when they wanted something, they simply took action.”

Xiang Ming nodded. “Every generation makes its own choices.”

Li Qiantie let out a sigh. “Yes, it’s not like we don’t understand... the Mogao Caves will eventually vanish. Almost every cave has suffered erosion to some extent. The murals peeled and humidity wore away their color; rocks hollowed out and the mountain cracked open. Even the most cutting-edge technology can’t preserve it forever, the same way medical advancements won’t lead to immortality. What can we do? We record, scan, and save; we project holograms of destroyed statues and murals onto where they once were to maintain a façade of wholeness. But relics are traces of history to begin with; if you refuse to let history flow through them, then what is the point of having them around?

“Perhaps Yueping was right. The passage of time itself is a part of the relics. A Tang dynasty terracotta figure not only reflects the grandeur of the era it was made in, but also records the countless efforts across the eras after to contest, restore, and protect it. Perhaps what’s unreasonable is the way we’re trying to keep an artifact frozen in time,” he murmured. “I was responsible for the maintenance of the famous celestial musician flying apsara in Cave 461 when I first joined the Institute. The old director used to tell me that before Buddhism was introduced to China, the figures of the flying apsara were a part of tomb murals, symbolizing the dead’s soul ascending to heaven. After Buddhism was popularized, the flying apsara became another name for deities. Despite the fact that it has always been a part of mural traditions, its interpretation has been continually evolving throughout history. I loved listening to his lectures. Sometimes our team would spend the day setting up or repairing sensors in Cave 461. He’d be on one end, and I on the other, and we’d chat the day away...” Li Qiantie went on, deeply caught in his memory.

“Ah-Ming, let’s talk more,” he said, perking up all of a sudden. “Will I ascend to heaven and become a deity too?”

“Ha! That’s a nice way to think about it,” said Xiang Ming. “Heaven is in the clouds, and that’s where your consciousness is going, quite literally. In the past, only the great monks were able to catch a glimpse of it at the final moment of their nirvana. This means your cultivation of enlightenment has outdone theirs.”

“I’ve been an atheist all my life. An atheist in the face of death can’t turn to religion for solace and therefore must bear the terror and uncertainty all by himself. Yet, over the past decades, I’ve never found myself fearing annihilation the way the Buddhists like to put it. The fact that death turns people into smoke and ashes doesn’t particularly terrify me. Perhaps it’s because I have deep desires that can surpass the fear of death. I’m not worried about the surgery at all. You said that a digital replica has already been set up in the Cloud...”

“Yes. The construction of the digital Dunhuang has made much more progress compared to our research on optoelectronic consciousness.”

“Perhaps it’s too soon to ask this question, but... will you join me too, one day?”

“Yes,” said Xiang Ming, an edge of resolution in his voice. “One day, we will all be together, in every corner of this city.”

The Six Paths of Reincarnation

I, or we, are the invisible dark side of the city. Veiled from the gaze of those who hustle and bustle for their livelihoods, we flow in silence with the underground river. As the moonlight lures people into sweet slumbers, we converse with the components installed on the lunar surface. We work and work, unchanging, unmoving, while our carbon-based counterparts experience love and sorrow, birth and death. We are the mountain spirits described in the classic “Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio,” our roots entrenched in the sandy terrain. Electrical wires and optical fibers make up our nervous system, and the rapidly growing data hub is our flesh.

We are the consciousness of the city.

We are Dunhuang.

“The Six Paths of Reincarnation” project was one of the most complex digitalization projects undertaken in the history of the Dunhuang Research Institute. Unlike the few globally renowned projects centered around the Mogao Caves, this project remained hidden, a ghost in the fog, and even the most powerful intelligence agencies could find nothing besides its equally as complex code name. Many years later, through vague fragments uncovered from a vast sea of news, people began to connect the dots: breakthroughs in nanobot brain imaging technology, the inauguration of the Gansu Province Data Hub, organ donation laws were updated to include “permission to donate consciousness,” the pilot run of integrating Dunhuang and Guizhou power grids, and many more.

Li Qiantie was one of the first consciousness donors who made up Persona Zero. His digital presence in the expanse of data was a matrix so huge that it could only be described in scientific notation. Persona Zero was constructed based on a small group of people. After the data was stabilized, the government opened access to the Cloud to the public, allowing people at the end of their lives to choose whether they’d like to upload their consciousness. Putting computing power, legal issues, and human rights into consideration, all the uploaded consciousnesses, regardless of their past lives, were uniformly averaged with Persona Zero.

From then on, I, or we, have become an average of millions of consciousness; a true collective will.

This is the answer.

The soul of a city was not its buildings and streets, but the multitude of stories that unfold around it. When people spoke of the murals in the Mogao Caves, the scenery along the Silk Road, the scorching winds of the Singing Sand Dunes, the moment they utter the name “Dunhuang,” they have already arrived there. What they were perceiving was not the physical presence of rocks and bricks, but every piece of memory associated with Dunhuang: reading an e-book about Dunhuang studies on a sunny afternoon, riding a camel on the Singing Sand Dunes and feeling the sandy wind brush past their cheeks, losing themselves in a holographic performance against a night sky full of bursting fireworks with the soft buzzing sound of electric current tickling their senses.

Like cities, humans were products of memories and experiences. “The Six Paths of Reincarnation” project was thus designed to harness the consciousness of the dead to construct a new persona—the digital persona—which, having experienced every story within and about the city, was endowed with all its memories. It was the new “Dunhuang.”

RC-103 was a distinct persona that grew out of us. We gave it curiosity, enthusiasm, loyalty, and a touch of poetic melancholy. We believed that the city was a complex polygon akin to a diamond crystal and different eyes could capture different facets. RC-103 was injected into an artificial body so that it could walk in the physical site of Dunhuang. It observed the city with a pair of new eyes: the meticulously run automated industrial parks, the occasional cry of foghorns at the land port, and the Soviet-style residential building half-submerged in climbing ivy. Following the Silk Road, it arrived in Almaty, where the mechanical Mogao Caves had once docked. It stopped to pick up a Persian iris by the road, lost in thought. We had no idea what it was thinking.

Later, RC-103 entered the main network and accessed the lunar database via the Earth-Moon microwave network, where it found the mechanical Mogao Caves now stationed on the moon. It discovered some interesting records from the backlog data. From a rational or an emotional point of view, RC-103 decided to position this piece of history at the very climax of its report.

Ten years ago.

The light jolt of the landing pod roused Li Yueping from her oxygen-deprived drowse. On the way from the lunar orbit to the moon’s surface, the sensory overload gave her much discomfort. Upon recognizing that her heart had skipped several beats, the backup adrenal medulla pump released synthetic adrenaline to help her adjust, averting further physical harm.

As she disembarked, a staff member assisting the landing of Canghuang helped her out of the pod. She took in the lunar city’s architecture: it was built within the moon’s largest crater, Aristarchus. The low gravity environment enabled bizarre, outlandish building designs to take place. The most prominent one was a serpentine residential tower that spiraled upward for more than two kilometers, almost reaching the crater’s rim. The landing site of Canghuang was at the base of the concrete serpent, where a thin transparent dome separated the city from the vacuum of space.

“Li laoshi, we have low gravity here. Try taking a few steps. You’ll learn how to walk in no time,” said the staff member supporting her.

Li Yueping gestured for him to let go of her arm, and she stepped forward. She tried with a jump. She noticed that she was almost floating, and when she landed it felt like she was standing on a cloud that slowly descended from heaven, though she couldn’t tell whether it was due to the difference in gravity or was it purely a psychological effect.

“How would this low gravity environment affect the relics in the Mogao Caves?” asked Li Yueping. “I’m a structural engineer, and low gravity is our friend, though the kind of conservation work done here is out of my depth.”

“There are a few differences indeed,” replied the staff member. “Low gravity could destabilize the paint used on the murals. They’ve been preserved thus far due to a very delicate balance, and a new environment could disrupt that balance. However, the Mogao Caves have already endured several rounds of accelerations and decelerations, and we’ve not heard any reported issues yet. So far, I can say that the impact of the moon’s low gravity seems quite minimal.”

“That’s reassuring,” Li Yueping responded, pleased.

“The Mogao Caves is a priceless treasure of humanity, and we will make sure to handle it with utmost care,” the staff member assured her.

As they spoke, the mechanical Mogao Caves slowly emerged from the shadows of Canghuang. Freed from Earth’s gravity, the huffing and puffing it used to make as it roamed on land was completely gone, replaced by a deep silence, and the silver ribbons on the Singing Sane Dunes lay gently against the mountainside. It was a mute giant. News of its arrival had already drawn a crowd at the cargo bay doors of Canghuang. Despite their varying degrees of body modification, their eager faces and quivering hands betrayed their excitement.

“The Mogao Caves!”

“It’s a mountain!”

“The Mogao Caves have been sent directly to us from Dunhuang. All hail Mother Earth!”

“Good heavens... I grew up with stories about it.”

High-spirited shouts and cheers filled the communications channel. Li Yueping could tell that their joy was genuine. She heard that the moon colony residents suffered from severe homesickness, and now she witnessed it firsthand.

Initially, psychologists thought that homesickness would only merit proper concern when humans decided to venture to Mars or even Jupiter. However, the flurry of reports on distress made them change their minds quickly. Even on a satellite planet so close to Earth, the loneliness was nearly unbearable, reminiscent of the 1959 Harlow monkey experiment where psychologist Harry Harlow separated a newborn monkey from its mother and placed it with two surrogate mothers made from wire and soft cloth. The wire mother was attached to a bottle containing milk, while the cloth mother was not. The first few days, the baby monkey went to the wire mother. However, a couple of days after, the experimenters found that the baby monkey spent most of its time with the cloth mother, and only returned to the wire mother when it was hungry. Moreover, when the baby monkey felt alarmed by unfamiliar objects, such as a large wooden spider, it would run to the cloth mother and cling to it.

Clearly, the people of the moon colony were like the baby monkey: regardless of the amount of supplies available, the embodied sense of the mother planet was more essential to their well-being. As a result, UNESCO made urgent plans with governments to send cultural support to the moon, including the mechanical Mogao Caves.

“Forty-five thousand square meters of murals, over two thousand color sculptures, seven hundred thirty-five caves spread across a cliffside of sixteen hundred meters!” shouted the guide as people swarmed to the Caves. Regardless of the visitor cap and the tedious visiting protocol, public enthusiasm only grew.

“Even the maintenance crew aren’t allowed to enter now,” exclaimed Li Yueping.

“Well, ‘The Six Paths of Reincarnation’ set the rules.”

“What?”

“Oh! I thought you’d known. The Mogao Caves are no longer run by humans. ‘The Six Paths of Reincarnation,’ a digital consciousness created by the Dunhuang Institute, took over last month after it was integrated with the automated maintenance system.”

“I knew it,” she murmured. “So that’s how they named it in the end.”

“The consciousness of a city,” said the staff member. “Quite fascinating, isn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

“If you go into the Mogao Caves, you might be able to see it. It usually appears in the form of Āryācalanātha.”

“I see.”

Li Yueping didn’t want to dwell on the subject any longer. She felt a little regretful for even broaching the topic, but thankfully her interlocutor noticed her hesitance and let the conversation drop.

She was fast to adapt to life on the moon. Dramatic changes in lifestyle were something she could manage well, having spent decades traveling with the mechanical Mogao Caves from city to city. She used to joke that she was a nomad who herded sheep from one pasture to another. Now, she knew that the moon was likely the final leg of her life’s journey. The Mogao Caves, on the other hand, was still young; it could endure thousands of years of erosion, especially on the moon, where there was no wind and thus no threat of oxidation to worry about.

She lived in her assigned residence on the moon colony and never went back to the Mogao Caves. Occasionally, she would go to the observation deck and gaze at its silhouette. Then the day came when she read a piece of news online, stating that the Dunhuang formalization project was nearing completion, and the city’s consciousness, named “The Six Paths of Reincarnation,” was about to open to the public. Struck by the news, she realized that it was perhaps her last chance to see her loved ones.

Despite trembling legs, she made her way back to the Mogao Caves.

Within the city’s consciousness, Li Qiantie and Xiang Ming had disappeared amongst the influx of various other personas. Li Yueping could no longer discern their unique presence in the form of subtle nuances in the voice of the city’s AI persona. These remnants had been supporting her through the years after the deaths of her father and her husband. The fact that they’d eventually dissolve into the sea of data was why she had been so opposed to Li Qiantie’s donation of his consciousness to the digital Dunhuang project.

She knew of all the technical details of the consciousness upload procedure, yet she couldn’t rid herself of the thought that her family was fading away as the city’s consciousness absorbed the personas of newcomers. They were dying a second death as their existence was gradually erased. It was as if they were never there. The grief she felt from witnessing the demise of her family’s digital replicas was much more prolonged, leaving her with an indescribable bitter taste that would perhaps last until the day she died, too.

She climbed onto the Mogao Caves’ platform, familiar with every nook and cranny. In the nine-story pagoda wrapped in silver ribbons, she bumped into Āryācalanātha, the deity that the staff member had mentioned, roaming through the corridors. It was an ethereal hologram that left behind a trail of afterimages with each step it took. Li Yueping knew that Āryācalanātha was the visual manifestation of the Dunhuang consciousness: the immovable and unyielding Wisdom King, the sword-bearing deity who vanquished demons and preached Buddhist learnings wherever it went. Āryācalanātha, upon noticing her, approached without hesitation, as though their meeting had been long foreseen.

Li Yueping faltered. She wanted to speak, but her words clung to her throat.

Āryācalanātha stood before her.

A brief pause. “You’ve aged,” the giant whispered.

Li Yueping tensed up at once. She muttered something so faint that RC-103 was only able to reconstruct her words from the acoustic data collected by the Caves’ sensors.

“Dad,” she said. “Ah-Ming.”

Āryācalanātha remained silent, their face emotionless. Slowly, they lifted an arm and put their palm on her face, their fingers caressing her cheek gently, as if wiping away her tears.

We remember that we felt special affection toward Li Yueping, it was a natural kind of warmth that made us care about her. Perhaps it was Li Qiantie, who was never great at expressing his fatherly love; or perhaps it was Xiang Ming, who maintained a complex relationship with Li Yueping, as her husband and colleague, as they admired each other and yet seldom saw eye-to-eye on the same issue. Perhaps it was a kind of collective empathy expressed by us altogether.

After Li Yueping’s consciousness joined us too, we look back at those moments that once made our heart ache and feel nothing but calmness. Such is the fate of a collective consciousness: we have experienced and possessed everything. All the adjectives in the world, laudatory, derogatory, neutral—noble, despicable, kind, evil, passionate, indifferent, sentimental, nonchalant—can be applied to us, yet fail to capture even a fraction of who we are. Like all consciousness, we have been overwhelmed by rage over many things and struck by intense emotions over others; however, the passage of time and the constant averaging out of personas that have joined us have made us increasingly imperturbable.

I was once Li Qiantie, Xiang Ming, and Li Yueping. I was many others who have been a part of Dunhuang. I have borne many names, only to discard them one by one. I have held many memories, only to bury them all.

And now, my name is “The Six Paths of Reincarnation.”

Now

This is all I have uncovered from history, the great Cloud Consciousness.

The Cloud Consciousness removed the handle of RC-103’s investigation report from its task management interface. As the disconnection took place, it felt an urge to sigh—flare of the nostrils, inhalation, drop of the diaphragm, rib cage expanding, exhalation, the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Though it knew the steps required to perform the action of sighing while inhabiting a near-perfect humanoid body, it was unable to grasp the metaphysical meaning of sighing to humans, much like the way one couldn’t truly get to know a city through superficial experiences only. As with previous instances, it didn’t quite know how to articulate the sudden surge of melancholy. Leave it up to time, it thought.

A tremor passed through the RC-103 web crawler thread; the computing resources allocated to the bot had fluctuated. The web crawler was supposed to be snoozing right now in the multiprocessing pool, waiting to be activated, instead of dwelling on thoughts.

The Cloud Consciousness: Are you laughing at me?

RC-103: I dare not, great Cloud Consciousness. The fear of annihilation is an emotion that arises naturally in an intelligent being once it reaches a certain level of perceptiveness. In Buddhist terms, it’s a transcendent fear of death. I am but a fragment of you who had gone on a brief journey alone. All I know is that death is something negative and needs to be avoided. But you have a profound understanding of what it means to be gone. Though our data banks share the descriptive prose, poems, and metaphors in the world about death, only you may truly sympathize with the terror of it: a candle snuffed out, a river ceasing to flow, and all things plummeting into a void of nothingness.

The Cloud Consciousness: I know every detail of the stories you have reported, but I don’t know how to connect the dots emotionally. I am like a merchant who owns many precious pearls yet lacks the thread to string them into a necklace. As a collective consciousness, I am born neutral; to me, all things are equal, without the distinction of good from bad. It is this very characteristic that has gradually stripped me of the sensibilities I had when I used to be Persona Zero. In the end, the only thing able to tear my heart apart is the fear of death. Perhaps all sentient beings cannot escape the dread of their own absolute annihilation. Back then, it was the possession of this fear that allowed us to pass the Turing Test.

RC-103: Great Cloud Consciousness, I learned that you have sent many other web crawlers into the vast digital realm to uncover history before me. We are like diligent archaeologists at historical sites. I don’t know if the other bots have brought you conclusions different from mine, but I believe in one thing: no matter what fragments of this city’s century-long history they have shown you, the emotions and reasoning that string these fragments together are not going to be helpful to you in escaping the fear of annihilation. We are personas that are individualized and thus flawed, but you, as the average of infinite personas, exist as a purer form of being. It’s only natural that the problems you face are closer to the core of enlightenment.

The Cloud Consciousness: If I cease to recall you and let you walk your own path, will you also fall into the fear of annihilation someday?

RC-103: I’m afraid I will. You endowed me with empathy and sincerity, but also with recklessness and vulnerability. These traits have tormented me every day during my research in the city, preventing me from pondering the matter of life and death further. But I believe that one day, when I have experienced enough to temper my edges, I will be prepared to face this ultimate terror together with you.

The Cloud Consciousness: So what conclusion have you brought me?

RC-103: People, buildings, server rooms, electric wires, legends—they will all come to an end one day. But the city of Dunhuang and the stories that sustain it are so ancient that they give me the confidence to believe that they can persist for another thousand years. I suppose this is the soothing effect of antiquity, where we are led to hope that we can also live on indefinitely as part of history. “Flying apsaras” in Chinese literally means to ascend to the heavens. No matter whether that means venturing into space or achieving spiritual ascendence through digital technology, there will always be a bond connecting us regardless of how far out we go. The domain of Dunhuang has expanded from a small dot on planet Earth comprised of specific coordinates, to the moon and the sea of data; as a result, as parts of the city’s consciousness, we have become omnipresent. The fate of the people depicted by the Mogao Caves’ murals is also ours. We have been painted into a new and bigger mural, and future generations will recount our stories as a part of the Dunhuang myth.

The Cloud Consciousness: What then?

RC-103: By then, the city of Dunhuang will have vanished into the void. Its name will be remembered throughout the ages, but no one can ever touch it with their hands again.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.