Now and Then, He Seems to Dive into Memory to Play

Memory may be a pool of unanswering water. Ripples easily disturb its mirrored surface, leaving the image blurred but its outlines intact.

One afternoon about eight years ago, in a classroom at a middle school in Chongqing, a girl came to speak to him. As leader of the group that had just cleaned the classroom, she was required to tell him, leader of the next group, that tomorrow would be their turn. They stood toward the back of the corridor on the classroom’s right side, he facing toward the rear and she toward the front. She looked into his eyes as she spoke, the tip of her nose perhaps ten centimeters^* from his. He seemed to lose all awareness in an instant and could do nothing but stare at her nose—or perhaps he looked only at her eyes. The truly miraculous thing was that, although he thought he had lost himself, he heard every word she said.

Four or perhaps five years later, they had long since lost touch. He vaguely remembered that she had an account on Weibo, China’s major microblogging platform. Naturally, he did not follow it. Then he recalled that she and another friend they shared probably followed each other. Naturally, he was not going to ask this friend. All right: the treasure hunt had its puzzle. Starting with the friend’s following list, find her among three hundred people. He knew that she had posted at least a thousand times. That meant he could not open each profile and immediately tell whether it was hers: an account with that many posts would contain a great deal of reposted material, and reposts could not reveal whether the person behind them was someone he had not seen in years.

People can be astonishingly alike. He almost mistook another girl from the same middle school, steeped in the same Chongqing culture, for her. He very nearly found himself moved by the posts of this accidental double. Perhaps he alone saw no irony in that and did not take it to mean that what he sought was not the thing itself, but the pleasure of finding it.

In the end, he found her. Of course he did. Compared with searching for a needle in the ocean, he had an embarrassment of clues. He could not say that he vividly remembered how it felt to see that Weibo account for the first time in more than a thousand days. In fact, he could remember almost nothing. Yet those blurred fragments really were his keys. His brain seemed to perform some mysterious synthesis of the information: sometime before September 2010, she should have posted a photograph. Its contents had left no trace in his memory, but the photograph ought to have been called “A Boring Afternoon.” With that, he was finally able to rule out the previous false lead. Some seven billion people had all lived through those two hundred-odd days before September 2010, but luckily his search set contained only three hundred. Once time was added, the problem was solved.

He seemed to understand that, in this cyberpunk age, human memory had become traceable for the first time.

Perhaps imagination had worked on the story, but he became convinced that the beauty of this encounter in his life was closely connected to a certain question on Baidu Zhidao, a Chinese question-and-answer site. This was how it happened: he had once done something that perhaps carried a certain significance. It made her curious, so she went to Baidu Zhidao and posted a question in search of an answer.

Of course he had forgotten what the question was, and of course he wanted to find it. Once, within eight hundred days^** of its being posted, he had managed to locate it using nothing more than a search engine. As he remembered it, he spent an hour trying combinations of keywords on Baidu without success, then switched to Google and quickly found the answer. His other clue was that her Baidu username contained two elements: “76” and the Chinese character dǎo—“island.”

The miracle did not happen again. Over the next two or three years, whenever the question returned to him, he opened his browser and mounted another fruitless search. Like every puzzle game he played, it always brought him back to the level where he was stuck.

A memory can only be a single-player game, tedious to everyone but the player. He had no choice but to play on alone. Fortunately, in this cyberpunk age, memory had not only become traceable; it had also found somewhere to live.

But what, after all, were “76” and “island”?

^* Ten centimeters is an estimate of a distance in memory. There may be a linear mapping between memory and reality here, but because we cannot determine the exact transformation matrix between them, it is difficult to calculate the real-world distance to which “ten centimeters” corresponds.

^** If we are willing to accept a 90% confidence interval, this figure can be reduced to five hundred days.