Soft Scifi - Blog Posts

Confession 91-02

This is a tale of three time-defying knights, but we shall start with humdrum glory.

16 years felt like half an eternity within the high walls of a mansion with seemingly as many rooms as there were visible stars in the night sky. Is there a better half elsewhere? Ilera often pondered. Born to parents who were slaves themselves in this aristocratic household, she spent her days hauling up trash, scrubbing off grime and wringing wet rags while other slave girls giggled among themselves when they could, sharing gossip about its master, who was always hanging out with a Somaku game buddy who practically lived in a house of ill repute. Hear no evil. That was the natural gift of her complete hearing loss. Why not finish the work quickly so that all of us could have time to teach ourselves to read and live second lives in the worlds of books, where we may travel anywhere we want?

Determined to dissuade her husband from spending time with his friend anyway, her mistress was busy mastering the board game herself. Fascinated by the strategy plays, Ilera would watch the piece patterns shift and shape between the couple, bringing life into the once blank numbness of her servitude. Back in the servants' quarters, she would picture the board on the tattered walls and test out move sequences while lying on her pallet.

One fateful night, the master teasingly left a difficult game situation for the lady to solve. As the frustrated lady went for a bathroom break, Ilera toyed with the pieces and found the correct move. Just then, the lady returned and saw Ilera's solution. Enraged, she accused Ilera of trying to seduce the master with her smart aleckiness, gave her a hard slap and tortured her with a burning iron. Ilera felt like she was in a world of fiery torment, her body writhing and wracking in anguish and her mind reeling, trying to escape the torture she was being put through.

As Ilera cried out in pain, two identical knights whose armor glowed with a bluish energy suddenly appeared in the room to save her. Their footsteps were muffled by the pads that lined their boots, and their swords were made of a glossy black material, their sharp edges glistening in the dim light. The knights moved with grace and precision, their movements carefully calculated as they stepped forward to whisk away Ilera. The shocked aristocrat lady could only nod in fear as they admonished her on the girl's rights. Ilera thanked the knights and gestured for their names and addresses so that she could repay them someday.

"Hold up. There's something you should know," one of the knights suddenly spoke up. "We may look like two people, but in fact, we are actually just a single man, a professional bodyguard from the temporal cluster 91-02. We have traveled back in time using a mechanism that caused us to emerge as multiple individuals in order to ensure moa-antimoa balance across spacetime according to the understanding of physics in our time."

"You mean to say that you're actually just one person?" Ilera wondered to herself, completely bewildered as she read his lips. But as they spoke on, she could tell that they were telling the truth.

Her mind blown by this incredible feat, Ilera spent years studying and eventually figured out how to travel to the time zone referred to as temporal cluster 91-02. However, upon her arrival, she realized that a person traveling forward in time would turn up at their destination invisible. Not used to speaking, she could not verbalize her existence either, for fear of startling the bodyguard. Being touched by an invisible entity or seeing writing or the like appear from nowhere would also make meeting again a one-time acquaintance he did not plan to see anymore eerie.

So Ilera merely watched in silence as the bodyguard went about his everyday life, shielding him from danger without him knowing. Sometimes, it involved diverting human and cyborg enemies with noise in a different direction. Sometimes, it involved altering the trajectory of an optoelectronic dart. Sometimes, she blocked off blows with her thin body, taking the hit for him. At night, she traded her imaginary game board for an imaginary map of hazard zones in his next work day's mission, and her shabby pallet for cold pavements.

On one mission, attack from assassins was so intense Ilera frenetically but astutely pulled off a spectacular series of stunts she picked up in the cluster. Just when she defeated the last assassin, a container of glistening rejuvenation capsules overhead toppled over, the translucent pills of liquid blinking with icy golden hues on contact with her body. Touched by the shimmering silhouette of her fighting pose, the bodyguard was finally certain someone invisible had been protecting him. He expressed his thanks out loud and invited Ilera to dinner.

As Ilera sat down at the dinner table, she was surrounded by a sea of colors and shapes, each formed by light bouncing around in seemingly endless layers of reflections and refractions. She reached out to touch the shining crystals forming the table, which rippled outwards as ripples in a pond, bending the light and creating a brilliant display of optical phenomena. The bodyguard gently smiled. As she explored this new world of physics and light, she couldn't help but find herself utterly transfixed. Bokeh spots then danced around, sharpened into focus and arranged themselves into words: I have traversed grand and unforgettable ancient millennia / But now I only want a future with you / No matter your age or gender.

Blushing in her surprise, Ilera never considered this before but at least had the assurance to type out her story on an airbound screen for him now. However, when the bodyguard learned Ilera's true identity, he choked in disbelief.

"Is this what it is? I am a highly trained professional, yet I … (laughs) I rely on the assistance of a deaf peasant girl from an ignorant, oh okay, bygone era to protect myself and my job? And I cultivated feelings for a mockery of me!" He pointed at her with a fat finger on impulse.

Ilera was shaken as his mouth trembled in rage. Repaying a kind deed was all that was previously on her mind. Never had she been in love with him. In the end, her fellow exponents, no matter the field of practice, place or time, saw her only as a rival or potential object of desire. We forever voyage on Atlantic trade ships propelled by our threatened primitive interests and our lurking thirst for power, every one of us bound by each other's history, ravaged by rich seas of little. Another light shone. With determined steps, the former slave girl disappeared into the mists of time. The cosmos was now her board, and she would be its game architect.

Credits

Plot + scifi terminology: Human

Prose: Human + 3 AI services

Atlantic trade note: Human's musing on Liu Cixin's afterword in the English edition of The Three-Body Problem