Today I will share with you a short story, please read it with patience.
The name of the short story is "Qima Lan", a sad but philosophical little story.
Prototype for EP14 in Love, Death and Robots.
(reply "love, death and robot" in the background to get free resources)
01
Just after the first week, people began to leave the island one after another. The stands around the swimming pool gradually emptied. The giant sightseeing ship departs for interstellar space, and those art fans, commentators and critics are packing their bags in Venice. Their disappointment filled the pool like methane.
I'm one of the few people left on the planet Murayek. At this point, I had been standing in the stands for hours, squinting at the reflection of the water. It was a chilling blue glow. Below me, Zima swam from one end of the pool to the other, dragging her pale, tired body. At first glance, you could really mistake him for a floating corpse. While he was swimming, I kept thinking about how to tell his story to others. I tried to remember the name of the newspaper I worked for on Mars, the first time I worked there. The newspaper didn't pay me as much as the big newspapers, but I had a vague feeling that I liked going back to where I used to work. It's been a long time since I worked at that newspaper. I checked my memo assistant for the name of the newspaper. I've probably checked it hundreds of times, but the memo assistant doesn't respond at all. After a while, I remembered that I had given up on the memo assistant completely the day before yesterday.
"It's up to you now, Kelly," I said to myself. "Get used to it."
In the swimming pool, Zima had already swam to the other end and started to swim back towards me...
One noon two weeks ago, I was sitting in Piazza San Marco drinking coffee, admiring the white statues and the marble bell tower on the square.
Starships are moored densely above Venice. The sides of the spacecraft are filled with huge total reflection luminous panels, which unify the color of the spacecraft with the true color of the sky.
Such a sight reminds me of a painting. The author of this painting is an avant-garde painter who specializes in space-distorting perspective dioramas such as never-ending waterfalls and interconnected lizards. I recalled in my head what the painting looked like, and sent it to the memo assistant to look up the name of the painting. However, it cannot be recalled.
I finished my coffee and got ready to check out.
I came to such a white marble Venice mainly to witness the unveiling of Zima's last work. I have been intrigued by this artist for many years and hope to get an opportunity to interview him. Unfortunately, thousands of colleagues share the same thoughts as me. In fact, peer competition is a secondary issue. The main issue is that Zima has never been interviewed in the past. Zima informs us that all the reporters are coming to the planet Muljek. Most of us are hearing about a world almost completely submerged in seawater for the first time. The planet Murjek is only known for having the 171st known replica of the water city of Venice, and it is one of only three to be made entirely of marble. Zima chose the planet Murjek to house his last work, and he plans to retire here, permanently out of the public eye.
The coffee shop waiter suddenly placed a folded card on my table.
With a heavy heart, I held up the card to see how much it cost in total. I thought it was a bill, but when I looked closely, it was a small blue card with hot stamped italics. The blue on the card is very fine and powdery, and it is clear that this is the signature sapphire blue that Zima created himself.
This card is addressed to me, Kelly Clay, and it says Zima wants to talk to me about the unveiling. The card also said I had to report to the Rialto Bridge within two hours if I was interested.
Interested? Of course I am.
The card states that no recording materials, even pens and paper, are allowed. It also mentioned at the end of the card that the coffee I ordered had already been paid for. I almost had the cheek to order another coffee, but think about it.
When I reached the bottom of the Rialto Bridge, Zima's robotic servant was already waiting there. The appearance of the robot servant is a human-shaped glass cover, and the inside of the glass cover is a complex mechanical structure, which emits neon light from time to time. It bowed deeply to me, and then asked softly, "Are you Miss Clay? Since you're here, let's go quickly."
The robot maid escorted me up the waterside gangway, and my memo assistant followed me closely, clinging to my shoulder. The other end of the gangway is connected to an air-cushion transport plane that has been waiting for a long time. The transport plane is suspended in the water, nearly 1 meter above the water. The robot maid led me into the private room at the back. My memo assistant also wanted to come in, but was stopped by the robot servant.
"I'm afraid you can't bring it with you, no recording tools allowed, remember?"
I looked at this metallic green hummingbird, my memo bot, trying to remember the last time I left its custody.
"Leave it?"
"It's safe to stay here, and you'll find it when you get back here in the evening."
"What if I say no?"
"If you insist, you probably won't be able to meet Mr. Zima."
Surely this robot servant won't be hanging around here all afternoon waiting for my response. When I think about leaving Memo Assistant, I feel a chill all over my body. But I really want to interview Zima so much that I can't control that much.
I keep the memo bot here until I get back.
The obedient little guy flew away quickly, drawing a metallic green lightning bolt in the air. Watching it go, I feel like a part of my body is gone too. I sat down and the glass cover on the seat covered my entire being. I could clearly feel the transporter speeding up.
Venice below us slanted and quickly disappeared into the horizon.
I issue a test command, asking the memo bot on which planet I am celebrating my 700th birthday. No response: I'm out of its custody. I can only rely on my severely overaged memory without any help.
I leaned forward. "Can you tell me what's going on here?"
"Sorry, he didn't tell me," replied the maid, with a face behind its head. "But if you don't feel well, we'll send you back to Venice immediately."
"I feel great now. Who else got the blue invitation card?"
"As far as I know, you are the only one."
"What if I say no? Should you find someone else?"
"No," replied the robot servant. "Stop guessing. Let's face it together, Miss Clay. You're not going to refuse him."
During the flight, the conveyor created waves on the sea, leaving a path of foam formation. It's like someone used a brush to draw a bar on the white marble that was painted but not yet dry, revealing the white bottom under the paint. I accepted Zima's invitation and headed straight for the horizon ahead. I've been thinking about whether Zima's signature blue is closer to the color of the sky, or closer to the color of the sea. Comparing the two colors, I think the color on the invitation card really catches my eye.
Zima Blue! This color is very precise, and from a scientific point of view, its spectral bandwidth and intensity must be measured to distinguish it.
If you're a painter, you'll definitely be mixing a range of colors based on spectral bandwidth and intensity. But no one can mix Zima blue unless they have calculated the color parameters of Zima.
When Zima first entered the public eye, he was already unique. His body has undergone the most thorough transformation, and even without protective clothing he can cope with the extremely harsh environment.
Seen from a distance, Zima is a man of superb stature, wearing a bodysuit. Only when you look closer will you realize that he has no clothes at all, and the layer on the surface is actually his skin.
His entire body is covered in a synthetic material that changes color and texture according to his mood and his surroundings. If in a social setting, his skin will turn into a dress. And this skin is able to withstand tremendous stress. If he wants to experience a vacuum, this skin will control his own pressure and won't explode;
If he were to visit a giant gaseous planet, this layer of skin could withstand the extremely strong external pressure. His skin is not only invulnerable, but also accurately transmits a full range of perception to the brain.
What's more, he doesn't need to breathe at all because his entire cardiovascular circulatory system has been replaced by a closed self-circulating life support system. He doesn't need to eat or drink, and he doesn't need to deal with the waste in his body. Nanoscale miniature repair robots spread throughout his body, allowing him to endure radiation that would kill an average person in a matter of minutes.
With this invincible armor capable of withstanding any extreme environment, Zima can draw inspiration wherever he wants to go, no matter how harsh the environment. He can soar freely in interstellar space, burrow into the surfaces of stars to explore, or wander to planets completely covered in scorching magma.
His eyes are replaced by high-performance cameras. Such cameras are capable of capturing an enormous span of the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond the range of visible light. The two cameras are connected to his brain through very complex processing modules.
He also has a synaptic hybrid bridge installed in his brain, and he can listen to the video data as music and see the symphony as some wonderful color. His skin also functions as an antenna, allowing him to sense changes in electric fields. If he doesn't think that's enough, he can interconnect a certain number of machines into a super cloud computing system and get data from it.
It is precisely because he is armed with such powerful technology that Zima's paintings are extremely creative, deeply attracting people's attention and making everyone want to stop. The quality of his paintings of landscapes and galaxies is beyond imagination and is breathtaking.
The paintings are filled with brilliant colors and employ superb space-warping perspective skills. What is even more amazing is that his works never use traditional painting materials, they are all works of the kind with a large area. Such paintings quickly attracted a large group of serious collectors. A small number of Zima's paintings were bought by them and turned into private collections, while most of the works exist in public interstellar space, and these paintings shine across the galaxy. The paintings span dozens of meters. Despite the size, all the details are clear to the limit of vision. Most of the paintings were completed in a very short period of time. Zima didn't need to sleep, so he could work nonstop until the entire painting was completely finished.
It is undeniable that these paintings left an indelible impression on people. They are undisputed masterpieces, both from a compositional and technical point of view. But these works are always chilling, sometimes even chilling. Because the landscapes and landforms painted in these paintings have never been seen before, they are completely drawn from the artist's own perspective.
Other than that chill, the paintings are pretty good overall, but I never had any of his paintings hanging in my house.
Obviously not everyone likes his work, and Zima is unlikely to sell all of his paintings. But I couldn't help but wonder: how many people actually bought these works just because Zima was famous? How many people really understand the intrinsic value of these works and collect them?
When I first noticed Zima, I had this question. I think he's artificial and not interested in him: if something else happened to him or his paintings, I'd think it would be worth writing a story.
This kind of thing happened, but it took a while for everyone else—including me—to notice it.
At one point, Zima took longer than usual to create a painting. When he showed the painting, it was discovered that something unusual appeared in the painting. This is a work of the Whirlpool Nebula, using an airless asteroid as a viewing point. On the edge of a crater on the asteroid, a small blue square covers part of the nebula.
At first glance, it seems that Zima first painted the entire canvas with blue, and then when he painted the nebula on it, he deliberately left such a square unpainted. The square is hollow, with no details to suggest that it has any connection to the overall landscape or context. It casts no shadows and doesn't have any gradients with surrounding colors. But the square must have been drawn with great deliberation: as close inspection reveals that it was indeed painted with paint over the top of the crater. There must be some depth to this.
And this square is just the beginning. After that, all the paintings Zima showed to the outside world had a similar geometric figure. The composition of each painting is embedded with a square,
triangle,
oval or other shapes.
It took a long time to discover that the geometric figures on each painting were painted the exact same blue.
This is Zima Blue, the exact same blue that came with the gold lettering card I received.
Over the next few decades, this abstract graphic gradually became his mainstream work, crowding out all other elements of the composition. The end of the cosmic vista becomes a narrow border, which is matched with a few blank circles, triangles, and rectangles. His early works were typically characterized by rich brushstrokes and layers of rich ink, but now they are blue graphics with a glossy mirror finish.
Many buyers were intimidated by Zima's abstract blue graphics and gradually turned away from him. Zima soon presented his first painting composed entirely of a single blue. The painting is huge, large enough to cover the side of a thousand-story building.
It is generally believed that Qima has exhausted his talents and will no longer be able to paint beautiful works.
They are so wrong.
02
As we approached an island, I felt the transporter slow down. No matter which direction you look at, this small island is the only landform feature in the entire sea.
"You are the first person to see this island," said the robot servant. "The sky above the island is covered by a distorted screen, and the island cannot be seen from space at all."
The small island is one kilometer in circumference and has a very low altitude. The whole shape is somewhat like a turtle, and it is surrounded by a narrow white sand beach. Near the center of the island is a high ground, and all the grass and trees on this high ground have been cleared away, leaving a roughly rectangular open space. I identified a small area of the clearing that was flat and reflecting blue light, and seemed to be surrounded by a row of tiered stands.
The transport plane lowered its altitude and slowed down, constantly heaving up and down until it came to a slow stop outside the area surrounded by the stands. Adjacent to the tarmac was a low hut made of white cobblestones that I didn't really notice on the way here.
The robotic servant went down the steps first, then helped me down the transporter.
"Zima will be here soon," it said, returning to the transport plane. The transport plane quickly disappeared into the sky with it.
Suddenly, I felt lonely and vulnerable. A gust of sea breeze came over and blew sand into my eyes. The sun gradually set in the west, heading straight for the horizon. The weather will get cold soon. Just when I started to panic a little, a man got out of the hut and rubbed his hands briskly. He walked towards me along a paved path.
"Glad to have you here, Kelly."
Of course this is Zima. I just suspected he wouldn't show up, what a stupid idea.
"Hi." I stammered.
Zima held out his hand with grace. I held his hand and could slightly feel the texture of the artificial skin on his body. Today his skin is silver gray.
"Let's sit on the balcony. It's nice to watch the sunset, isn't it?"
"Okay." I agreed.
He turned around and led me to the hut. As I followed him, I could clearly see the constant bulging of muscles beneath his silver-grey skin. The skin on his back seemed to have scales glowing, presumably mosaic or reflective chips. He was as strong as a black panther, and as good as a statue. He's actually quite handsome, not to mention that he can make so many tricks, but I've never heard of anyone he's been in a relationship with, not even any scandals in this regard. Art is his whole life.
I followed him, feeling clumsy and even stuttering. Zima led me into the hut, and I was greeted by an old-fashioned kitchen and an old-fashioned lounge, filled with ancient furniture and furnishings, probably thousands of years old.
"How does it feel to fly all the way?"
"Okay."
He stopped suddenly and turned to look at me. "I forgot to check... Did my robo-maid emphasize that you can't bring memo assistants?"
"have."
"Very good. I just want to talk to you as a person, Kelly, not some recording equipment."
"I?"
The silver-grey mask on his face makes for a hilarious look. "Hehe, can't you say a longer sentence, how can the answer be one word?"
"Uh……"
"Relax," he said. "I didn't ask you to come here to test you, humiliate you, or do anything to you. It's not a trap, you won't be in any danger here. You'll be back in Venice in the middle of the night. "
"I'm fine," I said, "just a little excited, like a groupie finally met their idol."
"Hehe, you don't have to. I can't be the first celebrity you meet, can I?"
"Of course not, it's just..."
"People think I'm intimidating," he said. "They eventually get used to it and then want to know what I'm doing with all this fuss."
"Why did you choose me?"
"Because you have always been kind enough to invite me to interview." Zima replied.
"Do not make jokes."
"Well, there are other reasons besides your being friendly. I've enjoyed most of your coverage over the years. A lot of people trust you, especially those who are about to die. Because you recorded it faithfully. The content of the interview does not contain any false elements."
"You came to me to talk about retirement, not about dying."
"It's all the same. It's going to disappear from the public eye anyway. Kelly, I think your articles are all true. I've never noticed anyone claiming that your articles are distorting the truth."
"I've always been like this," I said. "That's why I always have a memo assistant with me so no one can deny what they said."
"With or without the memo assistant, it won't affect your coverage of me," Zima said.
I looked at him alertly. "There must be other reasons, otherwise why would you only choose me?"
"I just want to help you," he said.
People often talk about Zima's blue age, referring to the time when he created huge paintings. To say that it is huge is not an exaggeration. The paintings he creates are exceptionally large, large enough to cover buildings and civic squares large and small, and can even be seen from orbit in outer space.
Looking at the entire Milky Way, there is still a blue picture 20 kilometers high. These paintings are generally built on private islands, like towers rising straight into the sky;
Some are even placed directly on the stormy sea. Funding for the creation of these paintings was never an issue, as Zima was surrounded by a slew of sponsors scrambling for the right to sponsor his latest and greatest work.
The huge paintings created by Zima became larger and larger, and later required complex high-tech mechanical equipment to be fixed to prevent the paintings from being damaged due to the influence of gravity or the weather. These giant mechanical devices penetrate the entire atmosphere of the planet where they are located and extend all the way to outer space, and they also emit faint light.
The painting is bent at an angle for those avid art lovers to see on the planet, who will find the entire field of view taken up by blue.
Zima is so famous that even people who have no interest in art know his name. He was the eccentric cyborg who created the giant blue buildings, the painter who never stated or implied the meaning of his art.
But that was hundreds of years ago, and Zima became more and more tossed, and later even the planet couldn't accommodate such a bulky giant painting. Zima simply moved to interstellar space and forged a blue picture scroll with a radius of tens of thousands of kilometers. These scrolls can float freely in space. And instead of using paintbrushes and paints, he employs fleets of mining robots to blast asteroids and use the debris as raw material to paint. The financial resources of sponsors are far from enough, and various star system economies are competing for the exhibition rights of Zima's works.
It was at this time that I became interested in Zima again. I was at a press conference for one of his "moon wrap" projects, which planned to build enclosures around the entire planet, forming a blue container with a lid, like a hat that fits in a box. Two months later, he released a huge amount of blue gas over the entire equatorial belt of the planet, and I was there. Six months later, he added some kind of blue chemical to the surface of a sungrazing comet so that the comet could drag its tail of Zima Blue across the solar system. But I don't think the news is worth writing about. I invited him to be interviewed again and again, but was rejected again and again. All I know is that Zima's obsession with blue goes beyond the art. But without a thorough understanding of his obsession, it is impossible to write truly meaningful reports, at best anecdotes.
I never write anecdotes.
So I've been waiting, and of course millions of my peers have been waiting. So as soon as I heard that Zima's last work was going to be unveiled in Venice on the planet Murjek, I rushed over without stopping. I'm not looking forward to interviewing him or getting new insights into his work. I just felt like I had to be there to witness it.
03
We walked up the stairs and through the sliding glass doors to the balcony. On the balcony is a white table with modest chairs on either side. There were also several bottles of wine and a plate of fruit on the table. From this balcony without railings, I can only see the boundless sea, which is connected to the sky, except for the precipitous barren land where I am. The sea was calm and calm, and under the rays of the setting sun, the entire sea was like a silver coin.
Zima motioned for me to sit down, two bottles of wine in his hand, still hanging around.
"Red wine or white wine, Kelly?"
I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Usually, the memo assistant will silently help me make a choice a moment after someone asks a question and before I answer. Without the prompts from the memo assistant, I felt my mind stop.
"Red wine, I guess," Zima. "Unless you strongly object."
"It's not that I can't decide these things myself," I said.
Zima poured me a glass of red wine, then raised the glass to the sky to see the quality of the red wine. "Of course not," he said.
"I just feel a little weird," I added.
"But it shouldn't feel like this," he said. "Isn't that how we lived hundreds of years ago?"
"You mean that natural way."
Zima poured himself a glass of red wine, of course he wouldn't drink it, he just smelled the aroma of the wine. "Yes."
"But I've lived for a thousand years, and it's not natural in itself," I said, "My body's sensory memory reached a saturation point seven hundred years ago, and my head was like a piece of furniture with too much furniture. If you want to move something in, you have to move something out first.” “Let’s get back to wine first,” Zima said. "Usually, you have to rely on the advice of the memo assistant, right?"
I shrugged and said, "Yes,"
"Does the memo assistant always choose one of the two possibilities? For example, always choose red wine, or always choose white wine?"
"It's not that simplistic," I said. "If I had a stronger preference for one of these wines, the memo assistant would definitely recommend it. But I don't have a preference for wine. Sometimes I like red wine, sometimes And I like white wine. And sometimes I don't want either." I wish my frustration wasn't so obvious. The last thing I wanted to talk to Zima about, aside from a series of carefully curated riddles about blue cards, hired robots, and transport planes, was my own incomplete memory.
"So it's a random choice?" he asked. "Will the memo assistant just choose red wine or white wine so casually?"
"No, it's not like that. The Memo Assistant has been with me for hundreds of years. It has seen me drink wine thousands of times on thousands of different occasions. It knows that according to the highest degree of reliability, Given a set of parameters, I figured out what was my best bet."
"Then you would accept its advice unconditionally?"
I took a sip of red wine. "Of course. If I go against its advice just to show that I have free will, am I being a little too childish? Anyway, I'm more satisfied with choosing based on its advice."
"But wouldn't your whole life then be a series of predictable feedback? Unless you ignore its advice."
"Maybe so," I said. "But it's not that bad, is it? As long as I'm happy, I don't care."
"I didn't mean to embarrass you," Zima said. He smiled and leaned back in the chair. After questioning me a series of questions, he wanted to ease the tension. "Not many people have memo assistants now, are they?"
"I don't know," I said,
"No more than one percent of the entire galaxy's population." Zima sniffed his wine again, looking at the sky through the glass. "Almost everyone out there has embraced the memo aide and thought it was inevitable."
"What's wrong with letting a machine manage a thousand years of memory?" I asked rhetorically.
"But another kind of machine," Zima said, "neural transplant, fully integrated into the participant's sense of self. Integrated with biological memory, indistinguishable. You don't need to ask the memo assistant how to choose wine; you don't need to Wait for the confirmation prompt. You must understand."
"What's the difference between the two? I allow my experiences to be recorded by a machine that accompanies me wherever I go. The machine never misses a thing, and it responds to my inquiries so efficiently that it Now I have to ask it about almost everything."
"The machine can be easily damaged."
"It backs up data at regular intervals. And it's no more susceptible to damage than a bunch of nerve-grafting modules in my head. Sorry to offend you, but the objection that machines are prone to damage is unreasonable."
"Of course you're right. But there's a deeper debate about the memo assistant. It's so perfect. It doesn't know how to distort or forget." "Isn't that what it's supposed to be?"
"No! When you use your mind to recall this conversation between me and you hundreds of years later, there must be some things that will be wrong. And these wrong parts will become part of your memory, remember Every detail that is wrong will gradually strengthen into a memory. After a thousand years, your memory of this conversation may be very different from the reality. But then you must swear that your memory is accurate."
"But if I have a memo assistant by my side, I can fully record the truth of the matter in every detail."
"You will," Zima said, "but it's not a living memory. It's just photography, a process of mechanical memory. The whole memory lacks imagination and leaves no room for selective forgetting." He gave me again A full glass of wine. "Imagine an occasion like this afternoon where you're sitting outside for some reason, and you have to decide whether to choose red or white, and you can't regret your choice. But just once, for whatever reason, you Being persuaded to choose a white wine - just against the judgment of the memo assistant - and drinking it and you still feel good. Everything is wonderfully put together: this conversation, the atmosphere of the sunset, the magnificence The scenery, the euphoria. A perfect afternoon turns into a perfect evening.”
"It doesn't matter what wine I choose," I said.
"Not really," Zima agreed. "The memo assistant will definitely not regard such a happy accident as a special case, and this special case should be recorded separately for future reference. Such a small deviation will not affect its prediction model. Make any significant impact. Next time, it will still make you choose red wine.”
I felt a sudden tingling in my heart, very uncomfortable. "But human memory doesn't work that way." "Yes, human memory will remember this exception and mark it as significant. It will magnify the attractive part of this afternoon's memory and suppress the unhappy part: the flies. The buzzing around your face all the time, the anxiety you felt on the boat ride home, and the fact that you knew you had to go shopping for a birthday present this morning. All you remember is the peace in the golden light. Next time, you The choice is white or red. It's up to you later. The whole behavior pattern changes because of this small deviation. The memo assistant will never tolerate that. You only have to go against its advice many times before it will Be very stingy about updating its data model before it starts suggesting you choose white grapes."
"That's right," I said, but I still wish Zima could talk more about himself than me. "But how much practical difference is there between a transplanted artificial memory and an external artificial memory?"
"It's a world of difference," Zima said. "The memory stored in the memo assistant is remembered forever. No matter how many times you ask it, it doesn't reinforce or ignore every detail. But the transplanted artificial memory Different. They are seamlessly integrated into biological memory, and the person who has transplanted artificial memory cannot distinguish which is artificial memory and which is biological memory. It is for this reason that the transplanted artificial memory has the necessary plasticity and variability, And it creates errors and distortions.”
"Fallability," I said, "but without fallibility there would be no art, and without art there would be no truth," Zima continued.
"Fallability guides facts? That's a good statement." I was surprised.
"By facts I mean higher-level, figurative facts. That golden afternoon? That's true. The fly you remember doesn't have any material meaning attached to it. It's extracted from the separated from memory."
"There are no flies without afternoon," I said. Eventually my patience has reached the limit of the explosion. "I'm grateful you invited me to come down here. But I didn't come here to hear you tell me how to choose artificial memory. I think it's time to talk about something else."
"Actually everything I'm going to talk to you will ultimately come down to this. Not only about me, but about you." He put down the glass. "Let's go for a walk, okay? I'm going to show you the pool."
"The sun has gone down," I said.
Zima smiled and said, "The sun will always rise."
He took me through the house the other way, and left through the other door. Between two walls of white stone, a rugged mountain road slowly climbs the hillside, bathed in golden afterglow the whole way. After a while, we came to the flat highland, which is the highland we saw when we came by the transport plane. It is really surrounded by stands: a 30-meter-high stepped structure, with stairs behind the stands that lead to all levels. Zima led me into the shadows below the stands, then through a private entrance into the enclosed area. The blue area I saw when I came was actually a not too big rectangular swimming pool that had been drained. Zima led me to the edge of the pool.
"A swimming pool," I said. "You're not kidding me. So many stands are built for this pool?"
"This is where the unveiling takes place," Zima said. "I will unveil my last work here and retire from public life."
The pool is not all finished yet. In the far corner, a small yellow robot is still posting tiles there. The parts close to our side have been tiled, but I still found that the tiles were broken or cracked in some places. The afterglow of the setting sun was a little dim, and I couldn't tell if I was in the shadows, but the tiles looked very close to Zima Blue.
"Is this a bit too low-level compared to paintings that take over an entire planet?" I asked.
"It's not like that for me," Zima said. "For me, this is where the exploration ends. This is where it all begins."
"A shabby swimming pool?"
"It's not just an old swimming pool," he said.
He walked around the island with me. The sun is about to sink into the sea, and everything turns pale.
"In the past my paintings were inspired by the heart," Zima said. "The reason I paint on such a large scale is because that's what the subject demands."
"It's very well drawn," I said.
"That's just hard work. Huge, fancy, trendy, but not soulful at all. It's just because the paintings are inspired by the soul that they don't paint well." I didn't say anything. In fact, I have always felt that his work is like this: magnificent but inhuman, and the mechanical transformation of Zima's body must bring some kind of uniqueness to his work. It's like people praising a work just because it was drawn by someone with a pen in their mouth. Zima's paintings are praised only because he is not a "normal person".
"My work doesn't tell people something about the universe, because the universe itself doesn't reveal anything. What's more, my work doesn't reveal anything about me. These paintings can be with me in a vacuum. What does it have to do with walking, swimming in liquid nitrogen oceans? What does it have to do with me being able to see ultraviolet light and sense electromagnetic fields? The transformations that have been carried out on me are extremely cruel. These transformations can bring me nothing, like a Remote observation drones don't make them artists.
"I think you're being a little too hard on yourself," I said.
"Not at all. I can say this because I know I've created something worthwhile. But it happened I didn't expect at all."
"You mean Zima Lan?"
"Zimaran," he said, nodding. "It came as an accident: the wrong color on a nearly finished canvas. A pale stain somewhere between sapphire blue and dark green. Yet the stain seemed charged, and I felt myself My brain short-circuited for an instant, triggering some kind of strong, primal memory. I had a feeling that this color used to be the most important thing in my life."
"What kind of memory is that?"
"I don't know. All I feel is this color is talking to me, like it took me my whole life to find it and free it." He thought for a moment. "This blue must represent something. A thousand years ago, Yves Klein said that blue is the essence of color, and can represent all other colors. He is such a person, spent a whole He spent his whole life looking for the unique blue in his childhood memories. Later, he was desperate and felt that such blue could not be found at all. Such a precise hue must have been imagined by himself, and there may be no such thing in nature. The color. Then one day, he stumbled across it. It was the color of a beetle specimen in the Natural History Museum. He cried with joy."
"So is your Zima blue?" I asked. "It's also the color of a beetle?"
"No," he said, "not the color of the beetle. But I have to know the answer, whatever the cost. I have to know why this blue is so important to me, why it controls me artistic creation.”
"You allow it to control itself?" I said.
"I don't have a choice. As this blue becomes more intense and dominant, I feel like I'm getting closer to the answer. I feel like I can only find out by immersing myself in this color. Everything I want to know. As an artist, I have to really understand myself."
"Then do you understand?"
"I understand myself," Zima said. "But it wasn't what I expected."
"what have you found?"
After waiting for a long time, Zima answered slowly. We continued walking slowly, I dragged slightly behind his muscular body. The weather is starting to get cooler, and I wish I had the foresight to bring a coat. I thought about borrowing a coat from Zima, but I had to focus and not lose sight of Zima's train of thought, or I wouldn't know where to start. Keeping your mouth shut is always the hardest part of the job.
"We just talked about the fallibility of memory," he said.
"Yes."
"My own memory is not complete. I remember everything since the artificial memory transplant, but this time is only the last three hundred years of my life. I know I must be more than three hundred years old, but before the transplant Life, I only remember fragments. I don't know how to put these broken memories back together. He turns slowly, the last ray of orange on the horizon on his face. "I know You must dig deep into that past to truly understand the special meaning of Qima Lan. "
"Then how far did you dig?"
"It's like archeology," he said, "I have to look for clues from the earliest reliable events in my memory, which happened a short time after I implanted my artificial memory. My memory went back to Halko. Planet 8, which is a planet in the Garlin Bay star area, 19,000 light-years away. The only thing I remember there is the name of a man I know - Cobago."
I haven't heard of Cobago, but I still know about Garlin Bay, and I don't need to check the memo assistant. That is a star field in the Milky Way with 600 habitable planetary systems and controlled by three major economic forces. In Garlin Bay, formal interstellar laws do not apply at all. It's completely outlaw territory.
"Kharkov Planet 8 offers one product exclusively," Zima said. The entire planet is providing private medical care that is simply not available anywhere else. That is illegal neuro-mechanical modification. "
"It's you there..." I didn't dare to continue.
"Yes, where I became what I am now," Zima said. "Of course I've strengthened my body since I left Kharkov 8—improving my adaptability to extreme environments, improving my senses—but the inner part of me is lying in the Cobago clinic. on the operating table."
"So you were a normal person until you got to Kharkov 8?" I asked.
"That question was the hardest part to figure out." "Back on Kharkov 8, I naturally wanted to find Kobago. Only with his help could I put together those fragments of memory in my head. Cobago has left and has gone into seclusion elsewhere in Garlin Bay. The clinic is still there, but it's now run by his grandson."
"I bet he wouldn't say it."
"Yes, he advised me not to know. Fortunately, I still have some means to coerce and lure." He smiled slightly when he said this. "Finally, he agreed to open the clinic's historical records and check the records of his grandfather's visit to me."
We turned a corner. The sky and sea were now an indistinguishable grey, with no trace of blue.
"What happened?"
"The record shows that I was never a real person," Zima said. He paused, not having any doubts about what he said. "Before I got to the clinic, Zima didn't exist at all."
At this time, I can't wait to get back my memo assistant, even if I have an old pen and notebook by my side. It's a pity that I can't use anything but my own memory. I frowned, hoping to make my memory work harder.
"Then what are you?" "A machine," he said. "A very complex robot, a robot with autonomous intelligence. When I arrived on Kharkov 8, I was hundreds of years old, but fully legally independent."
"No." I shook my head. "You are at most a person with machine parts, how can you be a machine?" "The records in the clinic are very clear. When I came to the clinic, I was a robot. A male-looking robot, like a fake replacement machine. . I was completely dismantled, my core cognitive functions integrated into the body of a fast-growing biological host." He tapped his skull with a finger. "There's a lot of organic material in it, and a lot of neuro-mechanical systems. It's so intricate, it's not clear where it started and where it ends. It's not even clear which is the main system and which is the auxiliary system."
I looked at the body standing next to me and had to force my mind to jump: I could no longer think of him as a man, but as a machine—a soft machine made of cells. But I can't do it, it's hard to accept it all at once.
I stopped. "The clinic may lie to you."
"I don't think so. They'd be happier if I didn't know about it."
"Even so," I said, "there has to be evidence..."
"Those are facts, easy to verify. I checked Kharkov Planet 8 customs records and found that a few months before the operation, an autonomous robot entered the planet's atmosphere."
"It's not necessarily you."
"In the decades before and after, no other robot has come close to this planet. That robot is me. And the record shows the port of origin of this robot."
"Where is the departure port?"
"A planet outside Geerlin Bay, Lintan No. 3 in the Hekou Archipelago Star Region."
The memo assistant is not around, like eating without teeth. "I don't even know if I know it there," I said.
"You probably don't know. It's basically impossible for you to visit a planet like this. There are no light-speed flights to get there. The only reason I'm there is...
"Where have you been?"
"Twice. Once before the surgery on Kharkov 8, and again recently to find out where I was before going to Lintan 3 for the first time. Taking a step back, the clues became It's getting blurry. I've asked the same question countless times, queried the same data in various databases, and finally I figured out where I came from. But that's still not the final answer. I've been to too many planets, of which It's hard to straighten out the relationship. But I never gave up."
"Also been spending money."
"Yes, there is money." He nodded politely. "Spent a ton of money."
"So what did you find in the end?"
"I followed the clues all the way back to the starting point. By the time I got to Kharkov 8, I already had the same intelligence as a human being and was able to think fast. But I was not always this smart and complex. As long as time and circumstances Allowed, my intelligence will gradually increase."
"Enhance yourself?"
"Then it was like this. It was after I had self-awareness and legal independence. But to be free, I also had to have a certain intelligence. Before that, I was just a mere machine... something like Heirlooms or pets. I've been passed down from generation to generation by my owners. They keep adding new things to me and making me smarter and smarter."
"Then how did you start?"
"Starting with a project," he replied.
Zima took me back to the pool. Night came quickly near the equator, and the pool was dazzled by the rows of artificial lights above the stands. The robot we saw just now has all the tiles in the last place.
"The pool is ready," Zima said. "Tomorrow it will be closed and the day after it will be filled with water. I will keep circulating the water until the pool is clear enough."
"and then?"
"I'll be ready for my show."
04
On the way back to the swimming pool, Zima had already told me his origin, and as long as he knew it, he had said it completely. Zima existed on Earth before I was born. He put it together by an amateur robotics hobbyist. This talented young man is particularly interested in practical robotics. In those days when technology was not developed, there were many teams or individuals groping the century problems of artificial intelligence in the dark. This young man is one of them.
Perception, navigation, and autonomous problem-solving are the three topics that this young man is most interested in. He has assembled a lot of robots using discarded toolboxes, toys, and parts. The minds of these robots—not really minds at all—are simple programs running on old computers with limited memory and processing speed.
The young man's house is full of these simple machines, and whenever he has spare time, he starts tinkering with robots. One of the robots is a "spider" with eight long sticky legs that can crawl around the walls of his house and clean the dust from the picture frames. Another function of the "spider" is to catch flies and cockroaches. It digests all the pests it catches, and uses the chemical energy produced by the digestion as its own energy to drive itself to the rest of the house. Another robot is used to paint the walls, and it will change the color of the walls according to the seasons.
There is also a robot living in his swimming pool.
It crawls up and down the tiled walls of the pool, cleaning the tiles constantly.
The young man could have bought a cheap swimming pool cleaner through a mail-order company, but he thought it would be more interesting to design one of his own. According to his novel design ideas, he made the robot himself from sketches. It equips the robot with a full-color vision system that integrates with the surrounding environment, and is equipped with a sufficiently advanced "brain" to process the visual data and input its environmental data model. He allows the robot to decide on its own the best strategy for cleaning the pool. He also allows the robot to choose when to clean the pool and when to charge it from a solar cell on its back. He instilled a primitive concept of reward in the robot.
In the process of making this swimming pool cleaning robot, young people have mastered a lot of principles of robot design technology. Using these principles, he built a series of other household robots until one of them — a simple household cleaning robot — became robust and autonomous. The young man started a mail-order company that sold the robot as a tool. Robots are selling like hot cakes. A year later, the young man launched a pre-assembled home robot. The robot has been a huge success, and young companies have gradually become market leaders in the home robot market.
For the next decade, the world was filled with these smart, enthusiastic robots.
But he never forgot the little swimming pool cleaning robot back then. He used the cleaning robot as a test machine, adding new hardware and software to him again and again. The cleaning robot has been the smartest of all his inventions, and the only one that hasn't been abandoned or eliminated.
When he died, he passed on the pool cleaning robot to his daughter. His daughter continued her father's business and continued to improve the intelligence of the little robot.
When she died, the young grandson continued the family tradition. At this time, the grandson had already lived on Mars.
"If you haven't guessed, let me tell you that this is the original swimming pool, and I moved it here," Zima said.
"Always the same?" I asked.
"It's really old, but the tiles have stood the test of time. The hardest part of finding the swimming pool was finding where it started. I had to dig up two metres of topsoil to get it out. . It used to have a big name in the place where it was - Silicon Valley."
"These tiles are in Zima Blue," I said.
"In fact, Zima blue is the color of these tiles." He corrected politely, "Qima blue is the color of the swimming pool tiles in the young people's homes."
"It's also the deepest part of your memory."
"That's where I was born. I was that rough little robot with just enough intelligence to spin itself around a swimming pool. But this swimming pool is my world. It's everything I know, and the only thing I need to know. ."
"And now?" I asked. Actually I'm terrified of the answer to this question.
"Now I'm going home."
05
I was there when he did it. The stands were packed that day, and everyone came to see Zima's final performance. The sky above the island was crowded with hovering spaceships. The curved screen covering the island has been turned off, and even the stands on the spacecraft are crowded with thousands of witnesses from afar.
Standing on the ship, they could see the swimming pool, where the water was as calm as a mirror and as clear as gin. They saw Zima standing on the edge of the swimming pool with scale-like solar panels on her back.
No one knew what was going to happen, and no one understood the significance of Zima's actions. They were expecting Zima to exhibit the ace of all his work at this unveiling; for now they can only stare at the pool in bewilderment. Compared to Zima's majestic giant paintings, those blue scrolls that envelop the entire planet, this small swimming pool is simply not up to the mark. They kept thinking that this swimming pool must be a trick. The real work—the one that really foreshadows his retirement—must be somewhere else, but it's not yet visible, and soon this gigantic work will be in front of the world.
This is what they think.
Only I know the truth. When Zima stood on the edge of the pool, surrounded by the blue that had bound him all his life, only I knew the truth. He had already told me what was going to happen next: the higher functions in his brain would be slowly and methodically shut down. The point is that the whole process is irreversible: there is no room for regret at all.
But a small part of his brain remains: a tiny kernel that only recognizes its own existence. This core is only enough for him to recognize the surrounding environment and perform a specific task, even if the task is meaningless.
He will never need to leave the pool. Solar panels provide him with enough energy. He doesn't get old and he doesn't get sick. Other robots tend to his island, guarding the pool, making sure the silent, slow swimmer isn't spoiled by weather and time.
This will go on for centuries,
Thousands of years, then millions of years.
What will it look like in a few million years? No one can tell. But one thing I can be sure of, Zima will never tire of his assignment. The concept of boredom no longer exists in his mind. He has become pure experience.
If he experiences some kind of happiness while swimming in the pool, it can only be a kind of happiness with little thought, like the happiness of a bee or a butterfly. But for him, such happiness is enough. It's enough for him in that pool in California, and it's enough for him in the same pool a thousand years from now. It's just that this swimming pool has moved to another distant world in the Milky Way, this world revolving around another sun.
It's enough for me too...
Such joy reminds me more of our meeting on the island, though I have no right to do so. Believe it or not, I no longer need a mental crutch like the memo assistant, which is completely different from what I imagined before. Zima was right: The memo assistant turned my life into a written script, like a designed drawing. When the sun goes down, it always makes me choose red wine, never white wine. By the time I left the planet of Murjek in a light-speed spacecraft, I had already gone to the clinic to have a series of neural memory expansion modules implanted. These modules should last four or five hundred years. One day I will need another solution, but I must cross that unique mnemonic bridge. The last thing I did before firing my memo assistant was to transfer its observations into my extended memory. I still feel as though all the things it recorded didn't happen to me, but each time I recall these memories are clearer than others. They've changed, softened, and the splendid places shine even more. I reckon every detail in these memories is less accurate, but like Zima said: maybe that's the point.
I now understand why he asked me to interview. Not just because he likes the way I write my biography, but he wants to help someone move forward, not like him.
I eventually found his biography and sold it to the first newspaper I worked for, The Martian Chronicles. It's nice to go back to the planets we've been on in the past, especially now that Mars has been moved into a warmer orbit.
It's been a long time, but I always feel that Zima's thing is not over, it's a little strange.
Every few decades, I'd board a light-speed ship bound for Murjeek, step into that gleaming incarnation of Venice, take a transport plane to the island, and sit in the stands with some other stubborn witnesses superior. These people, like me, still think that the master artist will leave something to give people the last surprise. They've all read what I've written, and most have, so they know what that slow-swimming body means...but they still don't come in groups. So even in excellent weather, the stands are always a bit empty and bleak. But I've never seen these stands completely empty, and I think it's some kind of sacred oath. Some people are willing to take the oath, but most people will never take it.
But that's art.
---END---
The original is more moving than the animation, and the animation is more refined than the original. In just ten minutes, it makes you think hard about the meaning of life.
There is no shortage of good stories like this in Love, Death and Robots, 18 shorts, 18 stories. See how the masters interpret love, death, and robots. From yogurt to vixen, from violence to sex... only you can't think of it, no master can't do it!
The little cutie who wants to watch the animation can get it by replying "Love, Death and Robot" directly in the background~
Without further ado, let's go to the show!
Aries Theater
I reject bad movies with you.
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