Outside the museum.
A wind kicked up white grains of fine sand, and as far as the eye could see stretched an endless expanse of barren plain.
“Brother Qian, you ever seen a place like this?” Zhao Meiyou asked.
“Nope.” Qian Duoduo took in their surroundings. “This… looks like a desert.”
“Brother Qian, I’m pretty clueless about astronomy.” Zhao Meiyou went on. “But I get the feeling we’re not on Earth anymore.”
He pointed toward the distant horizon.
Two moons hung there in the sky.
“Not out of the question.” Qian Duoduo eyed the twin moons. After all, Site 000 already had weird shit like the Rum Tunnel; being off-planet wasn’t much of a stretch. “Though under the right conditions, Earth could pull off two moons too.”
Before Zhao Meiyou could ask what those conditions might be, a massive roar ripped through the high air—like a meteor streaking down with a long tail—until it slammed into the ground not far off. Only then did Zhao Meiyou realize it wasn’t a meteorite at all, but some kind of aircraft.
Qian Duoduo thought it over for a second, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and murmured, “Stealth.”
The figure right in front of him vanished. Then Zhao Meiyou felt a warm, solid press against his lips, the scent of tobacco blooming around them. They had both gone invisible.
Qian Duoduo grabbed his arm. “Let’s go take a look.”
Unsure just how much Site 000 cramped an archaeologist’s style, they didn’t dare make any bold moves. The two crept up near the aircraft, wondering how to slip inside, when with a bang, its shell split open from both sides. Someone stepped out.
They both heard bells.
Zhao Meiyou had a vague sense that the tinkling was familiar, but his attention snapped to the figure emerging from the hatch. From its build, it looked like a teenager, with lotus flowers and gilded hairpins stacked high in an elaborate bun, its white porcelain cheeks painted with floral designs. The bells jingled from its body—it was barefoot, golden-red bells clamped around its ankles.
Zhao Meiyou glanced at Qian Duoduo, keeping his voice to a whisper. “Brother Qian, is that thing even human?”
Small wonder he asked. The teenager’s lower face looked human enough, but the upper half was fitted with a massive implanted visor—like a black external drive box—strapped between its nasal bridge and hairline, green code scrolling furiously across it.
It wore no clothes and showed no obvious sex characteristics, its body a vaguely humanoid shape sculpted from ceramic.
“Twenty-second century?” Zhao Meiyou guessed right off the bat—the shining pinnacle of human tech.
“Only the twenty-second had tech like that,” Qian Duoduo said, eyeing the teenager as it stepped down from the craft. “Bionics were perfected by then, sparking a retro fad where they played up artificial humans’ ‘inhuman’ look on purpose. Super trendy. Judging by the bling, this one’s top-shelf expensive.”
They watched the teenager, tense, waiting for its next move.
It strode to the middle of the desert, scanned around, then leaped high—spreading its limbs wide like a big X in midair—and bellowed, “Motherfucker, how the hell’d it get this fucked up—!”
Zhao Meiyou & Qian Duoduo: “…?”
This artificial human’s emotions were dialed way up; even from a distance, its frustration rang clear. “…Fuck you sideways, I hauled ass back from thousands of miles away, and it’s wrecked like this?! Who the hell did it? The United Government? Did the goddamn United Government finally go bankrupt?!”
It rattled off a storm of terms laced with ancient dialect curses. Zhao Meiyou barely followed. “Brother Qian, what’s this United Government deal?”
“Humanity’s old world government,” Qian Duoduo explained. “Formed in the twentieth century, fell apart mid-twenty-second. If this is an artificial human surveyor sent out to probe the stars, it must’ve left Earth before 2149—the World United Government disbanded on January first that year.”
“Artificial human surveyor? Deep-space expedition?”
“Just a hunch.” Qian Duoduo stared at the teenager, who was now yelling and sprinting naked across the sands. “The twenty-second century had this huge space boom. Humans pushed colonies to the edge of the Orion Arm and kept blasting ships deeper into the void for science missions. Most of the survey crews? Artificial humans.”
Zhao Meiyou: “…So?”
“So.” Qian Duoduo lowered his voice. “What if some teams got hit with unavoidable delays—or just shitty luck with mission timelines—and by the time they turned for home, a whole century had passed?”
All the while, roars echoed from the desert—
“Earth! Oh my fuckin’ momma—how’d you end up trashed like this?!”
“Humans? Humans done fucked themselves over again?!”
Zhao Meiyou: “…”
Yeah, even an artificial human could see it: mankind wasn’t busy dying, it was just on the road to get there.
Once they figured the teenager wasn’t hostile, Qian Duoduo tried reaching out—but his hand passed right through its shell like smoke. He first figured it was some fancy cloaking, but Zhao Meiyou tested the aircraft and got the same result. They could phase inside, but no touching solid matter.
The artificial human couldn’t spot them either.
“Quantum residue,” Qian Duoduo said—he’d seen it before. “Some sites go so long without archaeologists, the quantum stays in superposition, cooks up its own props. Outsiders can’t interact.”
Zhao Meiyou’s science illiteracy kicked in as usual; he didn’t get the details, but he nailed the point—they were stuck spectating this android teenager glitch out and rant to itself, no way to interfere.
They pieced together the basics quick. The flyer was just a vanguard craft; a bigger spaceship orbited high above. That explained the double moons.
The ship packed a full ecological life-support loop, banks of species genes, and a survey team in hibernation for fifty years.
Call it luck or curse, but this vessel was high-end: beyond the androids, it carried a full human crew. Qian Duoduo hacked the nav logs and got the story. The life-support crapped out, forcing the humans into hibernation pods while the android navigator limped home at one percent thrust to save fuel.
The teenager clearly hadn’t banked on finding Earth in this state. By now it was the twenty-third century, fresh off the Orion War and Great Catastrophe. Whether any humans survived—or if the ecosystem could sustain life—was up in the air. Playing it safe, it only thawed one person from the pods.
Examiner 000. Codename: Grandma’s Bridge.
Zhao Meiyou watched the figure stir from the hibernation pod. “Brother Qian, the old United Government hired kids back then?”
She wore a skin-tight sleep suit of some rubbery material, hugging outrageously soft curves. A girl, no question.
Assuming humans back then hadn’t mutated into ageless kidults, she couldn’t be a day over her early teens.
“Twenty-second century unlocked brainpower we can’t even dream of,” Qian Duoduo said, unfazed. “Geniuses were a dime a dozen. Archaeologists have dug up brainwave fetal training in sites—dunno the science, but the kids came out scary smart.”
Zhao Meiyou studied her. Sure enough, her gaze had that adult edge—but as a girl, it came off pure and piercing.
He hesitated. “Can we trust what we see in these sites?”
“Site reality’s Schrödinger’s reality,” Qian Duoduo replied. “Humans have lost so damn much to time. Tech from centuries back looks like magic, alchemy, or myths to us now—just like those did to them.”
“But smart call by the android,” he added, watching them sync data feeds. “Age-wise on the outside, they’re a match. Easier to talk.”
The teenager and the girl stood before a massive display, species stats, resources, ecosystem charts flashing by in a whirlwind. Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo hung back like two useless grown-ups, jargon pouring from these kids’ mouths. Finally, Zhao Meiyou plopped down and tugged Qian Duoduo’s pant leg. “Brother Qian, legs are killing me. Break time?”
Qian Duoduo sat too. “We might be here longer than we figured.”
“Yeah, like world-saving long.” Zhao Meiyou watched the girl pull supplies from the ship. He couldn’t parse their exact scheme, but one thing seemed clear: they aimed to fix Earth’s post-Catastrophe wasteland.
“Let the kids sweat humanity’s survival.”
Zhao Meiyou stretched out, slung an arm over Qian Duoduo’s shoulders, and grinned lazily.
“Mature adults kiss right about now.”
And so the mature adults trailed the capable kids, shuttling between the spaceship and Earth. The girl—codename Grandma’s Bridge—didn’t wake anyone else. She and the android teenager tackled surface recon with just the two of them. Zhao Meiyou couldn’t always tell if they were saving the world or playing a game. “Pull me up!” The girl had just leaped from hundreds of meters up and was bellowing at the hovering drone midair—a touch imperious, a touch unhinged. “Lemme jump again!”
“Granny!” The teenager hollered back in thick regional drawl. “Fuel’s gettin’ thin, and this here’s our last drone. Collect that surface data already!”
“Pull me up!” The girl jabbed a finger at it from the ground. “Or when we get back, I’ll rip you apart!”
“Sounds good to me.” The teenager didn’t budge, lounging in the hatchway and picking at its toes. “Rip me up and build me new. Gimme eight-pack abs this time.”
“This is a United Government site—” the girl roared from below. “You jump down, you’re just raving on those assholes’ graves—”
The teenager leaped without a second thought.
Zhao Meiyou watched the two go feral in the ruins, somehow pegging it as a United Government site. “They got some complicated beef with the old government.”
“Space colonization and exploration back then? Partly mandatory. Kinda like an arms race. Folks hating it makes sense.”
Qian Duoduo sat with Zhao Meiyou in the cockpit, peering down side by side. “This might also be why Grandma’s Bridge isn’t waking more humans. There could be someone inside who knows how to use policy to rein her in.”
Zhao Meiyou had fully embraced his do-nothing mode. He drawled lazily, “Humanity’s wiped out, and you’re worried about policy?”
“Even the remnants after the end of the world,” Qian Duoduo replied, “they’re still human.”
“I just thought of something,” Zhao Meiyou said suddenly. “Both of them jumped down there. Who’s going to pilot this hovercraft? How are they supposed to get back to the ship?”
Qian Duoduo blinked in surprise. “It should be on autopilot mode.”
“Autopilot mode?” Zhao Meiyou asked skeptically. “You think that’s reliable? Will it auto-land and parallel park or something?”
In the end, reality proved that autopilot mode didn’t include auto-landing or parallel parking. Zhao Meiyou and Qian Duoduo could only watch helplessly from the sidelines, unable to intervene. They fretted that the two kids might die down there, leading to the extinction of humanity and a world united in emptiness.
Finally, Qian Duoduo fiddled with the control panel and reached a conclusion: the hovercraft would automatically descend once its fuel hit the limit. They still had eighteen hours to go.
In these eighteen isolated hours, cut off from the world, saving humanity felt like someone else’s problem.
Down on the surface, the boy and the girl clearly knew as much. Grandma’s Bridge finished collecting her soil specimen and handed it to the young artificial human. “We’ve done all we can. Time to rest.”
Her throat was still hoarse from her earlier shouting. She stripped off the heavy protective suit and took a deep breath of the heavily polluted air left by the Great Catastrophe. The young artificial human watched her movements. “That will shorten your lifespan.”
“I’ve already lived a long time—longer than most humans.” Grandma’s Bridge lay down amid the ruins and gazed up at the enormous double moons overhead. “From the ship’s launch until now, nearly a century has passed.”
Perhaps because of her long slumber, Grandma’s Bridge came across as fragmented—sometimes a decisive genius, other times a raving mad girl, and at others like an old soul long estranged from home. Right now, under the moonlight, she sprawled with limbs outstretched. Every breath compressed her lifespan further, shortening even the years she’d missed in sleep. She stared at the starless sky and said, “The first time I came to the United Government, you could still see Venus here.”
“That was a good era,” murmured the girl, who seemed like an elder in that moment.
“Cities were filled with stars—you could barely tell the real ones from the satellites. Skyways bustled with traffic, and whenever you stopped at a light, you could watch the fireworks. I went to the biggest Chinatown, where the tallest tavern floated on a nuclear-powered airship. Android performers danced up there, and there was a storyteller wearing a green mask. I couldn’t understand his words, but his voice was exquisite.”
She paused, then continued, “I was bred for the voyage from birth. Literature wasn’t part of my training. It wasn’t until long after launch that I found his song in the database.”
The boy asked, “What did he sing?”
The girl extended her hand, her fingertip as luminous as the moon above. She flicked her wrist with a flourish and slowly sang a line:
“Chanting Away, Miles of Misty Waves—”
Green code flashed across the young artificial human’s glasses, followed by Chinese characters materializing in the air.
Chanting Away, Miles of Misty Waves.
Twilight Deepens, Chu Sky Vast.
“That’s a work by an ancient Eastern poet, about twelve hundred years old. Poets back then wrote lines of varying lengths to make them easier to sing,” the young artificial human recited from its database. “Do you like his poetry?”
“It’s not that I like his poetry exactly. I don’t fully understand what he was writing about,” Grandma’s Bridge said quietly. “It’s just that his words feel like they hold twelve hundred years.”
By comparison, her time in slumber seemed so fleeting.
Where shall I wake from my wine tonight?
By the willows on the bank, with dawn winds and fading moon.
More code flickered across the boy’s face. “We’re just killing time. I found a suitable melody in the database. Want to hear it?”
“You’re going to sing?” Grandma’s Bridge looked at it in surprise, amazed by how well it had read her mood. “Isn’t your intelligence level a bit too advanced?”
“You have top control authority over the ship right now. You can dial down my data or shut me off entirely,” the young artificial human said. “Need me to reboot?”
Grandma’s Bridge thought it over. “Nah. What can you sing? Let’s hear it.”
Drawing on her speech patterns and emotional data, the boy stood up and tried reciting the line she’d sung: “Chanting Away, Miles of Misty Waves, Twilight Deepens, Chu Sky Vast.”
“Your voice is a bit high,” she critiqued. “Try dropping an octave.”
The boy cleared its throat and sang again: “Ever since ancient times, passion has hurt at parting—”
“That’s too low now. Listen to me sing it.” Grandma’s Bridge sat up, drew a deep breath, and demonstrated. “Give it another shot?”
It was tricky, but the young artificial human worked hard to mimic her posture. Its core processor spun at maximum capacity. Vast data streams were analyzed and broken down in a flash, building a model to recreate the unique essence of the girl before it.
In the next instant, it raised a hand slightly. Moonlight poured down like fresh silk draped over fine porcelain.
Just as male actors a thousand years ago mimicked women—despite the vast differences in human anatomy—once they captured that elegant allure, they transcended gender altogether.
At this moment, it truly resembled a poet from a millennium past, softly chanting farewell at a roadside pavilion: “This parting for years to come.”
This parting for years to come,
Though fine seasons and views await, they’ll be laid to waste.
Even with a thousand charms, to whom shall I speak them now?
Grandma’s Bridge stared for a long moment, then slapped her thigh hard. “Yes! That’s the vibe—pure swagger!”
She clapped her hands like a drumbeat, her eyes alight with unprecedented joy. “Keep going! I remember a few more lines—’Winds howl high as apes wail in sorrow, a branch of red apricot peeks over the wall!'”
And so they went back and forth, line by line, each one wildly off-key. Boy and girl voices echoed beneath the moon—now solemn and joyful, now tinged with quiet sorrow. They sang of splendid steeds and furs worth a fortune, of spring blossoms in March down to Yangzhou; phoenixes on phoenix towers, the Big Dipper wheeling to hang over the western tower; a lone sail fading into empty green skies, the world reduced to a grain of sand and a single gull. At their most exuberant, it became hysterical shouts. The girl shed all her protective gear and hopped about frog-like under the moon in some inexplicable dance. It was as if they’d both gone mad right then—and with only the two of them left in all the world, when the whole universe holds just two lunatics, they become the measure of all things. They could define “normal” however they pleased.
Thus, in this moment, they were the most normal, the most deranged, the most anguished, the most delighted—the pinnacle of fortune and misery from eternity past to endless future. They were sovereigns, masters of all poetry.
I’m an iron pea that won’t steam soft or boil tender, hammer flat or fry crisp—clanging bright and tough!
Who taught you whelplings to squeeze into this unplowable, unchopable, unsolvable, unshakable, slow-unfurling layered brocade cap?
I play under the moon of Liang Garden, drink the wine of Eastern Capital, admire Luoyang’s flowers, climb Changtai’s willows.
I know Go, kick ball, hunt, crack jokes, dance and sing, play pipes and strings, trill tunes, recite verse, backgammon too.
Even if you knock out my teeth, twist my mouth awry, lame my leg, break my arm—heaven’s granted me these afflictions, and still I won’t quit!
By the end, Grandma’s Bridge’s voice was completely shot. She lay on the ground, panting and rolling over to face the moonlit boy. “There. Your voice now sounds just like the one I heard a hundred years ago.”
“Not that hard,” the boy said, a touch smug.
She spat. “That’s ’cause I taught you well.”
“Tch, look at yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You don’t look human.”
“You’re wrong about that.” Grandma’s Bridge lay under the moonlight and declared solemnly, “Let me tell you—humans are all like this.”
What were humans like?
The young artificial human suddenly turned its head to the sprawled girl. Green code scrolled across its glasses. “Hey, Grandma’s Bridge. Watch this.”
A white cube materialized in the young artificial human’s palm. It expanded rapidly, and the girl felt the sudden brightness. She sat up. “You’ve got a Holographic Projection System loaded too?”
Before the words left her mouth, vermilion towers sprouted from the earth. She found herself amid fireworks, with silk-clad performers dancing under the moon. Heaven and earth blurred into lantern-lit haze.
The boy donned a green mask and sat behind a desk in flowing robes and wide sleeves. It smacked the gavel.
Red candles blazed high as it sang:
Row, row, row,
Row to Grandma’s Bridge.
