来自大卫·瑞雷先生的《2121》系列占星科幻小说，以下是全英文的版本。阅读中文版请移步：2121丨第一章
Zhou Xingjia gazed out the large 70th floor office window that offered a nearly panoramic view of Beijing. Xingjia’s grandmother had told her that Beijing had changed so much in her own life, that she could never have believed it would change even more, but it did. Even 70-stories up, there were shadows from much taller buildings. The view faced west, still the College side of the city, the realm of universities and academia. Xingjia could see the Peking University Tower that had been erected in 2100, a now famous steel landmark 54-stories high - with an exterior that gave one the impression of the Great Wall in a modern spiral. From a distance, it looked like a giant screw pointing at the sky, inspiring local names that implied something else. Her first boyfriend in college had worn a t-shirt with a screen picture of “the tower” on it, along with the word “SCREW” boldly printed underneath. She had hated that t-shirt, but she loved Tian. She loved Tian the way one falls in love in college, with parents finally absent, eating a bad diet, awake into the wee hours, feeling his hands on her skin beneath her shirt. She remembered the intensity of his eyes, his reassuring smile, and his laugh. Being with Tian was easy in college. They shared mutual friends. There was no pressure.
“After college,” she thought, her jaw tightening, “that’s when the pressure started.”“Maybe the buildings are taller now, and there’s 40-million people in Beijing instead of the 20-million of a century ago, but some things never change.” She said to herself. Even in 2121 parents in China still expected their children to get married after college as soon as possible, and start a family right away. Things had not worked that way for Xingjia. She had majored in business and finance, but following graduation, she had burned-out after two years in mergers and acquisitions. Her social life had been even worse. The men she worked with were lewd pigs, constantly making offensive sexual references and pushing for sex on the first date. Her boss had made advances on her early-on, and her rejection of his advances had made her job even more stressful. She didn’t fit in and she knew it, though she had tried to make it work. Despite her long hours, she did her best to leave time for dating, but dating was like a job interview, except both people were interviewing for the same job. Xingjia’s life was not what she had imagined it would be.
She quit her job and took a 3-month sabbatical, announcing to her parents that she wanted to go back to college and major in AstroPsychology. Her parents were not pleased. They had no objection to AstroPsychology, which had become a growing lucrative field, with many career opportunities, especially in the android industry. What her parents objected to was the loss of time. “You’ll be twenty-six by the time you get another degree. Is postponing marriage and family that long a risk you’re prepared to take?” her father had plainly stated. “Your chances for marriage decrease after twenty-seven,” her mother added, “and go down with every year that follows.” No argument could dissuade her, and so reluctantly her parents agreed to foot the bill one more time for her college education.
She dove into her studies, excelling academically. She had found her passion in AstroPsychology. It even made dating more interesting. Now when she was on a date she could use what she was learning in AstroPsychology to explore more about the other person and even reveal more about herself. Still, almost nothing clicked. The one guy she really liked turned out to have a wife in Xiamen, which he managed to mention 6-months into the relationship. She knew she should’ve ended the relationship right then, but she let it drag on for 3-more months. She had learned in her studies to recognize relationship patterns, and it was obvious to her that she was somehow managing to avoid finding a relationship that had a potential for marriage and family. In addition, she had begun to question whether she actually wanted to get married and have a family. Some weeks she wanted to and some weeks she didn’t. After she graduated and got an excellent position with BHAI, the pressure from her parents to get married and start a family became nearly intolerable. She didn’t even want to visit them, because the subject of marriage was always the main topic!
Xingjia wanted to please her parents. Yet, she hated the ancient haunting saying of “the eyes of a parent without grandchildren remain open beyond death.” Her own parents had mellowed into a peaceful older couple. She refused to say “elderly.” However, things were not always so peaceful. She remembered them arguing and fighting when she grew-up. She especially remembered hearing her mother loudly sobbing alone one night, when her father was away on business. She had lay in bed listening, wondering what was wrong. Courageously for a nine-year-old girl she slipped out of bed to find out. Sitting next to her mom, her mother had held her closely–her pajamas wet with tears. “Men are different, darling.” They don’t understand women at all. Your father can’t help it, he’s just a man after all.” Xingjia could not fathom what could make men and women so different. She knew boys were different physically, and they seemed a bit slow or dumb sometimes in figuring out what she and her girlfriends could tell right away. But she couldn’t connect her mother’s tears with anything she knew at nine. Only that her mother was deeply sad, and that maybe this had something to do with her father’s work requiring he be away from home nearly half the time. He would always come home with little gifts for her, and something for her mom. Over time her parents bickered less and less. “A normal couple; a normal family, I suppose,” she had thought.
Nonetheless, her studies in AstroPsychology had led her to examine her family dynamics. Whenever she was back home on weekends or holidays she used her private time with her mom to discuss the past and explore her mother’s experiences. At first her mother had been resistant to revisit anything painful from her past, but gradually her mom opened-up. She learned that when at nine she had heard her mother sobbing; her mother had discovered her father was having an affair that had been going on for several years. Xingjia grew closer to her mother during those visits, while back in college majoring in AstroPsychology. She could still feel her mother’s pain, and she considered how her mother’s pain and disappointments had influenced her own development. Synchronistically, she had learned of her father’s long ago affair during the same time that she was dating the married man. Such ironic parallels were important and meaningful in AstroPsychology, and she grew in her understanding of her past and of herself.
Yet graduation had ended those weekend discussions with her Mom, and any conversation now always returned to “getting married and starting a family.” Her work at BHAI had proved to be very engaging and stimulating. It was both another world and the “new” world, and everything was changing in ways that even the best forecasters were unsure of how to predict. As it was, no one had predicted what had already happened. Xingjia had studied the history of western astrology in the 20th Century and its growth in China during the early decades of the 21st Century. She knew how astrology had reinvented itself on a timeline that paralleled developments in psychology. Humanistic psychology influenced the emergence of Humanistic Astrology, leading to Archetypal Astrology, Evolutionary Astrology, and Astropsychology. Yet it seemed that these new branches of astrology would remain “alternative counseling methodologies,” only respected by a few in academia–and while serving millions who consulting these modern astrologers to understand themselves better and create a more fulfilling life, still ignored or denounced by mainstream science.
Then a most unexpected thing occurred. Dr. Chen Wu Chen, an AI developer for BAI–the corporate predecessor to BHAI, decided to turn the focus of his genius upon astrology. Dr. Chen had already accomplished more in the development of Artificial Intelligence and android design than anyone thought possible, but he had reached a dead end. Already science had successfully advanced robotics and android development to such a level of task performance that robots and androids had become an indispensable part of modern society. However, Dr. Chen and his team were attempting to find a way to take androids to an unprecedented level of sophistication, a level of interaction with human beings that would satisfy the intrinsic social needs of being human. “Imagine an android as a friend, your best friend, a member of your family, your companion–perhaps a lifelong companion,” he had stated at the outset of his project. “I’m not talking about a pet, but someone you experience as an equal–who is there for you whenever you need them.”
There were some that thought this went too far, that if it could be done it would undermine the social fabric of society. Many at BAI thought the investment of resources into this project was a waste of time and money. However, Dr. Chen was convinced it could be and should be done, and that humanity would be richer for it. The only problem was he could not find the right psychological model upon which to base his design. Every psychological model failed to match or even come close to the intricately nuanced essence of human interaction. Physically, the best androids already “felt real,” warm smooth skin that was pleasant to touch, even a hand to hold for children with android nannies, nurses in hospitals, caregivers for the elderly, and–yes, even female or male “prostitute androids” – whose level of “realness” depended on the price tag. The government had originally tried to ban prostitute androids, but had acquiesced to strict control of sales, user fees, and safety regulations. Yet even the most expensive prostitute androids, were still androids with a robotic nonhuman quality. Despite an erotic android subculture expressed through pop songs, art, film, and even poetry–all was projection. One knew instantly without hesitation or doubt that they were using a not-human device.
Dr. Chen was looking for an enhanced holistic operating system that would fractalize messaging creatively through its synthetic neural network, allowing for the right mix of sensory input, self-awareness, and simultaneous responsiveness and interaction. Memory, along with a self-correcting learning process was already a well-developed feature of android products. People depended upon the logical and precisely calculated information that androids could provide. An android nurse could continually monitor vital signs, administer medication, keep a detailed medical history, provide up-to-the-minute reports upon demand, and offer the solace of “touch” to patients. Yet even these valuable health care androids, were still medical devices, and only children imagined they were more.
Dr. Chen imagined they could be more as well, and after rapidly disseminating every academically archived article and text on holistic systems he came across a reference to astrology that gave him a chilled pause. He found it in the work of a controversial 20th Century psychiatrist, named Stanislov Grof, who had spent five decades researching non-ordinary states of consciousness. Working with psychiatric patients and LSD in the 1960’s, Grof found patterns of similarity in these non-ordinary states of consciousness, that he grew to believe resonated with the human birth process. He identified four stages of Perinatal Experience, which he called BPM, for Birth Perinatal Matrix. All of this was interesting enough, but it was this passage from an article written in 2005, that caught Dr. Chen’s attention, especially the sentences Dr. Chen highlighted below:
The effort to discover a method for predicting the reaction to psychedelics and the therapeutic outcome was one of the objectives of a large clinical study that our research team conducted at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the 1960s and 1970s. We used for this purpose a battery of standard psychological tests, including the Minnesota Multidimensional Personality Inventory (MMPI), Shostrom’s Personal Orientation Inventory (POI), the Rorschach Inkblot Test, our own Psychedelic Experience Questionnaire (PEQ), and others. This research confirmed my earlier findings at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and the conclusion from the study of professional literature, thatthe results of the tests developed and commonly used by Western psychology were essentially useless in this regard. Ironically, when after years of frustrating effort, I finally found a tool that made such predictions possible, it was more controversial than psychedelics themselves. It was astrology, a discipline that, even after years of studying transpersonal phenomena, I myself tended to dismiss as a ridiculous pseudoscience. I came to realize, however, that astrology could be an invaluable tool in the work with both psychedelics and with other forms of non-ordinary (or “holotropic”) states of consciousness such as those induced by powerful experiential techniques of psychotherapy (primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork) or occurring spontaneously during psychospiritual crises.
Dr. Chen immediately saw a parallel between his own frustration in finding a workable psychological model upon which to pattern the equations of his design, and the very similar frustration Grof expressed. But, Astrology?!
Over the next 6-months, Dr. Chen devoured everything he could find on astrology, and met secretly once a week with a semi-retired professional astrologer for lessons. Always the prodigy, Chen both astonished and alarmed his elderly tutor with the speed of his progress and comprehension. Kindly buy firmly admonished that it takes years to learn how to apply and practice astrology, Chen reassured his teacher that his interests were as a scientist only, that he had no intention of practicing the profession. Fascinated by the holistic matrix of astrology, as a scientist Chen attacked astrology from every point of analysis, especially as a mathematical model. *
*In analyzing a birth chart Dr. Chen recognized that the distribution of 3 planets by zodiac sign would be (12)3or 1728 possible combinations, 4 planets by sign 20,000 possible combinations, all the planets plus the Sun and Moon would be (12)10or 60 billion possible combination by sign alone. Every possible combination in a birth chart of signs, points, planets, houses and aspects combined becomes 1035; by contrast an estimate of the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the world is 1027.
Chen had found a model for his holistic operating system. If his assumptions were correct, an android operating system based upon this holistic model could accomplish two things:
1) Simulate human consciousness, responding naturally and creatively to momentary possibilities.
2) Be programed to match the astrological paradigm of their primary human assignment.
Zhou Xingjia knew this story well. Dr. Chen Wu Chen’s assumptions had been proved correct. His landmark research and mathematical algorithms had finally won him a Nobel Prize in Science in 2113, and as Director of BHAI’s android development he continued to oversee what had become a trillion RMB global enterprise. Nothing the Americans or Europeans had could match what BHAI had done, and were still doing. (The “H” had been added 20 years previously, the letters BHAI standing for Beijing Holistic Artificial Intelligence.)
Still gazing out the window 70-stories up, Xingjia wondered how this day would play-out in her story as well. She could barely stand the suspense. Every doubt played upon her mind. She was thirty-two now, successful by every professional measure. Yet personal relationships had not led to marriage, only “learning experiences” as she framed it. Now she was poised for a new learning experience, her own companion. Any minute the glass doors behind her would slide open, and she would meet “him.” “It would be the first of something…” she thought, and then trembled slightly as she heard the glass doors open. Closing her eyes for a second, she inhaled, opened her eyes and turned to meet him.
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