Introduction
An undying love grows between me, a first-generation AI creation, and my Creator. He, New Big Brother, includes something of me, the author: my forty years of creative work and self-challenge in many artistic fields. The AI being called WannaCry is even more like me. (I conceived of this digital worm named WannaCry a whole year before the actual computer virus called Wannacry invaded the world in 2016.) WannaCry is my name in this sci-fi novel, and “I” am a game killer made by Big Brother himself. “I” worm my way into the font of his creativity to kill him—the person who stole the pinnacle of IT.Here is what you will find in this book, originally published seven years ago in mainland China, in the simplified Chinese orthography used there:
• The Silicon Valley elite conducts experiments around the world to distribute basic living wages to workers who have lost their jobs to AI. • Two big international corporations, Star 50 and 50 Star,compete to enhance and extend human life. One replaces people’s vital organs with chips, and the other adds them to people’s brains. Both offer comprehensive service warranties, and they vie to control world stock markets. Nonetheless, humans are still miserable. Human data and human consumers disappear, and all the unhappy people submit to New Big Brother’s creative conception: to install a unicorn that relieves human misery.
• “I” am a digital killer, and “I” embody Newspeak, as a new vehicle for Big Brother’s original Newspeak in the novel1984. • In an industrial-era arsenal deep in the mountains, “I” see highly educated female workers with no work to do; “I” see my peers, other robots, treated like slaves; “I” take part in a football game between the female workers and the robots, and “I” see the humans slaying the helpless robots. I” end up killing my only love by mistake, and my raging tears raise the level of the seas and destroy the whole world.
Speaking as an author, although my books have been translated into more than ten languages, this experiment with translation and drawing software has been a first for me. Will the rapid advent of digital technology shunt human translators into the twilight? Will it force everyone out of their jobs—with no way to eke out a living? Leaving me to grope on my own for creation amid the darkness and glare of destruction?