I first met Lady Win when she came highly recommended to our department by one of her paramours, the Marquis de Grace. A magician, he called her, and one of the brightest jewels of the Court. She was dressed for the interview in a one-piece tunic that was jet black except for a scarlet waist sash, and instead of fashionable platform shoes, she had on tall black soldiers’ boots. Lady Win’s face was a perfect oval, with soft, slightly upturned lips that reminded me of red cherries. Her look seemed calm but had a touch of defiance, and then I noticed the tear stains that had formed delicate half-moons under her mascara-tinged eyes.
Like my memories of Lady Win, our thoughts are little more than flashes of light. In their brief incandescence, they remind me of the fleeting flights of flying fish. We entertain about six thousand such fish a day, according to the scholars at the Imperial Medical Academy. Your Excellencies, I hope and pray that you will attain the ripe old age of at least seventy-five, like my father did, in which case you will have savored a hundred and sixty-four million thoughts! That is indeed a vast body of cogitation, dwarfing even our magnum opus, the twenty-two-thousand-chapter long Official Records of The Sixteen Dynasties. Indeed, the myriad thoughts, including brilliant ideas and plans that have emanated since the dawn of the Empire, until Lady Win and I came along, were mostly lost, as if those expressions of the true colors of our people were no more than wasteful excretions! Instead of being shackled in this cell and condemned to die, I should be honored for helping to preserve the essence of our civilization.
When Lady Win interviewed at our department, I didn’t dare ask her why she had been crying. At the window, Peeper, one of our mechanical birds, had its auricular eyes glued to the glass. I thought at first that its presence was disturbing her but Lady Win was gazing straight ahead, as if she had no time for distractions. When I enquired about her skills, she sighed, and with a few movements of her fingers caused an apparition to materialize before my eyes. It was a landscape painted entirely of light, and as I paused to admire it, the objects in the picture seemed to approach and then recede. The picture turned out to be the first page of a magic hand scroll that Lady Win slowly unrolled to reveal a faithful map of our Empire, and as she tapped at the light surface, the mountain chains, deserts, and rivers were rendered so vividly that I was left in awe. I bowed down to our Exalted Emperor for his success in brilliantly unifying such vast and diverse territories.
Picking up her ink brush, Lady Win pointed to a far-flung desert province from where, as a young girl, she said she had fled barefoot with nothing to her name. Murmuring to herself in her ancestral tongue, this mistress of magic painted in the empty space above her magic atlas, superimposing on her ancestral village a beautifully blended aerial park with sparkling fountains and lovely pavilions.
“Come,” she said, touching my fingertip with her brush. She pointed me to a walkway that descended through the park down to a cobblestoned lane, which ended at a humble cottage of rammed earth with a tiled clay roof overlooking a courtyard with a few ducks and chickens.
She cleared her throat. “This is where I lived with my parents … until the soldiers from the capital arrived.”
Opening the south-facing cottage door, I found gently waving plants and shelves filled with scrolls and framed calligraphy shimmering off the walls. The magician even made me hear glasses of tea being stirred, and women quietly conversing.
Lady Win guessed what I was thinking. “My Lord Wencer, without make-believe, reality would be utterly unbearable. Even more so for people like me whom fate has treated so cruelly.”
“Lady Win,” I said, “you appear to have overcome whatever disadvantages attended you earlier. But integrating the virtual and the real …”
“Doesn’t always go smoothly?” Hers was the most beautiful smile, and then she blushed, noticing my stare.
Eyes are like fishnets, catching our fluttering feelings.
I was about to remark on how we were completing each other’s sentences, when Lady Win interrupted me.
“Lord Wencer, our minds seem to be in harmony. Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be useful for the Ministry to be able to detect what I am about to say?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Lady Win, so now you want interviews for our department to be carried out telepathically? So that our mechanical birds can no longer listen in?”
“Nothing like that, My Lord,” Lady Win said. “Didn’t you discover how to infer thoughts directly from the brain, without having to await their voicing into words? You were, after all, regarded as one of the most brilliant students of the Imperial Medical Academy.”
Excellencies, inventions are thoughts that germinate and flower over many generations. Our ancestors invented not only practical conveniences, but entire fields like rheology, brontology, gnomonics, and hoplology. I too came up with a significant innovation while studying medicine. As Your Excellencies may know, when a region of the brain becomes more active, as it does when a thought arises, that region demands more of the combustible air that we breathe. As a result, blood carrying combustible air surges to that region. The enriched blood has a distinct paramagnetic property which I managed to detect and measure. My invention consisted of a giant magnet that was coiled around the head of the subject while I fired pulses of energy into the brain.
During the term breaks, I would invite my classmates to our estate, where they enjoyed browsing our ancestral library and relaxing in a tranquil pavilion watching banks of swans gliding on glistening water. One of my classmates painted as a hobby, and her Swan and Cygnets, inspired by our lake, won the first prize at Her Highness the Empress’s annual Exhibition. It was thanks to this collective friendship that my classmates volunteered to lie down inside my machine, where I had them listen to lively recitations of poems such as The Merchant Seaman’s Wife.
Of course, for each phrase my subjects heard, blood rich with combustible air rushed to particular areas of the brain that were activated, creating a pattern of cerebral circulation. Each new thought in reaction to those great classical compositions spawned a new spurt of blood flow, like a shadowy worm wriggling across the brain’s mysterious jelly. I found it easy enough, after a few weeks of detailed calculations using tables from the Compendium of Mathematical Delights, to come up with a formula to predict which phrases were most likely to correspond to particular thought worms. I used this formula to automatically translate my classmates’ brain activity into flawless text, whenever they were listening to a poem or story or even silently reconstructing it.
Excellencies, you will find the details of my formula and translation method disclosed in my paper Reconstruction of Continuous Language from Brain Recordings. The Minister of Pure Works himself read it and said it was one of the finest scientific papers to emerge from the Academy in recent years.
However, before I could graduate, my beloved father passed away. Due to the machinations of his step-brothers, we lost our estate and fortune, and my mother was left destitute. She was too old to serve the Palace as a Lady in Waiting, let alone become a concubine, though in her youth, before she met my father, she was much sought after for her looks. I had to leave my studies immediately and take the exams for the Civil Service. Once I became a mandarin at the Ministry of Pure Works, I was able to support my dear mother until her passing, and then work caught up with me and I thought no further about my formula, until Lady Win brought up the idea of a thought detection project for the betterment of our people.
Once she joined us as a special adviser, we devised a solution. By collaborating with a prison for minor offenders, particularly poachers, pickpockets and poetasters, my team was able to gather a vast trove of brain blood flows and their corresponding formula-derived texts, vetted for accuracy by each subject. This time, the tasks were not confined to lingering over poems and stories. In exchange for daily rations, the prisoners also had to wrestle with long mental calculations and puzzles such as the Three Gods Riddle and the once-popular game of Twenty.
Lady Win then came up with a clever way to make our invention both attractive and practical. Instead of having people lie down inside my Academy-developed apparatus, she was able to exploit an equivalent array of information from gadgets worn as diadems, necklaces, bracelets, and pins. The result was a wearable thought detector that could generate, for a thought anywhere in our realm, succinct and often scintillating text.
Our department demonstrated the technique to the Imperial Heir himself who clapped vigorously, the applause amplified by his two dozen courtesans.
His Highness then posed a question. Just as his father the Exalted Emperor was constantly reminding hungry farmers to be more diligent about saving grain in provincial warehouses, might not the thoughts of the Empire’s subjects be preserved somewhere safely for future generations?
The Ministers in attendance nodded gravely in appreciation of the profound nature of his question. Even the mechanical bird watching from behind a column couldn’t help butting its head out and nodding.
I sprang to attention. “It is a brilliant suggestion, Your Highness. The repository should be called the Collective Unconscious of Humanity. It will include the Empire’s finest ideas and most refined expressions of the mind, providing a permanent and ever-expanding cultural inheritance.”
“Your Highness, it will also help purify the spirit,” Lady Win interjected.
The Ministers said nothing, for they knew Lady Win well, but one of the concubines, a heavily-rouged young thing by the name of Spring Song, reminded her that they were in the presence of the Imperial Heir, and that making false claims in front of a royal would result in the ultimate punishment.
Lady Win was quick to answer. “By means of this invention, people will become intimate, at last, with their souls. The torrent of thoughts, as revealed by our invention, may seem disturbing at first, like waves on a lake being whipped into a frenzy by the wind. However, as one becomes familiar with the ebbs and flows of thinking, the winds will die down and the lake will turn still and calm. Being in touch in this way with our true nature will lead to detachment, a quieting of the monkey mind, and with that, percepts will become sharper, more focused, the wellsprings of action clearer.”
As I went on to explain further, Noble Excellencies, knowing that their thoughts were being stored and analyzed, people would want to look their best, ridding their minds of base ideas and allowing their native goodness to shine through. Instead of some regions of the Empire falling prey to irrational ideas and succumbing to tribal loyalties, the Unconscious would reveal our true commonality, emphasizing the universal values of honesty and kindness that bind us together, making the Empire much easier to govern.
His Highness was very pleased, and instructed the Minister of Revenue to endow our department with a substantial grant to make the Unconscious a crucial project of the Ministry of Pure Works. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“What are thoughts, really?” Lady Win asked silently. By then we were lovers.
A thought strutted across my mental field, then skittered to a halt.
“Take off your wearables.”
She stripped off her diadem and ejected a sexy pin from her navel.
“What are thoughts?” Lady Win repeated, as she crouched half-naked over me.
“Thoughts are concepts,” I said glibly. “Like what I’m feeling now, Lady Win.”
“You need to get out of your head more, Lord Wencer.”
Love. A fierce tug at the heartstrings, followed by wild plucks and fish flying far above the flotsam. The thrills, the heart poundings, the explosions of delight, even with Peeper looking on! Lady Win created with her brush wonder worlds for us to travel in, including a sizzling hot-air balloon that soared higher than any mechanical bird, taking us on a holiday tour of the vast and dazzling atlas of the Empire. There were also times when we didn’t want to go anywhere, content to repose together in each other’s arms. I remember how she once painted a pipa player floating above us dispensing heavenly melodies. I was inspired enough to strum on my six-string the cherished composition Cascades, drawing tears from her eyes.
Lady Win had a sadness that was not of this world, as if she was carrying not only the burden of her own suffering but that of humanity. It was strange being in love with such a person. We would joke and exchange witticisms, but then she would frown and withdraw into her thoughts. I knew I could never make her truly happy. Looking into her eyes with their shadowy pools of light, I nevertheless dared to believe that we were made for each other. Like a pair of swans gliding together on the lake of my long-lost estate, the memories of Lady Win and I lying together on a skiff, our fingers trailing through the dappled water and creating intersecting circles of ripples amid the floating plum blossoms, were duly logged by our wearables into the Unconscious, where they live on.
Call me a fool, Your Excellencies! For forgetting how suddenly our fate can change, and how an arrow shooting swiftly up will turn and plunge downwards. Lady Win’s promotion into the highest ranks of the Ministry, resulting from the successful deployment of the Unconscious throughout the Empire, involving of course its widespread adoption by the Palace and profitable application by industry, was not met everywhere with the welcome it deserved. She lost the support of the Marquis de Grace, who fell victim to some minor palace intrigue and was condemned to the same prison I was soon to occupy.
Seeing that Lady Win now lacked proper backing, the concubine Spring Song of the berouged cheeks moved in. Respected Excellencies, I now realize that some of you may know her! She had apparently set her sights on a boudoir in the well-appointed Palace of Eternal Bliss, and for that she hoped to curry favor with the Exalted Emperor himself. Lacking the magic and charms of Lady Win, all she possessed was youth and beauty, of which there was no scarcity.
Spring Song was however suspicious by nature, and something about Lady Win, perhaps her outspoken style of dress and the fact that she wasn’t from the capital, made her investigate further. By seducing an elderly archivist at the Records Secretariat, she managed to dig out obscure facts about Lady Win’s background. It turned out her parents were simple peasant farmers who tended to their crops and poultry, but there was also an ancient tradition of magic in those parts. Interestingly, her parents had declared in a village gathering that the invasion was happening not because their province was mutinous as claimed but because it was wealthy beyond imagination. For somewhere under the mounds of their village sat rich lodes of iron ore whose existence had been mentioned in ancient gazetteers but with the exact location left unspecified. Tapping into that resource would, the ancients believed, yield powerful magnets and other wonders, but would invite disaster by permanently upsetting the balance of nature. Their claims led to vigorous discussion, loud enough for the authorities to take notice. Her parents were warned, yet they continued to speak out.
When the Imperial Swordsmen arrived at her home, the seven-year-old Win was hiding behind the chicken coop. She saw her parents fend the invaders off with rakes and shovels until they were decapitated. Though a child, the future Lady Win was subject to the same brutal treatment as adult females seized in battle. I was not aware of that latter outcome, though Lady Win had mentioned that her parents had perished during the invasion.
“There is so much injustice and cruelty within our Empire,” she once told me, as we were sitting in the walled garden of the Ministry, with our wearables discarded and the mechanical birds grazing a little distance away. She fingered my queue thoughtfully. “The rich and powerful think they can get away with anything, and sometimes we too succumb to the belief that true justice will not be found on earth.” She sighed, and her eyes remained dark. “But the Unconscious never forgets. Everything has been preserved for eternity.”
Based on her archival research into Lady Win’s background, Spring Song obtained a warrant from the Ministry of Justice to examine her activities in more detail. It was then that they discovered her true magic. It turned out Lady Win had long ago made a list of names of those who instigated, executed, and benefitted from the invasion and massacre at their village. Some of those implicated were gentlemen of very high rank and captains of industry. Seeking vengeance, she had created a back door within the Unconscious to export some of their most private and shameful thoughts, including those which resulted in actions of unspeakable brutality, into one of her magic diffracted light pictures.
To her credit, Lady Win had held those third-party thoughts close, even though she had found many clandestine and execution-worthy nuggets among them. It was only when the soldiers came to arrest her that, in a few final brushstrokes, she maliciously posted the incriminating information into the official gazette of the Ministry of Pure Works, after which there was no way of hiding the truth about the real Empire. The consequences, from the toppling of Governors and breakup of families to the lingering questions of loyalty that have risen all the way up to the Imperial Heir himself, are well-known to Your Excellencies. I understand the Palace is still coping with the ramifications, as the darkest secrets of our Unconscious continue to pour out. Rather than blaming Lady Win, who remained steadfast, the Imperial Swordsmen should be paying a visit to the person who instigated the chain of events who was inspired not by a desire to make the world right, but by lowly ambition and jealousy.
Lady Song, as she is now known, was instead rewarded for her vigilance with oversight of my former job, while being granted sporadic access to the Imperial Bedchamber. Surely this is a grave injustice? Though I was heartbroken by the execution of Lady Win, who remained calm and defiant to the end, I cannot deny that I was used by her most barbarously. She told me that she was hopelessly in love, just as I was, but I now know she had singled me out solely on account of my invention from my student days, realizing long before I did its ultimate significance. The interview obtained through her Marquis friend was clearly a ruse. Through the marriage of her magic and my science, she succeeded in getting the Unconscious built and having it embedded inextricably in our daily life. That way, she made sure that there was no escaping the truth, which would perpetually be lurking about.
The Unconscious was our only hope, she said, to purify the spirit, no matter what the cost.
Your Excellencies, I was indeed the Ministry official with overall responsibility for the Unconscious, and I admit to being aware of Lady Win’s intention to reveal those dark secrets of our Empire, and becoming convinced of its righteousness. Yet as you scroll through these final words relayed through my soiled headband, be aware that these thoughts are now inscribed in perpetuity, guaranteeing that ideals of the common good, and sacrifices made for them, will never be forgotten.
