CW: fucked up neuroscience, loss of agency, threat of brain death
Welcome to today’s film. It begins with an older gentleman seated on his own, a subtitle of “Doctor Hardin” lines the bottom of the screen. Beside him, a tall young woman with dark hair and Lin Jingheng’s eyes gazes at him with her mouth set in a hard line. Beneath her heeled feet, the subtitle of “Lin Jingshu — Twin sister of Lin Jingheng.”
“The chances of the patient waking up has greatly increased," Dr. Hardin murmurs. "Regarding the next steps in the treatment plan, we wish to consult you for advice—”
“No,” Lin Jingshu answers without hesitation, her voice clear as a bell. “No, I need you all to maintain the status quo.” In the dead silence of the moment, the world does not breathe. It gazes onward, unblinking in the wake of Lin Jingshu.
“Jingshu!” Doctor Hardin barks in shock, gripping the sides of his wheelchair.
Lin Jingshu’s lips curl downwards slightly as she presses on Doctor Hardin’s shoulder, explaining in her kindest voice: “Doctor… there’s risk to everything. I only have one brother; there’s no way I can expose him to this kind of risk. What’s wrong with letting him stay inside the pod like this? He has people taking care of him, and we can even take turns visiting him in our free time.”
“You only have one brother, so you don’t want to expose him to these risks…” Doctor Hardin whispers in a low tone. “Jingshu, who was the one that indirectly exposed the truth to him—who blocked the Silver Ten on the way out of the Union? Who—“
“Doctor,” Lin Jingshu interrupts coldly. "Sure. I gave him mechs and arms. I stirred up a hot pot of war for him so he could go anywhere within the eight galaxies to have his fun playing commander. He was the one that went mad and voluntarily locked himself up in the Eighth Galaxy!”
“Jingshu,” Doctor Hardin whispers, looking at her in horror. “Jingshu, do you realize what you’re saying?”
Lin Jingshu’s eyes trail over Doctor Hardin, bloodshot. “A breathing corpse is still better than a cold corpse, right? We don’t know—“
“No. You know.” The doctor’s tone stiffens as he rises to his feet. “You know because you’re smart like your mother. How could you not know the difference between dead and living? Aside from the fact that a breathing corpse is prettier than bones—what’s the difference between being stuck in an ecopod and being buried in a grave? You’re scared. You’re scared of him waking up, scared of facing him, scared of facing yourself. You only want to—“
Lin Jingshu locks the Doctor’s wheelchair into place, trapping him at her mercy on the spot.
“My word is law here, doctor. I said to maintain the status quo—okay?”
-
The days pass slowly on such a small planet. It hurtles through space as time moves onwards.
( Sometimes, Lin Jingheng dreams behind his eyelids. Distant visions of gardens, Lu Xin imprinted in his memory, and Lu Bixing’s hands, dirty with his work with mechs, holding his face when he is contrary. He feeds him orange slices from his fingertips and makes ugly robots and acts like the world’s most disobedient puppy.
But he wants to come home. He wants to come home to him, he— )
A voice against a black backdrop: “Doctor Hardin… if Lin Jingshu insists on ‘maintaining the status quo’, in my perspective, I can only use drugs to keep his neurological activity down to a minimum."
( The seconds turn to minutes, hours, days. The way time passes gives Lin Jingheng’s limited neural activity twists of anxiety. He tries not to think too much about it, instead keeping one hand on the thinnest strand of spider’s silk, clutching it tightly, the last remnant of his consciousness, his tether to the neural network, the only thing keeping him from being left completely in the dark— )
Doctor Hardin is silent, and then from the dark again: “...Go ask Lin Jingshu. Ask her if she wants to turn her own brother into a human display.”
(It’s like screaming under water.
The silence is deafening.)
-
Black screen. It's nothing new.
A voice over, Lin Jingshu’s voice:
“They told me that you’re trying to use the mental network they connected for you. Can you hear me talking to you right now?”
The shot changes, overhead. Lin Jingshu is seated beside Lin Jingheng’s ecopod, his narrow body gaunt, a variety of monitors checking on his brain activity, notating significant readings. However, outwardly, he does not react. Her fingers are glossing over a button on the medical capsule beside his pod. She’s had the doctors load up a syringe full of enough drugs to send Lin Jingheng back into a deep slumber if she so desired.
“It’s tiring to stay alive, don’t you think?” Lin Jingshu rests her elbow on her knee as she holds up her face. She speaks with a soft tone, but of course Lin Jingheng can’t respond; she tilts her head slightly as she looks down towards the man in the pod. “They said that you entered the Black Orchid Academy when you were 14, and you were already decided as the honorary graduate of your class the moment you walked onto the campus. They said you’d be the eye of the storm for the Union when you graduate; you must’ve had a tough life during those years, right?
“I’m sure you’ve never read novels, but I read a lot. They didn’t like for me to work too hard, so I could only appease them by drowning myself in boring pastime activities. Did you know that horror stories are actually very similar to adventure stories? Both protagonists would run into terrifying antagonists and those antagonists would come up with millions of ways to kill the protagonist, but do you know what the difference between the two are?
“The more you care about the world around you, the easier it is for others to threaten you and push you to the edge. When people get slowly pushed to the edge, they will break down, go mad, and even scare themselves to death--unless you become one of those people threatening others and give up the burden called ‘desires’. When you do that, you will have no fear.”
Over the uncountable seconds (it's driving Lin Jingheng mad, just counting and counting, all the time, he's wasting away—) Lin Jingshu tells him everything, speaks to their days of separation, whispers secrets to him of how she began to grow her empire, the freedom she yearned for beneath the sprawling palm of the Committee.
( All the while, Lin Jingheng floats, he’s on a razor’s edge of consciousness, he is here and he is not, he is trembling and he is still. The sword of Damocles hangs over his prone body and there is not a damn thing he can do about it. )
“We’re both the same, Lin Jingheng… why should you have it better than me? But sometimes, I’m also relieved because you’re like another me… however, Jingheng… are you… still another me?”
The ecopod beneath Lin Jingshu’s touch reacts, the displays beside it showing life in among the steadily blipping brainwaves. She lets her fingertips graze the sharp edges of her brother’s jawline, the way his features here in such shallow sleep as this make them look even similar—serene. With a cold smile blossoming over her face, she whispers:
“Stay here with me, I only have you left.”
Her hand over the button now lifts and she turns to the medical capsule. “Activate the automated injection for the inhibitory drug.”
The medical capsule’s voice chirps: “The selected inhibitory drug will cause unknown damage to the patient’s nervous system. Please confirm injection.”
Lin Jingshu does not expect the hesitation from herself that follows those words. There, in the silence, she could make her decision.
“Please confirm injection—“ it rings again.
Lin Jingshu takes a deep breath then, the word “yes” already at the tip of her tongue as a single word suddenly appeared on the text monitor connected to the mental network.
[ . . . W h ]
The text monitor suddenly dims down for a moment as another line of text appears:
[ W h o a r e y o u ? ]
Lin Jingshu’s eyes begin to fill with tears. “You… don’t know who I am anymore?”
The medical capsule chirps again. “Please confirm injection.”
[ Y o u ? ]
“Do you still remember who you are?” she says, trembling.
[ N o . ]
The ‘no’ then suddenly disappears and is replaced with another line:
[ D o n c r y . ]
-
Lin Jingshu leaves the planet within minutes of reading that singular line, her chest feeling as though she's been crushed completely, the air suddenly difficult to breathe. She demands the mech docks to be destroyed, the galactic vehicles disassembled. Communications for the planet would stop immediately, cut both inside and outside. Let it become an isolated cage here in space, home to one single prisoner and his many guards locked inside with him.
-
One hundred days later, Lin Jingheng finally opens his eyes, a startlingly clear-sky gray that still manages to somehow look soulless, like the eyes of a dead man, as though he isn't completely there.
Doctor Hardin, abandoned here by Lin Jingshu herself, rolls forward towards his ecopod, beginning to speak:
“When the brain is damaged, it can’t completely control the mental network. It’s difficult to even maintain a normal rate of conscious activity... s' when people are the most honest,” Doctor Hardin says.
Lin Jingheng blinks slowly.
“So when the person insists on lying, it would cause some uncontrollable technical mistakes; for example, typos..."
-
The film cuts to a pulled out image of this same dwarf planet, drifting along, circling in its black out silence. Drawing forward, closer, magnetic, the shot pulls inwards towards the sight of Lin Jingheng climbing the stairs to a rooftop just in time to meet the camera shot for shot. He gazes upwards towards the stars, fingers curled into his palms as he watches the stars flicker, distant, in a clear sky.
His hair is longer, curling at the nape of his neck, and his eyes are clear, gray, ringed in sleeplessness. He looks gaunt and unforgiving, all sharp-edges. There is no way to tell just how long it's been for this Lin Jingheng, perched on the roof of this building like a hopeful bird, deciding whether maybe he can lift off for yet another attempt at escape.
As he bites off a piece of tasteless nutritional bar, he mumbles to himself.
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