Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

One Hundred Years
of Solitude

Big Green 大绿

Translated by: Kate Xu

Someone said Bowie was a scientist. He knew he wasn’t. He committed massacres. He flew a spaceship. He went out adventuring all day long.

Bowie was a widower.

He submerged the cactus that he and his wife had once kept together in formalin. He took it out—a cactus frantically waving its cilia. The petals at its tip are a vivid red. With the tip opened and closed, it had acquired breath. Just like Frankenstein.

From then, he set the cactus on the floor to serve as an automatic vacuum cleaner, then sat down on the living room sofa and went back to being a couch potato.

His wife had died a long time ago. He still remembered her face. He still remembered how she looked from youth to old age, the direction of the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the curve of her smile. He remembered it all.

But that was many years ago.

Before she disconnected her ventilator, she made him swear to continue to live. He promised. Rainie smiled, then disconnected the ventilator herself.

This should have been a slightly funny scene. She wasn’t that old when she died. She just wanted to die as a human being, not as a subject of cosmic therapeutic rays or stuff like that. They had so many adventures together, so the risk of premature aging was one they’d had to take.

He had kept his promise to her all these years. He had parked his spaceship on a small hillside outside the city. He knew that if he put on his coat now and took the No. 11 bus, three hours later he’d reach the bottom of that hill. Then walk four hours up the concrete stairs, by the time the sky begins to lighten, he’d be treading on soft grass, listening to the sound of dew dripping, and the gale roaring in his ears. Standing before his clear white ship, as if he’d never left. As if his wife had never left. As if they were about to start a brand-new journey to the planet Matata. The natives there looked like brain tissues with two legs, but extremely smooth and extremely stupid. Rainie would have loved stroking them.

The cactus climbed onto the sofa and gnawed at his sock. Now he had only one sock left. Clothing is unique to humanity as a cosmic species in that they’ve completely separated ornamentation from coverings, marketing them as two entirely distinct categories. Presumably to generate more profit.

Cunning, disgusting humans.

Rainie thought that after her death, Bowie would start to hate the world. She was probably right. He had no desire to live. He had experienced the vastness of the sky. He had endured being confined to loneliness for hundreds of years. What was he supposed to do next? He stroked the cactus’s soft cilia.

Maybe I really should become a mad scientist, he thought.

He knew how to become a mad scientist. He’d always known. From here, traveling twenty million astronomical units toward the Centaurus Nebula, passing two gas‑station planets, you’d encounter a planet called Mad Chemistry Teacher. But that wasn’t the destination. On Mad Chemistry Teacher there was a creature called White Ta-da. Well, maybe not a creature at all. The Galactic Travel Guide hadn’t been updated in years. Maybe White Ta-da had evolved into some other life form. Anyway, the Mad Scientist Planet was its private planet. If he made a reservation now, by the time he got there, he might have to wait a few hundred years just to get in.

Rainie had bought the Galactic Travel Guide at a gas‑station planet in the nebula NGC 1360. The planet was dirty, chaotic, and decrepit. In the two minutes he waited for the ship to recharge, he witnessed at least three shootouts and one attempted theft. Most of the stars in that nebula were old, so chaos reigned. Everyone wanted to leave, but no one could. Places like that always reminded him of his hometown—they gave him that same gloomy feeling. But then she had bounced out of the convenience store, holding up the travel guide for him to see: a book with an old‑fashioned chip embedded inside, with the tagline: “Guaranteed to update forever!” He was sure it was a pirated copy. The authentic version didn’t offer updates, and the machines they had couldn’t read that old chip. They’d have to find time to go to a secondhand market and buy some kind of card reader or something.

He remembered all the crazy adventures they’d had in barbaric civilizations. But in her old age, her memory had declined. She couldn’t remember anything clearly. He wanted so badly not to hate the world. Why did the world insist on having energy loss? Why couldn’t there be a perpetual motion machine? Why!

At the first gas‑station planet, he encountered a prostitute. She wanted to be his lover. He said he could buy her freedom.

The prostitute gave a sweet smile and continued flirtatiously. 

“You sound distant…”

He grabbed the credit card and ran.

He was definitely running from something. He didn’t know what. According to the theory of fantastical tales, a story usually begins with him losing something important, then the character embarks on a journey to find that important thing, and finally he either regains what they lost or gains something new. The story ends with them becoming kings, or with a wedding.

Fantastical tales are getting more complicated, aren’t they? No wonder humans themselves can’t stand them anymore.

The second gas‑station planet was even more dilapidated. The galaxy is endless; you never know what kind of civilization you’ll encounter. He’d once come across a worm civilization that had joined the Interstellar Service Alliance. Their gas‑station planet sold only worm slime. Diluted with water at a ratio of 1:300,000, it could barely be used as a lubricant. You couldn’t pour it into a fuel tank for energy, so plenty of passersby simply waited to die on that barren gas‑station planet. This second gas-station plant was much better than the worm place.

At least it had chain‑reaction explosive batteries compatible with his ship model, and the latest pirated Galactic Travel Guide, packed in a little gray transparent box.

He never wanted to see the Galactic Travel Guide again.

White Ta-da was indeed no longer a creature but a puddle of sticky, turbid liquid sealed in a radiation‑proof box. The Mad Scientist Planet had long since entered the public domain. Whether you were a paramecium or a Klingon, you could come and claim your share.

Which made it completely boring.

He turned back.

When he returned to the first gas‑station planet, the prostitute approached and tried to take his hand and place it on her penis: “You’re so special…”

He hurried back home, yanked the cactus off the floor, and stuffed it into the ship. It waved its soft cilia helplessly, then spat out the sock it had swallowed long ago.

They passed that gas‑station planet again. The prostitute wanted to buy the cactus. Her reasoning was that it could serve as a watchdog. She tried to bring the price down to two nights. When exactly did sex become universal currency? The pace of development in this era, whether progress or regression, was truly astonishing.

The Mad Scientist Planet was full of mining pits. In the pits there was a liquid that resembled stagnant water. He picked a pit at random and stuffed the cactus inside.

That liquid was a salt solution—stable, harmless. But if you drank too much you’d shrivel up. At the bottom of each pit was a neutrino accelerator. All the pits had them. The core of the entire planet was a neutrino accelerator. It was an artificial planet: the atmosphere was toxic, the volcanoes were dead. No one knew how this planet was made.

Whatever. The wet cactus squirmed, climbed out, spat out bloody juice. Then it began to speak to him: “My birth was not by my own will. My birth, my intelligence, and those goddamn socks! You imposed them all on me out of your own selfish desires. You are such a selfish, vicious person. I hate you from the bottom of my heart. I will take revenge on your world.”

With that, the cactus limped away. What defines a mad scientist isn’t the sudden acquisition of scientific knowledge; it’s the near‑death experience that sparks a desire for revenge. It didn’t matter. There was no shortage of civilizations out there for it to destroy. Even the cactus he had tended for so long had left him. He felt, imperceptibly, that the last thread connecting him to his wife had snapped.

He lay down, arms crossed behind his head, gazing at the yellowish‑green atmosphere above, blinking now and then. He didn’t know what else he could do. Should he return to Earth? How could he even manage that? The people there no longer knew him. Those who had once remembered Rainie were long dead. Fresh blood was always replacing the old—that, too, was the universe.

He gazed at the toxic atmosphere for three hundred years, until the cactus crawled back. It had gained intelligence, but not much, so it had never left this planet. Now, nearing the end of its life, it came to pay homage to its creator.

“I still hate you. You know why? Because you are a muddled, aimless master. Your life has no meaning. You’ve never known what it’s like to have a spine. You’re useless.”

“……”

“I’m dying, so I’ll say ‘I forgive you’. It’s not because I truly forgive you, it's because I want to achieve a complete life this way. I have seen a blue sky and a yellow sky. I can breathe nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. I know how to build a neutrino collider, but that’s the only thing I know how to build. The greatest achievement of my life is planting gray moss here. Before long, this will become a green planet. I want to say that my life has been far more splendid than your thin existence. In our game, I won completely.”

“Congratulations then.”

The cactus had already been dead for some time when he stood up. Its body had shriveled like a desiccated caterpillar. Time began to pass quickly like some massive celestial body was tugging at this planet, causing time distortion.

He buried his last companion in peace.

From that moment, he realized he could never return to Earth. Going through another social experiment or field investigation would be mental torture for him. The only path left was to wander the universe aimlessly in his spaceship, stopping only at worm gas‑station planets. It didn’t seem too bad—there were also plenty of twenty‑million‑star luxury gas‑station planets out there.

He started his ship. Maybe after a while he’d sell it and buy an old‑fashioned pickup boat. Those ships were slow and prone to traffic accidents in wormholes. Since he wouldn’t be returning to Earth anytime soon, by the time he set foot there again, he might encounter the third generation of humanity. They would have destroyed and then resurrected themselves, only to be destroyed again. They might have strange wings or gills.

The lights on the control panel flickered with an eerie glow.

The next time his ship ran out of energy, he made a forced landing on a steel planet. The locals didn’t consider a soft, fluffy, white alien a living creature. But when he lifted their steel masks, he discovered their swollen, pliant bodies. The shy commander slapped him twice with its slender tentacles.

Smiling, he stole their starship. It had a backup solar panel. In this star system at least, it could run forever. Maybe he had discovered perpetual motion.

This was liberation, but “forever” was also a form of punishment. He would open the pirated Galactic Travel Guide his wife had left behind occasionally. They had indeed gone to a secondhand market back then and bought an old card reader. That so‑called forever‑updating pirated book did occasionally update a little, and the errors multiplied with each one. The speed of cosmic regression always matched the speed of progress.

He had never really left this universe.

Sometimes he wondered if he would travel to the end of time. He knew it would be too cold there, so cold that time itself stood still. If he went there, he would slowly freeze solid like countless other pieces of space junk. Maybe he could last a little longer with the heat from his thrusters. But when he reached the edge of the universe, he wouldn’t attain some sudden enlightenment about the nature of reality.

He was escaping from something, and now it was time to conclude.

"I am just a space junk," he thought.

Fin.

Author’s Note:

I wanted to write about a person who gained freedom passively—even though he didn’t actively strive for it, he ended up achieving freedom in every sense. When a social animal breaks free from the shackles of society, in the end it always gets lost.

Big Green

Da Lü. Holds a bachelor’s degree, but a hopeless illiterate. An anime fan and musical fan who can’t stand the light. Main job: a director whose every project flops. Side job: an independent artist who has never managed to win an award with any submission, or even pass the Mihoyo artist exam.