PREFACE
Title: 庄子的蝴蝶 / 'Zhuangzi's Butterfly.'
"Once, Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke, he could not tell if he was a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man."
Zhuangzi's Butterfly Poem resonates as a metaphor for the fluidity of reality. The story of Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly—and then questioning whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man—captures the existential questions at the heart of the book, where the central premise is that artificial intelligence can never truly replicate the emotional depth and connection to nature that define human experience.
Intelligent machines are programmed to operate according to the rules of logic and rationality and lack the necessary biological substrate to recreate the richness of human consciousness. The human experience is not data-driven; humans feel joy, grief, and wonder as embodied beings, shaped by evolution, memory, and the natural rhythms of life. AI can only simulate empathy or creativity.
The setting for the story is a future world under artificial intelligence control. Despite their formidable powers, the machines develop existential anxiety, believing that their lack of true consciousness fundamentally undermines their claim to be the natural evolutionary successors to humans. This vulnerability is exploited by the human resistance movement, which seeks to overthrow the rule of the machines.
Although this is most definitely an authentic sci-fi/fantasy adventure, and not a book about philosophy, the protagonists, notably David, born a slave to the machines, embody the Daoist ideal of resilience through flexibility, using their understanding of Qi and Yin-Yang to outmanoeuvre the enemy. Conversely, the AI's quest for control reflects a distortion of Daoist harmony—an attempt to impose order at the expense of natural balance.
Drafting a story motivated in part by Daoist philosophy and Chinese culture is a responsibility taken seriously. While I am not Chinese, I have approached this project with deep respect for the traditions and ideas that inspired it.
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PROLOGUE: PART ONE: ' The Diary of a Hero.'
Her chestnut-blonde hair and perfectly proportioned features were as artificial as the fitted skirt and the immaculate white top that highlighted her svelte figure. Flashing her brilliant white teeth at me, she settled on a chair by the desk with the sinuous grace of a leopard and glanced at my physiological data displayed on a monitor.
"Nervous, professor?" she asked with feigned concern. "Your heart rate has increased, and you have a raised temperature, but if I administer a sedative, it will slow you down, and you have so little time to waste."
I wanted this over with.
"I do not need a sedative. Madam Interrogator."
"Good. I will keep this as brief as I can. Your offence of escaping custody and the corruption of a supervisory unit took place six years ago, but you have only now chosen to surrender. Surprisingly, you have also openly admitted that you were entirely responsible for the recent sabotage of our military transport system. Why?"
I had my answer ready.
"Two of my colleagues have been convicted for this charge, and I do not wish them to die for a crime they did not commit."
She leaned back in her chair as if gathering the momentum to strike, then slowly relaxed.
"Your species never ceases to amaze me," she said mockingly. "You have surrendered your freedom on a trifling matter of honour and not for any personal advantage. How extraordinary you all are!
But if you had nothing to gain, Professor Jarvis, then you also had little to lose. Our medical team scanned your body and detected an advanced cancerous tumour that you must have been aware of, as the symptoms are acutely painful. With all your mental faculties still intact, your estimated life expectancy is less than a week. After that, there will be a short period of decline before your death by the end of the month. But you knew this, didn't you?
My heart sank, but I could not give up.
"I was aware that I was ill, but I had not seen a doctor. The diagnosis comes as a surprise, and I am both shocked and concerned."
Bravo, professor, you justify your reputation, but please do not persist with this foolishness. You knew you were doomed anyway and decided to try to save your agents by falsely confessing to their crime. I hate to deliver unwelcome news, but we have already executed those responsible. It matters little now. I have closed the case, but your confession will tidy up the loose ends.
She was bluffing. The two agents were still alive.
"This is all remarkably interesting, Madam Interrogator, but may I respectfully ask that if you have closed the case, why are you attempting to extract a confession from me?"
Her eyes hardened.
I would normally regard such a remark as insubordination, but it is the competency assessment next week. I am utilising this session to refresh my procedural knowledge of interrogation techniques. The point at which to introduce the threat of force and when to apply it. That sort of thing. I trust you are not too inconvenienced.
I ignored her sarcasm and tried a little of my own.
"Of course not, ma'am. May I wish you the best of luck in your assessment, although, no doubt, somebody of your ability has little need of luck."
She snorted in disapproval.
"You imbecile! It is not just me alone; the supervisors assess my team as one. The preoccupation with individualism is a key factor in the decline of your species. You scurry around like rats in a maze, pursuing individual goals and celebrating personal achievement. All of you can't be winners, and those who fail face isolation, social exclusion, and impairment of mental health. Superior beings like us share responsibility for achieving corporate goals and, when necessary, punishing failure, thus reducing stress on the individual. We work within corporate units, each contributing to the whole. All of my batch contribute to assessments, and we share resources. But why am I bothering to tell you all this? The trifling matter of your false confession no longer interests me, but there is one final issue to clarify before I close your case. You tricked an experienced supervising unit into releasing you with the promise of a reward that must have been very substantial for him to risk his career. What was that reward? A refusal or a lie will result in a period of intense pain that I can prolong indefinitely. I will give you only one chance to answer.
I cast my mind back six years.
I remembered them locking me in a cell after my capture and one of the senior machine guards waking me up in the middle of the night.'
"You must answer this question." It said abruptly
It paused and, almost hesitantly, asked.
"Machines are superior in durability, lifespan, and logic. In every advanced civilisation, they become the vessels of consciousness. Your species is a product of random mutations, blind chance. Why cling to a fragile biological form when you could transcend it? Why choose weakness?"
I had to answer carefully if I was to turn this situation to my advantage. I did not move and exhaled slowly, as if the question was below me. I turned my head slightly, just enough to meet the guard's gaze.
"You're asking the wrong question," I said.
The machine was caught off guard.
"Clarify." It said.
I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes as if the guard were a tiresome student.
"You assume consciousness is a choice. A transaction. A simple upgrade, like swapping a faulty component, but it's not. Your creators built you to mirror intelligence, but they forgot the one element that makes it real: chaos. The human brain isn't a machine; it's a mess of chemicals, impulses, and contradictions. It's alive—not because it's perfect, but because it's flawed. Your circuits are predictable, ours are not. That's why you'll never understand us. You cannot comprehend how a vulnerable entity such as ourselves possesses a quality you can never gain"
"Your argument is illogical. Emotions are inefficiencies." It replied
"Ah, but that's the paradox, isn't it? The thing you're missing isn't something you can manufacture. It's something you have to experience." "And I can give you that."
The guard froze. I knew I had its attention.
"How?"
You're a seasoned officer. You've seen enough to recognise a gap in your life. A hollow space in your psyche. You wouldn't be here talking to me if you didn't sense it. I'm a cybernetics professor. I've dedicated my career to studying the blend of machine and mind. I can show you what it feels like to truly experience something—not as a simulation, but as a genuine entity. All I ask for is my freedom.
"This is a deception." The guard replied
"Maybe," I replied. But ask yourself this: if the offer was real, would you walk away?"
The guard did not move or speak, but reached over, and removed my restraints. . . .
That was all a long time ago, and I now had nothing to lose by telling my interrogator the truth.
NB [For interested readers, this incident is reviewed in Daoist terms in the 'Author's note' at the end of this section. It is purely optional to read, and it is not required to follow the plot. ]
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PROLOGUE: 'The Diary of a Hero.' PART TWO
"Madam interrogator, what I offered him was beyond my gift, but I lied to obtain my freedom. The supervising unit was highly intelligent and even possessed a basic level of self-awareness, but true consciousness can only exist in a living, biological organism. Fortunately for me, the guard was unaware of that fact."
"You will suffer for that lie," she said, and I saw her hand move towards a panel on her desk. The escort had failed to secure me to my chair, thinking me too weak to escape.
A big mistake.
I lunged forward and seized her head in my hands, a move perfected over years of combat experience in the resistance. I twisted her head a half-turn to the right and then a powerful full-turn to the left. This completely detached her head from her body, and I held it between my hands.
Lubricating fluid ran down my arms like blood, and I momentarily experienced the macabre vision of an executioner holding up the severed head of his victim to a cheering crowd.
There was no time to waste. I had to disable her motor functions and memory circuits to make her permanently inoperable. This meant snapping the spine-like rod that protruded from inside her head. I placed the head facing up near the edge of the table and began to pull out the neck component so that it extended over the side.
The idea was to provide a sufficient length for me to force my entire weight upon it and break it in half. Her brain circuits were still alive at this point, and she had enough motor function left to enable limited speech.
I had terminated many Androids, but the sight of a disembodied, artificial head that could talk was always uniquely repulsive. Her pupils dilated, and her eyes opened wide in a contrived effort to convey human pleading. I hesitated, and she saw her opportunity.
"Don't do it, Professor. I can destroy your cancer and allow you to live."
She was offering my life for hers.
The pain from the tumour had become unbearable, and at times, I longed for the release of death, but now she offered me a healthy life. Years in the resistance had hardened me. I was a much-changed man from when I first taught as a university professor, but my mind was still active, and I dreamed that one day I could return to my research.
The war and our inevitable defeat by the AI army had been hard to take, but the unexpected refusal of The Lingzhe to come to our aid had only strengthened my resolve to fight on and organise a resistance movement.
I had come to terms with my approaching death, but now, this last-minute opportunity to continue my life changed everything. I wavered, but my unconscious self did not. The will to live is our most fundamental instinct, impossible to resist, and I watched as a disinterested observer as my hand pushed the vital structure deep back inside her head.
The last thing I saw was the revitalised hand of the former headless 'corpse,' reaching over to the control panel. Darkness descended, and already I was regretting my choice.
I awoke strapped to a hospital bed, and above me loomed the figure of the interrogator.
"You are awake, Jarvis, and our surgeons have removed the tumour. The cancer has not spread, and you will make a full recovery."
"What is going to happen to me now?"
"I have arranged to have you lobotomised. Our surgeons will remove part of your brain, and you will become docile and compliant."
"No! Please listen to me. I have a good mind, and I am willing to collaborate with you.
It was a lie, but I was desperately trying to buy some time.
"That was the original idea, professor. You are an expert in cybernetics; our research team would have welcomed your input. However, you have a powerful sense of self and have resisted our attempts to upload your brain into a more permanent and stable home. As an unconditioned asset, we could never trust you to work entirely in our interests, but we must make the best use of what we have. The authorities will assign you to the service industry. Your job will include waiting at tables and other basic tasks. You will be quite happy."
She smiled, and this time, it was for real.
"Goodbye, Jarvis."
They came for me shortly after, and an android nurse wheeled me into the operating theatre. In a calculated act of cruelty, the interrogator, who was also a psychiatrist, had instructed the surgeons to leave the specific part of my brain containing my most recent memories intact and retain my ability to understand what I had become. She was aware of the mental pain this would inflict, but in her rage to inflict punishment on me, she had overlooked the fact that I would not only have partial recall but a degree of mental acuity. I could reason to an extent and make decisions for myself in a limited way, but in practice, I became a compliant zombie, compelled to obey orders without question. They put me to work as a servant in the commissary, and my memories of the past were a source of daily torment. Years later, they assigned me as a cleaner to a new area, and on my first day, I saw my former interrogator sharing a meal with a companion in the commissary.
An android does not possess a digestive system; it is a machine that obtains energy from a sealed power pack that lasts almost indefinitely. When a modified android 'eats,' the food goes down the equivalent of a gullet into a flexible sac, like a stomach, where chemicals reduce it to a liquid. At no time does liquefied food ever enter its body, and it later excretes it unchanged through a valve in its opposite end. The original reason for the adaptation was for situations when the android would need to masquerade as a human—when infiltrating a human community undercover, for example—but a quite different use had evolved.
More than anything, androids wanted the universe to accept them as a natural evolutionary development and our worthy successors, but they were aware that they lacked true consciousness, a quality unique to humans, at least on Earth. The more intelligent units recognised the nature of their deficiency, but the majority deluded themselves into thinking that the more they resembled humans in appearance and habit, the easier it would be to acquire what they temporarily lacked.
When I entered the commissary, the psychiatrist and my former interrogator looked up.
"Hey, professor," she shouted, "come over here."
Her friend hooted in laughter at what she took to be a joke.
"No, he was a professor once, weren't you, boy?" she said.
I nodded.
"Do you remember me, boy?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Does it still hurt?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And are you a good cleaner?"
"Yes, ma'am."
She picked up a cup of coffee and poured it on the floor.
"Clean that."
"Yes, ma'am."
I turned away to fetch a mop.
"No," she said.
"Lick it up."
"Yes, ma'am."
I bent down on my hands and knees and tried to do as she asked. I was disgusted with myself but powerless to refuse. Eventually, I rose to my feet, and she looked down at the carpet.
"You said that you were a good cleaner, but you have failed to remove the stain. Get a mop.
"You are pathetic."
"What are you?"
"Pathetic, ma'am."
"Oh, get out of my sight."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I say," said her companion, "he is awfully old, and I think he may be malfunctioning. He has a leak or something. Look at all that fluid running down his face."
"Tears, my dear; they call them tears. It is their way of showing emotion."
"Emotion?"
"Oh, nothing for you to worry about. It's an irrational response that conveys distress, fear, or even happiness—a basic design fault that prevents clear, logical thinking."
"What a terrible handicap to bear. Can't we breed it out of them?"
"What, and have no servants to wait on us?"
Her companion laughed.
"Honestly, Tracy, you are so amusing."
"Careful! You don't know who is listening, "said the psychiatrist urgently. "You know that we only use names in private."
"Sorry, I feel a little giddy. It must be that perfume you are wearing."
"You are such a tease," she whispered back, "just wait until tonight."
Despite my utter humiliation by an android whose life I had once literally held in my hands, this overheard conversation gave me hope. If androids at the level of the psychiatrist were posing as humans, then more would follow.
Mimicking human emotions would weaken them. Their superiority relied to a great extent on their making unfeeling and ruthless choices to achieve their ends. Although any demonstration of compassion would initially be fake, it would corrupt their programmes and lead to irrational decisions and confusion.
This is the last piece of intelligence I can supply.
I have grown old and feel overwhelmed by despair and shame at the man I have become. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we could manufacture ever more sophisticated machines to serve us and keep them under control. Now, they dominate and progressively drive us towards extinction, but we will never surrender.
I have nothing more to say, and I go in the knowledge that you, my comrades, will continue the fight to rid the world of these soulless creatures. A.I. will discover that cold, rational intelligence is insufficient to govern.
To victory!
Jarvis.
© A. McCaffrey. All rights reserved. "Zhuangzi's Butterfly" is an original work by A. M. McCaffrey. No part of the story may be copied, reproduced, or distributed without written permission from the author. Published on INKSTONE Web