Soft Burial: The Archive Zero Resistance
Summary
When a powerful AI threatens to erase both digital and human memory, a banned Chinese novelist and her global allies must risk everything to preserve forbidden truths and resist the machinery of forgetting.
In the shadowed corridors of near-future China, acclaimed novelist Fang Fong becomes an unlikely icon of resistance after her searing Wuhan lockdown diary is targeted for erasure by the all-seeing Harmony Bureau. As the regime deploys AI-driven disinformation and the chilling 'Soft Burial' project—capable of deleting both digital and neural memories—Fong’s words become more than testimony; they become a battleground for the very soul of history. Refusing exile, Fong clings to her roots, even as friends vanish and her every move is watched, haunted by the knowledge that forgetting is the state’s ultimate weapon.
Across the Pacific, her devoted translator Michael Perry faces a digital crucible of his own, enduring cyber harassment and smear campaigns as he fights to keep Fong’s banned diary alive in world consciousness. Meanwhile, a clandestine network of Wuhan Witnesses—coders, nurses, students—risk everything to reconstruct and smuggle fragments of forbidden memory into a blockchain-powered archive, defying the Harmony Bureau’s relentless pursuit. Guided by the stoic wisdom of elder novelist Yan Lianche, these accidental revolutionaries must outwit quantum surveillance and AI doppelgängers, forging new alliances in a world where trust is currency and memory itself is contraband. As the lines between fact and fiction blur, their struggle becomes a global war over the future of truth, identity, and what it means to be human.
Inspired by: Killing Memories: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign - https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/15/killing-memories-soft-burial-fang-fang/