When I was working at the university network center, on one spring equinox the servers suddenly crashed, and after rebooting they ran abnormally slowly. Our system had been built in-house with C under Linux, and in theory it was quite secure. Our instructor immediately told us to investigate the cause, but we found nothing wrong at all. Later I discovered a file named earthworm.dll in the system directory. I first assumed it to be a worm virus, but when I opened it there was only a single line of code inside: 221122. After deleting it, the system immediately returned to normal. How so short a line could have such power, I could not guess. That evening, when I returned to the dormitory and turned on my own computer, it too booted with unusual slowness. Sure enough, in the system32 folder on the C drive there was another earthworm.dll file. Inside it there was likewise only a single command line, this time 112121. Once I deleted it, my computer also returned to normal.
I immediately ran to the computers of other classmates and found the same file on all of them. When opened, the contents were not identical, but every one was a six-digit sequence made only of ones and twos. At the time I could make no sense of it at all. Much later, while reading the Book of Changes, I made the astonishing discovery that those six-digit strings were all hexagrams. For example, the 112121 on my own computer was the hexagram “The Family,” whose judgment says that within the household each person should fulfill his proper role. Thinking it over, I realized that I truly had not helped my mother with housework in a very long time. The 221122 at the network center was “Preponderance of the Small,” whose judgment says that one may undertake small things but not great ones. At the time we were developing a large campus information platform and indeed had made almost no progress for quite a while. This worm virus was actually casting hexagrams for every computer user, and doing so with startling accuracy. It was beyond belief.
Then, at the beginning of autumn that same year, I received an email asking me not to disclose anything about mountain sprites. I had only just heard that story from western Hunan and had not yet even begun to write it down on my computer. How could the sender possibly know? I could only suspect that my machine had been infected with a trojan horse. I ran antivirus and optimization software over it again and again, but found nothing. Later, after rebooting in Safe Mode, I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager and found a process named serpent.exe. The program was connected to a strange IP address. I used the command prompt to ping that IP and discovered what seemed to be an immeasurable database, containing tens of thousands of personal files. My own name stood plainly among them. Very quickly the administrator on the other side noticed me and kicked me out. No matter how I tried to reconnect, I could no longer get in. By the next day, even the serpent.exe process itself had disappeared from my computer.
Some years later I traveled alone to Laoshan. Nominally it was a spring outing, but in truth I had heard that a tiger-lure had appeared there and wanted to see what it looked like. I wandered the mountain for three days without finding anything. What did catch my attention, however, was an old man who had set up a stall before the Taiqing Palace gate. He wore a skullcap, his grizzled hair tied up in a Daoist knot, a pair of dark jade spectacles on his face, and a ragged beard under them, yet his eyes shone with a startling brightness. I used the tortoiseshell divination slips I carried with me to look at him, but could not tell in the least what sort of being he was. So I went up and struck up a conversation. He narrowed his eyes and looked at me for a long while. No matter how I asked for instruction, he only smiled and said nothing. At the end he handed me a grimy old CD case. When I asked around, everyone said he was no more than a fortune-telling old man who often brought out his grandson’s discs to sell. But I was certain it could not be so simple.
When I returned to school, I turned on my computer, took from the old man’s CD case a perfectly ordinary-looking disc, and put it into the drive. Before long a startup screen popped onto the monitor, with the words “Bian Three Installer” written on it in small-seal script. It was a piece of software I had never heard of. I installed it cautiously. After installation and reboot, my system now contained an antivirus program called Bian Three. The moment I ran it, it found several suspicious programs on my computer. One was “Spring Worm,” namely that earthworm.dll worm virus. Another was “Autumn Serpent,” namely serpent.exe, a process-monitoring tool. They had not been written in any ordinary programming language, but were composed from the Book of Changes itself, out of ones and twos.
The phrase “spring worms, autumn serpents” originally refers to the crooked shapes of spring earthworms and autumn snakes, and is used to describe poor calligraphy. I suspect the author chose such names deliberately, to leave a trail for attentive people like me, while also reminding others that there are spirits three feet above one’s head, and that one must not do shameful things in secret. Though I very much disapprove of prying into other people’s private lives in this way, I cannot help admitting that for some people such methods are indeed necessary. If one day your hard drive suddenly breaks, do not assume at once that BitTorrent downloads wore it out. First think carefully about what you have been doing in your ordinary life.
earthworm: earthworm;worm: worm virus;serpent: snake.