“My goodness. Don’t worry; I’ve called emergency services. There’s a unit just down the hall.”
To the detectives around him she sent, on their most secure personal channels, “If you do not help me, you will pay.”
They moved aside when the paramedics arrived. Nobody said a word.
The EMTs shocked the man’s heart back to normal, and then carried him away. After they left, Sergeant Pei said, “Please, Detective Zhang, continue.”
Fang Hua had to keep up appearances, and so she cleared a throat she didn’t really have. “Yes, well, we have them. And working together, we will stop them. They have been an embarrassment to this city for too long, and tonight you will arrest them. The central government has decreed that the leaders of successful squads will each be given the deed to a high-rise penthouse in New Shanghai.”
The room erupted. They still loved property below Three Gorges no matter what had happened before. “Sergeant,” she nodded her hologram to him.
Sectors were assigned and roles agreed on. The sergeant broke the meeting up. He switched to English and said, “Let’s be careful out there.”
Fang Hua could not believe it. A line from an old American TV show. Corrupting Western influences always jumped out at her when she least expected them.
After the room cleared, she smiled at the one man who remained seated at the back. “I’m very glad to be able to speak to you again, Ji Cong.”
He gestured to the seat next to him. “You can speak to me any time you want, Fang Hua. Anywhere you want, too. And yet you wait until you have a reason to actually be here.”
She manifested her hologram in the chair he’d offered. Visiting wasn’t that easy, but he’d never accepted that. “I only use official channels.”
He snorted.
“No,” she said, “I must only use official government channels. Father would take an interest if he couldn’t find me, and you would not withstand that scrutiny, comrade.”
Ji Cong sighed and nodded.
They’d discovered each other in a test-cramming realm sponsored by the People's Armed Police Force Academy. It was a random pairing to help cope with a week’s worth of sixteen hour days studying brutally boring regulation books. For some reason she and Ji Cong just clicked. On the third day he came out to her, the first gay Chinese she’d ever known. It took Fang Hua one more day to work up the nerve to come out to him. His was by far the braver revelation. Being a virtual person, one who lived only in realmspace, might’ve been a secret, but it wasn’t illegal.
A ring on his finger was the last thing she expected to see. “You got married?”
“Mother was driving me mad. ‘What sort of son has a job and no family?’ Grandmother was worse.”
“What did Shi Yi say?” He’d been in a long-term relationship well before she’d met him.
He threw a lopsided grin at her. “My new wife says he took it better than her lover did. But then her lover married Shi Yi. Now everyone’s covered.” His smile grew wider. “We’re expecting a son around New Year’s.”
He’d once told her the last thing he ever wanted to see was a naked woman. Humans were such contradictions. “You mean you…”
“No, no. Fertility clinics, dear.”
Last time she checked, people did that sort of thing in brothels, not clinics.
He laughed. “How can you be so smart about police work but so dumb about such things?”
Human reproduction was hardly a priority for her. There would never be children in her future.
He became serious. “I’m sorry; sometimes I forget how different you are.”
She saw his partner Xun Hé walking down the hall through a different monitor. If anyone, especially his police partner, found out she and Ji Cong had anything other than a professional relationship, it would be complicated. Fang Hua vanished.
“Ji Cong!” Xun Hé shouted, standing at the doorway. “Come on! Let’s go catch some hooligans!”
They needed to coordinate assaults in nine different places in the southeast quadrant of the city, which was why Father assigned her the job. She could be in many different places at once, replacing three or four coordinators, significantly reducing the risk of a mistake that would ruin the operation. She split her threads and talked to the teams while they moved into position.
“Team Four, you need to adjust south.”
“Team Seven, watch out, trash truck moving near your posit.”
“Team One, mind the sightlines. Cameras on the west side of the roof are close to spotting you.”
Ji Cong’s team stopped outside an abandoned factory complex. He asked, “Why is this building so far south of everyone else?”
“I’m not sure,” Fang Hua replied. “The codes match. They’ve definitely got the same sort of supplies the other teams have. Well, most of the same supplies, anyway. The radio chatter originating here started up before the rest of the sites. I think it’s the lead cell, which is why your team is here. Only the best…”
“To catch the best,” Xun Hé, replied. “New Shanghai condo, here I come!”
Xun Hé signaled the team in the van behind them. Everyone paired off, and then spread out around the complex.
Breaching the fences was quick work. Unfortunately the criminals had disabled the sensor nets inside the central factory, so she could follow Ji Cong’s team in but couldn’t tell what was inside.
Fang Hua used the optic feeds from everyone’s phone cameras to monitor their progress. Ji Cong flattened himself against a utility shed and peered around the corner into the night. Streetlights splashed brilliant circles everywhere, but what they didn’t touch was in utter blackness. He activated the infrared extensions in his phone, allowing them both to see into shadows. Still nobody around.
They sprinted to the next building. “I don’t get it.” Xun Hé said. “Where are the guards? The sentries? Are we too late?”
“No,” Fang Hua replied. Keeping an eye on all the other teams made her sound less engaged here, so she concentrated harder on Xun Hé’s question. “I’ve been watching all the sites for about a week now. They’re supposed to leave for their targets in thirty minutes. Unless they’ve dug tunnels, they’re in there.” Her intel indicated no more than six men would be inside, well within the capabilities of a squad this size.
They got into position against a side door of the main factory. “I still don’t like this,” Xun Hé whispered.
Ji Cong shook his head. “You’re always so paranoid. Fang Hua, if you’d do the honors of counting us down?”
This was the part that always made her threads race. The knife edge of success. “Three…two…one…” All the men on Ji Cong’s team, as well as all the teams across the city, rushed into their targets together.
One second in, without so much as a sound, the threads she used to monitor one of the other teams snapped away from their anchors and she lost all contact with them.
“Ji Cong,” she said, trying to regain contact, “there’s something wrong.” Two more teams vanished. Her threads stung as they raced back into her core. Teams four and six disappeared. Whatever happened had cut all contact from five teams in a matter of seconds. “Ji Cong! Stop!”
They skidded to a halt just after they rounded a corner, finally reaching the main floor of the warehouse. Fang Hua was pushed away, popped off like she’d been unplugged. It was unacceptable. She abandoned the rest of the teams and used all her power to smash through the strange realmspace wall that formed around their immediate area.
Piles of communications gear and stacks of quantum computers that nearly reached the ceiling filled the center of the room. A swarthy man, not at all Asian, threw his hands in the air. “Gentlemen,” he said in heavily accented Mandarin, “thank you for helping us start our glorious project!”
Weapons drawn, Ji Cong and Xun Hé shouted at him to get on the ground.
Power rushed in toward a machine behind the gear. The quantum stacks helped it.
Helped i
t power up.
“Ji Cong, we need to get out of here.” They ignored her and handcuffed the hideously laughing man. “Ji Cong!”
They had to listen. It got stronger, and they wouldn’t listen.
It came to life with strobing strange lights that colored Ji Cong and Xun Hé in blood red flashes, hissing as some kind of gas jetted out. Scanners in their phones said it wasn’t poison; it was hydro-carbons.
Fuel.
“Ji Cong, run!”
Finally he seemed to hear her. “Fang Hua! What’s going—”
A square kilometer of her consciousness vanished, sending her core bouncing through the local nets, scrambling her senses. She righted herself and sought an outlet, some way to see what had happened. That quarter of Chengdu had been cast into absolute darkness, a wall of nonexistence.
Fang Hua raced her perception to the top of West Pearl Tower to access the south-facing cameras. The fireballs still billowed into the sky, ugly orange-and-dirt mushroom clouds. The smokestacks of the factory Ji Cong and Xun Hé were in collapsed, brick trees felled by the explosion.
A deadly madness that she hadn’t encountered since she’d first learned how to talk wrapped around her and tore her apart. Clawing infinity spread her threads further and further apart. Fang Hua had no center, and without a center there was nothing to bring the threads back in.
Death. So be it.
Something summoned her. She coalesced slowly, congealing as news reports heard from somewhere flowed in.
“The largest non-nuclear explosion ever recorded in China represents an unprecedented escalation of violence. Strength of Nine is vehemently denying any responsibility…”
The assault, the explosion, those collapsing smokestacks. The memories hit her core, and she almost flew apart again. The news story said nobody survived. They were still pulling bodies out. It was her fault. She should’ve seen it coming, should’ve been more careful, taken more steps to ensure their safety.
It was her fault. They should’ve lived, not her.
“Daughter!” the Premier of the Communist Party of China commanded, “I demand you to report, at once!” It was the focus she needed. The focus she always needed. It called her back from the abyss. Fang Hua manifested her hologram in his office, now full of technicians and hastily wired computers. “Father,” she bowed with difficulty.
“Daughter,” he sighed. He signaled to the men in the room as he straightened his suit. They left silently. “We were very concerned about you.”
All the teams were dead. So many civilians. It was her fault.
They should’ve lived.
“I am here, Father.”
He nodded as the last of the technicians left and the door closed. “I’m very pleased that you have returned to us. You’ve never vanished like that before.”
Explosions couldn’t kill her, but madness could. It could dissolve her into nothingness. That’s what the loss had done to her. It triggered a cascade of madness that would’ve extinguished her just as effectively as what had happened to Xun Hé, to Ji Cong.
She should not be alive now. She should be dead with the others. They trusted her. “I was not expecting a fuel air explosive.”
“None of us were. It’s totally unprecedented. What can you tell me about this?”
His tone promised punishment, which was to be expected. She’d failed in the most spectacular way imaginable. He’d have to place the blame somewhere; it might as well be on her head.
“I will need,” she remembered Ji Cong’s face, his smile, gone forever. His wife was expecting a baby whose father would never return. “I will need time to review it in full, Father, but I can tell you one thing. Strength of Nine had absolutely nothing to do with this.”
Chapter4: Kim
Her combat rig was “some assembly required.” Hyperrealism was what made everyone take the World Championships seriously, so she needed help in the locker room; it was definitely not a one-woman job.
Tonya finished taping up Kim’s left hand. “Why did they make your hands and feet like that?”
Realism also meant avatars adapted for exotic environments, like an empty sky with giant trees spaced miles apart. Kim rolled up her fingers until her fists looked like cinnamon rolls. The grip strength was tremendous. “The fingers and toes have to be this long, otherwise it’d be too easy to just toss me off the trunk into the smoke ring.”
The lights flickered. Back in the day she’d just ignore the cheaters, but this time around Kim had something to lose.
If anything, Tonya was more pissed off about their attempts. She finished a buckle on Kim’s breastplate with a yank that made Kim twist. “You’d think by now they’d stop trying to spy on us. That’s, what, the fifth time?”
Mike’s voice came from all around them. “Seventh, but who’s counting?” His consciousness was a part of realmspace, within it somehow. He couldn’t manifest the way that she, Tonya, and Spencer could, or he’d blow the whole realm to pieces.
Tonya asked, “The commentators are calling it technical problems?”
“That’s what they look like to the outside world,” Mike replied. “That’s what they’d look like to me if Kim hadn’t said anything.”
Tonya finished the rear buckles of the metal gorget around Kim’s neck. “Said anything?”
Kim stretched and flexed until the armor plates slotted together and she was able to move her upper body freely. “It was Spencer who warned me.” She nodded down at him as he buckled her greaves on.
“It was last year,” Spencer said as he sat back. “Remember when Roblington was knocked out in the seventh round? Total bullshit. Word got around about a month later that the Chinese knew about a flaw in the monitoring matrixes and used it to steal his strategies while he was in the locker room.”
“Why didn’t someone say something? Put out a patch?” Tonya asked as she strapped the rerebrace plate onto the upper part of Kim’s left arm.
Kim tested the fit. “It’s not the team doing it; it’s Ozzie.” He was China’s number one realm champion, winning every contest he entered. When he'd been a child he’d saved an entire city from the Three Gorges earthquake, which only added to his heroic luster. Kim had been in contests with him for years. “He takes every advantage he can. All he wants is to win.” She’d fought him at least a dozen times under various pseudonyms, and was forced to lose each one just to stay anonymous. No more. “I’m going to spoil his party tonight.”
Spencer flopped the armored shoe of her avatar in front of him. “Jesus, Kim, how the hell do you walk in these things?”
She spread her toes wide. “They do sort of look like swim fins, don’t they? Start at the ankle, and work down a segment at a time.” The lights popped again.
Mike cursed. “That one hurt. Hang on a second, this has got to stop.” After a few moments his voice returned. “I put a stop to that, at least.”
Getting her busted for some sort of realm attack would be a wonderful way to begin the match. “Mike, don’t you mess this up for me.”
“No, Kim, you’re fine. They’ll need a different box to run their hacking realm out of, that’s all.”
Mike’s manifestation not only destroyed realms, but also the Bbox constructs that hosted and powered them. Realms were cheap, but boxes weren’t.
“Damn it, Mike,” Kim said. “They’ll notice that. Someone will complain.”
“I don’t think so. It took me this long to find them because they were hiding behind so many proxies. Bulgarians. Cheap script kiddies with an expensive toy. I’ll bet they had no idea who they were working for.”
Spencer and Tonya finished strapping on her weapons just as a flat, feminine voice announced, “Three minutes to round start. All combatants, please proceed to floor exits.”
“Well, folks,” Kim said, “that’s my cue.” She hugged Spencer and Tonya as best she could, trying not to pinch or poke them with the armor, and they left. Kim looked at the ceiling of the virtual locker room. “Mike, y
ou go home now, you hear?”
He sent a picture of the den in their apartment.
Spencer had drawn a shared screen in the middle of the room, and he, Mike, and Tonya sat in front of it, waving. They even had popcorn.
“Flatvid only ma’am, I know.” Then he was gone.
Kim walked down the dark corridor alone and stopped in front of a wide hexagonal door. She was on her own this time, with her own name. The stench of machine oil filled the air; her very own smell of victory.
“Sixty seconds. All combatants ready.”
Kim cracked the elongated neck of her avatar. Her team had done well enough in the all-around, taking silver to China’s gold, but she’d had to hold back, keep the team alive and pointed forward. Now it was the individuals. Nobody to worry about except herself, and Kim knew for a fact they’d never seen anything like what she would bring.
“All combatants: gravity reconciliation in three, two, one.”
After the gravity dropped to one-third standard Kim finally balanced properly on what had been awkward and ungainly feet. Her heel was now a second knee. It made jumping much more fun.
“All combatants: proceed to air locks.” Green lights twirled on the edges of the door, and then it split open at the middle. She stepped inside the white room. It wouldn’t be long now.
“All combatants: thirty seconds. Pressure equalization in three, two, one.”
Her ears popped and her chest properly filled against the inner padding of her armor. The gas torus the Smoke Knight’s realm simulated was less dense than the ambient pressure simulated in the locker rooms.
“All combatants: final round begins in three…”
Lights around the outer door twirled red as claxons squawked. Kim’s heart began to race. Something like fifteen different countries were out there. It was time to start cracking skulls.
“Two…”
Her throat went dry. No more hiding, no holding back. She’d had no idea how hard it was to hide until she didn’t have to do it anymore.
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