The second day Helen used the sound of a basketball horn anytime they slipped up. It was a very noisy session.
Kim got serious when she went to pick up the tools she needed to break the ark’s final firewalls. It was the reason they'd come all the way out to New Shanghai.
The Three Gorges dam collapse had washed most of the original Shanghai into the East China Sea. What the water didn’t carry away was buried under fifty feet of silt. The city’s replacement was on a scale only China could reach.
Everything was big—the biggest towers, biggest highways, biggest parks, and biggest monuments were all in New Shanghai. It also had the biggest crime.
The man she met was the opposite of the avatar Kim knew from her Rage days. Shi Shīzi had been an elf, a Peter Pan with Chinese characteristics. The realspace version was more like an Asian Tony Soprano: tall, balding, and fat, with a city accent and a commanding presence.
“I’m so happy to meet you in person after all these years,” Shi Shīzi said as he waved Kim and Mike to their seat at the back of the noodle shop.
Okay, he was actually an Asian Tony Soprano.
“How is Mark?”
The question was still hard to answer, and probably always would be. “He died about three years ago.”
“Michiko?”
She’d practiced these questions; otherwise Kim would’ve teared right up. Not good in this company. “No, they’re all gone. I’m the only one left.”
“I told you not to get mixed up with the drug trade. Nothing good comes of it.” He smiled at Mike, but kept talking to her. “You shouldn’t sleep with your bodyguard, dear. It’s like naming a horse you might have to eat.”
“Excuse me?” She rammed enough power through the realm monitors that the cameras around the room sparked. His bodyguards stumbled and cursed with the feedback she pushed into their heads.
Shi Shīzi laughed and waved his hands. “You haven’t changed a bit, Kai Kuai. I do apologize. Please,” he opened up a connection to a realm she hadn’t seen in more than five years, “take whatever you need.”
*
Kim walked Mike over to the sex shop herself after she found the tools she needed, then sat outside while he sent pictures of the interesting, improbable, and downright hilarious stuff inside. It took a bit for him to get over the embarrassment, but once he did, they found much more interesting tools to focus on.
Mike did a lot more than graduate from ribbons that night. There was a lot of giggling, and he singed her a few times with light touches, but sleeping back to back with a makeshift wall of pillows between them, wearing nothing but a sheet, felt safer than anything she’d ever known.
Kim woke up at four in the morning thinking about the ark. She hadn’t gotten any work done on it with the new tools yet. There was at least an hour before sunrise, well before Mike would wake up. She knew where trying to meditate in robes together with nobody else around would lead. Better to get up now and do a little homework beforehand.
One of the fondest memories she had of her dad was helping him work on his ancient Italian car. “Half the battle is having the right tools,” he’d say. She’d been working on the digital equivalent of a cylinder head with nothing but a Phillips screwdriver ever since the abbot had given them the ark. Now that Kim had a complete toolkit, its firewalls unscrewed like bolts soaked in oil.
She fired up her text-to-audio app and let it scroll through the file titles until she heard the first thing that sounded like a summary. In cold, robotic Mandarin, it said:
Latest forecast, project 459.
Pakistani commandos will reach Three Gorges on schedule. Weather fronts will maximize damage after collapse. Minimal staff will be maintained at all downstream dams to ensure subsequent overtops-collapses occur as predicted. Under no circumstances will security forces be allowed to intervene.
Kim made three different reading programs confirm the signatures at the bottom of the report. The men who’d signed off on this atrocity were now in charge of China. One of them was the current Premier.
Helen’s father.
She woke Mike up immediately, and after copying the data to other stores, they woke Helen.
She went very pale at the news. “You need to destroy this, right now. In fact…” files winked out of existence in their thousands, gathering speed as she spun threads off to do the work more efficiently. Kim left the realm as Helen crushed the model with her foot.
“This can never see the light of day, not now and not ever.”
She couldn’t believe it. “Are you kidding me?”
“Does this look like I’m kidding?”
Mike said, “You can’t destroy it all.”
“I will destroy it. Help me get the store out of the model.” She picked it up and tore at the hull.
“No, Helen, you don’t understand. You can’t destroy it. We’ve already made copies.”
She dropped the model. “Destroy them. Destroy them now.”
Kim was stunned at Helen’s reaction. “Slow down. This is monstrous. Millions of Chinese died, and the government knew all about it. Helen, they made it worse.”
She shook her head. “That is in the past. There is no changing it. If you value this country, if you value me, you must destroy the entire archive and any copies you have made.”
Mike flopped into a chair. “But why?”
“China is not like America. We cannot deal with the social chaos you live with every day. We have no way to cope with it. Chinese must have a strong central authority to guide us, otherwise we will collapse into anarchy.”
Kim had forgotten Helen was a Chinese cop who worked directly with the highest levels of the government. “That’s absurd.”
“No, it is not. You do not know our history; you do not know us. Look at your experiences here. The bandits, the kidnappings, the murder. This is what happens in China when central authority falters. When a Chinese government falls, we do not put a new one in its place. We tear at each other like rabid dogs. It takes decades, sometimes centuries, to put it back together again.”
Mike tried to reason with her. “You can’t say that about a whole country. Chinese all over the world do just fine without a central government. Look at how strong and rich the mainland has gotten. I’ve read up on China enough to know this all happened because the government eased up on the people, gave them the freedom to make their own decisions.”
“It’s not the same thing. That was a controlled easing, constantly guided by strong leadership.”
Kim couldn’t let that stand. “Are you serious? That leadership is rotten. It runs on bribes. You shoot the corrupt ones when you catch them, and the rest just keep at it.”
“Those are mid-level bureaucrats, corrupted by your Western influences.”
She could be so pig-headed. “They’re not mid-level anymore,” Kim said. “They’re running your damned country.”
“It doesn’t matter, not now. Revealing this will not bring those people back. It won’t rebuild the cities, and it won’t fix the dam. Those things have already happened. What it will do is plunge my country into murderous chaos. We’re on the brink of war. If the government collapses now, all the other countries around us will carve China up like meat on a plate. I will not allow you to subject us to such humiliation.”
Kim replied, “These are the people who brought you to the brink. If they’re capable of this monstrosity, don’t you see they’d be more than willing to start a war?”
They’d cornered her, Kim could see it. But then the stubborn came back.
“No. China does not start wars. We have no desire to conquer. We only wish to be left in peace.”
“Hang on,” Mike said. “You have one of the biggest armies in the world, with a modern air force and navy.”
“China must be strong to defend against its enemies. The moment we show weakness we will be conquered again, torn apart.” She clenched her fists. “It doesn’t matter.” Helen locked eyes with Kim. “You haven’t had
time to move those files into a cloud, here in China or anywhere else. The only place they can be is on your local store. Give me access now. You must give me the copies so I can destroy them.”
This had to stop. “I won’t. All you know about is China. If it hasn’t happened here, it may as well never have happened. We’ve seen men like this before in the West. They think people are interchangeable parts of a machine. They dissect them to figure out how to control them and kill the ones they can’t. They think nothing about shoving millions of people into gas chambers. Their only worry is about whether or not there are enough ovens to get rid of the bodies. Nobody says anything until it’s too late.
“I may not be able to bring all those millions of people back, but I can damned sure guarantee they won’t kill any more.”
Kim had made her final point, and won. Helen turned to Mike. “Please, you must do this. I must destroy these files.”
“Kim’s right. We can’t let this stay a secret. These are evil men. If we don’t stop them, who will?”
“I’m sorry,” Kim said, “but you have to trust us. This will turn out all right.”
Helen sighed heavily and was very still for a long moment. When she turned back to Kim she said, “I’m sorry, too.”
The tall windows behind Helen shattered as soldiers on the ends of ropes flew in and dropped to the floor. More slammed their way through the front door. Mike fell over, unconscious.
Kim ran to Mike, but a soldier stepped between them. “Helen! What have you done?”
The soldiers dragged Tonya and Spencer out of their rooms in restraints. “Kim,” Spencer shouted. “What the fuck?”
Helen wiped her face dry. She wasn’t Mike’s sister anymore. She was the head of a secret task force that reported straight to the premier.
“I cannot allow your simpering Western morality to destroy my country.”
One of the soldiers flung a strap around her neck. The steel of the pole was cold and hard. “What have you done to Mike?”
“He’ll be fine. You’ll all be fine. I need to talk to Father now.”
Kim jumped into realmspace and gathered the power to strike her, but was dumped back into the room when Helen yanked the phone off her neck.
“Sorry, not this time.” In Mandarin she said, “Take them away.”
Chapter 48: Helen
After the hotel Father reinstated her, ordered her to clean up the mess that China’s realmspace had become, and report to his office immediately. It was completely understandable he would force her to wait in the vestibule the entire morning, stared at with curious contempt by everyone who walked by. A common police officer, a female one at that, would sit outside the premier’s office this way only due to some terrible offense.
They were right.
Kim’s ridiculous obstinacy had forced her hand. Forced her to turn in her own brother, his friends, and the woman he loved. Helen’s feelings for them were nothing compared to preserving her country and obeying her father.
She had to remind herself of this constantly; otherwise, the urge to vomit would be impossible to fight off.
The cage had made it possible. Helen had slowly reconstructed the thing that had held her as a kind of private therapy. The intricate work strengthened the bindings between her real self and her outside host. It was a very clever construct. It could compact to the point of near invisibility, and then spring around the sort of people she and Mike were in an instant.
In her days at the academy, Father had forced her to travel through strange realms and do strenuous exercises in them. He told her they were a substitute for the physical training human recruits went through, but she now knew they must’ve also allowed whoever built the cage to test model after model until they found one that worked.
She entrapped all of Mike’s real consciousness in a portable construct that he could not break. The only things left were his autonomic daemons. Helen could still sense them on the other side of the Great Firewall. She wanted to reach out to him, but didn’t. She didn’t deserve it. She'd dishonored Mike with her betrayal more than she'd dishonored Father with her disobedience. The soldiers had taken them away, but Kim had never broken Helen’s gaze. That last scene was a knife she regularly used to cut her soul.
Helen needed to bleed. She deserved it.
The secretary walked over to her and said softly, “He’ll see you now.”
She hadn’t realized the floor of Father’s office was made of marble. Her shoes clacked loudly as she walked up to his desk. She’d reported to him every day, seven days a week, but only as a hologram. Helen now stood in front of one of his realspace desks. It was so detailed.
Then she remembered Mike carried out on a stretcher, and Kim’s eyes.
“Daughter. Report.”
The air conditioner vents blew cold air past her ears. She clenched her toes in her regulation boots. The leather creaked in response.
Tonya and Spencer never knew why the soldiers took them away.
“Report!”
“Disturbances in the realms are down ninety percent. Hooliganism has been eliminated. Due to the current labor shortage, all perpetrators have been marked. As soon as the crisis has passed they will be rounded up for processing.”
“An excuse? This is beneath you.”
It wasn’t an excuse, but she dared not protest. “I provide only a reason for why they have not been put in jail.”
He stood and stomped toward her. “Are you serious, Fang Hua?”
His aftershave was an assault. How had she ever ignored his clacking teeth?
“You are no mere hologram anymore.”
She wasn’t. How could she forget?
Because Mike was a prisoner now. They all were, and it was her fault.
Helen clenched her fists. “You are correct, sir. I will requisition a team, and we will begin rounding them up as soon as I’m dismissed.”
He grabbed the sleeve of her uniform. “This is amazing. I cannot believe you are standing in my office. Close the windows like you used to.”
She concentrated her threads and slapped the blinds closed.
“Well done.” He sat back down in the chair behind his granite desk. He was at ease, casual, but he hadn’t once given her any indication she could relax. He picked up his old-fashioned phone and spoke into it. “I’m here now. Please begin the meeting.”
He forced her to stand at attention in front of him as he held a routine staff meeting with the education ministry. His secretary came in with a tea set as he talked. Other orderlies brought in reports for him to sign. Never once did he look at her. An entire hour passed.
She wondered what Mike would think of her when he woke up and discovered what she’d done. They’d rescued her, in so many different ways. She had given her word to get them out of the country.
Helen had built her whole life on loyalty, but she was here because of a betrayal.
Being in realspace made coping so much harder. Helen would not cry. Damn her body.
“Daughter, you are dismissed,” he said as he got up and donned his coat.
“Father, I’m not done with my report.”
He waited until the orderlies cleared his tea away. “Go home, Fang Hua. Or should I say, find a home.”
Helen had to know what only he could tell her. “Father, what has become of…the spies?”
“Your foreign devils? You have done very well there, daughter. They are unique, and their status as spies means we can do whatever we want to them. You have been such a mystery to us. Now that we have another, we can use him to find out how you really work. Qiáng Shān died before we understood his nature, why he couldn’t stand to be touched. The woman will advance our medical science significantly.” He donned his jacket, and then moved to leave.
She'd saved her country, but Father only talked about experiments. “Will they be released?”
It was like he was a street food vendor, someone selling meat. “To the coroner, yes, once the scientists have finis
hed.”
One of Father’s assistants pulled the door firmly shut.
Chapter 49: Mike
Mike swam up out of unconsciousness. The threads of his real self were in a tight, tangled ball, along with his datastores, structs—basically the whole package. He tried to expand, and razors cut at his threads. Mike was in Helen’s cage again somehow. He gave it a tentative push and found it to be just as solid as the last time.
“Ah,” a voice said, low and silky, “you’re awake now, good.”
He tried to open his realspace eyes, but nothing happened. “I can’t see.”
“No,” she said, “I’m afraid that won’t work. Here, let me help you.”
He recognized the voice. Who wouldn’t? Fee was in here with him, somehow.
The walls just outside the cage became transparent and light poured in. Mike found himself laid out on a table, fully manifested as an avatar and floating inches above it. There was no air construct in here, nothing for him to interact with, no sparkling fizz of an imminent inversion. The bars of the cage prevented a simple inversion, so there was no obvious way out.
But he could see through the bars. The realm was a large room made of gray flagstones. Lights hung from iron chandeliers chained to the ceiling above. Constructs that reminded him of the machines Kim kept in her private hacking realm lined the walls.
“Fee? What are you doing here? Where are we?”
She moved around various consoles as she worked. “Where you are isn’t important. It’s where you’ll be taking me that is.”
If he kept her talking she would eventually tell him what she was up to. “Sure, Fee, I’ll take you anywhere you want, just say the word. You don’t need all of this stuff.”
She threw a switch, and Mike felt feverish. “For you to take me where I want to go, I definitely need all this stuff.”
“I don’t understand, Fee. What are you doing? Why are we in this dungeon realm anyway?” The haptic field was set as high as it could go. He had a pulse, and mucous in his throat. But no need to breathe, and sound still worked for some reason. She must’ve fiddled with the realm’s contracts to make that happen.
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