Son of Heaven

by Wingrove, David

  China’s response had been blunt, and memorable. Their delegate had stood and, in perfect English, told the American delegate: ‘Go fuck yourself !’

  What had followed was six months of tit-for-tat legislation, each of the two great superpowers vying to outdo the other in sheer pettiness. By Christmas 2019, any pretence of being trading partners was gone. As, effectively, was globalization. The days of free trade were over. Protectionism was now the key. The world economy began its slow slide.

  Then, two years later, another flashpoint.

  By then the recession was beginning to bite. America’s close neighbours (Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador), facing a massive economic downturn, did what had been unimaginable only ten years earlier and linked themselves politically with the now rampantly right-wing giant that had for so long dictated their policies. Plebiscites were held, and in all seven countries an overwhelming yes vote was delivered. On 29th October 2021 the United States of America became the ‘Fifty-Seven States’. Over the next three years it was to add another twelve – including its biggest neighbour, Canada.

  Before then, however, one other event threatened to shake the tree, and once more it was to do with oil.

  Back in the heady days of expansion – in 2008 – China had struck a deal with its neighbour Burma, to build a nine-hundred-mile-long oil line from Kyaukphyu, on Burma’s western coast, through Mandalay to Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province.

  It was a visionary venture, for until then, 80 per cent of China’s oil had had to come through the Strait of Malacca, a channel of water about five hundred miles in length that was ‘policed’ at one end by the US naval base at Changi in Singapore, and at the other by the US Indian Ocean Fleet, operating out of Diego Garcia.

  For China this was equivalent to the US having its fingers on their windpipe, even with the extra oil from Burma. It could not be tolerated, and led to the fast-track construction of a Chinese deep-sea fleet, further raising military tensions.

  Even so, all might have been well and the balance kept, except that in November 2021, just four weeks after the formation of the Fifty-Seven, the Attorney General of the United States expelled more than fifty Chinese embassy officials in response to yet another Chinese spy plot.

  China followed suit, expelling more than two hundred Americans.

  Stubbornness became belligerence. By the end of that first week, and in the shadow of a further twenty dollar rise in oil prices, the US threatened to blockade the Strait of Malacca unless China backed down.

  It was now a matter of face.

  For the next four days, as shipping ground to a halt, China was entirely dependent on its Burmese pipeline. War seemed imminent. And then it happened. The oil pipe was attacked and blown up, thirty miles south-west of Mandalay.

  The United States denied any involvement. In fact, it protested its innocence. Even so, the world held its breath.

  At urgent meetings over the next forty-eight hours, senior officials from both sides desperately cobbled together a peace. A treaty was signed. The world drew back from the edge.

  Only the damage had been done.

  China, in particular, was suffering now. While the slowdown had not been as catastrophic as some had predicted, it had caused problems, especially in the countryside, where the margin between eating and starvation had always been slender.

  For years there had been local uprisings against corrupt officials. China’s communist elite had accepted this as the price of modernization. Now, however, as the markets slumped and oil prices reached a peak, that fragile margin vanished. The spectre of starvation faced the seven hundred million who lived in rural China and the revolts began.

  Anhua, in Hunan Province, was the first. ‘Old Mud Legs’, as the peasant farmers were known, had had enough. Local officials were strung up. Two thousand peasants marched on the nearby town. They burned down government buildings and looted government storehouses. The authorities tried to suppress news of what had happened, but it had already leaked out on the internet. Local farmers, seeing it, joined the angry protest. Within the hour, Taojiang, Yiyang, Wangchang and a dozen more northern Hunan towns were in flames.

  The army was sent in. Two battalions from the regional capital, Chang Sha. Drawn from distant provinces – a measure the government had taken to try to avoid local boys having to subdue their own ‘brothers’ – the soldiers ought to have stayed loyal to their commanders. Only they didn’t. They understood the farmers’ plight only too well – weren’t they the sons of farmers themselves? – and they refused to fire on them.

  The riots spread. To Sichuan and Hubei, to Henan and Shantung and Kuei Cho. Soon every province had its burning towns. There was talk that the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ had been broken and that the leadership would have to stand down.

  It was then, on the fifth day, that they acted.

  Word of it flooded the news media just after dawn. Peasants, waking to another day of protest and violence, found themselves instead staring at the big TV screens in their local towns and watching an unbelievable scene.

  From above it seemed as if the sea was full, from horizon to horizon, of ships – Chinese navy ships – while overhead hundreds of planes, fighters and transporters, filled the sky.

  The invasion of Taiwan had begun.

  Since 1949, when the remnants of Chang Kai Shek’s Kuomingtang army had fled to what was then known as Formosa, the communists had wanted Taiwan back – to unify the Middle Kingdom and make it whole again, ending the long years of humiliation at Western hands. A defence treaty between Taiwan and the United States had meant China had held its hand all these years, but now they played it, meaning to take the country by force, whatever the cost in lives.

  It was cynical, of course. An act of desperation in the face of civil war. But it worked. No more buildings were burned – unless they were those owned by Americans. ‘Old Mud Legs’ stopped his shouting of angry anti-government slogans and stood in curious groups before whatever screen was available, watching the unfolding of events with bated breath.

  The United States reacted instantly. The diplomatic agreement between the two powers, which had stood since 1st January 1979, was torn up. The US sent its Seventh Fleet north. Fighters were scrambled from on board the Abraham Lincoln and the Enterprise.

  Jake had seen only recently – on the History Channel – what had happened next. For a full three days the two great fleets had faced each other in the Strait of Taiwan. The Chinese flagship, the Hung Se Huang Ti (or ‘Red Emperor’), pride of their deep-sea fleet, sailing north, shadowed by four US destroyers, then south again, like some ancient warrior king riding out on the battlefield in front of his army.

  And all the while the rhetoric grew and grew. China must have Taiwan, and how could that possibly be resolved except by violence?

  Even so, both sides held back from escalating the conflict. No one wanted to be the first to use nuclear weapons. Both fleets had missiles enough to blow each other to kingdom come, but neither used them yet.

  And then, at the eleventh hour, just as the rhetoric reached a crescendo and it seemed war was impossible to avoid, the US withdrew, leaving the battlefield – and Taiwan – to the Chinese.

  It was as abrupt as it was shocking. One minute it seemed as if it was the prelude to Armageddon, the next the Chinese were wading ashore unopposed, along the two-hundred-mile-long stretch of coast between Taipei and Kaohsiung.

  China, the Middle Kingdom had been reunited.

  Only later, as word leaked out of what had really happened, did the withdrawal make any sense. A deal had been made at the highest level. The last of all such deals between the two, as it turned out. The world was to be divided up into two spheres of influence. The East would go to China, the West to America, as when the New World was divided up between Portugal and Spain by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, five centuries before. The USA had abandoned Taiwan. Had traded it for a bigger slice of the global cake.
/>   No one else was consulted. It was done, and Taiwan was the deal clincher. The Battle of the Taiwan Strait – potentially the biggest single battle between two superpowers – gave way to ‘The Taiwan Compromise’.

  As it turned out, however, events were to overtake them. China might have solved its internal crisis, and America fashioned an empire of sorts, but oil was still the number one problem. Even as the two great super powers strove to lay their new foundations, so that problem escalated.

  The oil was running out, and in the last week of May 2022 the problem became a crisis and, in a matter of days, the crisis became a crash.

  Oil production – artificially maintained at a high level – peaked then began to fall away dramatically. And as it fell, so companies fell with it. By the middle of June demand outstripped supply by seven billion barrels a day.

  A modern, oil-based economy was no longer viable. Catastrophic recession was about to hit the world hard. Things were going to have to change.

  Jake remembered how his own father had come home that day, a look of sorrow and bewilderment on his face, to tell them that he had been laid off. He was no longer an insurance broker. He had joined the long ranks of the unemployed.

  As it turned out, his father had found another job, and they had done all right. But the UK, like most of the world, underwent radical changes in the years that followed. There was a massive swing to the right. And, with it, a massive polarization of society. In the convulsion of that year, a new modern world was formed.

  It was an uneasy birth and as the divide between rich and poor, have and have-not, widened to a gulf, there was increasing social unrest. Rioting and acts of terrorism characterized those first few years after the Crash. In the UK, as in so many Western countries, the right-wing government, elected on a populist mandate, began a crackdown. Many complained that they were living in a police state, and it was not far from the truth. But the public unrest settled. Slowly life improved. Only things had changed. There were two camps now, two kinds of citizen. And a third kind, who weren’t even citizens. The unprotected, or UPs.

  Jake sighed. It was the world he knew. The world he’d grown up in.

  For a time he slept. The sleep of innocents and fools. And then he woke.

  Daas woke him. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was. He had been dreaming. In the dream an army of bright red scarab beetles had appeared one by one from nowhere, unfolding, it seemed, from solid air, like baby universes.

  He sat up, knuckling his eyes, then glanced at the sleeper-clock.

  4.17 a.m.

  Christ, he thought. What now?

  He got ready, then went up onto the roof to wait.

  Ten minutes later, sat there in the shadows at the back of the hopper, waiting for clearance, the great dark sprawl of London spread out below, the City a bright-lit fortress embedded in its midst, Jake found himself thinking of the past.

  The years had shaped the landscape down below. From pagan settlement to Roman town and on through the centuries to now, men had come and gone and left their mark on the land, expanding and extending, though rarely with anything like the fervour of the last twenty years. Yes, while the greater world had suffered, some, like himself, had thrived. So it was. So it had always been. Nothing stayed the same for long. Nothing ever did.

  Jake snapped out of his reverie as the hopper lifted off.

  ‘Are you all right, Mister Reed?’

  ‘I’m fine, Sam.’

  ‘Sorry about the delay. They’re ultra-cautious tonight for some reason.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘And the Market…?’

  Jake looked across at the pilot. ‘Why, what have you heard?’

  Sam hesitated. ‘It’s just… signs… you being here at this hour, for in -stance. But yeah… there’s a vibe. Rumours… a feeling that things aren’t quite right.’

  ‘You pilots discuss this kind of stuff?’

  ‘Not usually, but… well, today’s felt different. I don’t know why…’

  Joel was waiting for him in the entrance hall. He was still wearing his wiring suit, his long-lens data glasses slung about his neck.

  ‘How’s the Market?’ Jake asked, going over to him.

  ‘Quiet…’

  ‘Then what…?’

  Joel took his arm and led him aside, away from the reception desk so they wouldn’t be overheard. He seemed excited.

  ‘We’ve heard from MAT.’

  ‘And?’

  Joel smiled. ‘We’ve been accepting that what we saw in the datscape was what went on. It wasn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean they’ve been using what MAT call perception distorters. Imagine a programme that takes what’s there in the datscape and feeds it back to us as something else. A programme that distorts not merely how we see it, but how it feels and smells. How we perceive it as a totality.’

  ‘Perception distorters… So it was there all the time?’

  ‘Staring us right in the face. The rogues didn’t appear from nowhere, they were in the data threads.’

  ‘And how did MAT find that out?’

  ‘They’ve got four dead spinners.’

  ‘Ah…’

  Jake almost laughed. It was obvious when you thought about it. After all, the only way to get a programme into the datscape was through the data nodes, and the only way to do that was to go through the guys who fed in the data: the ‘spinners’ as they were known. The rogues would have ridden in on the data threads, their presence masked by the fact that yet another programme – a perception distorter – was sending back a signal that simply didn’t register to the observing sensory equipment.

  ‘It’s an amazing programme,’ Joel said. ‘We’re calling it IM.’

  ‘IM?’

  Joel smiled. ‘Invisible Man…’

  ‘And the four dead spinners?’

  ‘No links whatsoever, as far as they can establish.’

  ‘Yet the attacks were coordinated to within a fraction of a second. Do we know how they were killed?’

  ‘They’re checking that out right now.’

  ‘Oh, but they must know by now…’

  Joel had gone quiet. ‘Word is they were suicides.’

  ‘Suicides?’

  That made no sense. No sense at all. Why would four men who didn’t know each other kill themselves? What possible motivation might they have had? Was this some new form of terrorism?

  The glass door across from them swished open. It was George.

  ‘Joel… Jake… You’ve heard the news?’

  They followed him through, into the interior.

  As George and Jake skinned up, Joel went to his desk to check on the situation inside the datscape.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ Jake asked.

  George met his eyes. ‘I want to have another look. Now that we know how, I want to see if there’s anything we might have missed first time round.’

  Jake couldn’t see how, but George was his line-boss and if George wanted another look…

  ‘How is it?’ George asked, looking past Jake to Joel, who had just returned.

  ‘Much as it was. Trade has slowed since the attacks. Word’s got out and people are a little jittery, but it’ll pick up. Now that we know what to look for…’

  Jake stopped what he was doing. Was that it? Was all of this just a feint? To make them look in one direction when the attack was coming from another?

  Maybe. But it all kept coming back to one question. Who in god’s name would want to do this? Suicides. No, it made no sense at all.

  They went in, the sensory rush washing over them.

  Standing close by and to his left, the portly grenadier lifted his arm and pointed. ‘That way, I think…’

  It was quiet. Unnaturally quiet. In a metaphorical sense.

  The datscape was a twenty-four-hour-a-day phenomenon, open everywhere and all the time. It never ceased. But this felt like it must have felt back in the old days, in the ga
p between when one market closed and another, on the far side of the world, opened.

  Jittery wasn’t the word for it. Afraid, more like.

  Yes, people were afraid.

  Are we really that fragile? Jake asked himself, as he clambered down a slope of cornsilk rocks.

  Even the data threads seemed listless. They lacked the pulse and vibrancy they normally possessed.

  George’s voice sounded in his head. ‘Is it me, Jake, or has this whole place gone to sleep?’

  Jake nodded. ‘It’s not you, George. It’s…’

  He stopped. The wind… it had begun to blow again. Faintly, like a silent rustling in the branches or the slightest rippling of a stream. He could feel it on his chest and arms and on his face. A gentle breeze that made the hairs stand up.

  He shivered. Across from him George was looking about him.

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  Jake licked his finger and held it up.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing east. ‘Right there.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ George asked Joel, keeping his channel to Jake open so Jake could hear.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joel said uncertainly. ‘We’re trying to get a trace. Daas is on to it… Oh!’

  That ‘Oh!’ made Jake stop in his tracks.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘There was a jump… I don’t know… like a power surge. Didn’t you feel it?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘No… George…?’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right, does it?’

  Jake closed his eyes. Did it feel right? It didn’t feel wrong…

  ‘Let’s press on,’ he said. ‘Do what we came to do and get out.’

  The wind blew a little stronger. Beneath Jake’s feet, a tiny rivulet of dark magenta grew agitated.

  ‘Someone’s dumping stock.’

  ‘What kind of stock?’ George asked, pre-empting Jake’s explanation.

  ‘Animal foodstuffs. Media. Industrials. Consumer goods…’

  ‘Random stuff, then?’

  ‘Looks that way…’