by Ramez Naam
“Wait!” the President said. “Pryce, what are you talking about? Where are you?”
Pryce cut the connection.
Pryce pulled out her second phone, the new one Kaori had used cash to buy her for this trip, and sent a single message to Kaori. “01” Zero for Jameson. One for Stockton. She popped the data card out of her primary phone and swapped it into the new phone, tunneled the new phone to an offshore anonymizer, and started beaming the video to a pair of remote accounts she’d created for herself and Kaori.
The primary phone started ringing.
She ignored it.
Someone overrode her, forced a connection to open against her will.
She reached over and hung up on them.
This video was, if not proof, then at least circumstantial evidence of Stockton’s innocence of the PLF’s creation.
The bandwidth was terrible out here. But she had other things to do. Pryce rotated her seat to face backward, to the wide open cabin configuration many preferred. Then she opened her gear bag and started pulling out the heavy Special Forces parka, snow pants, hood, face mask, and the rest of the gear.
Three times she reached over and hung up when the White House forced her phone on.
Finally, the gear was all on. Jesus, just putting it on was a lot of work.
“Display map,” she said.
There, that was the spot. That overpass.
She reached out with her finger. It trembled.
Whew.
She took a deep breath. Superior intelligence. Data. Planning.
I’ve got a plan, she told herself. It’s going to work.
She reached out with her finger again, pointed at the overpass. Her finger was steady this time.
Steady enough, anyway.
“Pause at this underpass,” she told the car. “Let me out. Then continue towards Billings at normal speed.”
Three hours later, as the light was starting to fail, Carolyn Pryce stopped her off-road hike across the fields of Montana and stood, panting, trying to catch her breath, her heart pounding in her chest, cursing herself for not keeping up a more intense training regimen in her day-to-day life.
To anyone passing by, she would have been the faintest of blurs, with the faintest of wide, soft depressions as tracks left behind her.
Then the blur reached down into a thigh pocket of the heavy chameleonware parka she wore, pulled out the un-stealthed black rectangle of her second phone, and punched in a code, before returning the phone to her pocket, and returning herself to near invisibility.
Her primary phone she’d left in the Tesla. Not to avoid the President.
But as a beacon for Jameson.
Twenty minutes later, she heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter. The Special Forces cold weather mask painted a vector for her. She turned, blinked at the tiny spot, and it magnified.
Blink, magnify.
Blink, magnify.
Blink, magnify.
Until she could read the registration on the side.
Only then did Carolyn Pryce deactivate her chameleonware.
It was only once she was in the helicopter, chartered under an alias, on her way to the airfield at Bozeman, that she checked the news on her phone.
Then she saw that there had been a terrible accident on icy highway 87.
The highway to Billings.
Head on collision between a truck and a passenger vehicle.
Her vehicle.
Total loss. Completely flattened.
Pryce felt numb from it. She felt no victory. No sense any more that her plan had been superior, that she’d outsmarted anyone.
I deal in lives and deaths in my job, she thought. But this is the first time that it’s been my life on the line. Or my death.
Then later, as the airfield of Bozeman appeared below her, and the entirely different plane, with a different aircrew, chartered under yet another name, came into view, did she think:
They’ve tried to kill me. Like they killed Becker. And Holtzman. They’ll probably try again.
77
What Videos?
Tuesday 2041.01.08
Yuguo limped tiredly from the subway stop to their residential tower. It was past midnight now. His clothes were caked in mud. His face and lungs still burned from gas, as much as he’d tried to rinse it out with water. One eye was circled in an ugly black bruise from where a boot had met his head as he’d tried to make his way free. A cut above his brow throbbed. Tears still fell, from the remnants of the gas, from the utter failure.
He’d made it out, crawling, kicking, running, stumbling, in a press of near strangers. They’d run past the armored, mirror-faced riot police, run through campus, run and run and run until he’d fallen over coughing, gasping, unable to breathe.
Alone.
Where was Xiaobo? Wei? Lee? Lifen? Longwei? Had they escaped? There was no answer on their phones. No response on any service online. He had to just hope, as he trudged slowly towards home, past the accusing stares and the cold indifference of the strangers of Shanghai.
You didn’t come, he stared back at them. We did what we could. It wasn’t enough.
He scraped mud off his shoes outside their building and let himself in with their code. The lobby was empty. The lift took him straight up to their floor. At the door to the apartment he could hear turmoil coming from within. Shouts. Police? He tensed.
No.
Or rather yes. Police voices. Certainly.
Dozens of them. And protesters, by the hundreds.
Impossible.
Curiosity overcame fear.
Yuguo punched in his code. The door opened.
“Yuguo?” His mother’s voice carried from the living room. She ran out into the hallway in a dressing gown. The sound of yells and screams, ordered commands and clashes followed her.
“Mother…” he started.
Then she had her arms wrapped around him.
“Yuguo!” she cried. “I was so frightened. I saw the videos! I kept watching, looking for your face, to see if you’d been taken.”
“Mother,” he said, softly, his arms wrapping around her in response, soothing her, some amazement striking a calm deep into him, some tiny sliver of hope blossoming through the despair. “What videos?”
Yuguo watched them again and again. Dozens of minutes of video. Signs waving, denouncing the coup, calling for Sun Liu’s reinstatement, calling for democracy, calling for a Billion Flowers, calling for Bo Jintao’s arrest. Police charging, beating protesters, beating them after they were down and helpless, dragging them away.
Xiaobo, beaten bloody, kicked mercilessly, into unconsciousness, dragged by one foot, face down in the mud. Wei, shot at close range with what Yuguo hoped was a rubber bullet, then gone from the screen. Lifen, the woman who’d inspired him, who’d told him that they were weak apart or strong together, unconscious, being dragged off by an armored State Security thug, her shirt half ripped off her body, another mirror-helmeted riot police man following behind them.
Yuguo felt tears falling down his face. Sorrow and remorse and rage.
He should have been up there. He should have leapt onto that table. For all he’d said about coming together, about someone needing to be first… he’d kept his head down when the police had come.
He slammed a fist into his palm.
“You’re alive, Yuguo,” his mother said. “I’m so thankful! We’re so fortunate.”
He turned to the discussion boards. They were alive with buzz. The video was everywhere, millions of views. There were other videos, he saw now. Videos from Beijing, from Hong Kong, from Guangzhou, from everywhere… More signs, stating the truth for once. More evidence of brutality, of repression.
And thousands of threads, tens of thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of messages, at least. People talking openly of their anger, of their anger that the police would beat students this way, their anger over being censored their whole lives, their anger over having no control.
People talking openly of how shocked they were that their messages and videos were getting through. That the censors weren’t working.
The conversation had evolved over time, he saw. As people realized that something had changed. That they could talk. They became emboldened. He saw people talking openly of things they’d never spoken of before.
That the police were part of the Ministry of State Security. That the man who controlled them now controlled China. That he was responsible. And his name was Bo Jintao.
That the police could beat a few hundred students. But that they couldn’t beat a billion Chinese citizens.
There were people talking openly of the coup.
Of bringing back the Billion Flowers.
Of democracy.
Of striking back harder, in larger numbers, with more organized protests, tomorrow.
Of revolution.
“Mother,” Yuguo said. “I’m not sure how this happened… but I think we’re winning.”
Zhi Li stood at the wall-to-wall window of Lu Song’s penthouse flat in the Pudong, staring out and down into the lights of Shanghai at night.
Across from her, her own gigantic face winked and smiled at the river of humanity, watching over all of Shanghai like a goddess.
Or a demon.
“We should join them,” she said aloud, pulling the bed sheet more snugly around her naked form. “The protesters, tomorrow.”
The videos had been shocking, raw. She’d seen such things when she traveled outside of China. Not here. She wanted to be there, fighting against Bo Jintao.
Lu Song came up behind her, still nude himself, and wrapped his strong arms around her.
How she loved when he held her.
“He’d kill us, my love,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
She looked down at the streets, hundreds of meters below them, then looked back up at the digital representation of herself, twenty stories high, on the skyscraper opposite her, a more perfect version of herself, more beautiful than she or any human woman could ever be, flawless, un-aging.
Unthinking.
“They look to me,” she told her lover. “You said it yourself. Millions of them talk to me every day. What kind of person am I if I don’t go to them? If I don’t fight for what’s right?” She twisted to look up and back at Lu. “What kind of people are we?”
Lu pursed his lips, held her more tightly. “You’re a living person, my love,” he said, squeezing her again. “Remember what Bo Jintao said. He could kill you, kill us. And he’d still have that screen over there.” Lu gestured with his chin, and Zhi turned to look at the digital her again.
“He’d still have his simulacra of us,” Lu went on. “Give him a reason to kill you, and you’ll be under his control forever.”
Zhi slammed her palm against the glass in frustration, hating the face she saw across the street now more than ever before.
“Impostor,” she cursed aloud at the thing with her face.
78
Viral
Wednesday 2041.01.09
Bo Jintao sat at the emergency meeting of the State Security Committee. The giant wall screens showed the massive, still growing protests in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Tens of thousands of protesters in the larger cities. Approaching a hundred thousand in some.
A disaster of historic proportions.
“We must turn off transit, block the streets, set up barricades, force these people back to their homes,” Bo Jintao said. “The sooner we act, the better.”
There were nods everywhere.
Deputy Minister Ho spoke up, “Premier, I agree. To do this, we need more than State Security. The police in some cities may actually be outnumbered! We need to call in the Army. May I pull in General Ouyang?”
Ouyang. The Minister of Defense. Not a Politburo member, but instead a career soldier, the head of the nation’s military, the man who’d thrown his weight behind Bo Jintao and made the coup possible.
Bo Jintao looked around. There was assent everywhere.
“Do it,” he told Ho.
The Deputy Minister for State Security bowed and hurried out of the room.
Another giant screen showed estimates of illicit message traffic, drawn from hand analysis. Information was still spreading, still drawing more people to the protests. That had to be stopped.
“The system is blind to these videos and messages,” Information Minister Fu Ping said again. “It simply does not see them. And our human censor staff are overwhelmed. That is why they’re spreading.”
“So, fix it!” Wang Wei repeated. The head of the Commission for Discipline Inspection was clearly growing impatient.
“We are trying, Wang Wei,” Fu Ping said, in a tone of respect. No one wanted Wang Wei investigating their ministry or their finances for hints of corruption or moral flaws. “But we must remember, it worked until yesterday, and then suddenly failed just as we broke up these protests.” He paused and looked around, meeting the others in the eye. “Someone has done this to us. We have been attacked.”
“By whom?” Bo Jintao asked, leaning forward.
Fu Ping’s gaze wavered. “We’re still trying to determine that, Premier. Our first priority is to restore the sys…”
“Who do you suspect?” Bo Jintao cut him off.
Fu Ping looked back up and met Bo Jintao’s gaze.
“There’s only one adversary who might possibly have such capabilities…” The Information Minister started.
“Who?” Bo Jintao demanded.
He knew the answer already. There was really only one answer.
Fu Ping took a heavy breath. “The NSA,” He said at last.
…
Li-hua watched the news of the protests with dread.
She’d known about the protests on campus. She’d walked by them every day for weeks on her way to the Computer Science building. That was terrifying enough.
But this. To see the government lose control this way.
It was horrific. It was like a sign of the apocalypse.
Didn’t they understand? This was a fire. This was going to burn the country down.
Why hadn’t the Indians called for her yet? Why wasn’t she already in Bangalore? Distinguished Professor Qiu?
They’d promised! What had all her work been for? What had her massive risk been for? Did they think it was trivial to sneak a data cube out of such a secure location? She’d risked execution!
She logged on again, her hands trembling, her breath coming fast.
No message. Nothing in her spam folder.
And there was nothing she could send that would not raise alarms.
Please, she thought. Get me out of here, before this place explodes.
79
To Quell an Angry Mind
Wednesday 2041.01.09
Kade was with Ananda when the news from China came. They’d been meditating, after an early morning of talking through the situation around the world, the possible use of Nexus to spread chaos, and how they could respond.
Then the images came from China. The beatings of protesters last night, at protests they’d had no idea were happening.
And the massive flooding of people into Tiananmen Square today, into other squares in Shanghai and Hong Kong and other cities around the country. The unprecedented amount of footage coming out from all those places.
Kade went online on a hunch, searched through Nexus sharing sites.
Sure enough, there were memories, even real-time feeds, from Chinese protesters, being uploaded now. And accessed everywhere.
“The Chinese people deserve their freedom as much as anyone else, Kade,” Ananda chided him.
Kade stared at the imagery of thousands flooding the streets. “I’m just concerned about how this happened. And for what purpose.” He turned towards Ananda. “Aren’t you?”
Ananda looked at him gravely. “The possibility of bloodshed is always of concern.”
Kade shook his he
ad slightly. “I’m worried more that someone’s manipulating all this, doing it for a reason. I’m worried that someone’s trying to drive the whole world crazy with rage.”
Ananda kept looking at Kade, calmly, his mind giving off a deep tranquil patience.
“Kade,” the old eminent monk and neuroscientist said. “I’ve seen your plans in this area. But remember, anger cannot be fought with anger. Rage cannot be fought with rage. No amount of signal processing can cancel out suffering, or craving, or aversion. If you want to help a mind – or a world – find peace, do exactly that. Help it find peace.”
80
Crucial Conversations
Wednesday 2041.01.09
“What the hell were you doing out there?” Stockton yelled at her. “You were gone! China’s blown up! I’ve got a dozen calls from Jameson’s people! What the hell, Carolyn!”
Pryce held her ground. They were in the President’s private study, off the Oval Office. She was standing as he sat, gesturing angrily with his arms.
She’d seen John Stockton like this before. But never aimed at her.
“President Jameson knew,” she said quietly. “He recognized the names of the programs that created the PLF. That means they’re real. And that he knew.”
Stockton just grew more incensed. “You tried to trick me!” he yelled. “You ran a game on me, Pryce! You tried to trip me up into admitting to something I didn’t know!”
“I had to!” Pryce shot back. The only way to handle an angry Stockton was to show him your own anger. Show him you were invested.
“I assigned this to you,” Stockton yelled. “I wouldn’t have done that if I was behind it!”