by Chen Qiufan
“That was an accident.” For a moment, Scott lost control of his voice. It grew shrill.
“One hundred and twenty-eight dead, and more than six hundred lost some or all mobility. This is what you call an ‘accident’? Can you look those children in the eyes?”
“I was there—” Scott lowered his voice. Nancy’s pale face in the water drifted before his eyes. He seemed to give up. “Tell me, what do you really want?”
“Evidence! Solid evidence that can bring down SBT! We want to know how they’re transporting toxic prosthesis waste to developing countries and how they’re covering it up.”
“Ms. Chiu Ho, you’re asking me to risk my neck to help you environmental extremists to satisfy your sense of moral superiority.”
The woman grinned as if anticipating his question. “We can offer you more. Remember how the stock market reacted after the truth about Enron got out?”
“You’re going to short SBT?” Scott did a quick calculation in his head: these people might make billions if they timed it right. “I’ve always thought of you as pure idealists.”
“Coltsfoot Blossom is best for results-driven idealists.” Sug-Yi’s reply came as precisely as an automated phone answering service.
“Fine. Tell me what is this thing you’re so interested in.” Finally, Scott had a chance to ask the question that had plagued him.
The smile disappeared from Sug-Yi’s face on the screen. She seemed to be figuring out just where to start.
“Have you heard of Project Waste Tide?”
* * *
In the weak dawn light, Kaizong saw white figures flashing behind the distant windows of the ICU. He dashed over, thinking that they were medical personnel waiting for him.
A quarter of an hour ago, he had received an urgent call from the hospital that Mimi was awake. Without telling anyone, without even stopping to brush his teeth or wash his face, Kaizong had jumped into a cab to rush to the side of the woman who was never far from his thoughts. The radio in the cab played the familiar leitmotif of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture to announce the hour. Now, at 6:01, Beijing time, the passionate melody, sped up by half a beat, circled around his mind like a breaking news alert.
The air was filled with the fragrance of magnolia. Commingled with the smell of disinfectant, the effect was one of sweetness betrayed by a hint of anxiety.
Kaizong didn’t bother waiting for the elevator but dashed up the stairs to the third floor, pausing for a moment in front of the ICU to calm himself down. He opened the door.
The room was unlit, and the bed empty. He was about to press the call button for the nurse when he noticed a still figure in front of the window, her back to him. The dim morning light limned a familiar outline.
“Mimi?” Kaizong asked tentatively. Unease crept into his heart.
The young woman remained still. Some seconds later, the body film on the back of her neck began to glow with a golden mi. Seen through the thin fabric of her hospital gown, the lit-up character appeared steady and strong. She turned around, a smile on her face, and the line dividing light from shadow slowly swept across her face until the smile was completely within the shadows.
“Kaizong, you’re here.” Her voice was still crisp and tender, as though nothing had happened.
He stood, amazed for a moment, before acknowledging the greeting. He flicked on the overhead lights and approached her, examining her smiling face carefully. Her wounds had healed remarkably well, and only a few faint scars remained on her forehead.
“What? Don’t you recognize me anymore?”
“No … Do you feel well?” Kaizong reached out to hug Mimi around the shoulder out of habit before remembering that he was not in America, and his hand stopped awkwardly midair.
Abruptly, Mimi seized his hand and cradled it in her own palms, her movements as determined and precise as if governed by some prewritten program.
“As well as coming back to life from death.”
Kaizong was stunned. Electrical shocks seemed to fire off all over his body, and he couldn’t answer at all.
Mimi’s expression turned to one of uncertainty, and then, after a moment, understanding. She let go of Kaizong’s hand, lowered her head, and softly said, “I heard that you took care of me this entire time. Without you, perhaps I’d be dead long ago.”
Kaizong relaxed. He took up Mimi’s hand. “Don’t be silly. Director Lin agreed to send guards to be with you twenty-four seven. You won’t be in danger anymore.”
“Danger?”
“It’s all in the past now. If I could have put you somewhere safe back then—” He stopped, biting his bottom lip. He felt like an idiot. His babbling made no sense, had no meaning.
A trace of almost unnoticeable hesitation flashed across Mimi’s eyes. “What really happened? I … I can’t seem to remember any of it…”
“The doctor said you need time to fully recover.” The image of Mimi’s smile on Tide Gazing Beach flashed before Kaizong’s eyes, and he felt thousands of needles stabbing into his heart. He forced himself to keep the rage off his face. “Why don’t you rest for a bit? I’ll go get the doctor and see if you need to remain in the hospital for observation or if you could go home.”
“Go home?” Mimi’s face was all confusion.
Kaizong was at a loss for words. Mimi’s home was thousands of kilometers away, unattainable. In their talks, she shared with him that she had no sense of attachment or belonging to any corner of Silicon Isle. A place without memories could not be called home. Kaizong understood that feeling very well.
“Your real home.” Kaizong tried to comfort Mimi with a warm smile.
He turned and was about to leave before he heard the humming behind him: it was the familiar melody from the 1812 Overture excerpted by the radio station. Kaizong’s face shifted in an instant, as though the music had been stolen from his thoughts and then implanted into the girlish vocal chords, as ethereal as porcelain. Mimi stared at him, her face impassive and her lips slightly parted, like a woman-shaped music box. The precise notes drifted from between her lips, and even the sped-up beat was imitated exactly. The short musical phrase repeated over and over, without any emotion, and then abruptly stopped.
Goose bumps erupted on the skin at the back of Kaizong’s neck. He suppressed the impulse to examine her closer and fled from the ICU, fled from the girl he had once saved.
* * *
Back at the hotel, waves of nausea assaulted Scott. Some of it was no doubt due to the swaying ride over the sea, but the rest came from a strong sense of having been duped.
He tried to connect through the secure chat program, but “Hirofumi Otogawa” never answered. Belatedly, he realized that it was two in the morning back on the American East Coast. That fucking liar! Scott struck the keys angrily and attempted to release some of his anger on a porn site, but the browser kept on showing him “451 Forbidden”—the HTTP error indicating that the website was unavailable due to local law, a reference to Bradbury’s novel.
In this restricted-bitrate zone, they won’t even permit you the comfort of self-abuse.
Scott couldn’t even laugh. He had imagined that his job in Silicon Isle would be cleaner, as least compared to the dirty deeds he had done in Southeast Asia, Southern India, and Western Africa. He was wrong, so very wrong.
The secret was rare earth metals, nonrenewable resources more precious than gold. They were like the witch’s magical dust in fairy tales: a small amount was enough to greatly improve the tactical value of ordinary materials and bring about astounding leaps in military technology, allowing the possessor to hold on to an overwhelming advantage on the modern battlefield.
The Art of War. Scott thought about that Chinese classic taught at West Point. It’s now The Art of Killing. He clearly recalled the videos shown to TerraGreen Recycling personnel at the internal briefing.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Papa-class, Alfa-class, Mike-class, and Sierra-class submarines flitted through the strat
egic choke points of the world’s oceans like ghosts, reaching speeds of up to forty knots and diving to depths of four hundred to six hundred meters. American torpedoes, in comparison, were as slow as crawling turtles. The USSR had achieved this by leveraging the rare earth element rhenium, which significantly strengthened the titanium alloys that allowed the construction of fast-cruising, deep-diving hunter-killer submarines.
Through the smoke and fog of the Gulf War, America’s M1A1 Abrams tanks, equipped with laser range finders enhanced by yttrium that could “see” as far as four thousand meters, thoroughly dominated the Iraqi T-72-derived tanks whose range finders were limited to below two thousand meters. The Abrams could aim, lock, and fire on the enemy long before the possibility of return fire and blow the opponent to smithereens. Similarly, night-vision goggles containing lanthanum allowed American soldiers to see as clearly at night as during the day and confidently kill enemies with precision.
However, almost half of the world’s reserves of rare earth resources were concentrated in China, and China was responsible for over 95 percent of global production. Starting in 2007, the Chinese government imposed a strict quota system to greatly reduce the total amount of rare earths exported, causing global prices to skyrocket. “The Chi nese Century!” Western media exclaimed in alarm. The developed nations had grown used to cheap rare earths, and, as such an age receded into the past, their strategic technology advantage, achieved and maintained with great effort, was going to fade into nonexistence. The world faced the prospect of a redistribution of power.
Scott held himself back from the verge of an emotional breakdown. He initiated his VPN software and waited until it negotiated an encrypted tunnel to an overseas server so that his packets could be sent, encrypted and unmolested, out of China before being redirected to his ultimate target—an Eastern European website featuring hard-core pornography. Although the speed of connection was slow, at least he was free of the Great Firewall.
This is the eighth trick in the Thirty-Six Stratagems: “passage under cover of darkness.”
Just like the path chosen by TerraGreen Recycling.
TerraGreen Recycling had developed the technology for recycling rare earth elements in consumer e-waste. More than 80 percent of the rare earths used in chips, batteries, displays, and similar electronics could be extracted and reused. However, the pollution generated by the process far exceeded EPA standards, and the processor would be required to pay into a trust fund to pay for anticipated environmental harms. Furthermore, adding to the already sky-high labor costs, American law required the employer to purchase expensive insurance for the workers and to reserve risk-mitigation funds in anticipation of outbreaks of work-related diseases decades down the road.
In other words, it wasn’t worth it.
This was the problem with democracy: by the time the congressmen finally understood the seriousness of the threat and proposed their bills, by the time interest groups were finally done with their squabbling and compromised on a joint industrial policy, the United States of America would probably have fallen to the status of a third-rate country, perhaps even a mere satellite of the Greater China Economic Sphere. The dissolution of the European Union was an object lesson, and no one in the West could forget the sight of the red field and golden stars of China’s flag waving over the beaches of Ibiza after its purchase by a Chinese group in 2022.
Thus, TerraGreen Recycling had to devise a creative outsourcing strategy within the framework of existing laws. Under the banner of “Green Economy,” TerraGreen Recycling would transfer waste and pollution overseas, to the vast lands of the developing nations. TerraGreen Recycling would help them construct industrial parks and production lines and enjoy their endless, cheap labor, and, pursuant to the contract, be given priority access to purchase the valuable rare earths produced at a substantial discount.
Scott remembered that the last page of the internal report contained a large equilateral triangle whose vertices were colorful circles filled with bold, giant letters: “WIN-WIN-WIN.”
The government wants economic development: we give them GDP growth.
The people want to eat: we give them jobs.
We want cheap rare earths: all the costs have been carefully calculated.
Scott had felt some unease. He had been haunted by nightmares after the accidental release of toxic gases in Ahmedabad: under the green miasma, bloated bodies were strewn all over the ground, their eyes cloudy due to the deformation of the crystalline lens. To reduce costs, he had chosen to use gas valves supplied by local manufacturers during the bidding process; they had quoted lower prices and offered higher kickbacks.
Those gray eyes would blink as though thousands of raw, unprocessed freshwater pearls were flickering simultaneously, and he would scream and wake up with his body covered in cold sweat. The psychiatrists couldn’t save him, only Jesus could.
But he was about to step onto another godless land, to commit an act of blasphemy.
Scott had felt that he had to do something. He had convinced the board of directors to allocate some of the investment specifically for local environmental remediation as a “gesture of goodwill”—even though according to the standards set by the EPA, the conditions after remediation weren’t going to be much better than hell.
In this world, there are many forms of cleanliness, many forms of fairness, and many forms of happiness. All we can do is to choose from among them, or to have our choices be made for us. Scott tried to comfort himself. I can only do what I can.
But now, Coltsfoot Blossom was hinting at him that Silicon Isle was going to once again stain his hands with blood.
The data from the porn site came back to him via the encrypted tunnel of the VPN server. A writhing Ukrainian model appeared on his screen, her flesh draped in brightly colored scraps. She teased and danced, using every trick at her disposal to entice visitors to click on the button for the paid channel, to satisfy their virtual but primitive desires. You could even design the exact face and figure of the object of desire: he or she could be your boss, neighbor, teacher, student, a cashier at the local fast-food restaurant, a fading starlet, a criminal, a politician, a passerby, pet, husband, wife … or even yourself.
Scott found himself anxious and unaroused. The cursor wandered over the page aimlessly while the virtual model responded to the movements of the arrow with exaggerated moans and mechanical movements. He suddenly realized what he should be doing, and flicked over to a search engine, inputting “Waste Tide.” After 0.13 seconds, more than 5,100 hits came back.
He clicked on the link for “Project Waste Tide,” certain that the VPN service was capable of retrieving the censored page. The trace route showed that the linked video was stored on a server in low Earth orbit, about four kilometers from the surface. The server, named Anarchy.Cloud, was set up to avoid the censoring organs of various governments. The VPN server took twice as long as usual to download the page, and the empty frame gradually filled in, bit by bit, like a dot-matrix printer filling up a desolate wasteland of information.
10
“What in the world happened to Mimi?” Kaizong pressed the doctor.
That wasn’t Mimi, or at least not the Mimi he had known. It was more like something that deliberately imitated Mimi’s gestures and patterns of speech. Something inhuman. He shuddered.
Mimi had never called him “Kaizong”; instead, she had always said “Fake Foreigner.”
“The situation is a bit complicated—” The doctor hesitated and then brought up some three-dimensional scans on the display. “I’ve never seen such a … brain map.”
He manipulated the display. “This is a typical BEAM image—oh, that’s ‘brain electrical activity mapping.’” A darkly colored brain hung in virtual space, and the animation showed various horizontal cross sections as irregular blotches or stripes of color appeared and disappeared, indicating shifting activity levels in various regions of the brain. “And this is Mimi’s.”
Kaizong g
aped at the magnified, flickering image.
If a typical BEAM image could be described as a brush-painting landscape done in the broad strokes of xieyi style, Mimi’s brain resembled a realist painting done in the gongbi style one might expect at the height of the Tang Dynasty, full of meticulous, fine details. As the ani mation flipped through the cross sections, the patterns built up into a complex, magnificent palace. The various colored regions were finely crafted components joined together by mortise and tenon, but endowed with dynamic ebb and flow. The whole scene resembled a carnival full of gaudy-hued costumes parading through a giant city, but order also emerged at the macro level, displaying a harmonious sense of beauty.
“How did she get to be this way?”
“Good question. Based on some biochemical indicators, we think a virus had invaded her brain—as a matter of fact, the infection had occurred in waves, with the last instance about a month ago. The virus could perhaps explain some aspects of this rare organic disease, but it is not the only cause. We also discovered this in her brain.”
Another brain map appeared. It was translucent and the folds and creases were only faintly visible. Kaizong thought some fog seemed to shroud parts of the image and made it impossible to see clearly—perhaps a result of the resolution of the display.
“This is the ACC—the anterior cingulate cortex, behind your forehead.” The doctor zoomed in on a region, much as one would use Google Earth to descend through the cloud cover and zoom in on some country, city, and street, evoking the perspective of God. “It’s an important area responsible for cognition, behavior, emotion, learning reinforcement, and registering pain. You’re looking at it under one million times magnification.”
The layer of fog gradually cleared as though some nebula in space drew near and resolved into individual stars, each giving off a metallic glint and suspended in a vast universe made of neurons and extracellular matrix.
“These metal particles have diameters ranging from one to two-point-five microns, smaller than individual neurons. Normally, harmful particles like this will become trapped in the lungs as the result of respiration, leading to pneumonitis and pulmonary fibrosis, even damaging the specific immune system. In this case, however, they were able to cross the blood-brain barrier and enter the cerebral cortex. I have no idea how that happened.”