by Chen Qiufan
“Absolutely. No matter where the natives of Silicon Isle go, they always remember the taste of home. Once, I was the guide for an old overseas Chinese tourist who had left Silicon Isle several decades ago. We went to that snack shop over there and he just inhaled four bowls of dry noodles within minutes. He didn’t say anything afterward, but his face was wet with tears.” Xin Yu waved his chopsticks through the air, clearly moved by the memory.
“Are you planning on coming back after graduation?”
“… I don’t know.” The energy that had animated Xin Yu seemed to vanish in an instant. “My parents want me to find some way to emigrate overseas. They tell me that the environment out there is better, and I’d have more of a future … you understand. Silicon Isle is a restricted-bitrate zone.”
“That’s what everyone says.” Scott smiled and casually looked back, and his gaze met the spy’s before he moved his eyes away quickly. “Maybe I can help you with a recommendation letter or something. You know that TerraGreen Recycling is a big multinational.”
“I know! One of the Global 500! I’d be really grateful, Mr. Brandle.”
“Don’t mention it. Oh, I wondered if you could do me a favor.”
“Just say the word.”
“Can you go to this address and get me some takeout? An order of sea urchin would be great.” Scott showed him the address on his phone. “Then we’ll meet up at the end of the lane, near the archway.”
“No problem. But—” Xin Yu paused thoughtfully and went on. “I heard that heavy metals tend to concentrate in sea urchin. Don’t eat too much.”
* * *
As a young man, Luo Jincheng had been obsessed with owning things. Whatever he fancied—toys, cars, money, land, women, or power—he would pay any price and do anything to acquire. He attributed this desire to the deprivations of his childhood, and as he grew older, he dressed it up as the motivating source of his own success.
Gradually, however, he had come to discover that mere possession wasn’t enough to maximize the value of capital. Making capital flow and circulate was the key to true prosperity in the information age.
Luo Jincheng built up an effective intelligence network to gather the latest information on major ports, various channel buyers, and the price fluctuations in international raw-materials markets, which gave him the bargaining power to stay atop the e-waste trade and to buy low and sell high. He still remembered the old days, when trading had been done without the aid of complete information. The supplier typically opened the shipping container and only allowed the buyer a glance to estimate a price, and the crafty ones would handpick the most valuable pieces of e-waste and leave them at the top, disguising the cheap trash of little value underneath.
It was like gambling at one of the street peddlers who sold geodes. Before cracking open the rock, no one knew whether the inside was filled with delicate, crystalline jade or mere crude stone. A single choice could make a man a millionaire overnight or push him into bankruptcy. The e-waste business wasn’t quite as risky, but a major player like Luo Jincheng would still pray to the Buddha and make offerings before each big trade, hoping that the shipping containers would bring him fortune.
Once he mastered the flow of information, he could determine the value of a shipping container of e-waste based on publicly available information such as the ship’s course and ports, the cargo manifest, the container number, the loading time, the consignment details at departure, and so forth. Then he could, based on the anticipated processing time, predict the market price at the time when he’d be ready to sell and thus come to the negotiating table well armed. This guiding principle guaranteed that the Luo clan squeezed better than average profits out of every deal. As a result, his reputation grew and the name of Boss Luo spread far and wide.
This was also why such a complex mixture of feelings had assaulted him when Li Wen had threatened the three clans with his notebook slammed onto the table. The young man’s patterns of thinking and charisma reminded him of a younger version of himself. If Li Wen weren’t a waste man, Luo would have considered having him as a partner, and who knew what they could have achieved together. Alas, none of these hypotheticals would ever come to pass due to a tiny, but unalterable, fact.
Luo Jincheng wondered: How can a man with such gifts and talents spend his time among the waste people and toil away in lowly trades that have no hope of real success?
He soon forgot the question, which was perhaps unanswerable. However, he did take note of the fact that Li Wen was among the first new migratory workers to join the waste people after Silicon Isle was punished by the government and designated a restricted-bitrate zone. Compared to previous waves of workers, the new arrivals were getting slightly better wages because many of the migratory workers had left after the imposition of restricted bitrate, leading to a temporary spike in demand.
Indeed, not only were migratory workers leaving in droves, even some families who had been in Silicon Isle for generations were emigrating. In this age when the speed of information determined everything, restricted bitrate meant that there was no value, no opportunity, no future. Who would want their children to live in a place with no future, even if it was the home to which they were bound by history and blood?
As for the incident that resulted in Silicon Isle’s restricted-bitrate status, the government never presented an official explanation. Many rumors circulated, some of them as thrilling and implausible as the plots of Hollywood films. Due to his special relationship with the government, however, Luo Jincheng was able to gather fragments of knowledge over meals and drinks with officials, which he managed to piece together into an approximation of the truth.
The incident began with a young woman who had been lured to Silicon Isle with false promises—later, the government would declare that she had run away from home of her own free will.
Such episodes were not exactly rare. In the economically developed regions along China’s southeastern coast, one could find many such “runaways” who found out the truth of their situation only after they were stuck. They were paid a pittance for their labor while they harbored dreams of someday making enough to return home in respectable circumstances. Living on the margins of the prosperity that did not belong to them, they toiled day after day in the most mechanical, repetitive, and trivial assembly line work.
The young woman wrote home a few times, and her letters indicated that she was working in Silicon Isle, her life was good, and her family should not worry about her. But then, all communications ceased. The family burned with anxiety, but they were poor peasants in southwest China, thousands of kilometers from the coast. They had to resort to contacting the police in Silicon Isle via the internet, asking for their help in searching for the girl. The conclusion, as one might imagine, was a perfunctory “exact location unknown.”
The young woman had an elder brother who was at college in one of China’s biggest cities. It was said that due to the family’s poverty, the parents could only pick one of the pair of siblings to send to college. The brother was smart and got good grades, and the family’s hopes for success were all pinned on him, but he planned to give up the opportunity for his sister. In his view, a boy was like a bull who always had the possibility, however remote, of plowing out a field for himself based on talent, effort, and luck; but a girl was like a pearl oyster who had to face the tumultuous ocean with her bare flesh. He wanted to do what he could to protect his baby sister.
Just as he was about to give up on taking the college entrance examination, the sister made a more extreme choice.
She ran away from home, leaving behind only a letter. She was close to her brother and understood the sacrifice he planned to make. She declared that unless he managed high enough marks in the examination to get into his dream school, he would never see her again. This letter later on became a powerful piece of proof in the official explanation that she was merely a common runaway.
The brother knew how stubborn his only sister was, and h
e had to suppress his anxiety and focus on the exam. He managed to do excep tionally well and was accepted by one of the elite schools. He swore that he would spend the rest of his life to pay his sister back and take care of her. However, just as he was about done with four years of diligent coursework and ready to start the job search to dig for his first bucket of gold, his sister stopped communicating, seemingly vanished.
“Exact location unknown” struck him in the chest like an icepick. He refused to trust anyone and pledged that he would find her with his own methods. He knew the art of crafting code, of shaping symbols to carry out his will without forbearance.
Almost unnoticed, a certain computer virus with directed propagation began to spread among IP addresses in Silicon Isle, infecting more and more machines and taking over web terminals frequented by the waste people. It showed no symptoms other than filtering all the information passing through the infected terminals with a special algorithm that looked for certain words and phrases and semantic patterns. When matches were found, it tossed off a packet to a secret address. The target address was dynamically disguised in clever ways, and if one were to try to trace the packet to find the ultimate destination, the task would be as difficult as trying to ascertain the ballistic trails of bullets fired from a roller coaster based on the timing of the shots alone.
With great patience, the brother finally obtained an encrypted video being passed around the underground discussion forums of Silicon Isle.
It was a recording from a live feed. Against the dim background, two men’s faces were blurred out, leaving behind only their semi-naked bodies and the tools they held in their hands. A third man’s voice spoke from offscreen. All their voices had been processed to obscure identifying characteristics, though it was obvious that they spoke in the Silicon Isle topolect. The video was recorded through a pair of augmented-reality glasses, and showed the typical characteristics of first-person-POV recordings: shaky, unfocused, but with a strong sense of I-am-there.
A body was curled up against the foot of a wall like a bundle of rags, emitting from time to time inhuman moans. Strangely, an augmented-reality helmet set to sleep mode was still on her head, the yellow light dimming and brightening slowly, like breathing.
The two men in view conversed, snickering and tittering now and then. With the help of translation software, the brother found out that they had been sent by their boss to deal with this piece of “trash.” The woman, a migrant with no local attachments, had become addicted to digital mushrooms and lost the ability to work. As such, she would have appeared to government inspectors as an “unsanitary spot” marring the boss’s record. The two men also revealed that her vestibular system had been damaged irreversibly, and she wouldn’t have survived much longer. They were putting her out of her misery.
The cameraman—the wearer of the augmented-reality glasses—ducked down and struck the floor with some hard object, producing a series of crisp knocks. He also tapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth, making tsk noises the way one would to attract the attention of a cat. The “trash” suddenly let out a ragged breath, sat up, crawled rapidly toward the camera, grabbed the object out of the hand of the cameraman, and stuck it into a slot in her helmet. The light turned from yellow to green, flashing rapidly as the data finished transferring. The woman kept her face lowered as reptilian screeches emerged from her throat, as though a monstrous thirst for a particular kind of neural stimulation had devoured all her human dignity.
You can make her do anything if you promise her this, said the cameraman, who had been silent until then.
The eyepieces of the woman’s helmet lit up, glowing eerily in the dark. She began to sing, the tune bringing to mind the style of some regional folk opera. Her high-pitched voice swerved around sharply, like a cold snake writhing in the night, and even her limbs began to twist and shake mechanically as she danced to her singing.
What a show! We get a night at the opera! The two men guffawed and danced, mocking her with their exaggerated imitation.
Abruptly, the woman’s voice became rough and piercing. As though she had gone mad, she rushed at one of the men, bringing him down and locking her arms about his thighs. The other two were so stunned that for a moment they did nothing as their companion screamed for help. In the end, the cameraman picked up a shovel and struck the woman a hard blow on her head. She fell.
I guess she didn’t enjoy my mushroom too much.
The man approached the motionless body, leaned down, pried off her helmet, and turned her face to the camera.
How fervently the brother hoped that the video would cut off at that point so that the victim’s face would never be revealed, so that he could maintain a shred of false hope. But he forced himself to continue to watch, to endure the long sequence of camera shake, the lighting so dim that he felt dizzy. The view abruptly shifted to a close-up of the woman’s face: her eyes half open, pupils unevenly dilated, weakly gasping for air. A dark liquid seeped from her temples down her face like two streams of concentrated tears.
It was his sister.
Hand me a garbage bag, said the cameraman. Time to take her out.
He shut off the monitor and, in the dark, lit a cigarette with trembling hands. He took two quick drags and tossed the cigarette, grinding it into the ground with his foot. He was silent for the rest of the night, and only as dawn arrived did he figure out that his extraordinary rage arose not only from the violence he had witnessed, but also from the way the violence had been displayed. The attacker had used technology to present the scene in first-person POV so that anyone watching the video became a source of violence along with him and was forced to experience the perpetrator’s pleasure in the attack. The brother had to suppress the powerful, biological disgust he felt for himself, as though he had murdered his sister.
Of course, much of this story occurred only in the imagination of the storytellers. In reality, the brother had passed the video on to the police, hoping that they could follow its clues and find his sister, even just her corpse. But the police chose another path: they erased all traces of the video from the Web and sealed off all channels of information. Like ostriches sticking their heads into the sand, they pretended that nothing had happened.
This was how they preferred to deal with any crisis.
The brother sank into utter despair, his rage stretched thin and torn into shapeless fragments of data by the thousands of kilometers in distance. He finally understood that the source of the tragedy was an invisible, intangible wall, a barrier that divided one people with the same blood and ancestors into two moieties, marking some as high and some as base, endowing some with privilege and others with suffering.
He would strike back.
The virus, now with its parameters adjusted, swept across the data terminals of Silicon Isle. Like a swarm of hungry locusts, it chewed up every bit of data it touched, filtering for nuggets of information. The results, after layers of routing, were directed at the major news outlets. And some of the information involved the secret documents describing the Silicon Isle government’s bidding process for major engineering projects. Like lit matches dropped one by one into a weak fire, slowly and with great effort, the flames cooked the frogs in the pot.
In the wake of the media frenzy over the exposed government scandals, the case of the missing girl lost its attraction. The audience’s interest waned and shifted; new scandals and new celebrities showed up one after another, consuming attention that was as sparse and precious as virtue.
However, upper levels in the machinery of officialdom were enraged by the leaks coming out of Silicon Isle—not because of the corruption and fraud, but because the media exposure had discredited the image of the local government, and that impacted the chances of promotion for the officials supposedly supervising them.
The supervisory officials finally decided that Silicon Isle had to pay a price for its lax data security. From the high-bitrate designation of a coastal, developed region, Silicon Isle was
stripped of two levels of access and trapped in the kind of low bitrate usually found only in backward regions in China’s interior. There would be no more augmented reality, no more enterprise-level cloud services, and certainly no more benefits from the special government policies designed only for Special Data Zones.
In a corner of the digital map of the world, the light of Silicon Isle went out.
Many who had lost much of their wealth as a result of this rezoning offered a bounty for the identity of the author of the virus, swearing that they could cut off his hands and blind his eyes or even remove his head and attach it to a life-support machine so that he could spend the rest of his life in a living hell, but they never succeeded. The brother of the vanished girl was like the serpent Ouroboros, whose head swallowed the tail until it had consumed itself and disappeared from the physical/digital world without leaving behind any trace.
Every time Luo Jincheng thought about the conclusion of the story, he tried to imagine what that talented young man, if he were still alive, would be doing now. Would he still be searching for his sister’s killer, sparing no effort? Or would he have already given up on all hope for life and turned to the permanent embrace of death? Revenge is a dish best served cold. He shivered, as though that pair of eyes burning with the fire of vengeance were right behind him.
No, it wasn’t my fault.
He tried to comfort himself. During those years, all the clans were engaged in similar activities, selling illegal digital mushrooms to the waste people in order to maintain the clans’ control over them. If some addicts, lacking in self-control, overdosed and lost the ability to work, then it was necessary to clean up the mess to avoid getting the clans in trouble. To be sure, every clan had its own way of dealing with the issue: deporting the disabled out of Silicon Isle was one way, and making them disappear was another.