by Chen Qiufan
“You don’t belong here.” The voice was female. “You’re going to die.”
16
A net that divided space and time. Luo Jincheng stared at the projection on the wall of his own living room, deep in thought.
Hard Tiger, still in his lair, was sending him the real-time image data through a dedicated fiber-optic cable.
Although the real-time dynamic stream had been greatly compressed after processing by sparse matrices and Fourier transforms, it still showed delays, jumps, and breaks under restricted bitrate. Against a dark background, dots of light like the stars of the Milky Way sketched an irregular surface floating in three-dimensional space. Like Indra’s net, which was made up of billions of sparkling jewels at each vertex reflecting the infinite connectedness of the universe, the lights here described the ups and downs and the twists and folds of space. Each light flashed with a different color and intensity, which indicated the type of data and velocity of flow. At this zoomed-out scale, however, the differences were not apparent to the eye.
The light cast by the network fell against Luo Jincheng, and he appeared as a ghostly dark presence at the edge of the galaxy, as though this world were missing a piece.
Hard Tiger’s low, deep voice emerged from the phone speaker as he held forth on what Luo was seeing, caring not one whit for how incomprehensible the stream of jargon sounded to his audience.
“I can’t see a damned thing…” Luo Jincheng muttered.
A small rectangular region was marked out in the galaxy and the view zoomed in on it. Luo Jincheng felt as though he were riding on a spaceship rocketing into a strange new sea of stars. Hundreds of lights burned around him like stars, surrounded by dense, flickering streams of data. A few of the stars were emphasized as their brightness was turned up while the rest faded into the dim background.
“The slow arrow system detected some unusual movements. Take a look at these dots: they suddenly became very active, but haven’t come close to the warning threshold.”
“Can you find their exact location?” Luo Jincheng asked.
“The positions and distances in this network are extrapolated based on IPv6 addresses. Even with redirects and concealing proxies, we can still trace them back to their physical locations. Of course, that’s not the end of the problem…”
The view zoomed out and returned to the galaxy as a whole. A few hundred stars in the galaxy now brightened, showing that they were flickering in sync. Their positions seemed random and patternless.
“This is like taking hundreds of stars in the galaxy, millions of light-years apart, and having them emit super powerful flares so that the light and energy released by all of them would reach the same observer at the same time. The span of times that must be coordinated is so wide that it’s comparable to the range from microseconds to centuries. This is an extremely sophisticated frequency-hopping camouflaging technique. I don’t think the waste people even possess the equipment to achieve it.”
That American again, Luo Jincheng thought. “Do you have any other methods?”
“No problem is harder than Hard Tiger.” The slow archer’s voice revealed barely suppressed excitement. “In my system, every data vertex reflects, in real time, the shifting parameters at every other vertex. This is the key to overcoming the bitrate restrictions. I have already filtered out the hundreds of vertices that are flickering in sync; one of them must be the center, the core. I just need more data. Give me some time.”
Luo Jincheng turned so that his face was hidden against the galaxy of information and his expression unreadable. He walked next to the eight-immortal table and picked up the mobile left behind by Scott Brandle, glancing at the time.
“You’ve got twenty minutes.”
* * *
“Twenty minutes?”
Scott was sitting in the car, listening to Kaizong’s replacement, a local young man named Xin Yu who was providing a simultaneous translation of the words transmitted by the bug embedded in the mobile.
“I really don’t understand what they’re talking about.” Xin Yu rubbed his ears, red with embarrassment. He had felt lost and struggled mightily with the complicated jargon. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Scott turned on the wipers, and a fan-shaped region of clarity was scraped out of the curtain of water on the windshield. The Luo mansion was not far from here, standing like a gloomy castle in the storm. “Do you mind waiting a bit longer?”
“I’d like you to let me out, actually.” Xin Yu grinned. “To be honest, I haven’t seen such a fierce typhoon since they built the Shantou Bay Bridge. I’ve heard the elders say that the floods used to be so bad that even cars would be washed away.”
“What does the bridge have to do with typhoons?” Scott’s heart wasn’t really in the conversation; he was focused on detecting signs of activity in the mansion.
“The bridge changed the feng shui, of course. To connect Silicon Isle and Shantou, the bridge has to span Phoenix Island. It’s said that the phoenix’s wings are held down by the bridge’s piers, and it can’t fly anymore. Thus, powerful typhoons always make landfall some other place and don’t assault this region directly anymore. As you can imagine, some also claim that the bridge changed the fortunes of Shantou and Silicon Isle, which is why both places have been in decline.”
“Interesting…” What Scott really wanted to say was, You Chinese are skilled at making up chains of cause and effect between things that have nothing to do with each other, but you never try to see if your own faults are at the root of your problems.
Luo Jincheng had blamed his son’s illness on Mimi; Mimi explained her own misfortunes by resorting to spirits; Kaizong simplified everything as the inevitable trends of history. This shallow habit of thought seemed to be embedded deep in their genes, and generation after generation, the tendency reinforced itself until it became a dominant characteristic of the culture of this people. Scott wasn’t interested in judging it, but he did find the phenomenon intriguing.
Based on the intercepted snippets of conversation, it was obvious that the waste people were planning something. Luo Jincheng’s patience was also close to the breaking point. At this crucial juncture, Scott could only wait for an opportunity to act. He hoped that everything would progress smoothly along the lines he had designed, but the game was full of unknowns, and any minor deviation might upset the entire scenario.
Scott couldn’t get through to Kaizong’s phone no matter how many times he tried; he really despised these devices designed for communication under restricted bitrate.
“Scott,” Xin Yu said, frowning. “They’re talking again.”
“Tell me what they’re saying.”
“Okay—” A piercing noise coming out of the earpiece made Xin Yu shudder and he pulled the earpiece out, staring at Scott in shock.
“They know!”
* * *
The knife stopped at his throat as soon as Kaizong had blurted out Mimi’s name.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” The woman’s tone was rough, and she didn’t show any signs of being willing to move the knife away.
Muddy water streamed down his hair, and Kaizong tasted a bitter, fishy tang in his mouth. He squinted, trying to prevent water from getting into his eyes. But he dared not make any sudden movements with his hands, and was forced to sputter. “… save … save Mimi … she’s … danger…”
The woman burst out into loud laughter, as if Kaizong had just told a hilarious joke.
“I think you need to save yourself first, dumbass.”
Kaizong forced himself to be calm. He knew that if he told the truth, he might receive even rougher treatment. The raindrops struck dense, interfering ripples in the muddy puddles. Think, damn it. Think like a waste person.
He noticed a deep rut in the mud extending into the distance, as though some heavy object had been dragged into the village of shacks. He recalled the photograph of the mecha kneeling on the beach he had seen on Luo Jinchen
g’s mobile phone, and realization struck him.
“You’ve moved the spirit of Tide Gazing Beach.” He looked up at the woman, brooking no denial. “This spirit is angry, very angry! Do you remember those thugs from the Luo clan killed by the spirit? That was only a start.”
The fish-bone-shaped knife retracted like some docile pet into the sheath formed by the woman’s arm muscles. She lifted Kaizong out of the puddle with a single hand and tossed him aside like a bag of garbage.
“If you are lying to me,” she said, “I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to the dogs.” However, at least some part of her murderous tone had been replaced by awe.
Kaizong stumbled through the mud behind the powerful woman. He tried the phone in his waterlogged pocket, but it was now as unresponsive as a rock. The squall raged, and from time to time, the woman stopped to dodge the swarms of silvery butterflies flitting through the air—thin fragments of metal with edges as sharp as razors.
“She’s in there.” The woman pointed to a shack and shouted. The gale made it hard to hear her. “But you can’t go in right now.”
“Why not?” Kaizong screamed back to be heard.
“Because I said so.”
Abruptly, Kaizong dashed forward, ducking out of the woman’s grasping hand, and headed for the shack. He slipped and skidded over the mud, soft and disgusting. He had just caught a glimpse of the blue flashes coming from inside the shack when he felt a heavy blow on his back and tumbled to the ground. His arms and legs were then immediately secured in a professional wrestling hold, and he felt waves of pain and heard ominous cracks coming from his dislocating joints.
“I told you to not fucking move!” The woman grabbed him by the left leg and dragged the powerless Kaizong into a temporary shed filled with junked prostheses. She pulled a rubber dildo out of the pile and, with astounding arm strength, stretched it into a rope, which she used to tie Kaizong’s hands securely to a water pipe.
“You better learn your lesson. Next time, I’ll use your own dick.” The woman cackled and walked into Mimi’s shack.
Kaizong was angry but also wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. The deformed rubber penis dug into the skin over his wrists, and no matter how much he struggled, he couldn’t get out of his binds. The wind grew stronger, and the dislodged prostheses struck him despite his efforts to dodge out of the way. He was lucky they were mostly made of silicone. Then he heard the screeching of metal, and a crack opened in the corrugated iron roof over his head. The tear opened up as the wind twisted and rolled the iron like a sheet of paper.
Damn! If the shed collapsed, all the weight of the structure would instantly land on him. Even if he didn’t die from being crushed, he might end up suffocating. Kaizong struggled even more fervently against the pipe, hoping to shift his body at least into a safer position to preserve his life. But the pipe didn’t move one whit.
Kaizong bit into the rubber dildo-rope and put all his strength into his jaws. He hoped that he could bite through the composite material, whose hardness measured 90A on the Shore scale, but he couldn’t even leave any tooth marks on the faux cock. This may be the most awkward moment of my entire life, Kaizong thought. And now my life is about to be over.
A few more piercing shrieks of metal sundering, and Kaizong watched as the corrugated roof rose and disappeared into the night air like some magic carpet. The entire structure of the shed jolted and emitted a slow but sharp howl of deformation. It was about to lose its balance, disintegrate, and turn into a pile of rubble. And Kaizong was going to be buried alive with thousands of dirty pieces of prostheses like some avant-garde installation art piece by Damien Hirst—except for the fact that no one was going to pay millions of pounds to buy his corpse.
The metallic scream abruptly stopped, and everything sank into silence.
Kaizong squeezed his eyes shut and prayed, hoping that God would forgive him for his tardy piety.
* * *
“Stand Up,” the last track on The Prodigy’s fifth studio album, Invaders Must Die, roared through Mimi’s ears. However, she didn’t know this. Her vision trembled slightly in sync with the powerful electronica beats and the passionate melody. She was riding a herd of stampeding wild horses.
Hundreds of waste people were connected to Mimi through their augmented-reality glasses, sharing her vision. Glimpses of countless ceilings flitted through Mimi’s vision, differing in brightness, angle, color; she valiantly pushed aside these interfering, useless bits of data and attempted to direct the high-speed data stream to flow to every terminal in sync with the beats of the music. It was like the comb and roller of a music box, where the bumps on the roller rang the various tines of the comb to transmit information at different frequencies, which were then reassembled by the decoding mechanism at the receiving terminal into a complete piece of music. This was Li Wen’s proudest accomplishment.
We can only get to the closest server in Shantou, he had said.
That’s good enough, Mimi had answered.
Mimi 0 could feel the scattered, confused crowd of consciousnesses behind her back; she was going to lead them on a fantastic journey. She still could not understand how her other self was capable of accomplishing this—it was like some hidden instinct within her, like cellular mitosis, like plant phototaxis, like animals searching for food, mating, reproducing. The only progress she had made was to grow used to the conversation between the two Mimis, like the precursor to completely split personalities.
Let there be light, Mimi 0 thought.
She saw them. Hundreds of thousands of dynamic images loomed in front of her eyes, data so complex that the human brain was incapable of processing them. She felt dizzy, nauseated, lost.
Welcome to the “Compound Eyes” system of Shantou, which connected hundreds of thousands of cameras and image-recognition artificial intelligence. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the system kept under surveillance the city’s every street, every corner, every expression on every person, searching for signs of crime or acts of terrorism and protecting the lives and properties of the inhabitants. Mimi was now an invader in its heart. She was looking for something special.
Soon, she realized that her search technique was inefficient, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Mimi 1 reorganized the logic for presenting the video feeds and re-created all of Shantou from a first-person point of view based on the geography of the streets and the locations of the cameras. Unlike regular human vision, this was a view where each perspective was all-encompassing, panoramic. It was like Correggio’s dome fresco, Assumption of the Virgin, at the Cathedral of Parma, where everything around the observer appeared in a vortex of concentric rings, with the vanishing point of the perspective the apex of the dome. As the observer moved closer, more details were revealed at the center of the vortex without end.
Imagine the world as a strange apple. The depressions at both poles are deformed and deepened until they connect, turning it into a doughnut. The skin of the apple, meanwhile, remains intact and can slide up and down the “hole” of the doughnut like an endless treadmill. The observer is situated somewhere in the hole, and what he sees is the ring-shaped world endlessly unfolding.
More fantastically, as the observer moves toward any point in the wall of the doughnut, the point would automatically open up, expand and surround the observer in a new doughnut-view. A perfect, self-organizing, fractal structure.
Hundreds of passengers wriggled under Mimi’s wings, getting impatient.
Mimi moved. Rationally, she knew that her body was still imprisoned in that tiny corrugated-iron shack quaking in the storm and that her consciousness was only about a dozen kilometers away, wandering inside the dull metal boxes of a data center. However, the images swirling around her gave her the illusion of having transformed into a winged angel gliding over this concrete and steel jungle. Her virtual body swept over streets, passed through houses, shops, bridges, parks, elevators, trains and buses, and glanced quickly into count
less lit windows, not overlooking any spot.
It was dusk, but the city was already awakening into a sparkling tapestry.
In the rain, the traffic crawled through the city’s main arteries and capillaric side streets like gleaming blood. Hundreds of thousands of equally anxious and numb faces hid behind the windshields, cleared by the unceasing sway of wipers that polished the wet glow of neon against glass. The self-driving cars were stuck between cars driven by those who refused to trust computers, and horns blared as the decibel counters on noise monitors rose and rose. Many glanced in the rearview mirror with a crooked set in the mouth that indicated ill intentions.
Three hundred thousand windows automatically lit up; the smart sensors understood the moods of the men and women coming home and automatically adjusted the temperature, the color of the lighting, the channels showing on the TV or the music playing through the sound sys tems; five thousand restaurants received automatically generated take-out orders; the health-monitoring systems synced up with the body films, and, based on dozens of parameters such as body temperature, heart rate, caloric intake/consumption, and galvanic skin response, made suggested plans for the next day’s activities. Exhausted face after exhausted face.
The offices in the skyscrapers were lit bright as day. The giant eye zoomed in and observed a hundred thousand faces staring at computer monitors through closed-circuit cameras; their tension, anxiety, anticipation, confusion, satisfaction, suspicion, jealousy, anger refreshed rapidly while their glasses reflected the data jumping across their screens. Their looks were empty but deep, without thought of the relationship between their lives and values, yearning for change but also afraid of it. They gazed at their screens the way they gazed at each other, and they hated their screens the way they hated each other. They all possessed the same bored, apathetic face.