by Brian Nelson
His father cupped his hand behind Sonam’s neck and pulled him closer until their foreheads touched.
“I don’t want to let go of you. Know that. If I could have my way, I would keep you here with me forever. My little boy, the one who learned to walk in this very kitchen, holding on to your mother’s hem and gripping the floor with your strong little toes. But it is more important that you live. You have a chance now, a chance to make much more of your life than so many other Tibetans. I want you to live—for me, for your mother. So let’s not argue anymore. Just be my son for the few hours we have left.”
Yéshé opened his arms, and the boy embraced him.
Three hours later, in the dead of night, they said goodbye. They stood out in the courtyard in the cold, the Milky Way hanging above them like a crystal river.
“You may return when the Dalai Lama returns,” his father said. Sonam knew that this meant never. He would never see their little farm again. Never again see the sloping hillsides, the painfully beautiful mountains beyond. He would never experience another day here, the feeling he had when he returned each afternoon with the sheep, hungry and tired, but content with the simplicity of life. He would never see his sister again, never again tease her and play pranks on her.
“Na kirinla gaguidou,” the boy said.
“I love you, too.” The old man clasped his hands and inclined his head in the Tibetan way, blessing him and his journey.
* * *
The truck rumbled over a series of potholes, and Sonam was shoved violently in one direction, then another.
How long had they been moving? He had lost all track of time. It was still daytime, which seemed impossible. Yet the pink circle of light around the lid told him so. The truck had stopped four times so far. Once for petrol, he was sure, because he had smelled the fumes and heard men talking and laughing. The other stops had been government checkpoints, each one more terrifying than the last. With no way to see what was going on, his imagination had run wild. It was maddening to think that someone might be inspecting the truck, looking for him; that some soldier might have moved onto the log without his hearing, and that at any moment he might hear the eureka shouts of soldiers and see the lid suddenly open.
Then came the fifth stop. It was after dark. The pink circle of light was gone, and the temperature was dropping fast. He heard the driver talking to someone, joking and laughing, but whoever he was talking to did not laugh in response. He heard talking in Chinese. Another checkpoint. Then he heard the whimper of a dog and three short barks.
Sonam felt a chill run through him. More barking, then a man shouting orders in Chinese. “Yú, check this one here.” He heard the scuff of boots on the logs coming closer. He stared into the darkness, listening with all his might. Waiting. Suddenly, the pink circle of light around the opening throbbed for a moment then faded. Throbbed and faded again. A flashlight was being swept over the lid. More footsteps. Coming closer. The wood gave a long creak, and the pink circle of light returned. The man was right on top of him. Suddenly, a new fear gripped Sonam. Perhaps the warmth of his breath had melted a circle in the snow. The searcher would surely see it. He would open the lid at any moment. Of course he would. And then Sonam would go back. Back to prison. Please, no, he thought.
He couldn’t go back. Six months in Drapchi had almost killed him. If they caught him again, the sentence would be much longer, and anything more than six months was a death sentence. That was because the Chinese prisons were not designed to reform or reeducate. No. The motto written in iron above the prison gate—reform through labor—was a lie. The prison was designed to kill, and they kept you until you died—usually not from the work or the beatings or even the torture, but from starvation. It was all about math. Caloric math. There was simply no way to survive on the amount of food they rationed. All the prisoners were slowly starving to death, from the moment they arrived.
It had been clear the very first day, when they had opened his cell and looked at the twenty prisoners inside. Those who had been there only a few weeks looked healthy and strong, but those who had been there longer—two months, then four months, then six—were wasting away in steady increments. Anyone jailed longer than six months was just a bag of bones. Many of them couldn’t even walk because their legs would no longer support their bodies. They crawled.
Yet, he had soon learned that some did live longer. They survived nine, ten months, some a year, and a few even longer. But that was only because they were getting extra calories from somewhere. Some made deals with the guards, others managed to smuggle food in, and some pilfered from the meager stashes of other prisoners. But you could be sure that anyone who looked too healthy for the time he had served was eating more than their ration.
He would never forget that first night, when the inevitability of his own starvation was driven home. It was around ten thirty, almost lights out, when the rumor ran from cell to cell that there was going to be an inspection. Any prisoner who had stashed extra food under his floor mat rushed to eat it lest it be confiscated. An older man from Kham had just received two balls of butter bread from his family—a prize that could be stretched for a week. He quickly shoved them in his mouth. He was fine throughout the inspection, but he was unaccustomed to so much rich food, and after the guards left he became sick and threw up on the floor. Sonam watched in horror as the other prisoners scrambled and fought over the vomit, pushing and scooping it into their mouths. But the greatest horror for Sonam was not what he was watching, but rather the certainty that within a few weeks he, too, would be hungry enough to fight over another man’s vomit. And with that realization came another. Now he understood the prison’s second leading cause of death: suicide.
No, he could not go back there. He looked up, transfixed by the ring of pink light, scarcely daring to breathe. Only an inch of cold pine separated him and prison. And in that moment he knew, with a profound sadness, that he could not let them take him. If the lid should open now, he would fight them. He would fight, run—whatever it took to provoke them into shooting him. He would not go back. He would do the thing he had wanted to do in prison: take his own life. He had stayed alive for Chodren, but now that she was gone …
The sudden bark of the dog made Sonam flinch. Then he heard a string of Chinese curses. “Get back here!” Then he heard the driver laughing. “It was a hare,” he cried. “There he goes! Go get him, boy!” More laughter. “You aren’t feeding him enough.” Sonam heard the dog growl, followed by the scrape of its claws on the pavement, and the receding sound of its barking.
Sonam felt the soldier’s boot grind on the wood as he turned; then the circle of pink was gone. Only after he heard the soldier swing down to the roadway did he finally breathe normally. He sighed with relief and thanked the hare that had saved his life, and he thanked the three jewels for the little bit of good karma he still had.
On and on the truck rolled through the night. And all night long Sonam shivered and squirmed inside his cocoon. His body ached from the constant jostling of the truck, and the cold seeped into his bones until he could not stay focused on the mantras. He would begin a recitation, but then his mind would spin away wildly, pursuing its own whims. He faded between consciousness and dream. And in the cold and the shuddering of a strong wind that shook truck and log and man, his weak mind returned to the dark places, to the things he tried to keep locked away—to the windowless room in Drapchi prison. To Lieutenant Bai. He had felt so small then, at his first torture session, naked except for his underwear, the men standing over him, armored in their uniforms. He remembered how Bai had waved his hand absently and the four soldiers descended on him, picking him up under the armpits and taking him back toward a stainless steel table. How cold the table was. Bai had selected a straight razor—to start with.
“But I told them everything. I swear.”
“Oh, I understand, but you see, it’s my job to be absolutely certain.”
>
As the night reached its darkest and coldest, so his mind delved into its darkest nightmares of Drapchi prison—which were not the things that were done to him, but the things he himself had done.
He would never forget the woman … her face. She had been a schoolteacher, and they had brought her in for thamzing, a “struggle session,” in the prison courtyard. They had tied her neck to her ankles so that she was bent at a right angle. Then they had strapped a full-size chalkboard to her back and listed on it her supposed crimes. “Poisoner of children,” it read. “Instrument of the imperialists.” “Refuses to give up the four olds: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas.”
Other prisoners and officials surrounded her, taunting her and humiliating her, trying to get her to confess to her crimes. A party official guided Sonam through the crowd toward her. When they reached the bound woman, the crowd grew quiet. The official leaned forward and grabbed the woman’s hair, trying to pull her up. The ropes creaked and she moaned in pain. It was then that Sonam’s heart jumped in his chest. He knew this woman. She was a nun from the Ganden Monastery, and she had tutored him when he was eight years old. His father had insisted that of all the nuns, he learn from this woman. For a moment, their eyes met. Please don’t recognize me, he thought. Please.
“Sonam,” she said, “help me.”
An anger had welled up in him then. A brutal sense of betrayal. She was not allowed to do that. In this perverted play, she was not allowed to name him, to return him to his old life. He kicked her hard in the face. To shut her up, to teach her not to violate that one vital truth: that here, we are no longer the human beings we once were. The crowd had cheered; the political officer smiled. And that had been just the beginning.
The logging truck ran ever eastward, toward the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Assailed by the nightmare visions, Sonam pushed and heaved against the unyielding wood. The dreams were so clear, so vivid. It was exhausting to live it all again: the school teacher, the torture sessions, the hot iron, the knives, the electricity.
He began to weep, and once he started he couldn’t stop. He wept and wept until it became his normal state, the way he was—until there seemed to be no reason in the world not to cry. He gasped for air and his whole body shuddered, but it kept going, an outpouring that he could not control or understand. He could only let it take its course. There seemed to be a reason for it—a reason that his body needed to do this here, now.
Finally, something in him snapped—a cathartic breaking—and a door in his mind opened. And there she was, standing in front of him. It was her, Chodren, and she was alive again. His beautiful girl with black eyes, his spirited fighter, his khandroma, warrior, goddess, lover. Her beautiful skin seemed to radiate light. She was sky walking, alive in bardo. She touched his cheek. “Sleep now,” she said. “You have done so much. You don’t need to carry the weight anymore. Let it go. Sleep and know that I love you and I am proud of you.”
He tried to keep the image of her in his mind: her dark eyes, her hair with the single knot in it. He had protected her those long months. He had never given her name to Lieutenant Bai, never. And Bai had known it. He had sensed that Sonam had something more to give, and that was why he had never stopped.
“You saved me,” he said. “You saved me, but I couldn’t save you. Oh, Chodren, how can I move on from this? How does one move on?”
* * *
Inside the truck cab, the music had stopped, and the driver thought he heard the boy weeping. Or was it just the wind? He listened hard and even dared to slow down a little. Then he thought he heard it again. He felt sorry for the boy, because he knew firsthand what the boy had been through. He himself had served two long sentences in the labor camps. But the boy’s story was so common that it did not shock him in the least. Former prisoners were everywhere. If you sat twelve Tibetan men down, all but two or three would have served some time in the Chinese jails. He would have liked to stop. To check on the boy and comfort him. But there was no way to do that without causing suspicion. The boy would just have to hold on.
He put a fresh CD in the stereo and turned up the volume.
* * *
When Sonam awoke, he felt cleaner somehow. His mind was not so cloudy. The dreams had been so real and her face so clear, he knew that he had come through the sacred sleep. That Chodren had come to him as a khandroma, a Bon Mother.
It was daylight again, warmer, and the air had a weight to it that he had never felt before. Just then the truck took a long turn back on itself, and he realized that it was a familiar feeling. While he dreamed, the truck had been making many such turns. He could also hear the deep, flatulent sound of the truck’s air brake, working to slow the heavy load. They were coming down off the plateau.
Suddenly, he couldn’t take this confinement any longer. He had to see out, to breathe fresh air. He began to push on the lid, but then he remembered the driver’s warning. If your head pops up out of this hole, the driver behind me will see you. Reason checked impulse, and he took a deep breath. He waited for the next switchback, for the exact moment the truck behind them could not see them; then he popped the top off the hole.
The sun was up, filling the world with yellow dawn. It was a wonderful sight, and he dared to put a finger on the lip of the hole, to feel the sun’s warmth on his skin. He breathed the air hungrily. The beauty of the world. It was still here. He did not know his place in it, but it was still here.
Then he looked up the long hillside, and his heart sank. He saw the switchbacks rising as far as he could see, a great twisting snake of a road, going up and up and up the side of the plateau. And every hundred yards he could see a logging truck. He could see no less than seventy of them, and he knew there were many more below him. He was filled with a sudden sadness, which turned quickly to anger. Forests in transport. Tibet’s huge forests, clear-cut, strapped to trucks, and bound for China’s factories, to be turned into everything from their daily newspapers to furniture; from cosmetics to turpentine; from toilet seats to chopsticks, then packaged and shipped to the far corners of the earth with the stamp, “Made in China.” The sight made his heart ache, for it made plain that even if China quit Tibet at this very moment, it would take a lifetime, if not a century, for the country to recover.
The more he thought about it, the more enraged he became. He had felt a serenity from the night before, from his visit from Chodren, but now that serenity was gone, replaced by hate. It was a shameful emotion for a Tibetan, but he could not shake it, and he knew that it would never leave him. Like the scars on his face, it was permanent. He was too young and too unwise to be forgiving. He hated the Chinese government, the PLA, and every damned Han who benefited from the Chinese occupation.
He was a Buddhist, dedicated to peace, sworn to revere all life, and all he could think of was revenge.
The power of nanotechnology has always been with us. We knew it was there. For thousands of years we saw it in ourselves, saw our wounds heal, our food become energy, watched our bodies age. We saw it in the gait of the lion and the growing of the trees. As with coal and steam before the industrial age, we hadn’t made the leap. We didn’t know how to harness it—until now.
—Bill Eastman, 2023
Chapter Eight
Initiation
May 9, 2025
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Phase 1 Deadline: T-minus six months and fifteen days
“This is the most difficult job on my team,” Jack Behrmann said. “So if you get the feeling that I’m asking more from you than I’m asking from anyone else, you’re right.”
Eric sat up straight in his chair, scarcely believing what Jack was telling him. The architect.
“You must have an intimate knowledge of all the other specialties,” Jack continued. “That means propulsion, data processing, system regulation, energy conversion, and replication. You have to be good at all of i
t. That’s what impressed me about your paper: your understanding of how the systems work together.
“Here, you can start with this.” He handed Eric an iSheet. “Keep it. It has all the design plans from each of the teams. As you’ll see, replication is our biggest headache.”
Eric scanned through the links. It was hundreds of pages. He felt a sudden queasiness.
“Bill has us on strict deadlines,” Jack added. “Every month. Sometimes every two weeks. We’ve met them all so far, but if we don’t figure out these replication errors, we are going to miss. And that looks very bad for me.”
The big man sat behind his desk. Behind him, Eric could see the Potomac River and Reagan National Airport beyond.
“What’s the problem?” Eric asked.
“Error rates. They’re much too high for efficient replication—too many mutations from parent to offspring. I need you to help me figure out what’s going on, and how to fix it.”
“I’ll get on it now,” Eric said.
He went to work. At first, he felt a rush of amazement. Architect—it was his dream job. But soon, the full gravity of it sank in. The complexity was overwhelming. The replication equations alone totaled 320 pages. He barely knew where to start. He tried hitting the books, but that got him only so far. Why? Because there was no textbook for what they were doing. No one had ever done this before. So he began interviewing every team member he could. He took copious notes, organized them, and reviewed them every night. He was learning, but his weakness was replication. He just couldn’t get his head around the equations.
He spent five long nights in the library with those equations, but it was like trying to learn Japanese without a dictionary. With each day he failed to make progress, the voice in his head grew louder and louder. Well, well, well. Having trouble already, are we? You thought you were such a hotshot, what with the full ride at Stanford. Now look at you.