Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Hologram, real lanterns, what’s the difference?” she says. “They’re pretty!”

  She rushes over to the shop and insists on posing for a photo, two fingers up in a cheeky V-sign. I dutifully hold her bag and snap the picture with her smartphone, assuring her she looks beautiful in every way.

  “I’m going to eat so many mooncakes this year,” she says. “I always do. Every year when they come out in the shops, I go in and scold them. You’re going to make me so fat! I say. But I just can’t resist them.”

  “You’re not fat,” I say absentmindedly. I’m thinking about the palace, how we’re going to shingle those roofs. Then my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Xiao Zhu.

  “They’ve got Lao Yang,” he gasps.

  I stop dead. “Who has?”

  “The cops. Or someone like them. That guy he met was a plant, or a rat, or something. They grabbed him this morning on his way to where they were meeting. I don’t know where they took him. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

  “Calm down,” I say, trying to sound soothing without arousing my girlfriend’s suspicions. “Where are you now?”

  “Back at the house. I don’t know how long we’ll be safe here, though. He’ll have to tell them everything.”

  “I’m coming over right now,” I say. “I’ll get a cab.”

  “Don’t take the first one,” he says, and hangs up.

  Xiao Zhu is pacing the length of our courtyard, one of Lao Yang’s cigarettes on his lips. The smog is thick today, outside the holographic curtain, and I have to squint to see him.

  “It’s over,” he says. “Him and his fucking double prosperity. They’ll come for us, and we’ll never see the light of day again. Not that we are now. Not that we ever have.”

  I sag onto one of our dilapidated couches. “It’s not over,” I say. “There’s still the two of us. You can work the holograms, and I can do everything else. It’ll take us longer to finish a house, but it’s what he’d want us to do. To keep going. To keep making things real.”

  Xiao Zhu snorts. “You’re just like him. Big dreams. Today the Forbidden City, tomorrow the stars. What are you in it for anyway? What are you hoping to change?”

  I start to speak, and then pause. What am I in it for? I loved the holograms as a kid. I remember people cheering when they switched them on in our street, watching the sky turn blue and the grass turn green. We never even had grass before. But then I grew up, and one day I realized I hadn’t seen the sun for ten years. Not the real sun. Not the stars. And I started looking at houses and shops I had known all my life with suspicion. What did they really look like? I knew what they looked like inside, because government-sponsored holograms stop at the door. But the truth of them was as foreign to me as if I had never seen them before.

  When Lao Yang approached me that day, I slurped at my noodles and listened to a dream. He wanted to live in Beijing—not a copy or a model, but a real city, a city that breathed, a city that had shit on the pavement and smog in the air but was free, effervescent and alive. He wanted a place that could move from past to present to future of its own accord, without technological intervention. He wanted his home back. And I wanted to help him.

  “I’m in it because sometimes you just fight,” I say, finally. “And you keep fighting until it’s done. Lao Yang’s out there. He’s an old man and he’s hurting. But he’s helped you, and he’s helped me, and I’m not going to let him disappear. I said something dumb before. I said there’s still the two of us. That’s not true. There’s three like there always was. I’m going to try and help him. And you’re coming with me.”

  Xiao Zhu lights another cigarette, blows the smoke out into the haze. “Nice speech, big guy. In a battle between the past, present and future, who would you be?”

  I growl. “The future. The future always wins.”

  Two days later, we have the names of the people who took Lao Yang and where they’re hiding him. Xiao Zhu bribed a local guard and wouldn’t tell me where he got the money. We have a plan, too, but I don’t trust it. It relies too much on gadgets, on things I’ve never learned to think of as real. This is Xiao Zhu’s world, and it makes me uncomfortable. But there’s nowhere else to turn.

  We’re standing in front of the Ru Jia hostel in east Chaoyang. Just like home!, the sign proclaims, and I believe it. I’ve met plenty of people who get beaten at home. Behind this facade is a black jail, an illegal holding facility for protesters and political dissidents. This is where they’re keeping Lao Yang, stripped naked and starving, pulpy and bruised; for once, I don’t have to see it to know that it’s true.

  I look over at Xiao Zhu. “Ready?” I ask.

  He nods, and pulls the hope of our whole campaign out of his pocket. It’s a portable holographic projector, powerful enough to generate a large object or change the appearance of a room. I have no idea where he got it; they’re normally only found in large hotels or function halls, helping to create a dream wedding at a fraction of the cost. He studies it intently, thumbing buttons as he perfects the image, confirming every last detail. A guard left the building half an hour ago, and I watch over Xiao Zhu’s shoulder as he is recreated, down to the pores on his skin, on an alien machine.

  “Ready,” Xiao Zhu says at last. He pushes a button, and the guard flickers into existence by our side. My stomach lurches involuntarily. If something like this passed me on the street, I’d think it was real. Xiao Zhu curls his hand around the projector, concealing it from sight, and the two of us walk up the steps of the Ru Jia with our holographic guard close behind.

  “You programmed the speech?” I whisper.

  “Everything you said,” Xiao Zhu replies. “We’ll be fine.”

  I knock on the door, then jump back behind the guard and try to look penitent. The door opens a fraction and a man peers out.

  “Yeah?”

  “I got ‘em, sir,” the false guard says. “The two that were with Lao Yang. Figured I’d drop them off here until the courts decide where they belong. Should I throw them in with their pal?”

  “Do that,” the man says, “do that. Make sure they feel welcome, too—ha, ha!”

  “Yessir,” says our guard. “I’ll treat them just right, don’t you worry about that.” The door creaks open further, and we step inside.

  The first thing that hits us when we enter the jail is the darkness. The second is the stench. Somewhere in another room a woman is sobbing, an endless, throaty sob that sounds like it could eat up the whole world. For the first time in years, I find myself longing for the comfort of holograms. Our false guard leads us down the corridor to the room where Lao Yang is being held; as we get closer, the stench grows stronger, and I start to panic. When we stop, it’s at Room 28. Double prosperity. I want to cry.

  I open the door. It’s not locked—the people here know what happens if they run. Lao Yang is lying in a ball on his bed, shaking in time to some unknown beat in his head. There’s dried blood on the sheets, and a dank smell in the air. I run to him. “Lao Yang, it’s me,” I say. I say it over and over, willing him to respond. At last he raises his head, a distant look in his eyes. “Oh,” he says. “So it is.”

  We lift him to his feet, cradling his body and wincing as each new bruise is revealed. Xiao Zhu takes the clothes we’ve brought from his pack, and we dress him as gently as we can, first pants and then arms up for the shirt. Lao Yang says nothing as we fuss over him, swaying unsteadily like a sapling in the wind. It is as if knowledge and years have all been beaten out of him, leaving him back as he began, an empty seed. When I reach out to him, I find myself stroking his hair as I would a child’s.

  “We should get moving,” Xiao Zhu says. “I’ve reprogrammed the projector.”

  “Just give me a minute,” I say. I look at the old man twitching feverishly in my grip, try to catch my gaze with his own. “Lao Yang, we’re going to get you out of here now. Just think of this time as a hologram. It was a bad one, but we’re going to hit the switch and bring yo
u back to reality. You’ll never need to be afraid again.”

  Lao Yang’s gaze wavers, but he nods. I turn to Xiao Zhu. “Let’s go.”

  We pack up the bag and sneak out into the corridor, Lao Yang hobbling between us. The guard is slouched by the door, watching some trashy late-night television and tossing sunflower seeds into his mouth.

  “Are you sure this will work?” I whisper. “It’s so melodramatic.”

  “It’ll work,” says Xiao Zhu, and as he pushes the button, he grins.

  A van slams through the opposite wall of the corridor, sending glass and masonry flying through the air. A brick lands on the horn, setting off a piercing wail. Lights flash and spin manically. Despite myself, I sniff. Melodramatic. The guard jumps up, shouts for someone, anyone, and rushes to inspect the damage. We run for the door, Lao Yang propped up between us, our footsteps camouflaged by the racket. We have about five seconds before he realizes there’s no van after all.

  We stop for breath in a small park two streets over, flattening ourselves against the trees for cover. I hold onto Lao Yang as tightly as I dare. I don’t believe what I said to him; reality is smog and shit and beatings, and you can’t hit the switch on that. But when you’re looking into the face of a broken man, what can you say? Beijing is a city of holograms, and that’s reality. It’s a city where you can get picked up off the street for no reason, and that’s reality. But we got in and out. We rescued a friend. That’s reality, too. “It shouldn’t have been that easy,” I say. “We should have had to fight them.”

  “I wanted to fight them,” says Xiao Zhu. “All those people in there, and that sobbing. We should have rescued them all.”

  “That trick wasn’t going to work twice,” I say. “We did what we could. We fought until it was done.”

  Xiao Zhu considers this, while the traffic roars past us and the holographic stars shine down. Then he turns to me, and the light in his eyes is brighter than them all.

  “We’re not done,” he says. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Two minutes later, with my heart in my mouth, I watch the hologram go down.

  The bright blue and yellow paint of the Ru Jia flickers, becomes faded and dull. Cracks appear in the plaster, windows become fractured and dusty, and the grass around its borders suddenly dies. For the first time in years, I see an eyesore on the streets of Beijing. And it stands out. It shouts its presence to the world. It makes me smile until I hurt.

  “Tomorrow morning, people are going to be asking questions about that,” says Xiao Zhu. ‘They’ll probably even have a look at what goes on inside.”

  Lao Yang lifts his head. “What did you do?”

  “I released a virus into their system, one that operates on a time delay. It’s knocked out their projector and it’ll block any attempt to fix it. I did it to cover our escape, but—” and he grins, helplessly, “it has an upside, too.”

  “Xiao Zhu,” I say, “I could kiss you. Let’s go home.”

  It’s funny. We spent three years picking away at the scab of history, but we never pulled it off until tonight. Twenty-eight courtyard houses are scattered throughout Beijing. They are beautiful, and they represent truth, but they never changed the world. All those roof beams, those delicate flowers, the tiles and the urns and the towers never did so much as hitting a switch and showing reality as it is. Our greatest triumph wasn’t renewing the past, but exposing the future. And in a battle between the past, present and future, the future always wins.

  Sunlight Society

  Margaret Ronald

  When the Fourth Street biolab went up, I didn’t think of Casey right away. I was working in the far side of the complex, which meant I was one of about four hundred people who got to see the entire dome rise up off its foundations, rotate counterclockwise ninety degrees, and shoot up into the sky. My immediate reaction followed the same pattern as everyone else: first What the hell, then, just before a needle of light vaporized the biolab, Are those people up there?

  I could hazard a guess at the second question; I’d gotten that far into the shadow organizations, even then. I knew enough to guess at the identities of some of the blurry shapes darting through the smoke, shapes that official press releases would call confabulation and that the conspiracists would call aliens or Muslims or Freemason-built androids. The shadow orgs had been sloppy that time; usually they didn’t like to be seen at their work, but there’d been so little warning that they’d had no choice but to break out the big guns. Literally, in this case.

  But that wasn’t what came to mind as I stared up into the sky, the glare of that solar blast fading bit by bit from my retinas, my nethead links relating the intensity of that blast, the projected knock-on effects on the rest of the Niobe web, the first stirrings among the dataminers. Instead, I just thought Casey would love this. I kept coming back to that thought over the next few weeks, even after word got out about the low-rent terrorists who’d gotten so close to taking over the biolab that vaporizing the whole place was the only alternative. Even after the arrests started.

  I still think it’s true.

  Today marks the first time I’ve been allowed into the Albuquerque facility. My credentials have been checked and re-checked so many times that they could probably tell you the weight and density of my last three bowel movements. Even so, they’ve been cutting corners on security, just so they can get me in here.

  I fully expect that within twenty years, someone will have figured out a way to install nethead technology in anyone regardless of individual brain structure. But until they do, I’m pretty much guaranteed work wherever I go. And there’s even fewer of us netheads with the proper security clearances to get into the Madison facility, let alone Albuquerque. I’m a valuable commodity.

  The facility isn’t much to look at: any decent biolab would have more apparent security. My nethead links are telling me otherwise, though; streams and warnings buzz against my skull so hard I can almost feel my teeth rattle. It unnerves me in a way that Madison didn’t, and Madison’s where they keep the host site for the Niobe satellite web. Enough solar power to—well, to blow up a biolab, for instance—focused onto the energy collectors for five dozen countries, and it’s still less well protected than this place.

  It’s cool and dark inside the guard shack, and the back of my neck prickles after the blazing heat outside. The guard’s got a laser sight wired into his left eye; the silver tracery of it fades into his pale complexion much more smoothly than the similar patterns on my own skin. He gestures to the marks while the machines verify my ID. “Looks nice.”

  “Thanks.” It’s striking, or so the nethead PR department says. They claim that’s why they want my image for their publicity stills, not just to provide the illusion of diversity. Some days I think they even believe it.

  “Been here before?” The guard knows I haven’t—a glance at the screens could tell him as much and more—but sometimes courtesy trumps efficiency.

  I shake my head. “I’ve been to Madison.”

  “Madison, pfft.” He grins. “That’s nothing to what we got—” He stops and turns red, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. I used to have that reaction, way back when I was sharing what I knew with Casey, when I tried to tell her that the comics we’d read were—well, not true, not close to true, but had some basis in reality.

  “Got what?” I ask, as the computers spit out my ID and agree that yes, my fingers and retinas appear to be my own.

  “Well, you know. Them.” He opens up the doors, and the flickering readouts in my periphery flare and scramble into new configurations. “The heroes.”

  The official story of Casey and me is that we were kids together, grew apart, came back together, screwed around, and then split up for good once I realized how crazy she was. Both times it was the heroes that brought us together, the first time through the comics that had come out in the wake of Maxentius sightings and the rumors about the Sixth Seal group. We read them all, regardless of qualit
y, lying on our backs in the vacant lot behind her house, ink on our fingers and intent discussions of whether Mistress Fivepoint could beat Jack o’the Green or if they’d just team up against Memetek. The second time it was because in my first months as a full nethead I learned so much about the shadow organizations, the reality behind all those rumors, and I could only think of one person I wanted to share that with—Casey, who could rattle off the Liberty League’s oath or Red Knight’s transformation mantra as easily as the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Both times it was her head, or what was wrong with it, that split us up.

  It’s a useful official version. But one thing you learn when you start getting involved in the shadow orgs is that the official version means very little. After all, none of them show up in any official version, except in the records of what didn’t happen, the plots that failed, the disasters averted.

  Or, sometimes, in the lists of people who’ve disappeared.

  The transport behind those metal doors takes me maybe eight floors down, with that bone-twitching stutter you only get from passing through negation fields. I don’t notice it; I’m too busy dealing with the sudden silence in my head. I can handle it—mental stability is one of the most important factors that they test for in determining nethead fitness—but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Particularly because the one link that does remain is the one that got implanted when I started working for the shadow orgs. For insurance, they told me. The Niobe GPS link.

  I remember the Fourth Street biolab, and the back of my neck goes abruptly hot again.

  When the doors open again, though, all thoughts of the world outside vanish. The visual input’s bad enough: between the scream of light on my right from what might be a laboratory and the dizzying drop twenty feet ahead of me, I can barely register mundane details like the polished-glass sheen of the floor, the central spindle of memory staves, the man waiting for me just to the side.

  But all that’s nothing compared to the chatter of computers on every side, the information in patterns I’ve never seen before. It’s like being picked up from one set of rapids and dropped into another, and it takes all of my concentration not to drown.