by Ian Williams
In Hong Kong, the protests were inflamed when democracy activists disappeared. Chinese security agents were accused of abducting them in violation of local laws. They turned up two days later on the mainland, confessing to inciting protests and saying they’d made the trip voluntarily, having felt a sudden need to atone for their wrongdoing.
The abductions brought thousands more to the streets, crippling several areas of Hong Kong Island and neighbouring Kowloon. The image of the stick alien hung from buildings and walkways across the territory as waves of protesters blocked the roads below.
Hong Kong’s internet connections collapsed and one of the World’s most important financial centres went blind. It followed cyber-attacks on pro-democracy targets, crippling their websites with a flood of requests in what was called a denial of service. Only the attack was so big the territory’s entire network came crashing down.
Hong Kong’s tech-savvy students had already shut down China’s top official in the territory, a man known as Two-Phone Ma on account of the two mobile phones he usually had glued to his ears. Students got hold of the numbers and posted them on sex-for-sale websites, offering big discounts. Ma’s phones were crippled when they were overwhelmed with calls. Drayton smiled when he heard about that. It was more low-tech than high-tech, but just about the most ingenious denial of service attack he’d come across.
There was a sharp increase in incidents in the South China Sea. A Chinese ship fired shots near an American destroyer. The US Ambassador to China urged the screens in the Bubble Room to stay calm, saying it was simply an attempt to deflect the protests by stirring up nationalist sentiment.
The Ambassador called it a dangerous strategy. He said that even where it succeeded in bringing nationalist protests onto the streets, they soon morphed into something else. And the funny little alien was never far behind.
The Bubble Room wasn’t convinced. Calm wasn’t something the screens did, and the Ambassador was told to issue an immediate diplomatic protest. A voice from the White House said any deployment of smog weapons to the South China Sea would be a red line for the President.
It was hard to say what was going on at the top of the Party, where a secretive and paranoid leadership saw enemies everywhere. Yet for all the arrests and abductions, and a renewed crackdown online, the authorities seemed at a loss as to how to deal with the big protests, the silent, peaceful protesters with their alien posters and banners, which just seemed to spread and to grow.
*
Drayton decided he needed to get out of the hothouse atmosphere of the consulate, and especially the Bubble Room, and grab a beer. It was all getting a little surreal, the diplomats now under fire from DC for failing to see this coming. Even while they were struggling to figure out quite what this was.
Drayton had been in the diplomatic game long enough to know that DC heard what it wanted to hear, saw what it wanted to see. And if a year ago anybody had predicted an uprising built around a strange little alien, and had suggested that far from being the biggest boon to the world economy, China might be about to bring it down, they’d have been laughed out of court.
And diplomats didn’t like being laughed out of court.
Drayton walked to the nearby microbrewery run by the guy from Minnesota, where he took his usual seat in a corner, back to the wall as always, and ordered a pint of Airpocalypse Pale Ale. But it was back to its usual name, Shanghai Wallop, and without the discount, because the smog was lifting.
His iPhone rang, a Japanese number he didn’t recognise. It was Sakura, telling him she’d had her visa revoked without explanation. She said work had become impossible anyway because their computers had been crippled by something called a service of denial attack, hackers bombarding the system with so many requests that it just collapsed.
“You familiar with that stuff?” she asked.
“Not really,” said Drayton. “Though it was probably a denial of service attack. Service of denial happens later, when you accuse China of doing it.”
He’d had his fill of the cyber world and changed the subject, saying they should really get together before she left and have some more fun, and she said, “But I’ve already left, Chuck. I’m back in Japan. Give me a shout next time you are in Tokyo.”
Then she hung up.
But Sakura phoned back a minute later, this time sounding a little more emotional, telling Drayton that it had been hard returning to Japan, leaving behind someone that means so much to you.
It was the most affection he’d ever heard from Sakura, and for a moment he didn’t know how to reply.
Then she said, “It was a quarantine issue. There was a lot of paperwork, and I had to leave Bobby behind.”
She asked whether he’d mind keeping an eye on the pug and gave the name of the Shanghai dogs home where he was lodging.
“Give him a kiss from me,” said Sakura.
And Drayton said, “Sure”, before they both hung up and he ordered another pint of the Airpocalypse Pale Ale that was now Shanghai Wallop.
He was worried about Morgan. He’d not been able to reach him. When he telephoned the sauna they told him that Mr Gerald had left for now, but they’d be sure to pass on a message if he returned.
Drayton had never met Morgan’s wife and had no contact information for her, so reaching out to her wasn’t an option.
He’d received two letters that afternoon in the diplomatic pouch from DC, which he’d forgotten about, but now with a moment to himself he took them out of his inside pocket. One was an in-house State Department magazine trumpeting all the latest efforts by US diplomats to bring peace and prosperity to the world.
It had become a lot thinner of late.
The other was a brown A5 envelope addressed to him, but care of the State Department. It had a bunch of strange stamps of exotic birds. Another of a turtle. It was from the Cayman Islands.
There was a smaller white envelope inside, and inside that was a postcard with a picture of a long beach fringed with palm trees on the front and a short message on the back.
Dear Chuck,
Aliens are by nature remote and of another world.
But thankfully some Party functionaries are still reliably corrupt.
Pay us a visit next time you are in the Caribbean.
Take care,
Mr and Mrs Gerald and son
Which made Drayton smile. Morgan and his wife had done a deal, bought their way out. Playing the system as always. And Morgan was right about the alien. That was precisely the message all those different protests were sending. That the Party was of another world.
Drayton then activated his VPN and went to the New York Times, which was reporting government appeals to protesters for reason and promising to investigate the landfill disaster and the collapsed finance companies and provide the truth about what happened.
Then he went to Twitter, where he was pleased see that
@Beijing_smog was tweeting again, back online after a break, and with its own take on promises of honesty from the Party.
When they’ve always fed you lies then even truth and honesty look tainted.
Drayton smiled. That guy was always spot on. He wished he’d had a chance to meet the person who wrote that stuff.
His phone then buzzed, an encrypted message saying there’d be another conference call in the Bubble Room later that evening, morning in DC. Which hardly filled him with enthusiasm. He already knew what the questions would be.
They wanted motives, conspiracies. But what could he tell them? That the Communist Party was brought to its knees by a viral image, unleashed by a student with a smartphone who thought it was all a joke. That the Party had been undermined by the power of ridicule, indifference and the internet.
His phone buzzed again, saying the world’s financial markets were in free-fall and looking for confirmati
on that he’d be on the call. For the first time in a long time he powered his phone off. Then he ordered another pint of Shanghai Wallop.
*
It had been a busy day in The Moment On Time coffee shop, where they’d stepped up production of stick alien posters and banners. Fatso was lending a hand too, providing the students with one room of his workshop.
There was going to be a protest in Tiananmen Square, right beside the Zhongnanhai leadership compound.
News had spread rapidly online, but cryptically.
The Zhongnanhai cigarette as a symbol for the leadership compound, and of course the stick alien for those who lived there. Both as originally posted by Wang. But that was a while back now. The alien had travelled a long way since then. And Wang played no part in the preparations. He was back in the world beyond his screen, working on an idea for another app. Another game, this one a chase. The player pursued by a bunch of crazed zombies through, round and sometimes over giant ice sculptures.
He left the coffee shop with the protesters and took the same train with them into the centre of town. It seemed like almost everybody on the train was heading to the protest, all nursing their aliens. But when they got off at Tiananmen Square, he stayed on for another three stops to Jianguomen, from where he walked to Ritan Park.
He entered the park and walked past a lake, still partly frozen. On a hill beside the lake the trees were still wrapped in green cladding to help them through the long winter. In a pagoda on top of a hill a group of elderly people stretched and turned, going through a series of slow and graceful movements, as they did every afternoon.
In another small clearing more elderly people were bent over low tables playing a board game, focused intensely on the small round pieces in front of them.
The sun was going down fast now. It was a cold, crisp afternoon without a cloud in the sky. And the smog had lifted. You didn’t need an app to tell you that.
Wang couldn’t remember the last time the air had been so clean. Apart from in the distance, close to where the sun was sinking, from the direction of Tiananmen Square, where smoke seemed to be rising. It was hard to tell for sure.
He sat on a bench and looked for the answer online, where he’d always looked, tapping on the screen of his phone. But the signal had been cut. His world was offline and he sat staring at a screen of lifeless icons.