by Sam Abraham
Copyright © 2018 by Sam Abraham
All rights reserved.
No part of this book maybe reproduced in any form or by any electronic or machanical means, including information storage and retrievel systems without wirrten permission from the author, except fort he use of brief quotations in a book review.
Main Cast
The Woman Hua (花)
Li Aizhu (李爱祝)
Uncle Qi (杞)
Shen Lingrui (申凌瑞), Li’s teacher
Lao Jinglai (嫪敬来), a.k.a Lao-Ba
The Bandit Sun (孙鸡)
Eli Warner, Director of Business Development for ORS, Inc.
Dr. Yang Congdao (羊聪道)
Zoe Chou, Dr. Yang’s postdoc
Xie Baotian (谢宝天), A Jade Captain
Han Deshi (翰德世), A born-again Jade
Jia Anmei (家安美), of the Three Self Church in the City of Wuhu
Ginger, the Man with Shining Eyes
Baiyue (白月)
Hu of Shanghai (滹)
A Note on Pronunciation
Jade Prophet is an adventure set in the rich cultural tapestry of China. Characters and places are named accordingly, using pinyin (an established framework of Romanizing Chinese phonetics) to represent these names in English. Many online resources are available on pinyin pronunciation.
Part 1: Old Yin
Chapter 1 - Qian (乾)
Dragon Appearing In The Field
A shadow flashed across a sea of neon skyscrapers. As the chopper overhead flew off, a slim figure landed on a roof and called up her holo, blueprints of the tower below unfolding in light. Tracing the plans to a vent, she pulled a coil from her pouch and fixed it to a wall. Then she clipped the line to her flight suit and dove thirty floors into the belly of the genelab.
Hidden in darkness, she keyed a sequence into the panel on her belt and another holo surrounded her, appearing as a white nurse’s uniform. Pulling a badge from her pouch, she watched the image on it materialize into the face of the nurse she had murdered. How lovely it had been when people knew me, she thought, and felt her wrinkles deepen. How beautiful it once was to have a name. Shaking off her regrets, she knew such dreams were poison now. Swallowing her fear, she walked calmly to security doors, where she swiped the badge and slipped inside.
Endless rows of bassinets stood, hundreds of them, their glass pods glimmering. In each one squirmed an infant, jammed together in a garden of small pink seeds. She walked through the neonates to another door, thick with Chinese characters, and flashed her badge again. The doors hissed open.
This room was smaller, ten meters across. A cylindrical tank stood at the center, holding an infant in blue synthamniotic fluid. The woman approached, touching her fingers to the glass. She tapped a keypad and the cylinder drained its liquid, congealing into a cradle around the small bundle of flesh. The baby wailed in its bassinet, her tiny hands fumbling at the wires taped to her fragile torso.
Suddenly, the woman was slammed to the floor. Gasping, she looked up to see a beast standing over her.
“Who are you?” it growled, bearing long canines. Sleek fur was all it wore above the waist, curling across muscles that could bend steel. It sniffed her scent and its eyeslits narrowed. “You’re not Nurse Song. You are the one that escaped.”
“You’ll go back to the kennel for touching your superior,” the woman said, reading the characters running down its arms. Hybrid, she knew. There was no mistaking the one of the Xinren, the mongrel killers that were more animal than man.
The hybrid let out a screech and tried to bite off her head, snapping its beartrap jaws as she rolled away. When it swiped at her, trying to rake her with its talons, she sprang up, feet first, and jammed her heels into the creature’s face. The hybrid flew back, pawing at its muzzle. While the beast was down, she pulled out a ball of smartglue and threw it at the door’s control unit. The ball fused with the unit and jammed the door. Then the hybrid was on its feet, popping its jaw back into place.
“I hope you are ready to die,” it growled, and lunged at her.
Closing her eyes, she pulled her fists close and focused the energy within. When she pushed out with open palms, bolts of electricity leapt from her arms in a shockwave, punching the hybrid into a concrete wall. The baby’s cries fueled the woman’s anger as she stood over the halfbreed.
“Your file did not say you were enhanced,” it panted, holding its wounded chest. She was silent as her heel came down on the hybrid’s face with the weight of a stone.
Catching her breath, she left the mess of skull and brains and took from her belt a syringe and a sling that shimmered in the dim light. Returning to the bassinet, she injected liquid from the syringe into the baby’s shoulder. The baby wailed, but the woman knew the treatment was necessary to disable tracking microdrones in the infant’s bloodstream. Dropping the syringe, she lifted the small body to her breast. Sensors linked to the newborn sent out alarms, but she paid no notice. She had waited a lifetime for this.
Cradling the little one, the woman squeezed a drop from a sedative pouch and touched it to the child’s tongue, helping the baby drop into sleep. Wrapping the infant in the shimmering sling, she had just pulled a hood over her face when guards forced open the door. She tapped her belt, and a shield of thermoptic camouflage made her vanish in a flash. But it was too late. They had seen her disappear.
The guards chased the thief, combing the maternity ward with laser fields. Waves of red light passed over the tiny pink bodies, but there were too many bassinets to get a clear signal. The invisible woman crawled on her hands and knees between the rows of babies, the infant hanging from her chest. After a few long minutes, she rose and scrambled through the exit, the door opening as if for a ghost. Holding the infant’s head, she sprinted towards high windows and threw one last ball at the glass that exploded on impact. As the wall collapsed in smoke, she held her breath and leapt through the ash.
City lights blinked far beneath her as she began to fall.
But the harness floated out there too, just beyond the wall. She grabbed it, looping it around her wrists as she swung wildly and the helicopter climbed, lifting her and the stolen child into the night.
As she flew away, she saw a distant tower out on the horizon. Ten times taller than the skyscrapers, its nanotube tentacles pierced the night. The genelab they fled faded as they flew south, just another light in the luminous city. But the manmade mountain loomed large, and the woman wondered what kind of future her daughter would see.
Chapter 2 – Kun (坤)
If By Chance You Are In The Service Of A King
17 years later.
Kowloon lay under lead clouds.
Li Aizhu hated walking to school in lines of uniformed brats. She hated the nuns and their rulers. She hated learning Mandarin when Cantonese was all anyone spoke at the market. And she especially hated the girls, with their penthouse flats and pearl-wearing mothers. Li’s uncle liked to say that such was price of a decent education. It was the best private school in Hong Kong, and Li had no idea how Uncle had finagled her in. She assumed she was on some kind of scholarship. Whatever he had given in exchange, it must have been a tremendous sacrifice. So no matter how much she hated school, no matter how sullen or drunk Uncle became, she felt forced to feel lucky. I am grateful, she would think, to be able to further myself.
Breakfast was served in a vaulted hall, where students ate porridge and giggled menacingly. Li always sat alone. She knew that if she went over and said hello, the little princesses would scatter at the first sign of wealth dilution. She never felt hungry at breakfast, so she sipped cold tea and thought about Uncle. What had he wanted when he was young?
First period was another tired lecture about the Gr
eat Nationalization. Every year she studied the same subject, as did every other student in the country. Three decades back, the Centrists in Beijing had embraced a policy pushing municipal authorities to toe their line, holding that local government in China would always be at risk of corruption. After all, it had been said, even since before the Song Dynasty, “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.”
In the last century, anyone with means had migrated to megacities like Jing-Jin-Ji, the megalopolis around Beijing, crowding into thirty massive sprawls where surveillance could spy on everyone who mattered. Yet the ancient question remained: how to control hundreds of millions who still lived in vast stretches of hinterland, in a country of almost five million square kilometers?
The Great Nationalization answered. By licensing rural lands to a state-owned corporation fat on government debt, remote “affiliated territories” were tightly held under Centrist thumbs. This corporation was the River Syndicate, an efficient organization serving its bondholders. Or, at least, such was the story from the propagandists dictating the country’s high school curriculum.
Li tuned out as usual, her teenage eyes wandering outside the window, oblivious to the world. This was it, she thought. My life. Suffocating in a uniform, preached to by mercenaries. A bell rang far away. She went down her tunnel to second period and sat by the window again. Someone said her name.
“What?” she asked. Several girls giggled.
“Aizhu, did you hear what I said?” asked the nun at the front of the room. Sister Ban was young for St. Christopher’s, a plump peasant from Fujian who had been educated by the Church. “Can you tell me what Jesus Christ was trying to teach us with his sacrifice?”
Li looked at the crucifix by the window. The wooden martyr seemed to writhe in the humidity, as if praying in vain to get off the reincarnation roller coaster. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was a warning.”
Sister Ban’s eyebrows rose. “That is not the lesson we’re learning.”
Li shrugged, forgetful of the etiquette that students should have no knowledge of their own. “Maybe He was saying that no matter who you are, some people won’t like what you’re about. One wrong move, and — ”
Cccchhhiiick, came a sound behind her from a tan boy with a lopsided tie, who drew his finger across his neck. Everyone laughed this time.
“Enough,” Sister Ban said sharply. “Who knows the right answer?”
A girl with a crooked nose and pale skin raised her hand. “Everyone knows that Christ knew his words were against the rules. But he said them anyway, and gladly died for our salvation.”
Li laughed. It wasn’t loud, and she thought she’d been laughing in her own head. Only when she saw everyone watching her did she look up at Sister Ban crossing her arms. “Thank you, Poching. However, what Christ said was not holy because it was against the rules, but because it was the truth.” The nun turned back to Li. “Is the right answer clear to you, Aizhu?”
On any other day, Li might have kept quiet. But she looked at the crucifix, bloody palms pierced in supplication, welcoming sacrifice, and found fury in a deep place. “He talked about sin. Some people listened, some didn’t. He went to the same place in the end.”
“Everyone knows it wasn’t the same place,” Poching said precociously. “That’s the point.”
Li shrugged. “Where’s the proof?”
“That’s enough,” Sister Ban said.
But Li wasn’t listening. “Are we really supposed to take it on faith that a man was born without his parents…you know, doing the nasty, and that he came back from the dead as a god?” As the class eyed her with contempt, she felt engulfed in remembered loneliness. “What’s so special about this man?” she spat, her eyes flashing silver. “Why couldn’t you be the Messiah too? Why couldn’t I?”
“Aizhu, watch your tongue! Detention for your mouth and your doubt. That’s three times this week,” Sister Ban said with a stern look. “Everyone, we’ll continue with today’s reading.”
Li heard giggling behind her. She had opened her mouth and gotten in trouble. Again. It never failed, and yet people asked her why she was so quiet all the time.
On her way to fifth period, she heard her name. Two times in one day. This could not be a good sign. But it was Daiwu who sauntered up to her. His hair was slicked back, his polo collar turned up, his dimples dancing, as he smiled and wove his charm around her.
“Want to come to the march with me on Sunday?” he said. “Maybe we’ll see more of what that doubtful mouth has to say.”
Li couldn’t help but smirk. “Maybe,” she said, and smiled as he turned and walked on.
No sooner had she turned back to her locker than she was surrounded by girls. Poching was among them, looking surly. The girl stuck her finger in Li’s face and said, “Daiwu is too good for poor sluts like you.”
It often seemed to Li that she bore many crosses. Poverty and loneliness and high school were burdens, and she carried them without complaining because inside she felt untouched, above mundane adolescence. But the one thing Li could not stand, not ever, was being insulted. “I’ll talk to whoever I want,” she said, swatting Poching’s hand away.
Enraged, Poching grabbed Li’s lapels. Li knew that the world wanted her to be polite, even deferential, to this brat of a girl. But just as ravens have no use for chicken coops, Li felt no need to obey rules. So, in a fluid blur, Li got a hand around the girl’s braids and slammed her face into a locker.
Li wasn’t trying to do any damage. But Poching was on the floor, her nose a bloody mess, shrieking at the top of her lungs. Li cursed and tried to help Poching up, but was pulled away by teachers and guards. Now she was definitely going to get more than detention.
Li had been alone in a classroom for forty minutes after final bell when Sister Ban marched her into the principal’s office. He was a chunky academic, his wispy hair combed over his balding dome. “Thank you, Sister,” he told Ban. “Leave her with me.” Gratefully, Ban left the two alone in an office stuck in the twenty-first century, overflowing with file cabinets. The principal sighed. “I should expel you, Li Aizhu, that’s what I should do. You’ve been in four fights this year. You threaten the learning environment.”
“So expel me,” she said, under her breath. She was so tired of this charade.
“Don’t think I haven’t tried.” Now Li was curious, but she would not ask who was protecting her, and reveal her ignorance to this pea of a man. “I could suspend you again,” The principal said, “but I have a better punishment. You will arrive at five AM every morning to help the gardeners weed and tend the grounds.”
“Sin ka lan!” Li cursed.
The principal grinned. “Watch your language. You go to school here for free, your uncle has seen to that. But I’ll be damned if you won’t learn to care for something larger than yourself. Be here at five AM tomorrow, five days a week, for four weeks. And if you get in another fight, it will be for even longer.”
“But the buses don’t run that early!”
“You take the bus?” he asked, and shrugged. “I’ll send a car to pick you up. You’re dismissed.”
Li fumed as she rose to leave. The humiliation was unbearable. All her classmates knew she was poor. To be made to do manual labor in front of them as they came to school every day would be worse than death. Uncle could never find out. Why couldn’t they just expel her?
“Oh,” the principal said as an afterthought. “You should know that Poching’s parents may bring charges. I’ve been told not to interfere, on account of who they are. You’ve really done it this time. If you’re sentenced to hard labor a little gardening might seem like a holiday.”
Chapter 3 – Zhun (屯)
Difficulties In Blessing
Li couldn’t leave school fast enough, but once she arrived for her shift, the afternoon dragged. The last four months had become a new kind of torture, ever since she turned seventeen and Uncle had told her to get a job. She gazed beyond the sli
ding doors of the automart, chasing colors. Blue selfdrives and green sarongs, yellow flags and crimson lights flitted past, bringing life to the pavement. Air control domes rose high above the tenements and crisscrossing laundry wires, their glass canopies shimmering in the gloom, drones zooming between the large holo displays curling over the complexes.
A customer entered with a ding, and went for one of the makers along the wall. Swiping through images of ramen and newspapers, the man pondered his choices as cameras scanned his face and linked it to his credit. The maker began connecting molecules with dizzying speed, congealing into blobs that soon compiled a bottle of milk tea. Li eyed him lazily as a woman in pajamas swiped the display on another maker. Behind the display were tanks storing the basic building blocks of food and consumables: amino acids, organic and inorganic polymers, metals and minerals. All the maker needed was a recipe, a formula for weaving molecular packets into tissue and sauce and plastic. By programming microbots and enzymes with recipes to mix and package primordial oozes, the same machine could make jellyfish and noodle broth, fruit and tobacco, nearly any parade of tangible desires. After all, everything was made of the same underlying stuff.
The holoview on the wall blabbed on. Talking heads jabbered about protests in the west and some treaty of five nations that Kenya just joined and didn’t that make it six now, and there was another flood-driven food shortage on the mainland and — oh! — some lunatic in the Ghost Lands of Anhui claimed to hear angels and had burned down an entire occuhive before being brought to trial.