Sometimes it felt like forever.
The complimentary realmspace connection was down—Mike had warned them his presence might do that—so Tonya read the issues of Nature and Scientific American she’d bought at the airport, watched an old movie, then eventually nodded off.
The change in engine pitch and a faint press forward woke her. A quick check of the map confirmed it: they’d started the descent to the airport. Tonya stowed her privacy screens and was greeted by a very sorry sight.
“I told you not to mix beer and liquor,” she said to the pile of death warmed over that used to be Spencer.
“What the hell was that stuff, anyway?”
“Baijiu,” Kim replied from across the aisle. “Otherwise known as Chinese white lightning. You might as well have been drinking turpentine.”
“The menu called it Chinese wine.”
Kim shook her head. “That’s how it’s usually translated. At least they brought you Kaoliang jiu. Taiwanese. Good stuff. You wouldn’t survive a hangover off of street liquor.”
The Chinese words sounded strange coming from Kim, whose normal accent was a barely detectable Southern lilt. It attracted the attention of one of the flight attendants, who struck up a conversation. To Tonya it was a bunch of swishing slurs with an occasional K thrown in. Kim glanced at Tonya often enough she had a sneaking suspicion she might be the topic of conversation. Kim’s grin clenched it.
“What’d he say?”
“He wanted to know what part of Beijing I grew up in. He thought I might be a missionary’s kid.” Kim’s talent for languages made for interesting trips to various restaurants and absolutely hilarious cab rides back home.
She lifted an eyebrow. “He wanted to know if you were single.”
Now it had taken on a new level of utility.
The guidebooks had talked about this: China’s demographics had gone pear shaped with its One Child Policy and its ancient preference for boys. Boosting the limit to two children only helped a little. The normally shy, reserved Chinese man had to be bolder if he wanted to start a family.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you were. Then he wanted your number.”
Kim enjoyed this too much.
“And?”
“And I told him to ask you.”
The book warned that some of the new ways could seem a bit pushy. She looked down the aisle, but the man very pointedly glanced at anything but her, his skin tone distinctly darker than before. The shyness was adorable, but this wasn’t the place or time to troll for a date.
The plane banked and filled their windows with a view of Chengdu. It had none of the grid-like regularity of the new cities built to replace the ones wiped out in the Three Gorges disaster. Pollution controls had supposedly improved the notorious smog, but it was still pretty hazy down there. Construction had so thoroughly swarmed over the gash the terrorist attack left that she could barely make it out.
Otherwise the city was a mish-mash of low- and mid-rise buildings surrounding a downtown full of modern skyscrapers. Reading about the bigness of China was one thing. Seeing it up close was another. Chengdu was twice the size of LA, with Manhattan dropped in the middle. Landing brought it back to some kind of human scale, mostly because Tonya couldn’t see so much of it all at once.
She had doubted Kim’s idea of using old camera lens boxes to hold China’s billions back, but when Kim marched down the aisle of the plane with one over each shoulder Tonya had to admit they made an impressive, and barely noticeable, kind of armor.
The airport was full of chrome and polished marble; the latticework ceiling made her think of a bird’s nest. They had fresh fruit and vegetable vendors. It wasn’t like any airport she’d ever seen.
Tonya skipped a bit as she walked. She was in China! She pulled out her new phone and looped its lanyard around her neck. Pendant phones were almost unheard of here. While Americans used devices like the RoseTech Fleur to connect to realmspace, China was single-handedly keeping Apple afloat with its wildly successful iPhone RE20 series. It was an amusing anachronism back home; its electronics were stored in a palm-sized processor meant to be carried and it had a thick white neck lanyard that recalled headphones of generations past. Tonya dropped the processor, complete with its old-fashioned OLED screen, into a pocket even though every Chinese person she passed seemed to carry them in their hands.
Pastel-colored graphics flashed into her enhanced vision when the phone connected with the local network. English translations of any Chinese words she looked at typed into being. The advertisements outside and around the shops were more bizarre as manic, doe-eyed children and cartoon animals appeared and danced around. It took a bit of fiddling to get it all under control.
Mike shook his phone while they walked toward the baggage terminal.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“It won’t let me log on.”
“You mean you broke the phone already?” Spencer asked.
“No, the electronics are fine. I just can’t connect.”
Kim slowed enough to walk beside him. “I thought you said once you got behind the firewall you’d be able to connect?”
“That’s what I thought. Once we’re inside it shouldn’t interfere. People couldn’t use Chinese realmspace in China otherwise.”
Mike had his problems, and Tonya had hers. Every single Chinese person in the airport seemed to stare at her openly, sometimes aggressively. Staring back didn’t change anything, and there were thousands of people all around her. Some of the stares were amused, others startled, and occasionally one or two were downright nasty.
When stranger got in her face with a flashing camera Kim cut loose with a long, vicious stream of rapid-fire Chinese. Everyone in the airport switched focus. It turned out a white girl who could swear like a local trumped a black girl who was a very long way from Kansas. Kim didn’t flinch under the attention; if anything, she enjoyed it.
Tonya spent the rest of the walk with Kim loudly teaching her basic Chinese phrases. Or at least that’s what Kim kept telling her they were. Some of the phrases seemed pretty long for “Where’s the bathroom?” or “How do you do?”
When the bags arrived, Mike unzipped the top of his and reached inside, fiddling at something blindly. He started swearing.
“Spencer, did you see where she went?”
“Only for a second. Shit, Mike, she really is fast.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Tonya asked.
“Zoe. She ran off.”
Ah. Mike’s unduplicate AI project, the one he’d been working on for months. Tonya had met her exactly once. Zoe’s avatar was cute and bouncy, a perfect match for her personality, but there was something a little off about her. Tonya couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but Zoe wasn’t like any other unduplicate she had ever met.
“Can’t you just recall her?”
Mike shrugged as he shared a look with Spencer. “It’s not that easy. She doesn’t have a recall function anymore. I took it out when I healed her.”
Kim grunted as she pulled a rolling soft side about as big as she was off the carousel. “You mean you’ve turned an unlicensed unduplicate loose behind the Great Firewall? Mike, you could get arrested for that. Shut her down.”
“I can’t. Her lattice is one of the most sensitive I’ve ever encountered. I’m afraid if I do that I’ll damage her.” He pulled the transport out and opened it. A wisp of smoke wafted up. “Besides, she’s already found a local host.”
Her nurse’s instincts said there was more to this than he was letting on. Those things weren’t supposed to have so much free will.
Mike shrugged. “Anyway, how much trouble can one unduplicate get into out here?”
They all stopped and stared at him.
Kim shook her head. “I can’t believe you said that out loud. As soon as we get to the hotel, you and Spencer need to figure out your access issue and put a leash on your pet.”
“Kim, she�
�s not a pet.”
“Because saying your teenaged foster child has disappeared into Chinese realmspace all by herself is so much better? Figure it out and find her.”
Tonya pulled her own bags off the conveyor, and then did a double take at the man who emerged from the crowd. He was possibly the most handsome man Tonya had ever seen in person, and he was walking straight toward them. The stranger had no ring on his finger. There was no way she could be this lucky.
“Mike,” she whispered. “Mike!” He finally turned her way. “Who did you say was picking us up?”
“He said his name was Chen umm....Shing-Shan?”
Kim gasped. “Qiáng Shān?”
“Yeah, that’s a lot closer to how he said it.”
“Mike, are you kidding me?”
He shrugged. “You were too busy being angry this morning for me to explain. What did I do wrong now?”
Mr. Shing-Shan, or Qiáng Shān, or whoever walked away from a trio of what had to be bodyguards, stared straight at Kim, and then held his hand out flat in front of him. “Hello, Ivy. Or should I say, Kim?”
“Ozzie?”
Chapter 8: Zoe
She ran through a place that had no notion of her existence, and Fee told her Mike couldn’t follow.
Mike’s credit card solved the language problem. It’d been stupid-easy to guilt him into giving it to her. The Titanium version of the Rosetta module she bought before they left included a bilingual Chinese with an earpiece. She was learning the language, but the sub-AI that integrated the lessons would take weeks to mesh with her consciousness.
Chinese realmspace was enormous, much bigger than back home; the nightclub realms alone would take her years to explore. The crowds made it even easier to pass herself off as human.
“You dance so well!” one of the boys she met exclaimed. “What part of America are you from?”
“Is it that obvious?” she asked through the translator.
The girl dancing next to him laughed. “You sound like you should be on the evening news in Beijing. That’s a really excellent program, though.”
The translation plugin made their avatars speak English, but it was still about five frames behind what she heard. Zoe had to blink occasionally to let the illusion catch up. “Does it really matter?” she shouted.
“No!” the boy replied. “What do you think of China?”
What did she think? What could she think? Their names were delightful: Robust Dragon and Songbird.
“Don’t say my name that way; with that accent it sounds awful,” Robust Dragon said when they took a rest between songs. “My teacher gave me my first Western name, and it’s worse. I want you to give me a Western name.”
“Yeah,” Songbird said as she drained a stim that resembled a flaming monkey encased in ice, “me too.”
And so Zoe’s first two Chinese friends became Barry and Alley, tributes to Beta and Alpha, family members she would never see again.
The arcades were the best. Realms that recreated ancient carnival games from all over the world were filled with laughing, flirting Chinese fascinated by the strange American who spoke their language with such a funny accent.
“Do you enjoy how spicy real Chinese food is?” one of Barry’s friends asked.
She would if she’d ever eaten anything. The third choice the translator gave as a reply worked. “I haven’t tried any. I only got here today.”
“We’ll take you somewhere!” Barry said, and everyone around the stim bar agreed. “Where are you in realspace?”
It was another complicated question. When she shot them the address of Mike’s hotel they all groaned.
“Chengdu? Really?”
It made her want to crawl under the bar. “What’s wrong with Chengdu?”
“It’s so ancient,” Alley replied. “We’re all from New Shanghai. The broadband is excellent here.” She raised an eyebrow. “You do know about Three Gorges, right?”
Well, no. Mike had warned her to read up on recent Chinese history, but it was so boring. Zoe ran her hands through her avatar’s hair, stalling for time. Go with the truth. “I’m sorry, guys. I was in an accident recently, and it really screwed with my memory. The only reason I’m here is my dad thought a change would shake things loose.” Thank God Mike couldn’t hear her.
“So you have been here before?” Barry asked.
“It’s complicated.” The thump of a new song saved her. “Let’s dance!”
Exhaustion tried to slow her down, but Zoe refused to stop. Until, that is, Alley leaned into her ear. “Do you want to see the real China?”
“Hell yes!”
The resolution of the next realm was ragged, smelling of old data. Alpha had talked about things like that, but Zoe had never experienced before. Stims hazed the air with their data-marked smoke. The music pounded and crashed through her, different, more vibrant than before. Her avatar’s face flushed as she moved her hips. Posters on the walls shouted things about revolution, and then her ears popped.
Alley talked to her, but all Zoe got was slurs and coughs. “What? I can’t understand you.”
Alley cocked her head and talked gibberish again. The translator was down.
“I’m sorry, Alley, I don’t understand anymore.” The music snapped off and the lights turned on. A half-dozen couples on the edges of the room scrabbled frantically as their clothes reset, and then Mike showed up.
It was such a disappointment. Fee promised, promised, there was no way he could enter Chinese realmspace. She didn’t need to see him. Zoe knew that all-enveloping feeling. As if being busted by Mike wasn’t embarrassing enough, he’d probably split himself into his thousand threads in front of everyone.
Then she turned around.
This was not possible. There was no goddamned way it was possible. What she felt was Mike: power everywhere, beyond comprehension.
What she saw was an angry young Chinese woman in a uniform.
Everyone around Zoe had gone rigid. She was sure a few of them would’ve exited if whoever, if whatever, this was hadn’t thrown a protocol net around the place. The officer’s hologram—of course it would be a hologram—shouted at them in rapid-fire Chinese. They all ended up in a line shoulder to shoulder with Zoe’s avatar as whoever this was marched back and forth in front of them. The holo stopped in front of her, and Zoe nearly dissolved. This was Mike, everything she’d learned said so.
But it wasn’t.
Her holo straightened. She asked in lightly accented English, “American, yes?”
Zoe nodded. Maybe it was a smell. If she had one. The urge to check her armpits was hard to fight off.
“Your papers, please.”
Oh, great. Zoe had literally been checked baggage. Baggage didn’t need papers. Well, okay, there was that tag on the suitcase, but she was pretty sure that didn’t count.
The holo got way too close. “Your papers, please.”
It was always easy to think of the wrong thing to say in times like these. “I think I left them in my other jacket.” She smiled weakly as the impossible person cocked her head. “Really, if you’ll wait here just a second.” Whoever this was cast out thousands of probes Zoe couldn’t resist. Time to go. “Oh to hell with this.”
She ran.
The only thing that kept her free was the realmspace laps she and Mike did the first week after she’d woken up. He’d turned into a titanic thing that hissed and grasped, a million-fingered hand that surrounded her. Zoe learned to be small and fast, traveling through realms while he had to flow around the outside.
The sounds, and most of all the smells, were the same—sparkling crashes that fizzed through her nose like simSeltz. She was only picoseconds ahead of her pursuer. Mike was unique; that’s what everyone said, but this was not Mike. Zoe’s cache buffers filled and began to overwrite her avatar’s core. It manifested as a desperate need to pee. Damned humans and their hyper-literal interfaces!
Before Zoe left for China, Fee gave her the address of
a bolt-hole, a safe house she could use, but only in an emergency, which this absolutely was. She skated another lap of the local realmspace. Everything inside her was either overflowing or threatening to crash. She had to find the shelter.
There! There it was! She tucked and fell into the hole. The hatch slammed shut behind her, a solid construct that could not be broken.
There was a hit on the hatch, a bass thump. She clapped hands over her avatar’s ears. It got bigger. Thousands of steel fists clanged against the hatch, making the pocket realm’s walls bow under them. The edges of the hatch glowed red, then yellow, and then white as uncounted probes tried to find their way inside. It was going to get her and tear her apart. The overburdened bandwidth made her cough and cry out.
This couldn’t be Mike! It had to be Mike! There was a pause, and then a hyperactive shriek. A million hammers bashed her hiding place at once. The construct buckled and then collapsed. She stilled every subroutine under her control, willing them to silence as the hatch sizzled and pinged inches away from her face.
The alien thing took an almighty sniff, and Zoe couldn’t move. It was too close. If she moved it would know she was here and never leave. Then the entire realm stretched away as whatever it was backed off. With another titanic huff, it was gone.
She waited until the hatch had decompressed to the point where it was simply hot before she called Fee.
“You what?” she said.
God, they always focused on the negative. “I’m sorry, Fee, I got held up. Jesus, you wouldn’t believe what was chasing me through here.”
“I know exactly what it was, you stupid girl. You were supposed to find a crystal host and make contact, not bring Chinese law enforcement down on your head. Did you make contact?”
Of course Fee would ignore the most terrifying experience in Zoe’s life. It was all about business. So lame.
“No, Fee, I didn’t. Did I mention the monster Mike-thing that chased me down this rabbit hole? The one that shouldn’t exist?”
“You have a job, Zoe. Do your job.”
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