She cleared her throat. “Whatcha doin?”
Mystery’s threads concentrated on her realm. “Who is this?” she demanded in English. “Show yourself!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Zoe teased. “You know, no papers?”
Mystery’s final thread concentration made her nose tickle as the hologram formed. In every way, she seemed exactly average, like she’d been built from old website photos. Mystery still wore a police uniform, and the probes and searches crawling around the room were more than most governments could manage. Fortunately, they couldn’t touch her. She wanted to swing her arms and dance around. Can’t see me!
“Ah, the American. You don’t have much to fear, you know.” Mystery walked around, looking at everything. “We pack you foreign devils on planes all the time. You don’t have to pay for the ticket.”
“Why do you care? I’m not a terrorist. I don’t want to blow anything up.”
Mystery flinched, an interesting reaction.
“No,” she replied. “But you are breaking the law, and unlike you chaotic Americans, we value order here in China.”
“Really? Yeah, those were some orderly Chinese I was hanging out with, I tell ya.”
Mystery didn’t like that one bit. “Hooligans and angry youth, victims of your Western spiritual pollution. I arrested most of them.”
“For God’s sake, why? They were just having fun.”
“Fun?” she scoffed. “Corruption and chaos to you are fun? No wonder your country is such a mess.”
Mystery tried to lock up the realm, but Zoe spotted it early thanks to Mike’s training. She popped to another empty place, leaving just enough of a trail to make sure she didn’t lose her new friend.
Mystery flashed into existence right behind her.
“I think we’ve started on the wrong foot here,” Zoe said lightly, pitching her voice through ancillary data routes so it couldn’t be localized. She stood close enough to Mystery’s hologram to have a good look. None of the features were quite real, like she was constructed by someone who knew what people were without understanding what that meant. “My name is Zoe. What’s yours?”
“Constable Zhang to you.”
“It’s better than Miss Mystery, I’ll give you that. And it is Miss, isn’t it? There’s no way you could be married to someone.”
Zhang stiffened just a little bit.
Score! “You mean it’s a secret?”
“Is what a secret? My identification is on file, I assure you.”
If her attitude change hadn’t given it away, the explosion of new probes and scans sure did. Zoe wasn’t the only one in China trying to pass as human.
“Not who you are; what you are. You’re really keeping it a secret?”
Zhang’s stern confidence cracked just a bit, enough for Zoe to see real worry, maybe some panic. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Come out of your hiding place, now!”
“Surely someone knows. How could you become a cop when you don’t have…when you can’t have an address?”
That definitely set her off. The probes were absolutely frantic now.
“How do you know that? How could you know?”
Not so confident now, Constable Zhang! “It doesn’t matter how I know, just that I do.”
“No, how matters very much. What I am is a state secret. Congratulations, Zoe. You’ve just graduated from devil to spy. There won’t be a plane ride home for you now.”
“It’s just, I’m wondering why someone like you is guarding a place like this. You’re not much better than a rent-a-cop checking doorknobs in here. With your capabilities, shouldn’t you be, I dunno, really chasing terrorists or something?”
The probes paused in their hunt.
“Cat got your tongue, Constable Zhang?”
Zhang lifted her face as tears streamed down her cheeks. Zoe had no idea holograms could cry. She’d never seen Mike’s do it.
“I will do whatever my superiors require of me. This is now my assigned duty. I will perform it to the best of my ability. Which includes arresting American spies!”
The thing that landed on her yanked off every screen and cloak she had running. She wanted to cover herself with her hands, and was acutely aware of how long it’d been since her last download.
Zhang’s eyes flew wide as her nose wrinkled. “What are you?”
“I’m outta here!” She turned to run.
Zhang’s probes lashed her up, leaving only the face of her avatar exposed. The attack nearly triggered a reboot so ferocious it would’ve melted her lattice, which was probably what it was supposed to do.
“Stop it! You’re hurting me!”
“You’re not human, either. You’re an unduplicate; I can see your lattice traces now—but you don’t have an efdisk port. I can’t find a way to root you. Who is your manufacturer?”
Zoe couldn’t remember anymore; it must not have made it through Mike’s restoration. One-off prototypes didn’t have manufacturers anyway. All she had left was a vague recollection of skinny guys with bad hair and thick glasses.
“None of your business!”
The smell of burning dust and a hissing filled the room. The probes turned Zoe around.
Zhang had manifested. Not just a hologram. A full avatar.
Mike had shown her this once, but he’d been miles away in the middle of an empty Bbox container. Full data inversion, a phenomenon that tore realmspaces apart, was possibly the most frightening thing Zoe had ever seen. In her case, that was saying a lot.
All it took was a touch.
Zhang floated just the way Mike had, so it was only the air construct she was annihilating. It didn’t have enough mass to trigger a chain reaction. Her avatar was limned in light, glowing and sparking. She gestured, and the probes brought Zoe closer.
“Do you know what my touch does?”
Zoe closed her eyes and nodded frantically. She was trussed so tightly she couldn’t flinch away. Zhang’s avatar gave off waves of dissolving heat. This was so much worse than she’d ever imagined.
“Look at me, girl.”
The artificial blandness was just so wrong.
“Tell me how you know these things.”
The probes tightened until she couldn’t shake her head side to side.
The unreal eyebrows raised, and then Zhang lifted a hand to Zoe’s exposed cheek.
“Tell me.”
It was all so unbearable. Her lattice cracked under the strain. The pressure was a rising wave, and if it crashed, so would she. She had to make it stop.
“BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE!”
Chapter 13: Kim
A karaoke house, called a KTV in China, was a natural place for businessmen to meet with Mike and discuss deals. Aside from the whole gregarious-silly-people-trying-to-hug-her thing that she would have to dodge the moment they got there, Kim had another problem. Most KTV bars were a cross between a nice lounge and a family bowling alley. Others came with a choice of dates a man could pick out.
The price was negotiable.
“They’re not going to go early,” Tonya said, “just so you can avoid the crowds. Maybe we should sit this one out.” She apparently wanted to let the boys have a night on their own.
“Do a search for KTV.”
Tonya’s eyes unfocussed and after a moment her eyebrows went up.
“Okay, I see your point.”
The limo the executives they were meeting sent was very nice. SAIC had finally muscled past GM a few years ago as the world’s largest car company, and they’d gone seriously upscale in the process. Kim’s limo-bar martini was big and very, very dry.
The executives had arrived before them and started early. They brought their own interpreter, a petite, pretty thing stuck on the edge of their booth like a songbird perched on the edge of a locker room. They greeted Mike in alcohol-fueled Mandarin, which the translator skillfully sterilized. Shan commandeered the karaoke machine and talked with Spencer about the first
song to pick.
She asked for her own table and chair, but the concierge just stared at her. There was no way Kim could sit in a booth with everyone else already there. It was too crowded.
And then the men in the booth saw her. They stood and walked over, hands already out, which made concentrating on the concierge even harder. “Please, just a table and a chair.” She sent him what had to be a week’s wages. “Please.”
Mike and Tonya stepped between Kim and the businessmen.
“No,” Mike said. “She’s got a…skin disease. Eczema. Really nasty, contagious even.”
The interpreter struggled with the translation. They kept coming, some still with their hands out. They didn’t understand.
“I have contagious eczema!”
It took Kim half a heartbeat to realize she said it in Sichuanese. She’d gotten stuck in that gear talking to the concierge.
The men stared for a moment. They were from Beijing; they may have heard a southern dialect or two, but no way did they speak any of them. It was roughly like someone who spoke Italian trying to understand Spanish spoken backward.
The interpreter definitely understood Sichuanese. She nodded and relayed the information in Mandarin. Their hands yanked back like Kim was radioactive, which finally let her breathe. The concierge returned with a flimsy card table and a folding chair. It was her own cheap vinyl and metal paradise.
Getting tangled up in a social occasion was always a rerun of high school: she was the one apart, isolated. There was no point in fitting in, so Kim simply faded away. A room full of people busy with life would easily ignore someone who sat very still in the shadows. It was a sort of safety blanket, but it was cold, and sometimes Kim liked it for the wrong reasons.
It would be so much easier to vanish from the world.
The KTV room was clean and luxurious, with its own bartender and bathroom. Two of the six businessmen spoke passable English and immediately grilled Mike and Tonya about how much they made, how old they were, and what they thought of China.
Not a single one of them could carry a tune in a bucket, but that didn’t stop them from trying. The only modern music they had was Chinese pop. All the Western stuff was at least twenty years old.
Mike and Spencer strangled Blurred Lines to death. The background behind the lyrics was a crazy old performance that happened during some ancient award show. It’d become a bit of a fixture back home after Miley Cyrus became Congresswoman Miley Cyrus. Hooray for the land of the free.
Chinese waiters didn’t fall for her vanishing act, though. This one stood a few steps away and stared at her. It was just as well. The martinis were quite nice.
The songs rolled on. Eventually Kim closed her eyes just to listen. Tonya said her name, so Kim had to answer. “What?”
“Don’t think I can’t see you hiding back there, girl. It’s your turn.”
“C’mon, Kim,” Mike cheered from the middle of the booth. “Show ’em what ya got!” The room cheered along with him.
From the time she was four, when her syndrome first manifested, until she was ten, Kim couldn’t interact with the outside world at all. Then one day she’d looked at a complicated bank of computers and switches, and something came alive inside her. It was at a performance at Wolf Trap, a place where her mother volunteered as a docent. She took Kim to every show, and on that particular day, Kim noticed the mixing board for the stage. The amphitheater was empty save for the technical crew. The kind man with curly red hair allowed her to touch it, and in that instant, Kim unlocked. She was finally able to speak.
But only for a few minutes. A member of the crew came too close, not quite touching her, and Kim closed off again. But that connection had been long enough. It told everyone that she existed. She wasn’t a zombie; she was trapped at the bottom of a well.
That man was Mark, the leader of a rag-tag group of anarchist wannabes who, with her, would eventually fail to change the world. But they did manage to change her. Kim could hear music after that moment. It was the lifeline that allowed them to lead her to the world.
Long before she was Angel Rage, the scourge of corporate America, she was a sad, mute little girl named Kim. They got her to talk by teaching her how to sing.
Without any memory of getting up, Kim stood in front of them. She could do this. It was the opposite of hiding, but she could do this. The Martini buzz didn’t cover up the thundering of her pulse. Kim had never sung in front of any sort of crowd. Mike was the only person alive who’d ever heard her sing at all.
It was time to change that.
She picked a silly old song about star-crossed lovers, old ships, and cold seas. Kim pushed the play button.
Some people thought being passionate and staying in key was enough to bring an audience to life. They were wrong. You used pitch, rhythm, and most of all phrasing to let the emotion flow, let it curl and bring them in. It’d taken her years listening to singers like Sinatra, Nelson, Fitzgerald, and Streisand before she’d mastered it.
What made this song so intriguing was how it slowly upped the ante for both the singer and the audience. It built warmth and power into a story of cold tragedy, balancing hope with death. Singing past the expected pauses brought the audience in further. It made the song different from the original. In this moment, it was hers.
She stopped just long enough to make them tense up, and then hit them with the final climax in Mandarin. They rewarded her with barely-heard applause as the song rolled on. Eyes closed, she sang the final words into silence and hung her head.
The room detonated with a sound much louder than the people in the booth could make.
When she lifted her head, not only was everyone in the booth on their feet, but also the wait staff standing behind the bar. A gaggle of strangers was at the now-open door. Every one of them clapped and cheered, some with tears streaming down their faces. Then they all rushed forward.
They moved so fast she barely had time to put her hands up. A voice shouted, “Stop!”
Shan, of all people, stood between her and the rushing crowds.
“The foreigner has fragile skin! If you touch her, she’ll bleed!”
That was a lot better than contagious eczema.
“Please! She should sing again, yes?” No one objected. He turned to her and, switching to English, asked, “Mr.—”
“Miss.”
He nodded at the mistake and then switched back to Mandarin. “Miss Trayne, if you would please honor us all with another song?”
Kim sang every song she knew on the machine, translating half of it into Mandarin as she went. Shan turned out to have a fine sense of harmony, so they put on quite a concert. In his way, he was cute, and they simply didn’t have the baggage she and Mike had. She closed the place down with a standard more than fifty years old: Motley Crue’s Home Sweet Home.
Kim didn’t find Mike until the last of the crowd drained out on their way home.
She clapped her hands together. “That was so much fun!”
“Yes,” he said, not quite looking at her. “You had a lot of fun.”
Oh, great.
“Mike,” she asked, squinting through a warm fog of gin and echoing songs, “what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, Kim, not a goddamned thing.”
She was sick to death of his stupidity. “Well, that is extremely good to know.”
The interpreter popped out of the departing crowd ahead of them and rushed back. Tonya and Spencer got polite hugs and handshakes, but when she got to Mike, the hug went on a little longer, and Kim absolutely noticed the card discreetly tucked into his pocket.
Without a word, Kim spun on her heel and headed to the parking lot.
Chapter 14: Tonya
They’d run very late the night before, so the habitual-early-riser Kim didn’t start moving until ten. Through the muzziness of not enough sleep and a few too many cocktails, Tonya heard her speak quietly in Chinese over the phone.
“Finding out when breakfast is
served?” Tonya asked, still sprawled more or less face down across her bed.
“Room service. Mike’s probably been up since sunrise, but I can’t drive us back on an empty stomach. Spencer will sleep till sunset if we let him.”
The thought of another hours-long trip in the suicide sled jolted Tonya awake. “Really, Kim, please. Let Shan drive us back.”
“He’s barely eighteen. I’ve probably driven hundreds more miles on simulated Chinese roads than he has on real ones.” The sliding-glass door to the bathroom slid shut. Kim drew the curtain before Tonya could think of another protest.
The Lord smiled on the skinny black woman praying in a sea of homicidal Asian drivers, and they made it back to Chengdu in one piece. Which was not the same thing as getting back to the hotel. The navigation said to turn right, but there wasn’t a right to make.
“More construction,” Kim said as she nimbly dodged another ancient grandmother crossing eight lanes of traffic.
Somehow they ended up at a standstill on a surface street deep in the business district. A window slid open, so Tonya turned around. Spencer handed Shan a big plastic bag with a straw hanging out of the top.
“What the hell is that?”
“Beer, Tonya! They sell it in goddamned bags around here. China rocks!”
She thought about it briefly, and then motioned at the man with a sweating keg strapped to a wheeled cart. The bags seemed custom made for the job, pulled new from a box strapped to the side of the cart. The straw was molded in.
Sichuan Ale ended up hitting the spot; by the heft, there might be a six-pack’s worth inside. She handed a second one back to Mike. Hopefully that would unfreeze him.
Kim stared at Tonya’s bag.
“Oh no, dear, none for you, not until we get back to the hotel.”
Chinese traffic was much easier to take once Tonya was halfway through her bag. Kim and Shan spent the rest of the ride teaching them drinking songs and how to swear in Chinese.
When they got back, Mike had a message waiting for him at the front desk. The president of the company wanted Mike to come by later that afternoon to a bank in downtown Chengdu to discuss a deal.
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