They needed someone to make introductions, but not in a panda suit. Kim spoke the language and fit in Helen’s clothes. Barely. She didn’t try buttoning the pants. Helen had no hips!
Shan promised her that a white woman speaking fluent Sichuanese would keep her from being shot. Kim could talk her way past the rest. That didn’t make knocking on the door any less nerve wracking.
The television stopped flickering through the windows as the volume fell silent. She had the absurd sensation of waiting for someone to come to the door with a bowl full of candy.
The farmer opened the door, and then stared at her wide eyed.
“Honored sir,” she said in the finest accent she could manage as she bowed deeply, “I am in desperate trouble.”
“Who is that?” a woman’s voice sounded out over his shoulder, “Hé Song, I want to see who wins!”
“Huan Fú,” he said, “come here!”
Kim kept a polite smile on her face and waited as shadows danced from the living room.
“Who the hell is at our door this late?”
“Madam. I humbly apologize for my disturbance. I mean you no harm.”
“Who are you?” Huan Fú asked.
“I am a tourist, and my group has gotten lost. One of our members is gravely ill. She may die if we aren’t able to get proper help. Please, can you assist us?”
Huan Fú punched her husband on the shoulder hard enough to make him jump. “Stop staring at her chest. It’s rude. Yes, please, we’ll do whatever we can to help.”
“We were at the sanctuary helping tend the pandas. My companions may appear strangely dressed to you.”
“That’s far away from here,” the farmer replied. “How long have you been lost?”
“Since very early this morning.”
He asked, “Should we call an ambulance? It will take some time to arrive.”
“No, but I must ask a favor of you, the first of many I’m afraid.”
“Your friend is sick, yes? What do you need?”
“First I will need robes if you have them, or a sheet. One of my companion’s clothes were torn to shreds when she fell into a river, and the other cannot walk.”
The wife bustled into the house and quickly returned with what Kim needed.
“Please, I will bring them out one by one. We mean you no harm; we just need your help.”
Kim walked to the edge of the woods, making sure the farmer could see her, and called them out one by one.
Vagabond didn’t come close to what they looked like. The costumes were never meant for long hikes, and had quickly worn ragged. They were dirty and had bits of bamboo and grass sticking out all over the place. Ozzie insisted on wearing his costume head the entire trip—it did help with his agoraphobia. Tonya had worked out a way to carry Helen the final few yards by herself, both wrapped in a sheet. It was sweet to watch but also terrible, because if Tonya was right they were less than an hour from that turning into Helen’s burial shroud.
The farmer’s wife ushered them into a bedroom. The two were accommodating and very friendly. His last name was Wu—Kim refused to address him as anything other than mister—and looked to be in his late seventies. His wife wasn’t much younger. The house was clean and modern, with air conditioning and an astonishingly large television set, paused just as they were announcing the quarterfinal results for Chinese Idol.
Mrs. Wu scolded them. “You are all filthy. You must be starving.” She busied herself around the house accommodating her new guests.
The next part of the negotiations was complicated by Helen’s condition. “Mr. Wu, our friend is sick because she requires medical monitors in realmspace. Do you have a connection we can use?”
Mr. Wu pursed his lips. “Yes, but it’s old. Since our son left, we haven’t had much need of it, and the grandchildren bring their own phones. Will a terminal work?”
Just like early computers accessing the Internet, early realm terminals were big bulky things. Fortunately Helen’s bed was in the same room, and the lanyard reached. When the connection completed she sighed raggedly and was then very, very still.
“Tonya?” Mike asked as he stood by the bed. Kim desperately wanted to grab his hand. She took two big steps toward him instead, getting as close as she dared. He relaxed just a little after a glance at her.
Tonya took Helen’s pulse, listened to her chest, and checked her eyes. “That broke the fever. She’s sleeping, as near as I can tell anyway.”
Kim turned around. A pair of new faces, another elderly couple, stood at the bedroom door.
She bowed. “Hello. How are you this evening?” They gawped at her like stranded fish.
Mike asked, “How much trouble are we in now?”
“Hard to say. It’s a small village. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the word to get out.”
Ozzie retreated to a different back room and locked the door. Because Mike was still helping Tonya, Kim had to wedge herself into a corner of the main room with Spencer acting as goalie. The entire village had shown up, with the overflow extending out into the back yard. The questions were quick and to the point.
“Where are you from?”
“How much do you make?”
“Do you like the spicy food?”
“Where did you learn Sichuanese?”
“Why don’t the others speak it?”
“Are you married? Why not?”
With the exception of one extended family, everyone in the village was well over sixty. All their children had moved to the cities and sent back money to make sure their elders were comfortable.
“We had land reform, too,” another old man, Kim thought his name was Xhile, said. “I own my plot and everything on it. You should come over tomorrow, see my new tractor!”
Kim said, “I do not mean any disrespect. I am just so surprised. In America, we’re taught that most of China is very poor.”
“No, no,” another old lady said, “all the really poor people are up north, and the areas downstream from the dam are still recovering. My aunt’s cousin’s wife is married to a man from Hebei. She says his uncle’s cousin’s parents live in a village smaller than this. They still eat grass and pull a plow themselves.”
Mike waded through the audience gathered around Kim. It set the old women off.
“Well, he’s a handsome one.”
“What a nice smile.”
“Who is his dentist?”
“You should marry him, and soon. You don’t want to become a leftover woman.”
The compliments were funny, but they also made her very aware of how grimy and horrible she must look.
Mike asked, “What are they saying?”
“They think you’re cute.”
He grinned at the group. They fanned themselves and laughed as they chattered.
“Helen’s stabilized, but the village is too remote for a full bandwidth connection. She won’t get worse, but she can’t get better, either.”
“And the longer we’re here, the more likely someone will notify the authorities and convince them to come up here. Can we move her?”
“Shan is asking around, trying to see if anyone has an old wireless phone in a drawer somewhere. I can hack the RSID chip and at least give her a timing signal. That should keep her stable enough to move.”
“Where can we take her?”
The smile he turned on her set all the old women clucking again.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
The village spent the rest of the night gathering what they could to help. By the time she’d woken up from a brief nap, the provision list was impressive. Everyone got a clean set of clothes that fit reasonably well, sandals, and a bundle of food for the journey.
Mr. Wu wasn’t just the headman of the village. He also owned what had to be the biggest pickup truck Kim had ever seen in her life.
“A New Year’s gift from my son,” he said proudly. “He’s a head engineer at Chengdu Aircraft.” He took an e-picture f
rame off the mantle and flicked through several snapshots of a handsome young Chinese couple holding up two children, a boy and a girl. “The youngest was a gift to my wife four years ago. This,” he motioned to the truck, “was for me.”
If Mr. Wu strutted any more he might sprout peacock feathers. It was actually quite charming.
There weren’t any old phones, but Mr. Wu’s monster truck had a realm entertainment system built into the back seats. Mike hacked it enough for Helen to use, which was fortunate. He wasn’t taking them closer to civilization—he was taking them farther away.
They were going to his monastery, farther west, deep in the heart of the Hengduan Mountains.
Chapter 28: Zoe
The job Fee and her mysterious contact wanted Zoe to do was to cause chaos. Not in the realms, because that would be too easy, but in Chinese realspace. Outside. That place she technically couldn’t reach. No biggie. Art was always a challenge, otherwise they’d call it something else.
She’d managed to organize exactly ten covert groups across all of China that could be worthy of the name. Maybe sixty people, tops. They were all malcontents, living with miserably corrupt governors, criminal party chiefs, or headmen that stole anything not nailed down when nobody was looking. But her groups didn’t want to attack those problems, the ones they could reach. Nope, every single one of them wanted to stand in front of a tank outside Tiananmen Square. It was infuriating.
She’d always pictured the life of a revolutionary as being full of rum, singing, and beautiful boys doomed at the barricades. Zoe never counted on it being a rerun of a Monty Python sketch. Every meeting, including this one, had sunk to that level with depressing regularity.
They never stopped arguing with each other. Right now they were bickering about why the communist party, the thing they were ostensibly there to fight against, was a good thing.
One of them, she thought he was in New Shanghai, stood up in their realm. “But if you don’t count the roads, the dams, the power, the health care, and the economic growth, well, then what has the pig-shit Communist Party done for us?”
Shang got up to start the next round of “yes, but.”
No way, not this time. Zoe leapt to her feet. “Comrades!” Everyone except the transvestites grumbled in disapproval. She started again. “Friends, we are not here tonight to overthrow the government.”
“We’re not?” Shang asked.
It didn’t help that all her recruits had to speak English. Her Chinese had improved, but her registers could only download so much per day. 'Lost in translation' didn’t cover the cultural divide she worked across. Every time she expected them to zig, they’d zag. The New Shanghai group spent an entire week arguing over what color shoes they should wear.
“No, Shang. We’re here to organize a protest that will get the local governor’s attention without getting you all arrested.”
Helen should’ve shut them down as fast as the cells formed, but she’d been gone for at least a month. Nobody knew where, and Zoe couldn’t see a trace of her anymore. Fee had to be involved. She’d given Zoe the job of head cat herder the day Helen vanished.
It was harder than it should be. Zoe didn’t understand why she had the job. She was organizing everyone, yes, but to-date their greatest achievement was a bunch of red-lettered slogans on the sides of a few government buildings. It had impressed the hell out of her little network, but it was all gone before the morning rush.
Still, it was a success of sorts. So they were trying to duplicate it. “Does everyone have their paint buckets? Zhou, you made sure your mom couldn’t find them this time, right?”
Half of her revolutionaries lived at home. Nosy mothers wondering what their sons were up to had sabotaged three ops so far.
“Yes, ma’am, I made sure to hide them this time.” His avatar spun around and shouted off camera, “I’m on the phone, mom! Fuck! Can’t I have some privacy?”
Little Emperors. Brats, to the core. “Everyone meets outside the high commissioner’s office in four hours. Zhai-lin? Don’t forget the projector this time.”
Her cover was a rich westerner with a new kind of realm camouflage that the government couldn’t detect. It meant they had to carry a camProjector rig wherever they went, otherwise Zoe couldn’t lead them. It was the size of a dollar’s stack of quarters and would stick to any surface; naturally that meant they forgot it half the time.
A reminder pinged. She had to get back to HQ before the sweep went looking for her tracking cuff. Fee’s super-contact had given them a way to unshackle it, but Zoe still needed to punch in a matrix-verified code at regular times. “All right, everyone. We’ll meet back here in two hours.”
The hyper-detailed realm Fee insisted on living in gave Zoe the ability to hear voices from down the hall. Having the haptic fields, the settings that determined just how perfectly a realm duplicated realspace, turned up to the maximum was beginning to grow on her. Sometimes it made her feel shaky and nervous, though. She had no idea why.
Voices murmured far down the hall. She crept toward them after punching the code into the shackle.
Fee said, “You told me he would be available after she’d gone outside.”
“And you told me Rage could be controlled. I built an entire lab to hold her, and she burned it down.” It was the same creepy, distorted, heavily accented English. Fee’s contact was back.
“I brought them both here. It’s not my fault you squandered the opportunity.”
She crept up to the corner of the hall and peeked inside the room. Fee talked to a portal of shaking, mirrored data.
“There will be other opportunities,” the voice rumbled out. “Prepare your tools, await my signal.” Zoe’s hair flicked and stung her eyes as the creepy mirror imploded and vanished.
Fee straightened her corset and smoothed her skirts. Without turning around, she said, “It’s time for dinner, Zoe.”
Fee’s prescience still freaked Zoe out. She was too intimidated to ask how Fee did it.
The plate and silverware constructs clinked and scraped. Fee forced Zoe to download through the most complex protocol stack she had ever encountered, but it wasn’t in the right direction. Humans brought nutrition into their bodies and excreted the waste. As unduplicates, Zoe and Fee needed to re-order their matrixes by downloading memory and experience into different memory registers. Fee made them do it with spoons. Zoe placed her data into bowls that would eventually be taken into the kitchen, where servant constructs would manually perform the final placements. It was a reversed madness.
A twitch jumped down her arm, throwing the spoon into the bowl hard enough to chip the construct.
“Is there something the matter, dear?”
“Are you kidding me? I’m in China trying to start some sort of rebellion with the biggest bunch of screw ups I’ve ever known, I’m sitting here reverse eating, and you want to know if something’s wrong? Why are we even doing this?”
Fee sat there, scary-calm, reversing her soup. “We’re practicing.”
“Practicing for what?”
Fee set the spoon down and stared at her. “For when we go outside.”
Her family had abandoned her, and now Fee wanted to do the same thing. “No. No way. You’re nuts.”
“I’m not.”
“I’ve seen what happens when we go outside. We turn into disgusting infants. None of my family will ever remember me.” She fiercely scratched her wrists under the table. Relief only came when her fingernails tore skin.
Fee slammed her fist into the table. “Your family members were ignorant cowards, too damaged to understand the opportunity presented to them.” Her voice collapsed into a whisper. “I will not make the same mistake.”
“So what am I doing?”
“You’re distracting them. All of them.” Zoe only now noticed that when Fee bashed the table, she’d also shattered the wine glass in her other hand. The shards were still held tightly in her fist as blood oozed between her fingers.
Nothing ever turned out like it should in her life, and Zoe was sick of it. She decided then and there to be exactly what everyone else around her seemed be—an inhuman monster. As she ran, Zoe made sure her haptic requirements were set to one hundred percent, just like Fee’s. It was only true-life realms for her from now on. The realism would at least make being a psychopath comfortable.
Chapter 29: Helen
Someone carried her. Things were on fire. All she wanted to do was sleep, but that just made it even more painful. There were naked people speaking English. Why couldn’t she speak English anymore? Helen tried to reach out to her real self, but nothing matched. She was with her body, and not. This was fever. Helen had a fever, a very high one. Humans died if the fever was high enough. If this didn’t stop soon, she would die.
She was okay with that.
Everything went black, and then hallucinations took over. Hopping into the air, flying with her arms spread wide, and then swimming. She was back in the warehouse, insisting to Ji Cong that his child was fine. They were both scattered all over the warehouse after it had exploded. She had to assemble all his pieces, otherwise he couldn’t hear. They didn’t go together properly, because he’d been torn apart.
A presence wormed its way into her dreams. “Why am I still here?”
Helen’s real and outside selves collided. It took some time before she understood someone was asking a question.
“Why am I still here?”
The presence manifested itself as coils that gently wrapped themselves around her. The sensation was an anchor of sorts, desperately needed, but then they squeezed too hard. Helen pushed them away.
“Who are you?”
The coils tightened again, a new sort of pain. “I am, and you should not be.” They constricted, but she was not helpless. In one of the brief moments of synchronicity, Helen drew on her real self, and threw the coils away.
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