Wake w-1

by Robert J. Sawyer

  There was much shuffling around, and she heard the surgeon’s voice moving toward the door.

  “Where’s he going?” Caitlin asked, worried.

  “Be calm, Miss Caitlin. His job is finished — he’s the eye specialist. Another doctor is going to do the final cleanup.”

  “How — how do I look?”

  “Honestly? Like you’ve been in a boxing match.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve got quite a black eye.” He gave a wheezy little chuckle. “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  Dr. Quan Li cradled the beige telephone handset against his shoulder and looked idly at the diplomas hanging on his office’s pale green walls: the fellowships, the degrees, the certifications. He’d been on hold now for fifty minutes, but one expected to wait when calling the man who was simultaneously Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China and President of the People’s Republic and General Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

  Li’s office, a corner room on the fifth floor of the Ministry of Health building, had windows that looked out over crowded streets. Cars inched along, rickshaws darting between them. Even through the thick glass, the din from outside was irritating.

  “I’m here,” said the famous voice at last. Li didn’t have to conjure up a mental image of the man; rather, he just swung his chair to look at the gold-framed portrait hanging next to the one of Mao Zedong: ethnically Zhuang; a long, thoughtful-looking face; dyed jet-black hair belying his seventy years; wire-frame glasses with thick arched eyebrows above.

  Li found his voice breaking a bit as he spoke: “Your Excellency, I need to recommend severe and swift action.”

  The president had been briefed on the outbreak in Shanxi. “What sort of action?”

  “A … culling, Your Excellency.”

  “Of birds?” That had been done several times now, and the president sounded irritated. “The Health Minister can authorize that.” His tone conveyed the unspoken words, There was no need to bother me.

  Li shifted in his chair, leaning forward over his desktop. “No, no, not of birds. Or, rather, not just of birds.” He fell silent. Wasting the president’s time just wasn’t done, but he couldn’t go on — couldn’t give voice to this. For pity’s sake, he was a doctor! But, as his old surgery teacher used to say, sometimes you have to cut in order to cure…

  “What, then?” demanded the president.

  Li felt his heart pounding. At last he said, very softly, “People.”

  There was more silence for a time. When the president’s voice came on again, it was quiet, reflective. “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t think there’s any other way.”

  Another long pause, then: “How would you do it?”

  “An airborne chemical agent,” said Li, taking care with his words. The army had such things, designed for warfare, intended for use in foreign lands, but they would work just as well here. He would select a toxin that would break down in a matter of days; the contagion would be halted. “It will affect only those in the target area — two villages, a hospital, the surrounding lands.”

  “And how many people are in the … target area?”

  “No one is exactly sure; peasants often fall through the cracks of the census process.”

  “Roughly,” said the president. “Round figures.”

  Li looked down at the computer printouts, and the figures that had been underlined in red by Cho. He took a deep breath with his mouth then let it out through his nose. “Ten or eleven thousand.”

  The president’s voice was thin, shocked. “Are you positive this needs to be done?”

  Studying scenarios for containing plague outbreaks was one of the key mandates of the Department of Disease Control. There were established protocols, and Li knew he was following them properly. By reacting quickly, by cauterizing the wound before infection spread too far, they would actually be reducing the scope of the required eliminations. The evil, he knew, wasn’t in what he had told the president to do; the evil, if any, would have been delaying, even by a matter of days, calling for this solution.

  He tried to keep his voice steady. “I believe so, Your Excellency.” He lowered his voice. “We, ah, don’t want another SARS.”

  “Are you positive there’s no other way?”

  “This isn’t regular H5N1,” said Li. “It’s a variant strain that passes directly from person to person. And it’s highly contagious.”

  “Can’t we just throw a cordon around the area?”

  Li leaned back in his chair now, and looked out at the neon signs of Beijing.

  “The perimeter is too large, with too many mountain passes. We could never be sure that people weren’t getting out. You’d need something as impenetrable as the Great Wall, and it couldn’t be erected in time.”

  The president’s voice — so assured on TV — sounded like that of a tired old man just now. “What’s the — what do you call it? — the mortality rate for this variant strain?”

  “High.”

  “How high?”

  “Ninety percent, at least.”

  “So almost all these people will die anyway?”

  And that was the saving grace, Li knew; that was the only thing that was keeping him from choking on his own bile. “Yes.”

  “Ten thousand…”

  “To protect over a billion Chinese — and more abroad,” said Li.

  The president fell quiet, and then, almost as if talking to himself, he said softly, “It’ll make June fourth look like a stroll in the sun.”

  June fourth, 1989: the day the protesters were killed in Tiananmen Square. Li didn’t know if he was supposed to respond, but when the silence had again grown uncomfortably long he said what Party faithful were supposed to say:

  “Nothing happened on that day.”

  To Li’s surprise, the president made a snorting sound and then said, “We may be able to contain your bird-flu epidemic, Dr. Quan, but we must be sure there is no other outbreak in its wake.”

  Li was lost. “Your Excellency?”

  “You said we won’t be able to erect something like the Great Wall fast enough, and that’s true. But there is another wall, and that one we can strengthen…”

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

  Title: Same Old Same Old

  Date: Tuesday 18 September, 15:44 EST

  Mood: Anxious

  Location: Godzilla’s stomping ground

  Music: Lee Amodeo, “Nothing To See Here, Move Along”

  * * *

  Well, the Mom and I are still here in Tokyo. I have a bandage over my left eye, and we’re waiting for the swelling — the edema, I should say — to go down, so that there’s no unnatural pressure on my optic nerve. Tomorrow, the bandage will come off and I should be able to see! :D

  I’ve been trying to keep my spirits up, but the suspense is killing me. And my best material is bombing here! I referred to the retina, which gathers light, as “the catcher in the eye,” and nobody laughed; apparently they don’t have to read Salinger in Japan.

  Anyway, check it: I’ve got this transceiver attached to my optic nerve, just behind my left eye. When it’s turned on, it’ll grab the signals my retina is putting out and transmit them to this little external computer pack I’m supposed to carry around, like, forever; I called it my eyePod, and at least that made Dr. Kuroda laugh. Anyway, the eyePod will reprocess the signals, correcting the errors in encoding, and then beam the corrected version to the implant, which will pass the information back to the optic nerve so it can continue on into that mysterious realm called — cue scary music — The Brain of Calculass!

  Speaking of brains, I’m really enjoying the book I mentioned before: The Origin of Consciousness Yadda Yadda. And from it comes our Word of the Day(tm): Commissurotomy. No, that’s not the wise but ancient leader of the Jellicle tribe from Cats (still my fave mu
sical!). Rather, it’s what they call it when they sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain — which, of course, are the two chambers of Jaynes’s bicameral mind…

  Anyway, tomorrow we’ll find out if my own operation worked. Please post some encouraging comments here, folks — give me something to read while I wait for the moment of truth…

  [And seekrit message to BG4: check your email, babe!]

  * * *

  China’s Paramount Leader and President replaced the ornate, gold-trimmed telephone handset into the cradle on his vast cherry-wood desk. He looked down the long length of his office, at the intricately carved wooden wall panels, beautiful tapestries, and glass display cases. A stick of sweet incense was burning on the sideboard.

  The room was absolutely quiet. Finally, sure now of his decision, he shifted in his red-leather chair and touched the intercom button.

  “Yes, Your Excellency?” said a female voice at once.

  “Bring me the Changcheng Strategy document.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then: “Right away.”

  “And have Minister Zhang briefed on the Shanxi situation, then have him come see me.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency.”

  The president got up from his chair and moved to the large side window, its red velvet curtains tied back with gold sashes. The window behind his desk looked out on the Forbidden City, but this one looked over the Southern Sea, one of two small artificial lakes surrounded by immaculately groomed parkland on the grounds of the Zhongnanhai complex. Looking in this direction, one could almost forget that this was downtown Beijing, and that Tiananmen Square was just south of here.

  He cast his mind back to 1989. The government had tried its best then to maintain social order, but rabble rousers outside China had made a difficult situation much worse by inundating the country with faxes of wildly inaccurate news reports, including New York Times articles and transcripts of CNN broadcasts.

  The Party recognized that there might someday be a similar circumstance during which protecting its citizens from an onslaught of outsider propaganda would be necessary, and so the Changcheng Strategy had been devised. Going far beyond the Golden Shield Project, which had been in effect for years, Changcheng had never yet been fully implemented, but surely it was called for now. He would address the nation in appropriate terms about the crisis in Shanxi, and he would not allow his words to be immediately gainsaid by outsiders. He could not risk the citizenry responding violently or in a panic.

  The door to his office opened. He turned and saw his secretary — beautiful, young, perfect — walking the long distance toward him holding a thick sheaf of papers bound in black covers. “Here you are, sir. And Minister Zhang is on the phone now with Dr. Quan Li. He will be here shortly.”

  She placed the document on the desk and withdrew. He looked once more at the placid water, then walked back to his desk and sat down. The cover of the document was marked in stark white characters “Eyes Only,” “Restricted,” and “If You Are Not Sure You Are Authorized to Read This, You Are Not.” He opened it and scanned the table of contents: “Fixed-Line Telephony,” “Cellular Phones,” “The Special Problem of Facsimile Machines,” “Shortwave Radio,” “Satellite Communications — Uplink and Downlink,” “Electronic Mail, the Internet, and the World Wide Web,” “Maintaining Essential Services During Implementation,” and so on.

  He turned the page to the Executive Summary; the paper was heavy, stiff. “As required by their conditions of license, all telephony providers in China — whether fixed-line or mobile — maintain a system-wide ability in software to immediately block calls going outside China’s borders and/or to reject incoming calls from foreign countries…” “Similar filtering capabilities are available for all governmental and commercial satellite relay stations…”

  “The World Wide Web presents a particular challenge, because of its decentralized nature; however, almost all Internet traffic between China and the rest of the world goes through just seven fiber-optic trunk lines, at three points, so…”

  He leaned back in his leather chair and shook his head. The name “World Wide Web” was offensive to him, for it touted a globalist, integrated view antithetical to his country’s great traditions.

  The office door opened again and in came Zhang Bo, the Minister of Communications. He was Han, in his mid-fifties, short and squat, and had a small mustache, which, like the hair on his head, was dark brown utterly devoid of gray. He wore a navy blue business suit and a light blue tie.

  “We are going to deal decisively with Shanxi,” said the president.

  Zhang’s thin eyebrows climbed his forehead, and the president saw his head bob as he swallowed. “Dr. Quan told me what he’d recommended. But surely you won’t—” The minister stopped, frozen by the president’s gaze.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry, Your Excellency. I’m simply concerned. The world will … note this.”

  “Doubtless. Which is why we shall invoke the Changcheng Strategy.”

  The minister’s eyes went wide. “That is a drastic step, Your Excellency.”

  “But a necessary one. Are you prepared to implement it?”

  Minister Zhang moved a finger back and forth along his mustache as he considered. “Well, telephony is no problem — we’ve done rotating tests of that for years now, during the night; the cutoffs work just fine. The same with satellite communications. As for the Internet, we studied what happened with the seabed earthquake of late 2006, and what happened in Burma in September 2007 when the junta there cut off all net access. And we looked at what happened in January 2008 when the severing of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean cut off Internet services to large parts of the Middle East. And in early 2008, of course, many of the procedures were tested here as we dealt with the Tibet situation.” He paused. “Now, yes, any attempt to shut down the Web within China would be difficult; thousands of ISPs would have to be blocked. But Changcheng calls only for cutting the Chinese part of the Web off from the rest of the world, and the appropriate infrastructure is in place for that. I don’t anticipate any problems.” Another pause. “But, if I may, how long do you intend to have Changcheng in effect?”

  “Several days; perhaps a week.”

  “You’re worried about word reaching the foreign press?”

  “No. I’m worried about word coming back from them to our people.”

  “Ah, yes. They will misconstrue what you’re intending to do in Shanxi, Excellency.”

  “Doubtless,” the president said, “but it will ultimately blow over. Fundamentally, the rest of the world doesn’t care what happens to the Chinese people, least of all to our poorest citizens. They have always turned a blind eye to what happens within our borders, so long as they can shop cheaply at their Wal-Marts. They will move on to other things soon enough.”

  “Tian—” Zhang stopped himself, the allusion that was never made by others in these contexts stillborn on his lips.

  But the president nodded. “That was different; those were students. Our actions there were the same as those of the Americans at Kent State and a hundred other places. The Westerners saw themselves in what we did, and it was their own self-loathing they transferred to us. But rural peasants? There is no connection. There may be vitriol for a short time, but it will die down because they will realize that our actions have helped make them — the Westerners — safe. Meanwhile, we will present a more palatable story to our people; I will leave preparing that in your capable hands. But if word does get out during the most sensitive period, when the incident is fresh, I don’t want a distorted Western view of it being reflected back into this country.”

  Zhang nodded. “Very well. Still, the Changcheng Strategy will have its own repercussions.”

  “Yes,” said the President. “I know. I’m sure the Minister of Finance will complain about the economic impact; he will urge me to make the interruption as short
as possible.”

  Zhang tilted his head. “Well, even during it, Chinese individuals will still be able to call and email other Chinese; Chinese consumers will still be able to buy online from Chinese merchants; Chinese television signals will still be relayed by satellites. Life will go on.” A pause. “But, yes, there will be needs for international electronic cash transfers — the Americans servicing their debts to us, for instance. We can keep certain key channels open, of course, but nonetheless a short interruption is doubtless best.”

  The president swiveled his chair, his back now to Zhang, and he looked out the other window, at the slanted roofs of the Forbidden City, the silver sky shimmering overhead.

  His country’s rapidly increasing prosperity had been a joy to behold, and it was, he knew, thanks to his policies. In a few more decades, peasant villages like the ones in question would be gone anyway; China would be the richest country in the world. Yes, there would always be foreign trade but by the end of this century there would be no more “developing world,” no cheap labor here — or anywhere else — for foreigners to use. Raising the level of prosperity in the People’s Republic meant that China would eventually be able to go back to what it had always been, back to the roots of its strength: an isolated nation with purity of thought and purpose. This would simply be a small taste of that, an appetizer for things to come.

  Zhang said, “When are you going to give the order to implement Changcheng?”

  The president turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. “Me? No, no. That would be…” His gaze roamed about the opulent office, as if seeking a word stashed among the ceramic and crystal art objects. “That would be unseemly,” he said at last. “It would be much more appropriate if you gave the order.”

  Zhang was clearly struggling to keep his features composed, but he made the only response he could under the circumstances. “Yes, Your Excellency.”