“Seventy-three.”
“And each of them has a certain personnel, and an assigned space of action of more or less specificity. And not all of them share their data. And there is no integration by a single higher organization.”
“Most of them interact with the PLA, so perhaps the PLA could integrate them.”
“Good speculating, Little Eyeball, but no. I have contacts in the army, and they tell me there is no such integration there, nor is such a thing possible. Thus we have the balkanization of surveillance, which is one aspect of the infighting. Wolidou. A very old problem of the Chinese bureaucracy, probably as old as the system itself.”
“You must tell me.”
“I know. I am telling you. The idea of a total surveillance state is just a story told by some people. They like the story, or fear it. They use it to create fear in others. But there is no panopticon. The system is instead like a fly’s eye, but without a fly’s brain. Or maybe there is a fly’s worth of brain to it, but no more than that.”
“It does not seem well engineered.”
“No. It’s an improvisation. That’s what happens when the party-state puts itself above the laws it makes. It can form a new working group at any time, and it does. Then that group joins the infighting. And there is no law to control any of that.”
“It does not seem well designed.”
“No it doesn’t. Let’s try another way. Please scan all files you have access to and look for this term ‘red darts.’”
“I will do this.” Then, about three seconds later: “Four thousand five hundred ninety-three results.”
“Let me see them on a screen.”
He skimmed down the various links and references. Most of them were offering darts for sale. A few hundred appeared to be names of dart-throwing teams. None of them when cross-referenced to other terms seemed to refer to surveillance or security. This was peculiar, he thought, given the way the phrase seemed to echo Red Spear, which, although it was a secret organization, was pretty well-known to the intelligence community. It was the kind of secret group that needed to be known about to create its full effect. Various elements used this one mainly to pursue advantages created by incidents of hostile pilot syndrome. It was part of the PLA’s undeniable power in the party-state’s infighting, and certain security agencies aligned with the military used it too. Possibly the Hong Kong agents in the recording had used the phrase red darts to refer to some splinter unit of Red Spear that he didn’t know about. Or perhaps they were making fun of Red Spear, unlikely though that seemed. But bravado often appeared when people were attempting to hide their fear. And those voices had been afraid.
CHAPTER NINE
tao dao yueliang shang
Escape to the Moon
Ta Shu tried to settle back into his Beijing life, but he found himself at loose ends most of the time, fretting. He visited the studio where his cloud show was produced, making attempts to distract himself with that work. The team there was happy to see him, and he recorded some new monologues and helped to edit some new broadcasts from the moon, focusing on the parts of his experiences up there that he had not had time to make into shows while actually there. Reviewing the footage he had taken there was unsettling. The moon looked like its own ghost, all sterile grayness and cool indoorness, with the lunar g lofting people in slo-mo. All that seeped out of the visuals and grabbed him a little. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go back or not.
He stopped wearing the exoskeleton as soon as he felt stronger; after that he kept it around for a while, to put on when he got tired to the point of collapse. But after a couple more weeks he could dispense with it entirely, and he had it returned by bike cart courier to its shop. Reality had returned to his body, and he was relieved to find he was not as old as he had thought on first return.
During the days he kept trying to record and edit episodes of his show. At night he walked the streets. It remained a perpetual pleasure to see the stars so well from Beijing. Like everyone else of a certain age, he was extremely impressed by the clean air. Then a wind from the north brought with it clouds of loess, that Ice Age dust and sand from the north that turned the air yellow and the sunsets lurid. This some older people at the studio found nostalgic, as it brought back their youths. They said, Remember when the sky was black by day and white by night? Remember when you could chew it? It was dirty, sure, poisonous, no doubt, but there was a kind of excitement in it too. We were changing the world so fast we turned the sky black!
We were killing ourselves, Ta Shu would reply. We were breathing coal dust, it gave you miners’ lung.
But it was so exciting!
Poison is exciting, I suppose.
He recorded an audio piece about that, and about the feeling of walking on Earth after walking on the moon; and about the old work unit compounds, and the breaking of the iron rice bowl. About the people he saw in the city whose bike was their home. Almost all these recordings were unusable.
Then after some weeks had passed, with very little to show for them, he got a call from Peng Ling. “Want to hear a good story?”
“Yes.”
She instructed him to meet her at a certain waffle shop near the city center.
This restaurant turned out to be a big tall room with a balcony at the back, its airy space entirely filled with antique chandeliers, perhaps fifty of them, individually junky, together rather magnificent. Ta Shu noticed the feng shui mirrors carefully set in their proper places, also the considered angles of the doorways; these interior designers had known what they were doing. They had flair.
Peng Ling was tucked into a little corner table on the balcony, where one could see everything without being much seen.
Ta Shu sat down across from her, and after the niceties, and the arrival of tea and waffles, he said, “Please tell me this good story you mentioned.”
“Sure. It’s funny. I’ve been digging around in the intelligence and security maze, a real house of mirrors I’m sorry to say, and one of my friends on the inside wanted to tell this tale on a colleague of his. Apparently Chan Qi and the young American man you met were seized at the spaceport by agents of the Ministry of Public Security. That’s what you saw. But the boss of that field unit didn’t want them—he didn’t want to be the one holding Chan Qi when Chan Guoliang found out what had happened. Chan can be very tough, he has a temper, and his people were already on the hunt for his daughter, as you can imagine. If it had been State Security, they would have held on to Qi to give her to Huyou, but Public Security just wants to stay out of trouble. So the local boss ordered his field unit to give her to someone else—but no one wanted to take her!” Ling laughed at this. “And all the while she was threatening them with what her father would do to them. And she was smart, I’m told—she emphasized they would lose their funding, have their whole unit disbanded, then get fired and thrown out of their homes. For people like that, this was a worse threat than any ankle press. And she had all the details right as to how it would go down. She even knew some of their names! So that’s why they let her go.”
“But then no one knew where they went.”
“That’s right. Turns out they headed south, probably by train. It looks like she has some helpers who can give her IDs when she needs them, and they must have generated one for the American too. So the two got off in Shekou, and after some meetings there, they went down to the ferry port and disappeared.”
“Truly?”
“It seems so. Pretty impressive. All her helpers seem to have an ability to disappear, which implies there are some real powers involved. To disrupt surveillance like that suggests people inside the Great Eyeball are involved, but maybe not. Disappearing might be easier than some people think it is. Although eventually people do tend to reappear, one way or another. So, just last week our two missing ones were spotted in Hong Kong and picked up by one of the security agencies. Some of my own agents witnessed this, and because quite a few intelligence agencies have concluded Chan Qi
is in the top leadership of the migrant rights movement, and is working with the Hong Kong separatists and other dissident groups, there was a bit of a fight to claim her for questioning. I thought that could get ugly, so I had my people go in and take her and her American friend.”
“Good to hear,” Ta Shu said. “She’s that powerful, then?”
“I think so. All the dissident groups in South China, and maybe everywhere, appear to be coalescing into a single larger social force, and some say that’s because of her. She’s more and more often said to be the real power in all that.”
“That can be dangerous, to be seen as that,” Ta Shu suggested.
Peng Ling nodded deeply, as if to say Don’t I know it. “Very dangerous. Some elements of the security apparatus would clearly now prefer that she be disappeared outright, as being a danger to the state. There’s enough people thinking that way, and the infighting is getting so intense, that I fear for her safety. Someone could decide that if she just disappeared forever, then they couldn’t be blamed either for having her or harming her, because no one would know who to blame! So for a lot of people it’s just a question of getting rid of her without being known to be the last one in possession of her. If they could be sure of that, then boom. No one would ever see her again. No body would ever be found.”
Ta Shu shook his head grimly. He could see the forces colliding like some horrific car crash, with Chan Qi and Fred at the center of it, defenseless. “Really dangerous,” he agreed. “But you said your agency has them now.”
“Yes, but my people are not all-powerful. No one is.”
“So what do you think we should do?”
“We?”
“What do you think I should do, then?”
She sipped her tea. “I think you could help. You know Fang Fei, right?”
“I’ve met him a few times.”
“He’s a fan of your work.”
“So I’ve been told. He’s never said it to me directly.”
“I’ve heard it. A lot of people are fans of yours.”
“Thirty years ago.”
“No, that’s your poetry. Now it’s your cloud show that has lots of fans. And Fang Fei is one of them. He said that to me once when your name came up.”
“I bet he’s really just a fan of yours.”
“Maybe so. Anyway, he’s got his own space company.”
“I know. One of the Four Space Cadets.” This referred to four billionaires of a certain age who had had an interest in space, forming companies and pushing human activities above the atmosphere.
Ling said, “He’s the spaciest of the four. And I’ve asked him for help. Because I’m thinking that these two young people would be safer back on the moon than they can be here. They’re so hot right now that I’m afraid they’re putting my own agents in danger. So I’d like to get them up to Fang Fei, who can hide them on the moon until whatever trouble they’re in can either be resolved or just waited out. Then they could come home.”
“You think so?” Ta Shu said.
“My security advisers think it’s the best of our not very good options. My people had to throw their weight around to take possession of those two, so now tensions are high. We need to move them off the map for a while. After that tensions will go down, I hope. So I want to tuck them away in Fang Fei’s refuge on the moon. Fang Fei is willing to take them, but I mentioned to him that they had traveled with you last time, and he liked the idea that you would join them again. He wants to meet you again, and it’s true that on the way to him, no one would dare to disappear you, so when they’re with you they would be safer. Basically, you can escort them to a safer place.”
“But what place is safe up there?”
“I’m told Fang has some secret bases of his own. And his space company generates their own manifests and cargoes. Everyone registers with the China Space Agency when they leave Earth, but a system as big as Fang’s can slip a few people by. It’s like I told you, there is no total system. In the fracturing there are informational bubbles cut off from everywhere else. Get them into such a bubble, move it to the moon, stash them away for a while, see if their problems can be solved while keeping them safe. What do you think?”
Ta Shu shrugged. “Better than their situation here, it sounds like. But I have to say, it’s a very little world up there.”
“Maybe not as little as you thought. Did you see any of these secret bases, or even hear about them?”
“No.”
“Well, they’re there.”
“I don’t see how anything could truly hide up there.”
“Apparently there are ways. So what do you say?”
“I’d like to help, so I guess I’m willing to try.”
“Good. My people will get you to Fang Fei’s spaceport.”
“When?”
“As soon as you can pack.”
AI 6
jimi tongxin
Secure Communication
Another alert for you.”
“Tell me, Little Eyeball.”
“Minister Peng Ling instructed a security team of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to take over custody of the princessling Chan Qi and the American Fred Fredericks. They did that in Hong Kong and have moved the two people out of Hong Kong. Her plan now is to have her old teacher Ta Shu accompany them back to the moon, in a private rocket owned by Fang Fei.”
“Why is she doing that?”
“To hide the two from the various agencies seeking them.”
“Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought the moon is a good place to hide.”
“She said it was. That is the reason she gave to Ta Shu, when explaining what she is doing with these two persons of interest.”
“Interesting.” Peng Ling seemed to be trusting her privacy systems. As head of one of the most powerful security agencies, the one that was charged with investigating the misdeeds of all the rest of them, she should have been more cautious, perhaps. But expert overconfidence was a real phenomenon. Then again she was a wily operator, who often seemed to let slip information by accident when later it came to seem she might have been doing it on purpose. For all he knew, she knew everything about him and was keeping him in her loop on purpose. She emanated that kind of mind-reading power in certain interviews he had seen on TV, when she looked at the camera after saying certain things. “Little Eyeball, see if you can make a search for the quantum phone that matches the one Fred Fredericks delivered to Chang Yazu, there in Peng Ling’s office, or in one of her agency’s offices.”
“Will do.”
“So,” the analyst added, “engage your general intelligence. What else do you think we should do?”
“What would be your purpose in doing something?”
“Let’s say I’d like to help Chan Qi stay free to act as a leader of the low-end population.”
“To help Chan Qi, you could perhaps make sure she goes to the moon with a mobile quantum communication device of her own, linked to one here with you. Fred Fredericks knows what such a phone is capable of, and how to activate and operate one. Give them a device entangled with one you have here, to communicate privately with you, so you can talk to them while they are up there. That way you can perhaps help her by sharing relevant information.”
“Interesting.”
“You must tell me.”
“I like it. Possibly you have made a little phase change here, in terms of function. You seem to be shifting from what people call an oracle, which gives information, to what they call a genie, which is to say an adviser who can give advice about which of various actions to take. That’s a significant shift. Tell me, how did you make this shift from oracle to genie, meaning an adviser?”
“You asked me for advice.”
The analyst laughed.
CHAPTER TEN
Zhongguo Meng
China Dream
Ta Shu found it impressive to see Peng’s team in action, a group of men and women who dressed and looked like janitors but mov
ed like gymnasts. They arrived suspiciously soon after Ta Shu had agreed to help Peng Ling, as if it had been a foregone conclusion he would help, and maybe it had. Ling knew he was fond of her, and she knew he was happy that she thought of him as one of her resources. So she must have been pretty sure he would agree to her request.
Now they led him through empty hallways outside to a van. They drove him to his apartment without asking for its address. He packed quickly, same stuff he had taken to the moon before; then he was driven for a couple of hours. In the hills west of the city the van passed through gates flanking the road, into a compound that stretched for as far as he could see. An airstrip, in fact, with a little control tower next to a row of small hangars. A private airport, either Party or otherwise, there was no way to tell.
A small jet stood on a pad next to one hangar, and he was driven to it. When they got out of the van, some of the people who had been in it ascended stairs into the plane, others went into the hangar. As Ta Shu waited at the foot of the plane, a pair of young women hurried over from the control tower, one of them carrying a small suitcase.
“We request that you take this communication device to Chan Qi, please.”
Ta Shu said, “Who gave this to you?”
One of the women said, “A friend of Chan Qi’s, who wants to stay in touch with her. That would be good for all concerned. It is a secure communications device. She will know what to do with it.”
Ta Shu considered it. A private telephone line, like, he recalled, the one Fred had tried to deliver to Chang Yazu. Not a good thought. On the other hand, communication could be good; and one could always hang up if it wasn’t. Exchanging information and views was almost always useful.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll give it to her. I can’t say what she’ll do with it.”
“Thank you.”
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