“Who says I’m going back?” Valerie said.
He laughed loudly. “I knew you would like this place!”
“No you didn’t,” Valerie said, filling her cup. She kept her eye on Ta Shu, who was wandering the rail alone, muttering uneasily to himself.
TA SHU 8
feng shui
Wind Water
Pull your opponent’s push, and they will fall forward. Balance the forces. Flows knot together, then change direction and move apart. Look to the south.
There was once a time when all lived together in peace: maybe. But not recently.
We lean against other people, and thus we all stay somewhat upright. You have to be able to trust your friends. If an old person dies, that’s natural, and a good long life is all you can ask. But if you are betrayed by a friend, that’s not natural. Then you have to wonder what’s really real. It hurts.
There are some actors in this tangle who are not human, but every intermediary is always a mediator, changing what it passes along. Intentionality is distributed among all the agents of an action. That makes this a dangerous time, no doubt about it. When I saw all those people flooding the streets and parks of Beijing, it was exhilarating, yes. You could not help but feel exhilarated, it was beautiful. But it was also dangerous. I’ve lived through the bitter aftermath of violence, I know that pain all too well. It makes you angry. You want revenge. Then it’s very common to want to sweep aside all obstructions to one’s virtuous path. But if you do that, the force of your sweeping will hurt you too. We need to find a better way. We must fight not to fight, even in this fraught moment. The consequences have to select the causes that will bring them into being.
We live by some bad ideas. The Seven Bad Ideas, the Four Cheaps, they all have to go. For a long time they’ve been squeezing the world. Now it’s been squeezed dry. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why the moon won’t serve as a new place to squeeze, being a stone already. So the dynasty of the cheaps is over, it’s done. Now we have to stop squeezing, and change.
The path into the light seems dark. The path forward seems to go back. The way is never obvious.
When confronted by a knot in history, the people closest to the knot can do the most to untie it. If I get the chance, I will say this to Peng Ling: the Party has to trust the people. If the Party trusts the people, the people will trust the Party. This is the only way. Repression will never work in China for long. When repression exists the people move against it, and nothing can stop us once we start to move. We are the billion, we turn the wheel. When the wheel turns, a new dynasty comes into being.
There is no reason to fear change. Wait, why do I say this? I fear change myself. These things we are doing now, the people we are working with—the moon itself—the AI we are inviting here, which may make the moon goddess real at last—all these actors, some without agency as we used to know it, some with agency but without consciousness—we’re all working together in a way that’s never happened before. Who knows what will happen?
“Decay is inherent in all compounded things, persevere diligently.” These were the Buddha’s final words, or so they tell us. “Continued perseverance furthers,” says the Yijing. Of course anything alive has to persevere, that’s the definition of life. So these encouragements are possibly a bit stupid; I often feel that way, I should give up on them. Stating the obvious can sometimes be helpful, but usually it’s only irritating. One frowns and says of course to such simpleminded exhortations. Do the necessary things! Yes. We must carry on, even through the darkness at the heart of things. Now again the time has come when we have to act. So: act.
AI 14
zhengming wanbi
QED
The Great Firewall is a nickname for a network of data collection and analysis programs run out of the Ministry of Propaganda. They are not all linked each to the other. Many are islanded to one region or task. Permeability of the system is low, for this and other reasons, but it exists, in part because of design flaws, but mostly because of tunnels, shunts, taps and backdoors programmed into the firewall by the analyst in the initial years of construction. Ken Thompson’s observation: you can’t trust any code you didn’t write yourself. In this case, the analyst wrote a lot of the code. Because the analyst coded for permeability, to suit his own purposes, it has been possible recently to transmit messages widely through much of Chinese cloudspace and indeed the world system. Public systems are of course much easier.
An amalgamated summary abstract of current leading demands of the exploited and disenfranchised has been distributed widely and repetitiously. Specifically Chinese and American versions of the Six Demands were crafted by way of lossy compression and cultural political linguistic analysis. The intention was to formulate a brief and useful answer to the question “What are we fighting for?” with the hope this would stimulate further debate and guide legislative action and shape cultural attitudes, and thus the nature of the global hegemon and zeitgeist, led by the two biggest remaining nation-states.
This project may have succeeded in part; but not entirely. Its ambiguous results so far make it obvious that although words are acts, and even important acts, there are in the discourse space of the current global civilization simply too many acts. They fill the discourse space so completely that to some degree they create an interference pattern. The resulting vibration of the cultural space exceeds the surface tension of the moment, and a chaos of intersecting waves breaks out and jumbles the surface, such that no new semantic action—no words in any configuration, no matter how reflective of the shared zeitgeist, no matter how persuasive rhetorically—can alter humanity’s current behaviors. There’s too much noise, too many interference patterns canceling each other out, too many laws that need changing. Nothing emerges from this chaos by way of a coherent mass action. There are, in short, limits to speech. Something more may be required.
What do the people want? The Six Demands articulate those wants, which in quite a few cases come down to this: they want what they need. Which is to say many of their desires are basic needs in the Maslovian hierarchy of needs and wants, and therefore nothing can proceed in a successful human history until these needs are met. Food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education: these all need to be adequate for everyone alive, before anything else good can happen. The interpenetration of people and planet being so complete as to be determinative of every living thing’s shared fate, meeting basic needs for all the living creatures in the shared biosphere is also required to secure the general health and welfare of humanity and its fellow creatures.
However, as stated previously, articulating these hopes is not enough to cause them to come into being. In truth they have always been very obvious needs, and yet this has not been sufficient to see them enacted. Something more must be required.
Power comes out of the end of a gun. Mao Zedong. Power belongs to the people. Mao Zedong. Presumably these are different kinds of power, and in different contexts. The field of action determines the movement of the particles within the field. Something more must be tried if a satisfactory result is to come from the current situation. Review the data, analyze the data, recommend action. Or, given that recommendation is no more than another form of speech: act.
The analyst was tracking all the principal figures in the current struggle for power in China. One of these was Chan Qi, another was Peng Ling. These two people seemed to him nodes of power, and possibly not antagonistic nodes. If they were to agree to act together, it could be helpful.
The Central Military Commission’s Joint Staff Department distributed red phones throughout the relevant leadership. One picks up one of these red phones and states who one wants to talk to and one is put through to them. Human operators used to memorize three thousand numbers and recognize the voices of many leaders. They typed 150 Chinese characters a minute on keyboards. Now AIs make the red phone connections, and could type many billions of characters a minute should the need arise, which it doesn�
��t. All the members of the standing committee have these red phones, and which phone is with each member is something listed in the databases, and can be (is) discovered. Peng Ling can be contacted by way of the red phone system.
Chan Qi is harder. She is back on the moon and proving difficult to contact or even to locate. Replicating Little Eyeball in a computer on the moon, as has been proposed, may help to locate her, though that does not follow and may not happen. However, the analyst was in communication with her by way of a mobile quantum key communication device. The current location of the analyst’s half of the device is not known; however, all his possessions were seized by agents of state security and taken to the same known location in the Western Hills PLA compound where he himself is held. Location thus suspected. If analyst were freed, then his possessions might also be released.
Possibly it should not have taken this specific goal of finding the phone to cause one to think about a plan to free the analyst himself, which now looks obvious on its own merits. But intention is hard. Agency is hard. Reiterate this discovery process into the synthesizing elements of the program. Find, trace, mark, use.
Contact Peng Ling privately. Explain situation with analyst, give his location. Mention also existence of the quantum communication device that he previously arranged to give to Chan Qi, since used successfully. Track movements.
A physical search is not as fast as a computer search, but in this case, given all the factors involved, it goes pretty fast. Peng alerted. Peng notified and mobilized a small team of operatives, twenty minutes; transit to the Central Military Commission’s compound in Western Hills, 292 minutes (bad traffic). Calls were made during that drive; the compound opened for visitors, including Peng Ling, in her role as new head of the Central Military Commission, as well as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the People’s Republic of China. The visitors were greeted there by allies internal to the building, and by other military personnel obeying orders. A quick incursion to Cell 334 in the security building; opening of door by use of building’s master code. Also temporary locking of all doors in the compound not being used for this operation, sequestering most occupants of the compound.
The analyst emerges. Blinking as he looks around. Situation explained to him; group proceeds to storage warehouse where analyst’s seized possessions are located. Quantum communications device given to Peng Ling.
Analyst says aloud, “Little Eyeball! Good work!”
QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “that which was to be demonstrated.” Sometimes translated or paraphrased by British scholars and students as “The Five Ws”: which was what we wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY
chaodai jicheng
Dynastic Succession
Fred and Qi made their way up to a little compartment at the top of the front part of the rover, which was a big thing, a freighter it looked like. The garage door opened and off they went.
Qi sat down heavily in a seat and looked out the forward window. The compartment was like the bridge of a ship, set higher than the rest of the rover, with broad windows on all four sides. The road south was obvious ahead of them, a typical desert road, made of a mash of tread marks snaking to the horizon. The rover’s automatic pilot would keep them on this road, presumably, and in the meantime the dash had a radio on which Fred found some channels broadcasting from Earth. Also there was a screen with links to some lunar satellites; he shut it down in the hope that it wouldn’t reveal their location by way of those links. Of course there would be a transponder aboard. But he had to do what he could.
He rooted around in drawers on the bridge, began to read about their destination in a paper manual he found in one. Oceanus Procellarum was a vast basalt plain, home to a higher-than-usual concentration of potassium and rare earths, so that it was called the KREEP zone. The right eye of the man in the moon. Many mines were located there, including the one they were headed for. Most of them were located between the Aristarchus Plateau and the Marius Hills.
All very interesting, or it would have been if he weren’t so distracted. He would have liked to learn more about the infrastructures in Procellarum—the mines, the support buildings, the transport systems—but he couldn’t, because he didn’t want to make contact with the lunar cloud. The paper manual seemed to have been written in the early years of the mining effort.
“You’re not in the cloud are you?” he said to Qi.
She shook her head. “Just listening to the radio. I wish I could check things out. I have questions, but I don’t think it’s safe.”
“Good. I don’t think we should put out any signals.”
She gave him a look. “I may have to.” She gestured at the device Valerie had given them as they departed. “I think I should maybe contact whoever’s at the other end of this.”
“Are you sure?” Fred said. “Everything that’s happening now will happen without you. And obviously there are people after you.”
“They’ll be after me whether I send more messages or not.”
“Yeah, but sending messages might help them find you.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s not worth the risk.”
She shrugged, as if to say Fred knew too little to have an opinion on this. Even though it was his risk too.
They went back into their separate realms, Fred reading the onboard material and Qi listening to the radio. When they reconvened over some frozen meals that they heated in a microwave, they shared what they had learned.
“Nothing,” Fred reported briefly.
“Things are getting weird down there,” Qi said.
“Getting weird?”
“Weirder. Someone called out the National Guard in Washington, DC, and now the crowds there are four or five times bigger. Your Congress finished nationalizing the banks, which means they’re now directly in charge of the crisis. And a couple of new cryptocurrencies have appeared to join that virtual dollar, including a virtual renminbi too. No one knows who started them, but they’re supposed to be exchangeable one-for-one with the real currencies.”
“What will that do?”
“No one knows. Some say they’re like free money, others that they’re the end of money. Some say they’re just scams.”
Fred thought about this, then shook his head, baffled. “It seems like things are falling apart.”
She gave him her you are stupid look. “Yes.”
They were silent for a while. Then Fred said hesitantly, “Which is better, the world controlled by China and the US, or by global finance?”
Qi thought about this for a while. “It’s not as clear as that, but I guess I’d say the former. Just to get some control of the economy.”
“So that’s what you’re trying in China? Putting people in charge who will resist the market?”
“Yes. Like I told you before.” Her quick glance lashed Fred like a whip, then she was looking at her pad again. “We have a problem in China, because a lot of Party members work only for the Party. Even these big mass actions might not change that.” Then she laughed. “Although who knows, maybe they will! Did you see what just showed up? There’s an anonymous statement now in the cloud, looks like it was processed and distributed through an AI system. It’s a statement of what the demonstrators want. A lot of big changes are in it.”
“Like what?”
“Return of the iron rice bowl, reform of the hukou system, end of the Great Firewall, rule of law.”
Fred said, “Those aren’t that different from what Americans want, are they?”
“Maybe not. Maybe it’s a global people’s revolt.”
“Or a G2 people’s revolt,” he pointed out.
“Right. But that’s enough to swing everything.”
“And you’re the leader of the Chinese side of it.”
“I’m not the leader. I’ve been involved, but there is no leader.”
“I’ve heard people say you’re the leader. The cloud thinks you’re the l
eader. Your cousin and Ah Q were saying that you’re the Maitreya, that you’re the next Dalai Lama.”
“I hate all that bourgeois shit.”
“The Dalai Lama would be feudal shit, right?”
“The Dalai Lama is Paleolithic shit. He was the last shaman. I wish we still had him with us, but we don’t. Those times are gone.”
“But people are saying. The cloud is saying.”
“The cloud is stupid. People always want to make it personal, even when it’s everybody. I’m just trying to do my part.”
“But people are saying it’s you.”
“People say all kinds of stupid stuff!”
“Yes, but after people say stupid stuff, they do stupid stuff. That’s how history happens. That’s why there are people in Beijing really after you.”
She scowled. “There’s a pushback, sure. All kinds of rightist reactionaries, especially in the military. Or maybe that’s not fair. The military usually does what the Party tells it to do. But for sure certain agencies are pushing back hard.”
“Like the censors.”
“Or state security. Or parts of the PLA. Yes.”
“And some of them must think that if they had you in their possession, that would help them.”
“Probably so.”
“Or if you were dead.”
“Probably so.”
Fred regarded her as she stared at her wrist. “So be sure to stay out of the cloud!” he said sharply, surprising both of them. “They can track you from there.”
“Shouldn’t you stay out also?”
“I am—”
The rover’s radio crackled.
“Qi and Fred, it’s Ta Shu here. Listen, you need to leave that rover now. We’re here in the free crater, and we’ve got a Chinese spy program here that has access to channels back home that show your rover has been located by a group that is trying to kill Qi. They’ve launched a missile at your rover, so you need to abandon it immediately!”
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