by Ian Williams
Drayton had felt things were going well after all the missteps with Morgan. He smiled as he watched Tom and Dick at their screen, like two kids. The worm was starting to deliver too, and that hopefully would complete the picture, would give the Bubble Room the names they wanted and confirm what PLA Unit 61398 was up to.
It would be a near-perfect situation, if it wasn’t for the hack, the Shanghai TT Logistics website compromised. For sure, that was a stupid mistake on his part. But he’d calmed down now and convinced himself it was probably just kids and saw no reason to believe they’d gone further into the system and grabbed the documents. And even if they’d seen them, they’d be unlikely to realise the significance. And anyway, the site was now deleted.
But he still had a niggling doubt. He’d prefer to know for sure.
So he rang Ed the Real Geek on an encrypted line and asked him whether he had anything more on the chat address.
“Yeah,” said Ed. “It belongs to a person called Wang.”
“A person called Wang?” said Drayton. “Ed, that’s fantastic. How did you get that?”
“Trade secrets, sir. Though actually pretty straightforward.”
“Well, whatever, but you’ve done a good job.”
“Hold off the celebrations just for a moment,” Ed said. “There’s a bit more digging to do.”
“How’s that?”
“There are ninety-five million Chinese called Wang.”
– 28 –
Something Weird
Zhang had started to sound like a recording stuck in repeat mode, which was pretty tedious, but when he said yet again that something weird was going on, something really weird, his roommates agreed that Zhang might just have a point.
No sooner had they all arrived at The Moment On Time coffee shop and got online when Wang received a message from his mother. This time the tone was different, so different that there wasn’t enough time for either his itchy knee or trembling foot to click in. There was just plain surprise, and it was a big surprise.
He’d expected more stuff about meeting the non-existent girlfriend, bringing Eu-Meh home to Harbin. But the first thing his mother said was that the girl wasn’t good for him, that he should ditch her before she got them all into trouble.
“She’s really no good, Chu,” his mother wrote. “Think of your father’s job at the Party School.”
“Wow,” he said, showing the message to Zhang and Liu. “What’s that all about?”
“I thought your mum was desperate to meet her,” said Zhang.
“She was,” said Wang. “I even sent her a photograph.”
“You sent her a photograph?” Liu said.
“Sure,” said Wang. “To keep her happy. I just copied a picture of a Chinese-Australian beauty queen called Eu-Meh, which I found online. Mum said she was gorgeous, which I guess she was.”
He said the photograph had just made his mother even more determined to meet her, even saying she’d come to Beijing.
Liu asked to see the picture of the beauty queen, and Wang searched for her online. But he got a lost connection screen. Access denied. His girlfriend had been deleted, and he could no longer find any reference to her on the internet. He did have a copy he’d saved to the picture folder on his smartphone, so he opened that instead and showed it to Liu.
“This is the picture I sent to Mum,” Wang said. “My girlfriend, Eu-Meh.”
“Miss Australia,” said Liu. “It’s Miss Australia.”
The picture was of a twenty-five-year-old ethnic Chinese woman who had won the Australian crown and become an instant celebrity in China, her country of birth. She’d seemed to Wang to be an ideal girlfriend.
“That’s her,” he said. “Why?”
“Didn’t you hear?” said Liu. “There was a lot of stuff online.”
He said Miss Australia had a thing about communists, like she hated them. That’s why her family had left China in the first place. And soon after she was crowned she said a whole bunch of things about the Dalai Lama being basically a good guy and that the Party abused human rights.
“Oh dear,” said Wang. “She really said that stuff?”
And Zhang told him he should choose his girlfriends more carefully.
Liu said party newspapers had denounced her as a fraud and a liar and she’d been banned from travelling to China for an upcoming beauty competition. There’d been a frenzy online, whipped up by the nationalist bloggers, calling her a “race traitor”.
Wang tried not to read those sites, but he was still surprised that he’d missed all the fuss, and he said, “I can see why Mum wouldn’t want her as part of the family.”
He messaged his mother saying don’t worry, and don’t let Dad worry, that he’d ditched the girl already, that he knew she wasn’t right for him and had never really been serious.
Then he looked back at his mother’s message, at the last line, where she’d written, “Things are difficult enough for us as it is, Chu. God bless you, and may God be with you.”
Now the itch did start again, and so did the trembling foot. What things were difficult? And what did God have to do with anything? For the first time in weeks he called up his mother’s number, but it went straight to voicemail. He did the same to his father’s phone, but he didn’t pick up either. They must be working, he thought.
He was going to ask Liu what he made of that bit of the message, but decided not to bother. His friend had his own family worries. He’d lost touch with his father, the top government official who’d been dismissed from his job. Liu’s mother said only that he’d had to go away for a while. That it was a Party thing. She’d tried to sound reassuring, but Liu could tell she was anxious.
Wang went back to his smartphone and searched once again for the fictional girlfriend who was now his fictional ex-girlfriend. She’d definitely been deleted.
The roommates rarely gave much thought to internet censorship, the Party’s finger that was poised permanently over the delete button. To them it was just a fact of life. Words were filtered, sites were blocked. That’s just the way it was. Not always quick, and there were a ton of ways around it, using pictures, symbols or abbreviations. A whole cyber language. Stuff to replace a word that was blocked, everybody knowing what it really meant. Playing cat and mouse with the censors could be fun.
In a small way, Zhang was part of that censorship machine. He was a member of what the University called its Opinion Guidance Unit, and his role, two evenings a week, was to share in university chat rooms and on news sites popular with students, postings and comments that were fair and reasonable, as defined by daily instructions sent by the Party.
When the Professor disappeared, the Unit defended the anti-corruption crackdown. And when the smog got really bad and the city was gasping under a blanket of toxic air, they were given stories to post about hard-working and public-spirited officials. When a wind swept in from the Gobi Desert and the smog briefly lifted, they credited it to the swift action of the Party. When the wind stopped and the poisonous air descended again, it was a natural phenomenon beyond Party control.
When a discussion got heated or strayed into forbidden areas, their job was just to change the subject.
And there was Brad Maxwell, an American exchange student and a prolific blogger, who thought the foreign media was unfair to China, and blogged about how China needed stability, and why the Party was almost always working in the best interests of the people. He was given prominence in university chat rooms, a foreign voice of reason, insightful and fair minded.
Only Brad Maxwell didn’t exist. The Party had invented him, and another role of Zhang’s unit was to put words in his mouth, and into the mouths of a fictitious French student called Pierre and a Brazilian named Ayrton. On his last shift, Zhang had been all three of them.
Not that Zhang saw hims
elf as being part of the Party’s censorship machine. His main motive was money, since he was paid for each posting. He struggled to take it seriously. As did most of his unit.
“And I’ll tell you another weird thing,” Zhang said. “The Party’s declared war on aliens.” He said they were trying to ban them from the internet.
He said his Unit had received instructions that any online references to aliens should be discouraged or deleted. Brad Maxwell was all set to denounce them as the product of a depraved Western imagination. People should be made to understand that aliens don’t exist.
“They don’t exist?” said Liu. “Wow.”
“Very funny,” said Zhang. “But they’re serious. It comes from the Party’s propaganda office and the ban covers time travel, monsters and superstition, which includes aliens.”
“Why would they do that?” Wang said.
Before Zhang could answer, they all looked out of the window. As did most others in the coffee shop, as the soupy grey sky of late afternoon began to change colour.
First it turned yellow, a low-level arch of colour on the horizon, just above the railway line. Then the sky turned green and orange, a giant ball of colour which grew into a mushroom-like cloud, high into the sky, before fading back into the deep grey as the sun went down and the sky was drained of light.
There was silence at first in The Moment On Time, where most customers had joined Wang, Zhang and Liu at the window, a wall of smartphones.
“Wow,” said Wang. “What was that?”
The strange light in the sky had been seen right across the city and, as photos and videos were posted online, so were hundreds of theories, from a chemical leak to an explosion at a steel plant to a bungled weapons test.
Wang had his own theory, and once again he called up his alien, posting to The Gasping Dragon:
Within the next hour his posts were shared more than two million times before being deleted. By then there were reports online of long lines of traffic trying to leave the city, a warehouse containing air purifiers looted by a gang chanting “Give us clean air”, and shopping malls that claimed to have clean air were besieged.
Riot police were called to one that boasted of being the greenest of them all. It was a new building in the central business district, a triangle of glass and steel, with walkways around and across a giant atrium full of modern art.
Wang knew the building. He’d visited it shortly after it opened and seen a promotional video about its unique air filtration system, which he still remembered. The mall had used that as its main sales pitch. Come and shop and play while protecting your lungs.
Now it seemed like half the city had taken up the offer. It had become a refuge from the toxic air, as the online rumours spread that a weapons test had gone wrong. Official denials and a chorus of experts saying the light was an optical effect, caused by the interaction of the smog, the sun and storm clouds, merely fuelled the rumours.
Wang watched events unfold as a series of snapshots – online photographs, video clips, blog postings and messages – all uploaded from smartphones at the scene.
Security guards attempting to block the doors. More security guards ejecting people from a showroom of Telstra electric cars, one man clinging to a car door. A video panning shakily across the packed atrium and walkways. A chanting crowd. Music still playing in the background, a Western song, “Blame it on the night, don’t blame it on me”. Crowds outside banging on the windows. An artwork, several porcelain dogs stacked on top of each other, tumbling over and breaking into pieces.
Then the police arrived and there were images of scuffles. A man forced over the edge of a walkway and photographs of him clinging to a red and white bull, another artwork suspended in mid-air, but close enough to the walkway for the man to grab and avoid a plunge to the atrium floor. Frightened-looking children.
The last image Wang saw on his phone was of a large crowd of perhaps a hundred people, standing in front of a row of riot police. Many young children were among them. They just stood there in silent condemnation, holding in the air pieces of paper, some small, some the size of small posters, and all with the same hand-drawn image. Some were better and more distinctive than others.
It was the image of an alien, a stick alien.
*
After a slow start, the internet police soon got up to speed and the images from the mall were erased from cyberspace. Though by that time the roommates had moved on and were gathered round the screen of Liu’s laptop looking at a mangled heap of red metal that used to be a Ferrari.
Liu said it looked like it had just been through a stamping machine in a junkyard.
“Says here it happened on one of the elevated highways just outside Shanghai. In the smog,”
“Wow,” said Zhang, looking at the picture, and then at several more that had appeared on the website of an official news agency.
“What a mess. Whose is it? Or was it?”
“The report just says there was a high-speed accident, that the driver died, that it happened late at night. But there are other reports here which say there were two women in the car too and that one survived, and that she was naked.”
The report and photograph had quickly gone viral, as did speculation and a lot of anger about who owned the car, everybody sure the driver had to be the son or daughter of some high-ranking official, because they usually were.
Wang tried to open the report on his smartphone, only to discover that the official news agency had taken it down, and other photographs were rapidly being deleted, which meant to him that it had to be the offspring of somebody very important. He saved one photograph to his phone, and then reopened it for a closer look, just as Liu said, “There’s another posting here that says the driver’s name was Chen.”
Wang zoomed in on the photo. The Ferrari was definitely red, and for all the damage it was possible to make out the last two characters of the licence plate: a D and an S.
He then powered up his old Lenovo and looked for Shanghai TT Logistics. The site had been taken down, which came as a disappointment to Wang, since it probably meant the owner didn’t want to do business, preferring to delete his site and start again rather than pay the roommates to have it put right.
Then he opened the documents he’d earlier downloaded from the site. He looked at the Ferrari on the cover page of the one called The Colonel. The last two letters of the plate were D and S. And the guy, the military guy, he was a Chen. The kid had to be his son. It had to be more than coincidence. The kid must have totalled the Ferrari. This must be the same one as the crumpled pile of metal in Liu’s photograph.
He decided to share the cover page of the document on The Gasping Dragon, his main Twitter-like account, but couldn’t open the account. Instead he posted it to another news-sharing site. For good measure, and because he was feeling angry at Shanghai TT Logistics for not responding to his offer of help, he shared the cover page of the Mr Fang document too. Beside both he posted an image of the stick alien.
Then he tried again to get into his Gasping Dragon account. It didn’t seem to be there. So he phoned the internet provider and after waiting in a queue for what seemed forever and listening to an annoying high-pitched voice rattle off all their promotions, he was connected to a man on the help desk. The man told him The Gasping Dragon account didn’t exist, and according to their records it never had.
Wang hung up and only then for the first time did he wonder whether there was any connection between all the alien fuss and his own postings, his own stick alien. But he quickly discounted the idea. It was just too silly. His was just an online thing. It wasn’t real. It was just some fun.
But when he went to look at his game, Whack An Alien, figuring it was time to start charging for all the add-ons, all the new weapons, that was gone too. It had been removed from both the app stores on which he’d listed it
. He sat back in his chair and looked out at the thick smog and the frozen bare branches of a skeletal-like tree brushing against the coffee shop window, and he realised that his online world had just been deleted. He’d been eliminated from cyberspace.
– 29 –
The Red Ferrari
Chuck Drayton didn’t immediately see the Ferrari report. He was reading about the sudden death of the head of the Communist Party’s anti-graft unit. A brief statement on state media said he’d passed away after a short illness and that his work would continue.
Drayton was back at the consulate, on his iPhone, his VPN enabled. He saw the news while he was checking out the @Beijing_smog Twitter account, which had shared the story, and was making a bit of a joke of it, saying the guy, this big-shot graft-buster, must have been under a lot of stress, with a job like that.
Chill. Overwork can be the death of you. Must have been something really shocking he discovered.
The original story was short, almost an afterthought in a Party newspaper, and Drayton didn’t give it much thought. Until he saw the photograph published alongside. He looked long and hard. Whether it was the big pair of thick-rimmed glasses with their tinted lenses or the child-like face betraying not even a hint of feeling, the face was somehow familiar.
There was something about that face, something that made Drayton feel uneasy.
He decided to talk to Ed the Real Geek, see what the word was on Chinese social media, find out what Ed had been wading through down in the sewer. But as soon as he got to Ed’s desk he forgot about the graft-buster because Ed had another photograph open on his computer’s desktop.
