by Sam Abraham
Hua nodded. “That is what Lao wants. Come.”
Hua started to rise, but Li pulled her back down. “I have not come back to be anyone’s slave,” Li said. “I have come to save you. My daughter will come too. We will all go far away and live together. We can be a family.”
Now Hua laughed a bitter belly cackle. “We cannot escape the design of our creator.”
“Mother, listen,” she whispered. “God has come to me in visions. I have seen you in them as well. You and I and my daughter and all of our ancestors have been born for a larger purpose.”
Now Hua grew concerned. “You have been hallucinating,” she said. “It is a side effect of your…condition. I get them too. I even listened to them, once.”
“And what did they tell you?” Li said.
“To take you from this place, and I did it, and in the end all it brought me was shame,” she said. An outline of light appeared in the wall as the door slid open. “Now come.”
Lost for words, Li rose and followed her mother past barcoded doors, into a wide laboratory. They passed centrifuges and microscopes packed on counters, gaping fume hoods hugging the walls, rows of technicians in cleansuits. Behind the labware were long trains of steel tanks. It was unlike anything Li had ever seen.
They soon reached a window that stretched the length of the lab. On the other side was a nursery larger than a concert hall, with row upon endless row of plastic bassinets. Hundreds of infants squirmed and pawed at tubes taped to their fragile torsos, as monitors on the walls trailed lines of data. Nurses walked between the infants, tending to them in their synthetic wombs.
Hua saw her daughter staring. “It’s a neonatal intensive care unit,” she said as they passed through the nursery. “The product of state-sanctioned genetic enhancement. Some of them are Xinren, others enhanced princelings. Many these days pay to be more than human. Yet none are as blessed – or cursed – as we are.”
They came to a tall door with lines of red characters. It slid open for them, revealing a cylindrical pod that stretched from floor to ceiling. And in the pod, floating inside a turquoise synthamniotic solution, was a girl with her eyes blissfully closed.
“She is fully grown,” said Hua as they entered this final room. Li’s eyes were seduced by the floating girl. She too was a mirror. She had Li’s porcelain skin, her same silken black hair waving in the brine, her dainty flowerbud ears. Li saw that there was no space between the girl’s earlobes and her jaw, and she involuntarily reached up and rubbed the skin of her own attached lobes. Hua saw Li staring and said, “She is to be released. Born, I suppose, as we all are.”
“What is her name?” Li asked, putting her fingers on the glass.
“That is Cell Line Three,” said another voice. Li turned, and saw the holo of the young man with straight hair. Lao. The man who had called himself her father. And behind him stood a massive hybrid, a muscular minotaur with a gold ring in its bovine nose. Long horns stamped with red characters jutted from the Xinren’s skull. Li recognized the Niutou class from her studies in the complex. They were as dumb and strong as oxen, bred for breaking into bunkers.
“I will name her Baiyue,” Li said, undaunted. “Like me and my mother before me, she is a daughter of the Lady in the Moon.”
Hua frowned and said, “Lao-Ba decides what we are called,” her endearing honorific referring to the shade as their father.
“Listen to your mother, Li,” the holo said with a wag of its intangible finger. “You are in my home now. Behave yourself.” Without any tremor of feeling, the holo reached through the glass, its translucent form now colored blue as its fingers pretended to grip the unborn woman’s arm. “What do you think of your daughter? Perfect, no?”
“I’m leaving and taking them with me,” Li growled.
The holo frowned and looked at Li’s mother. Hua put a hand on Li’s shoulder and said, “Hush, daughter, or you will damage Lao-Ba’s health with your crazy words.”
“Do not trouble yourself, Hua,” the holo said, gazing with cold eyes into the cylinder, inspecting the floating girl’s curves for flaws. “You forget that our daughter Li was raised on a savage island. In time she will realize her place. For now, let her name her daughter. Baiyue is it? Very well. Now that she has a name, she is ready to come into the world.”
The hologram nodded at a technician, who typed furiously as monitors surrounding the cylinder flashed yellow. Slowly the turquoise liquid drained from the pod as a series of plastic supports assembled under the naked girl’s legs, arms and head, supporting her. A robotic arm extended a syringe. Oriented with lasers, the robot plunged the needle into the sleeping girl’s arm.
And she opened her eyes.
For a moment the girl’s porcelain face was a sea of tranquility. Then she began hacking, the body writhing to purge her airway. Men in plastic draped her with a composite wrap and helped her from the supports. The supports soon retracted beneath the floor, and in their place a hospital bed unfolded from the wall. The techs helped the fresh clone onto the bed, wiped the fluid from her face and placed a saline drip in her vein. She settled down as Lao’s holo floated over to her. Li and Hua were close behind. The hybrid minotaur stood as still as a tank in the entranceway.
Lao’s holo looked on as Li approached and stroked the young girl’s hair. “Happy birthday,” Li said, kissing the clone’s head, trying to act the way she had always imagined her mother would have. She ignored Hua, who hung back, detached. “Can you hear me?”
The girl squinted and gave a weak nod.
Lao’s holo saw Li’s amazement. “Unlike you,” it said, “your daughter benefits from pre-birth language programs. Teaching lessons were administered while we stimulated her brain activity. Had you grown here as you were supposed to, you would have been similarly blessed. Ah well. We can blame your mother for depriving you of proper schooling.”
Li looked on her daughter with awe. “What did you do to her?”
The hologram smiled. “She knows more than anyone in your pathetic Hong Kong excuse for a school, more than Shen’s attempts to bring you up to speed could ever match. Her brain is conditioned to react perfectly obediently. The tracking nanodrones in her bloodstream are merely a precaution, for she will never disobey me. Filial piety for her is more than tradition. It is her very breath.”
“Then she will also obey her mother,” Li said, nauseous, feeling as if the floor was falling away from under her.
“And how will you command her,” Lao’s holo asked, “when you will never leave this lab again?” It floated next to Li and looked down on the clone. “What would you do to help your father?” it said.
“Anything,” Baiyue said, with a wan, eager smile.
Lao smiled. “Good. In two days you will be strong enough travel. You will go west, to a lake that used to be Anqing. There is a man there, a professor called Yang. Bring him to me quickly. Make sure he has what he owes me, and when I receive it I will reward you as my favorite daughter.” Baiyue nodded, and Lao’s holo said, “Good child. Now get some rest.”
“What are you going to do to the professor?” Li said.
The holo gave Li a thin smile. “Always so curious. Yang has made good on our deal. He developed a method to ensure the reproductive stability of longshui cell lines. As Hua no doubt told you, that is the purpose of your mother, you, your daughter, and all replicants who will come after her. After I rescue Yang from those vipers you left in Anqing, I’ll make sure he’s rewarded for his loyalty.”
“If you do not stop this right now,” Li said sharply, “I will have no choice but to destroy you. I will bring flood waters over everything you hold dear, just as I did the city of Anqing.”
Now the holo stopped, genuinely surprised. “Did Shen not tell you?” it asked, and smiled darkly. “Ah, how delicious! I know all about your little miracle, daughter. About how Yang integrated a series of makers, powered by longshui, to make enough stone to dam the Yangzi River.”
Li stared back blankly.
“What are you talking about? It was a true miracle-”
Now the holo grinned and said, “Oh daughter, don’t tell me you actually believed in your little cult! You are no more capable of miracles than I am!”
“You’re lying,” she hissed. “I saw the flood with my own eyes.”
“Don’t be naïve,” Lao’s image laughed. “You were merely a tool. You shamed the River Syndicate just as I ordered, and revealed the Great Nationalization as a failure just as I always said it would be. And in the Jade you created a bitter hanjian, a national enemy, forcing the Centrists to persecute the Ghost Lands. If a few yokels die, there will always be more to take their place. You see, the Centrists instill fear with the mere idea of the Ghost Lands, a lawless zone that no longer sustains civilization. But in relying on such fear for control, the Centrists have revealed their weakness. If we alleviate people’s dependence on food and enable them to make their own energy, there is no need for protection.”
Lao saw the confusion in Li’s eyes and said, “Let me explain something to you. For now, your bloodline is necessary to supply the longshui plants. But after we produce enough longhsui to infect a critical mass of people with Yang’s virus, the populous in the Ghost Lands will evolve into superior beings. Millions of people will contribute tissue to the plants, yielding a massive capture of usable energy, which will, in turn, enable the virus to be further cultured and spread exponentially. Thus, the three applications of longshui - your hybrid cell line, the virus, and the power plant - are each one part of a synergistic triad, a trinity designed to transform the land. Do you have any idea of the might that this will imbue upon the dispossessed? In time, the Ghost Lands will be more powerful than the Centrist cities, more powerful than any country on earth. And the people of the Ghost Lands will resent those who kept them in poverty.
“Those who lash out first will sow the seeds of chaos, and distract the Centrists while I plan my war. And when the cities are in ashes, I will restore the dynasty as an emperor more powerful even than Emperor Qin. Qin only had an army of clay, but I will have my army of Jade. The Jade will bow to your daughters, and your daughters will bow to me. And as I remake the future in my image, the mere humans who have been overthrown will see that they were fools to have ever doubted me.”
“No one in my family will ever bow to you,” Li hissed.
Now Lao’s holo laughed an empty digital cackle. “You already have. Everything I ordered, you executed without question,” it said, floating away through the minotaur that blocked the door. Li tried to follow him but the minotaur pushed her back. Li turned to her mother. Hua was staring at her newborn adult granddaughter, who had fallen asleep.
“How can you let this happen?” Li said, looking on her mother with disgust. She felt the light in her ebb, leaving only a gaping void of doubt. “That bastard is using us as if we were toys.”
“That is exactly what we are,” the old woman said with sunken eyes. “It is our fate.”
Chapter 36 – Ming Yi (明夷)
Darkening Of The Light
Zoe lifted her hood to look the Holy Lake. It had only been a few weeks since she had left here with Eli, and it had taken only a day to return here with the man with shining eyes. She told herself she was doing it for Eli, for the good she saw in him, and to ensure that her mentor was safe. But the truth was that Ginger, the man with shining eyes, had her at gunpoint in a game without rules.
Zoe had hoped that seeing the longshui factory would restore some sanity to her world. As if she and Yang would sit down over tea and work through the differential equations of membrane osmosis, like in the old days. But the lakeshore had become a shantytown of barges clogged around makeshift docks and the tips of submerged office towers. Zoe thought of the Caihong Gardens, mushrooming on the edge of Shanghai Island, and wondered why all slums looked the same.
She closed her holobeads. “No answer,” she said, worried. “The professor has always taken my calls. Something’s wrong.”
Ginger beckoned her to follow him. Dressed in the white tunics of Jade pilgrims, they set out on foot towards the factory. The causeway was clogged with hydrocycles dodging muskoxen, and scrawny preachers, and warriors with longshui lances. Exhaust assaulted Zoe’s mask, pack animals hawed in her face, and vendors hawked magic stones, healing potions, medicinal tea - everything but food. Men carried signs painted with characters begging the Lady in the Moon to return. Halfway down to the factory, a circle of shrieking boys surrounded a young girl, cutting her off from her family. Zoe pulled her tunic close and rushed to catch up with Ginger.
Near the factory it was worse. Hanging banners of calligraphy, once proclaiming blessings, now fluttered in tatters. The area smelled of charcoal and urine. Gaunt bodies lay upon the ground where pilgrims, traveling from far and wide for salvation, found no Communion and had succumbed to starvation.
But to Zoe the most appalling change was the wall that had been erected around the factory, a barricade of chain link and barbed wire and wooden boards. Ginger led Zoe up to the single gate in the structure, a giant slab of concrete hanging from a towering steel arch. It was affixed to the building with iron hinges, so that it took four men pulling oxen to draw it open.
“I told the professor this was a bad idea,” Zoe said under her breath, cursing how their life’s work had been engulfed by the people of the Ghost Lands.
“Come on,” Ginger said. They continued down the road, hiking along the crest that curved to the north of the valley. When they had circled around to the back of the wall, Ginger crouched in the hills, watching the factory smokestacks exhale plumes of white vapor.
Zoe sat in the dirt nearby, exhausted. “Now what?”
“GPS scans of a pellet in the professor’s arm put him somewhere in the factory,” Ginger said. “Finding him won’t be hard. He is to be executed at sunrise tomorrow.”
Zoe watched the factory, worrying. “How do you know you’re not wrong?”
Ginger looked at her as if he had expected more. “We make it our business to know.”
After the sun set, Ginger and Zoe scrambled down the hillside under cover of darkness. When they reached the fence, Ginger produced a pen from his belt and pressed a button, releasing a plasma knife that sliced through the metal rings. He bent the fence open and they slipped through. Ginger followed the feedback beacon in his eyepieces, leading Zoe to a locked door in a large warehouse. Using his knife again, he cut out the lock and the door swung open. Beams of light from his eyes illuminated one room after another, until they reached a dimly lit hallway. He held back, listening. Moments later they heard voices. Ginger cut his eye lamps and motioned for Zoe to stay quiet.
“—the traitor’s execution?” a question echoed in the dark.
“Lord Sun found where the traitor hides his treasure,” a second voice said. “My cousin is one of His Lordship’s bodyguards. He said that once the traitor is gone, Lady Li will come back to us.”
“I can't wait to take Communion again,” the first voice said, a short distance from where Ginger and Zoe stood. Three lanterns danced ahead. “Lord Sun should force the traitor to give us more before he’s executed. The light is all I think about--“
Before the warrior could finish, Ginger grabbed the man’s head and bashed it against the metal wall before planting his elbow in the second warrior’s sternum. But before the man with shining eyes could finish him, a third warrior charged his longshui lance and released a bolt of electricity in a blinding flash.
Zoe froze, waiting for the pain of electrocution. But all she felt was her pounding heart and the crackling air. Ginger stood over her. Beneath his burnt shirt, his torso was covered in brown rivets that danced with sparks running down to the ground. Nearly every inch of his skin, from shoulders to toes, was coated in copper. Only his forearms, neck and face were untreated. In awe, she realized that the cyborg had been enhanced to withstand longshui weapons, and wondered just how much Ginger’s people had made their business to know.
; Grimacing, Ginger turned on the man with the lance and in one fluid motion broke both his arms, grabbed the lance and crushed his windpipe. He then pounced on the soldier whose sternum he had injured. “Tell me where Dr. Yang is,” the cyborg said, “or you’re dead.”
“You mean the traitor?” the man said in a choked voice.
“He’s not a traitor!” Zoe shouted.
Ginger put a hand on her mouth and pushed her back against the wall. “Shut up,” he said. When Zoe nodded, he released her and pulled a bead from his pocket. Unclasping a hinge, the bead fell into a chain. Ginger handed it to Zoe and said, “Put this around your neck, and put on that dead man’s white tunic.” She gulped but nodded again, deciding her curiosity could wait. Ginger turned back to the warrior. “If your traitor is a professor with glasses called Yang,” he said, “then take us to him.”
