Jade Prophet

by Sam Abraham

  Xie prayed for its rider’s sacrifice, that he might be allowed into Heaven. He pushed his hydrocycle recklessly, and selfdrives fishtailed from him, swerving as police cruisers chased him off the highway into narrow alleys. He scattered byways full of fruitcarts and teashops as he heard a third hydrocycle sink into a burst of gunfire and cursed the silence that followed.

  But now Xie curved around to the industrial edge of the city, into a forest of cranes. Drills rose at the edge of the seawall, where scaffolding spread to support the steamstacks and turbines of offshore geothermal wells. It was these wells, he knew, that powered the batteries beneath the seawall and the Mountain. With one stroke, he would wipe out the Great Evil and bring revenge upon the rich.

  Hymns of angels rang in Xie’s ears as he rocketed past the rail yard into a cascade of voltage regulators, coils humming on metal branches. Something hit him in the shoulder and he saw the steel rain of glowing bullets fall around him. One cut through his chest, splattering the bike with blood. Then he lost control as his hydrocycle slid out from under him, slamming him through a fence and into a transformer array.

  His body tangled in wires, Xie saw light flare as the chemical bomb in his cycle fried the substation’s capacitors. Breakers tripped open in an arc fault, and power rushed through the substation, flashing as it ignited. He saw the image of his wife in the waves of heat and screamed as electricity sliced through his body. And as the grid failed around his corpse, darkness fell over the island.

  Just then, not two kilometers from Xie’s charred skull, a speedboat invisible in thermoptic camouflage slammed into the Binjiang Gate of the seawall, where the Huangpu met the Pacific. The stolen demolition ordinance roared, disintegrating the inner floodgate and blowing a whale-sized hole in the outer wall with a pillar of fire that rose halfway up to Heaven.

  Alarms blared and Seawall Control tried to deploy backup levees. But the grid was down and the backups frozen, unable to stop the rushing ocean from tearing the flimsy remains of the floodgate off its hinges and rising into a wall of water that fell upon the city.

  Chapter 56 – Lu (旅)

  Abundance

  As the city burned west of the Huangpu River, Eli, Zoe and Baiyue changed into blue coveralls near the eastern seawall, and clipped on ID tags. Their aliases had already been loaded into the Mountain’s maintenance system. It was a hack job, Eli was sure, but it would do the trick. They took no other belongings, save Zoe’s holobeads and the passports in their pockets.

  The streets in the Innovation District were empty as Baiyue led them to a gate at the back of the Mountain. As she spoke to the guard and flashed their identification, Eli couldn’t help but look up. The spindly pyramid loomed impossibly tall, a stiletto bisecting the sky. From here he could see the massive gates in the base open like puzzle pieces, accepting pickups from tanker trucks, and building-sized freight elevators shoot up to the apex of the towering needle. At its top was the floral platform, petals opening as cargotugs hopped up and down from the Spaceline during its float over. Eli checked his watch and guessed that the satellite was still somewhere over Japan.

  The gate rolled open, and Baiyue led them calmly to a service entrance, where she swiped a cryptofob and a door swung wide. She led them down halls flanked by instruments and security doors, penetrating ever deeper into the underbelly of the space elevator.

  Soon the hall opened into the vaulted cargo cavern of the elevator loading zone. A parade of bins floated along maglev tracks to the load point, where they would unfold, swallowing raw asteroid ore deposited by mechanical arms. As they walked the floor, Eli got a closer look at the robotic choreography of the ore deposits. Undulating like millipede legs above the tracks, each arm slid a metal proboscis into the freight cars to separate the exterior lift from an inside shell. Laser guidance synced the shell as the arm retracted, ensuring a clean dump of asteroid chunks. Once stuffed with ore, the bins floated on magnetic rails to the shipping bay outside.

  Baiyue hugged the walls, tracing the circumference of the loading zone until they came to an overflow bunker. The din of automatous forklifts and pick-pack-and-ship arms blended into a dull whir behind them. It seemed to Eli that they were heading into a forgotten place, with cobwebs forming in the corners. There was no precious asteroid ore here, only empty containers.

  Zoe noticed it too. “Where are we going?” she asked Eli.

  Baiyue turned to look at her, then at Eli. Without a word she continued into the labyrinth. Eli looked at Zoe and shrugged. “Covering our tracks, I guess.” Just as he lost sight of the loading zone through the maze of metal, Baiyue ducked behind a dumpster. Nervously, he followed. Zoe did the same.

  On the far side of the dumpster, they found Baiyue looking at a holo intently.

  “We are lost, aren’t we,” Zoe said.

  Without a word, Baiyue put her hand on Zoe’s shoulder and flooded her body with forty thousand volts. Zoe shook violently and dropped to the ground.

  “No!” Eli yelled, his voice echoing off the walls. Baiyue shot her hand out to cover his mouth, gripping his face painfully. Eli grabbed her arm to pry it off but it felt like trying to uproot a tree. She put a finger from her other hand to her lips, and Eli nodded, tears pooling in his eyes. The woman before him might have been synthesized from steel, she seemed so far from human. He had never seen Li as more than a strange rogue, but this thing was a monster. When the Xinren released him, he knelt in grief over his lover’s dead body.

  Baiyue turned the smoking corpse over with her foot. Rooting through her coveralls, she found the woman’s passport and holodisc. She stood and considered Eli. His head was in his hands as he knelt by the fallen woman, unable to hide the loss in his eyes.

  “Why?” he whispered.

  Baiyue cocked her head as if she did not understand. “This is the fastest way to leave the country without going through customs. There is only room for two people. Surely Lao told you.”

  “I tried to warn her,” he said as he stood, the words hollow on his tongue. The corpse that used to be Zoe Chou accused him with wide empty eyes. You missed Lao’s insinuation that I was expendable, they seemed to scream, but you would have killed me yourself if it brought you wealth. Memories haunted him of the night at the Wing hotel, or her birthday at the Sinan Mansions, or cooking with her in the shadow of the Mountain, and he felt tiny and alone in the dark machine belly.

  Baiyue left him no time to mourn, leaving the maze of empty containers. In a haze, Eli followed her back into the elevator loading zone. Once again, bins floated around them, queueing below the great lifts. Baiyue led Eli around the edge of the loading zone, keeping an eye on the engineers in the control booth. No one paid them a second glance. Soon they arrived at the door to a freight elevator, where Baiyue pressed her index finger to a wall panel. A plate brushed her epithelials, matching her genome to the dummy account Lao had set up.

  The door slid open and the two climbed into a booth no bigger than a back-alley noodle bar. It was the cockpit of a cargotug. A pilot was already there, running through a checklist. Behind him, masks hung over two seats. Baiyue sat, belted herself in with shoulder straps, and fit one of the masks over her head. Eli did the same, waiting for what came next. He looked at Baiyue nervously but she just stared out the tempered windshield, looking down on the waltzing robots below. Then the freight car lurched as it detached from the loading dock and picked up speed.

  Carbon caverns became blue sky as the cargotug shot outside, the sea around them blurring by as they sped along a magnetic track extending hundreds of kilometers out into the Pacific Ocean. As they slowed near the end of the track, Eli could see other such tracks radiating away from them, out over the ocean like spokes on a wheel. Beyond them, endless waves rolled out to the horizon.

  Getting cargo up to the Spaceline, after all, took more than a simple jet engine. Instead, the Mountain had eight magnetic acceleration tracks, used to push cargotugs hundreds of meters a second up the curve of the tower, shooting
them out like bullets with just enough velocity to reach the dropzone.

  Eli checked his watch through the plastic face mask and scanned the vista. There was the Spaceline, its periscopic tail bisecting the sky. It was hard to see at first, floating in from the East China Sea. But as the tail of the low orbit elevator drifted closer, Eli found its orange lights tracing a path into the clouds, and felt guilt and relief that he was leaving the Middle Kingdom for the last time.

  Suddenly, an angry red vortex streaked up from the northern seawall, and the entire elevator rattled violently and the wind roared and the lights around the edge of the platform went dark.

  Eli was about to ask what on earth could shake a Mountain, when the pilot said, “A blackout has knocked out communications with Spaceline control. Till we’re back online, we’re not going anywhere.”

  Chapter 57 – Xun (巽)

  Double Wind

  Li shouted after Xie as his hydrocycle sped away, but the roar of sirens drowned out her words. Enraged by Xie’s betrayal, afraid for what he might do, she felt every second weigh on her as she sprinted into the skyscraper forest of Lujiazui.

  She reached the lobby of the Tiger’s Den and passed through glass revolving doors. With her nose in the air she yelled, “I am Li Aizhu, mother of the Jade, avatar of Chang’e, and Elder Sister of Jesus Christ. Bring me to the Tiger. I imagine he is looking for me.”

  Guards escorted her to the penthouse. Fountains babbled and koi swam around a stone pond that was two hundred stories above sea level. Tapestries hung on the walls of ancient warriors on horseback. Everywhere, middle-aged bureaucrats scurried, pointing at holos. Dr. Yang was in the center, waiting for her. Next to him was a tall man in a silk suit with white hair, whom she recognized from holoviews all over the city.

  “Li Aizhu,” the Mayor growled, “you did not have to set fire to my city to get my attention.”

  Li ignored the Mayor, turning to Yang. “My daughter is on the island.” she said. “Tell me you can reprogram us to avoid phase three. I won’t be food for a power plant, nor will she. Give us the lives we deserve, or I will kill you where you stand.”

  “Aizhu,” Yang said softly, “you must tell your followers to stop this nonsense.”

  “Do it, Yang!” she screamed, her eyes sparkling with silver light. “Save us or die!”

  “I cannot,” Yang said with a weak voice. “There is a failsafe in your DNA, a hyperapoptosis switch that triggers your sacrifice if tumors do not develop. One way or another, your fate is sealed.”

  His words infuriated her. The idea that her daughter would grow up without a mother, just as she had, that they were doomed to waste away, liquefied her grasp on reason.

  Li screamed and leapt at Yang, pulling him to the wooden teahouse at the edge of the suite and threw him to the ground. She grabbed a corner of the teahouse, and, barely straining, ripped off a wooden wall and hurled it at the windows, splintering the ornamental hut and shattering a panel of glass. Then she grabbed the professor’s collar and dragged him out to the edge of the skyscraper. A sea of neon light spread over the city, but the professor’s face was in shadow as she dangled him out over six hundred meters of air. Across the river in Waitan, fires raged like an angry orange demon.

  “Wait!” the Mayor yelled, running over, grasping the edge of the tower. “I can help you.” Hu pointed to a mantiscraft curving around the spires of Pudong. Aiming its thrusters under its jointed underbelly, the ship floated up to the penthouse of the Tiger’s Den, and reached out with robotic claws to grasp the edge of the superscraper and stabilize itself. As it hovered, the Mayor said, “This is my personal craft. Go with my crew and find your daughter, bring her back here and we will spare no expense to re-make you in whatever image you desire. Just don’t hurt Dr. Yang.”

  As the craft’s door opened, Li let Yang go. “I don’t want much,” she said softly, her guard slipping, “just a life like any hu—“

  Before Li could finish, her arms were yanked back as fibers of nanowire caught her in a web. She turned and saw soldiers in body armor jump onto the penthouse balcony from the mantiscraft, aiming hoses at her that sprayed superstrong carbon filament, mummifying her with graphite strands. Wires whipped around her torso and legs, binding her knees and ankles. Pulled off-balance, her legs buckled and she fell, writhing on the balcony like a caught fish as the guards surrounded her.

  But before they could subdue her, she closed her eyes and opened the doors within. Power flooded Li’s arms and she burst from the carbon cocoon.

  The soldiers fired more goop at her but she dodged the spray, elbowing one soldier in the gut and hurling him into another. She grabbed Yang around the chest and leapt with him up to the door of the hovering mantiscraft, hauling the professor into the cockpit. She slammed the pilot into the hull, knocking him out. Then she grabbed the control stick and swung the ship upwards, pulling back the robotic arms and tearing out chunks of the balcony as the mantiscraft veered away from the tower.

  Suddenly, far in the distance, the edge of the city blinked out in shadow. Moments later, she saw a pillar of fire swirl angrily up towards Heaven.

  It bloomed and faded in an instant, leaving only an afterimage seared into the sky and horrible regret in her gut. It had to have been Xie, she knew. Li watched the city go dark and saw the void become the raging Pacific, engorging the rivers and gutting the city. She knew that anyone in its path would drown, and flashbacks ravaged her of the poor souls she had sacrificed in Anqing, the bloated bodies that had grabbed her in the current before Xie himself had rescued her. Panicking, she knew she had to find Baiyue before the waters did. Yet Li still had no idea where her daughter was. She jammed on the throttle and the mantiscraft shot out over Lujiazui, to the last place she had seen her daughter alive.

  In the penthouse, alarms were blaring.

  “Sectors 18 to 22 down!” a bureaucrat shouted. “Substation failure! Critical breach at the Binjiang Gate! Backups down, emergency measures failed!” The man pressed the mayor. “Sir, we must draw power from the Spaceline to restore the grid! The city might already be lost! Sir, are you listening?”

  Mayor Hu stared out his shattered penthouse window at where the column of fire had been. He clenched his fists so tightly they were turning blue. He looked at his wristwatch. “The tail has not yet picked up its cargo. We have never missed a drop. Not since the first orbit, for five years. Never.”

  “Every second we wait, people are dying!” the lacky said as the entire suite looked on. “What will the press think if you hesitate? Who do you care about, Kenyan miners or your own people?”

  “The future,” Hu whispered, watching the growing shadow. When the room grew silent, he shouted, “What are you waiting for? Make sure the Spaceline stays on track! Divert power from the levees!” People scrambled, shouting into holos to divert the lifeblood of the island city into the largest off-world mining center in Asia. Furious, the Mayor looked out at the fleeing mantiscraft, faint against smoke rising from Puxi. “And call in the cavalry. Get the professor back here.”

  Inside the mantiscraft, Yang watched Li pilot desperately, swerving the ship in arcs around the towers, searching anxiously for her daughter as waters fell upon the city.

  “Li,” Yang said quietly, “if you don’t help me right now, millions of innocent people will die.”

  Li ignored him, jamming the control stick again and forcing the mantiscraft into a dive, just missing the Jin Mao Tower as they swept out over the river. “Help me find my daughter first,” she growled, “I know you have a way to locate her.”

  “No one knows where she is,” Yang said. “If you keep searching, she will drown along with half the island. And if Shanghai is submerged, then you, and your daughter, and every hybrid in your cell line will be branded as mass murderers. Metrocide, Li. That will be your crime. Your entire lineage will be remembered for all time as the drowners of cities. Is that who want to be?” Yang waited, and found her silence telling. “I swear on my son’s li
fe,” the professor continued, “you and I can restore power to the seawall. And I will make sure everyone remembers who saved them.”

  The stolen mantiscraft now slowed, hanging in midair, surrounded by smoke. Li watched as the water fell, surging through the streets, washing people away like garbage. And in the water were visions. She saw blue bloated corpses in the lake and bloody warriors cut down in battle and dying women in metal quarry dunes mocking her failure as their bodies dissolved into viscous protoplasm cursing her name.

  But between the black tentacles of death spilling upon the world from the gaping wound she had opened, there was a single point of light. It grew, radiant spears piercing her mind, a luminous entity, a protomother in damask robes. The Holy Spirit of the Lady in the Moon flew to her, with a glowing aura that draped across the broken crystal city, her voice a monsoon arpeggio that could not be denied. And like a holy arrow, the luminous entity shot into a mantiscraft hovering above the destruction, into the heart of the woman inside.

  And Li saw. Tiny points of light pulsed across the city, in the heart of every living being. She saw the connections between them with the eyes of Chang’e, and knew that she had blessed every man, woman and child as the Lady in the Moon. They had always been her children, each and every one of them, as surely as any biological daughter. The notion of harm coming to any one of her beloved offspring triggered a wave of fear. That tens of millions of her sons and daughters might die a slow, suffocating asphyxiation was too much to bear.