What the hell had Wang been doing out there?
A short article in the Shanghai Satellite speculated that he could have set the ride going without meaning to. Suicide seemed the more likely explanation. On the other hand, why would somebody wanting to commit suicide pick his way along the track when he could have simply leapt from the open stretch of the boarding platform? Especially, another article added, since there were increasing indications that Wang hadn’t actually jumped but had been run over by the train as it came bearing down on him.
Accident after all? At any rate, nobody was talking about murder, although here and there some commentators speculated about an accident caused by someone other than Wang.
Two minutes later Jericho knew better. Xinhua reported that the surveillance camera footage was now being examined. Wang had apparently been accompanied by a tall man who left the floor right after Wang fell. The two men seemed to have had an argument, Wang had certainly been moving along the track with no safety gear, and the train had run into him level with the southern pillar.
Jericho drank his tea and considered.
Who was the murderer?
‘Computer,’ he said. ‘Open Yoyofiles.’
More than two thousand hits. Where should he begin? He decided to set a profile match of ninety-five per cent, which left 117 files where the surveillance system thought that it had seen Yoyo.
He ordered the computer to select files with direct eye contact.
There was only one, immediately by the block where Yoyo lived, recorded at 02.47. Jericho wouldn’t have been able to say exactly where the scanner was, but he suspected it was in a signpost. Exact coordinates were stored in a separate file. There was no doubt that the woman over there on the other side of the street was Yoyo. She was sitting on an unmarked motorbike, no licence plates, her head tilted down, both hands on a crash helmet. Just before she put it on, she lifted her gaze and looked directly into the scanner, then she put down the mirrored faceplate and sped away.
‘Gotcha,’ muttered Jericho. ‘Computer, rewind.’
Yoyo took the helmet briskly off again.
‘Stop.’
She looked him straight in the eyes.
‘Zoom, two hundred and thirty per cent.’
The new technology of the wall could give him a life-size view of Yoyo. The way she sat there on her bike, every detail clear in three-dimensional surroundings, it was as though he had opened a door out onto the night from his loft. He had judged the zoom quite well. Yoyo looked about three or four centimetres taller now than in real life, and the image was pin-sharp. A system that could recognise the structure of an iris from all the way across the street wasn’t nicknamed ‘the freckle-counter’ for nothing. Jericho knew that this would be his last good look at Yoyo for some time, so he tried to read what he could out of it.
You’re frightened, thought Jericho. But you hide it well.
Also, your mind is made up.
He stepped back. Yoyo was wearing pale jeans, knee-boots, a printed T-shirt down over her hips and a short puffy jacket of patent leather that looked as though it might have come from one of the spray cans he had found in her room. Most of the slogan printed on her shirt was in shadow, or under the jacket, and only a little showed where the jacket was open at the front. He would look into that later.
‘Find this person in the folder called Yoyofiles,’ he said. ‘Ninety per cent match.’
Straight away he got the answer, seventy-six hits. He considered having the computer play all the films, but told it instead to plot the recordings’ coordinates onto a city map of Shanghai. A moment later the map came up on the wall, showing Yoyo’s route, where she had gone on the night she disappeared. The last sighting had been just across from Demon Point, the little e-bike and hybrids workshop. After that, the trail went cold.
She was in the forgotten world.
* * *
Yoyo had only remained undiscovered in Quyu because there were hardly any surveillance systems there. Even so, Quyu wasn’t a slum in the classic sense, not to be compared with the festering shantytowns that surrounded Calcutta, Mexico City or Bombay and oozed out into the surrounding countryside. As a global city on a par with New York, Shanghai needed Quyu the way the Big Apple needed the Bronx, meaning that the city left the district in peace. It didn’t send in the bulldozers, or the riot police. In the years after the turn of the millennium, the historic inner-city areas and slums in the Shanghai interior had been torn down systematically until those boroughs were free of any sort of authentic history. Where the outer district of Baoshan ran up against this new Shanghai core, Quyu had grown up and been allowed to grow, much as a landowner might allow scrubland to grow in order to save the cost of a gardener. Quyu, north-west of Huangpu, now marked the crossover to swathes of makeshift settlements, vestigial villages, run-down small towns and abandoned industrial estates – a Moloch that grabbed more of the surrounding land each year, guzzling down the last remnants of a region that had once been rural.
Quyu was internally autonomous, and externally it was watched as closely as a prison camp; it was one of the most impressive examples of twenty-first-century urban poverty. The population was made up of people displaced from their original homes in the heart of Shanghai, of those who had lived here even before Quyu absorbed their small towns, of migrants from poor provinces lured to the promised land of the global city and living on temporary residence permits that no one ever checked, of battalions of illegal labourers who didn’t officially exist. Everybody in Quyu was poor, though some were less poor than others. Most money was made in drugs or in the leisure sector, largely prostitution. The social structure of Quyu’s population was unregulated in every way, with not a hint of health insurance, oldage pension or unemployment benefit.
But it was still more than just a horde of beggars.
After all, most of them had work. They manned the assembly lines and the building sites, they cleaned the parks and streets, drove delivery trucks and cleaned the houses of the better-off. They would turn up like ghosts in the regulated world, do their job and then vanish again once they were no longer needed. They were poor because everybody living in Quyu could be replaced at twenty-four hours’ notice. They stayed poor because, in the words of the wise old sage Bill Gates, they were part of a global society divided into those who were networked and those who weren’t. In Quyu, nobody was networked, even if they owned a mobile phone or a computer. Being networked meant playing the same high-speed game as the rest of the world, not letting your attention lapse for a second. It meant sifting out the relevant information from the irrelevant, grabbing advantages that lapsed as soon as you logged off. It meant being better, faster, leaner, more innovative and more flexible than the competition at every moment, it meant moving home when required, switching jobs.
It meant getting a place at the table.
Gates had said that the future belonged to the networked. Logically, non-networked society therefore had no future. Individuals outside the network were like spiders who didn’t spin threads. Nothing got caught in their web. They would starve.
Officially, nobody had starved to death in Quyu yet. Even if the powers-that-be in China had a blind spot when it came to slums or shantytowns, they wouldn’t quite so readily allow anyone to die of hunger on the streets of Shanghai. Less from the milk of human kindness, and more because you just couldn’t have that sort of thing happening in a world financial centre. On the other hand, official attitudes to Quyu mattered not a jot. What sort of official figures might come out of a district with totally opaque demographics, which was widely seen as ungovernable and uncontrollable, which actually ran its own affairs in some incomprehensible way and where the police hardly dared venture, although they had put a ring of iron around its edge? It was known that there was infrastructure of sorts, houses of sorts, some habitable, others barely more than damp caves. Clean drinking water was scarce, power cuts frequent, there was hardly a flush toilet in the place. There were doct
ors and ambulances in Quyu, hospitals, schools and kindergartens, snack bars, tea houses, bars, cinemas and kiosks and street markets of the sort that had almost completely vanished from the rest of Shanghai. Nobody knew, though, how life went on in Quyu exactly. Crimes committed there were hardly followed up, and this too was part of the tacit agreement that the district should look after itself, and was to be cut loose from the dynamic of social development. Residents were given no support but they were not held to account either, as long as they didn’t break the law outside the borders of their tribal reservation. There was no future here, and that meant no past, or at least not a past one could boast of or build on. Without a network, they lived outside of time itself, on the dark fringes of a universe whose shining centres were connected by multi-storey freeways and sky trains. Certainly the shortest routes from Shanghai city centre out to the luxurious commuter towns ran through districts like Quyu, but that didn’t mean anybody had to pass through the forgotten world and actually take notice of what went on there. The routes simply ran right overhead, as though the place were a swamp.
For a while the leadership in Beijing had asked themselves whether this method of running Shanghai might lead to revolt. Nobody doubted that terrorists and criminals had gone to ground there. Nevertheless the necessity of tightening the State’s grip in the district was undermined by scepticism that a rabble of migrant farm workers, factory girls, errand boys and building labourers would ever be able to coalesce into anything like a workers’ uprising. Large-scale political violence was expected from the bourgeoisie instead, since they had access to the information superhighway and to all kinds of hi-tech. On the other hand, the conventional criminals who haunted Quyu would feel all the safer there, the less danger they were in from outside. When had the Mafia ever called the workers to arms? In the end, the opinion prevailed that every criminal in Quyu was one less in Xaxu, leading Beijing to issue a clear recommendation:
Forget Quyu.
Yoyo had taken shelter in a world which was one of the blank spaces on the map of urbanisation. Jericho wondered whether anyone in Quyu had ever thought that it was also a form of discrimination not to be under surveillance.
Probably not.
He had spent the evening looking on the net for texts that Yoyo might have written since she went under. He used the same technology for this that Diamond Shield used in its hectic search for dissidents, or that the American Secret Services used in the unending war on terror, the same he had used himself against Animal Ma Liping. The rhythms of keystrokes on a computer keyboard were just as individual as fingerprints. A suspect could be identified in the very moment that he began to write his text into a browser. Advances in Social Network Analysis were even more interesting: choice of vocabulary, favoured metaphors, everything left grammatical and semantic clues. A computer only needed a few hundred words to identify who was writing with almost one hundred per cent accuracy. Most interesting of all, the system didn’t just blindly pile up words, it recognised meaning and context. To a certain extent, it actually understood what the writer was trying to say. It developed an unconscious intelligence, and became capable of tracking down whole networks, world-spanning structures of terrorism or organised crime, where neo-Nazis, bombers, racists and hooligans living thousands of miles apart met in a virtual alliance – though in real life they might well have beaten one another to pulp.
This had helped to track down paedophiles and uncover industrial espionage, but it also proved to be a nightmare for dissidents and human rights activists. It was no surprise that repressive regimes in particular showed great interest in the methods of Social Network Analysis. Nevertheless, Yoyo had always managed to stay one step ahead of the security services’ analytical programs, until a few days ago she had been exposed and identified. If indeed that was what had happened. At least Yoyo must have believed that that was the case, and this explained her headlong flight.
What he still couldn’t understand was how she noticed.
Jericho yawned.
He was dog-tired. He had had the computer running after clues all night. Obviously he would not be finding Yoyo any time soon. The Internet Police had spent years snapping at her heels, with no success. She probably knew the analytical programs’ algorithms inside out and backwards; in such matters, working for Tu Technologies was like sitting in the Jade Temple of Enlightenment. Feeling fairly baffled, he wondered how he could manage something that until just recently not even the government had been able to do; but he had one invaluable advantage.
He knew that Yoyo was one of the Guardians.
While the computer was chasing her virtual shadow, Jericho had unpacked the rest of the crates and turned the loft into something that pretty nearly resembled a flat. When at last the furniture was in place, the pictures were hanging on the walls and his clothes were in the wardrobe, once everything was tidied away and in its place, and Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies rippled through the room, he felt happy and at peace for the first time in days, free from those images of Shenzhen, and had even lost all interest in Yoyo for the time being.
* * *
Owen Jericho, snug in a cocoon of music.
‘Match,’ announced the computer.
Irksome.
So irksome that he decided there and then to dial up the personality protocol by thirty per cent. At least then the computer would sound like someone you could share a coffee or a glass of wine with.
‘There’s a blog entry that looks like Yoyo,’ said the warm female voice, almost human. ‘She posted an entry on Brilliant Shit, a Mando-prog forum. Should I read it out?’
‘Are you sure that it’s Yoyo?’
‘Almost certain. She knows how to cover her tracks. I imagine Yoyo is working with distorters. What do you think?’
Without the personality protocol the remark would have come out as: ‘Eighty-four point seven per cent match. Probability that distorter is being used, ninety point two per cent.’
‘I think it’s very probable that she’s working with distorters,’ Jericho agreed.
Distorters were programs that go over a text and alter the writer’s personal style. They were becoming more and more popular. Some of them rewrote texts using the style of great poets and writers, so that you could dash off a message and have it reach the recipient looking as though it had been written by Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway or Jonathan Franzen. Other programs imitated politicians. It became dangerous when malevolent hackers cracked the profiles of other, unsuspecting users and borrowed their style. Many dissidents on the net preferred to use distorters that would rewrite with randomly generated standards, using a variety of styles. The most important thing was that the meaning remain the same.
And that was precisely the weak spot in most programs.
‘Elements in the blog post are not stylistically uniform,’ said the computer. ‘That confirms your theory, Owen.’
A nice touch, using his first name. Polite too to pretend that it had been his theory, as though the computer itself hadn’t suggested that a distorter was at work. God knows, fifty per cent personality protocol was enough. At eighty per cent the computer would be crawling up his backside. Jericho hesitated. In fact he was fed up with calling the thing ‘computer’. What would a girl like this be called? Maybe—
He programs her with a name.
‘Diane?’
‘Yes, Owen?’
Great. He likes Diane. Diane is his new right-hand woman.
‘Please read the entry.’
‘Glad to. Hi all. Back in our galaxy now, have been for a few days. Was really stressed out these last days, is anybody harshing on me? Couldn’t help it, really truly. All happened so fast. Shit. Even so quickly you can be forgotten. Only waiting now for the old demons to visit me once more. Yeah, and, I’m busy writing new songs. If any of the band asks: We’ll make an appearance once I’ve got a few euphonious lyrics on the go. Let’s prog!’
Once again Jericho wonders how the program can identify a wr
iter from such a mishmash, but experience has taught him that even less would be enough. Still, he doesn’t have to understand it. He’s an end-user, not a programmer.
‘Give me an analysis,’ he says. It’s really quite cosy by now, with Satie and this velvet-smooth voice.
‘Of course, Owen.’
That’s to say, this ‘of course’ has to go. It reminds him of HAL 9000 from A Space Odyssey. Ever since the satnav system was invented, every speaking computer has been doing its best to copy crazy HAL.
‘The text is supposed to sound cocky,’ the computer said. ‘The style is broken though by the terms even so quickly and euphonious. The old demons to visit me once more seems rather forced – I don’t believe that the distorter was at work here. Everything else is just minor detail. Lyrics on the go for instance doesn’t fit the style of the second and third sentences.’
‘What do you make of the content?’
‘Hard to say. I might have a couple of suggestions for you. First off, galaxy. That might just be loosely meant, or it might be a synonym for something.’
‘For instance?’
‘Probably for a locality.’
‘Go on.’
‘Demons. You’ve already been looking for demons. I suspect that Yoyo is referring here to the City Demons, or City Daemons.’
‘I’m with you there. By the way, Daemons was a blind alley. Anything else strike you?’
The computer hesitated. The personality protocol once more.
‘I don’t know enough about Yoyo. I could give you about three hundred and eighty thousand variant interpretations of the other wording and phrases.’
‘Put a sock in it,’ Jericho murmured.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Please search Shanghai for the word galaxy in connection with some place or other.’
This time the computer didn’t hesitate. ‘No entries.’
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