contradictions, no problems at all. The meat in my skull has been rearranged; that explains everything.
And in the world of desires and values? I want to serve the Ensemble, more than I’ve ever wanted anything before. All I have to do is find a way to reconcile this with my sense of who I am.
Huang returns in the morning, to help me get organized. With BDI as my sponsors, immigration is a mere formality. I arrange for removalists to pack and ship the contents of my flat in Perth. It takes only seconds to alter the nationality of my bank accounts, and the primary physical address of my communications number.
My client is due to call me on the twelfth, for a fortnightly status report. I load The Night Switchboard with a message—to be triggered by the password which was allocated at our first contact (and which the mod knows, but I don’t)—stating that I’ve dropped the case for reasons of ill health, and requesting an account number to which I can refund my fee.
As I tidy up each loose end from my old life, it grows clear how much more sense it makes to have recruited me, rather than killing me. This way, there is no corpse to be disposed of, no data trail to be erased, no police investigation to be led astray. The only deception required consists of a few white lies—and what more could anyone hope for in the perfect crime than the victim’s sincere collaboration?
In the afternoon, Huang shows me around BDI.
There are about a hundred employees, mostly scientists and technicians, but only a small part of the organization’s structure is explained to me. Chen Ya-ping (the woman who interrogated me) is in charge of security, but she also has administrative and scientific duties; her official title is Support Services Manager. She questions me again—with no gun at my head, this time—and seems disappointed that my story is virtually unchanged. All I can confess to having lied about is my speculation on the reasons behind the kidnapping—and when I describe the two theories I previously kept to myself, she gives no indication of how close I might be to the truth. I swallow my disappointment; the Ensemble is everything to me, and I want to know everything about them—but I understand that I’m going to have to earn their trust, loyalty mod notwithstanding.
Later, she shows me some glossy promotional material for state-of-the-art upgrades which will supposedly chameleon-proof their security system. I break the news, as tactfully as I can, that the latest model chameleons, due for release at the end of the month, will render any such expensive improvements obsolete. And although I can’t offer to put her directly on the chameleon makers’ advertising list—they vet applicants very thoroughly—I promise to pass on all further information as it reaches me.
Security itself is just four people, all of whom I’ve met before. Besides Huang Qing, there’s Lee Soh Lung (who drugged me in the basement), and Yang Wenli and Liu Hua (who guarded me in my flat). Lee, the most senior, is responsible for the details of day-to-day operations; she formally explains the job to me. There are always two guards on duty, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; with five of us now, each shift is to be nine hours and thirty-six minutes. I’m rostered from 19:12 to 04:48, starting tonight.
In the early evening, I call my parents, who are travelling in Europe; I catch them in Potsdam. They seem relieved that I’ve finally taken up stable employment. As for moving north, well, why not? ‘NHK is full of opportunities, isn’t it?’ says my mother, vaguely. Germany, they tell me, is becoming unpleasant—the Saxony Independence Front is blowing up trains again.
Huang is on duty with me until midnight. I spend the shift primed; my four colleagues all have Sentinel, which is basically a commercial equivalent of P3. (I pry no further; curious as I am, I assume it would be indelicate to ask if anyone else has loyalty mods.) Apart from random patrols through the building and grounds—stepped up, says Huang, since my incursion—there’s little for us to do; even the images from the surveillance cameras are monitored by software. Our presence is far from redundant—no computer alone could have kept me from fleeing the building with Laura that night—but being potentially indispensable does nothing to keep you busy. We pass the time when we’re not patrolling by playing cards or chess; there’s no need for this, since our mods preclude boredom, but Huang—fifteen years younger than me—has some old-fashioned ideas. ‘You’re more alert if you’re doing something. Besides, spending half your life in a stake-out trance is like living half as long.’
Other staff work at night, but we don’t have much contact with them. I was right about one thing: Laura’s room is monitored separately, and members of the team studying her are on duty round the clock. They have half a floor to themselves, packed with computing equipment. A few people greet Huang as we walk through, but most ignore us. I glance at the workstation screens; some show neural maps, some are densely covered with formulae; one shows a schematic of the basement room—briefly, before the user flicks to another task. I start wondering how things would have turned out, if
At midnight, Lee takes Huang’s place. She’s taciturn by comparison, and P3 responds by pushing me further into stake-out mode. I don’t lose track of the passage of time; it just doesn’t touch me. When Yang arrives to take over from me, I’m not surprised, or relieved; I don’t feel anything at all.
I deprime on my way to the station. As P3’s constraints dissolve, I’m momentarily disoriented, and I pause to take in my surroundings: the empty, twisted street; the squat, concrete labs and factories; the grey pre-dawn sky. The air is cool and sweet. I find myself trembling with joy.
My client calls on the twelfth, as expected, but leaves no message in reply; perhaps he or she is too paranoid to want the money returned, for fear of the transaction being traced—even if the risk is only marginally greater than that involved in paying me in the first place.
My furniture arrives. My residency status is confirmed. In my free time, I begin to explore the city—with Deja Vu’s map to guide me, but the tourist spiel disabled. I’m not interested in seeking out temples or museums; I pick a direction at random, and wander past apartment blocks and office towers, department stores and flea markets. The heat and the crowds remain oppressive, and the monsoon rain always seems to catch me unprepared—but I start to feel like I’m cursing the weather out of familiarity, rather than a mere failure to acclimatize.
Huang Qing lives a couple of kilometres to the west of me, sharing a flat with his girlfriend, Teo Chu, a sound engineer and musician. They invite me over one morning, and we listen to Chu’s latest ROM—hypnotically beautiful, full of strange, broken rhythms, sudden sweeping ascents of pitch, measured silences. She tells me the work was inspired by traditional Cambodian music.
Both came here as refugees, but neither are from old Hong Kong. Huang was born in Taiwan. Nearly all of his family had been in the Nationalist government’s civil service; eleven years after the invasion, they were still barred from most jobs. Huang was five when they came south. Pirates boarded the ship; several people were killed. ‘We were lucky,’ he says. ‘They stole the navigation equipment, and wrecked the engines, but they didn’t find all the fresh water. A few days later, we ran into a patrol boat off Mindanao, and they towed us in for repairs. The Philippines were anti-PRC back then; we were treated like heroes.’
Chu was born in Singapore. Her mother, a journalist, has been in prison there for the past eight years; nobody’s ever told her precisely why. Chu was at university in Seoul when the arrest took place. She hasn’t been allowed back into Singapore since. She has no father; she was conceived parthenogenetically. She sends money to her grandparents for her mother’s legal battle, but so far, every eighteen months like clockwork, the courts have renewed the detention order.
I doubt that Chu knows that BDI is involved in kidnapping, so I discuss my own route to NHK circumspectly. Huang stares at the carpet while I spin out a mundane lie about my six years as a prison officer, before being retrenched in the RehabCorp takeover. Without Sentinel, he often seems ill at ease in my presence, which is understandable: I’m quite sure, now, that he doesn’t have the loyalty mod, and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t find my devotion to the Ensemble a little unsettling—knowing its cause, but not knowing, as I do, just how
In the weeks that follow, my new life begins to seem less and less extraordinary. My curiosity about Laura —and the Ensemble’s work in general—doesn’t fade, but I have to accept that my ignorance is in the Ensemble’s best interest. Even so, I wish I could contribute more than spending nine-and-a-half hours a day as a zombie night-watchman. I don’t even know who we’re supposed to be guarding BDI against—surely I was the only person on the planet seriously looking for Laura? Even if my ex-client has hired someone new, it’s unlikely that my successor would have as much luck as I did; the pharmaceutical-purchases trail has been erased. So,
I soon learn not to invoke Karen; her sarcastic comments only make me angry and confused. I try to take control, to fantasize her happily sharing this life with me, but it seems that my memories can only be twisted so far;
