fortunately — a small mercy — there was no such feed. The peasants had no cameras of their own, and the wing cameras had been disabled on the military aircraft. Even once the Changcheng Strategy was suspended, and external communications restored, there would be no damning videos to be posted on YouTube of planes swooping over farms, huts, and villages.
Sometimes you have to cut in order to cure.
Li looked over at Cho, who appeared even more haggard than before. The older man was leaning against the wall by the window, chain-smoking, lighting each new cigarette off the butt of the previous one. Cho didn’t meet his eyes.
Li found himself thinking of his old friends at Johns Hopkins and the CDC, and wondering what they would have to say if the story ever did break. There was a calculator sitting on the table. He picked it up, rolled one of the chairs out on its casters, sat, and punched in numbers, hoping to convince himself that it wasn’t that huge, that monstrous. Ten thousand people sounded like a lot, but in a country of 1.3 billion it was only…
The display showed the answer: 0.000769% of the population. The digits in the middle seemed darker, somehow, but surely it was just a trick of the light streaming in from the setting sun: 007. His American colleagues had always made gentle fun of his belief in numerology, but that was a sequence even they put special stock in: license to kill.
The phone rang. Cho made no move to go for it, so Li got up and lifted the black handset.
“It’s done,” a voice said through crackles of static.
Li felt his stomach churn.
Caitlin and her mom returned to Kuroda’s office at the University of Tokyo the next morning.
“Fascinating about China,” said Kuroda after they’d exchanged pleasantries; Caitlin could now say konnichi wa with the best of them.
“What?” said her mother.
“Haven’t you watched the news?” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It seems they’re having massive communications failures over there — cell phones, the Internet, and so on. Overtaxed infrastructure, I imagine; a lot of the networking architecture they use probably isn’t very scalable, and they have had such rapid growth. Not to mention relying on shoddy equipment — now, if they’d just buy more Japanese hardware. Speaking of which…”
He handed Caitlin the eyePod, and she immediately started feeling it all over with her fingers. The unit was longer now. An extension had been added to the bottom and it was held on with what felt like duct tape; it was a prototype after all. But the extension had the same width and thickness as the original unit, so the whole thing was still a rectangular block. It was substantially larger than Caitlin’s iPod — she had an old screenless version of the iPod Shuffle, since an LCD didn’t do her any good. But it wasn’t much bigger than Bashira’s iPhone, although the unit Dr. Kuroda had built had sharp right angles instead of the rounded corners of Apple’s devices.
“Okay,” said Kuroda. “I think I explained before that the eyePod is always in communication with your post- retinal implant via a Bluetooth 4.0 connection, right?”
“Yes,” said Caitlin, and “Right,” added her mom.
“But now we’ve added another layer of communication. That module I attached to the end of the eyePod is the Wi-Fi pack. It’ll find any available connection and use it to transmit to me copies of the input and output datastreams — your raw retinal feed, and that feed as corrected by the eyePod’s software.”
“That sounds like a lot of data,” Caitlin said.
“Not as much as you’d think. Remember, your nervous system uses slow chemical signaling. The main part of the retinal data signal — the acute portion produced by the fovea — amounts to only 0.5 megabits per second. Even Bluetooth 3.0 could handle a thousand times that rate.”
“Ah,” said Caitlin, and perhaps her mom nodded.
“Now, there’s a switch on the side of the unit — feel it. No, farther down. Right, that’s it. It lets you select between three communication modes: duplex, simplex, and off. In duplex mode, there’s two-way data transmission: copies of your retinal signals and the corrected datastream come here, and new software from here can be sent to you. But, of course, it’s not good security to leave an incoming channel open: the eyePod communicates with your post-retinal implant, after all, and we wouldn’t want people hacking into your brain.”
“Goodness!” said Mom.
“Sorry,” said Kuroda, but there was humor in his voice. “Anyway, so if you press the switch, it toggles over to simplex mode — in which the eyePod sends signals here but doesn’t receive anything back. Do that now. Hear that low-pitched beep? That means it’s in simplex. Press the switch again — that high-pitched beep means it’s in duplex.”
“All right,” said Caitlin.
“And, to turn it off altogether, just press and hold the switch for five seconds; same thing to turn it back on.”
“Okay.”
“And, um, don’t lose the unit, please. The University has it insured for two hundred million yen, but, frankly, it’s pretty much irreplaceable, in that if it’s lost my bosses will gladly cash the insurance check but they’ll never give me permission to take the time required to build a second unit — not after this one has failed in their eyes.”
It’s failed in my eye, too, Caitlin thought — but then she realized that Dr. Kuroda must be even more disappointed than she was. After all, she was no worse off than before coming to Japan — well, except for the shiner, and that would at least give her an interesting story to tell at school. In fact, she was better off now, because the eyePod was making her pupils contract properly — she’d be able to kiss the dark glasses goodbye. Kuroda was now boosting the signal her implant was sending down her left optic nerve so that it overrode the still- incorrect signal her right retina was producing.
But he had devoted months, if not years, to this project, and had little to show for it. He had to be bitterly upset and, she realized, it was a big gamble on his part to let her take the equipment back to Canada.
“Anyway,” he said, “you work on it from your end: let that brilliant brain of yours try to make sense of the signals it’s getting. And I’ll work on it from my end, analyzing the data your retina puts out and trying to improve the software that re-encodes it. Just remember…”
He didn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. Caitlin knew what he’d been about to say: you’ve only got until the end of the year.
She listened to his wall clock tick.
Chapter 9
Sinanthropus regretted it the moment he did it: slapping the flat of his hand against the rickety table top in the Internet cafe. Tea sloshed from his cup and everyone in the room turned to look at him: old Wu, the proprietor; the other users who might or might not be dissidents themselves; and the tough-looking plainclothes cop.
Sinanthropus was seething. The window he’d so carefully carved into the Great Firewall had slammed shut; he was cut off again from the outside world. Still, he knew he had to say something, had to make an excuse for his violent action.
“Sorry,” he said, looking at each of the questioning faces in turn. “Just lost the text of a document I was writing.”
“You have to save,” said the cop, helpfully. “Always remember to save.”
More thoughts imposing themselves, but garbled, incomplete.
…existence … hurt … no contact …
Fighting to perceive, to hear, to be instructed, by the voice.
More: whole … part … whole…
Straining to hear, but—
