Chapter 6
LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone
Title: Same Old Same Old
Date: Tuesday 18 September, 15:44 EST
Mood: Anxious
Location: Godzilla’s stomping ground
Music: Lee Amodeo, “Nothing To See Here, Move Along”
Well, the Mom and I are still here in Tokyo. I have a bandage over my left eye, and we’re waiting for the swelling — the edema, I should say — to go down, so that there’s no unnatural pressure on my optic nerve. Tomorrow, the bandage will come off and I should be able to see! :D
I’ve been trying to keep my spirits up, but the suspense is killing me. And my best material is bombing here! I referred to the retina, which gathers light, as “the catcher in the eye,” and nobody laughed; apparently they don’t have to read Salinger in Japan.
Anyway, check it: I’ve got this transceiver attached to my optic nerve, just behind my left eye. When it’s turned on, it’ll grab the signals my retina is putting out and transmit them to this little external computer pack I’m supposed to carry around, like, forever; I called it my eyePod, and at least that made Dr. Kuroda laugh. Anyway, the eyePod will reprocess the signals, correcting the errors in encoding, and then beam the corrected version to the implant, which will pass the information back to the optic nerve so it can continue on into that mysterious realm called — cue scary music — The Brain of Calculass!
Speaking of brains, I’m really enjoying the book I mentioned before: The Origin of Consciousness Yadda Yadda. And from it comes our Word of the Day(tm): Commissurotomy. No, that’s not the wise but ancient leader of the Jellicle tribe from Cats (still my fave musical!). Rather, it’s what they call it when they sever the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain — which, of course, are the two chambers of Jaynes’s bicameral mind…
Anyway, tomorrow we’ll find out if my own operation worked. Please post some encouraging comments here, folks — give me something to read while I wait for the moment of truth…
[And seekrit message to BG4: check your email, babe!]
China’s Paramount Leader and President replaced the ornate, gold-trimmed telephone handset into the cradle on his vast cherry-wood desk. He looked down the long length of his office, at the intricately carved wooden wall panels, beautiful tapestries, and glass display cases. A stick of sweet incense was burning on the sideboard.
The room was absolutely quiet. Finally, sure now of his decision, he shifted in his red-leather chair and touched the intercom button.
“Yes, Your Excellency?” said a female voice at once.
“Bring me the Changcheng Strategy document.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then: “Right away.”
“And have Minister Zhang briefed on the Shanxi situation, then have him come see me.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
The president got up from his chair and moved to the large side window, its red velvet curtains tied back with gold sashes. The window behind his desk looked out on the Forbidden City, but this one looked over the Southern Sea, one of two small artificial lakes surrounded by immaculately groomed parkland on the grounds of the Zhongnanhai complex. Looking in this direction, one could almost forget that this was downtown Beijing, and that Tiananmen Square was just south of here.
He cast his mind back to 1989. The government had tried its best then to maintain social order, but rabble rousers outside China had made a difficult situation much worse by inundating the country with faxes of wildly inaccurate news reports, including New York Times articles and transcripts of CNN broadcasts.
The Party recognized that there might someday be a similar circumstance during which protecting its citizens from an onslaught of outsider propaganda would be necessary, and so the Changcheng Strategy had been devised. Going far beyond the Golden Shield Project, which had been in effect for years, Changcheng had never yet been fully implemented, but surely it was called for now. He would address the nation in appropriate terms about the crisis in Shanxi, and he would not allow his words to be immediately gainsaid by outsiders. He could not risk the citizenry responding violently or in a panic.
The door to his office opened. He turned and saw his secretary — beautiful, young, perfect — walking the long distance toward him holding a thick sheaf of papers bound in black covers. “Here you are, sir. And Minister Zhang is on the phone now with Dr. Quan Li. He will be here shortly.”
She placed the document on the desk and withdrew. He looked once more at the placid water, then walked back to his desk and sat down. The cover of the document was marked in stark white characters “Eyes Only,” “Restricted,” and “If You Are Not Sure You Are Authorized to Read This, You Are Not.” He opened it and scanned the table of contents: “Fixed-Line Telephony,” “Cellular Phones,” “The Special Problem of Facsimile Machines,” “Shortwave Radio,” “Satellite Communications — Uplink and Downlink,” “Electronic Mail, the Internet, and the World Wide Web,” “Maintaining Essential Services During Implementation,” and so on.
He turned the page to the Executive Summary; the paper was heavy, stiff. “As required by their conditions of license, all telephony providers in China — whether fixed-line or mobile — maintain a system-wide ability in software to immediately block calls going outside China’s borders and/or to reject incoming calls from foreign countries…” “Similar filtering capabilities are available for all governmental and commercial satellite relay stations…”
“The World Wide Web presents a particular challenge, because of its decentralized nature; however, almost all Internet traffic between China and the rest of the world goes through just seven fiber-optic trunk lines, at three points, so…”
He leaned back in his leather chair and shook his head. The name “World Wide Web” was offensive to him, for it touted a globalist, integrated view antithetical to his country’s great traditions.
The office door opened again and in came Zhang Bo, the Minister of Communications. He was Han, in his mid-fifties, short and squat, and had a small mustache, which, like the hair on his head, was dark brown utterly devoid of gray. He wore a navy blue business suit and a light blue tie.
“We are going to deal decisively with Shanxi,” said the president.
Zhang’s thin eyebrows climbed his forehead, and the president saw his head bob as he swallowed. “Dr. Quan told me what he’d recommended. But surely you won’t—” The minister stopped, frozen by the president’s gaze.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, Your Excellency. I’m simply concerned. The world will … note this.”
“Doubtless. Which is why we shall invoke the Changcheng Strategy.”
The minister’s eyes went wide. “That is a drastic step, Your Excellency.”
“But a necessary one. Are you prepared to implement it?”
Minister Zhang moved a finger back and forth along his mustache as he considered. “Well, telephony is no problem — we’ve done rotating tests of that for years now, during the night; the cutoffs work just fine. The same with satellite communications. As for the Internet, we studied what happened with the seabed earthquake of late 2006, and what happened in Burma in September 2007 when the junta there cut off all net access. And we looked at what happened in January 2008 when the severing of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean cut off Internet services to large parts of the Middle East. And in early 2008, of course, many of the procedures were tested here as we dealt with the Tibet situation.” He paused. “Now, yes, any attempt to shut down the Web within China would be
