The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. 'Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ,' it asserts. 'Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired.'
'This monster.' Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn't sound too appetizing.
she wonders dismissively. 'What is this alien?' She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. 'Is it part of the Wunch?'
'Datum unknown. It-them came with you,' says the ghost. 'Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network.
If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us…'
* * *
A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a
guided missile and far more deadly.
Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of
Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom.
This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her
inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into
orbit from Xinkiang. She's free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the
tune of several million euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work
for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It's not exactly slavery: Thanks to
Dad's corporate shell game she doesn't have to worry about Mom
chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up
just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she's got a bit of pocket
money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to
keep her company, she's decided she's gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it right.
Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.
China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of
draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up
with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest
fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for
body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere
else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter. This is a place
where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the
glamour of high-technology living.
Walking along Jardine's Bazaar – More like Jardine's bizarre, she thinks
– exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like
skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive
shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea
breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no
burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the
shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In
these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new
shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30
climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight
surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as
eyeballs. The Chinese – fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? – is
heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that
reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of
Denial, the Trouble out of Wa'hab.
For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's
subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons,
the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their
deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a
sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her
back and snatches at her shoulder bag.
'Hey!' she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond
and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It's the frozen moment, the
dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away
before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her
extensions off-line she doesn't know how to yell 'stop, thief!' in
Cantonese.
Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship
field lets up. 'Get him, you bastards!' she screams, but the curious
shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman
brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something
back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the
subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts – it's going to make a
scene if she doesn't catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a
baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.
By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has
disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared
luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her
to pick it up. And by that time there's a robocop in attendance. 'Identify
yourself,' it rasps in synthetic English.
Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and
it's far too light. It's gone, she thinks, despairingly. He stole it. 'Help,' she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through
the robot's eyes. 'Been stolen.'
'What item missing?' asks the robot.
'My Hello Kitty,' she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at
maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of
dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet
cat. 'My kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?'
'Certainly,' says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder – a
hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and
notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on
suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of
authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her
