My Linh glanced at Hoc, who was looking up into the drone-choked sky as he kept pace with Huong’s scooter. Was there some clue to this mystery up there? My Linh followed his gaze, but found only writhing chaos above, mechanical disorder and the flickering of a dozen lenses, fixed of course on the raging industrial infernos. Somewhere, she heard a police loudspeaker announcement begin, commanding the crowds to go home immediately. She and her friends had barely made it past the trucks and tanks they’d seen on the road into the industrial zone. How could the cops have arrived so soon, unless they’d been waiting since the morning?
Before My Linh had time to consider this any further, Huong shouted, “It’s here, right?” back to her, and she realized they were finally there: The massive, two-building Korean factory complex looked just like she remembered it, from a couple of visits as a kid. It was as placid as the Singaporean factory had been, the doors closed, though they weren’t chained shut. The company sign, in cryptic Korean lettering on the left, and block Roman letters on the right, was the same one My Linh had seen years before: It read DOOBONG AUTOFACT in bright red beside neat lines of Korean lettering.
Every muscle in My Linh’s body was tense, and she realized she was holding her breath. Some deeply buried fear arose, impossible to explain beyond the knowledge that this was not how riots were supposed to happen, and some sense that she, and her father, and the whole of Binh Duong—not to mention wherever else riots had broken out—had been terribly, brutally tricked. The fear seemed to be choking her, and she forced herself to inhale as Huong revved the engine and they pulled up the long, empty driveway toward the dark factory.
It wasn’t the fire that troubled Yoon-Seok, or the broken table, or the bruises on his forearm: He’d seen mobs do much worse in far less time. It was the way the leader had collapsed and gone into convulsions, frothing at the mouth. Yoon-Seok had seen a man react badly to Focus, once, but it was supposed to be one-in-a-million. Effortlessly, he recalled the statistics he’d looked up at the time: probability dictated that he ought never to see such a reaction again, much less so soon. And yet here lay the mob’s leader, his body twisted a chillingly familiar way.
Before he had a chance to think, he shouted in Vietnamese: “Call an ambulance!” Poor though most of the mob was, half of them would have phones. But then Yoon-Seok remembered the phone network was down, and their calls—even repeated with Focused relentlessness—would never get through.
Suddenly, a teenaged girl, a local, appeared out of nowhere, trailed by some friends, all three of them in school uniforms. She ran toward the light, until she saw the convulsing man at Yoon-Seok’s feet. She fell to her knees beside him.
“Ba!” she screamed, and Yoon-Seok’s guts twisted, bile searing the back of his throat, as she turned to face him and, in astonishingly good English, shouted, “What did you do to him?”
“I … nothing …” Then Yoon-Seok realized, mathematical probability had held true. This was the same man he’d seen have an allergic reaction a few years back, right there on the floor of Doobong Autofact.
How could he have forgotten him? When the factory-wide Focus policy had come into effect, the worker had come to Yoon-Seok with a sob story about an allergy to Focus, claiming he’d discovered it the day his daughter had almost died getting her first routine dose at school. He’d been a good worker, otherwise, even management material: had he been Korean, the allergy ultimately might not even have mattered.
“But you aren’t Korean,” he’d said to the man, straightforwardly. It was fact, after all, and if only the man had been able to dose on Focus, he would have appreciated the primacy of facts: how simple and pure they are, how crucial to the constitution of the world.
And as the girl ripped open her father’s shirt and slapped him on the face, shouting desperately, “Ba! Ba!”, another fact nagged at Yoon-Seok: however implicitly the plan had been approved, and no matter which officials in Hanoi had quietly provided logistical support for it—the better to be rid of their own troublemaking dissidents—he knew the consequences for nonconsensual dosing of a worker were fatal.
The phone network was out: there was nobody to ask what to do, and Yoon-Seok realized—without caring, with that strange reluctance to move or speak that his wife so often had complained about—what was happening even as his senses sharpened, as the haze and noise and blur of everything drifted into clear, tight focus. The girl, starting to choke. The smudge of dirt on the shoulder of her uniform. Her friends’ gasping nearby in the darkness.
The choking sound of the stricken man. The beeping of phones being dialed, fruitlessly, over and over.
One droplet—whether a tear or sweat made no difference to Yoon-Seok— dropped from the girl’s chin to her father’s cheek. The faint trail it left there was the only thing in the world for Yoon-Seok now.
Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus Award—winning writer, best known for her high-tech science fiction, including The Red trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was a Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist, and named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. Her newest novel is the very near-future thriller, The Last Good Man. Linda has lived most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and an independent publisher. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island
