The Machine

research into the part the Special Circumstances and SearchIgnition were playing in all this.

On the other hand, Hooper had recently had an executioner’s bullet drilled through his skull, and Junko Terashima had been killed in a way that would have won a nod of approval from Charles Manson. Stone felt in no mood to meekly obey the deadline set by Zhang, or anyone else. He wasn’t about to go home, just as things were getting interesting.

As for the option of staying put and doing some more “research” … who was he kidding? Staying in one place was the riskiest thing he could do. And there were the questions, sprouting and spawning almost by the hour — where were the weapons coming from? What was Semyonov doing in China? And what hell was the Machine, that Semyonov had spent twenty-five billion to get his hands on it? Those questions were luring him on into Mainland China. In Hong Kong he faced arrest and possibly another “chat” with Professor Zhang. In China, on a false passport, Stone could be shot as a spy.

But then, there had been many times when Stone could have been shot. It was not the kind of thing that had ever bothered him that much. Stone took out his laptop, logged into the anonymized NotFutile web site, and began to type.

http://stone.blogs.notfutile.com

RIP Junko Terashima

Amid the press ballyhoo surrounding the death of Steven Semyonov, the murder of the young journalist Junko Terashima has barely been mentioned.

Terashima was the reporter who confronted Semyonov about his weapons activities a couple of weeks ago. She was fired as a troublemaker by GNN, but was so convinced of Semyonov’s guilt that she went off to Hong Kong to confront him. Lured away fromSemyonov’s announcement event, she was murdered in the backstreets of Hong Kong just minutes before Semyonov declared he was giving all his money to the Chinese.

Now Terashima’s files have been leaked to NotFutile.com. They include two very significant contacts in Mainland China. To protect the safety of these Chinese citizens, NotFutile cannot reveal their identities. Nonetheless, we intend to pursue the story Terashima was working on.

It should at least be possible to smoke out Ying Ning using the posting on the NotFutile.com web site. But it was this Robert Oyang that Stone really wanted — the man Terashima had gone to meet in Hong Kong. According to Junko's files, Oyang had been Steven Semyonov's closest associate in China.

Chapter 24–10:15am 30 March — Los Angeles, California

Chris Ostrovich had hooked up his laptop to the fifty-inch high definition screen in the office meeting room. He had on screen the grisly video Stone had sent to Virginia Carlisle. He was forcing himself to examine it, stopping and running and replaying, and at the same time talking to Virginia on a Skype link.

‘I know, Chris,’ she said, ‘It’s a real video nasty. Stone sent it this morning, through his anonymized email server.’

Ostrovich was a vision technician at the GNN Online web site. He was watching the footage in Los Angeles. ‘I’m not sure what’s going on, Ms Carlisle. I’ve watched parts of it fifty times. Gonna give me nightmares.’ He flinched as the video began again, and the camera settled on the girl in that crummy hotel room.

The question was all about the video file format, but it was impossible not to get distracted by the pictures. The young woman was seen against the grey wall of the hotel room, standing on her toes and stripped naked, hands tied to the light fitting. That was bad enough, but there was terror in her eyes. Ostrovich still had to look away when it zoomed onto her face. The pretty eyes disfigured by pain and fear, staring at someone or something. And then the ululation and writhing of the poor woman as the man came to her and sprayed her naked body with that weird aerosol — her neck, her breasts, between her legs. She screamed as he did it. What was it? Acid?

‘Try to be forensic about it,’ Stone had said in his email. ‘Turn off the sound. Use the zoom function to look at the details in the room. Don’t look at her face. It won’t be as bad and you’ll learn more. There must be some clue as to who, or what…’

It sounded a good plan. Except for the person who had to do it. Ostrovich had zoomed in, turned off the sound, frozen the frames. He done all he could to avoid looking at the perverted spectacle. He zoomed in on the bedside table. There could be a card or a matchbook he could focus in on. Something that could give him a clue about the killer maybe. He zoomed in on the bedside table. Still quite clear — high res. Ostrovich zoomed in further. Now this was strange. His brow creased in bewilderment and he zoomed in further still. What the hell?

Ostrovich finally saw what this Stone fellow had meant.

‘Any ideas Chris?’ Virginia Carlisle said again into the headset. ‘Stone said there was something weird about the file format or something.’ Ostrovich was barely listening, and he certainly wasn’t looking at the girl’s eyes any more.

‘OK, Ms Carlisle,’ said Ostrovich at length. ‘Er… How do I say this?’ He didn’t want to sound stupid in front of a star reporter. ‘I’ve a video clip here, which plays on some kind of Internet browser-based video player. Works on any computer in fact. The file he sent you looks way too small for a clip of around two minutes. It’s a little over a meg. Yet I can zoom in, and in, and in… It seems like I can zoom in as far as I want, and the image is still razor sharp. Never gets grainy or blocky. I’ve filled the whole of the fifty-inch monitor here with a close-up image of the ashtray on the table, and it’s still crystal.’

He felt a little stupid. ‘I know a few things about online video and television, Ms Carlisle, and aah… you just can’t do that. I feel like I’m standing in front of a crime scene with a full-size TV camera, looking at whatever I want, in realtime. Yet all I have is a tiny file sent by email. This isn’t just a better system than we’re using. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before. I’m gonna have to study the file programming format and call you back, Ms Carlisle.’

Ostrovich rang back after two hours.

‘It took me about an hour, but I managed to break into the programming code,’ said Ostrovich. ‘It’s just that…’ and his voice paused.

‘That what? What is it?’ asked Carlisle.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said the technician, embarrassed. ‘Virginia, this could be a computer program from Mars. It’s full of advanced mathematics — fractals, I think — but like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s not a big program — in fact it’s incredibly compact. I just… don’t understand it. I feel like a five-year-old trying to decipher Ancient Greek. It’s like no programming language, no software I’ve ever seen. Someone has decided to tear up every programming method, every software architecture that has been used for the last fifty years.’

‘OK, Chris. Thanks,’ said Virginia Carlisle, with a note of exasperation. ‘Can’t you even tell where it came from? If the technology is so unusual, that at least should give us a clue.’

‘That’s the point,’ said Ostrovich. ‘It’s not unusual. At least not in China. It’s called SmoothVision. “Grainless, HD video on the Internet with no delays” according to their web site. Turns out there are over twenty million copies of this program in use, mainly in South China. The technology tells us nothing whatever about the murder, Virginia. Except that some programmer in China is way, way ahead of us. This could revolutionize the whole of television, and it’s made by a firm I never heard of…’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Carlisle, ‘A Chinese company called New Machine Technology.’

Chapter 25 — 8:02am 1 April — Hung Hom, Hong Kong

The door to the apartment was open, and Stone pushed his way in. Light flooded the room, showing off a