up and pack.’
New Hong Kong was founded on January 1st, 2029. Eighteen months before—on the thirtieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s absorption into the People’s Republic of China—demonstrations against the suspension of the Basic Law had ended in violent repression, a crackdown on dissent, and a massive increase in the rate of illegal emigration. While everyone else in the region offered the emigrants squalid refugee camps ringed with barbed wire, and the prospect of spending half their lives in a stateless limbo, the Tribal Confederation of Arnhem Land offered two thousand square kilometres on a mangrove-infested peninsula in northern Australia. No ninety-nine-year lease this time; sovereignty in perpetuity, in exchange for a piece of the action Arnhem Land, where the remnants of half a dozen Aboriginal tribes were trying to re-establish their near-obliterated culture, had been independent itself only since 2026, and there was talk in Australia of cutting off the aid that kept it afloat—partly in response to Chinese threats of trade sanctions, but also out of sheer childish resentment that the fledgling nation had dared to take its autonomy seriously. (The Australian government’s own stunningly creative proposal had been to house sixty thousand refugees in a disused leper colony on the northwest coast, for however many decades it took to farm them out around the world at a politically acceptable rate.) The aid survived, but the project was widely ridiculed by the Australian media and their pet economists, who referred to it as ‘subletting the nation’, and predicted a social and financial disaster.
International investors thought otherwise; money flooded in. There was nothing humanitarian about this; it simply reflected the global economic situation at the time. The Koreans, especially, had been going crazy trying to find projects to soak up all their excess wealth. Creating the infrastructure from scratch must have been daunting, but the site was reasonably close to the booming industrial centres of south-east Asia, where there was engineering expertise and manufacturing capacity to spare. Making full use of new construction techniques, the core of the city was functional, and occupied, within seven years. Not a moment too soon: in 2036, the PRC invaded Taiwan, giving rise to a new wave of refugees.
In the decades that followed, cycles of political and economic reform came and went in Beijing, each one ending in an outflux of disillusioned members of the skilled middle class, with only one place to go. While China grew more impoverished and insular, New Hong Kong prospered. By 2056, its GDP had outstripped Australia’s.
At Mach 2 plus, three thousand kilometres takes a little more than an hour. I’m far from any window, but I switch my entertainment screen to the scenic channel and watch the desert go by. I leave the headphones off, to avoid the fatuous audio commentary, but I can’t work out how to make the distracting text and graphics overlays vanish. Eventually, I give up, and tell Boss to put me out of it until we arrive.
Monsoon rain pounds the runway as the plane touches down, but five minutes later I step out of the airport into dazzling sunshine and—after an hour of artificial, twenty-degree blandness—heat and humidity as palpable as a slap in the face.
To the north, I can glimpse the cranes of the harbour between the skyscrapers; to the east, a patch of blue, the Gulf of Carpentaria. I’m right beside an entrance to the underground, but since the rain has stopped, I decide to walk to my hotel. This is my first time in NHK, but I’ve loaded Deja Vu (Global Visage, $750) with an up-to-date street map and information package.
Sleek black towers from the early days alternate with the modern style: ornamental facades in imitation jade and gold, carved with ingenious fractal reliefs that catch the eye on a dozen different scales. Every building is topped with the giant logo of some major financial or information service. It always seems absurd to me that money or data should need a flag of convenience, but laws change slowly, and the laissez-faire regulations here have apparently tempted hundreds of transnationals to shift their head offices to this jurisdiction—if only to await the day when they can incorporate incorporeally, as waves of tax-free data flowing between orbiting supercomputers.
At street level, the towers are all but hidden by the undergrowth of small traders. Daylight holograms in
The crowd I move through looks prosperous: executives, traders, students, and plenty of the right kind of tourists. Twelve degrees south of the equator is about as far as most northern tourists will go; they want a winter tan, not the promise of a melanoma. Decades after the phasing out of the last ozone-depleting pollutants, the stratosphere remains contaminated—and the ‘hole’ which spreads out from Antarctica each spring is still severe enough to turn the latitude/cancer-risk equations upside down: sunlight is far more dangerous in the southern temperate zone than it is in the tropics. I’d better rapidly switch off my parochial UV-belt prejudice, and stop thinking of pale skin as marking out religious fanatics and genetic-purity freaks. Not many people born here (or in old Hong Kong) would have bothered with the melanin boost, but there’s a visible component of black-skinned ‘southerners’—Australian-born immigrants—of both Asian and European descent, so I may not be quite as conspicuously foreign as I feel.
The Renaissance Hotel was the least expensive I could find, but it’s still disconcertingly luxurious, all red and gold carpet and giant murals of da Vinci sketches. NHK has no cheap accommodation; penniless backpackers simply don’t get visas. I hate having my luggage carried, but I’d hate the fuss of refusing it even more. Several discreet signs advise against tipping; Deja Vu advises otherwise, and lets me know the going rate.
My room itself is small enough to make me feel slightly less profligate, and the view consists of nothing but a portion of the Axon building—the facade of which is tastefully adorned with the names of all their best-selling neural mods, spelt out in a dozen languages and repeated in all directions, like some abstract geometric tiling pattern. Letters cut into imitation black marble don’t exactly catch the eye, but perhaps that’s intentional; after all, Axon grew out of a company which peddled ‘subliminal learning tools’—audio and video tapes bearing inaudible or invisible messages, supposedly perceived ‘directly’ by the subconscious. Like all the other self-improvement snake oil of the time, this did more than provide placebo effects for the gullible and megabucks for the rip-off merchants; it also helped create the market for a technology that
I unpack, shower, belatedly put all the clocks in my head forward one-and-a-half hours, then sit on the bed and try to decide exactly how I’m going to And Laura in a city of twelve million people.
The funeral notices say that Han Hsiu-lien was cremated on December 24th, and no doubt the body that went into the furnace looked just like her—although presumably the real Han Hsiu-lien never left Perth. All this corpse shuffling is fascinating, but it doesn’t get me very far. If I talk to anyone at the funeral company, I risk tipping off the kidnappers. Ditto for the airline’s cargo handlers. All the people most likely to have seen something useful are also the most likely to have been involved in the swap themselves.
So where does that leave me? I still know nothing about the kidnappers, nothing about their motives, nothing about their plans. Apart from having narrowed the search geographically, I’m back to square one. All I have to go on is Laura herself, brain-damaged and immobile. I might as well be hunting for an inanimate object.
But she’s not an inanimate object, she’s a human being convalescing from skeletal reconstruction.
Doctor Pangloss is my favourite knowledge miner. Unlike Bella, who steals data which is supposed to be secure, Pangloss legally digs up facts which are—laughably—supposed to be easily accessible to anyone, for a few dollars, at the touch of a few keys. His mask, with powdered wig and beauty spot, always makes me think of Moliere rather than Voltaire, and his accent is pure RSC, but there’s no quibbling about his mining skills; he answers my question in thirty seconds flat. I could have consulted the same expert systems, databases and libraries myself, but it would have taken me hours.
A patient in Laura’s condition would have several pharmacological requirements, each of which could be met by a variety of substances, each in turn marketed under several different trade names, and each available from a choice of local suppliers. Pangloss arranges all of this for me in a neat tree diagram in midair, then sends a copy down the data channel.
I call Bella, pass her the list of pharmaceutical suppliers, and ask for their delivery records for the last three months. ‘Five hours,’ she says. ‘Your password is “nocturne”.’
Five hours. I spend ten minutes staring out the window, trying to think of something useful to do in the meantime. Nothing comes to mind, so I decide to eat.
