The vision made her way through the crowded bar, smiling at the other girls scattered among the tables drinking vodka shots or white wine with the various Directorate soldiers. These were prostitutes, most of them flown in from back home. But this one was clearly something different. Xiao Zheng knew he was staring, but the young Directorate marine couldn’t help himself. She stopped at the bar and pushed her sunglasses up on the top of her head. The way she held herself made it clear she could not be bought. She had to be earned.
For the next hour, he watched her. With someone so beautiful, he’d found that sometimes watching was enough.
“Another round!” shouted Bo Dai from the barstool next to Xiao Zheng, elbowing Xiao in the ribs. A microphone on Bo’s digital dog tags around his neck transmitted the command to a small translator he wore on his belt. The card-deck-size device scratchily conveyed his bellowed command in tinny English a moment later. Bo was the senior enlisted marine in Xiao’s squad, and he usually looked out for him.
Nine brimming shot glasses arrived quickly, as if the bartender had anticipated the order.
“Drink, you pussy,” Bo shouted at the top of his lungs before putting Xiao in a gentle headlock. The translator device started to convey the bawdy order before Bo silenced it with a drunken slap.
Xiao cringed and downed the shot. It was warm tequila, and he gagged as Bo whooped.
“Okay, no more of this mooning over some local whore. I need to know my best assistant machine gunner is not afraid of girls, because if he is, then what’s he going to do when the Americans from California come for us with both barrels?” Bo mimed an enormous pair of breasts.
The big sergeant dragged Xiao over to the goddess and set him down on the barstool next to her like an offering. Xiao stood. His knees trembled. He had to get out of there. Go anywhere but where he really wanted to be.
Xiao’s legs were unsteady; he turned to go but knocked over the stool. A lithe and deeply tanned arm reached out to catch him by the shoulder before he fell too. “Easy there, sailor,” she said.
She touched me! Xiao wanted to shout.
What to say? What was the Hawaiian phrase for “hello” they had learned? O-la-ha? No — he wanted her to hear his own words, even if he didn’t know what they should be.
But before he could say anything to the goddess, her sunglasses fell to the floor, and she slipped off her stool and bent down to pick them up, giving Xiao an unforgettable view.
“I need to go wash these off. Then you can buy me a drink?” she asked.
Xiao nodded silently and she smiled before disappearing into the back of the crowded bar. He fished in his pocket for some bills to pay the bartender for another wine for her so it would be waiting when she returned.
“Shit!” he cursed out loud. He stumbled and rushed back to the table where he had been sitting earlier. His wallet had to be there.
His squad mates registered the intense look on Xiao’s face as he dropped to all fours in front of everyone in the restaurant and began crawling under the table, looking for his wallet. There. Under a wrapper of soy chips lay his wallet, damp with beer. He stuffed it into his back pocket and stood up.
The other marines were laughing at him. Some barked like small dogs.
“Little friend, if you need a condom, I’ve got plenty,” Bo said.
Xiao turned away from Bo’s crude hand gestures and pushed through the crowd to the back of the bar, stumbling over toes and slipping on a slime of spilled liquor and beer. He made it without falling and stood in the darkened entrance to the bathroom. Was this the right place to wait? It was quieter. He cast a look over his shoulder to make sure none of his squad were going to humiliate him again.
All clear. When he turned around, there she was, standing close enough for him to kiss, if he had had the courage.
“Did you forget my drink?” she said.
Xiao flushed and looked down at his feet, again catching another eyeful of her breasts. She put a hand on his belt buckle and tugged slightly. He leaned back, and she tugged just a little bit harder.
“That’s okay, we don’t need it. Come with me,” she said and led him away from the bathrooms. “Where it’s quieter.”
“Yes, better,” he muttered, but not loud enough for the translator to pick up. He followed her down the humid stairway that led from the bar’s main room to a pitch-black storage area.
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, he realized that she was taller than him. But as she drew his face into her breasts, he decided he was just the right size.
Lavender and talc. It felt like all the blood that had rushed to his cheeks was now flowing to his groin. He felt a new courage rising up inside him. Bo was right! I should have gotten a condom when I had the chance.
She sighed and held him closer, drawing the moment out.
His body stiffened and then spasmed as the sharpened stem of the white sunglasses drove in just behind his jawbone, severing his internal carotid artery.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
When she saw the two men in matching gray suits enter the back of the lecture hall, Vernalise Li realized she should have listened to her mother’s warnings.
But instead she’d told her mom that she needed to stop reading Wikipedia, that what had happened to the Japanese Americans in the 1940s wouldn’t happen in the twenty-first century. People were better than that now, or so she’d thought.
She continued lecturing, unconsciously adopting a more Southern Californian accent with each word.
“From here, you can see that a rack-mount power system has its limitations. What are they? Space, for sure,” she said.
So what if she’d been born in Beijing? She had grown up in Santa Monica.
“But the advantage? Density. By using a fluid-based energy-storage system that, with a conformable design, we can address industrial pulse-power applications where the current rack designs fall short.”
She had played beach volleyball in high school. Varsity!
“The switch today operates for four milliseconds, and we are working to increase power density. That goes back to the question of how to store the energy. It always comes back to density, and fluid is the answer.”
She watched the two men take seats. The suits were evidently cheap, likely Dockers, but it didn’t matter. If they wanted to blend in, wearing suits and ties on campus any day but graduation wasn’t the way to go. Then she noticed they weren’t wearing viz glasses, so they weren’t even recording the lecture. Were they just checking in to make sure students were actually in class? It wouldn’t be surprising; the whole campus knew conscription was coming.
“The other element is addressing contamination in the switches, which always, always, always leads to shorter minority carrier lifespan. Plus, we’re maximizing peak power again, which makes contamination a major cause of degradation in these light-activated switch designs.”
So what was their deal? No one attended a lecture on the mathematical dynamics of pulsed-power systems for fun.
“Okay,” she said, wrapping up. “You know where to find me on the course sim later if you have any questions.”
“I’d like to ask one, with your students’ permission, of course,” said Professor Leonowsky, who’d stopped by earlier and was sitting in the front row. He perched his viz glasses atop his bald head and smiled with the ease of someone for whom the pressure of the tenure clock was a distant memory.
“Everyone, we’re not done yet. Have we all got a few more minutes? Of course we do,” said Leonowsky, as ever answering his own question.
“Certainly,” said Vern, hiding her trembling hands behind her back. Why did believing you were about to be accused of an unnamed crime make you feel guilty, even when you knew you were innocent? She could barely speak Mandarin, at least not without a horrible American accent, as her mother never failed to remind her.