‘Just a joke.’ Tu dug about with a toothpick, produced a small green scrap of something and flicked it away. Jericho tried not to look. For all that, his eyes were irresistibly drawn to where the scrap, whatever it was, had landed. It was irritating mostly because Tu appeared on his new media screen not just life-size but in perfect perspectival detail, so that it looked as though Jericho’s loft apartment had grown an extra room. It wouldn’t have surprised him to spot the scrap of food lying on his floorboards somewhere. Seeing Tu in three dimensions was very much less enjoyable than looking at Naomi Liu.
Now she really did have nice legs.
‘Owen?’
Jericho blinked. ‘I noticed that the Yoyo avatar is remarkably stable in crowds. How do you do that?’
‘Trade secret,’ Tu sang happily.
‘Tell me. Otherwise I’ll have to go and visit my optician.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your eyes.’
‘Clearly not. I mean, the specs themselves are transparent, just like a window. I’m seeing the real world. Your program can project details in, but it can’t change reality.’
‘Is that what it does?’ Tu asked, grinning.
‘You know perfectly well what it does. It makes people blink out of existence.’
‘You never thought that perhaps reality is just a projection as well?’
‘Could you say that a little less cryptically?’
‘Let’s say we could do without the lens on the specs.’
‘And Yoyo would still appear?’
‘Bingo.’
‘But what would be the substrate?’
‘She’d appear because none of what you see is actual reality. There are tiny cameras hidden in the arms of the specs and in the frame, feeding data on the real world into the computer so that it knows how and where it should fit Yoyo in. What you might have overlooked was the projectors on the inside edge.’
‘I know that Yoyo is projected onto the lens glass.’
‘No, that’s just what she’s not.’ Tu quaked with suppressed laughter. ‘The glass is surplus to requirements. The cameras produce a complete image, which is made up of your surroundings, plus Yoyo. Then this image is projected directly onto your retina.’
Jericho stared at Tu.
‘You mean none of what I saw—’
‘Oh, you definitely saw the real world. Just not first-hand. You see what the cameras film, and the film can be manipulated. In real time, of course. We can make the sky pink, make people disappear or have them grow horns. We turn your eyes into the projection screen.’
‘Unbelievable.’
Tu shrugged. ‘There are useful applications of virtual reality. Did you know that most cases of blindness are caused by clouding in the lens of the human eye? The retina underneath is healthy and functional, so we project the visible world directly into the retina. We make the blind see again. That’s the whole trick.’
‘I see.’ Jericho rubbed his chin. ‘And Yoyo’s been working on this.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You must trust her a lot.’
‘She’s good. She’s full of ideas. A veritable ideas factory.’
‘She’s an intern!’
‘That hardly matters.’
‘To me it does. I have to know who I’m dealing with here, Tian. How clued-up is the girl, in truth? Is she really just a—’ Dissident, he had been about to say. Stupid mistake. Diamond Shield would have filtered the word out from their conversation in an instant and put it into his file.
‘Yoyo knows what’s what,’ Tu said curtly. ‘I never said it would be easy to find her.’
‘No,’ said Jericho, more to himself than to Tu. ‘You didn’t.’
‘Chin up. I’ve remembered something else.’
‘What?’
‘Yoyo seems to have friends in a motorbike gang. She never introduced me, but I remember that she had City Demons on her jackets. That might bring you further forward.’
‘I know about that already, thanks. Yoyo didn’t happen to mention where they hang out?’
‘I think you’ll have to find that out on your own.’
‘All right then. If anything else comes back to you—’
‘I’ll let you know. Wait.’ Naomi Liu’s voice came from the other side of the projection. Tu stood up and disappeared from Jericho’s sight. He heard the two of them talking in low tones, then Tu came back.
‘Excuse me, Owen, but it looks as though we’ve had a suicide.’ He hesitated. ‘Or an accident.’
‘What happened?’
‘Something awful. Someone fell to his death. The roller-coaster had been set in motion, outside its usual hours. It looks as if whoever it was had been working up there. I’ll be back in touch, okay?’
‘Okay.’
They hung up. Jericho stayed there, sitting thoughtfully in front of the empty screen. Something about Tu’s remark unsettled him. He wondered why. People threw themselves from skyscrapers the whole time. China had the highest suicide rate in the world, higher even than Japan, and skyscrapers were also the most cost-efficient and effective way to leave this life.
It wasn’t about the suicide.
What then?
He fished out the stick that Tu had given him, put it on top of the console and let the computer download Yoyo’s virtual guided tours, her personnel file, records of conversations and documents. The files also contained her genetic code, voiceprint and eyescan, fingerprints and blood group. He could use the tours to get to know her body language and her gestures, her intonation as well, and the documents and conversation soundfiles would yield all her frequent turns of phrase, figures of speech and even syntactical patterns. This gave him a usable personality profile. A dossier that he could work from.
Perhaps though he should start from what he didn’t have.
He went online and set his computer looking for the City Demons. It served him up an Australian football club in New South Wales, another in New Zealand, a basketball team from Dodge City, Kansas, and a Vietnamese Goth band.
No demons in Shanghai.
After he had broadened the search mode and told it to allow for spelling errors, he got a hit. Two members of a biker gang called the City Daemons had got into a fight with half a dozen drunken North Koreans in the DKD Club on the Huaihai Zhong Lu; the NKs had been singing an anthem about the murder of their dear departed Supreme Leader. The bikers had got away with a police caution, since the Chinese leadership had declared Kim Jong Un persona non grata, posthumously, in recognition of the prevailing mood in reunited Korea. Beijing had several reasons to make sure that they nipped in the bud any cult of nostalgia that might develop around North Korean totalitarianism.
City Daemons. With an ‘a’.
Next the computer found a blog where Shanghai hip-hoppers picked up on the incident in the DKD and dwelt on the bravery of two members of the City Demons (with ‘e’), who had put their lives on the line to sling the North Koreans out on their ear. A link took Jericho to a biker forum which he browsed through, hoping to find more about the Demons. This confirmed his suspicion that the Demons themselves had posted up the comments. The forum turned out to be an advertising platform for an e-bike and hybrids workshop called Demon Point, whose owner was probably, pretty nearly definitely, a member of the City Demons.
And that was interesting.
The workshop, he learned, lay on the edge of Quyu: a parallel world where hardly anybody had their own computer or a net connection, but there was the black hole of a Cyber Planet on every street corner, sucking in the local youths and never spitting them out again. It was a world ruled by several Triad subclans, sometimes striking deals, mostly at loggerheads, who only really agreed that no kind of crime was off limits. A world of complex hierarchies, outside of which its inhabitants counted for nothing. A world which sent out battalions of cheap factory hands and unskilled labour to the better parts of the city every day, and then drew them back in every evening, a world which offered few sights but which nevertheless drew the well-heeled towards it with some magic charm, offering them something that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the Shanghai of urban renewaclass="underline" the fascinating, iridescent gleam of human decay.