Who could that be? Someone called Jan or Andre, perhaps even a woman – Jan in: Janine? Could you run a business address? Unfortunate choice of words. Something was missing, although the address seemed to be complete.
continues a grave that he knows all about One way or another
Something was continuing, and someone knew about it.
that he knows all about
He? Not a woman, then? Jan in Andre. Was that one continuous name? Now the controversial bit:
statement coup Chinese government
Here Yoyo’s eyes must have popped out of her head. The Chinese government, mentioned in the same breath as the idea of a coup. A person who had knowledge of it, possibly to the cost of the people undertaking the coup. Who or what was to be overthrown? The government in Beijing? Were there plans for a coup in parliament, amongst the military, abroad? Hard to imagine? It was more likely that the statement referred to a coup in another country, and that the Chinese government was involved in it. A coup that had succeeded or failed, or else was still to come.
Was there anyone who could have blown the cover on Beijing’s role?
implemented of timing and Donner be liquidated
Gobbledygook apart from one word: liquidated. Liquidate Donner? Donner and Blitzen? Donner kebab? Hardly. As everywhere throughout the fragment, crucial passages were missing here too. The text might have been completed with a few words, but it might equally have been hundreds of pages long, and everything that Jericho thought he was reading into it might prove to be erroneous. But if that wasn’t the case, a murder was being reported, announced or at least recommended here.
He studied the text once more.
timing. This was about a sequence of events. A sequence of events that was under threat? Yoyo must have assembled the puzzle just as he had, reached similar conclusions and immediately gone into hiding as if the devil were on her tail. And it was perfectly possible to see the Chinese State security service in that light. And yet her escape didn’t really make sense. She had been working with controversial material for years. The fragment should surely have aroused her curiosity, stirred her enthusiasm, and instead it had thrown her into a panic.
Had it? Or had she hurried enthusiastically to Quyu, to round up the Guardians and start doing background research in the shelter of the control centre?
No, that would have been absurd. She wouldn’t have left her father without a word. There could have been only one reason, that she was worried about putting him and herself in danger by making too close contact. Because she assumed that she was under surveillance. More than that! That night she must have had cause to worry that her enemies would be outside the door in a few minutes, because she had broken into their secret information channels and been noticed.
They had detected Yoyo.
Jericho called to mind her piece on Brilliant Shit, had Diane load the text and read it again:
‘Hi all. Back in our galaxy now, have been for a few days. Was really stressed out these last days, is anybody harshing on me? Couldn’t help it, really truly. All happened so fast. Shit. Even so quickly you can be forgotten. Only waiting now for the old demons to visit me once more. Yeah, and, I’m busy writing new songs. If any of the band asks: We’ll make an appearance once I’ve got a few euphonious lyrics on the go. Let’s prog!’
No one victorious would write like that. It was a cry for help from someone losing control. When she was uploading the web addresses and the mask, she must have realised that she’d been located. That was why she had left so quickly.
He studied the fragment again.
‘Diane, find 50 Oranienburger Strasse, 10117 Berlin.’
The reply came in an instant. Jericho looked at his watch. Two minutes to twelve. He connected the hologoggles to the computer, logged on and chose the coordinates entered by Yoyo.
The Second World
Since the middle of the last decade, when Second Life had been restructured after its predictable collapse, there was no longer a central hub, any more than the space–time continuum had a real centre, just an infinite number of observation points, each of which created the illusion of being the centre, the way an earth-dweller felt that his location was fixed and the whole cosmos was something spinning around him, moving away from him or towards him. An astronaut on the Moon and every creature in the universe felt exactly the same, wherever they happened to be. In the real universe, the totality of all particles was interlinked, which meant that every particle was able to occupy its relative centre.
Similarly, Second Life had turned into a peer-to-peer network, an almost infinite, decentralised and self-organising system in which every server – like a planet – formed a hub, which was connected by a random number of interfaces with every other hub. Each participant was automatically a host and a user of the worlds of others. How many planets Second Life comprised, who inhabited or controlled them, was unknown. Of course there were lists, cybernetic maps, well-known travel routes and records that made it possible to realise oneself in the virtual world in the first place, just as the outside universe was subject to physical boundary conditions. Within these standards, avatars travelled to all the places on the web that were known to them, and to which they were granted access. But there was no longer anyone who was familiar with everything.
Jericho would have expected to land at such an unknown place, but Yoyo’s coordinates led to a public hub. Almost every metropolis in the real world had been virtually copied by now, so he travelled from Shanghai to Shanghai, to find himself back in the People’s Square, or at any rate in a nearly identical copy of it. Unlike the real Shanghai, there were no traffic jams and beyond the city boundaries no districts like Quyu. On the other hand new edifices were constantly going up, staying for a while, changing or disappearing with the speed of a mouse-click.
The builder and owner of Cyber-Shanghai was the Chinese government, and it was financed by both Chinese and foreign companies. The Party also maintained a second Beijing, a second Hong Kong and a virtual Chongqing. Like all net cities based on real models, the charm of the depiction lay in the relationship between authenticity and idealism. It could hardly come as a surprise that more Americans lived in Cyber-Shanghai than Chinese, and that most Chinese-looking avatars were bots, machines disguised as living creatures. In turn, some Chinese had second homes in Cyber-New York, in virtual Paris or Berlin. French and Spanish people tended to live in Marrakech, Istanbul and Baghdad, Germans and the Irish liked Rome, the British were drawn to New Delhi and Cape Town and Indians to London. Anyone who dreamed of living in New York and couldn’t afford it found an affordable and entirely authentic Big Apple on the net, only wilder, more progressive and even a bit more interesting than the original. People doing business in virtual Paris didn’t seek seclusion, but were interested in as many interfaces with the real world as possible. BMW, Mercedes-Benz and other car manufacturers didn’t sell fantasy constructs in the cyber-cities, but prototypes of what they actually planned to build.
Basically net cities were nothing but colossal experimental labs in which no one thought twice of travelling by spaceship rather than by ship, as long as the Statue of Liberty stood where it belonged. The owners, meaning the countries in question, were opening another chapter in globalisation here, but above all they were remodelling the world of human beings in a peculiar way. Crime and terrorism did exist in the virtual New York, buildings were destroyed by data attack, avatars were sexually molested, there were muggings, break-ins, grievous bodily harm and rape, you could be imprisoned or exiled. There was only one thing that didn’t exist: