It was only logical that no single organisation in China had as many staff as the State internet surveillance authority. Cypol tried to penetrate every area of the virtual cosmos, and it was no more able to do that than the regular police were able to infiltrate the population in the real world. In spite of their massive apparatus they lacked the human staff required to keep countless millions of users under observation. Cypol relied on destabilisation. Not everyone in Second Life was a government agent by any means, but they could be: the sharp businesswoman, the friendly banker, the stripper, the willing sex partner, the alien and the winged dragon, the robot and the DJ, even a tree, a guitar or a whole building. As an additional consequence of chronic staff shortage, the government worked with great armies of bots, avatars that were guided not by human beings, but by machines pretending to be human beings.
By now there were highly refined bot programs. Every now and again, in the course of his Second Life missions, Jericho allowed Diane to take virtual form, and she appeared as a tiny, fluttering elf, white, androgynous, with insect-like, black eyes and transparent dragonfly wings. She might equally well have appeared as a seductive woman and turned the heads of real guys who didn’t notice that they were flirting with a computer. At moments like that Diane became a bot that you could only track down using the Turing test, a procedure that no machine was capable of performing, even in 2025. Anyone could carry out the test. It involved engaging a machine in dialogue long enough for it to reveal its cognitive limitations and out itself as a refined but ultimately stupid program.
And herein lay the problem of bot agents. Without genuine intelligence and capacity for abstraction, they were hardly capable of unmasking the behaviour and appearance of virtual people as codes. Small wonder, then, that Yoyo and her Guardians had focused their attention on Second Life: since the decentralised structure of the peer-to-peer network was ideally suited to the creation of hidden spaces, it was extremely hard to identify senders and receivers of data, and the number of worlds tended towards infinity. In fact, only the itineraries of the data between the servers could be reconstructed.
Servers themselves worked with many electronic doorkeepers. Anyone who visited a server and was allowed in was subject to the control of the webmaster in question, while visitors to the server couldn’t check one another if they didn’t have the requisite authorisation.
The webmaster of Cyber-Shanghai was Beijing. If Jericho had had an investigation centre in the virtual metropolis, he would have been a tenant of the Chinese government, which meant that the authorities would be able to knock at his door and turn his electronic office on its head with a search warrant (although to do that they would have needed judicial permission, which the Chinese were reluctant to grant). That was the only reason Jericho had never considered moving his office there.
He looked out at the bluish-green expanse.
Was it possible that this world had actually been created by a bot network? If computers developed something like aesthetic aspirations, they were copied from those of human beings, while at the same time being unsettlingly alien.
‘And is the island safe?’
Yoyo nodded. ‘We’ve drilled into cyberspace at every available point to build our own planets, in such a way that not everyone can get there. Jia Wei’ – she hesitated – ‘has calculated millions of simultaneous possibilities. That included modifying the protocol. Not significantly, just in such a way that the uninitiated end up in a jumble of data if they don’t have the right key. No idea how many variations we tried out, we generated them at random because we thought it was a new idea. Instead we ended up here.’
‘And the protocol is—’
‘A little green lizard.’
Yoyo smiled. It was the same sad smile that he knew from Chen Hongbing’s photograph.
‘Of course Cyber-Shanghai’s server records the intervention, but it doesn’t raise the alarm. It doesn’t register the momentary opening of an electronic wormhole, through which you escape into a kind of parallel universe. As far as it’s concerned, all that happens is that someone opens a door and closes it again.’
‘I figured it was something like that.’ Jericho nodded. ‘So who’s Irma la Douce?’
‘Hey!’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows. ‘You know Irma la Douce?’
‘Of course.’
‘Heavens! I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was when Daxiong turned up with her.’
‘A film. A lovely film.’
‘A film about a French poule.’
‘Perhaps it doesn’t necessarily represent the glorious Chinese culture,’ said Jericho mildly. ‘But there’s something else, think about it. The avatar is, incidentally, a perfect copy of Shirley MacLaine.’
‘She – erm – was an actress, right? A French one.’
‘American.’
Yoyo seemed to think for a second. Then she suddenly laughed out loud.
‘Oh, that’s going to nettle Daxiong. He thinks he knows everything there is to know.’
‘About films?’
‘Not at all. Daxiong has this thing about France. As if we didn’t have enough culture of our own. He could bang on at you all day about— Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
She turned away and ran her hand over her eyes. Jericho left her in peace. When she turned back to face him he saw the smeared remains of a tear on her cheek.
‘You’ve got my computer,’ she said. ‘So, what do you want? What do you want from me?’
‘Nothing,’ said Jericho.
‘But?’
‘Your father sent me. He’s terribly worried about you.’
‘Don’t think I don’t care,’ she said belligerently.
‘I don’t.’ He shook his head. ‘I know you don’t want to worry him. You thought your communications were being monitored, and that if you sent him an email they’d pounce on him and give him a going-over. Am I right?’
She stared gloomily ahead.
‘Hongbing doesn’t know about blogs and virtual worlds,’ Jericho went on. ‘He’s happy to be able to use an antediluvian mobile phone. And he’s consoling himself with the idea that his daughter has learned her lesson. He doesn’t know what you’re doing. Or let’s say, he guesses what you’re up to and doesn’t know. I’m sure he hasn’t the faintest idea that Tu Tian is protecting you.’
‘Tian!’ cried Yoyo. ‘He commissioned you, right?’
‘He referred your father to me.’
‘Sure, because Hongbing never— But why didn’t he—?’
‘Why didn’t he send a message for you to the Andromeda? Even though he knew where you’d fetched up? I mean, you never told him anything about the blast furnace, so in the end he got nervous—’
‘How do you know Tian?’
‘He’s a friend of mine. And, I should think, a kind of unofficial member of the Guardians. At least he supported you as best he could. The stuff in the control centre came from him, didn’t it? Tian was just as much of a dissident as you are now.’
‘As we were.’
Oh, right, thought Jericho. What a miserable subject. Whatever they were talking about, that was where they would always end up.
‘Tian didn’t need to send me a message,’ said Yoyo. ‘He knew it wouldn’t change a thing.’
‘Exactly. But it changed something when Hongbing hit on the idea of having a search made for you. A risky enterprise. Your father might prefer to act ignorant, but he knew he couldn’t get the police involved. I guess he secretly knew that you were going through the Party’s rubbish bins out the back. So he asked Tu Tian, the way you ask somebody with connections like that, and also because he accepted through gritted teeth that Tian might have been closer to you than your own—’