‘In any other circumstances I would agree with you. But the way Yoyo’s protection is set up means she could have decoding programs which are much more advanced than the norm. We wouldn’t have asked you to come to Shanghai if we weren’t seriously concerned about this.’
‘I’m as worried as you are. But what concerns me most is how sketchy your information is, if I may be so honest.’
‘And what have you found out?’ asked the voice, without responding to Xin’s comment.
‘I went to her apartment. Two flatmates. One knows nothing, and the other says he could take me to her. He wants money of course.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘Are you crazy? I have no choice but to follow every lead. He’ll be in touch, but I’ve no idea what will come of it.’
‘Did she not mention any relatives to either of the flatmates?’
‘Yoyo doesn’t exactly seem that communicative. They were having some drinks together on the night of 23 May, then she disappeared sometime between two and three in the morning.’
A short pause followed.
‘That could fit,’ said the voice thoughtfully. ‘The contact materialised just before two, Chinese time.’
‘And then she immediately takes off.’ Xin smiled thinly. ‘Clever kid.’
‘Where else have you been?’
‘In her room. Nothing. No computer. She did a great job of clearing everything up before she disappeared. There’s no trace of her at the university either, and it wasn’t possible to see her file. I could arrange to do so, but I’d prefer it if you took care of that. I’m sure you can get into the university’s database.’
‘Which university?’
‘Shanghai University, Shangda Lu, in the Bao Shan District.’
‘Kenny, I don’t need to remind you how explosive this thing is. So step up the pace! We need this girl’s computer. Without fail!’
‘You’ll get it, and the girl,’ said Xin, ending the call.
He stared back out into the urban desert.
The computer. He had no doubt that Yoyo had it with her. Xin wondered what the reasons for her overhasty departure had been. She must have realised that someone had not only noticed her hacking and started a counter-attack on her system, but that they had also downloaded her data, and therefore knew her identity. That was reason enough for concern, but not to flee in panic. Quite a few networks protected themselves by launching a lightning attack to deactivate the computers which had intentionally or unintentionally hacked into theirs and, if possible, they transferred the hacker’s data right away. That alone wasn’t enough. There must have been something else to make Yoyo think she wasn’t safe any more.
There was only one possible explanation.
Yoyo had read something she wasn’t supposed to have read.
Which meant the encoding had temporarily failed. An error in the system. A hole had unexpectedly opened up and provided her access. If that was the case, the consequences really could be terrible! The question was how quickly the hole had closed up again. Not quickly enough, that much was clear; just that brief glimpse had been enough to make the girl take flight.
But how much did she really know?
He needed more than the computer. He had to find Yoyo before she had the chance to pass on what she knew. The only hope so far was Grand Cherokee Wang. Quite a poor hope, admittedly. But when had hope ever been more than certainty’s pitiful sister? In any case, the guy would sell Yoyo, and her computer included, the second she so much as set foot back in the apartment.
Xin frowned. Something in the way he was standing displeased him. He took a step backwards until he was positioned exactly between two joists, the tips of his shoes at equal distance from where the floor bordered the window.
There, that was better.
Pudong
‘I’ve known Yoyo since the day she was born,’ said Tu. ‘She was just like any normal teenager while she was growing up, her brain full of romantic ideas. Then she experienced something that changed her. Nothing spectacular, but I think it was one of those crossroads in life when you decide who you’re going to be. Have you heard of Mian Mian?’
‘The author?’
‘Yes, that’s the one.’
Jericho thought for a moment. ‘It must be an eternity since I read one of her books. She was a figurehead of the scene, right? Quite popular in Europe. I remember being amazed that she made it past the censorship.’
‘Oh, her books were banned for a long time! But by now she can do whatever she wants. When Shanghai declared itself to be the nightlife and party capital, she represented the area of conflict between glamour and the gutter, because she knew and could speak convincingly about both. Today, she’s a kind of patron saint of the local art scene. In her mid-fifties, established, even the Party uses her as a figurehead. In the summer of 2016 she gave a reading from her new novel, in Guan Di in Fuxing Park shortly before it was torn down, and Yoyo went along. Afterwards, she had the chance to speak with Mian Mian, and they ended up doing a crawl around the clubs and galleries which lasted many hours. After that, it was like she was intoxicated. You have to appreciate the symbolic coincidence, you see. Mian Mian started writing when she was sixteen, as an immediate consequence of her best friend committing suicide, and Yoyo had just turned sixteen.’
‘So she decided to become a writer.’
‘She decided to change the world. To some extent, it was romantically motivated, but she also had an admirably clear take on reality. At around that time my own star was beginning to rise. I knew Chen Hongbing from the nineties and liked him a great deal. He entrusted his daughter to me because he believed she could learn from me. Yoyo had always been very fond of the virtual world; she practically lived on the internet. She was particularly interested in the vanishing dividing lines between the actual world and the artificial one. In 2018 I was elected onto the board of Dao IT, and Yoyo was just getting to grips with her studies at the time. Chen supported her as much as he could, but she placed a lot of importance on earning her own money. When she heard I was taking over the department for Virtual Environments, she pestered me to find a job for her there.’
‘What did she study anyway?’
‘Journalism, politics and psychology. The first to learn how to write, the second to know what to write about, and psychology—’
‘To understand her father.’
‘She wouldn’t put it quite like that. The way she sees it, China is like a patient in constant danger of succumbing to insanity. So she looks for diagnoses for our diseased society. And that, of course, is where Chen Hongbing comes into the picture.’
‘She got her tools from you,’ ruminated Jericho.
‘Tools?’
‘Of course. When did you found Tu Technologies?’
‘2020.’
‘And Yoyo was there from the start?’
‘Of course.’ Tu’s expression seemed to clear. ‘Ah, I see.’
‘She’s been looking over your shoulder for years. You develop programs for everything under the sun.’
‘I already know what role we play in the Guardians, unintentionally of course! But beyond that I can assure you that none of my people would ever dream of technologically arming a dissident.’
‘Chen mentioned that she had already been arrested several times.’
‘It was actually only during her studies that she realised the true extent to which the authorities censor the internet. For someone who views the net as their natural habitat, closed doors can be incredibly frustrating.’
‘So she encountered the Diamond Shield.’
Anyone who tried to accelerate on the Chinese data highway soon found themselves up against virtual roadblocks. At the beginning of the millennium, fearing that the new medium could illuminate explosive topics, the Party had developed a highly armed defence program for net censorship, the Golden Shield, followed in 2020 by the Diamond Shield. With its help, an Internet Police force of over 150,000 rummaged their way though chat-rooms, blogs and forums. While the Golden Shield had been like a tracker dog, snuffling through the most far-flung corners of the web for terms like Tiananmen Massacre, Tibet, student revolts, freedom and human rights, the Diamond Shield was also able to recognise, to a certain extent, contextual meaning in the texts. This was the Party’s reaction to the so-called Bodyguard Programs. Titanium Mouse, for example, had figured out after her release how to put critical texts on the net which didn’t contain a single word that could be pounced on by the Golden Shield. To do this, she made use of a Bodyguard Program which rapped her on the knuckles, so to speak, while she was typing – if she used any incriminating terms, the Bodyguard would delete them, thus protecting her from herself. As a result the Diamond Shield paid less attention to keywords and instead assessed whole texts, connecting sayings and observations, inspecting the entries for double meanings and coding, and then raised the alarm if subversion was suspected.