‘Nice.’ Jericho rolled the stick between his fingers and looked at the glasses. ‘I’ve got some hologoggles already.’
‘Not like these you haven’t. We were convinced the usual suspects would spy on that product development. But you seem to have scared them off with your last mission. Dao IT is still nursing its bruises.’
Jericho smirked. Dao IT, Tu’s former employer, had been less than pleased to lose its chief development officer for Virtual Environments when he had decided to set up independently. Since then the company had broken into Tu Technologies’ systems multiple times to download trade secrets. Each time, the hackers had hidden their tracks so skilfully that Jericho had had to use all the tricks of his trade to convict them. Tu had presented the evidence to the courts, and Dao IT had had to pay millions in fines.
‘By the way, they made me an offer,’ he said casually.
‘Who?’ Tu sat bolt upright. ‘Dao?’
‘Yes, well, they were impressed. They said if I had managed to track them down, it would be good to have me on their side.’
The manager pushed his construction of glasses up. He smacked his lips together noisily and cleared his throat.
‘I guess they’ve got no shame.’
‘I said no of course,’ said Jericho slowly. Loyalty was a valuable thing. ‘I just thought you might be interested to know.’
‘Of course I would.’ Tu grinned. Then he laughed and slapped Jericho on the shoulder. ‘Get to work then, xiongdi.’
World Financial Center
Grand Cherokee Wang moved his body to an inaudible beat. His head nodded with every step, as if confirming his own coolness. Bouncing at the knees, playing imaginary instruments, he skipped along the glass corridor, clicking his tongue loudly, allowing himself the hint of a swing at the hips and baring his teeth. Oh, how he loved himself! Grand Cherokee Wang, the King of the World. He liked it best up here at night, when he could see his reflection in the glass surface that looked out over the sea of light that was Shanghai: it was as if he were towering out of it in the flesh, a giant! There wasn’t a single shop window on Nanjing Donglu he forgot to pay homage to himself in: his beautifully structured face with the gold applications on his forehead and cheekbones, his shoulder-length blue-black hair, the white PVC jacket, although it was actually too warm for it at this time of year, but never mind. Wang and reflective surfaces were a match made in heaven.
He was right at the top.
At least, he worked right at the top, on the ninety-seventh floor of the World Financial Center, because Wang’s parents had made their financing of his studies dependent on his willingness to contribute to it with earnings of his own. And so that’s what he did. With such dedication that his father began to seriously wonder whether his otherwise less than delightful offspring actually loved working. In reality, though, it was thanks to the nature of this job in particular that Grand Cherokee Wang was now spending more time in the World Financial Center than in the lecture theatre, where his presence was more mandatory. On the other hand, it was clear that for a budding electrical and mechanical engineer, there could hardly be a better field trip than to the ninety-seventh floor of the World Financial Center.
Wang had tried to describe it to his grandmother, who had gone blind at the beginning of the millennium before the building had been completed.
‘Can you remember the Jin Mao Tower?’
‘Of course I can, I’m not stupid. I may be blind, but my memory still works!’
‘Then imagine the bottle opener right behind it. You know, don’t you, that people call it the bottle opener because—’
‘I know they call it that.’
‘But do you know why?’
‘No. But I doubt I’ll be able to stop you from telling me.’
Wang’s grandmother often said that going blind had brought with it a series of advantages, the most pleasing of which was no longer having to see the members of her family.
‘So, listen, it’s a narrow building, with beautifully winding façades. Completely smooth, nothing jutting out, just glass. The sky’s reflected in it, all around the building, like with the Jin Mao Tower. Unbelievable! Almost five hundred metres high, a hundred and one floors. How can I describe the shape? It’s a quadratic structure at ground level, like a completely normal tower, but as you go higher the two sides level out so it gets narrower and narrower at the top, and the roof is a long ledge.’
‘I don’t know if I want to know this much detail.’
‘You do! You have to be able to picture what they’ve managed to construct up there. Originally they planned for a circular opening under the ledge, fifty metres in diameter, but then the Party said it was a no go because of the symbolism. If it was round, it would look like Japan’s Rising Sun—’
‘The Japanese devil!’
‘Exactly, so they built a square opening, fifty by fifty metres. A hole in the heavens. With the angular opening, the whole tower looks like a huge, upright bottle opener, and once it was finished in 2008, everyone called it that; there was nothing they could do about it. The lower section of the hole is a viewing platform with a glass pathway leading up above it. And where it cuts off above, there’s a glass deck, with a glass floor too.’
‘I’ll never go up there!’
‘Listen, this is where it really gets good: in 2020 someone came up with the absolutely crazy idea of building the highest roller-coaster in the world in the opening, the Silver Dragon. Have you heard of it?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’
‘The hole was too small for a complete roller-coaster of course. I mean, it’s huge, but they had something bigger in mind, so they built the roller-coaster station in the opening and laid the track around the building. You climb into the car from the glass corridor, and off it goes, out ten metres beyond the edge of the building, then in a wide arc around the left side column round to the back of the tower. You hang there in the air above Pudong, half a kilometre up in the sky!’
‘That’s crazy!’
‘It’s awesome! At the back, the track climbs steeply towards the roof, circles round the right column and then flows into a long horizontal section which goes up onto the roof edge. Isn’t that wild? Going for a ride on the roof of the World Financial Center!’
‘I’d be dead by the time I got to that bit.’
‘That’s true, most people end up pissing their pants in the first few metres, but that’s nothing yet. On the other side of the edge it suddenly rushes upwards. Into a steep curve! Now the car is really racing! And you know what? It races straight into the hole, into this huge hole, through under the roof axis, then up again, up, up, up, because you’re in the goddamn looping section, high out over the roof, then steeply back down again, into the hole, around the right column and back upright and into the station, and three rounds of that. Oh man!’
Every time Grand Cherokee talked about it, he went hot and cold with excitement.
‘Shouldn’t you be studying?’
Should he be? In the glass corridor, hips swinging, watching the queue as it pushed its way forward at the barrier, faces turned towards him – some derailed between anticipation and the rushing onset of panic, some frozen in shock, others transfigured with the look of addiction – Grand Cherokee felt at an irreconcilable distance from the depressive depths of his studies. The university lay half a kilometre below him. He was far too special for an existence spent in lecture halls. Only the knowledge that all the cramming would ultimately enable him to create something even greater than the Silver Dragon kept him at it. He pushed his way through the queue of people to the glass door which separated the corridor from the platform, opened it and grinned around at them.