Expecting further disappointments, he unbolted the hatch at the back, opened the container and shone his torch inside, but there at least it all seemed undamaged. Hanna breathed freely again. If the cargo had been lost, that would really have been the end; everything else was mere inconvenience. He took the detector in his hand and checked the seams. Intact. No harm done.
Carefully, he fetched it out.
This simply meant that he would have to take the package across for deployment himself. No problem there. There was enough room on the grasshopper platform. For a moment he considered informing mission control, but time was running short. There was no alternative anyway. He had to act. It was best to be back in the hotel before the others started rubbing the sleep from their eyes.
Best never to have been away.
27 May 2025
GAMES
Xintiandi, Shanghai, China
Jericho woke up on his couch next to two bottles and a glass streaked with drying red wine, and two emptied packets of mango chips. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. He sat up, a process which needed two attempts and which raised the question of how the hell this sodden, heavy sponge had got inside his skull. Then he remembered his good fortune. At the same time he felt some indefinable sort of loss. There was something missing that had grown as familiar as his own heartbeat over the years.
Noise.
Never again would he wake up to the hammering sound of high-rises being built around him. Never again would six lanes of early morning traffic rattle his eardrums before the sun had even risen. From now on he was living in Xintiandi, where admittedly there were hordes of tourists, but you could cope perfectly well with them. Generally speaking they never arrived before ten o’clock in the morning and then in the late afternoon they retreated, bathed in sweat and with aching feet, back to their hotels, to gather the strength to go out again in the evening to the restaurants. In the evenings it was mostly Shanghaians in the district’s bistros, cafés and clubs, the boutiques and cinemas. In Jericho’s new home, you hardly felt either invasion. That was the advantage of a shikumen house. Outside someone could be driving herds of dinosaurs through the streets, but inside all was peace and quiet.
He rubbed his eyes. You couldn’t quite say that he lived here, not yet. There were still packed crates scattered through every room in the loft. At least he’d got as far as installing the new media terminal. Tu’s customer service team had delivered it the evening before, two cheery and helpful representatives hauling the thing upstairs for him and skilfully fitting it in with the decor so that it was hardly noticeable. Right after that, Jericho had had to set out for his surprise visit to Yoyo. It was only after he got back that he had got around to playing with his new toy, and celebrating his first night in Xintiandi while he did so. He’d gone to town on it, so the two empty bottles told him, though his only company had been Animal Ma Liping and the suffering children in their cages. He wondered whether Joanna would have liked this place, then decided not to even contemplate that.
It was good not to need anyone else.
He went to shower, and switched on his various appliances. Most of all he would have liked to unpack the rest of the crates, but since yesterday Tu Tian and Chen Hongbing had come to join all the other ghosts crowding the back of his mind, and they urged him on in his search for Yoyo. Dutifully, he decided to prioritise the case. He shaved, picked out a pair of light trousers and a shirt jacket, uploaded one of Tu’s programs to the datastick in his new hologoggles, and left the house.
He would spend the next hour with Yoyo.
Handily, one of the guided tours went through the French Concession, a colonial relic of the nineteenth century. It was right next door to Xintiandi, separated only by three levels of city highway. Once he had taken the underpass and come back up into the sunlight, he walked along the busy Fuxing Zhong Lu and activated the program’s speech recognition protocol.
‘Start,’ he said.
At first nothing happened. The world on the other side of the lens looked as it always had. People scurried or strolled about. Business types communed with their mobile phones, their eyes fixed on the displays and wireless earbuds firmly in place as they crossed the street, somehow managing not to get run over. Elegantly dressed women came in and out of the chic little boutiques around, chatting to one another or on their phones, while less well-dressed women thronged the Japanese or American department stores. Groups of tourists photographed what they imagined were authentic examples of colonial architecture. Cars, mini-vans and limousines filled the roads, and dozens of the identical CODs, cars on demand, squeezed in among them on the way up to the speedway. Electric scooters and hybrid cruisers wormed their way into gaps in the traffic that were filled before they had ever really opened. Bicycles with rattling mudguards raced futuristic antigrav skates. City buses and vans crept along the packed roads, a formation of police skymobiles overflew the Fuxing Zhong Lu, a little further on an ambulance took off, turned in the air and flew west. Gleaming private cars and sky-bikes shot across the sky, following aerial guidance beacons. Everything rumbled, squealed or honked, music blared, advertising slogans and news headlines splashed across the omnipresent video screens.
A quiet day in a calm neighbourhood.
The double T of Tu Technologies appeared in front of Jericho’s eyes. The system’s projection technology fooled his retina into thinking that the logo was floating, three-dimensional, above the ground several metres away. Then it vanished, and the computer in the arm of the specs projected Yoyo onto the Fuxing Zhong Lu.
It was astonishing.
Jericho had seen plenty of holographic projections in his time. The specs were one continuous curve of glass fibres, and they worked like a 3D cinema that you could carry around on your nose as you walked. The whole system had nothing in common with the early, bulky virtual reality viewscreens. Rather the computer added objects and people into the actual surroundings just by producing them on the glass lens. You could see someone who was not physically present. These could be real people or synthetic avatars, and the program could bring them closer or further away. In electronic environments, they could hardly be told apart from people who were actually there. The problems began out in the real world, when the computer had to combine the avatars’ movements and reactions with real-time events. They looked transparent against complex backdrops or if there was movement going on behind them. The illusion was broken completely if real people walked through the space where the avatar appeared to be. They simply walked straight through them. Your cheery chatty virtual pal paid no attention if, while they were talking, a truck ran them over. If you moved your head quickly, they would trail behind like ghosts. The system had to continuously scan and upload the real surroundings and synchronise them with the program to bring appearance and reality back together, and so far the attempt had seemed doomed to failure.
Yoyo, though, appeared one simulated metre away from Jericho, on the pavement, showing none of the telltale phantom characteristics of other avatars. She was wearing a close-fitting raspberry catsuit and discreet appliqués, her hair was plaited into a double ponytail and she was lightly made up.
‘Good morning, Mr Jericho!’ she said, smiling.
Pedestrians hurried past behind her. Yoyo blocked them from view. Nothing about her looked transparent, there were no fuzzy edges. She walked in front of him and looked straight into his eyes.