The tiny LEDs flickered as the book poured in. He had a back-up plan. You always needed a fall-back. He’d flick the power switch on the computer and flush the RAM. Any trace of what he was downloading would then be erased. But at a minimum such an act would cost him his computer privileges. At worst he’d be sent to re-education camp for years.
Hung had not been so lucky. Chin tried again to imagine who had squealed. Who from TOW camp had turned in his friend. It must have been the peasant man Hung had so often and so viciously derided. But he’d never know who it was in the end. It was just one of the mysteries that seemed to abound in the world. Mysteries such as the cause of Russia’s now-raging second civil war. Everyone knew that the violence had started in Moscow. At a rally in Red Square, he had read. The anarchist leadership had been literally torn limb from limb. And there were rumors of a sniper that had never been confirmed. Confusion always surrounded events on so large a scale. They were a blurred swirl of action and reaction — force and counterforce.
But Chin knew now that the chaotic ‘dissonance’ was caused by ‘complex, inter-related social variables’ — words he’d never even heard before that now explained so much. He was fascinated by his new world of ideas. Especially those that explained things dear to him. Stealing a foreign patent was certainly a challenge for an aspiring engineer. But water pumps held limited appeal in Chin’s new order of things. There was so much more to be gained by study and, increasingly, by action.
The red light at the top of the browser finally went black. Chin rolled the mouse and clicked the ‘Back’ button. The drawings again flashed onto the screen. Safe, he thought, relaxing. He clicked ‘Forward’ and the banned book reappeared instantly.
He was over a third of the way into the treatise. It was one long and fascinating lesson in the nature of man. It answered questions Chin had never pondered before the war. What drives man to extremes of behavior? How does violence reshape personality? It described the micro- and macro-social models with mathematical precision.
The only way he could find his place in the book for each furtive late-night read was to memorize the last words he’d read and search for them the next day. That wasn’t difficult. He’d already committed much of what he’d read to memory. Nothing had ever spoken to him like this book did. He’d found it late one night while browsing the Web. The propaganda about the great victory in the north obviously held no answers to any of Chin’s questions. Neither Chin’s family nor his friends discussed what it felt like to return home from hell. But Chin had found newsgroup postings by his former enemies in the West. He dared not reply, of course. But he relished their discussion of the great emptiness both he and they felt. From continent to continent, everyone talked about the great void that had been left inside them. About the end of life’s most cathartic experience and the beginning of the great nothingness that followed. ‘I was in the 1st MEF west of Vladivostok…’ would begin the heart-wrenching message. The replies would be from Germany, Belgium, Holland, France.
Chin barely held in the surge of emotions when he read what the men had to say. It took the greatest willpower he could muster to keep his facial expression neutral. When he was done, he’d run all the way from the library back to his room. He’d lie in bed and sob. Part in joy on realizing he wasn’t alone. Part in sadness on reliving the ordeal. For the experience of the cogs in the machine was universal no matter what the uniform. And he felt a kinship that cut across national boundaries. A closeness that linked brother-to-brother by spilt blood.
He’d learned many things from those postings. That the panicked, sweaty awakenings were quite normal. ‘Post-traumatic anxiety attacks’ were their name. No one ever talked of them in China. But his brothers described it exactly, just as they did the now-constant pain in his joints. According to a British vet, one in four in the UN army had been medically discharged due to ‘cold-induced rheumatism.’ The doctors at Beijing University clinic had denied there was any such thing. But he trusted only his brethren, and the news from them wasn’t good. The pain Chin felt now would worsen steadily for decades to come.
But his greatest discovery had come ten nights ago. It was a posting by a French combat veteran. One of the war-related sites he listed in his message contained the book Chin now accepted as his bible. It was the Rosetta Stone of his attempt at understanding why his life had changed. It not only answered all his questions, it posed new ones he hadn’t thought to ask.
But the most fascinating thing of all was its breadth and scope of subject. It not only answered whys — and the far simpler whens, wheres and whos — but it spent long sections discussing the ever-practical hows. The cause and effect of human behavior — both mass, and individual. The universal truths about man no matter how dark and base.
What had happened in the north after the UN withdrawal was only a precursor. But it was enough of a shock to Beijing that they’d quarantined all of Manchuria. No news or people flowed into or out of the rebellious provinces. But the fighting there still raged, according to reports he’d read on the Internet.
He fantasized late at night in the darkness of his room. In Chin’s mind he saw wave after wave of stimuli washing over a seething population. They would unleash violence on a scale never seen before. The destructive potential of a billion and a half people. He imagined the feeble efforts of the decrepit Communist government to stem the tidal forces. He imagined the liberating blows which would topple the weakened state. He went from grinding teeth to smiles to blissful sleep. Then he’d awaken the next morning to aching knees, hips, shoulders and elbows. He took painkillers he’d bought off the black market in ever-increasing doses.
It was, in fact, his first forays in search of drugs that had led to his great breakthrough. He’d thought at first of organizing the students at Beijing University. Of forming ‘study’ groups which he could carefully lead into social discussion and eventually criticism. But when he ventured into the back alleys of Beijing to find relief from his pain, he realized what a waste of time dealing with students would be. Instead of nudging them warily into subversion, he could step into opium dens filled with hatred. And while university groups were closely watched, commoners were too numerous for scrutiny. There were brutalized veterans like Chin. Angry men like Hung who’d lost loved ones to the basements and camps of the security apparatus. Refugees fresh from bloody reprisals in Manchuria. And a vast sea of the disenfranchised, whose bleary eyes lit up when Chin spoke of a world in which they would be free to say ‘No.’ For what he offered them was priceless. A relief from dreary existence. A break from incessant boredom. A justification to swing the fist they’d long before balled up in anger. A sense of belonging which was more addictive to society’s outcasts than the opium which they smoked around the clock.
Already Chin had gotten them to kill. It was no more difficult than issuing orders to his platoon. Part challenge, part coaxing, part plea — the result had been three dead policemen. Three slit throats. Three service pistols added to their budding arsenal.
But it was discovery of the treatise on the Internet which had given Chin focus, direction and drive. For armed with the tools that the book provided him, he could send masses crashing against the bastards who’d killed Hung. The fucking assholes who’d sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths. Who’d consigned many more men — like Chin — to a life filled with physical and emotional agony.