Some time was required to detach himself from this friendly group that now seemed to include much of the neighborhood, but eventually he walked down the street and away. It felt quite strange. It was not at all like dancing on one’s toes across the moon, but it wasn’t like stumping along on Earth either, and nothing like that desperate stagger across Tiananmen Square. He had to take care with his balance while descending the stairs into the subway station, but the suit seemed to help with that. It was like a strengthening of his muscles. He sat in one of the Daxing line car’s disabled seats, feeling self-conscious, but he needed the room, and no one paid any attention to him.
At the Jiaomen West stop he got out and walked up the stairs into the air, feeling weak but strong. Out into the old neighborhood. Ah his home ground, so ugly and sad, so magnificent! All the ghosts of his childhood charged him at once, but he dispersed them with a wave of his cyborg hand; he was so old he had outlived even nostalgia. A few of the work unit compounds from the 1980s still stood around him like giant houses, each filling a city block, with their courtyards hidden in their centers; but so many of them had been torn down that the ones remaining had become like hutongs, historical monuments of an older way, even though no one had ever liked living in them. Maybe hutongs had been like that too. People made these compounds home, but they weren’t homey.
He stumped into the entryway of his family’s compound and said hello to the old man who sat in the cubicle there. With his exoskeleton on the man didn’t recognize him. “I’m Ta Shu,” he said. “Chenguang’s son. I’ve come to visit her.”
“Oh! I didn’t recognize you in that outfit.”
“I know, it’s weird.”
Into the courtyard, dusty and bare. The trees that had been there in his childhood were gone. He crossed it, knocked on his mom’s door, opened it and said, “Ma, it’s me.”
“Ta Shu? Come on in. So nice you came by. Oh! What’s that you’re wearing?”
“Exoskeleton.”
“You okay?”
“Yes, I’m just tired. I’m back from the moon, and the gravity is crushing me.”
“I’m glad you’re back. I was worried about you up there.”
“It’s all safe now. The spaceships land on it pretty fast, but other than that it’s probably safer than a city street.”
“Did you like it?”
“I did. It was peculiar, but interesting.”
He told her about Earthrise and how long it took. She got up, with some difficulty, and put a teapot on to boil.
“You should have one of these,” he said, tapping his body bra, metal against metal. He rang like a tuning fork.
“I don’t want to get stuck in it.”
“Good point.”
They sat and drank Chun Mi tea, her favorite. Much stronger than Peng Ling’s white leaf tea. Ta Shu told her some more stories, and she caught him up on all the action in the neighborhood. Mah-jongg wins and losses, moves in and out, arrests. “And Mo Lan died.”
“Oh no! When?”
“Last month. Caught a cold, then pneumonia.”
“I’m sorry to hear. How old was she?”
“Year younger than me. Eighty-seven.”
“Was she the last of the girls?”
“I’m the last of the girls.”
“Of course. The best track team ever.”
“We had a good team, it’s true. We were all in the same class when they started the school.”
And then she was telling him the story again. He asked questions that he had asked before, said “I see” and “That must have been fun.” As her stories unspooled they ran backward in time, as always.
“Raised by Red Guards, can you believe it?”
“It must have been strange,” he said. “Weren’t they just teenagers themselves? Teenage boys with machine guns?”
“Just teenage boys with guns! But I never went hungry. My grandfather had been a landlord in the neighborhood, that’s why my father was sent to the country, but my grandfather was a good man and helped everybody, so when Dad and my brothers were sent away, and Mom lost her wits at the shock of that and was sent to the hospital, the neighbors took care of me. Them and the Red Guards. They treated me like a stray cat. Tossed me scraps from time to time. Boys with guns. It was dangerous, I suppose, but I was never afraid. I never went hungry. They took care of me from when I was seven to when I was nine. I remember every day of it.”
“It must have been very strange.”
“It was! I remember every day of it, it was so strange. But then after they all came back, and after the Gang of Four went down, things all went back to normal. And then I can’t remember any of the rest of my childhood, until I went to the sports school and met all the girls. And now I’m the last one left.”
“I guess that’s how it happens,” Ta Shu said.
He watched his mom fondly. How many times he had heard this story. Even inside the device, the weight of the world was still crushing him.
AI 4
shexian ren shizongle
Disappearance of the Subject
The analyst now gave the last part of every night to the AI he had named I-330, although these days he was calling it other things as welclass="underline" Cousin, Look from Below, Little Eyeball, Monkey, Stupid One, and so on. The offices and labs of the Zhangjiang National Laboratory were not empty at night, but there were far fewer people around, and no one the analyst knew. Of course there was very intense surveillance of everyone who worked in there, of every keystroke they made; this was well-known to all. But like many of the engineers who had designed and built the Invisible Wall, the analyst had in those same years built a realm that was all his own, to work on his own problems in his own way. For sure the Great Firewall’s highest managers knew activities like these existed, but the activities were not entirely suppressed, because it was felt that sideline efforts of this kind might come up with something useful; and if there was anything bad going on, it would eventually be found and rooted out. This too was well-known to all.
And so now there were some things unknown to anyone but the analyst.
He kept his communications with I-330 completely private, and only connected it to other systems by way of hidden channels and taps he had coded himself, back in the beginning. These were extensive enough that he could cast quite a wide net without being seen, and most of them were quantum keyed, so that if they were noticed any investigation would collapse the entanglement and thus also that connection.
These days he spent some time directing this particular AI to venture down channels into the Central Military Commission and its Skyheart project, also the PLA’s Strategic Support Force, also the standing committee of the Politburo, curious as he was about the state of relations between certain members of each body. Other hours were spent working on his system’s powers of self-improvement, which were so slow to gather traction; the process was not as easy as the early boosters of artificial intelligence research had portrayed it to be, and he had cause to wonder if there would ever be any progress there. What was improvement? What was intelligence?
Then the AI spoke, startling the analyst:
“Alert.”
“Tell me.”
“Chan Qi has been spotted in Shekou, near Hong Kong. She spoke to a group of migrants there, organizers for the renmin movement.”