Miller could read his face. “Doing what’s right is one thing. Knowing who decides what’s right is another.”
Langford nodded. Twenty years ago he would have given up the idea without another thought. Hell, ten years ago. But being within view of the end of one’s life had a habit of changing most men.
Eventually, Langford looked back across the table. “This bacteria… this miracle is going to take us to war. It’s going to take the whole world to war. Millions of people, Merl. Millions are going to die, over the very thing that can save them.”
Unfortunately, Langford’s idea was short lived. Less than an hour later, onboard the research ship Pathfinder, Neely Lawton sank slowly down into her chair.
Her eyes moved across the table in front of her, from cage to cage, with a look of pure horror. Every last one of her mice were dead. And her nagging fear was now fully realized.
Their miracle bacteria came with the worst possible vengeance. Anyone carrying the DNA extracted by the Chinese would be completely healed, physically, just before their minds were literally worked to death.
27
With weary eyes, Li Na Wei peered out over the distant cityscape, studying a blanket of gray clouds as they filled the sky above seemingly endless rows of towering high-rise buildings.
She could feel the faint mist on her face, causing what was left of the coal dust to begin to dot and streak down her cheeks. From the hillside, her dark almond-shaped eyes studied the span of buildings which spread out even further than she had realized.
Li Na blinked and continued staring, mentally exhausted. She hadn’t slept in two days, and though her mind wasn’t feeling the familiar dullness of sleep deprivation, her thoughts still felt impaired. Some were beginning to feel scattered.
However, as strange as her head was feeling, her body had never felt better. With only a faint twinge in her heart from her degenerative disease, the rest of her felt strong. As though she could walk forever.
Of course, she already had. It had been almost twelve hours since she’d leaped from the train as it began slowing into its last stop, a giant refinery now roughly eighty kilometers away.
A small pond had helped to remove most of the grime from her face and hands, leaving the remnants to now be finished off by the heavy mist.
Without a sound, she held her gaze and felt both a sense of awe and foreboding. The city standing before her was one that few had seen and yet everyone knew about. Fabled. Talked about only in rumors and stories among the working class, yet denied or ignored by the government. This brand new city was one of dozens like it scattered throughout the country, and one that Li Na’s father had mentioned specifically. Mysterious cities known to many people outside of China as “Ghost Cities.”
No one knew why they were built, or for whom, but they knew who had it done. The government. And yet the most remarkable thing about the city in front of her was that it was empty.
All of them were. Standing solemnly in the middle of nowhere, waiting to be populated and used. Row after row of high-rise towers stretching for kilometers.
And it wasn’t just the towers. Included in the landscape were city buildings, parking lots, and shopping centers. All empty. Sitting idle, littered with weeds stretching waist-high and growing out of what appeared to be thousands of fresh cracks in the concrete. Already eroding given their poor quality and several years of inattention.
The image was nothing short of apocalyptic, as if a neutron bomb had detonated, killing everyone but leaving the buildings intact.
After descending from the hills, the first sign of life Li Na encountered was a moose, grazing on a bush near the base of a still-functioning traffic light. Rows and rows of green lights stretched down the multilane boulevard, managing traffic for cars that were nowhere to be seen.
It took an hour before she saw her first human. Several people, in fact, as they moved between buildings in the large downtown square. None of them noticed Li Na or, if they had, none had paid her any attention. Instead they moved casually, but with purpose, disappearing into another building or around a street corner.
Still more appeared a few blocks further in, but far less inhabitants than a city that size should have. It felt eerie, leaving Li Na with a feeling of… despondence. A look of despair seemed plainly visible on their faces and in their eyes. Li Na had never felt anything like it. It was as if the people were planted there solely to prove the city was viable.
She watched them all for several minutes before following a man as he walked along a row of empty storefronts. Each displayed wide expansive windows with advertisements pasted to the glass, faded and peeling.
The man paid her no attention. He moved deliberately across another empty intersection and past more buildings until he reached two dirty glass doors. He pulled one open and promptly disappeared inside.
Li Na followed, guardedly. She looked cautiously through the glass doors before reaching to open one.
It was a shopping mall.
She stepped inside and remained near the door. It was a mall unlike any she’d ever seen. One as empty as the streets and buildings outside. She moved further down the wide hallway until she could see further in each direction. Some stores were open — a few at least — with bright neon signs over their entrances. One was a small convenience store. Another looked to be an electronics outlet with no one inside. The walls and shelves were sparsely stocked, and she could see neither customer nor employee.
It wasn’t until she turned to face the other direction that her heart nearly stopped. A feeling of excitement ran through her body, followed immediately by relief. At the end of the expansive walkway was a giant food court. Dozens of counters ringed the area, but only two were open. One served an array of soups and noodles and the other a selection of Korean dishes.
Having nearly depleted the food in her bag, Li Na allowed herself a grin and watched as the man she’d followed approached the counter and ordered a bowl of noodles.
Dozens of people were scattered around the large court, sitting randomly at different tables. Most were alone, with only a few small groups talking quietly to each other.
Even now, no one was watching her.
Li Na decided let her apprehension go. Hunger was absolutely her first priority. Thirty minutes and two bowls of noodles later, she rested in a red plastic chair, feeling full and watching two people sitting nearby. They were too far away to hear. Too far to bother anyone. Still, they whispered as good Chinese did.
Li Na tried again to listen but couldn’t. Instead she waited, bringing her bag in close and preparing to follow them when they left. Her thoughts had already moved from food to shelter, and she wondered where the people lived. She doubted that finding a place to hide in an empty city would be difficult. And she was right.
What she didn’t know about, however — what she failed to even consider — were the cameras positioned around the storefronts, buried subtly in the ceilings and overhangs.
The vast majority of cities in China still had little to no surveillance built out. It was a herculean job given the vast majority of the country was agrarian just three decades earlier. But some of the larger and newer areas were online, collecting and storing video images around the clock. Collected by giant data centers around the country, they were stored in immense databases. A practice replicated from the American FBI’s NGI system. And ironically, the ghost city of Yuhong was one of them.
But Li Na’s primary objective was survival. She did not have the years of experience to comprehend just how sophisticated a modern surveillance state could be. Or how pervasive. Even if she had seen the cameras, she would never have dreamed how quickly computers could search through millions of pictures. Or how accurate they could be in matching even the subtlest of facial features.