When it had worked? When Su-Yong had woken up in the cluster he’d designed, somehow sentient? Well, then he’d allowed himself to forget their doom. He’d let himself hope that the progressives would win, that gong kāi huà might return some day, that a billion flowers might bloom again, or that at least he could ride his wife’s coat-tails to even greater fame and wealth.
No. He should have put two and two together. Ted Prat-Nung was dead from American bullets in that Bangkok loft. Su-Yong was insane, would soon be functionally dead. He was the last of their triad, the last of the team that had turned his wife into the first true posthuman. It made sense. The hardliners would finish the job. They’d make sure that he died too.
Chen Pang bowed his head, and waited for the end to come.
Chen woke to a jolt, unaware that he’d fallen asleep. A loud noise clanged through his head. The elevator lurched unnervingly. Then it began to rise, with a new and unpleasant grinding sound. He waited for the lights to come back on, for the status indicator to change. Neither happened.
He came to his feet. What was going on? Scenarios ran though his head. Su-Yong had tried to escape, and had been stopped, and now they were rescuing him. Or the hardliners had attempted a coup, but had been defeated. Or it had been a power failure after all, and the lockdown nothing but a precaution.
Who would be there when the doors opened? Bai? The director of the SCC? His assistant Li-hua? Someone else?
The elevator stopped moving with a clang. Chen waited, his breath coming fast. Then the doors parted. Bright light hit him, and he fell back, a hand raised up to shield himself, blinded.
Even so, he caught the sight of the guns. Armed soldiers in insectile combat armor, matte black armored surfaces everywhere, bulging actuators and power packs, mirrored helmets obscuring their faces. They held assault rifles aimed in his direction, gaping wide muzzles ready to spew death at him. With them was a single young man in a dark suit, a briefcase in one hand.
“Professor Chen, please stay where you are,” the young man said. The mirror-faced soldiers rushed forwards, pointed their guns and shined lights into the corners of the elevator, up at its ceiling.
Two of them patted him down roughly. Their hands invaded his person, pressing against every part of his torso, grasping his ankles and sliding upwards along his thighs, even between his legs. An insult! But Chen bit his tongue, made no move to resist them.
“Clear!” a voice behind him said.
“Clean,” said one of the soldiers patting him down.
“Please come with me, Professor Chen,” the young man said. It wasn’t a request.
They walked through a red-lit Secure Computer Center. Flashlights and red emergency lights provided the only illumination. They passed rows and rows of workstations, abandoned. Tall metal equipment racks cast strange shadows against the wall. Two armored soldiers in their mirrored helmets went in front, then Chen and the young man in a suit, then two more armored soldiers behind them.
“I am Fu-han Zhao, Professor,” the young man in the suit said. “I’m an aide to State Security Minister Bo Jintao. I’m here to take you to him.”
Bo Jintao. One of the hardliners.
“Bo Jintao? What’s happened? Why is the power out here? Why was I stuck in that elevator for hours?”
“We’ve suffered a major cyber-attack, Professor. As for the rest, we were hoping you could tell us.”
They reached the emergency stairs that led from the Secure Computing Center to the surface, ten flights up. More mirror-faced soldiers in full battle armor were posted here. They parted to let them into the stairwell. Inside, emergency lights on their own batteries bathed them in red.
“How can the SCC power be out?” Chen asked as they climbed. “It has its own backup supply, good for days.”
“We have power here,” Zhao answered. “We fear to use it. The cyber-attack was pervasive. We fear bringing the systems back online until we know what could be compromised.”
At the top there were yet more armed and armored soldiers. The entire building was empty, lit only by emergency lights.
“The power is out up here?” Chen asked.
“Yes,” Zhao said.
“Where is my driver?”
“He’s been… temporarily relieved of duty, Professor. All of them have.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. All the clones.”
All the Confucian Fist clones, relieved of duty. This was about his wife, then. They thought she was behind the attack. And they feared her influence over the clones.
Damn.
He saw not a single student or faculty member in the red-lit computer science building. Outside, it was dark, sometime in the dead of night. Hard rain fell on them. Tank-like armored vehicles crouched on the street, huge guns and extended missile launchers pointed at the building. Between them, portable lights illuminated a military helicopter in the middle of the road. It sat there, waiting for them, rotors spinning, weapons mounted on its stubby wings, mirror-faced armored soldiers surrounding it. Its mottled skin glimmered in the rain and the sodium lights.
Chen heard more rotors up above. He raised his face, using his hand to shield himself from the rain. In the air above he could see dim red lights illuminating four smaller, sleeker, more deadly-looking helicopters circling around them, like birds of prey coolly regarding the ground, waiting for their moment to pounce.
And who knew what lethal weapons he didn’t see.
Zhao gestured for Chen to board the craft.
“My phone… my slate…” Chen shouted to be heard over the rain and the roar of the rotors.
Zhao nodded and yelled back, “They’ll be returned to you at the appropriate time.”
They suspect me too, Chen thought with dread.
He’d been ready to accept death hours ago, but now he very much wanted to live. And to do so, he had to persuade Bo Jintao that he wasn’t a threat. Chen boarded the helicopter, a chill sinking into him from more than the rain. Zhao boarded after him, and then they were aloft.
From the air Chen got his first look at Shanghai. Then he understood.
They flew through the urban canyons between lifeless skyscrapers, their escort helicopters flanking them. The city was a wasteland. Where there should have been light, there was darkness. A dim flicker of candles or flashlights shone in some windows. Down below, on the streets, there were fires. The immobile hulks of cars littered the roads. Water flowed around them. Soldiers manned checkpoints, directed spotlights from place to place. As they passed over an expensive block an explosion sounded, and then the sharp report of automatic weapons.
He saw people in the street, a mob of them pressing against a store front. Looters. The mob moved forward, and from the doorway he saw the flare of gunfire.
Then the chopper was past and he lost sight of them.
Face pale, Chen turned to Zhao next to him. “What happened?”
“The most damaging cyber-attack of all time, Professor. It disabled the on-board computers of hundreds of thousands of cars, sent electrical surges that destroyed hundreds of power substations, knocked out the trains, the ferry terminal, the public safety surveillance systems. Even the sewers. The intelligent water routing that separates waste water and rainwater has failed, and so now we have raw sewage flooding the streets.”
Chen couldn’t breathe. Could Su-Yong have done this?
“My daughter?” he asked.
“Safe,” Zhao said. “We have men with her.”
Chen nodded.
“Deaths?” he asked.
“Hundreds so far,” Zhao said. “Car crashes. Fires. We have thousands trapped in subways that are filling up with water. And violence. People know the delivery trucks will not be running tomorrow. So they loot the stores, steal from each other. Billions of yuan of damage, at least.”