What makes me waver the most, though, is Jian Jian. Before I met her, I didn’t believe there was any love in the world. After I met her, I didn’t believe that there was anything but love in the world. If I leave her, what would be the point in living even two thousand years? On the scales of life, two and a half centuries sits on one side and the pain of leaving Jian Jian sits on the other. The scales are practically balanced.
The head of our department calls a meeting, and I can guess from the look on his face that it isn’t to discuss work. Rather, it’s directed at a specific person. Sure enough, the chief says, today, he wants to talk about the “intolerable” conduct of some of the staff. I don’t look at Hadron, but I know he’s in trouble. The chief, however, says someone else’s name.
“Liu Wei, according to reliable sources, you joined the IT Republic?”
Liu Wei nods, as self-assured as Louis XVI walking to the guillotine. “This has nothing to do with work. I don’t want work interfering with my personal freedoms.”
The chief sternly shakes his head. He thrusts a finger at Liu Wei. “Very few things have nothing to do with work. Don’t bring your cherished university ideals into the workplace. If a country can condemn its president on Main Street, that’s called democracy. However, if everyone disobeys their boss, then this country will collapse.”
“The virtual nation is about to be recognized.”
“Recognized by whom? The United Nations? Or a world power? Stop dreaming.”
The chief doesn’t seem to have much faith in his last utterance. The territory human society owns is divided into two parts. One part is every continent and island on Earth. The other part is cyberspace.
The latter recapitulated human history at a hundred times the speed. In cyberspace, after tens of years of a disorganized Stone Age, nations emerged as a matter of course. Virtual nations chiefly stem from two sources. The first is every sort of bulletin-board system aggregated together. The second is massively multiplayer online games. Virtual nations have heads of state and legislatures similar to those of physical nations. They even have online armed forces. Their borders and citizenships are not like those of physical nations. Virtual nations chiefly take belief, virtue, and occupation as their organizing principles. Citizens of every virtual nation are spread all over the world. Virtual nations, with a combined population of over two billion, established a virtual United Nations comparable to the physical one. It’s a huge political entity that overlaps the traditional nations.
The IT Republic is a superpower in the virtual world. Its population is eighty million and still rapidly growing. The country is composed mostly of IT professionals, and makes aggressive political demands. It also has formidable power against the physical world. I don’t know what Liu Wei’s citizenship is. They say that the head of the IT Republic is an ordinary employee of some IT company. Conversely, more than one head of a physical nation has been exposed as an ordinary citizen of a virtual nation.
The chief gives everyone on our team a stern warning. No one can have a second nationality. He allows Liu Wei to go to the president’s office, then he ends the meeting. We haven’t even risen from our seats when Zheng Lili, who had stayed at her desk during the meeting, lets out a head-splitting scream. Something horrible has happened. We rush to turn on the news.
Back at my desk I pull up a news site. A broadcast is streaming on the homepage; the newsreader is in a daze. He announces that the United Nations has voted down Resolution 3617. That was the IT Republic’s request for diplomatic recognition. It had passed the Security Council. In response, the IT Republic has declared war against the physical world. It began attacking the world’s financial systems half an hour ago.
I look at Liu Wei. This seems to have surprised him, too.
The picture changes to that of a large city, a bird’s-eye view of a street of tall buildings, and a traffic jam. People stream out of cars and buildings. It’s like the aftermath of an earthquake. The shot cuts to a large supermarket. A crowd pushes in like the tide. Madly, they scramble for cans and packages of food. Row after row of shelves shake and crash into each other, like sandbars broken up by a tidal wave….
“What’s happening?” I ask, terrified.
“You still don’t understand?” Zheng Lili asks. “There’s no rich or poor anymore. Everyone is penniless. Steal or you won’t eat!”
Of course, I understand, but I don’t dare to believe this nightmare is real. Coins and paper money stopped circulating three years ago. Even buying a pack of cigarettes from a kiosk on the side of the street requires a card reader. In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage. As far as this grand office building is concerned, if the electronic records in relevant departments are deleted, even though a company holds title deeds, no one will recognize its property rights. What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash. As far as the IT Republic is concerned, close to half the IT workers in the physical world are its citizens. Erasing those marks is extremely easy.
Programmers, network engineers, and database managers form the main body of the IT Republic. They are a twenty-first-century revival of the nineteenth-century industrial army, except physical labor is now mental labor, and gets more and more difficult. They work with code as indistinct as thick fog and labyrinthine network hardware and software. Like dockworkers from two hundred years ago, they bear a heavy load on their backs.
Information technology advances in great strides. Except for those lucky enough to climb into management, everyone’s knowledge and skills grow obsolete quickly. New IT graduates pour in like hungry termites. The old workers (not actually old, most are just over thirty) are forced to the side, replaced and abandoned. The newcomers, though, don’t last long either. The vast majority of them don’t have long-term prospects…. This class is known as the technology proletariat.
Do not say that we own not a thing. We’re about to reformat the world! This is a corrupt version of “The Internationale.”
A thought strikes me like lightning. Oh, no. My money, which doesn’t belong to me but will buy me over two hundred years of life, will it be deleted? But if everything will be reformatted, won’t the result be the same? My money, my Gene Extension, my dreams… It grows dark before my eyes. My chest grows tight and I stumble away from my desk.
Zheng Lili laughs then, and I stop. She stands near me.
“Happy April Fool’s Day,” a sober Liu Wei says, glancing at the network switch at a corner of the office.
The office network isn’t connected to the outside world. Zheng Lili’s laptop is sitting on the switch, acting as a server. That bitch! She must have gone to a lot of trouble to pull off this April Fool’s joke, most of it to produce that news footage. An in-house designer, though, could have used 3-D software to produce that footage. It wouldn’t have been that hard.
Others obviously don’t think Zheng Lili’s joke went too far. “Oh, come on,” Hadron says to me. “Practical jokes are supposed to raise the hair on your neck if they’re being done right. What’s there to be afraid of?” He points at the executives upstairs.
I break into a cold sweat, wondering whether he suspects anything because of my reaction to Zheng Lili’s prank. Can he see through me? But even that’s not my biggest worry.
Reformatting the world, is that really just the mad ravings of IT Republic extremists? Is this really just an April Fool’s joke? How long can the hair that suspends the sword last?
In an instant, like a bright light driving away the dark, my doubt is gone. I have decided.