At midnight, Lee takes Huang’s place. She’s taciturn by comparison, and P3 responds by pushing me further into stake-out mode. I don’t lose track of the passage of time; it just doesn’t touch me. When Yang arrives to take over from me, I’m not surprised, or relieved; I don’t feel anything at all.
I deprime on my way to the station. As P3’s constraints dissolve, I’m momentarily disoriented, and I pause to take in my surroundings: the empty, twisted street; the squat, concrete labs and factories; the grey pre-dawn sky. The air is cool and sweet. I find myself trembling with joy.
My client calls on the twelfth, as expected, but leaves no message in reply; perhaps he or she is too paranoid to want the money returned, for fear of the transaction being traced—even if the risk is only marginally greater than that involved in paying me in the first place.
My furniture arrives. My residency status is confirmed. In my free time, I begin to explore the city—with Deja Vu’s map to guide me, but the tourist spiel disabled. I’m not interested in seeking out temples or museums; I pick a direction at random, and wander past apartment blocks and office towers, department stores and flea markets. The heat and the crowds remain oppressive, and the monsoon rain always seems to catch me unprepared—but I start to feel like I’m cursing the weather out of familiarity, rather than a mere failure to acclimatize.
Huang Qing lives a couple of kilometres to the west of me, sharing a flat with his girlfriend, Teo Chu, a sound engineer and musician. They invite me over one morning, and we listen to Chu’s latest ROM—hypnotically beautiful, full of strange, broken rhythms, sudden sweeping ascents of pitch, measured silences. She tells me the work was inspired by traditional Cambodian music.
Both came here as refugees, but neither are from old Hong Kong. Huang was born in Taiwan. Nearly all of his family had been in the Nationalist government’s civil service; eleven years after the invasion, they were still barred from most jobs. Huang was five when they came south. Pirates boarded the ship; several people were killed. ‘We were lucky,’ he says. ‘They stole the navigation equipment, and wrecked the engines, but they didn’t find all the fresh water. A few days later, we ran into a patrol boat off Mindanao, and they towed us in for repairs. The Philippines were anti-PRC back then; we were treated like heroes.’
Chu was born in Singapore. Her mother, a journalist, has been in prison there for the past eight years; nobody’s ever told her precisely why. Chu was at university in Seoul when the arrest took place. She hasn’t been allowed back into Singapore since. She has no father; she was conceived parthenogenetically. She sends money to her grandparents for her mother’s legal battle, but so far, every eighteen months like clockwork, the courts have renewed the detention order.
I doubt that Chu knows that BDI is involved in kidnapping, so I discuss my own route to NHK circumspectly. Huang stares at the carpet while I spin out a mundane lie about my six years as a prison officer, before being retrenched in the RehabCorp takeover. Without Sentinel, he often seems ill at ease in my presence, which is understandable: I’m quite sure, now, that he doesn’t have the loyalty mod, and he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t find my devotion to the Ensemble a little unsettling—knowing its cause, but not knowing, as I do, just how right it is. I’m fairly certain, too, that he’s been instructed to befriend me, which must make things even harder for him.
In the weeks that follow, my new life begins to seem less and less extraordinary. My curiosity about Laura—and the Ensemble’s work in general—doesn’t fade, but I have to accept that my ignorance is in the Ensemble’s best interest. Even so, I wish I could contribute more than spending nine-and-a-half hours a day as a zombie night-watchman. I don’t even know who we’re supposed to be guarding BDI against—surely I was the only person on the planet seriously looking for Laura? Even if my ex-client has hired someone new, it’s unlikely that my successor would have as much luck as I did; the pharmaceutical-purchases trail has been erased. So, who isthe enemy?
I soon learn not to invoke Karen; her sarcastic comments only make me angry and confused. I try to take control, to fantasize her happily sharing this life with me, but it seems that my memories can only be twisted so far; I literally can’t imagine her approving of what I’ve become. Even without using the mod, though, I find myself dreaming of her; I wake from nightmares of heresy, with the force—if not the sense—of her diatribe pounding in my skull. I intruct Boss to keep her from my dreams. It hurts to be without her, but the Ensemble gives me strength.
Every now and then—as I try to psych myself into choosing sleep in the noise and heat of the morning—I unwrap the contradiction that lies at the heart of who I am, and I stare at it one more time. It never fades, it never changes. I understand, as clearly as ever, that I ‘should’ be horrified by my fate—and I know that, in all honesty, I’m not. I don’t feel trapped. I don’t feel violated. I understand that my contentment is bizarre, irrational, inconsistent—but then, my reasons for happiness in the past were never exactly founded on an elaborate logical position, a carefully formulated philosophy.
There are times when I’m dispirited, lonely, perplexed; the loyalty mod doesn’t bliss me out—it doesn’t intervene, directly, in my moods at all. I listen to music, I watch HV—there’s no shortage of anaesthetic.
In the end, though, when the sweetest music fades, when the most diverting image disintegrates, there’s nothing left to do but look inside myself and ask what it is that I’m living for. And I have an answer, like never before.
I’m serving the Ensemble.
6
When Chen Ya-ping summons me to her office for the first time in six months, I can’t help being nervous. My daily routine has become so ingrained that merely riding the familiar underground line at an unfamiliar time leaves me ill at ease. I scour my conscience for failures in my duty to the Ensemble, and find so many that I can hardly believe that I’ve been allowed to go unpunished for so long. So what will it be? A reprimand? Demotion? Dimissal?
Chen is curt. ‘You’re being moved to a new job. On other premises. You’ll be helping to guard one of the volunteers.’
Volunteers? For a moment, I wonder if this is a euphemism—if there are more brain-damaged abductees like Laura on their way—but then Chen shows me a picture of Chung Po-kwai, taken at a university graduation ceremony, and it’s clear that the word means something else entirely.
‘You’ll be working at a place called ASR—Advanced Systems Research. Not everyone there is familiar with our side of things, and there are good reasons for that; it’s in the best interests of the Ensemble as a whole that the project remains… partitioned. So under no circumstances are you to discuss BDI, or anything you’ve learnt here, with anyone at ASR. Nor are you to discuss ASR’s work with any of the staff here, other than myself. Is that clear?’
‘Yes.’
And I realize, with an almost dizzying rush, that I’m not being punished, or even just shuffled sideways. This is a position of trust. I’m being promoted.
Why me? Why not Lee Soh Lung? Why not Huang Qing?
The loyalty mod, of course. I’m unworthy—but the mod redeems me. ‘Do you have any questions?’