“Which group?”
“The Hong Kong commission officers were perhaps using a code name for them, as they called these interlopers red darts.”
“Red darts? Not Red Spear?”
“Red darts. I can replay the recording of the report for you, if you like.”
“Please do that.”
The analyst listened to the recorded voices. The men making their report did indeed call the agents who had arrested Chan and Fredericks red darts. Hongse feibiao. It was not a term he had heard before. The agents were definitely not happy.
He said, “Please list all national security groups known to interact with the PLA.”
“Ministry of Public Security. Ministry of State Security. Central Commission for Military and Civilian Integration. Small Leading Group on the Internet and Informatization. State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission. Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group. International Department of the Central Committee. National Security Commission. National Security Leading Small Group. Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. National Defense Science Commission. Cyberspace Administration. AI Strategic Advisory Committee. The Ministry of Propaganda. Lunar Security Administration. Lunar Research Personnel Coordination Committee.”
“All right, please stop.”
“There are more.”
“I know. The group I would really like to belong to, if I had my choice, is the Economic System and Ecological Civilization System Reform Specialized Group. But this is not my fate. How many groups in total are on this list of security organizations?”
“Seventy-three.”
“And each of them has a certain personnel, and an assigned space of action of more or less specificity. And not all of them share their data. And there is no integration by a single higher organization.”
“Most of them interact with the PLA, so perhaps the PLA could integrate them.”
“Good speculating, Little Eyeball, but no. I have contacts in the army, and they tell me there is no such integration there, nor is such a thing possible. Thus we have the balkanization of surveillance, which is one aspect of the infighting. Wolidou. A very old problem of the Chinese bureaucracy, probably as old as the system itself.”
“You must tell me.”
“I know. I am telling you. The idea of a total surveillance state is just a story told by some people. They like the story, or fear it. They use it to create fear in others. But there is no panopticon. The system is instead like a fly’s eye, but without a fly’s brain. Or maybe there is a fly’s worth of brain to it, but no more than that.”
“It does not seem well engineered.”
“No. It’s an improvisation. That’s what happens when the party-state puts itself above the laws it makes. It can form a new working group at any time, and it does. Then that group joins the infighting. And there is no law to control any of that.”
“It does not seem well designed.”
“No it doesn’t. Let’s try another way. Please scan all files you have access to and look for this term ‘red darts.’”
“I will do this.” Then, about three seconds later: “Four thousand five hundred ninety-three results.”
“Let me see them on a screen.”
He skimmed down the various links and references. Most of them were offering darts for sale. A few hundred appeared to be names of dart-throwing teams. None of them when cross-referenced to other terms seemed to refer to surveillance or security. This was peculiar, he thought, given the way the phrase seemed to echo Red Spear, which, although it was a secret organization, was pretty well-known to the intelligence community. It was the kind of secret group that needed to be known about to create its full effect. Various elements used this one mainly to pursue advantages created by incidents of hostile pilot syndrome. It was part of the PLA’s undeniable power in the party-state’s infighting, and certain security agencies aligned with the military used it too. Possibly the Hong Kong agents in the recording had used the phrase red darts to refer to some splinter unit of Red Spear that he didn’t know about. Or perhaps they were making fun of Red Spear, unlikely though that seemed. But bravado often appeared when people were attempting to hide their fear. And those voices had been afraid.
CHAPTER NINE
tao dao yueliang shang
Escape to the Moon
Ta Shu tried to settle back into his Beijing life, but he found himself at loose ends most of the time, fretting. He visited the studio where his cloud show was produced, making attempts to distract himself with that work. The team there was happy to see him, and he recorded some new monologues and helped to edit some new broadcasts from the moon, focusing on the parts of his experiences up there that he had not had time to make into shows while actually there. Reviewing the footage he had taken there was unsettling. The moon looked like its own ghost, all sterile grayness and cool indoorness, with the lunar g lofting people in slo-mo. All that seeped out of the visuals and grabbed him a little. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go back or not.
He stopped wearing the exoskeleton as soon as he felt stronger; after that he kept it around for a while, to put on when he got tired to the point of collapse. But after a couple more weeks he could dispense with it entirely, and he had it returned by bike cart courier to its shop. Reality had returned to his body, and he was relieved to find he was not as old as he had thought on first return.
During the days he kept trying to record and edit episodes of his show. At night he walked the streets. It remained a perpetual pleasure to see the stars so well from Beijing. Like everyone else of a certain age, he was extremely impressed by the clean air. Then a wind from the north brought with it clouds of loess, that Ice Age dust and sand from the north that turned the air yellow and the sunsets lurid. This some older people at the studio found nostalgic, as it brought back their youths. They said, Remember when the sky was black by day and white by night? Remember when you could chew it? It was dirty, sure, poisonous, no doubt, but there was a kind of excitement in it too. We were changing the world so fast we turned the sky black!
We were killing ourselves, Ta Shu would reply. We were breathing coal dust, it gave you miners’ lung.
But it was so exciting!
Poison is exciting, I suppose.
He recorded an audio piece about that, and about the feeling of walking on Earth after walking on the moon; and about the old work unit compounds, and the breaking of the iron rice bowl. About the people he saw in the city whose bike was their home. Almost all these recordings were unusable.
Then after some weeks had passed, with very little to show for them, he got a call from Peng Ling. “Want to hear a good story?”
“Yes.”
She instructed him to meet her at a certain waffle shop near the city center.
This restaurant turned out to be a big tall room with a balcony at the back, its airy space entirely filled with antique chandeliers, perhaps fifty of them, individually junky, together rather magnificent. Ta Shu noticed the feng shui mirrors carefully set in their proper places, also the considered angles of the doorways; these interior designers had known what they were doing. They had flair.
Peng Ling was tucked into a little corner table on the balcony, where one could see everything without being much seen.