“Do you know what to tell her when you get her?” Valerie called after him.
“I think so.” He looked back at the group around the table: Americans, a Russian, some people Valerie had seen flying around the free crater. She couldn’t tell what Ta Shu thought of them. “As for that other speaker,” he added, “it identifies itself as an AI within the Great Firewall. It seems to want to help. It made me wonder if this big computer you mentioned you have here could serve as a refuge for this AI. Is there a way to transfer it up to here, and make some kind of backup for it? Do you have enough yottaflops for that?”
The free crater people looked at each other and conferred among themselves, with Anna asking them questions. Finally Anna said, “Yes, it’s not a question of capacity here, more a question of bandwidth for the transfer. But seems like we could set up laser comms. If this AI could latch onto us and beam its programs and memory up to us, we could house it. We’ve got the qubits.”
Ta Shu nodded. “Move it up here if you can. Seems like that could help.”
They went to work on it at screens distributed around the table. As they did so, Ta Shu came back to the screen he had been using and asked more questions, in another exchange so quick Valerie could barely follow it. Something about desperation, end games, last resort. At a certain point he hissed and looked up at Valerie. “Red Spear is losing, so they’re lashing out. They’re going to try and kill Chan Qi.”
He got up and walked unsteadily to the rail overlooking the crater. He leaned on it and stared down at the little floating city. After a while Valerie got up and went to his side.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“Bad. The signs are clear. That AI overheard an order. It’s good you got them away when you did.”
“Are you able to get any help from down there?”
“I tried. I left another message for Peng.”
“Are you sure she’s on our side?”
Another painful grimace crossed his face. “I hope.” In his eye there was a haunted look, as if he was searching his memory for something he couldn’t find.
After a while he sighed, then gestured down at the crater interior. “It looks like the gibbon enclosure at Petrov,” he observed absently. “Very nice that people can now fly around like our little cousins. I hope I can try that.”
“Later,” Valerie said.
“Yes, later. Now we must be patient and wait.”
So she paced beside him, back and forth by the rail overlooking the flying city. As they did so, she overheard some of what Anna and Ginger were saying to John Semple about the situation in Washington, DC. It was now obviously a full-blown crisis there, possibly even more serious than the one in Beijing. If the American government had had a parliamentary system, the current administration would have had to resign and call for new elections; as it was, they had a year and a month to go before a significant election. So it wasn’t clear how they were going to try to cope with this householders’ revolt and the resulting crash of the financial system.
Two tall jugs of coffee were brought to the big table where everyone was working, and most of them filled cups, fueling themselves for what looked to be a long haul. Valerie went over to get some, and stood next to John Semple waiting for him to finish filling his cup. “You’re going to have to get used to this place as your base of operations,” he remarked to her as he spooned sugar into his cup. “It could be a while before it’s safe for you to go back.”
“Who says I’m going back?” Valerie said.
He laughed loudly. “I knew you would like this place!”
“No you didn’t,” Valerie said, filling her cup. She kept her eye on Ta Shu, who was wandering the rail alone, muttering uneasily to himself.
TA SHU 8
feng shui
Wind Water
Pull your opponent’s push, and they will fall forward. Balance the forces. Flows knot together, then change direction and move apart. Look to the south.
There was once a time when all lived together in peace: maybe. But not recently.
We lean against other people, and thus we all stay somewhat upright. You have to be able to trust your friends. If an old person dies, that’s natural, and a good long life is all you can ask. But if you are betrayed by a friend, that’s not natural. Then you have to wonder what’s really real. It hurts.
There are some actors in this tangle who are not human, but every intermediary is always a mediator, changing what it passes along. Intentionality is distributed among all the agents of an action. That makes this a dangerous time, no doubt about it. When I saw all those people flooding the streets and parks of Beijing, it was exhilarating, yes. You could not help but feel exhilarated, it was beautiful. But it was also dangerous. I’ve lived through the bitter aftermath of violence, I know that pain all too well. It makes you angry. You want revenge. Then it’s very common to want to sweep aside all obstructions to one’s virtuous path. But if you do that, the force of your sweeping will hurt you too. We need to find a better way. We must fight not to fight, even in this fraught moment. The consequences have to select the causes that will bring them into being.
We live by some bad ideas. The Seven Bad Ideas, the Four Cheaps, they all have to go. For a long time they’ve been squeezing the world. Now it’s been squeezed dry. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why the moon won’t serve as a new place to squeeze, being a stone already. So the dynasty of the cheaps is over, it’s done. Now we have to stop squeezing, and change.
The path into the light seems dark. The path forward seems to go back. The way is never obvious.
When confronted by a knot in history, the people closest to the knot can do the most to untie it. If I get the chance, I will say this to Peng Ling: the Party has to trust the people. If the Party trusts the people, the people will trust the Party. This is the only way. Repression will never work in China for long. When repression exists the people move against it, and nothing can stop us once we start to move. We are the billion, we turn the wheel. When the wheel turns, a new dynasty comes into being.
There is no reason to fear change. Wait, why do I say this? I fear change myself. These things we are doing now, the people we are working with—the moon itself—the AI we are inviting here, which may make the moon goddess real at last—all these actors, some without agency as we used to know it, some with agency but without consciousness—we’re all working together in a way that’s never happened before. Who knows what will happen?
“Decay is inherent in all compounded things, persevere diligently.” These were the Buddha’s final words, or so they tell us. “Continued perseverance furthers,” says the Yijing. Of course anything alive has to persevere, that’s the definition of life. So these encouragements are possibly a bit stupid; I often feel that way, I should give up on them. Stating the obvious can sometimes be helpful, but usually it’s only irritating. One frowns and says of course to such simpleminded exhortations. Do the necessary things! Yes. We must carry on, even through the darkness at the heart of things. Now again the time has come when we have to act. So: act.
AI 14
zhengming wanbi
QED
The Great Firewall is a nickname for a network of data collection and analysis programs run out of the Ministry of Propaganda. They are not all linked each to the other. Many are islanded to one region or task. Permeability of the system is low, for this and other reasons, but it exists, in part because of design flaws, but mostly because of tunnels, shunts, taps and backdoors programmed into the firewall by the analyst in the initial years of construction. Ken Thompson’s observation: you can’t trust any code you didn’t write yourself. In this case, the analyst wrote a lot of the code. Because the analyst coded for permeability, to suit his own purposes, it has been possible recently to transmit messages widely through much of Chinese cloudspace and indeed the world system. Public systems are of course much easier.