Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (71 page)

“Calm down,” I say, trying to sound soothing without arousing my girlfriend’s suspicions. “Where are you now?”

“Back at the house. I don’t know how long we’ll be safe here, though. He’ll have to tell them everything.”

“I’m coming over right now,” I say. “I’ll get a cab.”

“Don’t take the first one,” he says, and hangs up.

Xiao Zhu is pacing the length of our courtyard, one of Lao Yang’s cigarettes on his lips. The smog is thick today, outside the holographic curtain, and I have to squint to see him.

“It’s over,” he says. “Him and his fucking double prosperity. They’ll come for us, and we’ll never see the light of day again. Not that we are now. Not that we ever have.”

I sag onto one of our dilapidated couches. “It’s not over,” I say. “There’s still the two of us. You can work the holograms, and I can do everything else. It’ll take us longer to finish a house, but it’s what he’d want us to do. To keep going. To keep making things real.”

Xiao Zhu snorts. “You’re just like him. Big dreams. Today the Forbidden City, tomorrow the stars. What are you in it for anyway? What are you hoping to change?”

I start to speak, and then pause. What am I in it for? I loved the holograms as a kid. I remember people cheering when they switched them on in our street, watching the sky turn blue and the grass turn green. We never even had grass before. But then I grew up, and one day I realized I hadn’t seen the sun for ten years. Not the real sun. Not the stars. And I started looking at houses and shops I had known all my life with suspicion. What did they really look like? I knew what they looked like inside, because government-sponsored holograms stop at the door. But the truth of them was as foreign to me as if I had never seen them before.

When Lao Yang approached me that day, I slurped at my noodles and listened to a dream. He wanted to live in Beijing—not a copy or a model, but a real city, a city that breathed, a city that had shit on the pavement and smog in the air but was free, effervescent and alive. He wanted a place that could move from past to present to future of its own accord, without technological intervention. He wanted his home back. And I wanted to help him.

“I’m in it because sometimes you just fight,” I say, finally. “And you keep fighting until it’s done. Lao Yang’s out there. He’s an old man and he’s hurting. But he’s helped you, and he’s helped me, and I’m not going to let him disappear. I said something dumb before. I said there’s still the two of us. That’s not true. There’s three like there always was. I’m going to try and help him. And you’re coming with me.”

Xiao Zhu lights another cigarette, blows the smoke out into the haze. “Nice speech, big guy. In a battle between the past, present and future, who would you be?”

I growl. “The future. The future always wins.”

Two days later, we have the names of the people who took Lao Yang and where they’re hiding him. Xiao Zhu bribed a local guard and wouldn’t tell me where he got the money. We have a plan, too, but I don’t trust it. It relies too much on gadgets, on things I’ve never learned to think of as real. This is Xiao Zhu’s world, and it makes me uncomfortable. But there’s nowhere else to turn.

We’re standing in front of the Ru Jia hostel in east Chaoyang.
Just like home!,
the sign proclaims, and I believe it. I’ve met plenty of people who get beaten at home. Behind this facade is a black jail, an illegal holding facility for protesters and political dissidents. This is where they’re keeping Lao Yang, stripped naked and starving, pulpy and bruised; for once, I don’t have to see it to know that’s it’s true.

I look over at Xiao Zhu. “Ready?” I ask.

He nods, and pulls the hope of our whole campaign out of his pocket. It’s a portable holographic projector, powerful enough to generate a large object or change the appearance of a room. I have no idea where he got it; they’re normally only found in large hotels or function halls, helping to create a dream wedding at a fraction of the cost. He studies it intently, thumbing buttons as he perfects the image, confirming every last detail. A guard left the building half an hour ago, and I watch over Xiao Zhu’s shoulder as he is recreated, down to the pores on his skin, on an alien machine.

“Ready,” Xiao Zhu says at last. He pushes a button, and the guard flickers into existence by our side. My stomach lurches involuntarily. If something like this passed me on the street, I’d think it was real. Xiao Zhu curls his hand around the projector, concealing it from sight, and the two of us walk up the steps of the Ru Jia with our holographic guard close behind.

“You programmed the speech?” I whisper.

“Everything you said,” Xiao Zhu replies. “We’ll be fine.”

I knock on the door, then jump back behind the guard and try to look penitent. The door opens a fraction and a man peers out.

“Yeah?”

“I got ‘em, sir,” the false guard says. “The two that were with Lao Yang. Figured I’d drop them off here until the courts decide where they belong. Should I throw them in with their pal?”

“Do that,” the man says, “do that. Make sure they feel welcome, too—ha, ha!”

“Yessir,” says our guard. “I’ll treat them just right, don’t you worry about that.” The door creaks open further, and we step inside.

The first thing that hits us when we enter the jail is the darkness. The second is the stench. Somewhere in another room a woman is sobbing, an endless, throaty sob that sounds like it could eat up the whole world. For the first time in years, I find myself longing for the comfort of holograms. Our false guard leads us down the corridor to the room where Lao Yang is being held; as we get closer, the stench grows stronger, and I start to panic. When we stop, it’s at Room 28. Double prosperity. I want to cry.

I open the door. It’s not locked—the people here know what happens if they run. Lao Yang is lying in a ball on his bed, shaking in time to some unknown beat in his head. There’s dried blood on the sheets, and a dank smell in the air. I run to him. “Lao Yang, it’s me,” I say. I say it over and over, willing him to respond. At last he raises his head, a distant look in his eyes. “Oh,” he says. “So it is.”

We lift him to his feet, cradling his body and wincing as each new bruise is revealed. Xiao Zhu takes the clothes we’ve brought from his pack, and we dress him as gently as we can, first pants and then arms up for the shirt. Lao Yang says nothing as we fuss over him, swaying unsteadily like a sapling in the wind. It is as if knowledge and years have all been beaten out of him, leaving him back as he began, an empty seed. When I reach out to him, I find myself stroking his hair as I would a child’s.

“We should get moving,” Xiao Zhu says. “I’ve reprogrammed the projector.”

“Just give me a minute,” I say. I look at the old man twitching feverishly in my grip, try to catch my gaze with his own. “Lao Yang, we’re going to get you out of here now. Just think of this time as a hologram. It was a bad one, but we’re going to hit the switch and bring you back to reality. You’ll never need to be afraid again.”

Lao Yang’s gaze wavers, but he nods. I turn to Xiao Zhu. “Let’s go.”

We pack up the bag and sneak out into the corridor, Lao Yang hobbling between us. The guard is slouched by the door, watching some trashy late-night television and tossing sunflower seeds into his mouth.

“Are you sure this will work?” I whisper. “It’s so melodramatic.”

“It’ll work,” says Xiao Zhu, and as he pushes the button, he grins.

A van slams through the opposite wall of the corridor, sending glass and masonry flying through the air. A brick lands on the horn, setting off a piercing wail. Lights flash and spin manically. Despite myself, I sniff. Melodramatic. The guard jumps up, shouts for someone, anyone, and rushes to inspect the damage. We run for the door, Lao Yang propped up between us, our footsteps camouflaged by the racket. We have about five seconds before he realizes there’s no van after all.

We stop for breath in a small park two streets over, flattening ourselves against the trees for cover. I hold onto Lao Yang as tightly as I dare. I don’t believe what I said to him; reality is smog and shit and beatings, and you can’t hit the switch on that. But when you’re looking into the face of a broken man, what can you say? Beijing is a city of holograms, and that’s reality. It’s a city where you can get picked up off the street for no reason, and that’s reality. But we got in and out. We rescued a friend. That’s reality, too.  “It shouldn’t have been that easy,” I say. “We should have had to fight them.”

“I wanted to fight them,” says Xiao Zhu. “All those people in there, and that sobbing. We should have rescued them all.”

“That trick wasn’t going to work twice,” I say. “We did what we could. We fought until it was done.”

Xiao Zhu considers this, while the traffic roars past us and the holographic stars shine down. Then he turns to me, and the light in his eyes is brighter than them all.

“We’re not done,” he says. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Two minutes later, with my heart in my mouth, I watch the hologram go down.

The bright blue and yellow paint of the Ru Jia flickers, becomes faded and dull. Cracks appear in the plaster, windows become fractured and dusty, and the grass around its borders suddenly dies. For the first time in years, I see an eyesore on the streets of Beijing. And it stands out. It shouts its presence to the world. It makes me smile until I hurt.

“Tomorrow morning, people are going to be asking questions about that,” says Xiao Zhu. ‘They’ll probably even have a look at what goes on inside.”

Lao Yang lifts his head. “What did you do?”

“I released a virus into their system, one that operates on a time delay. It’s knocked out their projector and it’ll block any attempt to fix it. I did it to cover our escape, but—” and he grins, helplessly, “it has an upside, too.”

“Xiao Zhu,” I say, “I could kiss you. Let’s go home.”

It’s funny. We spent three years picking away at the scab of history, but we never pulled it off until tonight. Twenty-eight courtyard houses are scattered throughout Beijing. They are beautiful, and they represent truth, but they never changed the world. All those roof beams, those delicate flowers, the tiles and the urns and the towers never did so much as hitting a switch and showing reality as it is. Our greatest triumph wasn’t renewing the past, but exposing the future. And in a battle between the past, present and future, the future always wins.

About the Author

Sarah Stanton
grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Halfway through university, she abandoned a promising career in not having much of a career when she transferred from an opera performance course into a Chinese language major, having fallen for the Middle Kingdom more or less overnight. Three years, two exchange programs and one potential firework accident later, she has settled in Beijing as a freelance translator and editor specializing in contemporary literature. As a writer, she has been published in a variety of magazines and indie projects, including
Voiceworks, Hunger Mountain, Asian Cha Journal
and
dotdotdash.
She is a recipient of the Talus Prize and was recently shortlisted for the James White Award.

Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

Sunny Moraine

Ping.

Vita. Wake up.

Spinning through the dark, I hear and feel CERA’s alert both at once, a sound that is a vibration like a plucked string between my sealed eyes. I shift in the padded transit cocoon. I move hands that barely feel like mine, and I feel wires pulling the jacks in my skin at the same instant as my fingers hit the tape over my eyelids. I wedge my nails under the strips and they come away like old skin. My tongue feels like a dry slug trapped between my teeth and my soft palate. But all of this is distant. I’m in high orbit over myself, and I can choose where I want to place my attention.

I chase the plucking string to its source.

All at once I learn a number of things, data nestled at the point where I and CERA intersect, waiting for me to retrieve it. I flip through it like a printed report; it helps to imagine these things in physical terms. This is how I was trained and in moments of partial consciousness it’s best to fall back on what you know at the most basic level. And here are the new things I know: as far as CERA can determine, re-emergence into normal space has occurred. There are a number of equipment malfunctions. Most of the sensor array appears to be offline. The primary Q-drives are offline. The differential sail is online and can be deployed if needed. Life support is online.

I am alive. I already knew this, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Chronometrics are offline.

Shit
.

Extensive systems failure was a distinct possibility; we knew this as well, and I was told it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the launch, as if it might make a difference. It makes no difference now in the most complete possible sense, but I punch a weak fist into the padding of the cocoon.

CERA’s plucked string voice in the center of my head—she’s waiting on my command. She’s a smart AI but even so she operates at about the intelligence of the average Labrador. She can think. But in situations featuring high degrees of uncertainty she needs instructions.

Do we have visual?

She shivers an affirmative into me. I feel something approaching relief; I’m flying blind in every meaningful way but one, then. My craft can’t tell me exactly where or when I am, the composition of the space around me, the relative location of any neighboring bodies, or whether I’ve gone anywhere else at all. But I can
see.

At my command CERA engages my optical feed. But my body jerks in protest, though the cocoon swallows the movement. This isn’t right. I can feel myself blinking, lifting my hands to my eyes again—the frantic movements of the abruptly blind. Because all of my vision is blackness.

Here’s a dream that’s also a memory: Kendra and I are in our closet of a kitchen in the slightly larger closet of the apartment that we shared for those last three years, and I’m excited about work, about the breakthrough we’ve just had, about possibilities. I’m pacing in what room there is to pace. Kendra is sitting on the counter and her legs are swinging like a child’s. She’s eating an orange. I remember—and I dream,
God,
over and over—that at the height of my excitement, the part about the possible applications of the technology, I braced my hands on either side of her hips and kissed her and the taste of her and that orange filled my mouth and both were a kind of sweet alchemical perfection. I remember that the lights were off and the sun was westering through the window. I remember that her hair flashed a deep gold in the corner of my vision as I slid a hand into it.