Chapter 27


Twelve hours earlier, the war criminal known as Anonymous had taken control of the Municipal Building next to Town Hall. It had been evacuated during the police alarm, and was never properly searched. Xiao had come within thirty meters of her, each unable to affect the other. Now their time was almost up.
  With technological skills equal to all of China in 1970, Qiyuan was an autonomous region, with its own food factories, waste recycling, and small nuclear plant. The provincial government encouraged the town's independence movement like a weak virus, an outlet for dissidents and other outsiders.
  The partners in her arbitration firm had collected facts about each of the 115.000 residents. They influenced everyone's jobs, relationships, and taxes. Fairness could be subjective.
  Of the nineteen partners, all but one had responded to this morning's emergency summons within three minutes. China had no real night, but midway between shifts was as quiet as it got. Walking down the empty streets and dark alleys, through curtains of artificial light, they felt trapped between lives. When told to enter the sewage/utility system at various access shafts, only one partner turned around and ran. The others had descended the ladders, and vanished from Qiyuan's sight.
  High and narrow, filled with pipes and cables, the tunnels had a fitting disinfectant smell. Walking through kilometers of unchanging tubeway, they seemed to be locked in place - or were they descending?
  Finally, they had reemerged in a dozen obscure back alleys and empty delivery bays, where the streetlights stayed dark and their radios wouldn't transmit. It seemed like a different town; but then came another Qiyuan moment: Each partner crawled inside a small box, which was soon picked up by an unmanned recycling truck. After a long drive, the partners were deposited in an empty corner of a parking garage.
  At first they had avoided eye-contact; to stay objective, the partners weren't supposed to know each other. Then they realized none of them had ever met before, except for a few chance encounters. That was almost unheard of in such a small town.
  "We've been had," the senior partner said.
  Their phones still didn't work, but instructions appeared on the walls: "THIS WAY". A short walk led to a second-floor suite of rooms extending the length of the building. In the main meeting room, twenty desks were arranged in an outward facing circle.
  Partitions clattered down around them, leaving a doorway to the restroom. Coughs bounced back in the new silence. With nothing else to do, each partner picked a desk and sat down.
  The screens showed inbound arrows and bright text: Qiyuan's civil defense plan. Some partners actually heard the words: "Three hostile forces are approaching at once. You will neutralize them from this room."
  No one moved as the final door came down. Two guards rolled under at the last moment, and the partners knew then who they were working for.
  Rows of Chinese standard characters scrolled past. A mind trying to connect, densities in the chaos. Despite the absence of recognizable grammar, they began to sense a deeper meaning.
  Each partner's numbered bank account suddenly contained a tiny bar of Muonium, isomer-stabilized element 158. Coincidentally twice as heavy as gold, it was made to look the same, and no government could prove it existed. It would finance their new lives.
  The joy lasted five seconds, almost as long as the next clip. A room filled with a fog of fine needles, shimmering like a cloud.
  As the town's unofficial futurologist and out-of-the-box planner, junior partner Hang Feng's job was to evaluate new technology. Sometimes he had trouble handling details, but he could always see the big picture. Hang realized an important fact about himself: he wasn't particularly brilliant, or fast, or smooth, but his brain could manufacture an incredible amount of pain. That was the only thing it did extremely well without any practice. It was vital that he believe that. All human wealth wasn't worth the description of what Anonymous could do to him. It might be a bluff, but they couldn't take that chance.
  "Resistance is impossible," he typed to his partners. "Do whatever she says." Someone typed a bad Anonymous joke.
  He pressed his mental reset button. Deafening music from direct nerve stimulation cleared his mind. Inside his interior fortress, he began to make plans. The partners were all in one place, so she was here too. This would be his only chance to make contact, before she transcended this incarnation, or vanished forever. He would always regret not trying. Like the risks, the possible benefits were incalculable.
  Hang didn't have much money or status. He was at the bottom of the dating agencies' waiting lists, despite several bribes, and had no family to worry about. He knew this could work.
  The movie had ended with an empty screen, a blind spot signaling her will to disappear. It would take as much preparation as a satellite launch.
  The partners had limited personality overlap, but their skills added up. Like a single mind that thought faster than any member, they differed from other such groups in only one way: each partner was, by the traditional definition of that word, insane. They insisted on believing things that were demonstrably untrue. Their beliefs involved gods and demons, conspiracies and hoaxes. Talk therapy and drugs had converted some delusions into mere anxiety, but they retained their most cherished beliefs. Each partner had been selected to comply with the privacy laws: they were less likely to reveal secrets if they didn't know what was real.
  The expendable guards watched from opposing corners, as unpersuadable as golems. Hang's chair rolled over the carpet, until he steadied himself. The partners quickly organized themselves into working groups to regain the illusion of control. They could access all of Qiyuan from their screens.
  Their assignment was simple: to pretend to be themselves, and take control of the town's secure network. Designed for emergencies, it was formed by people talking and typing in code, using signaling devices and messengers. The partners would try to minimize the inevitable casualties.
  During the first hour, they sent five trucks around town. Volunteers collected legal objects that were combined into various weapons. By noon, they had indirectly contacted one tenth of the population. No one knew the whole truth, but some sensed the coming storm.
  The blast at Town Hall had been followed by alarms and distant shouts. The employees on the lower floor evacuated at once. A small robot landed behind the blinds on a nearby window. Soon, the noise had faded. An hour later, the mayor announced that Qiyuan had seceded from the Chinese Federation.
  Hang rose so slowly his chair never moved. His partners continued to type and mumble instructions around him, their fingers drumming like soft rain. The guards were cutouts against the barrier wall. Taking the first step, he used his thumb remote to transmit a message: "I need to speak to Anonymous".
  The nearest guard moved with amazing speed, his hand stopping only a centimeter from Hang's face, who surprised himself by not flinching. The guard gripped his shoulder, and pushed him through a gap in the barrier.
  Green text in Hang's visor: "Who is Anonymous?"
  "I'm not resisting in any way. I have to talk to your boss, for my own survival. One of my partners is a police spy. I can be back at my post in one minute."
  "Go ahead," the guard said.
  "Here?" Hang looked around. The walls were gray. This wasn't a room at all.
  "Imagine an eye." He turned and was gone. "Everywhere," the guard's voice added.
  Hang had wanted to see her. A self-sustaining illusion, as unstoppable as a neutron star, she could learn or forget anything she desired.
  The room went dark, the TrueBlack screen staring back into his soul. "You're dead unless you do exactly as I say," Hang said.
  ". . . that better be true . . ." appeared amid a waterfall of characters. He had to focus on infinity to read. Her disguise was her identity.
  Standing at attention, he said: "I bring a proposal from a powerful organization to save your life and your knowledge."
  His group, the Starters, was the third wealthiest Fam, and had the most advanced technology. They were very selective, humiliating most applicants, and accepting only a small fraction of the rest.
  He sensed a flash, and was unsure if he'd reacted. Hang knew he was being tested.
  The voice came from nowhere - Beijing Standard, the "average voice" used by software, reciting names and percentages. He was being compared with everyone else. "You have ten seconds to find me," it finished.
  He began the search before he knew what he was looking for. The immense screen could scan and display the entire building in a million microseconds. Before he was done, he started over at increasing resolution.
  His friends considered Hang unusually gullible, but he had an incredible imagination. He only needed a few data points to imagine a whole world. He had helped perfect the technique of Deep Immersion. Recreating the municipal center was easy by comparison.
  He saw it all, inside and out. The sterile stairways, dark and bright rooms, the empty spot where he was standing - existing only in her imagination? Most areas were dimly lit, shades of blue and green, glowing brighter where two corridors crossed. A lamp floated over an empty countertop. Temperature gradients, a steady airflow from an open door, a hidden current. Checking every shadow and reflection, he cleared fifteen rooms per second. One of them was not empty.
  Hang focused on the VIP wing: private suites, an anti-depression clinic, secret societies. In the past ten years China had overcompensated for its lack of civic groups. Even Anonymous couldn't enter the Secure Room.
  He saw the purpose of the exercise: if he could find Anonymous, others would too. There was an imbalance somewhere. If he concentrated hard enough, he could penetrate her illusion, a small flicker in the frozen light.
  She was behind a false wall in a small anteroom near the basement vault. A private viewing area not on the main map. He studied a trembling view from a pinhole camera. To his amazement, it could be enhanced without limit, reflections of reflections.
  There were advanced sensors he could use without knowing their principle. He absorbed the static, looking for patterns.
  Sheets hung from the ceiling in fans of light. The shadows overlapped and formed an upright outline, rippling in place. The figure wore dark scrubs and sat on a constrictor pillow. They faced each other across a vast distance. The famous Guevara portrait was all wrong. A smooth bald head with prominent ears. Dark, symmetric eyes like a mannequin. A shell of fragments. To his surprise she looked exactly like . . . no human who had ever lived. The reciprocal of the average.
  He held his position while speaking. "Tonight, the equivalent of a full army regiment will occupy Qiyuan," he said. "This building will become their temporary headquarters. My group includes experienced negotiators, who've successfully defused dozens of standoffs. We can arrange long-term accommodations that would meet your standards, a private research facility under UNESCO. A generous budget, unlimited visitors, and no other prisoners."
  Anonymous faded into darkness, many voices talking through each other. "also do the opposite" "goal is to accelerate change" "have one hour 1".
  He watched the fluttering symbols. Anonymous was perfectly neutral. She wouldn't care if he died, turned into an obedient slave, or levitated out of this room. In the grand scheme of reality, humans were special in only one way: they had the smallest possible mind size, statistically also the most common one. He was a basement worm, a side-effect of reality.
  Somehow, he almost missed the loudest voice: "Plan Approved."
  Then there was silence - a perfectly ordinary second. During that time, ten thousand planets collided throughout the observable universe. He took a deep breath. The liter of air included the atomic remains of over fifty billion people.
  At that moment, he shared her greatest insight: a few years from now, sooner than anyone had expected, humans would be obsolete. Nothing could change that fact. Given the speed of progress, it should have happened already.
  The guard appeared in front of Hang like a repressed memory, spun him around, and walked him back to his desk. Reality had never been this crisp. He might have been injected with something. Carbon needles were so thin they could drain individual cells.
  Hang's collaborators now seemed semi-conscious, hunched over their workstations. The gravity shifted suddenly as he sat down.
  He began the final negotiations. His new job would be to pretend to be Anonymous. When he edited the first message, it was as if she had written it. The partners edited it further.
  It was already too late to stop the attack, so they would arrange a demonstration to manipulate the general. In the past half century, fleets of underground submarines had laid cables between most points on Earth. The partners didn't need to know the pattern to disrupt it.
  Hang's first target was Qiyuan's legendary traffic control, which had made rush hour obsolete. Cars rarely waited at intersections, merging was automated, and even the busiest lanes never stopped completely. The system had one tiny flaw. In the first three minutes, he caused a collision at every major intersection. Passengers suddenly had to become drivers again. Victims sat on the curb as traffic backed up in the side streets. Two older survivors died of heart attacks. Only one could be revived. Less than a fifth of the citizens had chosen to evacuate, but every road became gridlocked. The soldiers soon cleared lanes for themselves. An hour later, there was no traffic at all.
  Hang finally recovered from his strange meeting. His mind simply rejected what had happened. He realized that when the army arrived, assuming he survived the encounter, he would be charged with multiple human rights violations, murder, and treason. A possible death sentence, unless Anonymous or the Starters killed him first. China had no insanity defense.
  There was only one solution: relax. Simply put, he would not work as hard as he was capable of. His contributions would still be outstanding, of course. His lawyer would produce statistical evidence that he had resisted to the best of his ability. He might even emerge as a hero. Supervillain rumors would boost his credibility.
  The path out of this room was a long one, but Hang could see it now. Expecting a miracle, he hoped the soldiers would hurry up.
  The guard danced closer, elegant until the final strike. Hang never felt the needle's silver beam, the town's second murder in five years. Two partners reported a martial arts move too fast to see. The Global Inquirer would add a sonic boom, and even hardened skeptics would believe the story.
  The guard lifted his body like a heavy parcel, and Hang's bonus was split among the survivors. "He would have betrayed you," a voice whispered to each. Some heard it as a backward recording. The surviving partners were strangely relieved.
  Thunder rolled in from the distant mansion. The other guard spoke. "The enemy is coming. You will provide the first distraction."