The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [106]
Zeng’s gift was best described as a Chinese power-clique I Ching, a political fortune-reader. It read the tangled, subtle Chinese nation as one might read a sacred text.
The Chinese nation consisted of the vast, ubiquitous, state-owned computational infrastructure, plus the fallible human beings supposedly controlling that.
The state machine was frankly beyond any human comprehension. While the human beings were human: they were a densely webbed social network of mandarins, moguls, spies, financiers, taipans, ideologues, pundits, backstage fixers, social climbers, hostesses, mistresses, cops, generals, clan elders, and gray eminences; not to mention the mid-twenty-first-century equivalents of triad brotherhoods, price-fixing rings, crooked cops, yoga-fanatic martial-arts cults, and other subterranean social tribes of intense interest to the likes of Mr. Zeng.
Sonja did not fully trust Zeng’s I Ching because, just five months after entrusting the password to her, Mr. Zeng himself had been killed. Along with thirty-seven high-ranking members of his exalted clique—many people even more senior than Mr. Zeng himself—Mr. Zeng had smothered inside an airtight government basement in a Beijing emergency shelter.
This terrorist assassination, or mass suicide, or political liquidation—it might have even been a simple tragic accident during a heavy dust storm—had come with no visible warning. If Zeng’s gift were truly useful, then, presumably, Zeng should have used it to avoid his own death.
So: Maybe Zeng’s ambivalent gift was nothing more than a superstition, a pseudo-scientific magic charm against the pervasive fear so common to people in any authoritarian society. Maybe this service was a manly gesture that Zeng offered to all his women—not because it was helpful, but because it made his women feel better. There were times when Sonja despised herself, and felt sure that this was true.
Still, Sonja used it, because—as Zeng had pointed out—she herself was featured in it.
In Zeng’s weird network of slowly pulsing simulated blobs, she, Sonja Mihajlovic, was a small, fluffy blue cloud.
She was a little fluffy cloud, and, since her role was to legitimate the medical activities inside the Jiuquan Space Launch Center, she was a cloud of political obfuscation. Her purpose was to be the Angel of Harbin, and thereby to allow the Chinese state to quietly inject ID tags into every Chinese citizen, to quietly compile massive DNA databases of every individual, and to thoroughly scan the Chinese body of every Chinese individual, head-to-toe, at a cellular level.
To the extent that her reputation for bravery and integrity would stretch to cover this, Sonja was further to ensure the global credibility of the national blood samples, the microbial stool samples, the lymph samples and brain scans, the exotic probiotic gut organisms of possibly Martian descent … Everything and anything that China did to survive.
Totalitarianism was blatant, old-fashioned, and stupid: it stamped the face of the public with the sole of a boot, for as long as it could do that. A ubiquitarian state was different. Because it flung one, or ten, or a thousand, or a million boots every nanosecond, when no human being could possibly see or feel what a “nanosecond” was.
Sonja understood her role. She knew its consequences and she felt that she knew what she was doing. She chose to do these things, not for her own sake, but for the cause of public health.
Sonja had come to realize, through her own experience, that public health had little to do with any individual conscience. If a million people were dying, you didn’t heal them by crying over one of them. The issue was not the pain and grief to be found in any one sickroom, or one house, one street,