The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [134]
“What are you doing here, John? What is your great new purpose? You must tell me. I might be able to save you.”
“Well,” Montalban said, “at first, I came out here to the desert to dig up the buried brains of the state. Maybe it’s a useless twenty-year-old backup, but even if its human cloned apparatus rebelled against it and set fire to it, there has to be a great deal of historical evidence buried down there. And I wanted that evidence, of course. We Synchronists always want history. Because history is the ultimate commercial resource. Someday the human race will have to come to terms with the vast genocide in China, and what the state did to the human beings within its grasp. Of course the state itself is never going to reveal that historical truth. So it is up to us, the outside scholars, the researchers, to steal whatever evidence we can.”
“Evidence of what? The state saved Chinese civilization.”
“Well … ‘genocide’ is such an emotionally loaded term … But it’s entirely obvious from consumer demographic studies that the people who hindered the state—the burdens to its technical functions—were eliminated. There were over a billion Chinese people twenty years ago, now there are just under half a billion. No elderly, to speak of. No mentally ill. The handicapped are entirely gone. Criminals, liquidated. Even the people in the security apparatus, who were performing the liquidations, were themselves mostly purged … Even the male-female gender disparity was honed way back. The current China is very safe and peaceful. It’s a hyperefficient machine.”
“The strong survived. The weak died in the troubles. That’s what happened.”
“No, Sonja, that is just the party line. The state killed the weak and unfit. It controlled so many aspects of daily life that it had a million different methods to cull its herd.”
“That is a slander and a lie.”
“I know it’s not politically correct of me to say that, but demographics never lie.” Montalban shrugged irritably. “Look … I’ve gotten so used to combating the unthinkable, that I forget how the unthinkable can shock people. Yes, there was a genocide in China, during China’s climate crisis. You look into the walled bubble from outside the walled bubble, and the dirty murk in there is very obvious. I’m not angry about it. I’m not condemnatory. I don’t even want to discuss it right now. We in California could have accepted a hundred million refugee Chinese. We didn’t do that. Nobody let them out. So of course they had to die. The real genius of the solution was programming machines to do the dirty work so that politicians could keep their hands clean.”
John Montalban was rubbing one hand against the other. “My theory is that the architects of the regime’s Final Solution were about thirty-five Chinese statesmen. I surmise that they were the very same thirty-five guys who were cloned, and then trained for war in a godforsaken bomb shelter buried in the middle of nowhere. They did that terrible thing because they were patriots. Then they marched out to die like heroes along with their own victims, leaving one last ace in the hole. They died in their own genocide and they left their clones. That’s my big hypothesis. I haven’t proved that idea yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to proving it. But it’s the sort of thing I have to know for my own satisfaction—so that I know that I’m making real-world decisions.”
“If you libel the state in that fashion, the state will take reprisals against you.”
Montalban sighed. “I am not ‘libeling’ the state. The Chinese state is the world’s most remarkable case study in ubiquitous computing. It’s ‘ubiquity with Chinese national characteristics.’ I don’t consider that machine my enemy. It is not any moral actor, it’s a machine. I don’t condemn it. If the Chinese state committed ‘genocide,’ then the human race has committed ‘geocide.’ The ‘Fossil Fuel Project,’ that was infinitely worse. That was the worst and most comprehensive blunder that our species ever committed. Every