Tag: W

Chapter Ten – Passage Six

When I find Deepak, he’s smoking a cigarette and is gazing out over the balcony railing with that familiar thousand-yard stare.  Alan and Shu’s apartment overlooks one of the quieter side streets in Shingatse and it’s midafternoon.  There’s just a lone dried-pork-on-a-stick vendor who’s pedaling his greasy food on the street corner next to the locked bicycle racks.  Alan and Shu live next to a giant karaoke place that looks like it once used to be the life of the town on Friday nights.  But all that’s over now, remnants of a long-ago, fading world.

I light up a cigarette of my own and set my elbows on the rusted railing, leaning up against it.  Together, Deepak and I puff away for a moment in mutual silence.  It’s a golden, unwritten ritual among smokers everywhere.  Sometimes, smokers just need to smoke.  Helps clear the mind.

“You know what your problems all are?” he finally says, after taking a long drag, still looking out over the street.  “No one wants to pull the lever.  Everyone wants the trolley to go that way, but no one wants to actually be the one to do it.”

A single man, divorced with no wife or kids.  I know the broad strokes of Deepak’s story.  He’s a man with no family so he took on a new mission.  Someway to leave a legacy, to make a dent on the world that’s quickly leaving him behind with each passing day.

“We are dying a slow death by a thousand cuts every month, every year.  And the global community’s completely paralyzed, crippled by too many voices, to decide on a single course of action,” Deepak is saying, all while gesticulating pointedly.

It’s all a spiel I’ve heard before but I patiently listen and nod my head at all the right times.  Deepak’s receding hairline on his balding dome glints in the afternoon sun.

“…and now we have a chance!  We could be that change, Dexter!  Us!“

I nod.  Of course we could.

“I just don’t understand why everyone wants to hold China responsible,” and the frustration’s clear in his voice, “they’ve found a way to control the population in order to address a greater disaster that’s an existential threat to all of humanity.” He shakes his head.  “China’s the only country that’s doing what needs to be done.“

Deepak Chopra grew up in the slums of New Delhi as a child and had spent his childhood nights in the street under starless, smog-infested skies.  The fact that he was able to climb from such humble beginnings to the heights that he occupied now, he used as a forever-wedge, ammunition that he deployed frequently and widely in any argument.  If he could do it, then anyone could do it.  People made their own luck.  And that those who lived in abject poverty deserved it and were just too lazy to help themselves.  So they were always looking for handouts.

It’s a worldview I know very well.  Because, I guess, once upon a time it was my own.  But while it’s true we make our own luck, that’s only half the story. Fortune may favor the bold but that doesn’t mean you just launch everyone else into the sun. At least, I’m not there yet.

Deepak finally tires himself out and that’s my cue.

“Man, I agree with everything you’re saying and I hear you loud and clear,” I start,  “and I totally agree.  You’re right.  You’re absolutely right.  We are not a global community and we are not one world.  You don’t pay taxes to the government of the world.  You pay taxes to the government of America.  To India.  To China.”

“Absolutely,” Deepak says, nodding vigorously.  “Damn right.”

“And I agree someone needs to do what it takes,” I say gently, “but do you really want it to be China?  You want them at the top when it’s all over and all the dust has settled?”

Deepak frowns.

“You know as well as I do that one country’s benefit is another country’s loss.  China’s going to come out of this as the new global superpower with the fortunes of the western world rapidly waning.  Is that a future you wish to live in?  This new world order?”

“Of course not,” Deepak says disgustedly and he lights up another cigarette.  “But do we really have a choice, Dex?  They may be red but they’re the only people actually doing anything.”

“And why is immediate action so important?” I counter.  “I agree with you about climate change.  But why the urgency?  I see temperatures slowly rising and sea levels creeping up.  But no one’s dying yet.”

“Hundreds of thousands are dying in Africa and the other most impoverished regions in the world every year!” Deepak replies hotly.  “Millions probably, because you can’t trust the numbers.”

“And so what?” I rebut. “Are they contributing to global GDP?  Producing the great scientists and artists of tomorrow? The great minds that are shaping humanity’s next generation?”

“They’ll be lucky if they even live to the next generation! You think millions of poor people who live in poor countries and have no means of escape should suffer the consequences of rich industrialized nations?”

The opening I’ve been waiting for.

“You, yourself, immigrated from India, did you not?   As a child?  Poor people from poor countries will find a way to get out, if they really desire it.  People make their own luck.”

To this, Deepak is silent and I swoop in for the haymaker.

“Besides, if we kick the can down the road long enough, you know people and humanity always do their best when we have our backs up against the wall.  As a species, we’ve never failed.  Malthus prophesized imminent doom from overpopulation and famine.  But when we were really up against it, we cranked out Norman Borlaug.  In the 70s, America did nothing and gave the Soviets a huge head start but we got Neil to the moon first, didn’t we?  And reaching even father back, while Europe burned and Hitler and the Nazis marched across the continent, America twiddled its thumbs.  But when we finally entered the war, you know what happened?  Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  We ended it.

“America, and humanity– we’re the comeback kids.  In the history of our species, we’ve never faced any threat we didn’t beat, no matter how long we ignored it for.  We play best from behind.  In fact, it’s the only way we play.”

Deepak’s silent a long time. But I know I’ve got him cornered. Checkmate is always checkmate.

“So what are you proposing?” he finally asks.

“We’ve been asleep at the wheel long enough,” I say. Finishing my cigarette, I flick its stub out into the street and stand up from the railing.

“It’s time to get back in the saddle.”

Chapter Seven – Passage One

Winding our way in a horse-drawn stagecoach over cobblestone streets, we later get the full story about Xi’an from Alan.  The ride is a little tight with five of us sitting inside the carriage, facing each other; I’m sitting with Kristen opposite of Alan, Deepak, and Coleman.  And Shu’s sitting up top with the stagehand who’s working the reins.  Our luggage rollers and duffels are all tied up and chorded in the coach’s caboose.  It’s basically a scene out of Oregon Trail except we’re just trying to cross town and not all of North America.

As Kristen had mentioned earlier, we’re apparently on our way over to Jack Bao’s place for a luncheon appointment.  Dimly, I knew that the Bao family was one of the richest in China (“fifth richest,” Alan later informs us) and they’d accumulated their tremendous wealth on the back of a social network called Weibook.  Last I checked, it was estimated that Weibook had a roughly 90% penetration of the Chinese market which would make it the second largest platform in the world.  Of course, Chinese citizens didn’t really have a choice –all non-Chinese platforms had been explicitly banned– so it really, in my mind at least, begged the question of what 10% in China wasn’t on social media this day and age.

Aside from that founding story, the only other tidbit I know about Jack was that he’d stepped down from the company last year that his father had founded.  Bao Senior had passed away around that time and that was the reason that Jack, now in his fifties, had given for his retirement.  But there had also been speculation that it’d been a coup by the CCP.  And that once Bao Senior died, the predictable power vacuums had bloomed, Jack had lost, and that he’d been ousted.  But honestly, who knows?  It was all rumors.

“This is wild!” Coleman says over the sound of the clomping of horse hooves.  “It must take ages to get anywhere and do anything though!”

Alan nods.  “That’s precisely the point.”

It takes something like half-an-hour to go a meager few miles but during that time Alan explains to us the entire rationale behind Xi’an.

Like all countries, China at first was bowled over by the great technological tsunami that’d swept the world.  The internet!  Mobile smartphones in every pocket!  All that information at your fingertips!  But over the decades, as the gleam of the initial joy began to dull, the CCP started seeing all of the drawbacks of this new, smaller, interconnected, always-on, highspeed world as well.  Information was travelling so fast electronically that it couldn’t be factchecked in time.  Even with the Great Firewall enforcing at maximum blast, messages were falling through the cracks, as were full-bore websites.  Clever youths with their roundabout, multi-continent-traversing-proxy-VPNs were getting through to the outside world.  What’s fascinating though, that the CCP eventually discovered, was that while technology enabled these new deleterious social effects, they were not the cause.  The cause was something far more primitive– it was basic human appetite.  Chinese citizens weren’t consuming because they could; they were consuming the vast petaflops of information because they desired it.

So the CCP set up an experiment:  Xi’an: The Unconnected City.

We all turn to Katherine but it’s Vanessa who actually speaks next.

“You’ll find that this version in fact significantly improves on Ms. Henley’s original design.  And while we’re certainly grateful for her initial work on the idea, it’s come a long way since those early stages.”

“Did you just steal this right out of Foogle’s Labs in Darwin?” scoffs Katherine.  “Some kinda cloak-and-daggers corporate espionage?  Bribery?  Coercion? No, I bet it was blackmail. You likely got some dirt on Tunney, didn’t you? I bet you probably turned him, that gutless slimeball.”

“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Vanessa says dismissively, waving her hand.  “This isn’t a Grisham thriller. And it’s not like you Australians have a monopoly over creating totalitarian police states.”

“Can someone please for the love of God just explain what we’re looking at?”  Coleman is looking around at us, clearly increasingly agitated that he’s utterly in the dark.  “What the hell’s going on?  I see a mini-model metropolis –granted, a super-expensive and detailed one– of some random city.  Why’s everyone so worked up?”

I turn my attention back to the miniature city and study it for a moment.  It’s fascinating how the human mind works when it’s trying to tease out a riddle.  All of the pieces are here and I feel like I have everything I need to put this puzzle together.  Katherine’s sudden departure from Foogle.  Her work in Darwin.  All of us suddenly here in Jinshui.  The CCP initiating a state surveillance apparatus in Xinjiang.  Like individual discs sliding into place in a rotary combination lock, I slowly piece it all together.

Chopra beats me to the punch though.

“This is a model city of Ürümqi, isn’t it?” he says, “the capital of the Xinjiang Province.  You’ve somehow built a real-life proxy representation of the city.”

“And it’s even more than that,” I add, the last tumbler finally falling into place.  “This is real-time, isn’t it? That’s why everything’s in motion.  You’ve got IoT sensors all over the city tracking every movement of every Uyghur and you’re streaming all of that raw data into a system somewhere to reconstruct what’s going on in Ürümqi, all of it, at this very exact moment.”

I gesture towards the mini-city, sweeping my arm.  “And this is a 3D-visualization of that, right?  It’s not a physical model at all.  Rather, it’s a hologram.  Just like the fancy projectors you have mounted outside that hide this compound from spy satellites overhead. But here just on a vastly tinier scale. This monster science project thing lets you track and visualize every single Uyghur in the city in real-time at any time.”

“Good lord,” says Coleman, his eyes growing round.  “You mad lads legit created The Eye of Sauron.  Jesus.”