Alison smiled, tongue-in-cheek at last. "Get real, Bruno. How can you expect me to answer that, when the mathematics needed to predict the result doesn't even exist yet? Nothing I could say would be true or false-until someone's gone ahead and done the experiment."
I spent most of the day trying to convince myself that I wasn't being followed by some accomplice (or rival) of the surgeon, who might have been lurking outside the hotel. There was something disturbingly Kafka-esque about trying to lose a tail who might or might not have been real: no particular face I could search for in the crowd, just the abstract idea of a pursuer. It was too late to think about plastic surgery to make me look Han Chinese-Alison had raised this as a serious suggestion, back in Vietnam-but Shanghai had over a million foreign residents, so with -care even an Anglophone of Italian descent should have been able to vanish.
Whether or not I was up to the task was another matter.
I tried joining the ant-trails of the tourists, following the path of least resistance from the insane crush of the Yuyuan Bazaar (where racks bursting with ten-cent watch-PC's, mood-sensitive contact lenses, and the latest karaoke vocal implants, sat beside bamboo cages of live ducks and pigeons) to the one-time residence of Sun Yatsen (whose personality cult was currently undergoing a mini-series-led revival on Star TV, advertised on ten thousand buses and ten times as many T-shirts). From the tomb of the writer Lu Xun ("Always think and study . . . visit the general then visit the victims, see the realities of your time with open eyes"-no prime time for him) to the Hongkou McDonald's (where they were giving away small plastic Andy Warhol figurines, for reasons I couldn't fathom). I mimed leisurely window-shopping between the shrines, but kept my body language sufficiently unfriendly to deter even the loneliest Westerner from attempting to strike up a conversation. If foreigners were unremarkable in most of the city, they were positively eye-glazing here-even to each other-and I did my best to offer no one the slightest reason to remember me.
Along the way I checked for messages from Alison, but there were none. I left five of my own, tiny abstract chalk marks on bus shelters and park benches-all slightly different, but all saying the same thing: CLOSE BRUSH, BUT SAFE NOW. MOVING ON.
By early evening, I'd done all I could to throw off my hypothetical shadow, so I headed for the next hotel on our agreed but unwritten list. The last time we'd met face-to-face, in Hanoi, I mocked all of Alison's elaborate preparations. Now I was beginning to wish that I'd begged her to extend our secret language to cover extreme contingencies. . FATALLY WOUNDED. BETRAYED YOU UNDER TORTURE. REALITY DECAYING. OTHERWISE FINE.
The hotel on Huaihai Zhonglu was a step up from the last one, but not quite classy enough to refuse payment in cash. The desk clerk made polite small-talk, and I lied as smoothly as I could about my plans to spend a week sight seeing before heading for Beijing. The bellperson smirked when I tipped him too much-and I sat on my bed for five minutes afterward, wondering what significance to read into that.
I struggled to regain a sense of proportion. Industrial Algebra could have bribed every single hotel employee in Shanghai to be on the lookout for us-but that was a bit like saying that, in theory, they could have duplicated our entire twelve-year search for defects, and not bothered to pursue us at all. There was no question that they wanted what we had, badly-but what could they actually do about it? Go to a merchant bank (or the Mafia, or a Triad) for finance? That might have worked if the cargo had been a stray kilogram of plutonium, or a valuable gene sequence-but only a few hundred thousand people on the planet would be capable of understanding what the defect was, even in theory. Only a fraction of that number would believe that such a thing could really exist . . . and even fewer would be both wealthy and immoral enough to invest in the business of exploiting it.
The stakes appeared to be infinitely high-but that didn't make the players omnipotent.
Not yet.
I changed the dressing on my arm, from sock to handkerchief, but the incision was deeper than I'd realized, and it was still bleeding thinly. I left the hotel-and found exactly what I needed in a twenty-four-hour emporium just ten minutes away. Surgical grade tissue repair cream: a mixture of collagen-based adhesive, antiseptic, and growth factors. The emporium wasn't even a pharmaceuticals outlet-it just had aisle after aisle packed with all kinds of unrelated odds and ends, laid out beneath the unblinking blue-white ceiling panels. Canned food, PVC plumbing fixtures, traditional medicines, rat contraceptives, video ROMS. It was a random cornucopia, an almost organic diversity-as if the products had all just grown on the shelves from whatever spores the wind had happened to blow in.
I headed back to the hotel, pushing my way through the relentless crowds, half seduced and half sickened by the odors of cooking, dazed by the endless vista of holograms and neon in a language I barely understood. Fifteen minutes later, reeling from the noise and humidity, I realized that I was lost.
I stopped on a street corner and tried to get my bearings. Shanghai stretched out around me, dense and lavish, sensual and ruthless-a Darwinian economic simulation self-organized to the brink of catastrophe. The Amazon of commerce: this city of sixteen million had more industry of every kind, more exporters and importers, more wholesalers and retailers, traders and re-sellers and re-cyclers and scavengers, more billionaires and more beggars, than most nations on the planet.
Not to mention more computing power.
China itself was reaching the cusp of its decades-long transition from brutal totalitarian communism to brutal totalitarian capitalism: a slow seamless morph from Mao to Pinochet set to the enthusiastic applause of its trading partners and the international financial agencies. There'd been no need for a counter-revolution just layer after layer of carefully reasoned Newspeak to pave the way from previous doctrine to the stunningly obvious conclusion that private property, a thriving middle class, and a few trillion dollars worth of foreign investment were exactly what the Party had been aiming for all along.
The apparatus of the police state remained as essential as ever. Trade unionists with decadent bourgeois ideas about uncompetitive wages, journalists With counter-revolutionary notions of exposing corruption and nepotism, and any number of subversive political activists spreading destabilizing propaganda about the fantasy of free elections, all needed to be kept in check.
In a way, Luminous was a product of this strange transition from communism to not-communism in a thousand tiny steps. No one else, not even the U.S. defense research establishment, possessed a single machine with so much power. The rest of the world had succumbed long ago to networking, giving up their imposing supercomputers with their difficult architecture and customized chips for a few hundred of the latest mass-produced work stations. In fact, the biggest computing feats of the twenty-first century had all been farmed out over the Internet to thousands of volunteers, to run on their machines whenever the processors would otherwise be idle. That was how Alison and I had mapped the defect in the first place: seven thousand amateur mathematicians had shared the joke, for twelve years.
But now the net was the very opposite of what we needed-and only Luminous could take its place. And though only the People's Republic could have paid for it, and only the People's Institute for Advanced Optical Engineering could have built it . . . only Shanghai's QIPS Corporation could have sold time on it to the world-while it was still being used to model hydrogen bomb shock waves, pilotless fighter jets, and exotic antisatellite weapons.
I finally decoded the street signs, and realized what I'd done: I'd turned the wrong way coming out of the emporium, it was as simple as that.
I retraced my steps, and I was soon back on familiar territory.
When I opened the door of my room, Alison was sitting on the bed.
I said, "What is it with locks in this city?"
We embraced, briefly. We'd been lovers, once-but that was long over. And we'd been friends for years afterward-but I wasn't sure if that was still the right word. Our whole relationship now was too functional, too spartan. Everything revolved around the defect, now.
