Tom Aston - The Machine

‘Try to be forensic about it,’ Stone had said in his email. ‘Turn off the sound. Use the zoom function to look at the details in the room. Don’t look at her face. It won’t be as bad and you’ll learn more. There must be some clue as to who, or what…’

It sounded a good plan. Except for the person who had to do it. Ostrovich had zoomed in, turned off the sound, frozen the frames. He done all he could to avoid looking at the perverted spectacle. He zoomed in on the bedside table. There could be a card or a matchbook he could focus in on. Something that could give him a clue about the killer maybe. He zoomed in on the bedside table. Still quite clear — high res. Ostrovich zoomed in further. Now this was strange. His brow creased in bewilderment and he zoomed in further still. What the hell?

Ostrovich finally saw what this Stone fellow had meant.

‘ Any ideas Chris? ’ Virginia Carlisle said again into the headset. ‘ Stone said there was something weird about the file format or something.’ Ostrovich was barely listening, and he certainly wasn’t looking at the girl’s eyes any more.

‘OK, Ms Carlisle,’ said Ostrovich at length. ‘Er… How do I say this?’ He didn’t want to sound stupid in front of a star reporter. ‘I’ve a video clip here, which plays on some kind of Internet browser-based video player. Works on any computer in fact. The file he sent you looks way too small for a clip of around two minutes. It’s a little over a meg. Yet I can zoom in, and in, and in… It seems like I can zoom in as far as I want, and the image is still razor sharp. Never gets grainy or blocky. I’ve filled the whole of the fifty-inch monitor here with a close-up image of the ashtray on the table, and it’s still crystal.’

He felt a little stupid. ‘I know a few things about online video and television, Ms Carlisle, and aah… you just can’t do that. I feel like I’m standing in front of a crime scene with a full-size TV camera, looking at whatever I want, in realtime. Yet all I have is a tiny file sent by email. This isn’t just a better system than we’re using. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before. I’m gonna have to study the file programming format and call you back, Ms Carlisle.’

Ostrovich rang back after two hours.

‘It took me about an hour, but I managed to break into the programming code,’ said Ostrovich. ‘It’s just that…’ and his voice paused.

‘ That what? What is it? ’ asked Carlisle.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said the technician, embarrassed. ‘Virginia, this could be a computer program from Mars. It’s full of advanced mathematics — fractals, I think — but like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s not a big program — in fact it’s incredibly compact. I just… don’t understand it. I feel like a five-year-old trying to decipher Ancient Greek. It’s like no programming language, no software I’ve ever seen. Someone has decided to tear up every programming method, every software architecture that has been used for the last fifty years.’

‘ OK, Chris. Thanks ,’ said Virginia Carlisle, with a note of exasperation. ‘ Can’t you even tell where it came from? If the technology is so unusual, that at least should give us a clue. ’

‘That’s the point,’ said Ostrovich. ‘It’s not unusual. At least not in China. It’s called SmoothVision. “Grainless, HD video on the Internet with no delays” according to their web site. Turns out there are over twenty million copies of this program in use, mainly in South China. The technology tells us nothing whatever about the murder, Virginia. Except that some programmer in China is way, way ahead of us. This could revolutionize the whole of television, and it’s made by a firm I never heard of…’

‘ Don’t tell me, ’ said Carlisle, ‘ A Chinese company called New Machine Technology. ’

The door to the apartment was open, and Stone pushed his way in. Light flooded the room, showing off a selection of brutal modern art prints on the wall. There was the smell of strong coffee. A Chinese woman was sprawled across the solitary armchair with one leg hanging over the arm. Skinny black jeans and a black singlet, pulled tight over her breasts. No Asian subservience from this woman, that was for sure.

She wore a laconic smile, but said nothing, looking at Stone while chewing on crackers from a box, one after the other. Her eyes ran over his tall body like a thirsty woman looking at a long, cold drink. A smile played around her lips and she made sure her eyes stayed on Stone until he could be in absolutely no doubt that he’d been checked out.

‘A simple handshake would have sufficed,’ Stone said without looking, and walked over to pour a coffee for himself. ‘Do I pass inspection?’

He glanced at her again. Yep. That arrogant smile was unmistakable.

It’s not so difficult to find people if they want to be found. The signal came from Ying Ning not long after Stone’s posting on the NotFutile.com blog; Stone noticed a new blog entry on the web site.

http://yingning.blogs.notfutile.com

Capitalist plutocrat Steven Semyonov got what he was asking for, and much quicker than he thought. He was doing deals with the rightist clique that has taken over in Beijing, but they saw him coming. Took his money like the bourgeois bankers they are, then killed him as soon as he crossed the border

China21 continues to fight the capitalist billionaire clique which has seized control of China. The struggle goes on until the Revolution is restored.

No one else would take notice of this post. China21’s bland language of “struggle”, “bourgeois” and “revolution” meant nothing. And how retarded would any Chinese have to be in the 21 stCentury to sign off with “ Long Live the Cultural Revolution ”?

No. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Ying Ning had posted on Stone's site to make contact. After that it was simple to get in touch through the anonymized email server.

Ying Ning. The woman dressed as a tart when Junko was murdered in the Snake Market. That arrogant laconic smile was her trade mark. But she looked better without the lipstick and red wig for sure. So this was Ying Ning, with the spiky hair and the slim, angular body. The source of Junko’s information on ShinComm Corporation and New Machine Technologies.

Stone stood while he poured himself a coffee. Did she think he was going to blush or something? Her eyes stayed on him, drinking him in, and who knows what she was thinking.

‘Did you learn about Semyonov by sipping wine with his capitalist cronies?’ she asked. ‘Did he explain about his weapons factories? No? Or did you learn more from your visit with Professor Zhang?’

‘I found out more than you think,’ he said. ‘But Junko’s file tells me you’re the expert. So you can tell me, since you bought me here.’

‘OK. I tell you one thing. They will execute you, Stone,’ she said, coolly. ‘Zhang gave you one day to leave Hong Kong, but you are still here. If Gong An finds you in China, you will be a spy and you will be shot. Again. But this time it will be the last.’

She’d spotted the bullet wound scar just above his elbow, then. ‘What about you?’ said Stone. ‘They shoot subversives like you, don’t they? Or is it a prison camp in Qinghai?’

‘Could be.’ She shrugged. ‘But I know what I’m doing. I have the contacts, and I am Chinese. For yellow-haired yang guizi like you ,’ she used a racist term for a foreigner, ‘A man of a metre eighty-eight — not so easy to hide in China.’