Tom Aston - The Machine

‘Cool,’ said Stone. His calm, grey eyes searched into her. ‘Sounds like you’re the person I need to get me into China. Help me blend in.’

Ying Ning was still lounging back, one leg over the arm of the chair. She chose that point to take out a carton of cigarettes and tap it on the arm of the chair, then carefully take a cigarette and begin to smoke. It was like Ying Ning was marking her territory. ‘I’m the right girl for a lot of things,’ she replied. Stone could see she was thinking. Making a decision in her mind. ‘You ready for a holiday in Jiangsu province, Mr Shi-tou ?’

Shi-tou? What did that mean? Stone already knew his Chinese wasn’t up to much. Shi-tou? It meant a stone, or a piece of stone. Something like that.

She helped him out, smiling with disdain. ‘It means Rock-head,’ she said, and breathed out a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘I heard you learned some Chinese, Rockhead . But you didn’t study hard, I guess. Shi-tou sounds funny in English also, no?’

Stone laughed back into her black eyes. He liked her already. He ran his gaze for a second over her hips. The ones he remembered from the leather miniskirt in the Snake Market. ‘Come on then, Cat-Woman,’ he said. ‘I may just let you come along. We’re going to China to meet a man called Robert Oyang. But first you need to tell me all you know about Semyonov and ShinComm Corporation.’

He turned to get more coffee. Ying Ning lounged in the chair and checked him out from behind, then stubbed out her cigarette in deliberate fashion and walked up behind him. Pulled at his shirt to turn him around to face her.

‘You haven’t explained why you came here, Rockhead,’ she sa id. ‘You have not been honest before we go any further.’

‘I told you. I want to find out about what Semyonov was doing at ShinComm.’

‘You lie,’ she said. ‘You are looking for the Machine. Everybody is looking for the Machine.’

She was right of course.

As soon as Ying Ning contacted Stone through NotFutile.com, the question had come into Stone’s mind. Why was Ying Ning happy to have Stone alongside her in her campaigns against “China’s billionaire clique”? Why should she even trust him?

So Stone had done some background work on Ying Ning before he went to find her in that apartment. Even he would have to say what he found out was fascinating.

Ying Ning was an enigma. It wasn’t Ying Ning’s clever arrogance, her sarcasm, her plume of spiky black hair, her sexy angular body or that trademark crooked smile that made her mysterious. It wasn’t just her background story of bad-luck, suffering and violence. Or where on earth she found the information she used to expose and ridicule all those newly-rich businessmen and factory owners she was at war with. All that was understandable. It was just her. Her closedness. Stone sensed Ying Ning had hidden depths, but no one was going to see them.

After a couple of web searches, Stone had realised that Ying Ning was quite a famous individual — in fact she was a cult figure in China. China lacks a “free” press in the Western sense, but has a thriving scene of micro-bloggers. Literally millions of them, and millions more who read the blogs. Ying Ning and her banned protest organization, China21, were very well known, in an electronic-word-of-mouth way that can’t be replicated in the West. For the simple reason that they were banned.

Ying Ning was not a real name of course. As soon as she posted it on the NotFutile.com site, that was obvious. But this wasn’t just any made-up name. Ying Ning was a girl in a Chinese fairy tale. The Fox Girl. The fictional Ying Ning was a shape-changer girl who alternates between being a fox and a beautiful girl. Apparently, Fox Girls are not uncommon in Chinese and Japanese fairytales, and Ying Ning was one of the best known. She was not only beautiful. She used her powers, magical and sexual, to entrance and deceive. This Fox Girl name of Ying Ning, it turned out, was instantly memorable in China. Almost as if Stone had called himself “Robin Hood”. No one would forget it. The modern Ying Ning was known across China on blogs and forums, and she was already a myth in her own right.

The Chinese authorities took a less charitable view of the name Ying Ning, however. The official Chinese news site Xinhua stated that Ying Ning was “one of the criminal class”. In China “criminal” does not mean what it does in the West. China is a harsh country, where social control is tight, and resort to the firing squad commonplace. The Chinese “criminal class” aren’t the same as the lesser enemies of the state such as “dissidents” or “intellectuals”. Certainly not Robin Hood types. They’re desperate thugs with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

So Stone was impressed by Ying Ning, coming and going, travelling around China like a will-o-the-wisp. Ying Ning had long since discarded her real name and ran with a bunch of false identities. That was her real achievement and she wouldn’t tell anyone how she’d done it. No one knew her real name. In a country of over a billion, the ID card number is the bedrock of control. In China you can’t fart without an ID card number, but she had cheated that. She’d turned up all over China in the last two years, making her blogs and videos about billionaires and plutocrats, confronting corrupt officials online, and holding up China’s new class of super-rich to ridicule. Her campaign about the suicide rates amongst the workers at ShinComm had even made it through to the New York Times .

It wasn’t just satire, either. There was a hard edge to what Ying Ning did. A number of people had been arrested on the back of her anti-corruption campaigns. One had been shot.

Yet it was the Fox Girl name that created the Ying Ning aura more than anything. She was her own woman, a force of one — similar to Stone in the way she operated — and she liked to keep people guessing.

Why she might want to have Stone on her side was anyone’s guess. Ying Ning must think he was “useful”. She would have researched Stone since she met him in the Snake Market. Even before that. She must think he would be useful to her, just like Junko Terashima had been useful to her. She might want to use him and the NotFutile.com site for publicity. After all she had no chance whatsoever of putting up web pages in China that weren’t liable to be taken down just hours after they’d gone live. Then there was the weapons aspect. Through NotFutile.com, Stone himself showed a macabre level of understanding of weapons systems. It took an oddly perverted mindset to understand the people who had dreamed these weapons up, and Stone had that. Perhaps that’s why she needed him.

Stone’s cool rational core knew he’d have to be wary of Ying Ning. Stone always worked better alone, relying on himself, shunning the limelight. But Stone couldn’t fail to be impressed by Ying Ning. All she’d done and the way she’d done it. She was like an opposite version of him. Female and Chinese, where he was European and male. And where Stone used Western laws on openness and free speech to evade his enemies, Ying Ning did her stuff in spite of the laws in China.

Stone’s rational mind urged caution, but he wanted to learn more.

— oO0Oo-

Stone had been surprised that Ying Ning had arranged to meet in her own apartment — and of course she hadn’t. Ying Ning had Stone walk separately to another tower block ten minutes away, no doubt having him followed as she did so. It was broiling mid-morning in Kowloon, and it ought to be quiet. Nonetheless there must be two hundred Chinese people on each hundred metre stretch of sidewalk. More on the backstreets in the shade. Street vendors, awnings, hawkers, desultory market stalls. There was no chance of Stone spotting his follower here, and he gave up the effort. Stone made it to the tower block as arranged and walked up an airless stairwell for eight stories.