Frank Schätzing - Limit

It meant getting a place at the table.

Gates had said that the future belonged to the networked. Logically, non-networked society therefore had no future. Individuals outside the network were like spiders who didn’t spin threads. Nothing got caught in their web. They would starve.

Officially, nobody had starved to death in Quyu yet. Even if the powers-that-be in China had a blind spot when it came to slums or shantytowns, they wouldn’t quite so readily allow anyone to die of hunger on the streets of Shanghai. Less from the milk of human kindness, and more because you just couldn’t have that sort of thing happening in a world financial centre. On the other hand, official attitudes to Quyu mattered not a jot. What sort of official figures might come out of a district with totally opaque demographics, which was widely seen as ungovernable and uncontrollable, which actually ran its own affairs in some incomprehensible way and where the police hardly dared venture, although they had put a ring of iron around its edge? It was known that there was infrastructure of sorts, houses of sorts, some habitable, others barely more than damp caves. Clean drinking water was scarce, power cuts frequent, there was hardly a flush toilet in the place. There were doctors and ambulances in Quyu, hospitals, schools and kindergartens, snack bars, tea houses, bars, cinemas and kiosks and street markets of the sort that had almost completely vanished from the rest of Shanghai. Nobody knew, though, how life went on in Quyu exactly. Crimes committed there were hardly followed up, and this too was part of the tacit agreement that the district should look after itself, and was to be cut loose from the dynamic of social development. Residents were given no support but they were not held to account either, as long as they didn’t break the law outside the borders of their tribal reservation. There was no future here, and that meant no past, or at least not a past one could boast of or build on. Without a network, they lived outside of time itself, on the dark fringes of a universe whose shining centres were connected by multi-storey freeways and sky trains. Certainly the shortest routes from Shanghai city centre out to the luxurious commuter towns ran through districts like Quyu, but that didn’t mean anybody had to pass through the forgotten world and actually take notice of what went on there. The routes simply ran right overhead , as though the place were a swamp.

For a while the leadership in Beijing had asked themselves whether this method of running Shanghai might lead to revolt. Nobody doubted that terrorists and criminals had gone to ground there. Nevertheless the necessity of tightening the State’s grip in the district was undermined by scepticism that a rabble of migrant farm workers, factory girls, errand boys and building labourers would ever be able to coalesce into anything like a workers’ uprising. Large-scale political violence was expected from the bourgeoisie instead, since they had access to the information superhighway and to all kinds of hi-tech. On the other hand, the conventional criminals who haunted Quyu would feel all the safer there, the less danger they were in from outside. When had the Mafia ever called the workers to arms? In the end, the opinion prevailed that every criminal in Quyu was one less in Xaxu, leading Beijing to issue a clear recommendation:

Forget Quyu.

Yoyo had taken shelter in a world which was one of the blank spaces on the map of urbanisation. Jericho wondered whether anyone in Quyu had ever thought that it was also a form of discrimination not to be under surveillance.

Probably not.

He had spent the evening looking on the net for texts that Yoyo might have written since she went under. He used the same technology for this that Diamond Shield used in its hectic search for dissidents, or that the American Secret Services used in the unending war on terror, the same he had used himself against Animal Ma Liping. The rhythms of keystrokes on a computer keyboard were just as individual as fingerprints. A suspect could be identified in the very moment that he began to write his text into a browser. Advances in Social Network Analysis were even more interesting: choice of vocabulary, favoured metaphors, everything left grammatical and semantic clues. A computer only needed a few hundred words to identify who was writing with almost one hundred per cent accuracy. Most interesting of all, the system didn’t just blindly pile up words, it recognised meaning and context. To a certain extent, it actually understood what the writer was trying to say. It developed an unconscious intelligence, and became capable of tracking down whole networks, world-spanning structures of terrorism or organised crime, where neo-Nazis, bombers, racists and hooligans living thousands of miles apart met in a virtual alliance – though in real life they might well have beaten one another to pulp.

This had helped to track down paedophiles and uncover industrial espionage, but it also proved to be a nightmare for dissidents and human rights activists. It was no surprise that repressive regimes in particular showed great interest in the methods of Social Network Analysis. Nevertheless, Yoyo had always managed to stay one step ahead of the security services’ analytical programs, until a few days ago she had been exposed and identified. If indeed that was what had happened. At least Yoyo must have believed that that was the case, and this explained her headlong flight.

What he still couldn’t understand was how she noticed.

Jericho yawned.

He was dog-tired. He had had the computer running after clues all night. Obviously he would not be finding Yoyo any time soon. The Internet Police had spent years snapping at her heels, with no success. She probably knew the analytical programs’ algorithms inside out and backwards; in such matters, working for Tu Technologies was like sitting in the Jade Temple of Enlightenment. Feeling fairly baffled, he wondered how he could manage something that until just recently not even the government had been able to do; but he had one invaluable advantage.

He knew that Yoyo was one of the Guardians.

While the computer was chasing her virtual shadow, Jericho had unpacked the rest of the crates and turned the loft into something that pretty nearly resembled a flat. When at last the furniture was in place, the pictures were hanging on the walls and his clothes were in the wardrobe, once everything was tidied away and in its place, and Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies rippled through the room, he felt happy and at peace for the first time in days, free from those images of Shenzhen, and had even lost all interest in Yoyo for the time being.

Owen Jericho, snug in a cocoon of music.

‘Match,’ announced the computer.

Irksome.

So irksome that he decided there and then to dial up the personality protocol by thirty per cent. At least then the computer would sound like someone you could share a coffee or a glass of wine with.

‘There’s a blog entry that looks like Yoyo,’ said the warm female voice, almost human. ‘She posted an entry on Brilliant Shit, a Mando-prog forum. Should I read it out?’

‘Are you sure that it’s Yoyo?’

‘Almost certain. She knows how to cover her tracks. I imagine Yoyo is working with distorters. What do you think?’

Without the personality protocol the remark would have come out as: ‘Eighty-four point seven per cent match. Probability that distorter is being used, ninety point two per cent.’

‘I think it’s very probable that she’s working with distorters,’ Jericho agreed.

Distorters were programs that go over a text and alter the writer’s personal style. They were becoming more and more popular. Some of them rewrote texts using the style of great poets and writers, so that you could dash off a message and have it reach the recipient looking as though it had been written by Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway or Jonathan Franzen. Other programs imitated politicians. It became dangerous when malevolent hackers cracked the profiles of other, unsuspecting users and borrowed their style. Many dissidents on the net preferred to use distorters that would rewrite with randomly generated standards, using a variety of styles. The most important thing was that the meaning remain the same.