Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘The author?’

‘Yes, that’s the one.’

Jericho thought for a moment. ‘It must be an eternity since I read one of her books. She was a figurehead of the scene, right? Quite popular in Europe. I remember being amazed that she made it past the censorship.’

‘Oh, her books were banned for a long time! But by now she can do whatever she wants. When Shanghai declared itself to be the nightlife and party capital, she represented the area of conflict between glamour and the gutter, because she knew and could speak convincingly about both. Today, she’s a kind of patron saint of the local art scene. In her mid-fifties, established, even the Party uses her as a figurehead. In the summer of 2016 she gave a reading from her new novel, in Guan Di in Fuxing Park shortly before it was torn down, and Yoyo went along. Afterwards, she had the chance to speak with Mian Mian, and they ended up doing a crawl around the clubs and galleries which lasted many hours. After that, it was like she was intoxicated. You have to appreciate the symbolic coincidence, you see. Mian Mian started writing when she was sixteen, as an immediate consequence of her best friend committing suicide, and Yoyo had just turned sixteen.’

‘So she decided to become a writer.’

‘She decided to change the world. To some extent, it was romantically motivated, but she also had an admirably clear take on reality. At around that time my own star was beginning to rise. I knew Chen Hongbing from the nineties and liked him a great deal. He entrusted his daughter to me because he believed she could learn from me. Yoyo had always been very fond of the virtual world; she practically lived on the internet. She was particularly interested in the vanishing dividing lines between the actual world and the artificial one. In 2018 I was elected onto the board of Dao IT, and Yoyo was just getting to grips with her studies at the time. Chen supported her as much as he could, but she placed a lot of importance on earning her own money. When she heard I was taking over the department for Virtual Environments, she pestered me to find a job for her there.’

‘What did she study anyway?’

‘Journalism, politics and psychology. The first to learn how to write, the second to know what to write about, and psychology—’

‘To understand her father.’

‘She wouldn’t put it quite like that. The way she sees it, China is like a patient in constant danger of succumbing to insanity. So she looks for diagnoses for our diseased society. And that, of course, is where Chen Hongbing comes into the picture.’

‘She got her tools from you,’ ruminated Jericho.

‘Tools?’

‘Of course. When did you found Tu Technologies?’

‘2020.’

‘And Yoyo was there from the start?’

‘Of course.’ Tu’s expression seemed to clear. ‘Ah, I see.’

‘She’s been looking over your shoulder for years. You develop programs for everything under the sun.’

‘I already know what role we play in the Guardians, unintentionally of course! But beyond that I can assure you that none of my people would ever dream of technologically arming a dissident.’

‘Chen mentioned that she had already been arrested several times.’

‘It was actually only during her studies that she realised the true extent to which the authorities censor the internet. For someone who views the net as their natural habitat, closed doors can be incredibly frustrating.’

‘So she encountered the Diamond Shield.’

Anyone who tried to accelerate on the Chinese data highway soon found themselves up against virtual roadblocks. At the beginning of the millennium, fearing that the new medium could illuminate explosive topics, the Party had developed a highly armed defence program for net censorship, the Golden Shield, followed in 2020 by the Diamond Shield. With its help, an Internet Police force of over 150,000 rummaged their way though chat-rooms, blogs and forums. While the Golden Shield had been like a tracker dog, snuffling through the most far-flung corners of the web for terms like Tiananmen Massacre, Tibet, student revolts, freedom and human rights, the Diamond Shield was also able to recognise, to a certain extent, contextual meaning in the texts. This was the Party’s reaction to the so-called Bodyguard Programs. Titanium Mouse, for example, had figured out after her release how to put critical texts on the net which didn’t contain a single word that could be pounced on by the Golden Shield. To do this, she made use of a Bodyguard Program which rapped her on the knuckles, so to speak, while she was typing – if she used any incriminating terms, the Bodyguard would delete them, thus protecting her from herself. As a result the Diamond Shield paid less attention to keywords and instead assessed whole texts, connecting sayings and observations, inspecting the entries for double meanings and coding, and then raised the alarm if subversion was suspected.

Ironically, it was thanks to this very Cerberus that epoch-making advances were made in the hacker scene, enabling dissidents to unleash the maximum criticism with the minimum of risk. Of course, the Diamond Shield also blocked search engines and websites of foreign news agencies. The whole world had experienced the assassination of Kim Jong Un and the collapse of North Korea, but in the Chinese net none of it had ever happened. The bloody uprising against the junta in Burma might have taken place on Planet Earth, but not on Planet China. Anyone who tried to bring up the sites of Reuters or CNN could be sure of reprisal. To the same extent that the Wall of China was crumbling, the wall the Diamond Shield had erected around the country became stronger by the day, and yet so did the authorities’ fear. It wasn’t just the community of Chinese hackers who seemed to have sworn a solemn oath to shatter the Diamond Wall into a thousand pieces, but activists all around the world were working away on it too, some in the offices of European, Indian and American companies, Secret Services and government bases. The world was caught up in a cyber war, and, as the foremost aggressor, China was the key target for attack.

‘Compared with what was going on with hackers,’ explained Tu, ‘inside China and outside, Yoyo’s first steps in the net were kids’ stuff. With her big, indignantly wide eyes, she hit out at censorship and signed her name underneath in bold. She pleaded for freedom of opinion and demanded access to the inventories of information provided by Google, Alta Vista and so on. She entered into dialogue with like-minded people who thought chat-rooms could be barricaded against unwanted intruders just as easily as broom cupboards.’

‘Was she really that naïve?’

‘To start with, yes. It’s obvious that she wanted to impress Hongbing. In all seriousness, she really thought she was acting in accordance with his wishes. That he would be proud of his little dissident. But Hongbing was horrified.’

‘He tried to stop her from doing it.’

‘Yoyo was completely dumbfounded. She just couldn’t understand it. Chen became stubborn, and I tell you, he can be as stubborn as a mule! The more Yoyo pushed him to justify his negative reaction, the more he dug his heels in. She argued. She screamed. She cried. But he still wouldn’t talk to her. She realised he was worried for her of course, but it wasn’t like she’d called for the government to be overthrown, she’d just grumbled a bit.’

‘And so she confided in you.’

‘She said she thought her father was just a coward. I certainly didn’t let her get away with that one easily. I explained that I understood Hongbing’s motivations better than she did, which made her bitter at first. Naturally, she wanted to know why Hongbing didn’t trust his own daughter. I told her that his silence had nothing to do with lack of trust, but was related to something private. Do you have children, Owen?’