Jon Grimwood - reMix

The man sat at his desk and frowned at the tiny monitor in front of him. These days he wasn’t a general, of course. He was Mr Que — owner not just of Shanghai, that Los Angeles of the Pacific, but of most of the newly ploughed-over countryside surrounding it. Still as thin as he’d been at eighteen and with hair that was only just beginning to grey at the temples, he wore sober suits cut from Thai silk and patterned on an illustration he’d once seen in an American magazine. Esquire or GQ . He wasn’t good with foreign names.

Eighteen was how old he’d been when first conscripted. At twenty-two he was a full colonel, alternating his dress between the gold braid and white silk of ceremonial and a combat suit of self-sealing, earth-hued Kevlar. By twenty-three he’d commanded the Army of the East as senior general, brokering its peace with the old men in Beijing.

Beijing would have made him a field marshal — one of theirs — but the General was a gambler and, like all good gamblers, could taste luck in the back of his throat. For three years it had been rich and clear, almost oil-like in its smoothness. But in Beijing his luck had developed a sour aftertaste, like a burgundy just beginning to oxidize. From wine to vinegar was a single fall of the dice... it always had been so.

The General turned down their offer. And so avoided responsibility for not preventing the Lhasa uprising that finally ripped Buddhism’s navel out of China’s body politic. The old men hated him for it, but there was nothing they could do. Que turned his back on the Forbidden City and the concrete wastes of Beijing that surrounded it and moved himself and his pregnant wife to Shanghai, buying the whole Flatiron building and taking the top floor for himself.

In the West, the rich might like to live at ground level and keep the poor in towers, but this was China. And besides, he needed to be able to see the sky.

“Replay the St Lucius e-vid...” General Que demanded.

Mencius, his house AI, knew exactly which e-vid the General meant. The man had watched it five times already that morning while most of Shanghai still slept, fucked or thought of breakfast. It showed the General talking to Ms Gwyneth.

The AI didn’t feel guilty about not notifying the General about the original message. Mistakes it understood, logged and coded into its fractal web to avoid repetition, but guilt was something else. Programming guilt into an AI was technically possible, but wastefully self-destructive. The last thing any user needed was a machine that put every other task on hold while it considered the implications of its own actions.

All the same, Mencius had been worried enough to make contact with a conveniently placed ballerina. And one of the General’s best, no less... In the circumstances, it seemed just as well. The General needed to know that Anchee was safe, and not just because Anchee was his daughter. His fortune, his history, the soul of his family rested in that little silver shrine, maybe even his luck.

“Pan in,” demanded the General crossly, wishing he could see the woman’s eyes...

Mencius did as he asked, cropping out most of the face on screen until only eyes remained, framed top and bottom by an elegant brow and the start of an aquiline nose. The woman was lying, that the General didn’t doubt. The only question was, about what?

Without knowing it, the General drummed out a repetitive three-beat rhythm with his index finger, his elegantly trimmed nail clicking softly against the top of a priceless desk. Its top was cut from a single slab of jade carved around the edges with tiny, intricate immortals. The original slab had been cut from a vast jade boulder found in Burma at the start of the nineteenth century, but the carving was late nineteenth, when the Manchu dynasty was in terminal decline and the Empress Tz’u Hi was already dying.

The General, like most of his ancestors, disliked the Manchu and their memory. And even two centuries after their final collapse, he still regarded them as little more than incoming barbarians. It was just one of the things that hadn’t made him popular in Beijing.

The monitor on his desk was a new-model Samsung, so small it looked like an unrolled banknote until his voice called it awake. An S3e monitor might cost a week’s salary for one of his houseboys, but the General still had a drawerful, rolled tight like scrolls and tied with red ribbon. He used each monitor once only and then had it destroyed. Not sold, deconstructed or recycled but burnt in a furnace in his basement.

It was the General’s firm belief that whatever had once been fired onto the screen’s pixels could be recalled like blast shadows on a wall, if the software artisan doing the recalling was skilled enough. There was no proof of this, no scientific evidence. But it was his unshakeable belief all the same.

So far he’d wasted half a dozen screens and three hours of Sunday morning trying to decide what was wrong with the picture in front of him. Apart from the fact Ms Gwyneth was lying. The lies showed in her eyes every time he replayed the download.

Part of General Que wanted to commandeer the next commercial flight to the Moon and go find out for himself. A Beretta pushed hard against the temples often had a way of freeing the truth. But he couldn’t, there were no flights. None at all. At the first rumour that the Azerbaijani virus had reached Brazil, the Moon had been declared off-limits to all Earth traffic.

The General snorted in disgust. Skyscrapers collapsed in Sao Paulo all the time. If he’d had to bet on it, he’d place his money on bribed building inspectors or sub-quality concrete. But the rumours had been enough for Planetside to lock off the landing computer and declare a Luna-wide low-orbit exclusion zone.

Now he was in Shanghai and Anchee was up there, apparently unable to take his call. Oh, he’d seen his daughter right enough, asleep in her bed at St Lucius. Or rather asleep in a bed in the school sanatorium. She’d been lying there, tucked under a crisp cotton sheet and resting on a clean, brand-new polyfoam slab. Her breathing was slow and regular, and when the shot panned in on her face, her closed eyes had flickered and jumped with healthy — perfectly healthy — rapid eye movement.

“Anchee’s being rested,” announced the headmistress, pointing to a tiny tube inserted into the girl’s thin wrist. He’d been told why too. So Anchee’s immune system could avoid stress while her white blood cells fought off a viral infection; one that his daughter must have caught at home in Shanghai. No one mentioned chicken flu, but the inference rested there between them.

The General was left in no doubt that he was somehow to blame.

“Let me talk to...” On screen, the General was fumbling for the name of the noisy foreign girl. That his quiet, dutiful daughter had nevertheless made friends with her while so many other Han attended St Lucius worried him, but Anchee had. Still frowning into the lens, the General pulled LizAlec’s name from his memory.

On screen, the woman shook her head. “Lady Elizabeth is away for a few days...”

Which meant what? General Que still didn’t know.

“Then wake my daughter.” He’d been losing his temper by this point, irritation overcoming his usual manners.

“No,” said a woman he’d never seen before, “that I can’t allow...” The new woman had a wide face and firm but smiling eyes. Her black hair was scraped back into little snakes and trapped under a nurse’s cap. “She must rest, I insist.”

Absent-mindedly, the nurse smoothed the front of her uniform, which was as white and as crisp as Anchee’s turned-back sheet. Everything about the scene was reassuringly normal. Much too normal, in the General’s opinion.