Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“Very fast. Not so much strong, in my opinion, because of how lame we are at programming. But fast for sure.”

Anna then introduced a few of the free crater residents around the table, and invited the visitors to sit down. Anna sat by Ta Shu and said to him, “One big problem for us right now is that we’re having trouble contacting Peng Ling directly, and we don’t have any sense of the people we’ve gotten on the line who say they speak for her. There’s also a really fast stream of messages coming from some kind of bot that’s infected a lot of Chinese systems. In both cases it might be a language thing, we’re not sure. Can you talk to them for us and see what you think?”

“Of course,” Ta Shu said. He put on a headset and began asking questions in Chinese. Valerie, who had sat down next to John Semple, found herself just barely following Ta Shu, he spoke so fast, but she gathered from his questions that the people in Beijing were saying Peng Ling had gone into hiding and was now in a secure location. Peng wanted to talk to Ta Shu, they were telling him, but it would take some time to patch him through to her, as she was very busy dealing with disruptions down there having to do with the demonstrations in Beijing, also some dissension in the military. She would get back to them as soon as she could.

Ta Shu explained this to the people around the table who didn’t speak Chinese. Valerie could tell he didn’t know whether to believe it. “She’s getting pushback,” he said with a worried look. “We’ll have to wait till she can call us.” He shrugged unhappily, stood, walked carefully to the railing overlooking the crater interior.

“Do you know what to tell her when you get her?” Valerie called after him.

“I think so.” He looked back at the group around the table: Americans, a Russian, some people Valerie had seen flying around the free crater. She couldn’t tell what Ta Shu thought of them. “As for that other speaker,” he added, “it identifies itself as an AI within the Great Firewall. It seems to want to help. It made me wonder if this big computer you mentioned you have here could serve as a refuge for this AI. Is there a way to transfer it up to here, and make some kind of backup for it? Do you have enough yottaflops for that?”

The free crater people looked at each other and conferred among themselves, with Anna asking them questions. Finally Anna said, “Yes, it’s not a question of capacity here, more a question of bandwidth for the transfer. But seems like we could set up laser comms. If this AI could latch onto us and beam its programs and memory up to us, we could house it. We’ve got the qubits.”

Ta Shu nodded. “Move it up here if you can. Seems like that could help.”

They went to work on it at screens distributed around the table. As they did so, Ta Shu came back to the screen he had been using and asked more questions, in another exchange so quick Valerie could barely follow it. Something about desperation, end games, last resort. At a certain point he hissed and looked up at Valerie. “Red Spear is losing, so they’re lashing out. They’re going to try and kill Chan Qi.”

He got up and walked unsteadily to the rail overlooking the crater. He leaned on it and stared down at the little floating city. After a while Valerie got up and went to his side.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“Bad. The signs are clear. That AI overheard an order. It’s good you got them away when you did.”

“Are you able to get any help from down there?”

“I tried. I left another message for Peng.”

“Are you sure she’s on our side?”

Another painful grimace crossed his face. “I hope.” In his eye there was a haunted look, as if he was searching his memory for something he couldn’t find.

After a while he sighed, then gestured down at the crater interior. “It looks like the gibbon enclosure at Petrov,” he observed absently. “Very nice that people can now fly around like our little cousins. I hope I can try that.”

“Later,” Valerie said.

“Yes, later. Now we must be patient and wait.”

So she paced beside him, back and forth by the rail overlooking the flying city. As they did so, she overheard some of what Anna and Ginger were saying to John Semple about the situation in Washington, DC. It was now obviously a full-blown crisis there, possibly even more serious than the one in Beijing. If the American government had had a parliamentary system, the current administration would have had to resign and call for new elections; as it was, they had a year and a month to go before a significant election. So it wasn’t clear how they were going to try to cope with this householders’ revolt and the resulting crash of the financial system.

Two tall jugs of coffee were brought to the big table where everyone was working, and most of them filled cups, fueling themselves for what looked to be a long haul. Valerie went over to get some, and stood next to John Semple waiting for him to finish filling his cup. “You’re going to have to get used to this place as your base of operations,” he remarked to her as he spooned sugar into his cup. “It could be a while before it’s safe for you to go back.”

“Who says I’m going back?” Valerie said.

He laughed loudly. “I knew you would like this place!”

“No you didn’t,” Valerie said, filling her cup. She kept her eye on Ta Shu, who was wandering the rail alone, muttering uneasily to himself.

Pull your opponent’s push, and they will fall forward. Balance the forces. Flows knot together, then change direction and move apart. Look to the south.

There was once a time when all lived together in peace: maybe. But not recently.

We lean against other people, and thus we all stay somewhat upright. You have to be able to trust your friends. If an old person dies, that’s natural, and a good long life is all you can ask. But if you are betrayed by a friend, that’s not natural. Then you have to wonder what’s really real. It hurts.

There are some actors in this tangle who are not human, but every intermediary is always a mediator, changing what it passes along. Intentionality is distributed among all the agents of an action. That makes this a dangerous time, no doubt about it. When I saw all those people flooding the streets and parks of Beijing, it was exhilarating, yes. You could not help but feel exhilarated, it was beautiful. But it was also dangerous. I’ve lived through the bitter aftermath of violence, I know that pain all too well. It makes you angry. You want revenge. Then it’s very common to want to sweep aside all obstructions to one’s virtuous path. But if you do that, the force of your sweeping will hurt you too. We need to find a better way. We must fight not to fight, even in this fraught moment. The consequences have to select the causes that will bring them into being.

We live by some bad ideas. The Seven Bad Ideas, the Four Cheaps, they all have to go. For a long time they’ve been squeezing the world. Now it’s been squeezed dry. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why the moon won’t serve as a new place to squeeze, being a stone already. So the dynasty of the cheaps is over, it’s done. Now we have to stop squeezing, and change.

The path into the light seems dark. The path forward seems to go back. The way is never obvious.

When confronted by a knot in history, the people closest to the knot can do the most to untie it. If I get the chance, I will say this to Peng Ling: the Party has to trust the people. If the Party trusts the people, the people will trust the Party. This is the only way. Repression will never work in China for long. When repression exists the people move against it, and nothing can stop us once we start to move. We are the billion, we turn the wheel. When the wheel turns, a new dynasty comes into being.