Limit

  ‘You’ll have to explain one thing.’

  ‘As long as you don’t go selling it to Dao.’

  Idiot, Jericho thought, but he kept it to himself.

  ‘You know I’d never do something like that,’ he said instead.

  ‘Just a joke.’ Tu dug about with a toothpick, produced a small green scrap of something and flicked it away. Jericho tried not to look. For all that, his eyes were irresistibly drawn to where the scrap, whatever it was, had landed. It was irritating mostly because Tu appeared on his new media screen not just life-size but in perfect perspectival detail, so that it looked as though Jericho’s loft apartment had grown an extra room. It wouldn’t have surprised him to spot the scrap of food lying on his floorboards somewhere. Seeing Tu in three dimensions was very much less enjoyable than looking at Naomi Liu.

  Now she really did have nice legs.

  ‘Owen?’

  Jericho blinked. ‘I noticed that the Yoyo avatar is remarkably stable in crowds. How do you do that?’

  ‘Trade secret,’ Tu sang happily.

  ‘Tell me. Otherwise I’ll have to go and visit my optician.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your eyes.’

  ‘Clearly not. I mean, the specs themselves are transparent, just like a window. I’m seeing the real world. Your program can project details in, but it can’t change reality.’

  ‘Is that what it does?’ Tu asked, grinning.

  ‘You know perfectly well what it does. It makes people blink out of existence.’

  ‘You never thought that perhaps reality is just a projection as well?’

  ‘Could you say that a little less cryptically?’

  ‘Let’s say we could do without the lens on the specs.’

  ‘And Yoyo would still appear?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘But what would be the substrate?’

  ‘She’d appear because none of what you see is actual reality. There are tiny cameras hidden in the arms of the specs and in the frame, feeding data on the real world into the computer so that it knows how and where it should fit Yoyo in. What you might have overlooked was the projectors on the inside edge.’

  ‘I know that Yoyo is projected onto the lens glass.’

  ‘No, that’s just what she’s not.’ Tu quaked with suppressed laughter. ‘The glass is surplus to requirements. The cameras produce a complete image, which is made up of your surroundings, plus Yoyo. Then this image is projected directly onto your retina.’

  Jericho stared at Tu.

  ‘You mean none of what I saw—’

  ‘Oh, you definitely saw the real world. Just not first-hand. You see what the cameras film, and the film can be manipulated. In real time, of course. We can make the sky pink, make people disappear or have them grow horns. We turn your eyes into the projection screen.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  Tu shrugged. ‘There are useful applications of virtual reality. Did you know that most cases of blindness are caused by clouding in the lens of the human eye? The retina underneath is healthy and functional, so we project the visible world directly into the retina. We make the blind see again. That’s the whole trick.’

  ‘I see.’ Jericho rubbed his chin. ‘And Yoyo’s been working on this.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You must trust her a lot.’

  ‘She’s good. She’s full of ideas. A veritable ideas factory.’

  ‘She’s an intern!’

  ‘That hardly matters.’

  ‘To me it does. I have to know who I’m dealing with here, Tian. How clued-up is the girl, in truth? Is she really just a—’ Dissident, he had been about to say. Stupid mistake. Diamond Shield would have filtered the word out from their conversation in an instant and put it into his file.

  ‘Yoyo knows what’s what,’ Tu said curtly. ‘I never said it would be easy to find her.’

  ‘No,’ said Jericho, more to himself than to Tu. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Chin up. I’ve remembered something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yoyo seems to have friends in a motorbike gang. She never introduced me, but I remember that she had City Demons on her jackets. That might bring you further forward.’

  ‘I know about that already, thanks. Yoyo didn’t happen to mention where they hang out?’

  ‘I think you’ll have to find that out on your own.’

  ‘All right then. If anything else comes back to you—’

  ‘I’ll let you know. Wait.’ Naomi Liu’s voice came from the other side of the projection. Tu stood up and disappeared from Jericho’s sight. He heard the two of them talking in low tones, then Tu came back.

  ‘Excuse me, Owen, but it looks as though we’ve had a suicide.’ He hesitated. ‘Or an accident.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Something awful. Someone fell to his death. The roller-coaster had been set in motion, outside its usual hours. It looks as if whoever it was had been working up there. I’ll be back in touch, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  They hung up. Jericho stayed there, sitting thoughtfully in front of the empty screen. Something about Tu’s remark unsettled him. He wondered why. People threw themselves from skyscrapers the whole time. China had the highest suicide rate in the world, higher even than Japan, and skyscrapers were also the most cost-efficient and effective way to leave this life.

  It wasn’t about the suicide.

  What then?

  He fished out the stick that Tu had given him, put it on top of the console and let the computer download Yoyo’s virtual guided tours, her personnel file, records of conversations and documents. The files also contained her genetic code, voiceprint and eyescan, fingerprints and blood group. He could use the tours to get to know her body language and her gestures, her intonation as well, and the documents and conversation soundfiles would yield all her frequent turns of phrase, figures of speech and even syntactical patterns. This gave him a usable personality profile. A dossier that he could work from.

  Perhaps though he should start from what he didn’t have.

  He went online and set his computer looking for the City Demons. It served him up an Australian football club in New South Wales, another in New Zealand, a basketball team from Dodge City, Kansas, and a Vietnamese Goth band.

  No demons in Shanghai.

  After he had broadened the search mode and told it to allow for spelling errors, he got a hit. Two members of a biker gang called the City Daemons had got into a fight with half a dozen drunken North Koreans in the DKD Club on the Huaihai Zhong Lu; the NKs had been singing an anthem about the murder of their dear departed Supreme Leader. The bikers had got away with a police caution, since the Chinese leadership had declared Kim Jong Un persona non grata, posthumously, in recognition of the prevailing mood in reunited Korea. Beijing had several reasons to make sure that they nipped in the bud any cult of nostalgia that might develop around North Korean totalitarianism.

  City Daemons. With an ‘a’.

  Next the computer found a blog where Shanghai hip-hoppers picked up on the incident in the DKD and dwelt on the bravery of two members of the City Demons (with ‘e’), who had put their lives on the line to sling the North Koreans out on their ear. A link took Jericho to a biker forum which he browsed through, hoping to find more about the Demons. This confirmed his suspicion that the Demons themselves had posted up the comments. The forum turned out to be an advertising platform for an e-bike and hybrids workshop called Demon Point, whose owner was probably, pretty nearly definitely, a member of the City Demons.

  And that was interesting.

  The workshop, he learned, lay on the edge of Quyu: a parallel world where hardly anybody had their own computer or a net connection, but there was the black hole of a Cyber Planet on every street corner, sucking in the local youths and never spitting them out again. It was a world ruled by several Triad subclans, sometimes striking deals, mostly at loggerheads, who only really agreed that no kind of crime was o
ff limits. A world of complex hierarchies, outside of which its inhabitants counted for nothing. A world which sent out battalions of cheap factory hands and unskilled labour to the better parts of the city every day, and then drew them back in every evening, a world which offered few sights but which nevertheless drew the well-heeled towards it with some magic charm, offering them something that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the Shanghai of urban renewal: the fascinating, iridescent gleam of human decay.

  Quyu, the Zone, the forgotten world. The perfect place if you wanted to disappear without trace.

  The little bike workshop wasn’t in Quyu proper, but it was close enough to function as a gateway in or out. Jericho sighed. He found himself forced to take a step that he didn’t like at all. He often worked with the Shanghai police, as he had done just recently. He had good relations with them. The officers would sometimes help him with his own cases, depending on whether they had their own irons in the fire in the cases of corruption or espionage that Jericho was looking into. For all that, they worked shoulder to shoulder when it came to fighting monsters such as Animal Ma Liping. His reputation among the police force was growing, even before he had rooted out the paedophile. When he went out drinking with members of the force, they let it be known that they would like to pass on information if he needed it, and ever since the nightmare in Shenzhen his friend Patrice Ho, a high-ranking officer, owed him a major favour, and had made it clear that this could be a peek into police databases. Jericho would have been all too pleased to call in the favour now, but if the authorities really were after Yoyo, he couldn’t even think about it.

  And that meant that he had to hack his way in.

  He’d dared to do so twice. He’d succeeded twice.

  At the time, he had sworn not to chance it a third time. He knew what he’d be in for if they caught wind of him. After Beijing had hacked into European and American government networks in 2007, the West had gone on a counter-offensive, supported by Russian and Arab hackers working off their own grudges. Since then, there was hardly anything China feared more than cyber-attacks. Accordingly, anybody infiltrating Chinese systems was shown no mercy.

  With mixed feelings, he set to work.

  A little later he had the access he wanted to various archives. Practically every area of the city was decked out with scanners hidden in the walls of houses, in traffic lights and signposts, in door handles and bell-pushes, in advertising hoardings, labels, mirrors, scaffolding and household devices. They scanned retinas, stored biometrics, analysed the way people walked and gestured, recorded voices and sounds. While the phone-tapping system had been brought to the peak of perfection some decades ago, using the American NSA system as a model, retinal analysis was a comparatively new phenomenon. The scanner could recognise individual structures in the human iris from several metres away and thereby identify a person. Microscopically small directional mics filtered the frequencies out of a noisy street crossing till you could hear one voice speaking quite distinctly. The real art of such surveillance lay in evaluating data. The system recognised wanted individuals by the way they moved, could recognise a face even obscured by a false beard. If Yoyo glanced just once into one of the omnipresent scanners, this would be enough to identify her retina, which had been data-captured first as she was born, again on her first day of school, and then at university enrolment. It had also been stored when she was arrested, and when she was released.

  Jericho’s computer started sifting.

  It analysed every twitch of Yoyo’s eyes, dived into the crystalline structures of her iris, measured the angle of her lips when she smiled, set up studies for the way her hair moved in the wind, calibrated the sway of her hips, the spread of her fingers as she swung her arms, the line of her wrist as she pointed, her average length of pace. Yoyo became a creature of equations, an algorithm which Jericho sent out into the phantom world of the police surveillance archive, hoping that it would meet its match there. He narrowed down the search window to the time right after she had vanished, but even so the system reported more than two thousand hits. He uploaded the stolen data to his hard drive, stored it under Yoyofiles and withdrew as quickly as he could. His presence had not been noticed. Time to begin evaluation.

  Hold on, there was one piece of the puzzle missing. Unlikely though it might seem, this student with the grandiose name might actually have some information to offer. What was the guy called anyway? Grand Cherokee Wang.

  Grand Cherokee—

  At that moment, Jericho was struck by the realisation.

  He had found out in his investigations that Wang had a part-time job at the World Financial Center where Tu’s company was headquartered. He handled the Silver Dragon—

  And the Silver Dragon was a roller-coaster!

  The roller-coaster had been set in motion, outside its usual hours. It looks as if whoever it was had been working up there.

  Jericho gazed into empty air. His gut feelings told him that the student hadn’t jumped of his own accord, and it hadn’t been an accident. Wang was dead because he had known something about Yoyo. No, not even that! Because he had given the impression that he knew something about Yoyo.

  This put the case in a whole new light.

  He paced through the enormous loft, went into the kitchen and said, ‘Tea. Lady Grey. One cup, two sugars, milk as usual.’

  While the machine attended to his order, he went over what he knew. Perhaps he was seeing ghosts, but his knack for spotting patterns and making connections where others saw only fragments had rarely let him down. It was obvious that there was somebody else after Yoyo, besides himself. This wasn’t in itself news. Chen and Tu had both voiced their suspicion that Yoyo was on the run. Both of them had also been doubtful that she was wanted by the police, even if Yoyo herself might believe just that. This time, she hadn’t been picked up by police officers as had happened twice before, rather she had vanished at dead of night. Why? The decision seemed to have been taken in great haste. Something must have made Yoyo fear a visit, in the next few minutes or hours, from people who did not have her best interests at heart. So what had she done before she took fright?

  Had she been warned?

  By whom? Against whom? If Wang had been telling the truth, she had been alone at the time, so that meant that she might have had a call: Make sure you get out of there. Or an email. Perhaps nothing of the sort. Perhaps she had discovered something on the net, seen something on the news, that frightened her.

  A diffident beeping sound from the kitchen let him know that his tea was ready. Jericho picked up the cup, burned his hand, cursed and took a little sip. He decided to call customer service to reprogram the machine. Two sugars was too sweet, one not sweet enough. Lost in thought, he went back to his office area. Shanghai police were not squeamish, but they were hardly in the habit of throwing suspects off the roof. More likely, Grand Cherokee Wang would have come round in a police station. The kid had wanted to play a bluff. A chancer, who hadn’t actually had anything to sell, and had tried his act with the wrong customer.

  Whose toes had Yoyo been treading on, for heaven’s sake?

  ‘Breaking news,’ he said. ‘Shanghai. World Financial Center.’

  Headlines and images grouped themselves together on the wall. Jericho blew on his tea and asked the computer to read him the latest reports.

  ‘Today at around 10.20 local time a man fell to his death from the Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong,’ said a female voice, pleasantly low-pitched. ‘Initial reports suggest that he worked in the building, with responsibility for watching and operating the Silver Dragon, the world’s highest roller-coaster. At the time he fell, the ride was in motion, outside of usual hours. The Public Prosecutor has opened proceedings against the ride’s owners. It has been impossible to establish so far whether this was an accident or suicide, but everything seems to point to—’

  ‘Show filmed reports only,’ said Jericho.

  A video window opened. A young Chinese woman w
as standing in front of the Jin Mao Tower with the camera trained on her so that viewers could see the foot of the World Financial Center. Under a veneer of half-hearted distress she was glowing with joy at the thought that some nitwit had given her a headline in the summer silly season by obligingly dying for her.

  ‘It is still a mystery why the roller-coaster ride was even in motion, without passengers and outside of its usual hours,’ she was saying, imbuing portent and secrecy into every word. ‘An eyewitness video which happened to be filming the tracks when the accident happened has shed some light on the matter. If indeed it was an accident. There is no confirmation as yet of the identity of the dead—’

  ‘Eyewitness video,’ Jericho interrupted. ‘Identity of victim.’

  ‘The video is sadly not available.’ The computer managed to put a note of real regret into the announcement. Jericho had set the system’s affective level to twenty per cent. At this setting, the voice didn’t sound mechanical, but rather warmly human. The computer also had a personality protocol. ‘There are two reports on the dead man’s identity.’

  ‘Read, please.’

  ‘Shanghai Satellite writes: The dead man is apparently one Wang Jintao. Wang was a student at—’

  ‘The second.’

  ‘Xinhua agency reports: The dead man has been positively identified as Wang Jintao, also known as Grand Cherokee, who studied—’

  ‘Reports on the precise circumstances of death.’

  There were a great many reports, as it turned out, but nobody wanted to commit to a particular story. Nevertheless, they made up an interesting picture. It was certain that somebody had set the Silver Dragon free ten minutes early, before the paying passengers had arrived. Grand Cherokee’s job had been to set the system in motion and look after the morning customers, which basically meant working the till and starting the ride. Nobody was supposed to be up there with him at the time of the incident, although there were indications that perhaps somebody had been there after all. Two staff in the Sky Lobby said that they had seen Wang meet a man and go into a lift with him. Further clues came from the eyewitness video, it seemed, which apparently showed Wang moving around on the tracks as the ride was already in motion.