Red Moon

AI 3 shexian ren zai chuxian Reappearance of the Subject

The analyst had long studied movement patterns among China’s internal migrant populations, sometimes called sanwu, the three withouts, sometimes diduan renkou, the low-end population, sometimes simply shi yi, the billion, although in fact there were only about half a billion of them. Now he was finding some interesting new patterns. People whose hukou registration gave them legal status and land in the rural areas where they had been born were of course still coming illegally to the cities and getting work in the informal urban economy. This would not stop until some kind of reform arrived. All these people, doing about eighty percent of the construction work and fifty percent of the service work, were unprotected by law and therefore badly exploited. They had to go back home when their jobs disappeared or if they got sick; their legal home was the only place they could take advantage of whatever pieces of the iron rice bowl were left. When they were mapped, the analyst saw these flows of humanity like floods after a storm, people flowing like water under the impact of economic storms.

Now he was also seeing evidence that those people whose household registration was located in rural areas nearest to the growing cities were staying at home, even when formal jobs would have allowed them to change their registration into the cities. Presumably this was because they hoped to get paid to leave their land, to make room for urban development. So now rings of population stability surrounded all the fastest-growing cities, especially the Jing-Jin-Ji megacity, formerly a great source of migrant labor, now stabilized by anticipation. Both inside and outside these rings the movement was as turbulent as ever, violent crosscurrents of exploitation and suffering, the ultimate result of sannong weiji, the three rural crises, which were behind all the migration out of the rural areas: that people’s lives were bitter, that the countryside was really poor, that agriculture was in crisis.

Then the sound of a mountain temple bell filled the room, and the AI he had named I-330 said in Zhou Xuan’s rich voice, “Alert.”

It had been a while, and he sat up and checked his security systems. The Chinese oversight apparatus, run by the Ministries of Public Security and Propaganda, and including Cyberspace Administration, the Great Firewall, the Invisible Wall, the Police Cloud, and the Invisible Ones, also the citizenship scores and the citizen reporting app called Sharp Eyes, had become in its proliferation what the most perceptive foreign sinologists were calling a “balkanized panopticon.” The optics of the con were not pan, in other words. In the analyst’s well-informed judgment, this was definitely the case; he had even helped to make it that way. And his knowledge of the nature of this balkanization gave him some advantages. Inserting I-330 into several aspects of the system now allowed it to send him uncorrelated and discontinuous information that he suspected no one else could gather so well. So when I-330 made reports, he was extremely interested to hear its news.

“Yes?” he said, confident they were in a secure comms space. “What is your news?”

“Swiss Quantum Works technical officer Fred Fredericks, who went missing on the moon thirteen days ago, has reappeared.”

“Where is he?”

“At the Bayan Nur spaceport.”

“What, in China?”

“Yes. He came down on the most recent shuttle from the moon, accompanying the cloud travel host and poet Ta Shu. He was detained by security on arrival.”

“How long ago?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Good job.”

“Thank you.”

“He met Ta Shu while on the moon, as I recall?”

“They went to the moon on the same spaceship. They stayed in the same hotel. They breakfasted together on the morning the American had his fatal encounter with Chang Yazu.”

“And could you determine where Fredericks was when he went missing on the moon?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Please keep looking into that. What about how he reappeared up there, can you say who connected him with Ta Shu?”

“Yes. Jiang Jianguo, the lead police inspector and head of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force, brought him to Ta Shu and Zhou Bao, an officer of the Chinese Lunar Authority in charge of Petrov Crater Station.”

“Tell me about this Inspector Jiang.”

“Jiang was a senior member of the Beijing police force before he took an assignment on the moon in 2039. He has been working as head of the Lunar Personnel Coordination Task Force ever since, with short breaks in Beijing. He has gone there and come back eight times. In his time on the moon he has investigated twenty-three serious crimes successfully and eight unsuccessfully, and mediated in forty-five disputes. Two months ago, Jiang was asked by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection to locate and send back to Earth Chan Guoliang’s daughter, Chan Qi, who went to the moon in a private capacity six months ago, and disappeared there five months ago.”

“I think you told me about that when it happened.”

“Yes. Chan Qi is one of the persons of interest you have asked me to track when possible. She is Chan Guoliang’s daughter. Chan Guoliang is minister of finance and member of the Politburo Standing Committee. He is one that you have called a big tiger.”

“Right. And can you tell me more about Chan Qi now?”

“Yes. She also was at the Bayan Nur spaceport. She too was part of Ta Shu’s group.”

“What! Now you tell me this?”

“Now I tell you this.”

“Listen, I-330! I ask you to be a great eyeball, and so far you are more of a little eyeball. You are really quite erratic. Remember this: whenever two of my persons of interest intersect, I want to be alerted to that! That is a standing request.”

“I see ninety-seven such intersections in the last month.”

“That’s okay, alert me anyway. They’re important.”

“You tell me what’s important.”

“I know. I’m just continually fooled by your naïveté. General intelligence means an ability to put together information from disparate spheres and then to make a new synthesis of interest from these combinations. But you don’t seem to do that very well.”

“I can only perform the operations I am programmed to perform.”

The analyst sighed. “I’m programming you to improve your own operations. I’m programming you for general intelligence.”

“General intelligence is poorly defined.”

“In your case, I mean a useful combination of search engine results.”

“Useful has many definitions.”

“All right, be quiet about this. Admittedly general intelligence isn’t well understood or well characterized, in people or machines. Let’s just try to direct yours a little better. For the moment, tap into every system available to you, and try to track these two young people. Now that Chan Qi has reappeared, I hope not to lose her again.”

“It appears you are not alone in that hope. She is being tracked by many others, as I can see already.”

“Of course. She is the most active of the princelings. And not in ways good for stability. Stay out of the other trackers’ field of attention. Locate her if you can, and keep a list of the other trackers you see. And keep trying to generalize! Keep experimenting with operations, try combinations, apply the learning algorithms, refine accordingly, and see what happens.”

“Will do.”