Red Moon

AI 12 houhui Regret

The analyst sat on the concrete floor of a cell. A standard prison cell, plastic bucket for a toilet, nothing else. No windows. Door solid. Air vent above. Neither comfortable nor horrid.

In his head he talked to Little Eyeball. I hope you are following the protocol for this situation, he said to the program. I hope you can help the situation even in my absence.

From here it was impossible to say, and it seemed very unlikely he would ever find out. Well, maybe. Much depended on how his friends on the outside reacted, and on many other forces outside any one person’s control. He would either be released or not. If not, he would either be questioned, which might involve torture, or shot; or left alive but incarcerated in isolation forever; or allowed to join some prison population, for some period of time or for the rest of his days. Possibly there were other options, but he didn’t want to think too much about them. It was hard not to think of the varieties of interrogation he might be subjected to, but there was no use in that, so he kept directing his mind elsewhere. The painful possibilities were known to all people at all times, everything from simple deprivations and impositions to luridly ingenious Ming mutilations. Of course the basic methods were as effective as anything fancier, old things like the ankle press (he had bad ankles), or fingernail pulling (he had arthritis in his hands). Even to think of it was painful. He had always known this possibility had existed, but it was easy to ignore when you were in your own life and felt safe. Clever, protected, shielded. In fact he wasn’t sure how they had found him. Probably he would never know. There was so much he would never know.

He wondered how the AI would respond to his absence. He had left a protocol in place, and once certain gates were unlocked, if they were, the program should have moved itself into the blind he had constructed for it, so that it would remain powered up for as long as the firewall itself was powered. If it did that it could then generate and send out a remarkable number of messages—trillions, or even quadrillions. If some of these messages were calls for people to locate and rescue the analyst, that might get some sort of response, including him being summarily executed by whoever was holding him. A bullet to the back of the head. Well, there were worse ways to die. Presumably he would lose consciousness before even registering the shot had happened. Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things. Obviously you had to be alive to suffer.

He shifted on the floor, sighed. He wondered if he had done right to try to alter the system from the inside. Possibly it had always been a false hope, a dream. A fantasy response, as happened so often. Watching the urban youth wander Beijing staring at their wristpads, underemployed and at risk of destitution at all times, oblivious to their own precarious situation—oblivious to history itself—unaware of all that China had gone through to get them into their bubble of precarious ease… seeing all that around him on the street every day had made him think he needed to strike directly, himself, from the inside. He had given up on mass action.

But someday the streets would fill with people. Young and old—the young without prospects, the old without the iron rice bowl—they would all take to the streets. Thirty million more young men than young women—that in itself was enough to fuel a revolution. He wondered when it would happen, and what would come of it. If he had believed in the people more, perhaps he could have helped them more. Worked from the inside to help the outside. That had been his intention all along, but now he saw that when you did it alone, in solitude, with only your AI for companionship, the dangers rose, also the possibilities for failure. The whole point of a collective national success was undercut when you tried to do it alone. He was surprised he had gone for so long without seeing that.

Well, he had done what he could with what he had. He had had to work in secret to stay inside. Public gestures of opposition to the Party by intellectuals or government officials had never done much, being always very quickly and effectively quashed. He had tried to find a different way, suited to his expertise and his temperament. Build a new society inside the shell of the old—a saying from an older time, from the international workers’ movement, or so they had called themselves. A return to some kind of solidarity with other people. Did the so-called netizens, each plugged in by their earbuds, staring at their screens, feel any of that anymore? Each time and place had its own particular structure of feeling, a cultural construct ordering and channeling the basic biological emotions. He knew this. And cut off from the rest of the world, so much older than the rest of the world, China had always had its own structure of feeling. Presumably every culture did. In China there had always been the feeling that China was a project they all created and owned together, often against the resistance of all the other people in the world, also against the resistance of the imperial overlords at home. China belonged to its people, and the Chinese Communist Party belonged to the people. And not so long ago there had been a time when farmers, workers, artists and intellectuals had banded together without any notion of fame or profit or power, simply out of a feeling of compassion and human solidarity, to work tirelessly their whole lives to make a socialist revolution in which no one exploited anyone else, and men and women lived together as equals. Now there was a structure of feeling!

But power gathered too tightly into one place always grew out of hand, and often became monstrous. They had seen it time after time. Power had to be split up and distributed, by way of the Party and the government and all the agencies and commissions and committees and task forces, the entire massive intricate bureaucracy, and from there out to all the individuals involved. In theory all this splitting should have worked to keep the Party in service to the people and to China.

Maybe all this happening now was part of that process working itself out. Impossible to say from here in a cell. Even when living his ordinary life, now so small in his memory, it had been impossible to say. He had done what he could with what he had. He had given his life. So many had given their lives. So many had died for China. If he became one of them, so be it. All for China; always for China. But it would be too bad. He would like to have seen what was going to happen next.