At nightfall, they contemplated heading to their respective dormitories and homes to fill their empty bellies. Instead a meal came to them, in the hands of a student, working the evening shift at a dormitory cafeteria, sneaking them food that would otherwise have been thrown out.

“It’s a sign,” Lifen said. “We should stay the night. Hold the square. Show them that it’s ours.”

She was the leader, by unspoken election. There was discussion over matters. But when she spoke, people tended to do what she said.

So four of their crew and two of their new friends went back to the dormitories and returned, their arms full of blankets and bedding they’d taken from the rooms.. And for once, the Shanghai night was dry.

The morning brought more students, more signs. Someone brought a giant, catering-size dispenser of green tea from one of the buildings. A popup tent appeared with a fold out table beneath it. At noon a woman who ran a restaurant just outside the campus, popular with students, brought them two giant baskets full of steaming hom bao, the hot buns filled with pork or beef or celery.

“We have a revolution on our hands,” Wei said a few days later, as the crowd swelled past a hundred. And then he went off to flirt with a cute girl standing at the periphery, and, if Yuguo was any judge, to offer her a sip of Nexus, and “guide” her through her first trip.

That was days ago.

Now they were hundreds.

Yuguo looked up. Above them, quadcopter drones buzzed by, constantly now, watching, filming, recording faces, their red lights glowing when the sun was down.

The insight he’d had from his Nexus calibration dream was as strong now as then. The game theory was clear. He was inside that game, inside the real world of it. For freedom, the people of China had only two choices. Come together, and become something more. Or remain apart, and be squashed.

They were hundreds, here.

But that wasn’t enough. Not when the world didn’t know, not when the authorities filtered every picture and video and description of this protest out of the net before it even appeared.

Yuguo looked up, into the dark telephoto eye of a passing drone, and shivered.

65
Husband, Lover

Su-Yong smiles up into the virtual sky of her virtual world. In her mind’s eye, the metrics continue to improve, but still have days to go until they return to baseline. She is hampered on old, imperfect hardware, cut-off from the net, in the custody of unknown forces, in an unknown location.

She hasn’t felt this good, or this much herself, in ages. Her virtual body tingles with it. The clarity of her thoughts sends an almost erotic thrill through her.

She hears clapping to the side. Chen. Young Chen.