Yuguo turned, and ran. Ahead of him a mirror-masked, black-armored riot policeman dragged a struggling female student by the hair as she flailed at him with the remains of a FREE SUN LIU sign. Yuguo turned and dodged another way, looking for an opening, a path out of the nightmare. All around him he saw riot police slamming into the students, their long shadows thrown in the harsh lights of the spotlights. He saw phones held up above the crowd, recording video that would never be seen. He saw signs being beaten down, a billion flowers – no, a mere few hundred flowers – being trampled into the mud. Overhead, the police drones circled, their red lights glowing with menace.

Shanghai hadn’t come together.

And now they were shattered.

“The protests have all been cleared, Premier,” Gao Yang said.

Bo Jintao looked up from his reports on the American Navy’s provocations, on what looked like preparations for war.

“Go on,” he told his aide.

“Protests cleared in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Xi’an, and Dalian,” Gao said. “State security police encountered no difficulty. Minimal force was used. A token number of arrests were made. Interrogations are beginning now. No sign of coordination between protests. Some indication of drug use among protesters. Information containment is so far perfect.”

“Good,” Bo Jintao said. “But we remain alert,” he cautioned Gao. “People will still hear stories. The public response in the first twenty-four hours – that’ll tell us what we need to know.”

Gao Yang nodded.

Bo brought his eyes back to aggressive actions of the Americans.

The Avatar watched as files were uploaded, scanned, and filtered. Censor codes deployed at network edges and chat and video service hubs ran the models fed to them by the Information Ministry on incoming chats and images and videos. Rules based modules found time tags and geo-codes for events on the Do Not Publish list. Video and image recognition modules found telltales of protesters, of police action, of near riot conditions, of text on signs. Linguistic analysis found banned phrases, mention of suppressed persons, anti-state sentiments, even attacks on upper leadership and the integrity of the State and the Party themselves.

Videos disappeared before ever reaching their destinations. Chunks of text fell into the void. Images dropped out. Accounts and phones were flagged for seditious activity, notes fired back to the Information Ministry and State Security Ministry servers for appendage to citizen files.

The Avatar marveled at it, the machinery of human bondage, the software of memetic suppression, the mechanism of mass ignorance, one of the companion pieces to the simulated Friends who planted the ideas the old men wanted to see spread.

So much effort, she thought to herself, humans spend on lobotomizing themselves.

Then she reached out to her agents within the vast edifice, whispered to them a tiny update to their models, and scattered the faintest of false trails across the net.

76
Thin Ice

Tuesday 2041.01.08